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code ZERO SIGNAL. Fuel your day the healthier
way. A show about what they won't say and what
you're probably already thinking. No fluff, no
filters, no bullshit. Let's crack it open. Tonight
on Zero Signal, we're going to start with a headline
that sounds like it fell out of some alternative
timeline. The capture of Nicolas Maduro, the
president of Venezuela. A man the United States
has spent years sanctioning, indicting, threatening,
and isolating, suddenly in custody, suddenly
on a plane, suddenly facing an American courtroom.
On the surface, this sounds simple. Bad guy finally
gets grabbed. Justice system does its thing.
Roll credits. But nothing about Maduro or Venezuela
has ever been simple. The closer you get to the
story, the more it stops looking like law enforcement
starts looking like a move on a geopolitical
chessboard. One where the pieces are oil, cocaine,
migration, and alliances with countries that
don't exactly send the White House Christmas
cards. So tonight we're going to talk about what
this capture means, what it took to pull off,
and why there are a lot of people whispering
that Madura might not be the only target. Last
night, on the order of the President of the United
States, and in support of a request from the
Department of Justice, as the President said,
the United States military conducted an apprehension
mission in Caracas, Venezuela, to bring to justice
two indicted persons, Nicholas and Cecilia Maduro.
This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve,
was discreet. precise and conducted during the
darkest hours of January 2nd and was in the culmination
of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation
that frankly only the United States military
could undertake. What I'd like to do this morning
is talk to you through some of the preparation
and the details without compromising any of our
tactics, techniques and procedures. There is
always a chance that we'll be tasked to do this
type of mission again. Our interagency work began
months ago and built on decades of experience
of integrating complex air, ground, space and
maritime operations. While the past two decades
have honed the skills of our special operations
forces, this particular mission required every
component of our joint force with soldiers. sailors,
airmen, Marines, and guardians working in unison
with our intelligence agency partners and law
enforcement teammates in an unprecedented operation.
We leveraged our unmatched intelligence capabilities
and our years of experience in hunting terrorists.
And we could not have done this mission without
the incredible work by various intelligence agencies,
including the CIA, NSA, and NGA. We watched.
We waited, we prepared, we remained patient and
professional. This mission was meticulously planned,
drawing lessons from decades of missions over
the last many years, decades or many missions
over these last many years. This was an audacious
operation that only the United States could do.
It required the utmost of precision and integration
within our joint force. And the word integration
does not explain the sheer complexity of such
a mission. An extraction so precise, it involved
more than 150 aircraft launching across the Western
Hemisphere in close coordination, all coming
together in time and place to layer effects for
a single purpose, to get an interdiction force
into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element
of tactical surprise. Failure of one component
of this well -oiled machine would have endangered
the entire mission, and failure is never an option
for America's joint force. Those in the air over
Caracas last night were willing to give their
lives for those on the ground and in the helicopters.
Let me talk a little bit about the preparation.
After months of work by our intelligence teammates
to find Maduro and understand how we moved, where
he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what
he wore. what were his pets. In early December,
our force was set pending a series of aligned
events. Key was choosing the right day to minimize
the potential for civilian harm and maximize
the element of surprise and minimize the harm
to the indicted personnel. So as the president
said, that could be brought to justice. And as
the president said earlier today, weather in
Venezuela is always a factor this time of the
year. And over the weeks through Christmas and
New Year's, the men and women of the United States
military sat ready, patiently waiting for the
right triggers to be met and the president to
order us into action. Last night, the weather
broke just enough, clearing a path that only
the most skilled aviators in the world could
maneuver through ocean, mountain, low cloud ceilings.
But when tasked with a mission, this organization
does not quit. At 10 46 p .m. Eastern time last
night, the president ordered the United States
military to move forward with this mission. He
said to us and we appreciated Mr President, good
luck and Godspeed. And those words were transmitted
to the entire joint force. Over the course of
the night, aircraft began launching from 20 different
bases on land and sea across the Western Hemisphere.
In total, more than 150 aircraft, bombers, fighters,
intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, rotary
wing were in the air last night. Thousands and
thousands of hours of experience were airborne.
Our youngest crew member was 20 and our oldest
crew member was 49. and there's simply no match
for American military might. As the night began,
the helicopters took off with the extraction
force, which included law enforcement officers,
and began their flight into Venezuela at 100
feet above the water. As they approached Venezuelan
shores, the United States began layering different
effects provided by Spacecom, Cybercom, and other
members of the interagency to create a pathway.
Overhead, those forces were protected by aircraft
from the United States Marines, the United States
Navy, the United States Air Force, and the Air
National Guard. The force included F -22s, F
-35s, F -18s, EA -18s, E -2s, B -1 bombers, and
other support aircraft, as well as numerous remotely
piloted drones. As the force began to approach
Caracas, the Joint Air Component began dismantling
and disabling the air defense systems in Venezuela,
employing weapons to ensure the safe passage
of the helicopters into the target area. The
goal of our air component is, was, and always
will be to protect the helicopters and the ground
force and get them to the target and get them
home. As the force crossed the last point of
high terrain where they'd been hiding in the
clutter, we assessed that we had maintained totally
the element of surprise. As the helicopter force
ingress towards the objective at low level, we
arrived at Maduro's compound at 1 .01 a .m. Eastern
Standard Time or 2 .01 a .m. Caracas local time.
And the apprehension force descended into Maduro's
compound and moved with speed. precision and
discipline towards their objective and isolated
the area to ensure the safety and security of
the ground force while apprehending the indicted
persons. On arrival into the target area, the
helicopters came under fire and they replied
with that fire with overwhelming force and self
-defense. One of our aircraft was hit, but remained
flyable. And as the president said earlier today,
all of our aircraft came home and that aircraft
remained flyable during the rest of the mission.
As the operation unfolded at the compound, our
air and ground intelligence teams provided real
time updates to the ground force, ensuring those
forces could safely navigate the complex environment
without unnecessary risk. The force remained
protected by overhead tactical aviation. Maduro
and his wife, both indicted, gave up. and we're
taken into custody by the Department of Justice,
assisted by our incredible U .S. military with
professionalism and precision, with no loss of
U .S. life. Let's start by rewinding the tape.
Venezuela wasn't always the cautionary tale you
see in cable news, b -roll. For a long time,
it was an oil -rich success story of South America.
Huge reserves, big promises, and enough petrodollars
flowing to build a kind of 21st century socialism
under Hugo Chavez. When Chavez died in 2013,
his chosen hair, Nicolas Maduro slid into that
chair. Bus driver turned into union leader, turned
foreign minister, turned president. On paper,
it looks like a working class success story.
In reality, he inherited a system already cracking,
corruption baked in, oil money mismanaged, and
a government that had learned to survive by crushing
opposition instead of fixing problems. Under
Maduro, the wheels didn't just wobble, they came
off. Hyperinflation, empty shelves, electric
blackouts, millions of people walking out of
the country on foot. If you've ever seen the
images of Venezuelans carrying everything they
own in a backpack and crossing into Colombia
by the thousands, you've seen the human side
of Maduro's role. Now, put yourself in Washington's
shoes. Here, this regime turning into a narco
state right in your hemisphere. It's accused
of letting military officers and insiders run
a cartel known as the Cartel of the Suns. It's
tied into cocaine routes, moving product from
Colombia through Venezuela out to Europe and
the United States. In 2020, the U .S. Department
of Justice actually indicts Maduro on narcoterrorism
and drug trafficking charges and offers a huge
reward for information leading to his arrest.
That alone is wild. You're putting a setting
head of state, the same legal shelf as cartel
bosses and terrorists. So when people say the
U .S. would never go into another country and
grab a leader, they forget something. We've done
this before. Manuel Noriega in Panama. Operation
Just Cause. The message was clear. If you're
both running a country and running dope, don't
assume that presidential sash is a force field.
So when the story breaks that Maduro has been
captured, that he's on his way to are already
setting in a courtroom. You have to ask this
question. Is this the natural end of that 2020
indictment or something else? We're supposed
to believe that after years where he couldn't
be touched, it suddenly all comes together. An
operation we're told is clean, surgical, almost
boring in its efficiency. Maybe it's an extradition
dressed up as diplomacy. A neighboring country
quietly hands him over after an internal power
struggle. Maybe it's a jet diverted on the strength
of sealed warrants, behind the scenes pressure.
Maybe it's something darker. The red edition
that never makes the front page in full detail.
Whatever version you're being fed. understand
one thing. To get a sitting president out of
his own security bubble and to inform custody,
you need more than just good intel. You need
insiders. That's the first conspiracy pressure
point. This doesn't happen without someone close
to Maduro, either breaking, flipping, or deciding
he's more valuable as a bargaining chip than
a boss. It could mean a military faction that's
tired of being tied to sanctions or narco trafficking
allegations. It could mean a rival insider, the
ruling party who sees his moment to step into
the vacuum. Or, and this is where it gets interesting,
it could mean a deal. Safe pass. message and
money for one circle, handcuffs and headlines
for the man on top. If you are the United States
and you went up Maduro for years, you don't wait
for a miracle. You engineer the conditions for
one. Now, add in a second layer. This isn't just
about one country and its leader. Look at who
Maduro has been getting close with to while Washington
has been tightening the screws, Iran, Russia,
to a lesser extent, China and Turkey. When your
economy is sanctioned to death and Western banks
won't touch you, you go to whoever's willing
to do business in the shadows. That has meant
Iranian fuel shipments when Venezuela's own refineries
were falling apart. It's meant flights and cargo
links that Western intel agencies watched very
carefully because they weren't always convinced
it was just for food or spare parts for those
planes. It meant long -running accusations that
Venezuela became a friendly space for Hezbollah
-linked networks to move money, launder profits,
and stage logistics in Latin America. It's meant
Russian strategic bombers landing in Venezuela
back in the late 2010s as a way to send a message
that Moscow has friends in America's backyard.
yourself into the mindset of people who write
threat assessments for a living. You don't just
see Maduro as a corrupt leader running a broken
state. You see a gateway. You see a regime willing
to trade access for survival, access to ports,
airspace, passports, banks, whatever keeps the
lights on in the presidential palace for more
than one year. Iran looking for places to extend
its reach to the Western Hemisphere, whether
through diplomatic missions, cultural centers,
or shell companies. You see Russia, under sanctions
of its own, trying to create pressure points
close to U .S. territory. You start to ask, is
Venezuela or is it being turned into a platform?
Now ask the forbidden question. That's how the
government sees it. Is this capture really about
cocaine and corruption or is it about breaking
an alliance? Venezuela under Maduro is viewed
as a bridge between Iran, Russia and networks
that scare counter -terror analysts, Hezbollah,
Quads Force, Russian security contractors. Then
removing him isn't just a legal victory. It's
a regime change by indictment. It's decapitation
of a node in a larger network. That's how special
operations and intelligence people talk when
they're being honest. You don't just remove individuals,
you remove links in a chain. There's another
historical pattern here that's uncomfortable
to talk about. When the United States has a problem
it can't solve with normal diplomacy, it does
two things at once. It tells a clean story to
the public and runs a messier one underneath.
In Noriega, the clean story was dictator, drug
trafficker, minister to democracy, so we had
to go in. The messy story was about bases, shipping
lanes, and who controls the canal. With Saddam
Hussein, the clean story was weapons of mass
- destruction and liberating Iraq. The message
story was oil, regional balance, a long list
of unfinished business from the 1990s. With Maduro,
the clean story now is something like narco -dictator,
finally held accountable, justice for the Venezuela
people. The messy story has more to do with who
gets to set the roles in the western hemisphere,
Washington and its allies, or a coalition that
includes Moscow and Tehran. Here's where the
conspiracy angle deepens. What if Maduro isn't
the real engul at all, but a lever? Think about
what a man in his position knows. Internal ledgers,
off the book deal. intelligence shared from his
partners, conversations with Russians or Iranian
envoys that we're never supposed to see in daylight.
If you get him into a position where he's staring
down decades in an American prison, you have
an incentive to lean on him, not just for criminal,
but as a source. You don't even have to parade
that part in front of the cameras. The official
story is we want justice. The off the record
story is tell us how the network works. Tell
us how money flows from South America cocaine
labs into the Middle Eastern front companies.
Tell us what generals are double dipping, which
bankers moved which billions, which foreign agents
you met and what they promised you. In that scenario,
Maduro isn't just a trophy, he's a hard drive.
Now flip it around. If you're Iran or Russia
watching this happen, what do you see? You see
the Americans proving they're still willing to
reach into another country and physically remove
a leader they've labeled an enemy. You see all
other partners, people you deal with in Africa,
Asia, Latin America, suddenly wondering if their
turn is next. You see a president that creates
pressure to respond, not necessarily with a big,
obvious missile launch, but with asymmetrical
moves, cyber attacks, sabotage, using proxies.
If you believe that Maduro's capture was less
about justice, more about dismantling a loose
network, then you also have to believe that the
Alliance won't just shrug and walk away. Let's
zoom back into Venezuela for a moment, because
there's a human cost here that never fully makes
it into the headlines. When you remove a strong
man from a fragile system, you don't automatically
get peace and democracy. Sometimes you get a
power vacuum. You get factions behind the scenes
maneuvering to become the next Maduro, but with
a better PR team. You get military officers who
suddenly don't know whether their safest move
is staying loyal or flipping Besides, you get
opposition leaders who have spent years trying
not to get killed, now being dangled offers they
can't entirely trust from foreign capitals to
have their own agendas. You get regular people,
teachers, nurses, shop owners, kids, who just
want a stable currency and the lights to stay
on, suddenly living through another round of
uncertainty. If you believe that Maduro's capture
is the beginning of Venezuela's healing, that's
one narrative. If you believe it's the opening
chapter of something more chaotic, that's another.
Here's where the timing question comes in. Why
now? Maduro has been under sanctions and indictment
for years. The economic collapse isn't new. The
exodus of refugees isn't new. The cocaine rounds
aren't new. So what changed? One theory is that
his value to his foreign backers started to drop.
Foil deals were delivering what they promised.
If he was seen as too toxic, too erratic, maybe
he became expendable, a bargaining chip to trade
for sanctions relief or guarantees. Another theory
is that the alliances themselves crossed a line
that Washington wasn't willing to tolerate. Perhaps
intelligence started to indicate not just political
support from Iran and Russia, but actual military
cooperation in ways that turned Venezuela to
more than an economic partner, more like a staging
point. When you combine that with ongoing worries
about Hezbollah and other proxy networks using
Latin America as a back office, suddenly the
risk calculation shifts. A leader who was once
annoying but manageable becomes an unacceptable
risk. There's also the domestic angle in the
United States. You cannot ignore the political
value of a dramatic foreign victory when things
at home are brittle. Polarization, economic anxiety,
mistrust in institutions, putting a foreign villain
in handcuffs on TV is a way to project strength
across party lines. If you're a political face
in a tough election or a messy news cycle, announcing
the capture of someone you've spent years calling
a narco terrorist dictator is a great way to
change that subject. That doesn't mean the operation
is fake. It means the decision of when and how
to pull the trigger on that operation is never
purely about the target. It's about the audience.
Now let's talk about the court part because that's
where the story gets both legal and symbolic.
When you haul a foreign president to an American
court room, you're doing more than prosecuting
him. You're sending a message to every head of
state who has ever thought as long as I stay
in Inside my borders, I'm untouchable. You're
saying we don't see this as politics. We see
this as a crime. Conspiracy angle here is subtle.
Once we normalize that ideal, where does it stop?
Today it's Madura and narcoterrorism. Tomorrow
could be a different leader accused of cyber
attacks or human rights abuses or financial crimes.
There's a version of the future where U .S. courts
become kind of a global tribunal whenever Washington
decides someone crossed that line. That sounds
great if you trusted people drawing the lines.
It sounds a lot less great if you watched those
lines shift depending on whose interests are
at stake. Some people will say, look, this is
overthinking it. Maduro is a corrupt dictator
who ruined his country, worked with cartels,
cozied up to hostile regimes. Of course he should
face justice. And there's truth in that. But
Zero Signal isn't about accepting the press release
version and calling it a night. It's about asking
what has to be true in the background for the
headline to exist. In this case, for Maduro to
be captured and sent to court, you need high
level cooperation from at least one neighboring
country. A faction without its own system willing
to sell him out. A green life for the people
in Washington who know exactly how dangerous
the president is. this sets, and the confidence
that they can handle whatever blowback comes
next. That's a lot of moving pieces, and none
of them move without deep remotives. There's
one more thread I want to tug on before we start
landing this plane. Think about information.
For years, the Venezuelan government has been
accused of using disinformation, propaganda,
and censorship to keep control. But if Maduro
is in custody, if he's being interrogated, if
his devices and documents are being analyzed,
that flow of information suddenly reverses. Secrets
start to move outward instead of inward, things
that were brushed off as conspiracy theories.
about his foreign partners might suddenly look
a lot less theoretical when they show up in court
exhibits or leaked transcripts, where if you're
more cynical, only the secrets that are useful
to certain agendas will see the light of day,
while others stay locked in classified annexes
forever. Either way, the capture of a leader
like Maduro doesn't just change who runs a country,
it changed who owns the narrative. So where does
this leave us? On paper, this is a story about
a narco dictator finally facing justice after
years of abusing power, wrecking an economy,
and aligning with regimes who want to undermine
the U .S. In practice, it's a story about what
happens when law enforcement, intel, and geopolitics
fuse into the same system. Was this operation
about protecting Americans from drugs and terror?
Was it about snapping a link in a chain that
runs from Caracas to Moscow to Tehran? Was it
about domestic political theater? Or is it the
most unsettling version, all of the above at
once? That's the part that most people don't
want to look at. Possibly that logical, rational
motives and opportunities, self -serving opportunities,
can coexist inside the same decision. As always,
I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm here
to walk you around the edges of the story and
show you the parts that don't fit neatly into
the official script. Maduro's capture and trial
became real fixtures of our new cycle. You'll
hear a thousand pundits talk about what it means
for democracy, the rule of law, and for the free
world. What you won't hear as often is the quiet
worry in the background. If we can reach across
borders and take him, who else is fair game?
How does his former friends respond? And what
happens to the millions of people in Venezuela
who are about to live through yet another new
beginning designed not by them, but for them?
If you're listening to this, I'm not asking you
to panic or go full doomer. That never helps.
I'm asking you to do what we always talk about
on this show. Live in that yellow zone of awareness.
Pay attention to the connections. Notice when
the narrative shifts from justice to strategy
without anyone admitting it out loud. Maybe ask
yourself a personal question. If powerful people
can rewrite the fate of a country with an operation
in a courtroom, what can you still control in
your own life, your community, your situational
awareness, your ability to separate signal from
noise? That's yours for now. This has been Zero
Signal. this story plays out, stay safe, stay
curious, and stay in that thin line between fear
and denial. That's where the truth usually hides.
We've hit the zero hour. That's a wrap on this
week's transmission. New episodes drop weekly,
so stay tuned and don't miss the next Signal.
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