Inside Operation Gideon, a Coup Gone Very Wrong
Why did three American ex-Special Forces soldiers try to overthrow the Venezuelan government?
Why did three American ex-Special Forces soldiers try to overthrow the Venezuelan government in the spring of 2020?
The two AmericAns left late on May 2nd, 2020, well after dark had fallen on an arid beach near Castilletes, in northern Colombia. The men, both ex-Special Forces, had been waiting to pile into a flat-bottomed boat stocked with guns and ammunition and about 50 Venezuelan revolutionaries for a journey into the heart of enemy territory. The mission was Operation Gideon, and its objective was to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.
But the weather wasn’t cooperating, and the 5 p.m. launch had been delayed by an hour, then another. One pilot boat carrying 11 had already shipped out, but the Americans waited for the all-clear from the operation’s leader, Jordan Goudreau, the intense exGreen Beret and head of the private-security company Silvercorp USA. Goudreau was some 1,100 miles northwest in Florida — the boat he intended to get him to Venezuela had broken down — poring over weather forecasts and giving orders via satellite phone.
Around 8 p.m., the winds finally lulled. Goudreau radioed the two Americans to depart. The plan, even in good weather, would have been incredibly risky. They were to sail undetected through hostile waters for about 16 hours before landing just north of Caracas. From there they would fan out. One group would take over a broadcast station, which would activate a number of sleeper cells. The two Americans would commandeer an airport, while another group would capture Maduro, the feared Bolivarian dictator who has starved his people and exacerbated one of the largest refugee crises in the world. Finally, they would exfiltrate the deposed leader via plane to the U.S., which had placed a $15 million bounty on his head.
Pretty much everything went wrong. The revolutionaries, having trained on land, spent their miserable voyage seasick and vomiting overboard. Hourly calls between Goudreau and the mercenaries failed to go through — in one crucial miscommunication, Goudreau thought the boats were turning back to Colombia, when they’d sailed on. An engine gave out, fuel ran low. Venezuelan fishing boats informed the government of at least one of the vessels. The pilot boat was overtaken by the Venezuelan military, which killed six men on board. The larger one was escorted by Maduro forces into the sea town of Macuto. In propaganda videos released by Venezuela, the rest of the revolution
aries — as well as the two Americans — can be seen aboard the boat with their hands in the air.
The story of the failed coup is one of a plan so inept it makes John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco 59 years earlier look sophisticated. Among the supplies brought were a high-end BB gun and a Kindle e-reader, according to photographs taken after the raid, and the two Americans, former Staff Sgt. Luke Denman and Sgt. Airan Berry, hardly spoke Spanish. Not only had the Maduro regime infiltrated Operation Gideon with informants, the secret plan was no secret at all: It was openly discussed on Venezuelan television, and its existence had already been reported in an article by the Associated Press. Goudreau himself provided a comment.
Operation Gideon’s failure isn’t in dispute. What’s less clear, however, is how it came to be. Those who supposedly knew about it — intelligence operators, political and military wannabes, secretive Trumpworld associates — have distanced themselves from it, unsurprisingly, as it resulted in the imprisonment of two former U.S. soldiers, the deaths of an unknown number of Venezuelans, and a consolidation of power by the Maduro regime.
Goudreau told me his story over four hours in two conversations, first over Zoom from an undisclosed location with the shadow of a ceiling fan spinning overhead, then from a burner number with a Texas area code. He surfaced in November after going underground for six months, a period of time he refuses to talk about. I corroborated details of his story with more than a dozen firsthand sources, as well as reporting from AP and the Miami Herald, but his perspective, especially on the launch of Operation Gideon, provides a key to understanding the coup gone wrong.
I’d been trying to find Goudreau since May. Those who’d known him — some trustworthy, others less so — described him alternately as a savvy con man, a world-class bullshit artist, a loose cannon too naive to realize he was being played. What I found was more complicated. Goudreau was often ingratiating, confident, and open about his history of concussions, memory lapses, and the deep toll that 15 years of fighting in the Middle East have taken on his health. Still, details of his story differ in slight but significant ways on retellings, and sometimes contradict documented evidence. He and his lawyer never sent data and documents that, Goudreau says, would prove details of his story right. Anger rises swiftly when I challenge him.
Goudreau is also more inconsistent than his detractors have painted him: The 44-yearold calls himself a mere “kid” unfamiliar with business, while insisting he’s the mastermind behind the operation; he defends an allegedly cartel-linked Venezuelan general as having “a good heart,” while railing against other politicians for unspecified corruption; he insists that Operation Gideon was an honest attempt to liberate the Venezuelan people, while decrying the