The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  With Kelly’s departure and Mulvaney’s appointment, all effective efforts at managing the Executive Office of the President ceased. Both domestic policy strategy and political strategy, never strong suits, all but disappeared; personnel decisions deteriorated further, and the general chaos spread. The crisis over Ukraine followed. There was a lot of evidence that Kelly’s hypothesis was entirely correct.

  CHAPTER 9 VENEZUELA LIBRE

  Venezuela’s illegitimate regime, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most oppressive, presented the Trump Administration an opportunity. But it required steady determination on our part and consistent, all-out, unrelenting pressure. We failed to meet this standard. The President vacillated and wobbled, exacerbating internal Administration disagreements rather than resolving them, and repeatedly impeding our efforts to carry out a policy. We were never overconfident of success supporting the Venezuelan opposition’s efforts to replace Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s heir. It was almost the opposite. Maduro’s opponents acted in January 2019 because they felt strongly this could be their last opportunity for freedom, after years of trying and failing. America responded because it was in our national interest to do so. It still is, and the struggle continues.

  After the unsuccessful efforts to oust Maduro, the Trump Administration did not hesitate to discuss publicly, in detail, how close the Opposition had come to ousting Maduro, and what had gone wrong. Numerous press stories repeated details of what we had continuously heard from the Opposition during 2019, and which are discussed in the text. This was hardly a normal situation of diplomatic conversations and interchanges, and we heard as well from many members of Congress, and private US citizens, especially members of the Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities in Florida. Someday, when Venezuela is free again, the many individuals supporting the Opposition will be free to tell their stories publicly. Until then, we have only the memories of people like myself fortunate enough to be able to tell their stories for them.1

  There is a two-decade-long history of missed opportunities in Venezuela, given the widespread, strongly held opposition to the Chavez-Maduro regime. Shortly after I became National Security Advisor, while Maduro was speaking at a military awards ceremony on August 4, he was attacked by two drones. While the attack failed, it showed vigorous dissent within the military. And the hilarious pictures of service members fleeing energetically at the sound of explosions, despite regime propaganda, showed just how “loyal” the military was to Maduro.

  Maduro’s autocratic regime was a threat due to its Cuba connection and the openings it afforded Russia, China, and Iran. Moscow’s menace was undeniable, both military and financial, having expended substantial resources to buttress Maduro, dominate Venezuela’s oil-and-gas industry, and impose costs on the US. Beijing was not far behind. Trump saw this, telling me after a New Year’s Day 2019 call with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that he worried about Russia and China: “I don’t want to be sitting around watching.” Venezuela hadn’t topped my priorities when I started, but competent national-security management requires flexibility when new threats or opportunities arise. Venezuela was just such a contingency. America had opposed external threats in the Western Hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine, and it was time to resurrect it after the Obama-Kerry efforts to bury it.

  Venezuela was a threat on its own account, as demonstrated in a December 22 incident at sea, along the Guyana-Venezuela border. Venezuelan naval units tried to board ExxonMobil exploration ships, under licenses from Guyana in its territorial waters. Chavez and Maduro had run Venezuela’s oil-and-gas industry into a ditch, and extensive hydrocarbon resources in Guyana would pose an immediate competitive threat right next door. The incident evaporated as the exploration ships, after refusing Venezuelan requests to land a chopper on board one of them, headed rapidly back into undeniably Guyanese waters.

  Shortly after the drone attack, during an unrelated meeting on August 15, Venezuela came up, and Trump said to me emphatically, “Get it done,” meaning get rid of the Maduro regime. “This is the fifth time I’ve asked for it,” he continued. I described the thinking we were doing, in a meeting now slimmed down to just Kelly and me, but Trump insisted he wanted military options for Venezuela and then keep it because “it’s really part of the United States.” This presidential interest in discussing military options initially surprised me, but it shouldn’t have; as I learned, Trump had previously advocated it, responding to a press question, almost exactly one year earlier, on August 11, 2017, at Bedminster, N.J.:

  “We have many options for Venezuela, and by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option. We have many options for Venezuela. This is our neighbor… this is—we’re all over the world, and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they’re dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.”2

  I explained why military force was not the answer, especially given the inevitable congressional opposition, but that we could accomplish the same objective by working with Maduro’s opponents. I subsequently decided to turn a spotlight on Venezuela, giving a widely covered speech in Miami on November 1, 2018, in which I condemned the Western Hemisphere’s “troika of tyranny”: Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. I announced that the Administration, in its ongoing reversal of Obama’s Cuba policy, would impose new sanctions against Havana, and also carry out a new Executive Order sanctioning Venezuela’s gold sector, which the regime used to keep itself afloat by selling gold from Venezuela’s Central Bank. The “troika of tyranny” speech underlined the affiliations between all three authoritarian governments, laying the basis for a more forward-leaning policy. Trump liked the phrase “troika of tyranny,” telling me, “You give such great speeches”; this one, as I pointed out, had been written by one of his own speechwriters.

  Of course, Trump also periodically said that he wanted to meet with Maduro to resolve all our problems with Venezuela, which neither Pompeo nor I thought was a good idea. At one point in December, I ran into Rudy Giuliani in the West Wing. He asked to come see me after a meeting of Trump’s lawyers, which was why he was there. He had a message for Trump from Representative Pete Sessions, who had long advocated Trump meet with Maduro, as had Senator Bob Corker, for reasons best known to themselves. Discussing this later, Pompeo suggested we first send someone to Venezuela to see Maduro, although, as Trump’s interest in talking with Maduro waned thereafter, nothing happened.

  The big bang in Venezuela came on Friday, January 11. The new, young President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, announced at a huge rally in Caracas that the Assembly believed Maduro’s manifestly fraudulent 2018 reelection was illegitimate, and therefore invalid. Accordingly, the Assembly, Venezuela’s only legitimate, popularly elected institution, had declared the Venezuelan presidency vacant. Under the vacancy clause of Hugo Chavez’s own Constitution, Guaidó said he would become Interim President on January 23, which was the anniversary of the 1958 military coup that overthrew the Marcos Perez Jimenez dictatorship, and oust Maduro to prepare new elections.3 The US had only late word the National Assembly would move in this direction. We played no role encouraging or assisting the Opposition. They saw this moment as possibly their last chance. It was now all on the line in Venezuela, and we had to decide how to respond. Sit and watch? Or act? I had no doubt what we should do. The revolution was on. I told Mauricio Claver-Carone, whom I had recently chosen as NSC Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere, to issue a statement of support.4

  I briefed Trump on what had happened, interrupting a meeting with an outsider that had already run past its scheduled end. Trump, though, was irritated at being informed only of a possible change in Venezuela, saying I should put the statement out in my name, not his. I could have reminded him he had said not ten days before, “I don’t want to be sitting around watching,” and probably should have, but I just issued the stat
ement as my own. Maduro reacted harshly, threatening National Assembly members and their families. Guaidó himself was arrested by one of the regime’s secret police forces but then quickly released.5 There was speculation it was actually Cubans who seized Guaidó, but his release indicated real confusion in the regime, a good sign.6

  I also tweeted the first of many Venezuela tweets to come condemning the Maduro dictatorship’s arrest of Guaidó. I was heartened that Maduro’s government promptly accused me of leading a coup “against Venezuela’s democracy,”7 an approach followed by other adversaries who attacked Trump’s advisors. More important, we began devising steps to take immediately against Maduro’s regime, and also Cuba, its protector and likely controller, and Nicaragua. Why not go after all three at once? Oil sanctions were a natural choice, but why not declare Venezuela a “state sponsor of terrorism,” something I first suggested on October 1, 2018, and also return Cuba to the list after Obama had removed it?

  Under Chavez and now Maduro, Venezuela’s revenues from petroleum-related exports had dropped dramatically, as production itself fell, from approximately 3.3 million barrels of oil pumped per day when Chavez took power in 1999 to approximately 1.1 million barrels per day in January 2019. This precipitous decline, dropping Venezuela to production levels not seen since the 1940s, had already substantially impoverished the country. Driving the state-owned oil monopoly’s production as low as possible, which the Opposition fully supported,8 might well have been enough to crash Maduro’s regime. There were many other sanctions necessary to eliminate the regime’s illicit income streams—especially drug trafficking with narco-terrorists operating primarily in Colombia, with safe havens in Venezuela—but striking the oil company was key.9

  On January 14, I convened a Principals Committee in the Sit Room to consider our options for sanctioning the Maduro regime, especially the petroleum sector. I thought it was time to turn the screws and asked, “Why don’t we go for a win here?” It rapidly became clear that everyone wanted to take decisive action except Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. He wanted to do little or nothing, arguing that if we acted, it risked Maduro’s nationalizing what little remained of US oil-sector investments in Venezuela and raising international oil prices. Mnuchin essentially wanted a guarantee we would succeed, with Maduro overthrown, if we imposed sanctions. That, of course, was impossible. If I have one memory of Mnuchin from the Administration—and there were many carbon copies of this one, Mnuchin opposing tough measures, especially against China—this is it. Why were our sanctions often not as sweeping and effective as they might have been? Read no further. As Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (a renowned financier, much more politically conservative than Mnuchin, who was basically a Democrat) said to me in April, “Stephen’s more worried about secondary effects on US companies than about the mission,” which was completely accurate. Mnuchin’s argument for passivity was entirely economic, so it was important that Larry Kudlow weighed in quickly to say, “John’s view is my view too.” Keith Kellogg added that Pence believed we should be “going all out” against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. That had enormous effect since Pence rarely offered his views in such settings, to avoid boxing in the President. Pompeo was traveling, but Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan argued for sanctions, although not with great specificity. Energy Secretary Rick Perry was strongly in favor of tough sanctions, sweeping aside Mnuchin’s concerns about the limited US oil-and-gas assets in Venezuela.

  Mnuchin was a minority of one, so I said we would send Trump a split-decision memo; everyone should get their arguments in quickly because we were moving fast. Pence had earlier offered to call Guaidó to express our support, which, after hearing Mnuchin, I thought was a good idea. The call went well, increasing the urgency that America react with something more than just rhetoric praising Venezuela’s National Assembly. Nonetheless, Mnuchin kept up his campaign for doing nothing; Pompeo told me he had had a thirty-minute call with Mnuchin on Thursday and had counterproposed doing the sanctions in slices. I responded that we had a shot to overthrow Maduro now, and it might be a long, long time before we had another one as good. Half measures weren’t going to cut it. Pompeo agreed we didn’t want to replicate Obama in 2009, watching pro-democracy protests in Iran suppressed while the US did nothing. That sounded like Pompeo was moving in the right direction. Even the Organization of American States, long one of the most moribund international organizations (and that’s saying something), was roused to help Guaidó, as a growing number of Latin American countries stood up to declare support for Venezuela’s defiant National Assembly.

  * * *

  The mere fact Guaidó remained free showed we had a chance. We needed Trump’s decision on sanctions and whether to recognize Guaidó as the legitimate Interim President when he crossed the Rubicon on January 23. On the twenty-first, I explained to Trump the possible political and economic steps to take against Maduro and said a lot depended on what happened two days later. Trump doubted Maduro would fall, saying he’s “too smart and too tough,” which was yet another surprise, given earlier comments on the regime’s stability. (He had said just a short time before, on September 25, 2018, in New York, that “it’s a regime that, frankly, could be toppled very quickly by the military, if the military decides to do that.”10 Trump added that he also wanted the fullest range of options against the regime,11 which request I conveyed to Dunford later in the day. Dunford and I also discussed what might be required if things went badly in Caracas, potentially endangering the lives of official US personnel and even private US citizens there, thereby perhaps necessitating a “non-permissive” evacuation of those in danger.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized the decision on political recognition was more important now than the oil sanctions. First, US recognition would have major implications for the Federal Reserve Board, and therefore banks worldwide. The Fed would automatically turn control over Venezuelan government assets it possessed to the Guaidó-led Administration. Unfortunately, as we were to find, Maduro’s regime had been so proficient at stealing or squandering those assets, there weren’t many left. But the international financial consequences of recognition were nonetheless significant, since other central banks and private bankers weren’t looking for reasons to be on the Fed’s bad side. Second, the logic of sanctioning the country’s oil monopoly, and other measures Mnuchin and Treasury were resisting, would become unanswerable once we endorsed Guaidó’s legitimacy. To that end, I scheduled an eight a.m. meeting on January 22 with Pompeo, Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Kudlow.

  Inside Venezuela, tensions were rising. In the hours before we met, there had been all-night demonstrations, including cacerolazos, the traditional gatherings to bang pots and pans, in the poorest areas of Caracas, the original base of “Chavista” support. Shortages of basic goods were increasing, and demonstrators had briefly seized control of the roads to the Caracas airport. Only colectivos, the armed gangs of motorcycle thugs used by Chavez and Maduro to sow terror and intimidate the Opposition, and which the Opposition believed were equipped and directed by the Cubans,12 appeared to reopen the roads. No military. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino (one of many Latins with Russian first names, from Cold War days) and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza had both already approached the Opposition, tentatively exploring what the National Assembly’s amnesty for defecting military officers would mean if the Opposition prevailed. Nonetheless, after years of hostility between the two sides, there was real mistrust within Venezuelan society.

  With this backdrop, I asked if we should recognize Guaidó when the National Assembly declared him Interim President. Ross spoke first, saying it was clear we should support Guaidó, immediately seconded by Kudlow and Pompeo. Happily, Mnuchin concurred, saying we had already asserted that Maduro was illegitimate, so recognizing Guaidó was simply the next logical step. We didn’t discuss what the economic consequences would be; either Mnuchin didn’t see the connection, or he didn’t want to fight the issue. I was fine either
way. With recognition resolved, we discussed other steps: working with the informal “Lima Group” of Latin American nations for them to recognize Guaidó (which took little or no convincing), adjusting the level of our travel-advisory warnings, considering how to oust the Cubans, and handling the Russian paramilitaries reportedly arriving to protect Maduro.13 I considered the meeting a total victory.

  Later in the morning, I spoke with Trump, who now wanted assurances regarding post-Maduro access to Venezuela’s oil resources, trying to ensure that China and Russia would not continue to benefit from their deals with the illicit Chavez-Maduro regime. Trump, as usual, was having trouble distinguishing responsible measures to protect legitimate American interests from what amounted to vast overreaching of the sort no other government, especially a democratic one, would even consider. I suggested Pence raise the issue with Guaidó in the call being scheduled for later in the day, and Trump agreed. I also called several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, who were coming to see Trump on Venezuela that afternoon, so they were prepared if the oil-field issue arose. Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, and Congressmen Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ron DeSantis, gave very forceful support for toppling Maduro, with Rubio saying, “This may be the last chance,” and that success would be “a big foreign-policy win.” During the meeting, they explained that the National Assembly believed many Russian and Chinese business deals had been procured through bribes and corruption, making them easy to invalidate once a new government was installed.14 The discussion was very helpful, and Trump agreed unequivocally to recognize Guaidó, which Pence, who was attending the meeting, was fully prepared to do. Trump later added unhelpfully, “I want him to say he will be extremely loyal to the United States and no one else.”