Venezuelan soldiers in balaclavas move a detainee from a helicopter Monday after the failed incursion. (Reuters TV/Reuters)
For a time, Rendón and others thought Goudreau might produce results. But they grew wary after he began demanding payment of the $1.5 million retainer. Rendón describes the payment as a mere gesture, not to be collected upfront, to help Goudreau raise $50 million in private funds.
Goudreau counters that the agreement — supplied in part to The Post by Goudreau, with a more complete version provided by Rendón — bound the opposition to his services and initial fee. A seven-page document provided by Goudreau carries Guaido’s signature, along with those of Rendón and fellow opposition official Sergio Vergara.
“Look, J.J. Rendón pushed for the $50 million for the operation, an operation to flip the country,” Goudreau said. “Nobody here is a Boy Scout. They thought they were going to seize power.”
Rendón, however, insists that the document Goudreau produced was never signed by Guaidó, and provided previous and subsequent agreements to The Post that did not bear Guaido’s name. Rendón said Guaidó knew only the rough outlines of an “exploratory plan” but grew suspicious of Goudreau based on the reports of the committee.
“We were all having red flags, and the president was not comfortable with this,” he said.
Some have feared that Maduro will use Goudreau’s operation to take an action he has so far resisted: arresting Guaidó. On Wednesday, he called for an investigation into Guaido’s alleged involvement.
Days before the incursion into Venezuela, Goudreau’s attorneys delivered a letter to Rendón demanding payment of $1.45 million. Opposition officials began to fear Goudreau might take last year’s discussions public.
Venezuelan authorities patrol the waters off Macuto. (Rayner Pena/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
When Rendón woke up Sunday to news of the operation, he said, he was stunned.
“I thought, are these guys crazy?” he said. “They were blackmailing us [for the money]. I thought, wow, are you really going to take it this deep?”
After providing security at the 2019 border concert, Goudreau came into contact with Clíver Alcalá. The former Venezuelan major general had been close to the late socialist leader Hugo Chávez but defected under his successor, Maduro. Alcalá was living in Colombia, organizing former Venezuelan soldiers in a plan to oust Maduro.
The meeting took place in a hotel in Bogotá. There, several people familiar with the events say, Goudreau learned the details of Alcalá’s plan. At one point, people familiar with the events say, the plan was to rush to seize the Venezuelan oil capital of Maracaibo, then push east toward Caracas.
Some senior opposition officials had dismissed the plan as a “fantasy.” When Goudreau got involved, the plan became an operation to extract Maduro, his wife and other government officials, including close Maduro ally Diosdado Cabello.
But that plan appeared to be compromised.
In March, U.S. authorities indicted Maduro and other current and former senior Venezuelan figures on narcoterrorism charges. Defendants included Alcalá, who was brought to the United States. Then Maduro’s government went public with charges it had been lobbing for months — that a plot against him was brewing on Colombian soil.
Maduro has claimed his agents knew every detail of Sunday’s incursion and were lying in wait.
“We knew everything,” he said. “What they ate, what they didn’t eat. What they drank. Who financed them.”
Goudreau briefly came into contact last year with former longtime Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller, now a security consultant. The two men attended a meeting in Florida last spring with businessmen at which Goudreau met influential figures in the Venezuelan opposition, according to a person close to Schiller. That meeting was unrelated to the opposition’s strategic committee. Schiller, determining there were no real business prospects, subsequently cut off contact with both the opposition and Goudreau.
U.S. officials were aware, and concerned, about the hundreds of Venezuelan soldiers who had defected and were living precariously in Colombia. U.S. and Colombian officials shared concern that if they were destitute, they could be drawn into illicit activity. Discussions were held about how and whether to feed those men, or organize them to aid the Venezuelan refugee community.
But they viewed the idea that they could be organized into a fighting force as “completely insane,” one official said.
The Colombians “were against it and we were against it,” according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “No one should be doing this kind of military organizing.”
A screen capture from the YouTube page of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shows Luke Denman. (Nicolás Maduro)
Maduro said Wednesday that four additional “terrorists” had been arrested. He showed a video of the questioning of a man identified as Luke Denman, one of two former Green Berets who had served with Goudreau and was now captured.
Denman, who appeared disheveled but calm and unharmed, spoke in response to questions from an unseen interrogator. He confirmed that the goal of the mission had been to capture Maduro, and that he had expected $50,000 to $100,000 for training in Colombia.
He said training and organization of the operation had taken place near the Colombian town of Riohacha, near the Venezuelan border. Only two Americans were in the training camp, he said, including himself.
Weapons and uniforms, he said, had been provided by “Jordan, through Silvercorp.”
They were picked up at airport and driven by a woman called “Alex.” He described a “man in a wheelchair” who showed up at one of two safe houses in Riohacha, who “appeared to have some influence.” He “arrived in a nice SUV, had on a nice shirt, he had gold jewelry on.”
“I was helping Venezuelans take back control of their country,” Denman said.
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