U.S. Agent Plot to Capture Maduro Through Pilot Recruitment

Wed Oct 29 2025 10:57:16 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)

A behind-the-scenes look at Edwin Lopez's efforts to flip Nicolás Maduro's chief pilot in an ambitious plan to capture the Venezuelan leader.

Edwin Lopez, a federal agent, engaged in a complex scheme to recruit Nicolás Maduro's pilot, Gen. Bitner Villegas, to redirect the president's plane for arrest by U.S. authorities. Over 16 months, Lopez maintained contact through encrypted messaging, attempting to convince Villegas that cooperation would make him wealthy and a national hero. Despite initial interest, Villegas ultimately rebuffed the overtures, demonstrating the risks of disloyalty within Maduro’s regime.

MIAMI (AP) — The federal agent had a daring pitch for Nicolás Maduro's chief pilot: All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president's plane to a place where U.S. authorities could nab the strongman.

In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine meeting, the aviator would be made a very rich man.

The conversation was tense, and the pilot left noncommittal, though he provided the agent, Edwin Lopez, with his cell number — a sign he might be interested in helping the U.S. government.

Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his government job in July, Lopez kept at it, chatting with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app.

The untold intrigue-filled saga of how Lopez tried to flip the pilot has all the elements of a Cold War spy thriller — luxury private jets, a secret meeting at an airport hangar, high-stakes diplomacy, and the delicate wooing of a key Maduro lieutenant. There was even a final machination aimed at rattling the Venezuelan president about the pilot's true loyalties.

The scheme reveals the extent — and often slapdash fashion — to which the U.S. has for years sought to topple Maduro, who it blames for destroying the oil-rich nation’s democracy while providing a lifeline to drug traffickers, terrorist groups, and communist-run Cuba.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has taken an even harder line. This summer, the president has deployed thousands of troops, attack helicopters, and warships to the Caribbean to attack fishing boats suspected of smuggling cocaine out of Venezuela.

This month, Trump authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela, and the U.S. government has also doubled the bounty for Maduro’s capture on federal narco-trafficking charges, a move that Lopez sought to leverage in a text message to the pilot.

“I’m still waiting for your answer,” Lopez wrote the pilot on Aug. 7, attaching a link to a Justice Department press release announcing the reward had risen to $50 million.

Details of the ultimately unsuccessful plan were drawn from interviews with three current and former U.S. officials and one of Maduro’s opponents, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity due to safety concerns. The AP also reviewed authenticated text exchanges between Lopez and the pilot.

Attempts to locate the pilot, Venezuelan Gen. Bitner Villegas, were not successful. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not comment. The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.

Maduro’s planes

The plot was hatched when a tipster showed up at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic on April 24, 2024, when Joe Biden was president. The informant purported to have information about Maduro’s planes.

Lopez, 50, was then an attaché at the embassy and an agent for Homeland Security Investigations. A wiry former U.S. Army Ranger from Puerto Rico, Lopez was leading the agency’s investigations into transnational criminal networks with a presence in the Caribbean. His work dismantling an illicit money operation in Miami had even earned him a public rebuke from Hugo Chávez in 2010. The embassy assignment was to be his last before retirement.

The embassy was closed, though Lopez was still at his desk. He was handed a card with the tipster’s name and phone number. When he called, the tipster claimed two planes used by Maduro were in the Dominican Republic undergoing repairs.

Locating the aircraft was easy – they were housed in La Isabela executive airport in Santo Domingo. Tracing them to Maduro would take federal investigators months. As they built that case, they learned that Maduro had dispatched five pilots to retrieve the multimillion-dollar jets.

A plan comes together

Lopez had an epiphany: What if he could persuade the pilot to fly Maduro to a place where the U.S. could arrest him? Maduro had been indicted in 2020 on federal narco-terrorism charges.

Lopez secured permission from his superiors and Dominican authorities to question the pilots, overcoming concerns about creating a diplomatic rift with Venezuela.

At the airport hangar, Lopez and fellow agents asked each pilot to join them in a small conference room. After about 15 minutes with Villegas, who was a member of the elite presidential honor guard, Lopez made his pitch: In exchange for secretly ferrying Maduro into American hands, the pilot could become very rich.

Villegas didn’t tip his hand. Yet, before departing, he gave Lopez his cell number.

Villegas and the other pilots returned to Venezuela without the aircraft. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was assembling a federal forfeiture case.

As the political situation evolved and Maduro's influence began to wane, Lopez consistently contacted Villegas via encrypted messaging to keep the conversation alive, stating in July that there was “still time left to be Venezuela’s hero.” The pilot, however, repeatedly dismissed the overtures.

Realizing that Villegas wasn’t going to join the plot, Lopez and his allies attempted to unnerve Maduro through public pressure tactics.