It was New Year’s Eve and elite Army commandos were on standby in the Caribbean region, poised to storm an armored safe house in Caracas to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

But the weather wasn’t perfect. They waited — and watched.

Late Friday night, the cloud cover lifted, and President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead.

Under cover of darkness, highly trained Delta Force troops arrived by helicopter and descended into the compound where Maduro, clad in a gray sweatsuit, and his wife, Cilia Flores, were sleeping. They scrambled out of bed to get to a safe room behind steel doors, as Trump watched a live feed from his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago.

The commandos, armed with blow torches to cut through steel barriers, “bum-rushed” the couple, Trump said, adding that they did not put up much of a fight.

Maduro “was trying to get to a safe place,” Trump said at a news conference Saturday morning. “He didn’t make it.’’

The couple were taken by helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship positioned off Venezuela, and from there were flown to New York, where they will face drug-trafficking charges.

This account of Maduro’s capture is drawn from interviews with senior administration officials and other people familiar with the operation, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details about the secretive operation, as well as public remarks Saturday by Trump and his top aides.

The audacious move makes good on Trump’s long-held desire to remove the Venezuelan strongman, but was done without congressional authorization, is in apparent violation of international law and leaves open questions about Venezuela’s future.

It is the president’s most pointed exercise of presidential power overseas, marshaling elite Delta Force troops and other U.S. Special Operations personnel — supported by CIA covert operators — not only to seize a foreign leader in a country with which the United States is not at war but to take over the running of that state.

Trump said there were no U.S. deaths in the operation, which the military called Absolute Resolve. An unspecified number of U.S. troops received non-life-threatening injuries, senior administration officials said, including a member of a helicopter crew struck by small arms fire. An unspecified number of Venezuelan security personnel were killed where U.S. troops were operating, officials said.

The helicopter assault was conducted by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which flies some of the military’s most clandestine and dangerous missions.

“They were waiting for us,” Trump said. “They knew we were coming, so they were in … what’s called a ready position, but they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated.”

In the predawn black over Caracas, explosions shook multiple locations across the Venezuelan capital, including key military facilities, with U.S. aircraft streaking overhead.

Helicopters carrying extraction and ground teams sped at 100 feet above the water toward downtown Caracas. The city lights had been blacked out by U.S. cyber operators. The helicopters were part of a force that totaled more than 150 aircraft launched from 20 different locations in the western hemisphere. They included an array of fighter jets, planes that specialize in electronic jamming, B-1 supersonic bombers and others that are designed to detect early warnings of missile launches.

At 1:01 a.m. Eastern time, the helicopters reached Maduro’s compound, where they took and returned fire, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told reporters.

“From the time the first booms went off to the time someone was kicking down their door was three minutes,” a senior administration official said.

The military operation was preceded by an extraordinary covert effort to track Maduro’s “pattern of life” down to the finest detail.

Before the commandos launched, there was “months of work by our intelligence teammates to find Maduro and understand how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets,” Caine said.

The CIA had a source within the Venezuelan government who provided information on Maduro’s movement and locations, a person familiar with the matter said. And in August, the spy agency inserted a small team of its own personnel into Venezuela to monitor Maduro’s routines, this person said, feeding information to U.S. military special operators.

By 3:29 a.m. Eastern, two and a half hours after the raid on the compound began, the helicopter carrying Maduro and Flores was back over the water taking the couple to the Iwo Jima.

The raid was the culmination of months of preparation and rehearsal, Trump said.

U.S. forces trained on a mock-up of Maduro’s compound, similar to preparations 15 years ago leading up to the raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. “They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the safes and all the steel all over the place,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.”

Reaction was swift, with Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez condemning “this complete brutal aggression.”

Rodriguez was sworn in Saturday as Venezuela’s interim president, Trump said. In a televised address, Rodriguez was defiant, saying, “There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”

The administration framed the operation as a U.S. law enforcement mission with the military in support. Justice Department officials were part of the mission to arrest Maduro and his wife, U.S. officials said.

“There were literally Department of Justice personnel on-site to read him his rights and take him into custody,” said one senior administration official.

Calling Maduro’s removal a matter of law enforcement does not make it legal, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer now with the International Crisis Group. “It’s still an unlawful use of force against another state under international law.”

Congressional committees were notified of the operation after the fact, a congressional aide familiar with the situation said. The administration cited Trump’s power as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution and the threat it said Maduro’s government posed to the United States, the aide said.

“It’s just not the kind of mission that you can prenotify because it endangers the mission,” Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio said at the news conference with Trump.

Maduro, who has led Venezuela since 2013, faces charges including narcoterrorism, cocaine-trafficking conspiracies and weapons offenses, stemming from a long-running federal case in New York.

U.S. prosecutors allege that Maduro helped lead the Cartel of the Suns — described as a Venezuelan drug-trafficking network made up of senior government and military officials — and worked with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to move multiton shipments of cocaine and provide weapons.

Maduro was indicted in March 2020 in the Southern District of New York. The U.S. government has since repeatedly raised its reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction —increasing it to as much as $50 million in August. It remains unclear whether the reward will be paid out, or to whom.

“Don’t let anybody claim it,” Trump quipped at the news conference. “Nobody deserves it but us.’’

Maduro was given numerous opportunities to avoid capture, senior U.S. officials said. “Option A - and the ideal option” was to persuade him to leave office through enticements as well as pressure, one official said. The enticements included moving to a country of his choice, say Turkey or Qatar, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and a promise not to seek extradition.

“There were multiple places that he could have gone and had people there who would have been willing to take him,” the official said. “He chose not to.”

Trump’s seizure of Maduro is part of a broader campaign to counter narcotics trafficking from the region and a display of the administration’s bold assertion of a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

To compel Maduro’s departure, the president sent an armada of ships, planes and troops to the Caribbean. The Army commandos and special CIA units that provide support to air, sea and land operations were moved into the Caribbean region in recent weeks for potential imminent operations against Maduro’s government. Those forces joined some 15,000 troops and more than a dozen Navy vessels already surged to the area.

Since early September, the military has destroyed more than 30 alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 107 people in a campaign deemed unlawful by a number of legal experts and former officials. An ongoing U.S. effort to seize tankers and blockade Venezuela’s oil was designed to further strangle the government in Caracas.

On Saturday, U.S. officials said the blockade and boat strikes would continue.

Throughout the fall, Trump steadily upped the pressure, demanding that Maduro leave power and repeatedly threatening strikes on Venezuelan territory in addition to those on alleged drug boats at sea.

In the lead-up to the operation, two Delta Force squadrons had been relocated to the region, one from the Middle East and one from North Africa, to be in position for a potential Maduro “snatch and grab,” according to people familiar with the matter.

The CIA, which had not made Latin America a priority in recent decades, surged intelligence-collection assets, including stealth drones, to the region, people familiar with the matter said. The agency also sent covert units that provide support to air, sea and land operations.

The CIA had recently carried out a drone strike on a remote port facility in Venezuela, according to a person familiar with the operation. Trump suggested it had taken place on Dec. 24, making it the first known attack inside Venezuela and the first attributed to the spy agency.

Maduro’s seizure bears a surface resemblance to the U.S. effort to oust and seize Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega in 1989. That effort involved a U.S. military force of more than 25,000 troops in a mission widely perceived as American interference in the political dynamics of Latin American countries.

Noriega evaded U.S. capture for 10 days, holing up in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission before finally surrendering.

Operation Just Cause, ordered by President George H.W. Bush, was conducted under a different legal basis and did not involve congressional authorization, according to a Pentagon history of the mission. The Bush administration claimed a right to self-defense, citing Noriega’s declaration of a state of war against the United States, the killing of a Marine officer, and physical assaults on other Americans. In the Panama operation, 23 U.S. troops were killed.

The second Trump administration took office with a desire to go after narcotics cartels. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is also his deputy chief of staff, played an instrumental role in guiding the campaign. Miller and his team early on wanted to use the CIA in this effort, but encountered pushback from career lawyers who raised concerns. The administration then turned more seriously toward using the military, though work continued on developing covert-action options that could be deployed by the CIA, former U.S. officials said.

By July, plans were taking shape with a “Phase 1” to involve strikes on boats in international waters led by U.S. Joint Special Operations Command’s SEAL Team 6. “Phase 2” was focused more on Venezuela, with different options to be carried out by Delta Force. One was a potential abduction of Maduro. Another was the potential seizure of oil fields, a former official said.

In his news conference, Trump said the U.S. would be taking control of Venezuela’s oil production, noting that he was “not afraid of [putting] boots on the ground,” but did not give specifics about any future military action.

The Army’s Delta Force, known within the clandestine community as Combat Applications Group, is among the Pentagon’s most elite units, tasked with executing high-stakes and secretive missions, including hostage rescue and kill-and-capture missions. The unit works closely with CIA counterparts, a relationship Caine acknowledged has deepened over two decades of battling Islamist militant groups.

Delta Force relies on aviators of the 160th SOAR who fly specialized aircraft, including MH-60 Black Hawks and MH-47 Chinooks involved in the operation, officials said. In October, The Washington Post reported the 160th flew within 90 miles of the Venezuelan coast, flying in a formation that suggested training for a ground assault.

previous coverage

• Trump says US not afraid of ‘boots on the ground’ as it ‘runs’ Venezuela during transition