So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about. Hello, I’m Edmund DeMarche with The Trends Journal. It’s a great honor today to be talking to Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst from sonar21.com. Larry Johnson, thanks for joining The Trends Journal. Hey, Ed. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. We started with a bang. Boy, got that right. After last night in Venezuela. Larry, I’d love to get your opinion on what happened last night in Caracas.

Obviously, we know that the U.S. took control of Maduro and his wife. He’s headed to a court in New York, a federal court, to face narco-terrorism charges. Right now, Donald Trump says that the U.S. is essentially in control of Venezuela. What happened, and where do we stand right now, Larry, in your opinion? Well, this whole narcotics angle is a pretext. That’s not what really the issue really is, and the terrorism thing is laughable. This is all about getting control of Venezuela’s oil so that it can be used by oil companies that are loyal to, willing to do the bidding of the United States.

We’re mad at Maduro because he won’t submit himself to us. But at least it sounded like there were some talks where he was willing to make a deal, but it wasn’t the deal that Donald Trump wanted. And I think one of the things driving this attack on Venezuela now is that the White House needs to secure an alternative source of oil to offset the possibility that supply of oil coming out of the Persian Gulf will be disrupted, shut down because of an impending attack on Iran. And the United States and Israel are going to attack Iran, and I don’t think it’s a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

And it’s really a misplaced, foolish thing to do because Iran is in a much stronger position now to retaliate and respond. But this is this Donald Trump action towards Maduro trying to reassert US control dominance over Latin American countries, Central South America. This has been a pattern for well over 150 years where we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that we control the process. It became especially pointed in the 20th century where particularly fruit plantations and then oil that the United States wanted to keep this whole area for itself. Back in 1986 when I began working the Honduran account at the CIA as the lead analyst.

I was the only analyst on Honduras, but Honduras was one of the top five foreign policy priorities for the US government in terms of supporting the war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And so I’ve witnessed where the United States goes from caring deeply about these little countries that really mean nothing in terms of world affairs to ignoring them. And then all of a sudden they come back into focus. And so we’ve seen a very elaborate propaganda campaign prior to this arrest of Maduro. It is a violation of international law. The Trump administration is hinging its action on the fact that Maduro is not a legal.

He’s not a legitimate leader. Well, neither is Vladimir Zelensky. But Trump’s Vladimir Zelensky was not a problem at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, what’s the deal? And the people said, well, how can you say Vladimir Zelensky is not legitimate? Well, his presidential term is up and he declared, hey, I’m still president. I’m not leaving. So like I said, the United States picks and chooses. It’s the issues that it’s going to care deeply about. And we will align ourselves with drug traffickers and terrorists, whatever suits us. Just like we aligned ourselves with the terrorists now running Syria, formerly Al-Jalani, now Al-Shara.

As we’ve aligned ourselves with the Iranian terrorist group, the MEK, who is now involved with creating a false narrative that there’s complete chaos and protests tearing apart Iran that they’re on the verge of regime collapse. And so we’ve got that as well here in Venezuela. I want to get to Iran. This is from The Economist. The Economist summary of what happened. It was this is the paper wrote Latin America and what Trump now calls the Don Roe Doctrine. It said the U.S. He said the U.S. would run a country that boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, putting boots on the ground only if necessary.

Its companies would extract a tremendous amount of wealth in the name of enriching both Americans and Venezuelans. And then it went on to say Trump said that the U.S. had for too long forgotten to enforce the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, which sought to exclude foreign powers from Latin America henceforth. He declared American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again, won’t happen. Is this a done deal with Venezuela? Does the U.S. now control Venezuela? And will this be considering that the Venezuelan military seems like it put up no fight? Is this going to be easy for the U.S.

to control or will this be a challenge and turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan? Well, it’s a fantasy. Look how well we control what comes across the border in Mexico. We don’t. Look how well we control what comes out of Colombia. We failed. Venezuela would just be another failed project on that. What it does run the risk of is if the United States puts any kind of presence at all in the country, that they will be targeted by insurgent groups, opponents to the U.S. interference. And we’ll see a new space will be justified as terrorism.

So we’ll see the need to send more troops into Venezuela to combat terrorism. And that’s how the camel nose gets under the tent. Before you know it, you got the camel inside the tent. That’s how the United States gets itself embroiled in foreign wars that has no business being involved with. Were you Trump in the White House and the entire administration? They’ve been taking victory laps today and they’ve been saying that. Look at what we did. This is what happens. F.A.F.O. F around and find out. That’s that old saying that Pete Hegseth said during his meeting with the generals.

What a child. What a child he is. And what they adopted that they’ve adopted the F.A.F.O. Everyone’s been posting that today and they’ve been saying this is what you get when you have a leader with strength. You know, look at how easy this was. Are you surprised that it was so successful last night in capturing Maduro? The only thing we’re lacking is a mission accomplished banner. Look, you know, that’s why, you know, the people that are doing the celebrating the two damn young to remember the stupidity that George W. Bush celebrating our mission accomplished because we’ve conquered Iraq.

May of 2003. That was before we’d captured Saddam Hussein. But yet it led to an insurgency that plagued us until we got our basically left Iraq. This this is a similar moment. You know, this is this fall. This is so typical. You know, we get this initial news. Remember the shock at all. We did shock it on a rock. Oh, boy, that’ll teach them. Then it turned out we had to put more troops on the ground. Then we got mission accomplished. Well, then that didn’t actually end the violence. So, you know, we’ve seen this over and over.

We all we killed. So we killed General Soleimani. That’ll show those Iranians that’ll shut them down. Didn’t. So this is this is this is one more example of premature celebration. On the part of the Americans without understanding the kind of problem. They’ve created for themselves. You know, they don’t. Well, the average American doesn’t understand that in the neighboring country of Colombia. There is a group called the FARC. F.A.R.C. Stands for forces. Our mother’s revolution. Arias Colombian. They’ve been fighting against the government of Colombia now for 64 years. No, take that back. It’s now 65 years. Started 64.

Excuse me. My bad. 62 years. Well, they fought against this group with U.S. military backing with U.S. Special Forces groups going into Colombia with counterinsurgency campaigns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Haven’t been able to eliminate it in 62 years. The similar thing could likely happen here in Venezuela. The terrain is just as rugged and the country is so big, we don’t have enough troops to put in there to control it. So what this is likely to do is set Venezuela on a path of more chaos, not less. You mentioned before Russia and China.

So far, they’ve come out and made statements against what the U.S. did and the overthrow. Do you see them continuing to sit on the sidelines here? I know China expressed some concern about the U.S. taking over an oil tanker that was supposed to be shipping oil to China. What do you see developing as far as China and Russia and their approach to what’s going on in Venezuela? I don’t see them getting involved militarily. I could see them getting involved from the standpoint of covert action organizing insurgent groups that would attack U.S.

entities, but maintaining a degree of cutout. I mean, look, the borders between Brazil and Venezuela in the south and Colombia and Venezuela on the west and northwest, they’re impossible to control. And so it’s going to create, it can create a real problem. I think if Russia and China can take action that will tie the United States in knots, they’ll do so. I wouldn’t blame them. I’d do so. Because what the United States has done is such a blatant act of aggression. Remember, from the Russian standpoint, they’re looking at the events of this last week. On Sunday and Monday last week, the United States worked with the Ukrainians to try to kill President Putin.

And they failed. The Russians realize that now. And that is why the Russian reaction to this attempted attack with 91 drones was so furious, so angry. Because you step back and say, this is an attack. They didn’t kill anybody. But it’s not so much what it was supposed to accomplish as much as the message it was sending from the United States. At the very moment, the United States is supposedly leading a peace effort to bring it into the war. They are planning, conspiring with the Ukrainian services, providing targeting data that the Ukrainians needed in order to launch the attack at the residents of President Putin.

And then they turn around and see what the United States did here. They know that Maduro was actually trying to accommodate the United States, trying to reach a deal. Trump had no interest in a deal. This is all about domination. And you can probably make the same case. Well, I want to get back to Russia. Now, when the U.S. and Europeans that came out in favor of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, do we have a light to stand on anymore when we criticize Russia for attacking Ukraine? If we criticize China aggression, let’s say, towards Taiwan, have we lost any kind of moral standings in that criticism? Yeah, exactly right.

It further undermines U.S. credibility. Not that we had much to start with. We had already largely squandered that credibility. But if nothing else, this reinforces in the minds of the Chinese and Russian leaders that the United States is not to be trusted. Putin has already been facing pressure by some who have argued that the West is no longer to be a trusted partner, that there’s no future with the West. Sergei Karaghanov is one of the leading proponents of this approach. We, the Russians, need to focus on the East, our relations, our futures with China, our futures in Siberia, our future is in the eastern part of Russia, not going to Western Europe.

Western Europe’s a dead end. This attack by the United States and Venezuela will certainly reinforce what Karaghanov is. It gives him more credibility. You mentioned before that part of the strategic reasoning behind the attack on Venezuela could be for the oil due to any kind of a large-scale war with Iran. We saw, obviously, Netanyahu met with Trump this week in Mar-a-Lago, and the protests broke out across Iran, according to reports. It’s just a coincidence, Ed. It’s a coincidence. Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, came out, and he wished the Mossad agents protesting in Iran a Happy New Year in a post on X, which obviously attracted some concern on social media.

The fact that a former Secretary of State is wishing the Mossad agents Happy New Year, who are protesting in Iran. Well, look, the biggest proponent of this narrative is a group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran, NCRI. It sounds like a TV detective story or medical story, the NCRI. But this is an Iranian exile group. It was founded in 1981, but they are basically the political front for the Mujahideen Al-Qalq, which is MEK, and what’s known as the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran, also known as the PMOI. Terrorist organizations. I mean, these PMOIs slash MEK, in the 1970s, frequently they attacked and killed several American military officers and civilian contractors in Iran.

And they bombed U.S. sites, including back then Pan American Airlines, Shell Oil. So here we are, and we start making nice with this terrorist group in the 2000s, 2004, to be precise, because we were going to use them against Iran to carry out attacks in Iran, which they gladly did. And so they are directly involved right now in creating these, quote, protests and feeding the narrative to the West that the Iranian people are rising up in anger to overthrow the Ayatollah. Now, fortunately, I’m in contact with a couple of people in Iran right now.

Professor Mohammed Marandi, born in Virginia, grew up a little bit in Ohio before he returned to Iran and finished up his Ph.D. there. And then Nima Akhoshid. Oh, Nima’s great. Dialogue works. Yeah. So Nima’s, his podcast dialogue works. He’s lived in Brazil for at least eight years. He’s a resident, citizen resident of Brazil. His children are born in Brazil. But so he just went back last week, a week ago, to visit family in Iran. He had not been back to Iran for 12 years. So I called him up. I said, what about these, you know, these protests? And he was just laughing because when I shared with him what was being said in the West.

And he just said, this is ridiculous. They’re trying to create a narrative to make it appear that there is actually a foundation for overthrowing both Pajeskian, but more importantly, Khamenei. And there isn’t. So, but, you know, this has been, the purpose of this is not to stir up a, quote, revolution in Iran. It is to persuade Americans that we need to attack Iran. If we only attack Iran, we’ll cause the regime to collapse. So what it’s doing is we’re in the process of seeing a new round of effort to convince the average American that we need to go to war with Iran.

Does the quick collapse of Maduro and even looking back on the quick collapse of Assad in Syria. Do you think Trump sees these things and feels emboldened? Yeah, try to take out the leadership in Iran. Oh, after seeing recent quick collapses. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, the difference is it looks like with respect to what has happened in Venezuela, some key people were paid off. You know, the CIA is very good at identifying folks and trying to bribe them. We’ll see how long that lasts. But, you know, there are different money interests in Venezuela. And I always believe in follow the money.

We’ll see if the moneyed interests in Venezuela are going to play with the United States or choose a different path. Larry, I promise I wouldn’t keep you too long today. I appreciate you taking some time. My last question to you, Larry, is what’s going to happen in your view in Venezuela? And how do you see this unfolding? Of course, no one has crystal ball. Yeah. But how do you see this potentially unfolding? I think if the United States puts any kind of presence in Venezuela, I think we will see terrorist attacks carried out against those U.S.

persons and institutions that will then be used by Donald Trump to justify expanding the U.S. troop presence in Venezuela. And once we do that, we’re going to be into the briar patch with the tar baby. It’ll be stuck all over our hands. Larry Johnson, Sonar 21. Thank you for joining the Trends Journal. We’ll have links below where you can follow Larry on these outlets. Hey, can I leave you with one last comment? Oh, of course. Yeah, we heard that we heard that Donald Trump was going to put Marco Rubio and Pete Hexeth in charge of managing the day-to-day operations in Venezuela.

And I said, you know, that’s like giving Cheech and Chong the job of running a marijuana store. Oh, man, it’s just it’s amazing seeing the photos that the White House is promoting in black and white to show. Look at this leadership. Yeah, look at these brave decision makers. It’s like, yeah, complete joke. But anyway, Larry, thank you. Always great to talk to you. All right, thanks for the invite. Later. [tr:trw].

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