OPERATION GIDEON
When Goudreau, Denman, and Berry boarded the plane to Colombia, they were escorted by Yacsy Alexandra Mirabal. The way Goudreau tells it, she was a patriot — willing to give up everything to see the liberation of her country — and, he claims, a financial backer who invested about $100,000 of her own money into the cause. Goudreau didn’t know at the time, however, that the plane was owned by Franklin Duran, a wealthy businessman with family ties to a Venezuelan-owned oil company, who was convicted in 2008 of operating as an illegal agent of the Venezuelan government. In fact, Mirabal had worked under Duran. In September, Colombian authorities, in partnership with the FBI, arrested her for being a Venezuelan agent trying to destabilize Colombia.
None of this bothers Goudreau today. I was struck by how deeply he still believes in the people who allegedly helped facilitate the coup, how forcefully he rejects any notion that Mirabal, Duran, or exiled Venezuelan Gen. Alcala might have had divided loyalties. Mirabal, he says, “has more courage than all of them, and so does the general. Let me tell you something about the general,” he continues. “That dude is beyond fucking repute. He’s an honorable man.”
Despite Goudreau’s unbreakable trust, the apparent ties to the Venezuelan government have raised questions about whether Maduro’s regime was secretly guiding the operation. A failed coup led by a bunch of Americans, after all, would be a propaganda win for Maduro, and an embarrassment for the U.S. There were other signs that the plan was not airtight. Starting in March, a critical arms shipment — allegedly facilitated by Mirabal — was apprehended in Colombia. Then, Venezuelan politicians went on television to point out the location of the rebel training camps in Colombia, and the AP published its story about Operation Gideon before the launch.
Goudreau acknowledges that the operation had been infiltrated, but maintains that the final push was done without the Maduro regime’s knowledge. “It would have been a lot different if it was truly compromised,” he says, even while acknowledging that six men were killed and almost all the rest were captured. In November, the Miami Herald published an article, based on an interview with one of Operation Gideon’s participants and data given to them by Goudreau, saying that one of the coup participants informed the Maduro regime of the coordinates of the landing. Goudreau strenuously disputes this, but also acknowledges he couldn’t know for sure.
Other evidence does point to Maduro’s forces lying in wait. The Maduro regime claimed that the six men from the smaller vessel were killed in a firefight as they landed ashore. However, Rolling Stone obtained an autopsy report containing graphic photos of the dead men that concludes none of the rebels’ weapons were found near the bodies, and that they were likely executed at close range, including one who may have been killed with a shot to the back of the head. An independent forensic pathologist, who commented on condition of anonymity, says that the evidence in the report supports that conclusion.
“The execution stuff? That’s very possible,” Goudreau says. “But would it alarm you to know that we basically executed a whole bunch of people in Iraq? If I was in that [situation] I probably would have shot everybody, too. That’s war. Look, the Geneva Convention doesn’t cover fucking enemy insurgents.”
Goudreau argues that it didn’t matter that Venezuela knew about the plan, as long as it didn’t know when or where they planned to attack. He even says he delayed Operation Gideon’s launch by a few days until after the AP story was published, as a way to catch Maduro off guard. (He also blames the AP reporter for the deaths of the six men because the story was published. When I tell him he’s contradicting himself, he just denies it.)
But in a tale so rife with espionage and intrigue, motives are never entirely clear. In July, Duran was arrested by Maduro’s police and charged with treason and financing terrorism. Before his arrest, he’d told reporters for The Washington Post that he did not knowingly have anything to do with the plot.
“This is a story where you have this criminal, corrupt regime that’s paying a lot of people off, and it’s hard to keep that machine running,” says Shifter, the Council on Foreign Relations member. “The segment of people who believe in the revolution today in Venezuela is negligible. So it all becomes transactional.”
The future for Denman and Berry is now uncertain. On August 7th, 2020, Venezuela’s attorney general announced that they were convicted on terrorism and arms-smuggling charges. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison. The following week, the government convicted another 17 Venezuelans. (The fate of the other 36 Venezuelans who weren’t killed in the raid is unknown.) Maduro maintains that the operation was backed by the U.S. government. Initial talks between Maduro and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who negotiates the release of prisoners and hostages through his nonprofit, have so far gone nowhere, except to make sure Denman and Berry were being treated well. On October 16th, Denman and Berry had a Zoom call with their families where they appeared healthy and in good spirits. Their families set up a GoFundMe to help cover legal costs, but as of mid-November had raised less than half of its $50,000 goal.
On May 21st, Goudreau says, the FBI raided his Florida home, characterizing the action as an attempt on his life. “I took my shirt off. And they had no reason to death-by-cop me. But they knew my background. They knew I had a gun,” he says. And while the FBI recently started to return nearly $57,000 they had seized during the raid, Goudreau’s lawyer told him he is still under investigation.
“If the DOJ wants to go after me, they can indict me because I jaywalked and then put me in prison for 20 fucking years,” Goudreau says. “It’s rare in this world to have guys like Julian Assange, and it’s rare to have guys like Edward Snowden actually see something that’s fucked up, say, ‘You know what, that’s fucked up, I’m going to try to fix it.’ You know why it’s rare? It’s because these governments come together and they just destroy them.”
To this day, Goudreau still thinks he had a good chance at success. He blames a cadre of provocateurs, from double agents to former Silvercorp employees and the DEA and the FBI, for hobbling his plans. If he had the chance to do it again, he says he’d seek out a smaller circle of people he could trust.
“Had we succeeded, you really think that the Guaidó administration would have said, ‘That’s not us, we want nothing to do with this’? Do you think that Donald Trump would have said, ‘That wasn’t us’? Every motherfucker that I talked to would have said, ‘That was us! U.S.A., baby!’ They would have taken credit for all of it. And if you say it’s not true, you’re pretty naive.”