By Chuck Warren
It appears from news leaks and official pronouncement breadcrumbs, that the Trump administration has made regime change in Venezuela its policy. There are few better ideas out there! Since the Monroe Doctrine, it has been the U.S. policy that no power that is not from the Americas should have influence in the Western Hemisphere, and Trump wants to enforce it, given Chinese and Iranian influence in Venezuela. But this might take military power because the CIA’s Latin America division is awful.
I have written previously about why the CIA needs reform, and you should read it if you have not yet. But the Latin America division is even worse.
The CIA got in trouble after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. John F. Kennedy basically scapegoated the agency. He told the CIA director, Allen Dulles, that in parliamentary democracies his government would have fallen. But because America is a presidential system, he could not resign, so he had to fire Dulles.
The CIA had some successful operations in Latin America after that, most famously in Chile to oust the socialist government of Salvador Allende. But the elite have held that against the CIA, saying it created a cruel dictatorship in Chile, which is half the truth.
The CIA’s Latin America division has been scapegoated when the president failed and scolded when it succeeded. It has developed a bias against action as a result, which is understandable, but also harmful.
Venezuela is a big country. It would be great if we did not have to go to war with it and could instead convince some officer to organize a coup and oust dictator Nicolás Maduro. But it is unlikely that we have enough agents there. Even if we did, the Latin America division would do everything possible to do nothing. Here’s how they would do it.
First, the best way to fail in a covert operation is by devising a plan and telling the CIA to go and do it. The CIA knows what assets they have, what will work, and what will not because they have been working on it for years and decades. Even the most knowledgeable politician is not nearly as informed as the agency’s bureaucracy. So they have to come up with different plans for the president and his advisers to choose from and modify. But if the CIA does not want to do it, it will be very difficult to convince it to offer plans.
Instead, it will advise the administration that they do not have enough assets and resources, that nothing is realistically possible, and so on. Rather than acting, the bureaucracy will delay when time is of the essence until other crises take over and push Venezuela lower on the list.
So we are stuck with military action as our surest bet. This is partly the CIA’s fault, to be sure, but it is also the fault of those who attacked it when it succeeded and blamed it for someone else’s failure. The Latin America division, as well as the rest of the CIA, needs reform. We can hope that President Donald Trump still manages to take advantage of our spies to overthrow Maduro. But whether that happens or not, he should look into improving our espionage operations in our own backyard.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
