The White House shared a first-hand account Saturday of the U.S. raid that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The post detailed a Venezuelan security official’s claim that regime forces had been overwhelmed in what he described as a “massacre.” “Stop what you are doing and read this,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote while sharing the report online.
The piece, presented as an interview with a Venezuelan security official who claims to have been on duty during the raid, describes a sudden and overwhelming attack to which Venezuelan forces were unable to respond. According to the report, radar systems shut down “without any explanation” before swarms of drones appeared overhead.Also read: Wars Without Explanations: The American Way“We were on guard, but suddenly all of our radar systems shut down,” the guard said. “The next thing we saw were drones, lots of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.”The guard claimed that only a handful of helicopters followed, which he estimated stationed “maybe twenty men.” He said the Venezuelan armed forces are “technologically second to none.” “They didn’t look like anything we’d fought before,” he said.When asked how the confrontation went, the guard replied: “It was a massacre.”“There were hundreds of us, but we had no chance,” he said, describing shots fired with “precision and speed.” He added that it appeared as if each attacker was firing “300 rounds per minute.”The guard also described a weapon that he could not identify and likened to a sonic or acoustic device. “It was like a very intense sound wave,” he said. “Suddenly it felt like my head was exploding from the inside out. We all started bleeding from our noses. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground and couldn’t move.”
The guard claimed the attackers suffered no casualties, adding: “Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology.”He concluded with a stark warning to other countries in the region. “I send a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States,” he said. “They have no idea what they’re capable of.”
Operation Absolute Resolve
The report emerged as U.S. officials continue to defend the legality and necessity of the raid that captured Maduro in a predawn operation and flown him out of Venezuela. The mission followed months of covert intelligence gathering by the CIA, including drone surveillance and human sources close to the Venezuelan leader that allowed U.S. planners to map his movements in minute detail.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine previously said the intelligence operation meant the U.S. knew “where Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.” Elite Delta Force commandos rehearsed the recovery on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound before launching the raid.U.S. forces reportedly disabled air defenses, plunging parts of Caracas into darkness and clearing the way for special forces helicopters. Maduro was captured within minutes and transferred to a US warship before being flown to the United States to face charges.President Donald Trump described the operation as a decisive blow to the drug trade in Latin America.
