By MEG KINNARD and MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — After months of growing military pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump ordered a brazen operation into the South American country to capture its leader and whisk him to the United States where his administration planned to put him on trial.
In a Saturday morning interview on “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Trump laid out the details of the overnight strike, after which he said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were flown by helicopter to a U.S. warship.
Maduro was in a ‘fortress,’ Trump says
Trump described Maduro as being “highly guarded” in a presidential palace that was “like a fortress,” although the Venezuelan leader was not able to get to a safe room.
American forces were armed with “massive blowtorches,” which they would have used to cut through steel walls had Maduro locked himself in the room, Trump said.
“It had what they call a safety space, where it’s solid steel all around,” Trump said. “He didn’t get that space closed. He was trying to get into it, but he got bum-rushed right so fast that he didn’t get into that. We were prepared.”
Part of that preparation, Trump said, included practicing maneuvers on a replica building.
“They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the same, all that steel all over the place,” Trump said.
‘We turned off all the lights’
Trump said that the U.S. operation took place in darkness, although he did not detail how that had happened. He said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights in Caracas,” the capital of Venezuela.
“This thing was so organized,” he said. “And they go into a dark space with machine guns facing them all over the place.”
At least seven explosions were heard in Caracas. The attack lasted less than 30 minutes.
Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who under that country’s law takes power, said some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed.
Trump says ‘a couple of guys injured’
Trump said a few U.S. members of the operation were injured but he believed no one was killed.
“A couple of guys were hit, but they came back and they’re supposed to be in pretty good shape,” he said.
The Republican president said the U.S. had lost no aircraft, but that a helicopter was “hit pretty hard.”
“We had to do it because it’s a war,” he added.
The weather was a factor
Trump said U.S. forces held off on conducting the operation for days, waiting for cloud cover to pass because the “weather has to be perfect.”
“We waited four days,” he said. “We were going to do this four days ago, three days ago, two days ago. And then all of a sudden it opened up and we said, go. And I’ll tell you, it’s, it was just amazing.”
Where is Maduro now?
Trump said that Maduro and Flores were flown by helicopter to a U.S. warship and would go on to New York to face charges. The Justice Department released an indictment accusing the pair of having an alleged role in a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
Months of escalating actions
The raid was a dramatic escalation from a series of strikes the U.S. military has carried out on what Trump has said were drug carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since early September. There had been 35 known strikes that killed at least 115 people.
On Dec. 29, Trump said the U.S. struck a facility where boats accused of carrying drugs “load up.” The CIA was behind the drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels. It was the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began its strikes in September.
Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina.
