White House officials knew in advance about the 2020 Venezuelan coup, according to archives

By Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed – The Grayzone

Documents released by a federal court offer disturbing new details about an attempt by figures connected to Trump to orchestrate a coup against a government they clearly did not understand. This unprecedented look at the actors and their conspiracies—from terrorism to false flags—could illuminate the nature of the looming US military assault on Venezuela. 

The man whom the US government blames for everything, Jordan Goudreau, provided evidence to The Grayzone that:

• He signed a $221 million contract with Juan Guaidó while the United States was plotting, both publicly and privately, to designate him as the legitimate president of the country. 
• High-level officials from the first Trump administration, including Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, the CIA’s top Latin America officer, and a top-level National Security Council advisor, appear to have been aware of his invasion plan and may have been involved in its planning. 
• People connected to Trump formed a shady company to extract profits from a post-Maduro Venezuela after a Guaidó associate urged them to “act now, grab companies, collect.” 
• The CIA and an intelligence-connected propaganda firm called The Rendon Group carried out sabotage of critical Venezuelan infrastructure for “roughly a decade”. 
• A proposal delivered to Vice President Mike Pence’s office included plans to conduct “false flag” operations in Venezuela, spread hepatitis within the country’s military, and fund schemes through the “expropriation” of “narcotic substance”. 
• Roen Kraft, a wealthy financier with intelligence ties, recruited to fund aspects of the operation, told the FBI that he came to the conclusion that “if Venezuelans see something they steal it,” accusing Guadió’s cronies of pocketing $200,000 of humanitarian aid money. 
• Participants in the scheme told the FBI that they viewed the Venezuelan opposition as hopelessly corrupt after witnessing its leaders squandering huge sums “on prostitutes, thousand-dollar bottles of wine, and appointments for their girlfriends’ nails.” 

On the morning of May 3, 2020, two small boats with outboard motors lurked in the coastal waters of La Guaira, Venezuela. Unlike the 15 that the U.S. Navy had recently sunk, they weren’t carrying drugs, allegedly. Instead, they carried something far more alarming: former U.S. special forces soldiers hoping to be welcomed as liberators by the Venezuelan people. 

Along with a handful of Venezuelans who had trained in the Colombian jungle, former Green Berets Airan Berry and Luke Denman planned to activate a violent national insurgency that was to culminate in the overthrow and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. 

Hours later, the pair were filmed on the seawall of a fishing village, face down and bound hand and foot by the very Venezuelans they thought they were saving. Officially, the failed coup was known as Operation Gideon. But it would popularly become known as the “Bay of Pigs,” a humorous repackaging of the equally failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. 

Eight Venezuelan exiles died during the aborted incursion, and jailhouse interviews with two of the captured Americans were later broadcast on television to audiences across Venezuela. In the file, Berry and Denman make it clear that authorization for the operation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, directly pointing to President Trump as the mission’s chief executor. 

Mike Pompeo, Trump’s then-Secretary of State, denied any direct U.S. involvement. In the years since, the United States has sought to portray the plot as an unauthorized operation carried out by a rogue mercenary named Jordan Goudreau. The decorated former Green Beret, who has since become the face of Operation Gideon, was arrested in 2024 and now faces 14 charges based on federal allegations that he conspired to traffic weapons through Colombia in the final phase of the failed plot. The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of ten years. 

In interviews with The Grayzone, however, Goudreau insisted that he was personally recruited by Trump’s team security chief, Keith Schiller, to lead a coup against the Venezuelan government, and that the operation proceeded with the full support and knowledge of the U.S. government. 

Now, Goudreau’s legal team has gained access to previously unseen evidence about the figures he says orchestrated the coup. The Grayzone is among the first publications to review the material, which includes FBI interviews with plot participants demonstrating advance knowledge by high-level Trump associates, Colombian government leaders, CIA officers and agents, and officials working directly under Mike Pence and Trump. The documents strongly suggest that the government monitored and supported the operation at various stages, and that it has been funded by U.S. financiers close to Trump, as well as Venezuelan opposition leaders on Washington’s payroll. 

Behind the guise of lofty goals like “promoting democracy” and holding “bad actors” accountable, the Washington operatives and spies who allegedly recruited Goudreau to lead them to Caracas were driven by something more than greed. Hungry for a slice of Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth, and eager to secure lucrative contracts for the day after Maduro’s departure, the coup’s white-collar planners embarked on a plundering adventure that ended in infamy. 

The files reviewed by The Grayzone also include secretly recorded discussions, emails, and elaborate plans for coups and terrorist attacks prepared by influential figures in the Venezuelan opposition. Taken together, they paint a far from flattering portrait of the political circle that the United States has trained and sponsored for two decades. Among the accusations most frequently leveled by those involved in Operation Gideon was that leading opposition figures were not only eccentric degenerates but also prone to stealing from their patrons in Washington. 

Those exposed for wasteful corruption in the Operation Gideon files are poised to seize power if the U.S. military show of force ordered by Trump this October succeeds in toppling the Venezuelan government. This includes two opposition leaders ridiculed as “Beavis and Butt-head” by a U.S. financier of the operation, as well as their former boss, Leopoldo López, and his protégé, Juan Guaidó, who is described in one of the FBI files as a potential recipient of money from anonymous “drug traffickers.” 

However, the only figure who has faced criminal penalties for Operation Gideon is the former Green Beret who carried it out. Facing years in federal prison, Goudreau skipped bail and disappeared. Before evading justice, he participated in several interviews with The Grayzone, providing us with an “intelligence briefing” claiming that he would never have been in a position to lead a private army into Venezuela without the knowledge and blessing of the Trump White House. 

“We have several options for Venezuela”

Once seen as a staunch U.S. ally and a reliable intelligence partner during the Cold War, Venezuela’s relationship with Washington began to sour when the country elected populist Hugo Chávez in 1998. The charismatic army officer, who rose to fame leading an unsuccessful uprising against the repressive, unpopular neoliberal government in 1992, threw himself headlong into an ambitious plan to fund massive anti-poverty campaigns by renationalizing Venezuela’s oil fields. 

In the following decade, Chávez’s initiative raised living standards and oil production in Venezuela, reducing extreme poverty by two-thirds while quadrupling crude exports. But he was less popular in Washington, which responded in 2002 by orchestrating a coup that deposed the president for almost 48 hours before massive, spontaneous demonstrations, along with loyal factions within the military, restored him to power. 

Following Chávez’s untimely death in March 2013, his foreign minister and successor, Nicolás Maduro, was elected months later. Within a year, then-President Barack Obama enacted sweeping sanctions against Venezuela, leveling accusations of human rights abuses to justify attacks on the country’s oil sector, thus paving the way for a series of violent regime-change operations. 

The opposition-controlled National Assembly ignored a court ruling , swearing in three legislators whose seats were obtained through vote-buying, and exploiting the deadlock to destabilize the country through violent street riots. Maduro essentially overcame the paralysis by invoking the original constituent power to convene a constituent assembly in 2017. 

Trump seized the opportunity to escalate, threatening to invade the country if Maduro refused to step down. “We have several options, including military action, if necessary,” Trump told reporters at a press conference that August. 

Maduro was subsequently declared the winner of the 2018 presidential election, which the Trump administration condemned as illegitimate . The following year, the administration declared the previously obscure leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as the president of Venezuela, citing a constitutional provision they insisted disqualified Maduro from holding power.

Washington’s recognition of Guaidó enabled the theft of Venezuela’s gold reserves at the Bank of England, as well as the expropriation of its most valuable asset, Citgo, the international arm of the state oil company PDVSA. By forcibly removing billions of dollars of wealth from the elected government in Caracas, the US government fueled poverty and mass migration, and encouraged the corruption of opposition figures financed with the stolen assets. 

However, like previous plots to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist leadership, the sham presidency would end in shameful disgrace. Its demise began with a failed operation in February 2019 to force a massive shipment of USAID-supplied goods across the Colombian-Venezuelan border. 

The death of Venezuela Aid Live

The plan aimed to cross the country’s borders under the guise of humanitarian aid, using convoys of trucks to force their way into Venezuela. They would then accuse Maduro of cruelly rejecting aid intended for a supposedly desperate population, and of using his security forces to obstruct the hostile intervention. If the Venezuelan government failed to prevent the convoys from entering the country, the resulting loss of control would ignite a larger rebellion. 

But the humanitarian propaganda maneuver ended almost immediately in ignominy when its initial wave failed to break through a line of border guards, and opposition hooligan gangs set fire to the aid while seizing the rest. An attempt to blame the burning of the millions of dollars of purported aid against Maduro’s forces equally failed when Max Blumenthal and several local reporters exposed the opposition’s responsibility. 

A botched Live Aid concert in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta, sponsored by neoliberal oligarch Richard Branson, was equally unsuccessful, with much of the profit siphoned off by opposition figures. A survey revealed that less than 1% of concertgoers stayed to help after the star-studded show. 

Meanwhile, pro-opposition media outlets revealed that Guaidó’s cronies had embezzled enormous sums of money promised to Venezuelan soldiers who deserted to Colombia and joined the anti-Maduro rebellion. In the end, the deserter soldiers were abandoned penniless in Cúcuta, while Guaidó’s high-ranking henchmen squandered their share of the humanitarian aid on prostitutes and lavish hotels. Two of the would-be coup plotters, Freddy Superlano and his cousin, Carlos José Salinas, were found unconscious in a hotel room after being drugged and robbed by two prostitutes who were apparently paid with money meant for impoverished Venezuelans.  

For his part, Guaidó was photographed days before the humanitarian publicity stunt on the Colombian side of the border with high-level leaders of the notorious Los Rastrojos cartel, who reportedly smuggled him into Colombia.

Following the failure of the humanitarian intervention, and with options for ousting Maduro dwindling, the Trump administration took an extraordinary step, clearly designed to incentivize private coup plots. On March 26, 2019, the Department of Justice offered a $15 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s capture.

At that time, Goudreau was exploring an invasion of Venezuela to collect the bounty and become a mercenary superstar. After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he earned commendations from his special forces operatives for his human intelligence skills, Goudreau left to work in private security. He worked at least one Trump campaign rally, with a photo posted on his firm’s Instagram account showing him within the president’s security detail in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2018. 

It was around that time that Goudreau said he was introduced to Keith Schiller, a longtime security chief for Donald Trump and the face of several of the president’s family’s ventures abroad. 

In early 2019, Schiller was one of a group of Trump associates, Washington lawyers, and resource-hungry industrialists who joined forces to pursue lucrative contracts in a fanciful post-Maduro Venezuela. Operating under the name “Global Governments,” this shadowy group quickly sought to leave its mark on Venezuela, though not in the way its founders intended. 

Monetizing regime change

In an interview with Max Blumenthal for The Grayzone, Goudreau said that the Global Governments (GG) team had a simple set of motives: “They wanted contracts. They wanted a way to monetize what would come next in a Venezuela free of Maduro.” 

Apart from Schiller, those mentioned in internal documents as members of the “Team” include:

• Roen Kraft, a senior transportation and logistics advisor for a company whose first name is not publicly listed, but appears to be Timothy. According to a GG partner, “Kraft handled energy, oil, gas, and mining issues; he was experienced and capable in international business and was a logical fit for those roles. Kraft had also dealt with these things in Nigeria, which was a hostile country to work in.” Kraft later told the FBI that he was in a position to provide funding for subsequent humanitarian interventions in Venezuela and recoup his losses in the form of oil profits and contracts for the aftermath of Maduro’s ouster. It remains unclear whether Kraft is one of the heirs to the Kraft dairy fortune, as other media outlets have reported. 
• Néstor Sainz, a former State Department desk officer and Washington-based operative, assumed a role at GG to act as a bridge to contacts linked to the Venezuelan opposition. FBI interviews with associates of the company indicate that Sainz had cultivated relationships with several associates of Leopoldo López, the main lobbyist for the U.S.-backed opposition. 
• Gary Compton, the “attorney and lobbyist for energy tycoon T. Boon Pickens for more than 20 years,” was described as an oil and energy expert by his GG colleagues. He was listed as a former partner at the law firm of Travis Lucas, who was frequently present at the company’s meetings related to Venezuela. 
• Germán Chica , a Venezuelan opposition figure who occasionally appeared at GG meetings as a liaison for anti-Maduro forces, was one of the governors of the Luna Foundation , ostensibly dedicated to women’s rights, and is listed as a GG associate. 
• Andrew Davis, president of the Catalan-American Council , which lobbied for the independence of Catalonia from Spain. 
• Travis Lucas is not listed as a former member of the GG team; however, he acted as Schiller’s Washington lawyer. Having legally represented then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Lucas offered the firm a potential line to the top of the Trump administration. 

GG secured its first and only client in early 2019 when Sainz contacted Morris, the well-known Republican consultant, to promote the company’s plans to amass lucrative contracts following the ouster of the Republican government. According to Sainz, Morris contacted his brother-in-law, Chris Larsen, who ran an international construction company called Halmar , and expressed strong interest in the project. 

In early February 2019, Larsen arrived at GG’s Washington office to discuss the next steps with Kraft, Sainz, and Germán Chica. Dick Morris was also present for the meeting. Apparently, Larsen liked what he heard because, according to Sainz, he became the first and only client GG signed for its post-Maduro gold rush. 

The New Jersey construction magnate sent a $16 billion advance to Global Governments, promising another $6 billion over the next six months. After spending nearly $100,000, however, Larsen withdrew from the project when it appeared to be going nowhere. 

According to an FBI document, “Sainz said that several months had passed and they hadn’t done anything for Larsen, who understood why and wanted to retire. When Larsen’s check arrived, it was cashed and divided among GG’s team.” 

Although GG struggled to get off the ground, Sainz told the FBI that it was clear the firm was preparing a military-style operation in Venezuela, a perception that Goudreau confirms was widely shared. 

“In the first meeting we had, all of us together with GG, always knew that I was going to stage a military coup,” Goudreau said.

“Act now, seize companies, collect.”

“It all started at a University Club of Washington meeting on March 19, 2019.” 

This is how Lester Toledo, Juan Guaidó’s self-styled humanitarian aid director, described his first meeting with people associated with Trump and top GG executives at the University Club, a luxurious members-only club in the heart of the capital. Together, the group of curious coup plotters brainstormed a course of action after Guaidó’s humanitarian maneuver had fizzled out a month earlier. 

On hand for the initial reception were Sainz, Schiller, Lucas, Kraft and representatives of the Danish shipping company Maersk, who expected to be given logistical support for future assistance operations. 

“Nothing about military action was discussed at that meeting,” Toledo told the FBI. 

Two weeks later, Toledo said he received a text from Schiller seeking to introduce Goudreau as the potential leader of the team that would provide security for the humanitarian aid shipments to Venezuela. In an interview with the FBI two years later, Schiller echoed Toledo’s account, insisting that Goudreau was never supposed to lead a private military invasion. 

Next, in early April, Goudreau and Schiller traveled to Boca Raton, Florida, to discuss their emergency plans with Toledo. During that discussion, Schiller questioned how the supposed humanitarian aid could ensure Maduro’s forced removal. “It would be a disaster,” Trump’s security chief warned. 

Then, in an email dated April 16, 2019, Schiller arranged a call to introduce Goudreau to GG’s director of corporate affairs. 

As GG got closer and closer to Guaidó’s inner circle, one of his advisors, a former State Department official named Nestor Sainz, learned of a decisive opposition plan to incite a military uprising against Maduro and seize power by force. 

During a wide-ranging interview with the FBI, Sainz said he was informed of a military coup at least a year before it was carried out, having been alerted by a close confidant of Guaidó named Pedro Paúl Betancourt. According to Sainz, Guaidó’s associate marketed the impending  coup as an opportunity for potential U.S. supporters to “act now, seize companies, and collect.”

In that interview, Sainz insisted that he merely sought to help introduce energy companies to Venezuela, as well as construction companies that could rebuild the country’s damaged infrastructure. 

GG affiliates echoed this line, claiming they were only interested in humanitarian efforts and business opportunities under a pro-US, market-friendly Venezuelan government. However, recently released documents and witness statements show that military action against Maduro was frequently discussed at these meetings. 

On April 13, 2019, Kraft sent an email to Sainz, Schiller, Lucas, and other GG affiliates stating: “There are now few, if any, who believe that Venezuela will have a change of government without some degree of military action. The doors are closing around Maduro, and there are ongoing actions to ensure his downfall and removal.” 

Kraft stated that the Venezuelan opposition had requested a proposal from him to pave the way for this “military action” by organizing supplies and assets around the country’s borders: “Guaidó’s request is for a proposal with sufficient time to mobilize, following prior work in that direction, and including a draft of the main services… I believe Curaçao is the best location to have as a base, since Venezuela now has 17 bases along the border with Colombia. With the navy disabled, it’s a safer approach from Curaçao, and we can divert to Colombia to land easily.” 

Kraft appeared to suggest he had obtained financing from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), though he noted that he would only pay mercenaries if they were falsely classified as health and safety personnel. “Please note that the IDB would not pay or approve a payment for belligerents or security personnel. They would need to be booked and billed as something like health, safety, and environment (HSE) personnel,” the financier wrote. 

The impending coup depended on mass defections from the army’s leaders, and was to culminate in the takeover of Miraflores Palace. 

However, when Guaidó executed the plan on April 30, 2019, it resulted in an even greater political catastrophe for the opposition than the humanitarian aid maneuver of a few months earlier. The army stood firmly with Maduro, leaving Guaidó’s men isolated and outnumbered on the streets of Caracas. They were all arrested or sought refuge in embassies. 

While the army dealt with the aftermath of the operation, a photo circulated in international media showing the presidential wannabe looking desolate, abandoned by his supporters and isolated at a highway exit in Caracas alongside his mentor, Leopoldo López. 

The failure proved to be Guaidó’s death knell, triggering a series of bizarre political maneuvers and public humiliations before his career in Venezuela finally fizzled out. He fled to Miami in 2021, where he now holds a symbolic professorship at Florida International University’s Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom, a position typically reserved for other disgraced political colleagues on the Latin American right. 

Hours after the failed uprising on April 30, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attempted to boost the morale of the would-be coup plotters, declaring in a Fox Business interview that Trump remained open to military action against the Maduro government: “The president has been very clear and incredibly consistent: military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, then that’s what the United States will do.” 

At this point, Goudreau moved to center stage as GG sought alternative means to overthrow the president. For on-the-ground assistance, they approached a couple of opposition figures who claimed to be CIA agents. 

Introducing “Beavis and Butt-head”, and their “CIA boss”

On May 3, Nestor Sainz asked Goudreau to introduce himself and his private security company, Silvercorp USA (based in Florida), to the rest of the GG team. 

In an email to Sainz and Schiller two days later, Goudreau outlined his purported “peaceful options” for regime change, which involved neither “foreign military involvement nor the participation of security contractors.” He contrasted his own plans with the “U.S. military’s option for power conversion.” 

But having “personally used it in parts of the Middle East,” Goudreau acknowledged that a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela “has the potential to cost many civilian lives” and “could also plunge the country into a civil war.” 

By this point, Goudreau had become a recurring presence in discussions with GG and the organization’s contacts within Venezuelan opposition circles. Accounts of these interactions differ, but the details Sainz described to the FBI largely align with Goudreau’s statements. 

Through Sainz, a couple of opposition activists with close ties to the U.S. government and alleged CIA connections were introduced to Goudreau and GG. They were Lester Toledo, Guaidó’s director of humanitarian assistance, and Jorge Betancourt Silva, an operative whom Toledo described to the FBI as “the right-hand man” of Guaidó’s mentor, Leopoldo López. 

Goudreau, writing for The Grayzone, characterized Betancourt as a kind of ghost, saying, “You won’t find his name in the news anywhere. He’s well protected.” And indeed, it’s nearly impossible to find any information about Betancourt, or even a mere mention of him, through a simple Google search. Nevertheless, a few Venezuelan blogs and interviews with the FBI reveal him as Leopoldo López’s former bodyguard with a penchant for questionable behavior. 

Raised in the small mountain town of Caripe, he was likely introduced to the opposition faction by Carlos Vecchio , a lawyer from the same town who represented ExxonMobil before being appointed as Guaidó’s “ambassador” to the United States. Although they do not appear to be related, several social media posts by Leopoldo López refer to Betancourt as his “brother.” In photos taken by López during a trip to Cúcuta in 2020, Betancourt can be seen acting as his personal bodyguard. 

The rest of her family is similarly involved in Venezuelan opposition politics. When the group sought negotiations with the Venezuelan government in Mexico in 2021, it was represented by Betancourt’s sister-in-law, Claudia Nikken. 

Toledo helped López found the Popular Will party (with US funding), launching a violent color revolution in 2014 and erecting armed barricades known as guarimbas across the country. Toledo himself led opposition shock troops in Zulia state, where he had previously served as a legislator. When the Venezuelan government sought to arrest him for his role in the unrest, he fled to Spain and later relocated to South Florida to orchestrate further destabilization efforts with Washington’s assistance. 

In February 2019, Toledo traveled to Cúcuta to represent Guaidó during the failed “humanitarian aid concert.” In addition to his work with the opposition, since 2019 Toledo has served as an advisor to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the self-described “coolest dictator in the whole wide world” who has given the Trump administration space in his notorious maximum-security prison, CECOT, and has aggressively abused Venezuelan migrants. 

In 2024, Toledo began assisting Colombian presidential contender Uribe Turbay with what the right-wing news site Infobae described as an effort to replace the current left-wing government in Bogotá with one “allied with the Venezuelan opposition and facilitating Maduro’s departure from power” in 2026. 

Gustavo Petro, the left-wing Colombian president, is now in Trump’s crosshairs, facing sanctions and an escalating torrent of invective from the US president. 

But in his August 2020 interview , Toledo presented himself as a humble “humanitarian aid director” while distancing himself from military plots against the Venezuelan government. 

Sainz, however, painted a decidedly different picture of the pair, telling the CIA that Betancourt’s interests extended far beyond humanitarian work. The former State Department official told federal investigators that the two Venezuelans were also involved in orchestrating large-scale power outages, social unrest, and a military coup against Maduro. 

Sainz told the FBI that it was at the May 11, 2019, meeting in a WeWork rental office in Miami that he realized the opposition members “were not only interested in humanitarian aid but in overthrowing Maduro.” According to Sainz, the participants—including Kraft, Schiller, Goudreau, Bonaventura, Betancourt, and others—were instructed to leave their phones outside the room. 

Upon being informed that Betancourt and Toledo “were organizing blackouts, riots, and a military operation to overthrow Maduro” from an office in Colombia, “Goudreau raised his hand and said he could help them with that.” Sainz characterized this as the moment he realized that Betancourt and Toledo “were involved in destabilization activities in Venezuela.” 

During that meeting, Sainz said, Betancourt claimed to have contacts within the CIA. One of those was likely Juan Cruz, a longtime intelligence operative whom Goudreau described as Toledo and Betancourt’s “monitor.” In 2017, Univision revealed that Cruz had served as the CIA’s station chief in Colombia before becoming the head of the agency’s Latin America division.

The pair of opposition operatives first connected with GG’s team during the meeting at the University Club in Washington in March 2019. And it was there that they began their sales pitch to Kraft, the money man, to finance their operation worth hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The billionaire’s account of his interactions with Toledo and Betancourt was decidedly unflattering. He was so eager to give it to the FBI, in fact, that he rejected his lawyer’s advice not to speak to federal law enforcement officials. 

“Kraft said he referred to Jorge and Toledo as Beavis and Butt-head” and “described them as children, lacking class, grace, or intellect,” the FBI stated . Kraft allegedly said he “didn’t know why they showed up asking for hundreds of millions of dollars without any plan” but that they were “sent by Guaidó and were registered as representatives of the new Venezuelan government.” 

The two men allegedly told Kraft they could transport containers to Venezuela, but at nearly four times the cost he anticipated. “Kraft didn’t think the price made sense and assumed they were getting the lion’s share,” the FBI file states.

This characterization was corroborated by Goudreau, who told Kraft that he had been swindled by the pair out of nearly $30,000, squandering the money on luxury hotels, expensive alcohol, and prostitutes. 

When “Goudreau called Kraft to tell him that Toledo and Jorge had maxed out his credit card,” the FBI interview says, “Goudreau said they were spending money on prostitutes, thousand-dollar bottles of wine, and appointments for their girlfriends to get their nails done.” 

In Kraft’s version of events, he never wanted to participate in military actions, viewing GG’s role as merely protecting shipments of humanitarian aid. The FBI interview notes that “Kraft was told that he could secure resources for the people of Venezuela once the opposition came to power; Kraft would be the main contractor in Venezuela.” 

But had he gone to the country to extract wealth, he would have been the first to deal with the local gamblers who provided his direct line to the potential ruler of post-Maduro Venezuela. From the beginning, the FBI wrote, “Kraft had concerns about Venezuelan culture”; specifically, “he said that if Venezuelans see something, they steal it.” 

To illustrate his point, Kraft pointed to a couple who played as a team, whom he accused of pocketing around $200,000 from the humanitarian concert sponsored by Richard Branson in Cúcuta in February 2019. 

Bioterrorism proposals, false flag operations, and psychological operations while the power goes out

While escalating his show of military force against Venezuela in October 2025, President Donald Trump announced that he had authorized the CIA to carry out “lethal” activities inside Venezuela. 

However, after working closely and for an extended period with the US-backed opposition, Goudreau learned that US intelligence had been sabotaging Venezuelan infrastructure for years. He now claims that Maduro was right when he blamed his opponents “every time the power went out in Venezuela.” 

Goudreau singled out a shadowy public relations firm called The Rendon Group as a key CIA intermediary for interfering in Venezuela. Founded by former Democratic Party operative John Rendon, the organization is best known for taking millions of dollars from the CIA in the 1990s to “create the conditions for Saddam Hussein’s departure from power.” In a 2004 profile for Rolling Stone magazine, Rendon boasted to journalist James Bamford that “going back to Panama, we’ve been involved in every war” except Somalia. 

The Rendon Group “has been carrying out attacks on infrastructure, or helping to facilitate them, in Venezuela for about a decade,” Goudreau told The Grayzone. “These are all TS/SCI (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information) projects that the CIA oversees through private companies.” 

According to Bamford, Pentagon documents revealed that the Rendon Group was authorized to “investigate and analyze classified information at the Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS level,” an “extraordinary” combination of acronyms that “indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence gathering: eavesdropping, satellite imagery, and human spies.” 

Goudreau confirmed that the CIA’s prolonged sabotage campaign also extended to Venezuela’s oil production sector. He pointed to a deadly 2012 explosion at the country’s largest refinery that killed nearly 50 people. 

It was “a major attack that killed several Venezuelans,” Goudreau stated. “This attack was carried out by U.S. intelligence in collaboration with Venezuelan opposition saboteurs.” 

Also among the discovered material supplied to Goudreau was an email sent by a representative of an organization called Virtual Democracy, with an attachment outlining proposals to create “conditions of ungovernability” in Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro government. 

The email was sent to Drew Horn, a senior aide to Vice President Mike Pence, on December 8, 2019, by a former Venezuelan counternarcotics chief named Johan Obdola. Despite bearing his name and signature, the proposal was presented as the work of a six-person team, including retired Rear Admiral Molina Tamayo, an officer from an elite unit who played a prominent role in the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez. The document’s header indicates that the sales pitch was directed specifically to Pence. 

Written in non-native English and riddled with grammatical errors, the document contained a collection of proposals for terrorist attacks across Venezuela, including false flag operations, spreading “hepatitis (A, B and C), influenza, measles” in the lockers of Caracas country clubs frequented by government officials, as well as funding an insurgency by expropriating “narcotic substances”.

The proposal called for the training of 400 to 500 fighters at Camp Moyock, North Carolina, a training facility operated by the private military company Academi, formerly known as Blackwater. The camp was owned by Erik Prince, the right-wing heir and Trump associate who vowed to lead a military invasion of Venezuela to overthrow Maduro. 

Goudreau dismissed that plan as virtually impossible, telling The Grayzone that “500 men versus a concentration of, say, 50,000 soldiers who have control of the city and pretty decent air support with their Sukhois, against Erik Prince’s helicopters… I don’t know if that would even scratch the paint.” 

In an interview with The Grayzone, Obdola denied any knowledge of the document’s most alarming proposals, claiming that the document was “manipulated” by one or more of the signatories. He confirmed that the digital signature on the document was his, but expressed surprise that the document was sent to Drew Horn, even though the message originated from Obdola’s personal email. 

Obdola has been involved in previous efforts to impose a so-called transitional government in Venezuela, but has since severed ties with Guaidó’s team, whom he derided as “vultures,” claiming the U.S. government allocated them huge sums of money, but they ended up “stealing everything.” 

While the Venezuelan opposition may not have implemented Digital Democracy’s proposals for nationwide terrorism, US intelligence continued to wage sabotage attacks within the country in the vain hope of inspiring a rebellion against Maduro. 

Around 5 p.m. on March 7, 2019, Venezuela experienced the most severe blackout in its history following a suspected failure at the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant. Located on the edge of the enormous Guri reservoir, the plant provides nearly three-quarters of the nation’s electricity supply. 

Within minutes, then-Senator Marco Rubio took to social media to celebrate. “18 of 23 states and the Capital District are currently facing a complete blackout. The main airport is also without power, and backup generators have failed,” Rubio wrote . It was unclear at the time whether he had access to such detailed information about Venezuela’s electrical grid, especially since Caracas had not yet issued a statement. 

As Venezuela plunged into darkness, Secretary of State Pompeo joined in the celebrations. “No food. No medicine. Now, no electricity. Soon, no Maduro,” he exclaimed. Not to be outdone, Juan Guaidó tweeted: “The lights will return when the usurpation ends.” 

Other acts of sabotage were detailed in a 2024 Wired magazine article that revealed that in 2019 the CIA carried out a cyberattack on the payroll system responsible for disbursing the salaries of Venezuelan soldiers, citing four members of the Trump administration and Langley officials. 

While the covert attacks irritated the Venezuelan government, they failed to produce any real change on the ground. And, meanwhile, Goudreau’s plan continued to take shape. 

Meetings planned with John Bolton and Elliot Abrams

According to Sainz, the former State Department official, by the time Goudreau met with Betancourt on May 11, 2019, everyone present knew that Goudreau was preparing a military operation in Venezuela. At that meeting, Sainz said that Schiller explicitly instructed him that any details for the White House had to go through him. 

Sainz also said that Kraft promised to contact his sources at the State Department, as well as John Bolton—then White House National Security Advisor—and Elliot Abrams, then the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela. Both Bolton and Abrams are fixtures in the White House when it is under Republican control, and they have spent decades trying to overthrow independent governments around the world. While serving as Under Secretary for Arms Control under George W. Bush, Bolton helped fabricate evidence that Iraq was seeking “yellow concentrate” of uranium from Niger.  

As director of the National Security Council, Bolton was obsessed with toppling governments from Tehran to Caracas. Nicolás Maduro personally held Bolton responsible for the failed attempt to assassinate him with explosive drones during a military parade in 2018, telling Max Blumenthal in an interview a year later: “John Bolton tried to assassinate me.” 

In a 2002 interview with CNN, Bolton described himself as “someone who has helped to plan coups; not here but, you know, elsewhere.” 

Abrams, for his part, had been convicted of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, having found a variety of creative methods to funnel money to death squads in Central America after the U.S. Congress had prohibited the Reagan administration from doing so. The neoconservative operative was later identified as the Bush administration official who gave the green light to the coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002. 

According to Sainz’s statements to the FBI, Kraft mentioned that Craig Faller, the head of Southern Command at the time, had demanded a level of “transparency” in the operation. Taken together, these statements from high-ranking officials gave Sainz reason to believe that Kraft was communicating with the government, and he said this made him feel like “validation for his operation.” 

Separately, Goudreau told The Grayzone that Betancourt has also met with both Abrams and Pompeo. “It was strange that Betancourt met with Abrams and Pompeo,” the former Green Beret told The Grayzone. “Betancourt was a consummate buffoon.” 

The “next steps” to “recapture the country”

On May 14, 2019, Sainz emailed Kraft, Schiller, Lucas, and two other GG affiliates. He advised the recipients not to share the email’s contents with outside parties. In the message, Sainz provided an account of his recent meeting with Betancourt. Also present at the meeting were Betancourt’s brother, Pedro Paúl Betancourt, an aspiring political consultant who had once worked for Voluntad Popular; Héctor Di Bonaventura, whom Sainz described as “Toledo’s right-hand man in Miami”; and Daniel Echenagucia, an Italian-Venezuelan who was arrested in Venezuela in 2024 and charged with conspiracy, criminal association, terrorism, financing terrorism, and treason. 

Sainz told GG leaders that the meeting began with a summary of the situation on the ground in Venezuela provided by Betancourt, whom Sainz described as “the main voice behind Leopoldo López.” Betancourt’s summary contained segments not only on “humanitarian aid and human rights,” but also on much more dangerous topics, including “rebellion strategy” and “military support.” “In the end, Betancourt was given the responsibility of coordinating all matters associated with the liberation of Venezuela,” Sainz wrote. 

With “the current regime bankrupt” and “unable to meet the future needs of the army,” Sainz paraphrased Betancourt, the opposition had therefore “seized this opportunity to create a channel of communication with the armed forces.” As part of this military outreach, “the opposition created a database of key military personnel” in Venezuela, which included the “full names, rank, address, extended family, etc.” of soldiers, Sainz wrote; a move that any army in the world would interpret as hostile. 

The email, and Kraft’s approving replies, made it abundantly clear that everyone on GG’s team was aware of Goudreau’s plans, along with those of leading opposition figures, for a violent coup attempt against Maduro. The only point of contention was who would carry out the plan. 

According to Betancourt, there were three objectives: first, “to create and execute a general strategy to overthrow the current regime”; second, to implement a “strategic sustainability plan” during the “transition period”; and third, “to recapture the country.” 

It was this second phase, in which the group had removed the Venezuelan government but had not yet replaced it with the one that “kept Mr. Betancourt awake at night,” Sainz stated, adding that “he and others were very worried that when they took power they would not be able to hold onto it.” To flesh out the details, Betancourt proposed establishing three “working groups” in Washington, Miami, and Bogotá, Sainz wrote. 

According to the Washington-based group, “Mr. Betancourt expressed that Global should work with members of The Rendon Group,” Sainz wrote, referring to the CIA-linked public relations firm that Goudreau connected to the sabotage within Venezuela. 

Betancourt’s document concluded with a list of “next steps,” which included a “videoconference with Leopoldo” López and a proposal to “organize and coordinate Jordan’s visit to Bogotá.” 

About a week later, on May 20, Sainz, Schiller, Kraft, Toledo, and Betancourt met in a room at the Hilton Hotel in Boca Raton, Florida, and had a video call with López, the lobbyist for the Venezuelan opposition. 

Sainz recalled Schiller taking a more active role in that meeting, telling the Venezuelan opposition figure that he “could count on them and that they were there for him.” As the discussion drew to a close, Sainz also remembered Schiller handing out White House pens and Challenge coins from his time in the Trump administration. 

Sainz told the FBI that these trinkets gave participants the impression that the White House was firmly behind the project. 

The “strategy of rebellion”

By June, Goudreau was hiding in a house 25 minutes from Bogotá with Toledo and Betancourt. Inside, according to Toledo, the American had transformed the place into a Hollywood-style war room, with maps of Venezuela and coordinates spread out on the table, along with photographs of key targets, including Maduro and ministers Jorge and Delcy Rodríguez. 

Tapped to one of the walls were pieces of paper with keywords representing the steps to take before, during, and after the heist to ensure its success. The most glaring keyword, “narrative,” was misspelled.

But Goudreau and Betancourt disagreed on how the operation should be carried out. A photo dated June 2, 2020, demonstrating Betancourt’s “rebellion strategy” was outlined in a handwritten battle plan containing several keywords from the executors and their high-level targets within the Venezuelan government. The plan presented a timeline calling for prison riots, “disinformation,” a “distraction” campaign in the Pemón region of Venezuela, “black operations,” and an apparent attack on Venezuela’s Sukhoi fleet. All of this would somehow culminate in a “popular rebellion.” 

According to Goudreau, the document was presented by Betancourt, in which he placed himself at the top of the chain of command. The former Green Beret said that Betancourt and Toledo planned to pay opposition members to stage prison riots to create instability as a prelude to a national uprising. 

At that time, the gang that controlled Venezuela’s prisons—and therefore was the likely recipient of opposition funding—was the Tren de Aragua. Since then, Trump has essentially cited disinformation to blame Maduro for the Tren de Aragua’s ” invasion ” of the United States. 

“Betancourt and Toledo couldn’t get the idea of ​​a popular uprising out of their heads,” Goudreau said. “I always thought that was ridiculous, ever since the attempt in April (2019). I had very little faith in that plan, but I reassured Betancourt.” 

He continued: “I knew I would need powerful people within the army. The problem was that the Venezuelan army detested Betancourt, Toledo, Leopoldo, and Guaidó, and didn’t trust them. And with good reason.” 

Goudreau added that Betancourt and his men viscerally despised the army leadership, particularly Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and then-President of the National Constituent Assembly Diosdado Cabello, and were obsessed with killing them. “They went crazy when I said these men should be allowed to flee or be captured,” he recalled. 

On June 19, 2019, Goudreau unveiled his own master plan for regime change in Venezuela during a meeting at the JW Marriott Hotel in Bogotá, alongside Sainz, Toledo, and Betancourt. 

The meeting quickly went off the rails when the Venezuelan activists found themselves across the table from a highly decorated former Venezuelan officer named Clíver Alcalá. While serving as a major general under Chávez, Alcalá appeared loyal to his country’s Bolivarian Revolution. But after Maduro’s election, he clashed with the new president and switched to the opposition. Guaidó’s associates viewed Alcalá with deep suspicion, not only because of his Chavista past but also because of rumors about his involvement in drug trafficking. They then worried that his presence might tarnish their image among backers in Washington. 

Toledo told the FBI he was astonished to see Alcalá involved, claiming he believed the former general was implicated in drug trafficking. Given his history as a Chavista, Toledo said meeting him was like coming “face to face with the enemy.” Goudreau, however, asserted that Toledo himself introduced him to Alcalá in the first place. 

Alcalá was assigned the code name “César” during the planning phase of Operation Gideon. He had been training Venezuelan deserters who were largely abandoned by Guaidó after heeding his call to lay down their arms and flee to Colombia amid the failed coup attempt of April 2019. 

“General Clíver Alcalá was in charge of the operation,” Goudreau explained. “So I was going to connect with units of the Venezuelan army that Alcalá had assembled inside Venezuela, and we were going to catalyze a rebellion.” 

Goudreau insisted that his role would be to convey American support for the conspiracy to ensure its success: “We needed Venezuelans inside the country to see the face of an American to realize that this really was the way forward and that it was trusted: that it had the support of the United States.” 

The special forces operative was initially wary of Alcalá, suspecting the general was still a “Chávez type” at heart. But over the course of their time together, “he never lied to me even once and showed no signs of deception,” Goudreau said. In the end, the veteran Green Beret concluded that Alcalá would be a useful ally, as his military credentials could help bring other Venezuelan forces to his side during the planned coup. Goudreau also believed Alcalá could help represent the interests of more moderate opposition factions who disliked Guaidó.

Alongside Alcalá, Goudreau devised a plan for several special forces veterans to train a handful of Venezuelan deserters who had been exiled in Colombia since the failed 2019 coup. When the time came to act, Goudreau maintained that his team would infiltrate Venezuela and connect with units of the Venezuelan armed forces supposedly poised to turn against Maduro. Toledo told the FBI that he considered the whole thing “a suicide mission.” 

Goudreau denies suggestions that he sought to capture or kill the sitting Venezuelan president, saying he would have only needed to distract Maduro and keep him on the run long enough to install an opposition junta. 

Goudreau realized that many opposition figures were against allowing Alcalá to have a significant role in post-Maduro Venezuela, a group that the special forces operative included Betancourt and Toledo. He said his suspicions were confirmed after he secretly arranged to record a conversation with them during their June meeting at the Marriott in Bogotá. 

The person who conducted the covert recording was a former National Guard commander, Arturo José Gómez Morante, whom the Venezuelan government accused of several kidnapping operations this year. 

In the recording, Betancourt and Toledo openly denigrate Alcalá and discuss their desire to reduce the general’s role in the operation. They went on to discuss their willingness to rehabilitate him and help lift sanctions on some of the prominent Venezuelan leaders working to overthrow Maduro, but not on Alcalá. 

Toledo can also be heard acknowledging that he had traveled to Colombia to discuss the plan with the rabidly right-wing, pro-American former president Álvaro Uribe, who allegedly approved it. He described the then-Colombian ambassador to the United States, Francisco Santos Calderón (also known as “Pacho Santos”), as “the man who is organizing all of this.” In the comments, Toledo says that Santos sought to use the Venezuelan deserter militia to launch an attack on the leftist guerrillas known as the ELN, or National Liberation Army. 

“I went to talk to Ambassador Pacho Santos, who, in my opinion, has the biggest balls in this mess; he’s crazy,” Toledo said. He recalled that the Colombian politician “proposed what he called a phased plan” in which the Venezuelan opposition would “find 38 guys, go there, beat the shit out of those ELN sons of bitches, and then withdraw.” 

“They’re finally growing up, brother,” he added. According to Toledo, Santos told him he had “only one request from the Uribe government: that at some point we begin to coordinate between the CIA and the people here.” 

“And there’s only one person for that: Juan Cruz, who’s a very skilled guy,” Toledo said, referring to the former CIA chief of operations in Latin America. “Why do they trust Juan Cruz so much? They trust him because he was the CIA chief here.” 

Toledo insisted that he had never met Cruz before that, until the Colombian ambassador introduced them. Even so, because of Cruz’s leadership role in Langley, “we trusted him, not even Trump, but him.” 

When Arturo Morante, the man who was recording, commented that this meant that “the CIA has to know” about the plans in Venezuela, Toledo confirmed: “of course.”

Toledo went so far as to say that once the CIA and the Colombian government had committed to supporting the plan, “I’ll provide the music, bring the weapons, do everything.” However, he said, there was still a problem: “A problem whose name begins and ends with César,” using Alcalá’s code name. 

According to Toledo, Leopoldo López had presented him with a list of 22 names whose inclusion in any operation could be considered a violation of a “red line.” Toledo recalled López saying bluntly that “we are willing to support anyone, from anyone, except these 22,” and “the first one was César.” 

Toledo later told the FBI that when he learned he had been secretly recorded, he concluded that Morante was compromised. But even with dissent growing within his circle of Venezuelan contacts, Goudreau pressed ahead with his operation.  

A contract to “capture/detain/remove”

Back in the United States, the CIA wasn’t the only group that allegedly gave its blessing to the operation. According to Sainz’s testimony to the FBI, Kraft claimed to have met in person with President Trump after a campaign rally in North Carolina in the summer of 2019. During the conversation, he said they discussed how to arrange the weapons and funding for the project. 

For his part, Goudreau stated that Kraft told him he had met with Vice President Mike Pence at an event that summer and had briefed Trump’s deputy on the status of the Venezuelan project. But although he continued to make the rounds at the White House, the businessman never provided Goudreau with the funds he needed. 

In the following months, Goudreau said he initially believed his contacts at Global Governments (GG), and Kraft in particular, could compensate him for the work his team did. But by the summer of 2019, his expenses were piling up, and GG still hadn’t reimbursed him. 

In his FBI interview summary, Toledo said he cut off all contact with the Green Beret after a volatile meeting that ended in a heated argument. According to Toledo, Goudreau demanded payment for his work on the project. When he refused, Toledo said Goudreau offered to show him the weapons he had in the trunk of his car parked outside, to which Toledo claims he told Goudreau to “get out” of his office and “never come back.” Toledo now maintains that he then informed the five highest-ranking members of the opposition about the interaction, warning them that “the out-of-control” Goudreau “was crazy.” 

But even though Kraft had proven to be an unreliable financier and Toledo had fired him, Goudreau hadn’t exhausted all his options. In the summer of 2019, Goudreau said that other Venezuelan associates connected him with Juan José “JJ” Rendón, a wealthy TED Talk celebrity and consultant to pro-U.S. Latin American politicians (no relation to The Rendon Group). Having successfully managed the presidential campaigns of Colombian Álvaro Uribe, and having served as his chief strategist during his presidency— facing accusations of receiving under-the-table payments from local drug lords in the process—Rendón remained the mastermind behind his country’s right wing. 

Rendón’s influence extended to the Venezuelan border, where he served as a prestigious guide for the pro-US opposition. By the time Rendón contacted Goudreau, Guaidó had appointed him director of the strategic committee tasked with exploring options for overthrowing Maduro. 

Over the following months, Goudreau and Rendón negotiated a contract for Goudreau to carry out his coup with financial backing from Guaidó’s movement. The document authorized his group to use lethal force and detain civilians, and established the rules of engagement to be employed, depending on the level of anticipated “collateral damage.” It stipulated that Goudreau and his American colleagues would do everything possible to “conceal their identities” to ensure the coup was perceived as “solely Venezuelan.” 

Under the terms of the agreement, Silvercorp USA, Guaidó’s company, would receive a non-refundable sum of $1.5 million to prepare for the action. 

The contract specified that the objective of the operation was to “capture/detain/remove” Maduro and the current government from power and install Guaidó in their place. Upon this, Goudreau would receive a $10 million “success bonus.” The “total estimated project cost” for the operation was $212.9 million. Should the coup prove unsuccessful, the document contained a highly unusual clause allowing Guaidó’s self-proclaimed administration to deny any knowledge of the plot. 

Furthermore, the contract placed Guaidó at the top of the operation’s chain of command. Not only did Goudreau believe he had the support of the White House, but the contract assured him that he was acting with the blessing of the “interim government.” 

However, some of Guaidó’s closest associates were apparently beginning to fear the coup. Toledo referred to a meeting on October 15, 2019, in Colombia, organized by the then-head of Colombian intelligence, Rodolfo Amaya, and allegedly including a CIA representative. During that meeting, Toledo said the attendees drafted a memo assessing that the Maduro government had infiltrated Goudreau’s network. 

Goudreau told The Grayzone that before the meeting in Colombia between Betancourt, Amaya, and the CIA official, the opposition leaders were “determined to overthrow Venezuela.” But afterward, “everything changed.” 

He asserted that the CIA officer who organized the meeting was Juan Cruz. 

Toledo told the FBI that he was not sure if Guaidó was immediately informed of the memo against him that originated in the meeting with Betancourt, but he was certain that Rendón continued to meet with Goudreau. 

Despite the warning signs, Guaidó signed a contract with Goudreau exactly one day later, on October 16, 2019.

Although this is not visible in the video, The Grayzone reviewed the audio recordings of the signing and concluded that the participant’s voice strongly resembles that of Juan Guaidó. Since then, Guaidó has repeatedly denied signing any contract with Goudreau. He now insists that the signature on the contract was forged by the Maduro government, an idea that a poll showed less than 5% of Venezuelans find plausible. In the following days, Rendón transferred $50,000 as an initial advance payment, and the parties finalized the agreement. 

During the negotiations, Goudreau kept GG informed, providing Sainz with a draft of the agreement. Sainz told the FBI that he advised Goudreau to seek legal counsel and to share the contract details with Travis Lucas, the Washington lawyer who worked closely with Mike Pompeo. 

In interviews, Goudreau explained that having a contract with Guaidó authorizing the operation was more important than the financial compensation outlined in the document. Even so, Goudreau is currently suing Rendón for breach of contract for failing to pay the remainder of the advance. 

Within a day or two of signing, Goudreau said he met with Lucas and another lawyer named George Sorial at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Sorial had worked as executive vice president and head of the Trump Organization’s compliance council from January 2007 to June 2019. Goudreau said the three of them met to discuss his contract with Rendón. 

Sainz, in his interview with the FBI, recalled Goudreau telling him about his October meeting that year at Trump’s hotel with Lucas and Sorial. Sorial, however, told The Grayzone: “I had no contact whatsoever with Goudreau and I don’t even remember meeting with him.” 

During this period, Goudreau said he also crossed paths with Trump’s former security chief, Schiller, at the White House. Goudreau said they discussed the potential for extraordinary gains to come, and Schiller affirmed “the boss’s support” for the Green Beret’s efforts. 

White House visitor logs shared by Goudreau’s legal team show that Schiller visited Trump at the White House on October 16, 2019, the same day the contract was signed. Speaking to the FBI, Schiller acknowledged meeting with Goudreau at the Trump Hotel but insisted he did not discuss GG or its operation with administration staff or with Trump. 

But even if true, his denial does not undermine Goudreau’s claims that the White House authorized the operation.

Around the time the contract was finalized, Goudreau informed another veteran Green Beret named Drew Horn, after being introduced to him by Lucas. At the time, Horn was serving as a political advisor to Vice President Pence. 

When interviewed by the FBI in September 2021, Horn described the meeting with Goudreau as having an air of “intrigue and mystery.” Under the ground rules established by Lucas, Horn recalled, he and Goudreau were supposed to refer to each other by their first names, and Lucas assured Horn that what Goudreau was doing in Colombia was humanitarian. And legal. 

In response to a request for comment regarding his interactions with GG and Goudreau, Lucas wrote: “As an attorney, I cannot and will not discuss my interactions or communications with clients or prospective clients. I can, however, state unequivocally that I played no role whatsoever in the failed coup attempt in Venezuela, had no knowledge of the coup attempt before it was revealed, and never discussed or communicated with any U.S. government official regarding a coup or uprising in Venezuela. Any suggestion to the contrary is completely untrue.” 

But an invoice provided by Goudreau showing that he had spent $30,000 as an advance for Lucas’s legal services refers to “navigating any federal law” associated with ITAR, the government’s regulatory system that handles the import and export of weapons. 

“We don’t care how bloody it all gets.”

The available evidence is even more incriminating for Horn. Transcripts of his communications with Goudreau on the Signal messaging app show that Goudreau and Horn chatted extensively and met in person on multiple occasions between November 2019 and February 2020, as evidenced by the text logs. 

During his interview with the FBI, Horn expressed remorse over his interactions with Goudreau. The summary states that Horn said he “acted like an idiot and should have done more research on Jordan Goudreau before offering him any kind of help.” 

Text messages from November 26, 2019, between Goudreau and Horn show the pair introducing themselves around 11 a.m. That evening, the vice presidential aide suggested they meet at 2 p.m. the following day at a restaurant called PJ Clarke’s—located between the White House and Goudreau’s office on K Street, where most lobbying firms are based—where “they had a basement that was pretty quiet at that hour.” Five minutes after the meeting ended, Horn texted Goudreau: “Also spoke with my contacts at the State Department, good conversations.” 

At the meeting the next day, Goudreau says Horn told him, “We don’t care how bloody it gets, once it’s done, the money will flow.”

“I was incredibly excited that someone was working on this,” Jordan told The Grayzone. “We worked together for several months to try and get this off the ground,” and Horn “conveyed… that this was authorized at the highest level.”

Another veteran green beret that Horn knew, Jason Beardsley, was also in attendance that day.

At the time, Beardsley was working as an employee for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Email traffic obtained through the leaked documents indicates that Horn was promoting Beardsley’s resume in the fall of 2019 in an effort to help him get a job in special operations or counterterrorism with the Department of Defense. In one of those emails , Horn touted Beardsley’s experience in “white and black special operations forces,” the latter referring to operations with JSOC. Beardsley confirmed his membership in the “JSOC community” on a podcast in 2023.

In a February 2022 interview with the FBI, Beardsley said he remembered meeting Goudreau only once in person, and insisted that their communication was limited to a few text messages after the meeting. Beardsley told the bureau he did not recall ever speaking to Goudreau by phone.

When interviewed by the FBI about these interactions, Beardsley described Goudreau as “a cowboy and a door-breaker,” and claimed that the sole purpose of their interactions was to “unravel” Goudreau’s plans in Venezuela. 

In response to their efforts to distance themselves from the Green Beret, however, Goudreau notes that both Horn and Beardsley continued to request to communicate with him during this period. 

Text message logs show that Horn contacted Goudreau via Signal on December 9, 2019, to inform him that Beardsley had further developed the scheme. “We’ve run everything through wargames as best we can, Jason has the next steps,” Horn’s text reads. 

The White House visitor log indicates that Beardsley attended a meeting at the presidential palace with Joseph Wier, then the director of overseas military sales for the National Security Council. By this point, the only supplies being sent to the Venezuelan defectors in Colombia were non-lethal and had been donated by a Miami arms dealer, according to Goudreau. Although he declined to name the individual responsible, Goudreau described him as “a gentleman in Miami, a Venezuelan, a patriot” with “contracts to sell firearms and tactical equipment in South America.”

It appears the FBI believed this was Mark Von Reitzenstein, an arms dealer based in the Venezuelan expat community of Doral, Florida. Von Reitzenstein’s company, High End Defense Systems, currently claims to supply uniforms to the Ecuadorian and Israeli militaries. 

That night, Beardsley texted Goudreau: “I haven’t forgotten, I was going over some ideas with a decent gentleman on NSC watch who is reliable.” Explaining this text to the FBI two years later, Beardsley stated that, although he was talking to someone at the National Security Council, he wasn’t discussing Goudreau, and insisted that he only mentioned him to the Green Beret because he thought Goudreau was trying to avoid a meeting. 

On December 11, 2019, Beardsley sent Goudreau a series of texts requesting another in-person meeting. Beardsley also described “stakeholder groups,” which he said would be “comprised of (experts in) equity, finance, operations, and regional matters.” They planned a meeting for December 16, but the texts indicate that Goudreau asked to reschedule, saying, “I have to go south this week.” 

Beardsley told the FBI that he had used that December 16 meeting to scrutinize Goudreau’s plans. Referring to the “interested parties,” Beardsley said it was an attempt to give Goudreau “a reality shock” and force him to “act or shut up.” 

While Beardsley claimed that these texts were part of his way of “untangling” Goudreau, they occurred during what then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper described as a period of renewed interest in Venezuela within the White House and the National Security Council. 

In his 2022 memoir, Esper wrote that during a meeting at the Pentagon on December 12, 2019, then-National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien briefed him on several new projects in the pipeline, including “next steps in Venezuela.” 

Kraft meets the “little doctor” and the “baby eater”

In the final weeks of 2019, Timothy Roen Kraft said he had regular calls with Leopoldo López, the opposition leader who had taken refuge in the Spanish embassy in Caracas after his failed military coup months earlier. López wanted to know if Goudreau had any chance of capturing Maduro. According to FBI agents’ notes, “Kraft said that no one could get near Maduro. Kraft believed that Goudreau and everyone around him would die. López didn’t really react to Kraft’s response.” 

During the Christmas holidays, Kraft was at his family’s home in Minot, North Dakota, when he learned that Guaidó was seeking a meeting. The self-proclaimed interim president had lost momentum since the failed coup in Caracas and was the subject of a Washington Post profile earlier that month, its headline proclaiming that “the flame Guaidó lit is dying out.” 

On December 27, 2019, two Venezuelan opposition figures, acting on instructions from Guaidó’s mentor, López, stepped off a jet one chilly morning at an airfield in Minot and went straight to lunch with Kraft. One of them was covered in colorful tattoos, including one depicting a chemical formula. He introduced himself to Kraft as “the little doctor” and would only give his first name. The other, who said his name was “Carlos,” also remained anonymous throughout the meeting. (Guaidó’s “ambassador” in Washington was named Carlos Vecchio.) Kraft acknowledged that they were intelligence operatives with connections within the Venezuelan military, referring to their intelligence work in his interview with the FBI.  

“The little doctor” was identified by the FBI as César Omaña, a Venezuelan opposition operative who is little known in his country but has played a central role in several conspiracies to undermine the Maduro government. He is credited with helping López escape from the Spanish embassy in Caracas and move abroad in 2019, and was photographed that same year alongside another high-profile opposition figure, former police chief Iván Simonovis, after his escape from house arrest, where he was serving a lengthy sentence for his role in the deadly violence during the 2002 coup that briefly ousted then-President Hugo Chávez.

According to NBC News , Omaña worked through U.S. government channels and with two other foreign governments (most likely Colombia and Spain) to arrange Simonovis’s escape. Simonovis subsequently became a U.S. government asset, and Néstor Sainz, in his FBI interview, described him as “very valuable.” (The former police chief is now identified as the security director for María Corina Machado, the current de facto leader of the opposition, which is subservient to Washington.) 

Omaña also took credit for recruiting the former head of Venezuela’s intelligence service, SEBIN, General Manuel Christopher Figuera, as an informant for the U.S. government. Described by the Washington Post as a “doctor, businessman, and adventurer” who had been insinuating himself into elite circles, Omaña recruited Figuera for the uprising initially planned for May 1, 2019, which never materialized. 

 

Omaña appears to be close to Jorge Betancourt, allegedly covering his expenses at the JW Marriott in Bogotá, Colombia, while he stayed there for several weeks in 2019 with Jordan Goudreau, and from where, according to Kraft, he and Lester Toledo accumulated a rather large bill for prostitute services. 

Kraft told the FBI that Omaña and “Carlos” sought to contact him about various business deals and requested his support for a series of deceptive schemes against the Venezuelan government. The first involved seizing a pair of cargo ships transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba. Guaidó’s operatives were confident they could commandeer the ships through recruited crew members and then sail them to the U.S. Virgin Islands and hand them over to U.S. authorities. 

Kraft responded favorably to the plan but demanded a formal letter of approval from Pompeo before joining. When asked about his own involvement with U.S. intelligence, he told the FBI that he “could help in this situation by boarding the ships and assisting the captains in gaining control of the wheelhouse, securing areas of the ship. Once the wheelhouse was breached, they could retake the vessel.” 

The business deal then presented to Kraft involved “creating fake European Union designations to plant against Venezuelan diplomats of the regime who were traveling through Europe for cocaine distribution activities.” The idea was to “discredit the currency” and thus expose “how Venezuela played a significant role in cocaine distribution in Europe,” Kraft said. But the proposal involved “too much intelligence work,” so the money man declined.

After the meeting, Kraft said he had discovered the true identity of the “little doctor” and began investigating Omaña’s history. He discovered that Omaña had “swindled Venezuelans out of food” and “had a bad feeling about Omaña based on what he read.” 

Suspicions that Omaña was acting as a double or triple agent have circulated for years within intelligence circles, including among his fellow coup plotters.

After the meeting with Omaña and “Carlos,” Kraft arranged to meet with another shadowy figure known as the “child-eater.” He told the FBI he was waiting for Guaidó’s authorization for the meeting. 

According to the Washington Post, Mauricio Clavier-Carone, the National Security Council’s director for Latin America, was nicknamed “child-eater” during the failed rebellion plot orchestrated by Omaña and Figuera. Clavier-Carone is a Cuban-American lawyer who has exploited positions in both the Trump administration to orchestrate regime-change plots against the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. During the Biden administration, he served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) but was dismissed after it was revealed that he had given preferential treatment to a subordinate with whom he had a relationship. Clavier-Carone now serves as the United States’ special envoy for Latin America. 

If Claver-Carone was the same figure as the “child-eater” who requested the meeting with Kraft, this would further strengthen Goudreau’s argument that high-level Trump officials were fully aware of the coup plot. 

Kraft even told the FBI that he had discussed a contract with Guaidó for unspecified services, but that the self-proclaimed interim president would need to take some extraordinary measures to pay for it. “Kraft explained that Guaidó could have money if he was willing to surrender and work with the drug traffickers,” he said. “That would be a last resort.” 

It remains unclear who those drug traffickers were, but Kraft declined to comment to The Grayzone. However,  photos published in September 2019 showing Guaidó posing with two leaders of Los Rastrojos as he was taken from Venezuela to Colombia might offer a clue.

Stepping on the gas for Maduro

While Goudreau’s plan was progressing, the person linked to Trump who initially recruited him applied for an international arms sales license. 

On December 31, 2019, the State Department sent Keith Schiller a letter notifying him that it had received his application and payment statement to register as an arms exporter. 

Schiller told the FBI he did not recall discussing arms export regulations in his interactions with Global Governments and Goudreau. Schiller acknowledged registering as an arms broker but said he did not take advantage of his appointment. He said he kept the registration for future work with other contractors, but not Goudreau. 

On January 7, 2020, the text message log shows that Beardsley texted Goudreau asking how things were going. Goudreau replied, “Moving forward quickly.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll show strength, just let me know… alternatively, if it’s so fast that you’re moving beyond the slow pace of our stakeholders, let me know and we’ll look at what other way, or what we can do to better support you,” Beardsley replied. 

Beardsley told the FBI that his offer to explore “anything we could do to better support” if Goudreau moved faster than “the stakeholders” was his way of telling him he didn’t have government support. Beardsley told the FBI he expected Goudreau’s plans to “fall apart” from there. 

Goudreau mocked this explanation. 

“If Beardsley wanted me to stop, he could have written, ‘Listen, we’re going in the wrong direction. We need to cease operations.’ That would have been enough.” But “he didn’t do that,” Goudreau said. 

On January 25, 2020, Goudreau wrote to Beardsley, telling him that preparations “were finished. Ready for launch…”. Beardsley told the FBI that he didn’t know what Goudreau meant on that January 25, a claim Goudreau completely dismissed. 

“In the army we usually use simple English. Even at the spy school and in that world, simple English,” he said. 

Guaidó and the White House

By early 2020, with all the preparatory work done, Goudreau had his team in Colombia – including fellow veteran Green Berets Airan Berry and Luke Denman – training a disparate band of Venezuelan opposition forces for the operation to overthrow Maduro.

Goudreau referred to the plan, including his team’s infiltration, the coup, and the post-coup efforts to secure Venezuela and facilitate new elections, as “Operation Edgemont”. 

The Venezuelan deserters he worked with referred to his initial infiltration and tactical role in the overall plan as “Operation Gideon”.

Meanwhile, Trump continued to emphasize his support for Guaidó. Addressing the self-proclaimed interim president in his State of the Union address on February 4, 2020, Trump vowed that “Maduro’s grip on tyranny will be crushed and destroyed.” 

The next day, Trump received Guaidó at the White House.

In his book, Esper wrote that during Guaidó’s visit, the president asked him: “What if the U.S. military went there and got rid of Maduro?”

Esper said the meeting moved to the Cabinet Room. It was there that Esper recalled one of Guaidó’s colleagues saying, “We have some plans that you know we’re working on, they’re just not ready.” Esper said this individual briefly referred to Florida. 

“As he finished the prayer, he smiled, looked away from me, and made eye contact with Mauricio Claver-Carone, the senior director of the National Security Council who was the one pushing hardest for military action. Claver-Carone smiled and nodded back,” Esper wrote. 

“Let me know if I need to do more groundwork to get you support,” Beardsley wrote in another message a minute later. 

When the FBI asked him about these text messages, Beardsley said that no one in the administration was talking to him about Guaidó at the time. 

Beardsley and Goudreau exchanged their last message on February 6. Their final exchange centered on a plan to meet on February 14, 2020. Beardsley said this in-person meeting never took place. Shortly afterward, he said he had “gotten a taste” for Goudreau. 

Horn told the FBI that in February 2020, Goudreau offered to give the Trump administration credit if his coup plot moved forward. Horn told the FBI that he had rejected Goudreau’s offer and insisted that the Trump administration rejected the idea of ​​regime change.  

Goudreau denied Horn’s claims. 

“I would think that if Drew Horn wanted me to stop, to cease and desist, he would have written me a memo or sent me an email saying, whatever it is, cease and desist,” Goudreau said. But “that message never came,” she notes. 

Records show that Goudreau and Horn continued to communicate throughout May 2020. Horn declined a request for comment on this. 

The Ides of March

Although elements of the Venezuelan opposition lost faith in Goudreau’s plan, it was not until he attempted to move equipment that Operation Gideon began to unfold. 

On March 23, 2020, Colombian authorities in the Caribbean town of Pueblo Viejo seized a shipment of weapons that included a dozen AR-type automatic and semi-automatic rifles at a checkpoint. When the driver of the vehicle confessed that he was to deliver the weapons to a man named “Pantera,” the Maduro government quickly deduced that he was likely referring to the former army captain who was training deserters in Colombia: Roberto Levid “Pantera” Colina Ibarra. 

In a televised message, the then Minister of Communications Jorge Rodríguez revealed details that made it clear the plan had been infiltrated, describing the exact location of the training camps and naming Pantera as a subordinate of the “traitor named Clíver Alcalá”. 

The situation worsened for Goudreau on March 26, when the Justice Department declared that Alcalá was one of the leaders of the “Cartel of the Suns,” a drug trafficking operation established by people within the military before Chávez’s rise to power. The Trump administration had apparently received the long-defunct “cartel” to justify placing a reward on the Venezuelan leaders they sought to capture, while burying the sordid origins of the operation. 

In 1993, DEA Chief Judge Robert Bonner told 60 Minutes that the Cartel of the Suns imported more than a ton of cocaine into the United States under the direct supervision of the CIA. The program quoted Annabelle Grimm, the DEA agent in charge of Caracas, as saying, “We did nothing…no surveillance, nothing.” After Chávez came to power, the Cartel of the Suns became a useful bogeyman, justifying U.S. anti-drug operations that had been infiltrated by the government. 

Upon learning that Alcalá was being accused of leading the alleged cartel, Goudreau contacted Horn, wondering how the news would impact his plans. Text messages reviewed by The Grayzone show Horn asking, “Do you want me to try to find someone at the Justice Department to appeal the narco-designation?” He also requested that Goudreau send him any evidence he could use to argue for Alcalá’s exoneration.

Email records shared with Goudreau’s legal team show that Horn used White House emails to contact State Department employee Hillary Batjer Johnson about Alcalá. Johnson connected Horn with another State Department official, Carrie Filipetti, and asked if she could direct Horn “to the appropriate people at State or Justice.” 

Other correspondence reviewed by The Grayzone shows that Schiller had also been contacted by Goudreau regarding an “emerging situation” with “American lives in danger.” Schiller did not respond. 

Goudreau’s intervention on Alcalá’s behalf proved fruitless. On March 27, Alcalá surrendered to Colombian authorities. Shortly afterward, Horn informed Goudreau that the former major general was being extradited to the United States. The man Goudreau knew as “César,” whom he considered “the absolute strongest voice against Maduro,” had been brutally sidelined. 

Caught in the crossfire between a power-hungry opposition seeking to prevent another strongman from taking the presidency, and a U.S. government that never forgave him for his outspoken support of Chavismo, Alcalá ultimately pleaded guilty to providing material support to the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, and was sentenced to 22 years in prison. 

In Venezuela, the arrest dealt a blow to Goudreau’s credibility among his group of former soldiers, who had come to see Alcalá as their leader. It also hampered his plans to recruit other Venezuelan military leaders. 

“After Barr and Pompeo had Alcalá arrested, the Venezuelan military saw this as the ultimate betrayal,” Goudreau told The Grayzone. “So they began to get closer to Maduro.” 

Featured on Venezuelan television

Following Alcalá’s arrest, Venezuelan authorities continued dismantling the operation, focusing on Goudreau as the group’s leader. In a March 28 national broadcast of the variety show “Con el Mazo Dando,” Diosdado Cabello, then president of the National Constituent Assembly, exposed Operation Gideon, warning that a number of “American mercenaries” had been hired to capture or eliminate high-ranking government officials. Cabello presented photos and video footage showing Goudreau working security at a Trump rally, suggesting a scheme directly linked to the White House. 

Goudreau characterizes this as the period in which he decided to abort Operation Gideon and extract his team from Colombia by sea. But once again, the plan went awry. 

Having previously positioned some resources for the Venezuelan operation in Jamaica, Goudreau said he made a stop there to pick them up on his way to Colombia. 

Citing anonymous sources, several media outlets in the United States reported that a CIA representative approached Goudreau during his stop in Jamaica and warned him against proceeding with the plan. Goudreau denies that any such direct interaction with a CIA employee or agent ever occurred. 

Instead, Goudreau said, he set sail for Colombia, and made a dozen nautical miles before a belt on the boat’s engine broke, leaving him adrift. 

“This is the part that’s truly strange. I mean, those straps were brand new, and they break, when they should have been functional for much longer,” Goudreau said. 

Goudreau was stranded at sea for nearly three days before a Chinese tanker picked them up and took them back to the Gulf Coast. Back there, with his boat out of commission and flights limited by newly announced COVID-19 restrictions, Goudreau weighed his meager options.  

“I need approval from the State Department to send weapons and ammunition.”

Fearing that the Colombian guerrillas would discover his forces if they remained in their training camps, Goudreau said he reluctantly chose to proceed with the operation, hoping his assault force could still successfully link up with allies in Venezuela. He acknowledged the plan was risky, saying he hated the idea of ​​sending his team into danger while no one was with them, but maintains it was the least serious of a set of bad options. 

“For me, it’s a damn habit that I walk through the door first. I go first. Because I want my people to follow me. I don’t want to lead from the back. I have to lead from the front. That’s why Venezuela broke my heart so much, because my ship broke down and I couldn’t even get there to be at the front,” Goudreau said. 

Two days before the launch of Operation Gideon, another setback occurred when the Associated Press published details of a military plot to overthrow Maduro. Citing several anonymous sources, the AP described some of Goudreau’s interactions with the Venezuelan opposition community and outlined what he said was an earlier version of the coup plan. 

The AP article from May 1, 2020, described an operation in which an assault force would travel with a convoy overland, fighting from the Colombian-Venezuelan border to Caracas. Toledo, in his interview with the FBI, confirmed that he was aware of this version of Goudreau’s attack plan, which could involve his forces crossing from Colombia into Zulia state and continuing east toward Caracas.

Goudreau acknowledged that the AP article had glossed over the element of surprise in his operation, but said he calculated that the described ground assault was sufficiently different from the actual plan, which was a landing, that his strike force could still take the Venezuelans by surprise. 

On the same day the AP report was published, Goudreau said the first two boats of his assault force had set sail from the Colombian coast, carrying eleven people. The following day, Denman and Berry departed in a larger vessel with the rest of the assault team. 

While remotely monitoring the progress of the plan on May 3, Goudreau wrote a message to Horn: “I have 500 people in Colombia waiting for the order but I need approval from the State Department to send weapons and ammunition. 

Horn, who at this point was working as a senior advisor to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, replied, “Okay, let me work on that and see what I can do. I’ll update you tomorrow.”

Not content with waiting for Horn’s help, Goudreau took to Twitter, writing: “Strike force incursion into Venezuela. 60 Venezuelans, 2 ex-US Green Berets,” and tagged Trump’s account. This, Goudreau said, was a cry for help.

By the afternoon of May 3, Goudreau and former National Guard captain Javier Nieto Quintero had filmed a video claiming their forces were fighting in southern, eastern, and western Venezuela. This, he said, was a deliberate fabrication intended to divert Maduro’s forces and buy his team time to escape.

Although he himself had been safely removed from the operation, Goudreau’s public statements in the midst of his coup attempt represented his most desperate attempts to save his team. Both efforts would fail, becoming an endless stream of jokes about the botched operation.

By May 5, 2020, at least six members of Goudreau’s assault group had been killed in action. Denman, Berry, and a dozen others were captured. News footage showed the veteran Green Berets being forcibly taken to prison by their captors. 

A contractually deniable blow

As Goudreau’s plan fell apart, Trump and other members of his administration quickly denied that Washington played a role in the coup plot. 

“There was no direct involvement of the U.S. government in this operation. If we had been, it would have been different,” Pompeo told reporters on May 6. “As for who paid, we are not prepared to share more information about what we know happened. We will disclose that at the appropriate time.” 

Goudreau maintains that he had Trump’s blessing to organize his operation, but it was thwarted by disparate elements within the US government and the Venezuelan opposition community: “I had a meeting with several powerful people from Trump’s inner circle. After the contract was signed, a few hours later I had this meeting at Trump’s hotel. And then, hours later, Trump and Guaidó met at the White House.” 

Furthermore, Goudreau has alleged that he avoided more direct interactions with Trump and worked through intermediaries to preserve a degree of plausible deniability for the president. 

“If I had met with Donald Trump and had a certificate and was able to prove some kind of contract or, you know, some written authorization or something, that would kind of undermine the ulterior motives,” he said. 

Goudreau stated that he expected the U.S. government to disavow him if he failed. But he did not anticipate that they might prosecute him, forcing him to abandon the veil of secrecy he had built around Operation Gideon.

The possibility of denying it was explicitly incorporated into Goudreau’s contract with Rendón. The agreement stated that Guaidó could “maintain the denial and be absolved of all knowledge and guilt by all parties” for the operation. And indeed, Guaidó has done so. 

After distancing himself from Goudreau’s operation, Guaidó accepted the resignation of Rendón and another individual involved in drafting that contract, after Rendón acknowledged his role in discussions with the green beret.

In October 2020, Goudreau initiated legal action against Rendón for breach of contract, alleging that Guaidó’s team failed to pay the remaining $1.45 million required to launch the coup plot. Rendón’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the case, but a judge denied it in a February 2025 order .

Around the time Goudreau filed his civil suit, Beardsley began working with Curtis Cashour and Peter Kasperowicz of the Department of Veterans Affairs to draft a statement he could share and inquired about his connection to Goudreau’s scheme. Beardsley and his government colleagues prepared several drafts of the statement, in which Beardsley could indicate that his interactions with Goudreau were unrelated to his government work. The drafts stated that Goudreau first approached Beardsley to discuss humanitarian efforts for refugees in Colombia, and that when Goudreau brought up the topic of Venezuela, Beardsley insisted that the government could not support any aid or efforts in that country that violated U.S. law. 

The drafts also state that Beardsley invited Goudreau to discuss humanitarian work, but that Goudreau never followed through on that offer. Several of the drafts conclude with Beardsley saying, “Everything I know about his activities in Venezuela I learned from reading the newspapers.” 

Juan Cruz, the former CIA director for Latin America, offered commentary on Goudreau’s failed operation in Venezuela in an interview with Business Insider in October 2020. Through his current employer , the think tank CSIS, Cruz declined an interview request from The Grayzone. 

In his interview with the FBI, Schiller acknowledged that he knew Horn well and that Horn had helped him and Beardsley obtain jobs in the Trump administration. However, Schiller said he found it odd to learn that Horn had also been in contact with Goudreau in the lead-up to Operation Gideon. 

Horn, for his part, told the FBI that he was surprised to learn that Schiller had also been discussing the plan with Goudreau. 

Goudreau dismisses their claims of ignorance, pointing out that the only possible motive for anyone linked to Trump to have maintained communications with him was his involvement in the planned military operation in Venezuela: “There is absolutely no reason for Drew Horn to be talking to me or Jason Whitley to talk about anything other than this.”

In January 2021, Horn, Schiller, and Sorial co-founded a company called GreenMet, which is currently seeking partnerships with Greenland’s critical minerals sector. The company’s website lists Horn as its CEO, but Schiller and Sorial are no longer on staff. A 2025 Bloomberg profile of GreenMet described Horn as having “emerged as a key intermediary in Donald Trump’s campaign to secure the natural resources of the world’s largest island for the benefit of the United States.” 

In 2024, Schiller and Sorial created Javelin Advisors, a government consulting and public relations firm. Lobbying revelations indicate that the company had registered to lobby for “executive relief” on behalf of Fred Daibes, who in September 2024 pleaded guilty to perjury regarding a $1.8 million bank loan document. Records show that Javelin Advisors registered as a lobbyist working with Daibes in January, and that Daibes had since paid the company $1 million for its services. 

Last month, Javelin Advisors registered as a lobbyist on behalf of Greg Lindberg, seeking an “executive pardon” for their client. Lindberg pleaded guilty in November in connection with a $2 billion fraud and money laundering scheme. 

Javelin Advisors also presented itself as a lobbyist on behalf of a company called Capstone USA Advisory Group. The stated purpose of its lobbying efforts is “to cultivate U.S. government relationships and associated contacts to help promote potential government-sponsored reconstruction initiatives in Ukraine.” 

The Biden administration secured the release of Denman and Berry in a prisoner swap in December 2023.

Goudreau disappears

Federal prosecutors indicted Goudreau and Alcala in July 2024, accusing them in connection with the shipment of weapons and military equipment seized by Colombian authorities in the spring of 2020.

The indictment alleges that Goudreau purchased 61 kits to assemble AR-type weapons, including incomplete inner frames that could be converted into firearms. 

The prosecution alleges that Goudreau ordered the weapons to be sent sometime between December 2019 and March 2020, although they do not say exactly when or how they would arrive in Colombia. 

In addition to the 26 AR-type rifles, Colombian authorities also reported seizing eight silencers listed as “solvent traps,” a dozen more laser sights and gun scopes, and a single night-vision monocular. Some of these items provide the basis for other export violation charges. 

On January 10, both Goudreau and Alcala filed a public authority defense notice, indicating that they would discuss the criminal charges stemming from actions they took on behalf of the U.S. government. 

During his own case, Alcalá attempted to argue that the CIA knew he was working against Maduro. Alcalá sought access to classified records that could substantiate his claims, but the CIA invoked state secrecy, and a federal judge denied the request for access to the files. 

Goudreau and Alcalá had some success in forcing the U.S. government to release files that would prove knowledge of and support for Goudreau’s failed operation, but they have not received all the records they are seeking. 

Goudreau told The Grayzone that he wanted prosecutors to take his arms trafficking case to trial because it would allow his legal team to search for previously unavailable classified intelligence documents through discovered files. But when a trial seemed inevitable, he took evasive action. 

After his release in 2024, Goudreau moved in with Jen Gatien, a renowned documentary filmmaker who produced the film *Men of War* about Operation Gideon. After putting up her $2 million Manhattan home as collateral for Goudreau’s bail, the couple became embroiled in a bitter dispute in which Gatien allegedly accused Goudreau of failing to transfer his “significant cryptocurrency holdings” to her after she helped secure his release. As she sought to be released from her role as bail guarantor, Goudreau texted her: “I’m not going back to prison.” 

On October 31, 2025, Goudreau was ordered to attend a hearing to determine whether he had violated the conditions of his pretrial release. He failed to appear in court, leaving his electronic monitoring bracelet behind in downtown Tampa, Florida, where he was attending equine therapy. This prompted a federal judge to issue an arrest warrant. The Grayzone has been unable to reach him since, and his whereabouts are unknown. 

Before his disappearance, Goudreau told The Grayzone that the case against him “is really a smokescreen.” He said that numerous connections between several of the actors suggest foul play. 

“My case originated within the National Security Division of the Justice Department. That division is headed by a man named John Eisenberg,” he explained. “Eisenberg was initially placed there by former General Michael Flynn. He was in the White House at the same time as Keith Schiller. So these individuals were working together. Where I come from, that’s called a conflict of interest.” 

Kraft did not respond to a request for comment for this article. 

Sainz, Schiller, Beardsley, Betancourt, and Toledo did not respond to requests for comment.

Similarly, Sainz, Schiller, Beardsley, Betancourt, and Toledo did not respond to similar requests. 

Several days before he disappeared, Goudreau shared this thought with Max Blumenthal: “I don’t think a military coup is possible now. If it were, it would have already happened. Everything you see the United States doing, including destroying fishing boats, is just noise. Only an invasion is possible.”