US agent’s daring plot to coax Nicolas Maduro’s pilot into turning on the Venezuelan leader and delivering him into custody
A federal agent made a daring pitch to Nicolás Maduro’s chief pilot: Surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president’s plane to a place where US authorities could nab the strongman.
In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine meeting, he would be made a very rich man.
The conversation was tense, and Maduro’s pilot left noncommittal, though he gave the agent, Edwin Lopez, his cell number — a sign he might be interested in helping the US government.
Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his government job in July, Lopez kept at it. He chatted with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app.
The untold, intrigue-filled saga of how Lopez tried to flip the pilot has all the elements of a Cold War spy thriller — luxury private jets, a secret meeting at an airport hangar, high-stakes diplomacy and the delicate wooing of a key Maduro lieutenant. There was even a final 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 US has for years sought to topple Maduro, who it blames for destroying the oil-rich nation’s democracy while providing a lifeline to drug traffickers, terrorist groups and communist-run Cuba.
Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has taken an even harder line. This summer, the president has deployed thousands of troops, attack helicopters and warships to the Caribbean to attack fishing boats suspected of smuggling cocaine out of Venezuela. In 10 strikes, including a few in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the US military has killed at least 43 people.
This month, Trump authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela, and the US government has also doubled the bounty for Maduro’s capture on federal narco-trafficking charges, a move that Lopez sought to leverage in a text message to the pilot.
“I’m still waiting for your answer,” Lopez wrote the pilot on Aug. 7, attaching a link to a Justice Department press release announcing the reward had risen to $50 million.
Details of the ultimately unsuccessful plan were drawn from interviews with three current and former US officials, as well as one of Maduro’s opponents. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to discuss the effort or feared retribution for disclosing it. The Associated Press also reviewed — and authenticated — text exchanges between Lopez and the pilot.
Attempts to locate the pilot, Venezuelan Gen. Bitner Villegas, were not successful.
The US Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not comment. The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.
The plot was hatched when a tipster showed up at the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic on April 24, 2024, when Joe Biden was president. The informant purported to have information about Maduro’s planes, according to three of the officials familiar with the matter.
Lopez, 50, was then an attaché at the embassy and agent for Homeland Security Investigations, a part of the Department of Homeland Security.
