Recruit Maduros pilot to turn on the Venezuelan leader

MIAMI (AP) — The federal agent had a daring pitch for Nicolás Maduro’s chief pilot: All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president’s airplane to a place where U.S. authorities may nab the strongman.

In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine assembly, the aviator could be made a very wealthy man.

The dialog was tense, and the pilot left noncommittal, though he offered the agent, Edwin Lopez, with his cell quantity — a signal he may be in serving to the U.S. authorities.

Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his authorities job in July, Lopez stored at it, chatting with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app.

The untold, intrigue-filled saga of how Lopez tried to flip the pilot has all the components of a Cold War spy thriller — luxurious non-public jets, a secret assembly at an airport hangar, high-stakes diplomacy and the delicate wooing of a key Maduro lieutenant. There was even a closing machination aimed at rattling the Venezuelan president about the pilot’s true loyalties.

More broadly, the scheme reveals the extent — and often slapdash fashion — to which the U.S. has for years sought to topple Maduro, who it blames for destroying the oil-rich nation’s democracy while offering a lifeline to drug traffickers, terrorist teams and communist-run Cuba.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has taken an even tougher line. This summer season, the president has deployed 1000’s of troops, assault helicopters and warships to the Caribbean to assault fishing boats suspected of smuggling cocaine out of Venezuela. In 10 strikes, including a few in the japanese Pacific Ocean, the U.S. navy has killed at least 43 people.

This month, Trump licensed the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela, and the U.S. authorities has also doubled the bounty for Maduro’s seize on federal narco-trafficking prices, a transfer that Lopez sought to leverage in a textual content message to the pilot.

“I’m still waiting for your answer,” Lopez wrote the pilot on Aug. 7, attaching a hyperlink to a Justice Department press release asserting the reward had risen to $50 million.

Details of the finally unsuccessful plan have been drawn from interviews with three current and former U.S. officers, as properly as one of Maduro’s opponents. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they have been either not licensed to talk about the effort or feared retribution for disclosing it. The Associated Press also reviewed — and authenticated — textual content exchanges between Lopez and the pilot.

Attempts to find the pilot, Venezuelan Gen. Bitner Villegas, weren’t profitable.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department didn’t remark. The Venezuelan authorities didn’t reply to a request for remark.

It began with a tip on Maduro’s planes

The plot was hatched when a tipster confirmed up at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic on April 24, 2024, when Joe Biden was president. The informant purported to have info about Maduro’s planes, according to three of the officers acquainted with the matter.

Lopez, 50, was then an attaché at the embassy and agent for Homeland Security Investigations, a half of the Department of Homeland Security.

A wiry former U.S. Army Ranger from Puerto Rico, Lopez was main the company’s investigations into transnational prison networks with a presence in the Caribbean, after a storied profession taking down drug gangs, money launderers and fraudsters. His work dismantling an illicit money-changing operation in Miami even earned him a public rebuke in 2010 from Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor. The embassy task was to be his last before retirement.

The embassy was closed, although Lopez was still at his desk. He was handed a 3×5 index card with the tipster’s title and telephone quantity. When he called, the tipster claimed that two planes used by Maduro have been in the Dominican Republic present process expensive repairs.

Lopez was intrigued: He knew that any upkeep was most probably a prison violation under U.S. law because it will’ve concerned the buy of American elements, prohibited by sanctions on Venezuela. The planes have been also subject to seizure – for violating those same sanctions.

Locating the plane was simple – they have been housed in La Isabela govt airport in Santo Domingo. Tracing them to Maduro would take federal investigators months. As they constructed that case, they discovered that the Venezuelan president had dispatched 5 pilots to the island to retrieve the multimillion-dollar jets – a Dassault Falcon 2000EX and Dassault Falcon 900EX.

A plan comes together

Lopez had an epiphany, according to the current and former officers acquainted with the operation: What if he may persuade the pilot to fly Maduro to a place where the U.S. may arrest him?

Maduro had been indicted in 2020 on federal narco-terrorism prices accusing him of flooding the U.S. with cocaine.

The DHS agent secured permission from his superiors and Dominican authorities to query the pilots, overcoming the officers’ issues about creating a diplomatic rift with Venezuela.

At the airport hangar, a short distance from the jet, Lopez and fellow brokers requested each pilot to be part of them individually in a small convention room. There was no agenda, the brokers said. They just needed to speak.

The brokers pretended not to know that the pilots spent their time jetting around Maduro and other top officers. They spoke to each airman for about an hour, saving their largest goal for last: Villegas, who the brokers had decided was Maduro’s common pilot.

Villegas was a member of the elite presidential honor guard and colonel in the Venezuelan air pressure. A former Venezuelan official who frequently traveled with the president described him as pleasant, reserved and trusted by Maduro. The planes he flew have been used to shuttle Maduro across the globe –- often to U.S. adversaries like Iran, Cuba and Russia. In a December 2023 video posted online by Maduro, Villegas could be seen holding up a radio in the cockpit as the president trades patriotic slogans with the pilot of a Russian Sukhoi fighter jet.

Lopez called Villegas into the room, and they bantered for a while about celebrities the pilot had shuttled around, his navy service and the sorts of jets he was licensed to fly, according to two of the people acquainted with the operation. After about quarter-hour, the pilot started to grow tense, and his legs began to shake.

The agent drilled in more sharply: Had the pilot ever flown Chávez or Maduro? Villegas at first tried to dodge the questions, but finally admitted he had been a pilot for both leaders. Villegas confirmed the brokers photographs on his telephone of him and the two presidents on numerous journeys. He also offered particulars about Venezuelan navy installations he had visited. Unbeknownst to Villegas, one of Lopez’s colleagues recorded the dialog on a cellphone.

As the dialog wrapped up, the two people said, Lopez made his pitch: In exchange for secretly ferrying Maduro into America’s arms, the pilot would develop into very wealthy and beloved by tens of millions of his compatriots. The rendezvous could possibly be of the pilot’s selecting: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico or the U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Villegas didn’t tip his hand. Yet, before departing, he gave Lopez his cell quantity.

‘Treasure trove of intelligence’

Villegas and the other pilots returned to Venezuela without the plane, which they have been told lacked the correct clearances.

Meanwhile, the U.S. authorities was assembling a federal forfeiture case to seize the jets. It seized one, registered in the European microstate of San Marino to a shell company from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in September 2024.

It seized the other in February during the first abroad journey by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the top U.S. diplomat.

At a press convention at the airport in the Dominican Republic, Lopez briefed the secretary in entrance of the press. Lopez told Rubio that the airplane contained a “ treasure trove of intelligence,” including the names of Venezuelan air pressure officers and detailed info about its actions. Lopez affixed a seizure warrant to the jet.

Maduro’s authorities reacted angrily, releasing a assertion that accused Rubio of “brazen theft.”

Even in retirement, Lopez stored going

As he assembled the forfeiture in live performance with other federal companies, Lopez targeted on coaxing Villegas to be part of his plot.

The process wouldn’t be simple. Maduro had made it exceedingly expensive for anybody who turns against him. Since taking workplace in 2013, he has brutally repressed protests, main to scores of arrests, while jailing even once-powerful allies suspected of disloyalty.

Even so, Lopez plugged away. The pair texted on WhatsApp and Telegram about a dozen occasions. But the conversations appeared to go nowhere.

In July, Lopez retired. But he couldn’t let Villegas go. He sought steering from the tight-knit group of exiled opposition leaders he acquired to know as a lawman. One described the former agent as obsessed with bringing Maduro to justice.

“He felt he had an unfinished mission to complete,” said an exiled member of Maduro’s opposition who spoke on the condition of anonymity over issues about his security. That dedication, he added, makes Lopez “more valuable to us than many of Maduro’s biggest opponents inside Venezuela.”

After the August textual content about the $50 million reward, Lopez despatched another saying there was “still time left to be Venezuela’s hero and be on the right side of history.” But he didn’t hear back.

On Sept. 18, Lopez was watching the news of Trump’s buildup in the Caribbean when he noticed a post on X by an nameless airplane spotter who had intently tracked the comings and goings of Maduro’s jetliners over the years, according to three of the people acquainted with the matter. The person, @Arr3ch0, a play on Venezuelan slang for “furious,” posted a screenshot of a flight monitoring map that confirmed a presidential Airbus making an odd loop after taking off from Caracas.

“Where are you heading?” wrote Lopez, utilizing a new quantity.

“Who is this?” responded Villegas, either not recognizing the quantity or feigning ignorance.

When Lopez pressed about what they mentioned in the Dominican Republic, Villegas grew combative, calling Lopez a “coward.”

“We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth,” Villegas wrote. “The last thing we are is traitors.”

Lopez despatched him a photograph of them speaking to each other on a purple leather-based sofa at the airplane hangar the earlier 12 months.

“Are you crazy?” Villegas replied.

“A little…,” wrote Lopez.

Two hours later, Lopez tried one last time, mentioning Villegas’ three youngsters by title and a better future he said awaited them in the U.S.

“The window for a decision is closing,” Lopez wrote, shortly before Villegas blocked his quantity. “Soon it will be too late.”

Trying to rattle Maduro

Realizing that Villegas wasn’t going to be part of the plan, Lopez and others in the anti-Maduro motion determined to strive to unnerve the Venezuelan leader, according to three of the people acquainted with the operation.

The day after the testy WhatsApp exchange between Lopez and Villegas, Marshall Billingslea – a close ally of Venezuela’s opposition – took motion. A former national security official in Republican administrations, Billingslea had for weeks been trolling Maduro. Now he introduced Villegas into his cyberbullying.

“Feliz cumpleanos ‘General’ Bitner!” he wrote in a mocking birthday wish on X the day Villegas turned 48.

Billingslea included side-by-side photographs that would be sure to raise eyebrows. One was the same one that Lopez had shared with Villegas the day before over WhatsApp, except the agent had been cropped out of it. The other was an official air force photo with a gold star denoting his new rank affixed to the shoulder epaulet.

The X post was published at 3:01 p.m. — a minute before another sanctioned Airbus that Maduro has been known to fly took off from Caracas’ airport. Twenty minutes later, the plane unexpectedly returned to the airport.

The birthday wish, seen by almost 3 million people, sent shockwaves across Venezuelan social media, as Maduro’s opponents speculated the pilot had been ordered to return to face interrogation. Others wondered if he would be jailed. Nobody saw or heard from Villegas for days. Then, on Sept. 24, the pilot resurfaced, in an air force flight suit, on a widely followed TV show hosted by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

Cabello laughed off any suggestion that Venezuela’s military could be bought. As he praised Villegas’ loyalty, calling him an “unfailing, kick-ass patriot, ” the pilot stood by silently, raising a clenched fist in a show of his loyalty.

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Contact AP’s global investigative group at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/suggestions/

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Associated Press author Regina Garcia Cano contributed to this report from Caracas, Venezuela.