THE United States sent undercover operatives into Venezuela to secretly record and build drug-trafficking cases against the country’s socialist leadership, a leaked memo has revealed.
“It is necessary to conduct this operation unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan officials,” reads the 2018 memo on expanding Operation Money Badger, a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation that authorities say targeted dozens of people, including Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
While there’s no clear mechanism to hold the US accountable legally, the revelation threatens to do further damage to already fraught relations between the US and Mr Maduro’s government and could deepen suspicion of Washington across Latin America.
Some of Mr Maduro’s closest allies were targeted by the investigation, including businessman Alex Saab, who was recently freed in a prisoner swap for 10 US citizens and a fugitive defence contractor.
The memo was written at the height of then-president Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to remove the Venezuelan leader.
Within weeks of Mr Maduro winning re-election in 2018, senior DEA officials plotted to deploy at least three undercover informants to surreptitiously record top officials, hoping to gain evidence that they were turning Venezuela into a narco state.
But because the plan breached Venezuelan and international law, it required the approval of senior state and Justice Department officials who make up what is known as the Sensitive Activity Review Committee.
By authorising illicit wire transfers through US-based front companies and bank accounts, the DEA aimed to show that Colombian drug traffickers and corrupt officials were using Venezuela’s tightly controlled foreign currency exchange system for money laundering.
However, the operation expanded over time, homing in on Mr Maduro’s family and top allies, although the president would end up being indicted elsewhere, by the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, on drug-trafficking charges.
It is not clear if Money Badger is still ongoing.
Venezuela’s Communications Ministry did not respond to requests for comment, but, in recent days, Mr Maduro has accused the DEA and the CIA of trying to destabilise the country.
“I don’t think President Biden is involved,” Mr Maduro said this month. “But the CIA and the DEA operate independently as imperialist criminal organisations.”
The memo was obtained by the Associated Press news agency after being inadvertently uploaded, among dozens of government exhibits, to a file-share website by the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan during the bribery conspiracy trial of two former DEA supervisors late last year.
