Trump’s Venezuela action is NOT unprecedented, says former top CIA agent

Rollie Flynn, now CEO of the Arkin Group and a 30-year veteran of the agency, said recent commentary had overlooked earlier US operations aimed at disrupting the drug trade.

“Well, it's very interesting because the current US administration, President Trump, has talked openly about having a covert action plan to stem the flow of drugs to the United States,” Flynn said. 

She noted the unusual decision to speak publicly about such plans, given that “normally in the past, covert action means it's covert, and we don't talk about it.”

Flynn cautioned that the implications could extend well beyond counter-narcotics work. 

“If the US administration is thinking of this covert action as doing something beyond stemming the flow of drugs, but are also thinking of regime change, that's something that I think that you have to think long and hard about,” she said, adding that such efforts require “sufficient domestic support, including the military.”

She argued that analysts were wrong to treat US interference as unprecedented, pointing to both the Bay of Pigs fiasco and anti-drug operations in South America. 

“A lot of the commentators have said … nothing like this has ever happened. And yet there was a Peruvian shoot-down programme in Peru that ran in the nineties and through the early, very early two thousands,” she said.

On whether Nicolás Maduro’s government could be toppled, Flynn was sceptical. 

“It would take a lot. And simply because the military seems to support him,” she said. Foreign backers such as Iran and Russia were weakened, she noted, but “the bottom line is regime change is really hard,” requiring “a mass uprising supported by the military and the security services” to succeed.

Watch the full interview: