WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – U.S. officials at the highest levels of the CIA and other key federal agencies were aware of efforts to topple Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro, a retired Venezuelan general who led the conspiracy has emphasized in his bid to debunk ironic criminal charges that he had colluded with Maduro to flood the U.S. with cocaine.
The stunning revelation by the Venezuelan general – identified as Cliver Alcala – came in a court document filed by his attorneys late Friday seeking to nullify narcoterrorist allegations filed against him nearly two years ago by federal U.S. prosecutors in New York, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
“Efforts to overthrow the Maduro regime have been well known to the United States government,” Alcala’s attorneys insisted in a November 2021 letter to U.S. prosecutors that accompanied their motion to have the charges dismissed. “His opposition to the government and his alleged efforts to overthrow it were reported to the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, and the Department of the Treasury.”
The court records raise new questions about what the Trump administration knew about the failed plot to oust Maduro in May 2020 -- involving veteran U.S. Green Beret Jordan Goudreau and a ragtag army of Venezuelan military deserters he was helping Alcala train at secret camps in Colombia around the time of his arrest.
Alcala’s attorneys, the report adds, further underlined that their client’s coup plotting activities against Maduro “were communicated at the highest levels of a number of U.S. government agencies” -- including the CIA, Treasury and Justice departments, the NSC and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Despite such open hostility against the Venezuelan president, however, Alcala and Maduro were charged together “in a second superseding indictment with being part of a cabal of senior Venezuelan officials and military officers that worked with Colombian rebels to allegedly send 250 metric tons of cocaine a year to the US,” according to the report.
Attorneys of the anti-Maduro general are thus seeking documents and information -- much of it classified -- regarding communications between top American officials and members of Venezuela’s opposition about Alcala. Those officials include former hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Attorney General William Barr as well as senior officials at the White House and unnamed CIA operatives in Colombia.
Also named as having knowledge of Alcalá’s anti-Caracas schemes are two key allies of the U.S.-sponsored opposition leader Juan Guaidó — who Washington boasts as Venezuela’s “legitimate” leader — as well as Miami-based political strategist J.J. Rendon, who signed on behalf of Guaidó a never-executed agreement for Goudreau to carry out a kidnapping operation against Maduro.