For the world's crummiest anti-American dictators, sometimes it's not just the art of the deal for them in relations with President Trump. The left has criticized Trump for talking to dictators for deals, but now it's obvious that Trump as president was willing to do more than just talk.

Actually, Trump could play as hard and dirty as the dictators do -- no deals, pal -- and in his first term, he did.

According to Wired magazine, he targeted Venezuela, home to fraudulent elections and anti-American activity, unleashing the CIA on them.

Wired spoke to eight former Trump and agency officials who had direct knowledge of the matter:

... the Trump administration amped up its efforts around the world to isolate and depose the Venezuelan leader, including by levying additional punishing sanctions against his regime. Much of that diplomatic maneuvering played out in public. But the administration also put into motion another, very much secret prong to the US’s regime-change campaign: a covert CIA-run initiative to help overthrow the Venezuelan strongman.

Which is basically what we have a CIA for.

Trump dispatched the CIA to do what it does best, which is overthrow the hate-America regimes creating problems, so that we don't have to send in the Marines.

It was about as legitimate a mission as anything ever commissioned by a U.S. president in that Maduro was a problem for us, driving millions of his nationals out of the country (even before Joe Biden's open borders crisis) and turning his government over to Putin's, Cuba's and Hezb'allah's puppet state in operations aimed at the U.S. He even infiltrated the rap music industry in the states, making an ex-Chavista high level official very rich in the process. That's far from all of it.

What's more, protests, democratic elections, and non-violent resistance á la Gandhi, to change the government had all been useless nonsense, and had been so for about 15 years. With one stolen election after another, elections were useless: Anyone with a brain knew that Venezuelans would only be able to get that thug out of there by force.

Force could be covert, or the U.S. could send in the Marines. Trump didn't like endless wars and their mountains-of-money consultant contracts, so he asked the CIA to just do its job and take care of the matter.

It didn't.

The opportunity came when by order of Venezuela's legislature, Juan Guaido was installed as Venezuela's acting president in 2019, following the fraudulent election of 2018. Trump and John Bolton at the National Security Council started thinking about using covert means of getting rid of Maduro, given that the popular momentum was there and the Venezuelans had lined up a guy ready to take over.

According to Wired:

The CIA quickly assembled a Venezuela Task Force. That group had its work cut out for it. Before the Trump administration’s directive, Venezuela was a low priority at Langley, and capabilities had to be built from the ground up, according to the administration and former CIA officials. One of the task force’s first goals: an expansion of efforts to hack Venezuelan government networks and other infrastructure targets for intelligence-gathering purposes.

So far so good -- better that the CIA focus on dirtbag dictators than domestic pursuits.

But the kinds of things it came up with were often bad:

The agency launched a covert influence campaign to spread pro-democracy content online in Venezuela, spun up a “democracy promotion” program to secretly sponsor leadership trainings, and provided support to Venezuelan civic groups, according to former US officials.

But as these efforts got under way, more cracks between the administration and the CIA started to show. Trump administration officials were unimpressed by the agency’s “democracy promotion” efforts. The CIA’s secret program appeared to be indistinguishable from pro-democracy initiatives carried out openly by other government agencies like USAID, according to four former officials. It was “the most embarrassing bullshit ever,” says a former national security official—“not even sinister,” but “purely lazy.” To some Trump administration officials, the presence in Venezuela of a viable, legitimate opposition leader like Guaidó, and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in the country, made the CIA’s covert “pro-democracy” campaign appear farcical.

This tactic might have been O.K. in the era of velvet revolutions in the early aughts, but to try that as a strategy, after Venezuelans had been protesting, and voting, and protesting and voting, over and over again for 15 or 20 years, never getting a different result, was inexcusable, a sign of an agency frozen in time. It most certainly was not a problem of poor goobers not understanding democracy.

It was a problem of who counts the votes, and a bigger problem of a CIA that had no idea what was going on, having never updated their playbook from apparently about 2005. It was indeed stupid and lazy. 

It was actually worse than that. Bolton, speaking to Wired said there were a lot of them who didn't consider Venezuela an enemy, who were actually aligned with Venezuela, Cuba, or its admirers, which certainly would explain why they took as a given that Venezuela would fairly count its votes. (Sound like any other places you know?) No such thing as a fraud election, as electoral fraud is 'exceedingly rare,' right?

There was resistance all over because so many of them were leftists with a secret crush on the dirty dictatorship and its vile allies:

To some Trump-era officials, CIA executives—including CIA director Gina Haspel—were clearly opposed to the administration’s directive. Haspel “never bought into doing anything aggressive in Venezuela because she was still of the mind that we were ugly Americans,” says a senior Trump-era official. Haspel declined to comment.

"Part of the intelligence community is still traumatized by the Bay of Pigs invasion and failure. That's number one,” Bolton says. “Number two, other parts of it are still traumatized by the Obama administration view that we have no enemies in Latin America. Castro regime's OK. Chavez-Maduro regime's OK. They're not really threats. Ortega and Nicaragua was not really a threat. That wasn't my view."

That's why the task force couldn't get its players to act with results in mind.

They had problems getting just basic resources -- here is one example:

Very quickly, the task force ran into roadblocks. It had to fight—sometimes unsuccessfully—for access to important resources, like elite CIA and NSA hacking teams. Those teams usually worked on higher-profile targets, according to a former agency official. In fact, when officials in the administration asked to have NSA hacking resources redirected to Venezuela, a former Trump-era official said top Pentagon officials “pushed back hard.”

Would that have been Gen. Mark Milley? It would not surprise me. He didn't want to do it any more than Haspel did. The pair of them even formed their own group -- and shut out Bolton.

At one point, officials created a working group focused on Venezuela. It included the CIA and the State, Treasury, and Defense departments. One group it—intentionally—did not include: Bolton and his allies on the National Security Council, says a former State Department official. The CIA “sort of thought they were dealing with Oliver North,” another official says, adding that the spy agency “reacted in an equal and opposite direction” to what they felt was Bolton’s aggressiveness by trying to avoid any operations that could cause blowback for the CIA.

Someone at the bloated agency must have felt the same way, denying them use of a device that could disrupt ship traffic, which could have screwed both Cuba and Venezuela as oil was transported:

Cuba relies on oil from Venezuela. In return, US officials believe, the Cuban security services have helped protect Maduro, essentially serving as an on-the-ground praetorian guard for the embattled socialist autocrat. The Trump administration thought if the US could somehow intercept or sabotage the oil ships sailing from Venezuela to Cuba, it could strike a blow against both regimes. Senior administration officials held meetings with paramilitary experts to look at the mechanics of such an operation. At least one option involved the CIA, which had a mobile system that could covertly (and nonviolently) disable ships. Trump administration officials wanted the agency to move the system near Venezuela, to hit some of its fuel tankers. The agency balked. CIA officials explained that it only had one of these systems, that it was currently in another hemisphere, and they didn’t want to move it to the northern end of South America. The idea was shelved.

That was a shame. Why didn't the CIA, for all its cash, have two of those devices? And once they said 'no,' why didn't the CIA have an operative or two on the ground then to infiltrate the crew to sabotage those ships from the inside, or if that was impossible, then see about paying the Israelis or Colombians to do it? No imagination whatsoever, let alone will to win.

CIA Director Gina Haspel seemed to be cut out of the same cloth as the Milley crew:

“Haspel,” the source says, “was absolutely not inclined to lean forward unless someone brought her into the Oval Office and said, ‘You know, you have to do this.’ And it never reached that point.”

And over at State, Mike Pompeo, for less culpable reasons, shut down the U.S. embassy in Venezuela, fearing another Benghazi, after a series of Chavista thug threats. That hampered the task force's operations even more.

So with nobody helping, not much got done at all.

One operation that did go well came too little too late -- the CIA sent its hackers to break into military payments system and disrupt it -- an army marches on its stomach, after all -- and deprive the Maduro military that was holding him there in power of its paychecks. Unpaid militaries tend to drop their undying loyalty.

They succeeded but it came after the climax moment of 2019 when Guaido asked Venezuelan troops to defect to his side, and most didn't.

All the wind went out of the balloon then, and probably for the reasons Trump cited -- that Guaido was weak as a leader, too much of a believer in fair elections and legal processes same as some of these other characters, when the situation called for some kind of Pancho Villa type to rally around. The rough characters inside the Venezuelan military probably didn't want to defect over to a guy like Guaido, particularly since so many of them were involved in dealing drugs and other corruption crimes. It was too much to ask of them.

All of that benefited Maduro, who ended up staying in power and went on to steal another election, even more brazenly than the election of 2018. He's out being a death-squad dictator now, murdering opposition leaders and dumping their bodies in ditches, which happened last week -- getting away with it.

Trump apparently lost confidence in Bolton by September and acrimoniously fired him -- he has now joined Kamp Kamala, as one of its swamp thing allies. But if he couldn't even rally the swamp to get rid of a two-bit dictator, it's hard to see why he shouldn't have been replaced. Bolton bills himself as a Washington insider, but he got nowhere with Haspel and Milley, both of whom seemed to be throwing sand in his gears alongside Pompeo.

The CIA had a grand chance to reclaim its credibility with this operation, as well as send all the world's tyrants a message that the U.S. has more than one means of getting rid of lowlife states who bother us but it blew it, raising questions as to why the taxpayers should be paying for it. If its personnel want to admire Maduro, or Hamas, or whatever evil leftist tyrants it admires, fine and dandy, but those stances come into direct contact with its mission at CIA, which is to get rid of bad guys before they know what hit them. The same goes for the Pentagon and State, both of which failed, too.

Obviously, they have lost sights of their mission. Maduro would have been such an easy target to show off their chops with, and they couldn't manage even that. Agencies that botch their core operations need to be dismantled. It is hoped that Trump will send Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy in to take care of that business.

For now, the agency seems to be living up to its new logo -- in it only for its self-preservation alone, not the well being of the United States of America as its earlier logo had it.

Image: logo // public domain