Delta Force and the secret operation to capture Maduro and Cilia Flores in Venezuela

"According to the Trump administration, narcotics cause thousands of American deaths a year, and that is true; many military friends I respect also argue that if the use of the police force in counter-narcotics has proven unsatisfactory, then it is time to try something else."

'But the drug that has caused thousands of deaths in the US is fentanyl, not the cocaine suspected of being trafficked by the Maduro regime,' continues the legal/military source, 'and to claim that the arrival of any narcotic on US soil amounts to an attack like 9/11, thus legitimising a use of force similar to that used against terrorist organisations, seems to me to be an over-extension of the interpretation of the law.

The label of 'narco-terrorism' that the Trump administration has applied to the Maduro regime, in short, is legally tenuous.

In the last few hours, US Justice Secretary Pam Bondi announced a new indictment against Maduro and Flores for 'narcoterrorism and conspiracy to traffic narcotics', and the ensuing court case before the Southern District Court of New York is one with very few precedents.

In the meantime, however, the military aspects of the affair need to be investigated.

"The soldiers who led the capture of Maduro and Flores are a minimum of eight and a maximum of fifteen," American military analyst Jason H. Campbell (former senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and former director of the US Secretary of Defence's Afghanistan policy office; now senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington) tells Il Sole 24Ore.

As reported by the US network CBS, these would be soldiers of the Combat Applications Group, the so-called 'Delta Force', i.e. the US special forces.

According to Campbell, the special units probably moved in two helicopters - plus other support helicopters, in case of accidents or technical problems - that would have landed at the location of Maduro and Flores.

Although in an interview with Fox News, Trump himself reported minor damage to a helicopter, the Delta Force was able to act with relative ease and - probably - little resistance.

However, Jason H. Campbell continues, the exfiltration of Maduro and Flores would only be the culmination of a much broader operation, designed to muddy the waters and hide the final objective until the very end, as also confirmed by the massive mobilisation of US forces around Venezuela that had been going on for weeks: 'The first phase consisted of generalised attacks on Caracas and the three other Venezuelan states of Aragua, La Guaira and Miranda. These bombings served to give the impression that something much bigger was going on, like an invasion, and to divert attention'.

"The second phase took down all immediate communication capabilities, from internet access to radio communications," Campbell continues. "Finally, before landing at Maduro's location, US forces likely launched attacks to minimise the response capabilities of the Venezuelan military and the Bolivarian Guard."

All these attacks and the final landing of the 8-15 men of the special forces, the analyst explains, would not have been possible without the involvement of US Navy jets, the NSA (National Security Agency) in charge of monitoring the situation with radar and satellites and targeting the Venezuelans' communication capabilities, and the Navy, which probably received delegated command of the operation from SOUTHCOM (the command that oversees US operations in Latin America and the Caribbean).

Both Campbell and Colonel Orio Giorgio Stirpe, a retired Italian Army officer specialising in operational intelligence and military analysis, agree that in order to carry out the operation it was necessary to have a Venezuelan source capable of precisely locating Maduro and Flores; the New York Times itself reports an element of the Caracas government in contact with the CIA, but according to Stirpe the sources were 'certainly more than one'.

A hunt for the traitor that Maduro's loyalists, in all likelihood, have already opened.