Venezuelan cartels are shipping fentanyl into the United States - they say - with the full complicity of president Maduro. The socialist leader is thereby contributing to a crisis which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; justifying a state of war readiness and a series of deadly air strikes on small Venezuelan boats. But not everybody is convinced. The majority of all fentanyl in the US is made using Chinese chemicals by cartels in Mexico, from where almost all of it is imported. OS1 Ed Calderon, who is a combat instructor, security consultant and a cartels expert join Piers Morgan to discuss. Then; from plotting to lace Fidel Castro’s diving suit with poison fungus to the execution of Che Guevara, the CIA has a long and troubled history of meddling in the countries south of its own border - especially when socialists are involved. President Trump says he’s authorized secret CIA missions inside Venezuela, along with a not-so-secret massing of Naval forces in the Caribbean sea. Piers is joined by OS2 former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Narco-Terrorism and Regime Change00:14:47
You said fentanyl at the beginning and you are right.
A lot of that product is not coming from Venezuela.
It's coming from Mexico.
It's coming from China specifically.
It's a very broad sword, this narco-terrorism designation.
I think that it's being used to conduct some regime change.
Right, so that's the key point here.
I think there's something horrible happening here, and this is just one part of the chessboard.
Perhaps this is a way to keep the Chinese out of the Caribbean, to keep the Chinese out of Venezuela.
You can say you're doing it in order to stop the flow of drugs, even if that's not really the case.
What will the CIA be doing right now in Venezuela?
To effect a coup, if you want it to be quick, everything that's important is going to take place in the capital.
You have to control the radio and television stations.
You have to surround the presidential palace, and you have to control the major intersections in the city.
Once that happens, all the other dominoes begin to fall.
The White House is very clear about why it's ramping up pressure on Venezuela.
Drugs, Venezuelan cartels are shipping fentanyl into the United States, they say, with the full complicity of President Maduro.
The socialist leader is thereby contributing to a crisis which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, justifying a state of war readiness and a series of deadly airstrikes on small Venezuelan boats.
But not everybody's convinced.
The majority of all fentanyl in the U.S. is made using Chinese chemicals by cartels in Mexico, from where almost all of it is imported.
Well, Ed Cauldron is a combat instructor, security consultant, and a cartels expert.
And he joins me now.
Ed, thank you very much, indeed, for joining me.
Thank you.
What do you make of this?
I mean, Donald Trump is accusing Nicholas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, of conducting a narco-war, of running a narco-terrorist cartel.
You're a cartel expert.
Is he right?
The connections between his family and the movement of cocaine into the United States has long since been known.
2015 saw two of his nephews basically arrested for some of these issues.
The military in Venezuela has been engaging in these activities for years now.
It is something that is happening.
Cocaine, though, you said fentanyl at the beginning, and you are right.
A lot of that product is not coming from Venezuela.
It's coming from Mexico.
It's coming from overseas, China specifically.
It's a very broad sword, this narco-terrorism designation.
I think that it's being used in this case to conduct some regime change.
Right.
So that's the key point here, is that many people think it's a cover for regime change aspirations by the U.S. government under Donald Trump.
And many people speculate because Venezuela has a lot of oil and that you have a socialist leader who they think is there by default.
The last election, he should have left, but he's refused to go and so on.
And there's also a kind of like an anomaly here where if you were choosing one of the countries in that region as a place to target for imports, say, of cocaine or illegal drugs generally, then you would probably choose Colombia, not Venezuela.
So why Venezuela?
10% of the cocaine, these are government, U.S. government numbers back from 2009.
10% of cocaine coming into the United States was coming from Venezuela.
The numbers are now completely impossible to know because of some of the things that are happening on the seaside.
The military has long since been known for their association with certain cartels, specifically the Sinaloa cartel, when it was existing back in the day.
Chapo Buzman was arrested speaking to members of the military trying to figure out how to get a close connection.
Yes, Colombia should be on that list as well.
And I think it might be on that list.
I think many countries in South America and North America, that being Mexico, are probably on a list.
They're attempting to do something in Venezuela that they might want to replicate other parts of the other parts of the continent, I think.
It's hard to blame the United States as far as how it views the situation in Venezuela.
I mean, I'm currently in Sweden and I've spoken with some people who are refugees of Venezuela here.
And they've explained to me how the current government has basically stolen their lands, put in people that they know and family members that they know in positions of power in that region and basically took everything for themselves.
They're looking for any single way, every single way of making money in that region.
And the military is very much involved in some of these activities.
So it's a real thing.
Now, how big of a threat is versus other parts of the continent and prioritizement, that's where I know people are questioning resources specifically in that region.
But the Venezuelan government itself has single-handedly destroyed most of its ability to process a lot of the fuel that it extracts from the ground.
So here we are.
Right.
So you've got a sort of chaotic regime, probably illegitimate now, and acting with impunity.
And that may be a collection of explanations for why the U.S. is considering regime change.
Of course, Donald Trump has always been very anti-regime change and spoken out against regime change, thinking America should be America first and shouldn't be intervening in foreign countries.
So what do you think is going on here with his change of mind, if that's what happens?
I mean, Venezuela has very clear ties to the United States' enemies abroad.
I mean, Russia and China.
I mean, and we have to mention that they are nowhere to be seen realistically as far as coming to their aid.
I think there's something global hope happening here.
And this is just one part of the chessboard that the United States is playing.
It's unsustainable.
Whatever is going on there as far as the governance and just, I mean, I get to speak to a lot of refugees and people.
I do a lot of charity work and to speak specifically to the immigrant situation.
There is something happening there that is driving humanity away from that country that is undeniable.
Now, is that a just cause to blow up drug boats in the ocean without really knowing exactly what's going on there?
And the people that are on those boats, this is beyond my wheelhouse.
But people there are expecting an attack any day now.
And people that are not there who are living abroad are jubilant with the possibility that the regime is going away.
And it's hard to ignore those voices as well.
There has been a mass exodus of people from Venezuela, hasn't there?
Yes.
We saw the migrant caravans being conformed by many Venezuelans going through Mexico.
Some of these encampments were full of them.
We have this narrative in some places where some of these, where all of these migrants are criminal, which is not the case.
Again, I've been speaking to some in Switzerland who are highly educated people, people that came from wealthy families that were pretty much set in Venezuela that were stripped of land, stripped of property, stripped of everything they owned and basically left to the wind.
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This broad stroke that sometimes gets labeled on some of these migrants as all being criminal, as all being part of these international transnational gangs is false.
But yes, the mass humanity that has been moving out of the country and crossing the border, specifically in the time of the Biden administration, where that border was basically wide open, a lot of those were Venezuelan.
A lot of the there is a lot.
The thing gets told a lot by the president right now in the United States about prisons being emptied.
That actually did happen and prisons were emptied.
And Mexico specifically right now, and I have friends who are working at a federal level right now, are dealing with Trendaragua threats in Mexico City, for example, where they're setting up, they're clearing out cartels, their local Mexican cartels with their ongoing efforts against the cartels in Mexico.
And now you're seeing Trendaragua people basically setting up shop in Mexico.
So yes, it is a real threat that is happening not only throughout Latin America, but in Mexico and yes, the United States as well.
Speaking to some of my counterparts who are active there, that they've seen this threat, then it is a real one.
But it's not all of them.
Again, this broad stroke, this broad brush that gets painted against all of them as criminals or as some sort of undesirable people is just not the case.
What is the general view amongst the Venezuelans you've talked to about the likelihood that these boats that are being targeted are being gang operated?
They are criminals and they are trying to bring in large amounts of drugs into the United States and therefore are legitimate targets.
It's probably, I mean, this is a transport job.
These drug boats are drug boats.
There's no denying that they are moving quantities of drugs through the ocean.
Now, are they going to make it all the way to Florida with the fuel they have on those boats?
Probably not.
They're transporting from one point to another.
Most of the trafficking has moved to the ground.
That's where the real threat as far as drug trafficking happens.
Most of it is now moving through the ground.
You have on the Pacific side, the Navy, the U.S. Navy, and on the Caribbean side, it's full of government ships.
The sentiment is mixed.
You have to realize that a lot of these people that are probably on those boats are poor, marginalized people.
I don't think they probably any, I don't think there are any sort of military officials on those boats.
They're kids.
They're minors maybe on some of these boats.
And, you know, if you're a human being and you have any sort of sentiment towards humanity, seeing them get blown up in the middle of the ocean and then survivors getting blown up again is going to be something that's going to hit you in a certain way.
Will it act, though, as a deterrent, which is obviously what the Trump administration is saying, is that they believe if they keep doing this, the number of boats bringing these drugs over, which as you say, you're certain they are drug boats, that if they want to stop the drugs coming, this will be a very effective deterrent.
It is a very effective deterrent.
Fear is there, I have to say.
It is a very effective deterrent.
The trafficking side of things on both sides of the ocean.
We don't hear a lot about some of the boats that have been taken out on the coasts of Mexico, but there have been a few as well.
And speaking to people that are in law enforcement still currently active on both sides of the border, both in Mexico and the United States, they have seen some sort of stoppage, at least of traffic on the ocean.
So it is working on that end.
But we also have to realize that drug prices and the availability of some of these substances hasn't really diminished or moved in any significant way.
So, yes, there is an effect on the ocean and the way things are being trafficked, and fear is on there, fears in the water, basically.
But the effects of these policies haven't been felt in the cities and on the streets in the United States.
So I think that's where at least people on my end of things who are analyzing this closely haven't really seen that needle move.
So then is this working?
Would be the question.
Right, because these drug gangs, they're very sophisticated.
They're very well resourced.
And presumably, if they lose a particular way of transporting their drugs, they'll find another way.
That's it.
Yeah, that's it, Pierce.
Colombia is another source.
Mexico is another source.
So there's a lot of sources.
Right now, this very broadsword that is this terrorist designation is being utilized in Venezuela for many reasons.
And I think we all know that there are many more reasons beyond that of this being a specific counter operation.
There's a kind of obvious double standard that's just emerged this week where you've got President Trump at a cabinet meeting yesterday saying anyone who brings drugs into the U.S. will die.
Let's watch the clip.
Mr. President, if you are declaring war against these cartels and Congress is likely to approve of that process, why not just ask for a declaration of war?
Well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war.
I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.
Okay, we're going to kill them.
You know, they're going to be like dead.
Okay.
Now, that's strong words, but then he has literally just pardoned and released the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024, his last year, was found guilty of conspiring to import cocaine to the United States and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Killing Drug Smugglers in Venezuela00:04:13
There'll be many people looking at that going, hang on, how does that work?
It's from what I can tell and from what I've seen as far as that release, he's basically saying that it was a political motivated arrest and that he was framed for those crimes by the PAT administration.
The veracity of that is beyond me if that is a true statement or not.
His threats of death, his threats of killing people that are going to cross drugs into the United States is something that I have to tell you, Pierce.
It resonates a lot with people that have been the victims of these substances and in these criminal organizations on many parts, in many parts of the continent, myself included.
These criminal organizations have taken over vast amounts of territory, become governors and government in some of the places they control.
And the effects of this.
I mean, I grew up on the streets of Tijuana and I've went from there to going to places like Portland and seeing some of the effects of some of these substances and how it consumes people.
Not even that.
I mean, I have friends who have kids 17, 16, who just took some drugs at a party and didn't wake up.
I understand some of the anger and some of the feelings around some of these substances and some of the people that voted and got the president to the White House and why this is such a motivating topic for the populace.
Now, this designation and how it's being utilized and the scope of it, I think is what people are now kind of backing up a bit and trying to see if it's actually feasible or not to be utilizing this designation to continue on with these efforts.
I have a feeling that this is going to continue on.
And I think whatever happens in Venezuela is going to be a template for further actions in other parts of the continent.
Do you think it is more likely than not that the U.S. will invade Venezuela?
I think the pressure right now is to make Maduro reach a deal and extract himself from Venezuela.
I'm expecting a plane flying out of Venezuela, landing in Russia at any time, Syria-style, any day now.
Hopefully, that is where we're headed.
Speaking to people that know more about military inventions than I do, Venezuela is a very, it's going to be a very difficult thing to hold and to control if the regime falls and turns into a guerrilla force.
We must understand that Venezuela, the Venezuelan military is one thing, but also there's a bunch of guerrilla forces in and around Venezuela that are aligned with the regime that will basically take up arms against whoever stays in power.
And we're going to be looking at another Afghanistan or another Iraq as far as the battle not being concluded when the invasion concludes, but when the death toll rises from trying to hold that space.
And that's not even taking into account the mass amount of humanity that is already struggling with things like affordable water or food in some of these regions by the regime's complete mishandling of everything when it comes to governments.
So now add onto that the war aspect.
And I think we're in for some pretty horrible humanitarian crisis.
Hopefully Maduro and his family jump on a plane with a bunch of gold bricks, like for like a lot of people that have followed kind of his suit and fly to Russia or China, whoever takes them.
Yeah.
Let's hope that he sees sense.
It could get very messy.
Organic vs Enforced Regime Change00:17:11
Hey, Coolera, thank you very much, indeed, for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
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From plotting to lace Fidel Castro's diving suit with poison fungus to the execution of Shea Guevara, the CIA has a long and troubled history of meddling in the countries south of its own border, especially when socialists are involved.
President Trump says he's authorized secret CIA missions inside Venezuela, along with a not-so-secret massing of naval forces in the Caribbean Sea.
But here's a view on what's going on and why.
I'm joined by the former CIA officer and whistleblower, John Kariaku.
John, welcome back to Uncensor.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's always a pleasure.
So what's going on here?
Is the U.S. using the obviously genuine threat of drug cartels bringing drugs into the United States via these boats as an excuse for regime change?
And if so, why?
I think probably yes, which I think also is unfortunate because there are legitimate reasons to put pressure on the likes of Nicolas Maduro, but you don't have to threaten invasion to do that.
I think that what we're seeing here is a multifaceted program.
First of all, the U.S. has a very, very long history, of course, going back to the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America.
Much of that history has been very ugly.
We could sit here and talk for hours about the United Fruit Company, for example, and the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala.
We could talk about military dictatorships in South America as recently as the 1980s.
But this is unusual because we've never used drugs as a reason to institute regime change.
Let's put it that way.
I think that's only a part of it, though, Pierce.
I think that there's a bigger picture issue at play here, and that is China's influence in Latin America.
Look at it this way.
The Venezuelans are sitting on an ocean of oil.
That oil happens to be very dirty.
It's very, very high in sulfur.
And for many decades, the only place where that oil could be refined properly was at refineries in southern Texas.
Well, now the Chinese are building a refinery in the Caribbean, and the Chinese will be willing and able to refine high-sulfur Venezuelan oil.
Perhaps this is a way to keep the Chinese out of the Caribbean, to keep the Chinese out of Venezuela.
Certainly, having a regime change operation successful in Venezuela would make the Colombian military very happy.
And then at the same time, you can say you're doing it in order to stop the flow of drugs, even if that's not really the case.
The history of regime change involving the United States is pretty messy.
Is there any guarantee that if the U.S. committed troops on the ground to actually invade Venezuela, it wouldn't end up like Iraq, for example?
I mean, Venezuela has even more oil than Iraq.
You know, could it turn into another Iraq if the U.S. is not careful?
Oh, I think the answer is yes.
You've hit on something very important here.
This is something that the United States has traditionally been very bad at.
It's easy to go into a country and overthrow its leadership.
That's the easy part.
The difficult part is what to do next.
Regime change is one thing.
Regime or nation building, rather, nation building is an entirely different thing.
You know, I sat in a meeting.
I think you'll get a kick out of this.
I sat in a meeting the night before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The meeting was chaired by Vice President Cheney.
I was the note-taker for CIA Director George Tennant.
And it was the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA Director, all the big principals.
And one of the briefers was the director of CENTCOM, the Central Command.
And he said almost offhandedly that things will go well tomorrow.
When we cross the border into Iraq, the Iraqis will throw flowers at us.
And he said, if things go as planned, we can be in Tehran by August.
And Director Tennett turned off his microphone and he turned to me and he said, did he say Tehran or did he say Baghdad?
I said, he said Tehran.
And George says, are these people insane?
Well, the answer is yes.
Oftentimes, they are insane.
At least they think so highly of themselves and their own ability or the Pentagon's ability to institute forced change and then to live happily ever after.
You would think that they would learn their lesson when we fail time after time after time.
And isn't there a clear lesson from what's happened in Syria, right?
When if it's organic and it comes from within and it's Syrian driven by Syrian people who want to affect their own regime change, actually it can be far quicker, far more effective and far less messy.
Look, we have to wait and see what happens in Syria.
But certainly so far, it would be hard to argue that the new regime is worse than the Assad regime.
And America didn't have to do very much, right?
And in fact, Putin backed.
Exactly right.
So it seems to me there's an obvious template there for organic regime change always being a better option than enforced regime change, particularly from the U.S., who are often get themselves corralled into really messy situations for long periods of time.
Oh, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
And Syria ought to be the template for how we move forward on these.
Listen, there's no problem from a policy perspective to supply aid, for example, whether it's economic aid or military aid to the Kurds or to free Syrian fighters.
Oddly enough, we had the CIA most recently in Syria.
We had the CIA supplying al-Qaeda and the Pentagon supplying a completely different group that was at war with Al-Qaeda.
So we almost came out on top in spite of ourselves there.
But I think you're right.
I think Syria is something that should be studied in the halls of international intelligence services and implemented with more of a hands-off approach.
Going into a country and just occupying it and thinking that you're going to succeed just because we're the good guys is not a workable plan.
What will the CIA be doing right now in Venezuela?
We know they're there.
It's no great surprise.
But given all the backdrop of a potential invasion, or maybe it's a double bluff by Trump and he's just trying to get Maduro to leave the country, which could well be what he's trying to do.
But what would the CIA be doing?
Yeah, that's a good observation, too.
This could be a bluff.
But let's assume for the sake of this question that it's not a bluff.
The CIA would be doing everything from trying to recruit or to influence the owners of the Venezuelan media to place anti-Maduro articles or opinion pieces or pro-American articles or opinion pieces to arming factions that may be available to them in Caracas.
Listen, to effect a coup, if you want it to be quick, and it's a place like Venezuela where everything that's important is going to take place in the capital, you have to control the radio and television stations.
You have to surround the presidential palace and you have to control the major intersections in the city.
Once that happens, all the other dominoes begin to fall.
So it would be like overthrowing the Greek government in 1967.
You don't have to attack and invade and occupy the entire country.
You just need the center of the city along with the presidential palace and the parliament.
I think that's the plan.
But as we saw, interestingly, as we saw in Ukraine, for example, clearly the Russians thought they could steam into Kyiv, overthrow Zelensky, and this would all be over quite quickly.
And here we are years later, and it didn't happen.
Often the best laid plans look straightforward on paper.
You make assumptions, but cold, hard reality can kick in and take you to places you never imagined.
That's right.
Look at Afghanistan.
After years and years, Hamid Karzai was really little more than the mayor of Kabul.
And even then, he didn't control all of Kabul.
20 years of American occupation, more than a trillion dollars spent.
And still we're facing enemies as soon as we leave the city limits.
It's not a way to run a war.
Maduro, many people think he's there illegitimately now, that following the last election, he lost it and he's just refused to go.
What is the reality about that?
You know, I consider myself to be a person who approaches these issues from the slightly left of center, but I've never believed that Maduro was legitimate.
I've always believed that he was pumping up these numbers, stealing these elections.
Not to say that the right is the savior of the country.
We don't, frankly, know what the Venezuelan right is going to look like once it begins to run things.
But I've always believed that Maduro had serious legitimacy problems.
What's your hunch about what he may do?
We've seen enough of him now for a few years to get a kind of measure of the man.
Is he the kind, you think, who, when confronted with the possibility of an invasion and perhaps his death, that he will just pull an Assad and get on a plane?
I think that's the likelihood.
Now, the CIA, just three or four weeks ago, according to Maduro's private pilot, the CIA tried to recruit the pilot with the idea that were Maduro to run, he would get on the plane, say, take me to Havana.
Instead, the pilot takes him to Key West and the FBI is there to arrest him and charge him with international narcotics trafficking.
So I think that Maduro probably has laid plans to leave if he needs to leave quickly.
If he does need to leave quickly, I think he'll probably end up in Havana, possibly in Moscow.
But yeah, I think that's probably the way it would play out.
Now, I think that we would get a very, I think we would get a better idea of what the plans are if we were to watch those military leaders closest to him.
If we begin to see fissures among the military leadership in Venezuela, then it won't be long for Maduro after that.
And how easy would it be for the CIA to arrange his death?
You know, I think that's a lot harder than most people would expect.
It's not the 60s or the early 70s anymore where the CIA is a completely renegade organization and it just goes around overthrowing governments and assassinating world leaders.
Now there actually is at least some congressional oversight.
There's a bureaucratic process by which they would have to go through.
And it's quite difficult because it's not just the CIA coming up with an idea and then going to the president to approve the idea.
There are layers and layers of attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in the National Security Council's Office of Legal Affairs, in the CIA's general counsel's office.
And so you have this army, this army of attorneys that has to approve it before it even gets to the president for his signature.
It would be easier, it would be more legal to put so much pressure on Maduro that he opts to just get up and run than it would be to try to kill him.
And just in the last year or so, Pierce, there have been, what, a dozen, a dozen and a half mercenaries that have sort of washed up on shore and have said, hey, we're here to overthrow Maduro, only to be then arrested and traded back to the United States for Venezuelan prisoners.
It's kind of silly.
Finally, these strikes on the boats in the Caribbean Sea, in your estimation, are these legal and justified or not?
No, I'm not seeing any even efforts at legality here.
By all accounts, the intelligence is just simply not there to show that these are drug boats, or if they are drug boats, that the drugs are bound for the United States.
There was a foot in a boot that washed up on shore in Trinidad and Tobago last week, and it was identified as the foot and boot of a Trinidadian fisherman.
And now the family wants answers.
So, you know, I was in the CIA long enough that I came to learn when a CIA officer or a White House official or a Pentagon, you know, general says, take my word for it.
I've seen the intelligence.
Don't take his word for it.
I want to play this before we finish a clip from Pete Hegseth.
He's the Secretary of State, obviously, for the War Department, as it's now renamed.
Let's take a look.
You didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike.
I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire.
It was exploded in fire and smoke.
You can't see anything.
You got digital.
This is called the fog of war.
This is what you and the press don't understand.
You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.
And then you want to throw up real irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.
I've wrote a whole book on this topic because what politicians and the press does to warfighters.
The fog of war.
I mean, look, there is a fog of war.
Of course there is.
But did you find that convincing?
No, there is no war.
This was just a unilateral American decision to start bombing these boats.
So fog of war, no.
And international law is actually very clear here.
If there are survivors who are not able to engage in combat, you can't kill them.
It's really quite simple.
Yeah, I agree.
John Kiriaku, thank you very much indeed for rejoining me on Uncensored.
Thank you.
Good to see you again.
Thank you.
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