Washington / Caracas, Jan. 4 -- The US military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was the culmination of months of covert intelligence work and one of the most complex American raids in more than a decade, US officials said.
A pre-dawn raid carried out Saturday by elite "US Army Delta Force" commandos resulted in the capture of Maduro, marking the "riskiest American military operation" of its kind since US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan's Abbottabad in 2011.
The operation followed months of clandestine intelligence-gathering by the Central Intelligence Agency, which began last August when a covert team of CIA officers entered Venezuela to track Maduro, whom the Trump administration had...