Despite denials, CIA documents show that officials were aware of the looming coup
By BART JONES and LETTA TAYLER
Newsday

The U.S. government knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, in the weeks before a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the putsch.
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Yet the United States, which depends on Venezuela for nearly one-sixth of its oil, never warned the Chavez government, Venezuelan officials said.

The Bush administration has denied it was involved in the coup or knew one was being planned. At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after the 47-hour coup, a senior administration official who did not want to be named said, “The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow — or to get Chavez out of power.”

Yet based on the newly released CIA briefs, an analyst said Wednesday that did not appear to be the case.

“This is substantive evidence that the CIA knew in advance about the coup, and it is clear that this intelligence was distributed to dozens of members of the Bush administration, giving them knowledge of coup plotting,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.

However, he said that while the documents show U.S. officials knew a coup was coming, perhaps implying tacit approval, they do not prove the United States was involved in ousting Chavez, Venezuela's elected leader. That is partly because the briefs are from the intelligence side of the CIA and not the operational side.

A CIA spokeswoman contended the agency played no role in the coup and was merely collecting information about political events in Venezuela. She said it was up to top U.S. officials and not the CIA to determine what to do with the information. The spokeswoman, who declined to be named, said alerting Chavez to the impending coup “would suggest we would meddle in the affairs of another nation.”

Asked to comment, a U.S. State Department spokesman would say only, “As we've stated before, there is no basis to claims the United States was involved in the events of April 12-14 in Venezuela.”

One of the CIA documents filed just five days before the coup would appear to support that. It notes that “repeated warnings that the U.S. will not support any extraconstitutional moves to oust Chavez probably have given pause to the plotters.”