MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
All right. It took American forces just over 2 hours, 150 aircraft and the dismantling of Venezuela's air defenses to capture and arrest Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Meanwhile, this morning, Trump said this.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.
KELLY: I'm still trying to wrap my head around that phrase. We are going to run the country. Here to help me try to make sense of it, Greg Myre, who covers national security. Hey, Greg.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: And Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Hey, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Tom, you start with what we know. How did all this unfold?
BOWMAN: Well, Trump gave the order last night around 11. The operation called Absolute Resolve started around 1 a.m. Eastern Time. U.S. airstrikes took out Venezuelan air defenses. You know, those were likely explosions we could see from local videos. And then a U.S. special operations unit arrived at Maduro's house by helicopter, flying just 100 feet above the ground.
KELLY: This was Delta Force?
BOWMAN: It was Delta Force.
KELLY: OK.
BOWMAN: They went...
KELLY: Army special ops. Yeah.
BOWMAN: ...Into the house, and Maduro tried to flee through the steel door into a safe room. Both he and his wife were taken. No sense of any gunfire until the helicopters were leaving, and one took some fire, but officials said it was flyable. Few skirmishes as the helicopters were leaving, and they engaged in defensive fire. No U.S. casualties, and no word yet, Mary Louise, on Venezuelan casualties.
It was all over in about 2 1/2 hours. Maduro and his wife were taken by helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, and then they're now in New York where an indictment is charging them, along with Maduro's son and two officials, with narcotrafficking. This was a huge operation - 150 aircraft, everything from F-35 to B-1 bombers to drones to surveillance aircraft, and officials said it was done with complete surprise.
KELLY: Yeah, that's - I - one follow-up on that, the complete surprise element because there have been all these questions about U.S. intelligence and how good it was, how much we knew about Maduro's movements. Do we know how they found him?
BOWMAN: Well, Joint Chiefs chairman General Dan Caine said they knew his location, likely through intelligence sources, and Trump had already said a few weeks ago - remember - the CIA was on the ground. So General Caine mounted what's called a pattern of life for some time. He said, we knew how he moved, lived, traveled, ate, so they were watching him steadily. And Caine said the National Security Agency was involved, so they were intercepting communications, phone calls. And he also said the National Geospatial Agency was involved, as well, which provides photos from its satellite. So they likely had a very complete picture of where he was and what he was doing around the clock.
Now, we're told the U.S. has been planning and training for this operation for months, and it included building a mockup, a model of Maduro's home. And as you know, Mary Louise, covering intel, this is common for operations like this.
KELLY: Yeah.
BOWMAN: The Navy SEAL Team Six did something similar before they assaulted Osama Bin Laden's compound back in Pakistan in 2011.
KELLY: I have seen that model. The former CIA director Bill Burns used to keep it in his office...
BOWMAN: Right.
KELLY: ...On the seventh floor at headquarters at Langley. Greg Myre, just to sum up here, we have an American president - President Trump - who has sent troops to another country - a sovereign country - arrested its leader, spirited him out of the country. Is this legal?
MYRE: Well, you certainly have a lot of folks saying no, especially Democrats in Congress. We heard a bit of that from Congressman Adam Smith just a few moments ago. The Democrats say, Congress needs to authorize war and the use of military force. And we've seen this stream of statements today from Democrats saying things like, Trump's action is an illegal escalation. He's trampling the Constitution. It's an abuse of power. Now, Trump's team is trying to portray this as a military action which was part of a law enforcement operation. Maduro was indicted in 2020 on drug trafficking and other charges.
KELLY: They updated that indictment today, yeah.
MYRE: Exactly. And this was just an effort to bring him to justice in the U.S. But obviously, this is much larger than just a legal case. A foreign leader has been ousted, and as we noted, Trump says the U.S. will be in charge of the country for some indefinite time.
KELLY: Yeah, that tees up my next question, which is, how is that going to work? - the U.S. running Venezuela for some indefinite period of time.
MYRE: Yeah, very unclear at this point. Now, Trump said it would be done with some of those standing with him at the news conference - Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Pentagon chief Hegseth - working in coordination with leaders or people in Venezuela. Now, Trump does have this reputation of declaring victory and then moving on in other sorts of endeavors. But he did acknowledge rebuilding Venezuela would be a challenge. He said, you know, if the U.S. just left, there would be zero chance of it coming back.
And so Trump has been, you know, much more aggressive with the military in this term by sending - and sending troops always seemed to be a red line. But this time, it didn't seem to bother him. As we've noted, he said, I'm not afraid to put boots on the ground. We don't mind saying it. That's what we need. But, you know, the troops aren't there right now, and the U.S. doesn't have diplomats there. The U.S. embassy has been closed since 2019.
KELLY: Since Trump's first term. Yeah.
MYRE: So how is the U.S. going to run a country when it really doesn't have a presence, at least at the moment?
KELLY: What about the question of how actual Venezuelans feel about this? Are they likely to welcome U.S. boots on the ground, whatever that may end up looking like?
MYRE: Yeah, that seems a question that's almost impossible to answer clearly, and it's why it's so risky and it's so uncertain. You know, the country's in terrible shape. The economy has effectively collapsed.
They had a presidential election in 2024. Voters appeared, according to independent monitors, to overwhelmingly go against Maduro and his party, vote against him. They say he rigged the election. So there are certainly a lot of Venezuelans who are probably very happy to see him go.
But he had his supporters. He has a lot of people who depended on him for their benefits. What will the military do? So it doesn't automatically mean that most or all Venezuelans are going to be supporting a new government.
BOWMAN: And Mary Louise, if I could just add...
KELLY: Please.
BOWMAN: ...You know, Trump said and others have said that the Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez would cooperate with the U.S., but we haven't heard from her, really. And then Carrie Kahn said she sounded defiant and certainly not cooperating with the U.S.
And more importantly, we have not heard from any Venezuelan military leaders. Now, what will they do? Will they stand down? Could the army splinter? Could you have some sort of guerrilla force within the military working on behalf of Maduro and his supporters? We're in a very tense situation. It has just started. We have no idea what the security situation will look like in Venezuela in the coming days and weeks.
KELLY: Yeah, all excellent questions. Greg, just a quick one to you. This is not a quick question, but if you can answer it quickly - oil. Venezuela is broke. Oil is its one big valuable industry. What does this look like, to have the U.S. going in? Does that help Venezuela get back on its feet?
MYRE: Well, it certainly could, but it just seems like a long-term process. This - the infrastructure has just degraded over time. It will need huge investments. This is a difficult thing to do. It's gone from about 3 million barrels a day a quarter-century ago to 1 million barrels a day. So if it could restore that level of production, yeah, the country would have some money. It would have some income. It wouldn't necessarily guarantee prosperity for everybody. But it could be a big help. But that doesn't happen overnight. That is a multi-year process.
BOWMAN: And it's also important to note that Trump said there could be a U.S. military presence as they rebuild these oil facilities. Well, how many troops will that require? That's - it's going to be a lot more than a small Delta Force unit to accomplish that in the coming days and weeks.
KELLY: And we've certainly see them - laid the groundwork for that with sending all these ships to the region and so forth. That is NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre - thank you, Greg - and our Pentagon correspondent, Tom Bowman. Thanks to you both.
BOWMAN: You're welcome.
MYRE: Sure thing, Mary Louise.
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