Special forces’ raid

Two hours 28 minutes that had been months in the planning

- Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor

The US took two hours and 28 minutes to snatch President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in the small hours of Saturday, an extraordinary display of imperial power that now plunges 30 million Venezuelans into a profound uncertainty. But the operation was also months in the planning.

Critical to Operation Absolute Resolve was the work of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. From as early as August, their goal was to establish Maduro’s “pattern of life” or, as Gen Dan Caine, chairman of US joint chiefs of staff, described it, to “understand how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets”.

As the US built up its military presence in the Caribbean from September, Maduro had tightened his personal security in an effort to evade capture. Gone were the well-trailed public speeches. He changed his sleeping location regularly, using six to eight different places to spend the night, according to the New York Times.

Maduro also relied more heavily on Cuban counterintelligence and bodyguards, more trusted than Venezuelans. Yet such measures were not enough. On Friday evening, when the weather was clear enough for the US operation go ahead, Maduro’s location was fixed at a compound on Fuerte Tiuna, a military base in Caracas.

Spy drones were part of how the CIA monitored Maduro, but after he was seized on Saturday the agency also surprisingly briefed that it had a human source inside the Venezuelan government, a bold statement given that it could risk leading to the source being discovered - though also a way, perhaps, of undermining the confidence of Maduro’s successors in their own security system.