This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and the U.S. Military has a pretty good view of Venezuela right now.

It is far too large at this point to only be about striking a few speedboats in the Caribbean.

Stick with us.

And I was talking to Secretary Hegg, said that you know what he said, he said you know what Mr. Vice President, we don't see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They've completely stopped. And I said I know why. I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn't go fishing right now in that area of the world.

Since early September, Trump administration officials like Vice President J.D. Vance have been bragging about blowing up boats off the coast of Venezuela. They claim, without any hard evidence, that the boats are affiliated with cartels trafficking illegal drugs from South America up to the U.S. Now, this had already raised a ton of legal and ethical questions, but then on Wednesday, President Trump took things a step further and confirmed the CIA had been authorized to operate inside Venezuela. So is this really about drugs or something deeper? And how serious could this conflict get? Let's break this down today with CNN's Natasha Bertrand. She covers the Pentagon. So Natasha, important to note, we're talking here on Friday. This is a very fast moving story. But before we get to the CIA, part of it, I wanna briefly step back. Can you just tell us how we got to this point?

So, President Trump has been fixated on removing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power since his first term. So a few months ago, back in August, in the middle of the month, we started seeing this very large military buildup in the Caribbean, and we started learning about US military strikes on boats in the Carribean that were coming primarily from Venezuela.

Now some new videos showing the moment President Trump says the U.S. Military carried out a strike in international waters on an alleged drug boat tied to a Venezuelan drug cartel killing 11 people.

Over the last month, President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, they have been posting video on social media of these U.S. Military strikes, blasting these boats in the Caribbean out of the water and killing everyone on board.

You see it there in the Caribbean, the fourth so far, just off the coast of Venezuela.

President Trump just said a U.S. Strike killed six men in a boat off the coast of Venezuela.

And there have been six strikes to date, we're told. One of them was not publicly acknowledged by the administration, and that's one that took place on Thursday, and it didn't kill everyone on board. It appears to have been botched. And that's significant because amid all of the concerns about the legality of these strikes, there are going to be serious questions now about whether they're even carrying out this mission competently. If there were survivors on this boat that was struck, and we are told that there were, then there are gonna be questions, of course, about who they actually are.

Yeah, you could actually figure out if they are affiliated with these gangs that the administration say that they are.

Exactly right. And we're told that up until now, with all of these strikes, the US actually has not been able to definitively say the identities of each person on board of the boats that they are striking and killing. If you have survivors, they are willing to talk. You are able now to definitively confirm whether they have ties to these drug trafficking organizations or if they're simply innocent civilians.

Are you considering strikes on land?

Well, I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control. Now we're seeing that.

Amid all of this military buildup, it seems to be escalating even further with President Trump saying that he is considering land strikes inside Venezuela itself. He has authorized the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela, and we're told that that includes lethal action, lethal targeting.

Does the CIA have authority to take out the door.

Oh, I don't want to answer a question like that. That's a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn't it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? But I think Venezuela is feeling heat, but I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat too. So this has been building

for quite some time, and it seems as though while the U.S. Military buildup can in some ways be read as just a show of force trying to intimidate Maduro and try to pressure him to step aside, it's also worth considering that President Trump has said publicly that he is weighing his options to actually strike inside the country itself.

Mr. President, it has been reported that Maduro offered everything in his country, all the natural resources. He even recorded a message to you in English recently offering mediation. What should we do to stop that?

He has offered everything. He's offered everything, you're right. You know why? Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, the initial reasoning for these strikes on these boats was that they were suspected drug traffickers. But it sounds like you're saying that there are broader, you know, geopolitical aims here with all this.

'I think that's right. I think the administration has designated the Venezuelan criminal organization Trander Agua as a terrorist organization for a reason. It has now allowed them to say that the United States is in an armed conflict with that group and with other drug traffickers that are coming from Latin America and bringing drugs into the U.S. And that also then allows the president to say, we are acting in self-defense of our country when we take these military actions, potentially against Venezuela itself and against Venezuelan targets, even inside the country. And so we are continuing to see this huge military buildup. It is far too large at this point to only be about striking a few speedboats in the Caribbean. But it is still too small to actually be a ground force invasion. So a lot of it is messaging. But there's still a lot that the US military can do if it wants to put pressure on Maduro.

When it comes to the CIA though, how covert is an operation like this if the president of the United States is just coming out and saying it?

It's extremely unusual, to say the least, for the president to disclose that he's authorized the CIA to conduct clandestine activities and conduct covert action, especially narrowing it down to a specific country. But the CIA still obviously has a lot of capabilities to conduct its activity in secret, right? I mean, they are now authorized to conduct covert actions, which could include a range of things. The CIA has a very long history. Of conducting regime change activities, for example, in Latin America.

And it hasn't all gone well.

Correct. It's very risky. It is very risky for the CIA as well because, especially in Latin America, you have the risk of potentially harming people that are dual U.S. And Latin American citizens of different Latin American countries. And so this has actually been a pretty vexing problem for the C.I.A., we're told. They have been reviewing their legal authorities over the last several months. So it's unclear at this point what the guy's actual mission set is? Is it just to go after the cartels that are operating? Inside Venezuela and other Latin American countries, or is it also aimed at conducting regime change activities and lethal targeting, perhaps, of people around Nicolas Maduro, which would be, of course, a massive escalation in and of itself?

How does Maduro feel about all this? How are the Venezuelans responding?

Tell the American people no to war. We do not want a war in the Caribbean or in South America...

'Madero has declared a state of emergency in his country. He has called up forces to be built up along the coast. And that is really significant because you have the U S military operating very close to the Venezuelan coast. They have been conducting training exercises there. They flew B-52 bombers along the cost for four hours the other day as a show of force. So you have that potential for a possible confrontation between the US military and Venezuelan forces. Venezuela is not obviously a military powerhouse, but you can see how there is the possibility for escalation.

Yeah, I've seen some people asking, you know, are we going to war with Venezuela? I mean, it sounds like we're not there yet, obviously, but like you say, all it takes is one over read by one side or the other and things could spiral.

'It really does only take one miscalculation. That's the biggest risk whenever you have these forces operating closely to each other. And Venezuela's president has not indicated that he's going to back down at this point either. But in the middle of all of this, you have Admiral Alvin Holdie, who is the commander of U.S. Southern Command, announcing that he's stepping down just one year into his tenure as the commander of Southern Command in the midst of this huge U. S. Military operation, this massive buildup. It's really difficult to overstate how unusual that is. Usually a Southcom commander or commander of any combatant command, they serve a minimum of three years. And we're told that there have been a lot of tensions in recent weeks between Holzi and Hegseth. Hegsith wanted Holzi to move quicker on the anti-drug operations. Holzi, and US Southern Command were told they were deeply concerned about a lot of the operations taking place, particularly the question of whether these strikes on the boats in the Caribbean were actually lawful. So they were butting heads, and it's significant because the question is who is going to replace Holzi? Is it going to be someone who is willing to go further than he was? But this is yet another example, it seems, of Hegseth pushing someone out who was raising concerns about a particular issue and Hegsath saw that person as an obstacle.

We gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, I'm gonna talk to an expert who says if the Trump administration is serious about going after illegal drugs like fentanyl, this is a weird way to be doing it. We'll be right back.

What we're seeing is a major shift in how the United States deals with drug trafficking organizations.

'Steven Dudley is the co-founder of the think tank Insight Crime, and he's reported extensively on gangs and illegal drugs. His most recent book is MS-13, The Making of America's Most Notorious Gang. And since he has covered this world for so long, I wanted to ask him, if this is really about combating illegal drugs, as the Trump administration says, has the U.S. Ever gone about it in quite this way?

I mean, we can go back to the late 1980s, really, when the what we now regularly call the drug wars was, I would say, really getting its sea legs.

The U.S. Military presence in Panama, growing minute by minute, reports tonight of plane loads of troops and equipment arriving every ten minutes there. And the New York Times says U. S. Officials are hinting that the movement is the first step toward action against the Noriega regime.

'Going after the likes of Pablo Escobar and then later Manuel Noriega, which was a full-scale invasion of a country to remove a then dictator.

'Deitman alleges Noriega got millions of dollars in bribes from members of the so-called Medellin Cartel, Colombia's largest cocaine organization.

On the premise that he was part of a larger drug trafficking ring.

Prosecutors charged Noriega guaranteed safe passage for Colombian drug dealers through Panama including safe haven for drug hit squads Allegedly involved in the murder of a top Colombian Justice Department official

'There have been different assaults on drug trafficking organizations, military assaults on drug-trafficking organizations over the years, one in Honduras, which led to several civilians being killed and what was, you know, investigated and deemed to be not the right approach. So this, as I was saying, was, a decision now is just a major shift to declare these enemy combatants. Which is essentially what they are trying to argue, is a major shift in United States policy.

But again, there's no evidence that they actually are. As far as we know, they're civilians. But the Trump administration is arguing that, oh, because these drugs end up in the U.S., they are part of this enemy force that is transporting these drugs, and that is why we have the authority to take them out with a missile.

The president himself has mentioned the drug fentanyl. These criminal organizations that are coming from Venezuela are not carrying fentanyls. If they are indeed drug carrying vessels because the very first boat had as many as 11 people on that particular boat, that is not how drug carrying vessel work. They have a couple of guys who are logistics admin, Drivers, that sort of thing. They might have a couple more that are security, but they don't have 11. They don't need 11 people on that. They're trying to minimize the amount of weight. So that just seemed odd to us at Insight Crime. We were just like, we're just not sure. And in the first instance, they assigned it to the gang called the Tren de Agua. This is a very dispersed criminal network that does not traffic drugs on an international level.

You're saying that it likely wouldn't even have that much of an impact on the actual drugs like fentanyl that are coming into the U.S.

They're not carrying fentanyl. There is no fentanyle being trafficked from Venezuela. The fentanyel is coming from Mexico and the precursor chemicals are drawn mostly from China. Then they're fabricated into fentanyol. They're manufactured into fentynol in illegal labs. And then they're trafficked across the U.S. Border. In very small quantities because fentanyl, you don't need much fentanyol in order to satisfy the U.S. Market demand. So that is the way fentanyel is trafficked. So if they're going after fentanyle, they're gonna after it in a very strange way.

It seems like the strikes and the broader crackdown in the region touch on a lot of different areas that the administration cares about. Like you mentioned, illegal drugs, immigration, there's the energy issue with oil in the region, military might. So are these strikes on these boats a way to kind of get at all that and then albeit messy and maybe legally perilous? Kind of way, is it a distraction from stuff back home? Like, how do you read the recent actions down there?

I read them as a general militarization of everything that the administration has decided is a threat, so I don't see it as too far away from, say, use of federal forces in United States cities. It's sort of a general approach of using the military as a means of suppressing any type of threat. And the belief that you can either destroy the enemy, in this case a drug boat or a couple of drug boats, or you can arrest your way out of these criminal problems, both of which we know are very difficult propositions to fulfill.

Steven, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. That's all for us today. You can stay up to date on this story and all the other news over at CNN.com or the CNN app. We'll be back on Wednesday. In the meantime, make sure you follow the show wherever you listen so a new episode will pop into your feed then. I'll talk to you later.