The details are still coming to the forefront, but it seems that a former U.S. Green Beret was heavily involved in the secret military operation to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. 

The Associated Press (AP) was first to break the story about a daring but overly ambitious plan to sneak 300 former soldiers from the regime into the northern tip of Venezuela. They would raid government armories along the way and create a popular uprising to overthrow Maduro’s regime.

Maduro is believed to have rigged the last elections. Sixty countries, including the U.S., recognize the opposition candidate, Juan Guaidó as the rightful president. However, Maduro is firmly entrenched in power, with the military backing him, so this plan had little chance of being successful. Luckily, this entire operation fell apart before it was ever launched. Still, the political fallout of the American involvement will no doubt be played up in the media as another failed coup attempt similar to the Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba. 

One of the alleged ringleaders of the coup plot was a former Army Green Beret, Jordan Goudreau. He is a decorated SF medic who was awarded three Bronze Stars during combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. After leaving the military, Goudreau in 2018 started his own company Silvercorp USA, a private security firm, near his home in Melbourne, Florida. Silvercorp’s website already lists operations in over 50 countries.

Those who knew Goudreau in Special Forces told AP the following, “[He was] always at the top of his class: a cell leader with a superb intellect for handling sources, an amazing shot and a devoted mixed martial arts fighter who still cut his hair high and tight.”

But as the coup plot unraveled, most of those involved pointed at Goudreau as a kind of a loose cannon, a smooth-talker, long on promises but short of coming through. That isn’t a shocker: While a successful operation has 1,000 fathers, a failed one is an orphan. And Goudreau is an easy target to pin the failure to. He’s now being portrayed as a “patriotic, gung-ho American, in over his head.” He makes a convenient target, while the rest run for cover. 

He declined to be interviewed by AP for their piece.

What was worse for the plotters was that the former Venezuelan general, Major General Cliver Alcalá, whom they hoped would put a face to the plot for the Venezuelan military, has been jailed in the United States on the same narcoterrorism charges that the Justice Department leveled against Maduro.