The Donald Trump administration has secretly authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials, intensifying a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the country's authoritarian leader.

The authorization is the latest step in the administration's escalating pressure campaign. For weeks, the U.S. military has been attacking vessels off the Venezuelan coast that it says are carrying drugs, causing 27 deaths. American officials have been clear, privately, that the ultimate goal is to remove Maduro from power.

The new authority would allow the CIA to conduct lethal operations in Venezuela and carry out a range of operations in the Caribbean.

The agency could take covert action against the president or his administration, either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. It is unknown whether the CIA is planning operations in Venezuela or if the authorizations are a contingency measure.

However, this development comes as the U.S. military is planning for its own potential escalation, drafting options for President Trump to consider, including attacks inside Venezuela.

The scale of the military deployment in the region is substantial: There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops there, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico, but also a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships. In total, the Navy has eight surface warships and one submarine in the Caribbean.

The new authorizations, known in intelligence jargon as"presidential finding," were described by multiple U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the highly classified document.

The United States announced it sank another ship carrying"narco-terrorists" near Venezuela.

Trump ordered an end to diplomatic talks with Maduro's government this month, growing frustrated with the Venezuelan leader's failure to voluntarily relinquish power and his officials' continued insistence that they had no involvement in drug trafficking.

The CIA has long had the authority to work with governments in Latin America on security matters and intelligence sharing. This has allowed it to work with Mexican officials to attack drug cartels. However, those authorizations do not allow the agency to carry out direct lethal operations.

The Trump administration's Venezuela strategy, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio with the help of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, seeks to overthrow Maduro.

Ratcliffe has said little about what his agency is doing in Venezuela. But he has promised that the C.I.A. under his leadership would become more aggressive. During his confirmation hearing, Ratcliffe said he would make the agency less risk-averse and more willing to take covert action when ordered by the president,"going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do."

The White House and the CIA declined to comment.

The United States has offered $50 million for information leading to Maduro's arrest and conviction on drug trafficking charges in the U.S.

Rubio, who also serves as Trump's national security adviser, has called Maduro illegitimate, and the Trump administration describes him as a"narco-terrorist."

Maduro prevented the government, which was democratically elected last year, from taking power. But the Trump administration's accusations that he has benefited from the narcotics trade and that his country is a major producer of drugs for the United States have been the subject of debate.

The administration has claimed in legal documents that Maduro controls a criminal gang, the Tren de Aragua. However, an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies contradicts that conclusion.

While the Trump administration has publicly offered relatively scant legal justifications for its campaign, Trump told Congress that he decided the United States was engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels he considers terrorist organizations. In the notification to Congress late last month, the Trump administration said the drug-smuggling cartels were"non-state armed groups" whose actions "constitute an armed attack against the United States."

White House findings authorizing covert actions are closely guarded secrets. They are often reauthorized from one administration to the next, and their precise language is rarely made public. They also constitute one of the crudest uses of executive authority.

The United States has claimed in legal documents that Maduro controls a criminal gang, the Aragua Train. Photo: EFE

Select members of Congress are briefed on the authorizations, but lawmakers cannot make them public, and oversight of potential covert actions is difficult.

While U.S. military operations, such as attacks on vessels allegedly transporting drugs from Venezuelan territory, are generally made public, the CIA's covert actions tend to remain secret. Some, however, such as the CIA operation in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, are quickly made public.

The agency has been ramping up its counternarcotics work for years. Gina Haspel, the CIA's second director during the first Trump administration, devoted more resources to hunting drugs in Mexico and Latin America. Under William J. Burns, the Biden administration's director, the CIA began flying drones over Mexico in search of fentanyl labs, operations that Ratcliffe expanded.

The covert discovery is, in a way, a natural evolution of those anti-drug efforts. But the CIA's track record with covert action in Latin America and the Caribbean is, at best, mixed.

In 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability. The C.I.A.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, and the agency repeatedly attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, however, the C.I.A. supplied arms to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic.

The agency was also involved in a 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia, a 1973 coup in Chile, and the Contra fight against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government in the 1980s.