*He Was Chevron’s Man in Venezuela—and a CIA Informant*
*After retiring from the U.S. oil giant, Ali Moshiri warned the Trump
administration it would face a morass if it tried to replace Maduro with
the democratic opposition*
Ali Moshiri had unparalleled access to the highest circles of power in
Caracas.
/By //Joel Schectman
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/news/author/joel-schectman>//,
//Christopher M. Matthews
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/news/author/christopherm-matthews>//and
//Vera Bergengruen
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/news/author/vera-bergengruen>/,
/March 14, 2026,
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/chevron-venezuela-cia-moshiri-c88670fc?mod=hp_lead_pos7/
In the months before President Trump moved to capture Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/topics/person/nicolas-maduro>,
the Central Intelligence Agency turned to an old friend for advice on
who should replace the autocratic leftist.
Former Chevron
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/CVX>executive
Ali Moshiri told the agency that if the U.S. government tried to oust
the entire Maduro regime and install the democratic opposition led by
María Corina Machado it would have another quagmire like Iraq on its
hands, according to people familiar with the matter.
She didn’t have the support of the country’s security services or
control of its oil infrastructure, Moshiri argued.
His recommendation: Stick for now with another autocratic leftist,
Maduro’s longtime deputy and economic manager Delcy Rodríguez. The
option was later presented to Trump in a secret CIA assessment
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-concluded-regime-loyalists-were-best-placed-to-lead-venezuela-after-maduro-24b0be1a>.
Hours after American commandos dragged Maduro out of his fortified
compound, Trump echoed the sentiment. It would be “very tough” for
Machado to take over, he said. “She doesn’t have the support within or
the respect within the country.”
Moshiri’s hidden hand in Washington spycraft, revealed here for the
first time, offers a window into how Trump embraced the energy
industry’s unsentimental playbook for dealing with autocratic regimes.
And it marks a dramatic turnaround for Chevron’s prospects in Venezuela,
where the company’s decision to stay invested during decades of
political upheaval now leaves it with a strategic advantage as the oil
begins to gush again.
In a statement, Chevron said that “between spring of 2025 and the
removal of Maduro, Chevron did not authorize anyone working for, or on
behalf of, the company to engage with the CIA related to Venezuela’s
leadership, including assessments of government officials or opposition
leaders.” It added that the company had no advance knowledge of Maduro’s
ouster, and didn’t coordinate or advocate for it. Chevron added that it
“does not have a business relationship with Ali Moshiri—formal or
informal.”
Moshiri, who left the company in 2017 and ended his consulting
relationship with Chevron in 2024, declined to discuss any contact he
had with the CIA, saying: “You know I can’t disclose any of that.”
In an interview, he freely acknowledged sharing his skepticism of the
Venezuelan opposition with Washington—the same perspective he expresses
in public. “Venezuelan opposition believes that we want to build from
the bottom up, that we need to get rid of all this,” Moshiri said. “And
that’s the model of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Chevron played no role in the
operation that removed Maduro, which she said was “the result of
meticulous planning at the highest levels of the administration,
informed by detailed intelligence, and flawless execution by the
Department of Justice and Department of War.”
Moshiri’s insights were only part of the overall intelligence picture
that the U.S. government was collecting on Venezuela, which ranged from
electronic surveillance to a covert CIA team that was secretly embedded
on the ground to a source within Maduro’s inner circle, the Journal
previously reported
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/livecoverage/venezuela-strikes/card/cia-team-in-venezuela-since-august-tracked-maduro-s-whereabouts-before-capture-RY5CuDKtqcA2XnkSHSYv>.
U.S. officials were familiar with Rodriguez’s career and understood that
she would potentially be amenable to a working relationship, an
administration official said.
Still, as the longtime head of Chevron’s oil production in Venezuela,
Moshiri had unparalleled access to the highest circles of power in the
regime, including the late President Hugo Chávez, who called him a “dear
friend.” At a time when the agency had little expertise of its own in
the South American country, and scrambled to divert resources from
counterterrorism to plug the gap, it in part relied on Moshiri and
others who used to work for Chevron to keep an eye on the political
situation.
Now, Chevron is poised to take a key role in developing Venezuela’s oil
reserves, which are the largest in the world by some estimates. It is
the only major U.S. oil company positioned to quickly increase output
there and has said it aims to increase its Venezuelan oil production by
up to 50% within the next 18 to 24 months. The potential payday
validates the company’s yearslong strategy to stay put as rivals pulled
out—a giant win for Chief Executive Mike Wirth.
“For more than a century, Chevron’s presence in Venezuela has focused on
safely producing energy, supporting jobs, and contributing to economic
stability that benefits both the Venezuelan people and U.S. energy
security,” the company said. “That longstanding record should not be
recast to suggest motives or actions that are inconsistent with
Chevron’s history, values, or conduct.”
On the ground, the Trump administration is benefiting from Chevron’s
extensive network. The company escorted Energy Secretary Chris Wright on
his visit last month, according to a copy of Wright’s agenda. Chevron
representatives delivered personal protective equipment to the
delegation at its hotel in Caracas, ferried the press contingent that
accompanied Wright around the country in armored vehicles and hosted the
group at its operations in Morichal, the agenda said. “All travelers to
be dressed in Chevron coveralls and boots,” it said.
Meanwhile, Moshiri is offering advice on the new leadership of
Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, as
his Amos Fund raises $3 billion for Venezuelan oil projects.
*Getting to know the dictator*
During his time at Chevron, Ali Moshiri did what few other American
capitalists managed to do: get Hugo Chávez, the fiery socialist who used
Venezuela’s oil riches to challenge the U.S.
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203458604577265460960140008>,
to trust him.
It helped that Moshiri wasn’t originally from the U.S. He grew up in
Iran, came to Oklahoma to get a degree in petroleum engineering and
joined Chevron just after finishing graduate school in 1978. He married
a woman he met in Venezuela, learned Spanish and developed an unusual
accent that seemingly blended the multiple languages he spoke.
Associates describe him as a man who prides himself on helping his
adopted American homeland—and also in doing favors for others he can
cash in on later.
Moshiri frequently wears designer suits and horn-rimmed glasses that
rest below a swept-back wave of gray hair. He’s spent a career traveling
to far-flung and sometimes dangerous regions for Chevron—Angola, Mexico,
Colombia—navigating regimes of varying political ideologies. He speaks
in a self-deprecating tone about how he’ll tolerate just about anyone,
noting with a wry smile that his own children are socialists—until they
ask to fly private.
Moshiri took over Chevron’s Latin America operations at a time when the
company’s presence in Venezuela had become a U.S. national security
issue after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. officials
wanted to ensure reliable access to crude in the Western Hemisphere in
the face of instability in the Middle East. Condoleezza Rice, who became
President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and later secretary
of state, was a longtime Chevron board member. The company had even
named one of its oil tankers after her.
As Chevron’s footprint in Venezuela cemented its strategic importance
for the U.S., Moshiri’s inroads with the country’s leader proved critical.
In the early 2000s, Moshiri told the Journal, he accompanied Chávez to
visit the site of a planned deepwater port in northeastern Venezuela, to
bring offshore gas into the country. PdVSA executives laid out a model
of what the port would look like, and said it would be built in 18
months. Moshiri, who noticed on the drive in that fallen trees on the
side of the road still had green leaves on them, was skeptical. “They
just cut the trees for you to come in here,” Moshiri told him. It’s
never going to get done on that timeline, he said.
Moshiri took to visiting Chávez’s office when aides called with
questions, he said, waiting for the habitually late president to provide
his feedback on the oil industry, including on the waste and theft
plaguing Venezuelan development projects. Chávez took some of Moshiri’s
advice.
When Colombia, led by Álvaro Uribe, an icon of the Latin American right
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/world/americas/former-colombian-president-is-sentenced-to-house-arrest-in-witness-tampering-case-a41d6096>,
was resisting selling natural gas that Chevron was extracting there to
Venezuela, Moshiri found a way to bridge the gap. With both Chávez and
Uribe in attendance at a regional conference in Colombia, Moshiri urged
Chávez to tell Uribe Venezuela would build a gas pipeline. Otherwise,
Moshiri said, Uribe wouldn’t agree to the deal. Chávez told Uribe on the
spot that PdVSA would build it, and they signed the deal.
The CIA also took notice of Moshiri’s connections. According to people
familiar with the matter, he has since the days of Chávez provided
information about Venezuela’s leaders to the agency, with the approval
of Chevron’s senior-most executives.
A Chevron spokesman said: “We have no knowledge of the validity of the
claims made by anonymous sources about conversations that may or may not
have taken place nearly two decades ago.”
When Chávez began nationalizing oil fields in 2006, sharply raising
taxes, and rewriting contracts to make PdVSA the operator and majority
owner of most projects, Exxon Mobil and other Western firms left, suing
over the billions of dollars in assets and equipment they left behind.
Moshiri made the case for Chevron to stay, telling executives that
access to Venezuela’s oil would one day be valuable. Moshiri once told a
colleague “you know investing in Venezuela is risky, but it’s riskier to
invest in Chile” which was then considered the corporate-friendly
environment in the region. Chile, Moshiri pointed out, has no oil.
For other colleagues, Moshiri’s optimism could also be read as naiveté.
As oil prices dropped and PdVSA became a piggy bank for Chávez’s pet
projects, including the sale of chickens, oil production slumped.
Operations fell into disrepair. Moshiri sank more of Chevron’s own money
into PdVSA’s ventures to eke out modest returns.
After Chávez’s 2013 death, Moshiri deepened his relationship with
Rodríguez, a Chavez acolyte who became a central figure in a regime that
destroyed the country’s economy. Just two months later, Moshiri led
Chevron to sign a $2 billion loan deal with PdVSA, telling the Journal
at the time Chevron would continue to work with PdVSA because it
believed Venezuela still had significant resources to tap.
By 2017, Venezuela owed the company billions of dollars. “He may have
picked the wrong strategy,” said Luis Pacheco, a former PdVSA executive.
Rodríguez rose to the senior ranks of Venezuela’s government. As
Maduro’s vice president, she managed the country’s oil sector and
oversaw the state security apparatus, which is accused of jailing
thousands of political prisoners in detention centers where many were
held without charges and tortured.
Chevron and the few remaining Western companies there saw Rodríguez as
someone they could do business with. Moshiri said she was a “tough,
determined negotiator” who was willing to change her mind when she heard
a convincing argument.
After Moshiri retired in 2017, some senior Chevron executives began
rethinking their commitment to Venezuela
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/articles/chevron-the-last-u-s-oil-major-in-venezuela-debates-should-it-stay-1541700438>.
But Moshiri, still on the payroll as an adviser, once again helped
persuade the company to stay.
*The Trump factor*
In Trump’s first term, Chevron’s pragmatic relations with the Venezuelan
regime threatened to become a liability. Some of Trump’s closest
advisers had long viewed the company suspiciously, believing its oil
revenues had helped keep Maduro in power.
Trump took a shot at ousting Maduro after January 2019, when Venezuela’s
National Assembly moved to designate legislative head and opposition
figure Juan Guaidó
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelan-lawmakers-anoint-new-leader-they-hope-will-replace-maduro-11547585527>as
the country’s legitimate leader.
Mauricio Claver-Carone, a senior official on Trump’s National Security
Council with a history of taking a hard line against Maduro, flew to
Miami and Bogotá to convince aides to Venezuelan generals to support the
U.S. cause. Other U.S. officials promised the generals more than $1
million each.
Also part of the plot: a cyberattack to cripple the military’s payment
system, a plan for Venezuelan pilots to steal the Air Force’s jet
fighters and a judgment from the top court in the country naming Guaidó
the real president to kick things off.
“This may be the last chance,” then-Sen. Marco Rubio urged John Bolton,
Trump’s then-national security adviser, Bolton recounted in a memoir.
Rubio publicly backed the Venezuelan opposition’s offer of legal amnesty
to military leaders who broke with Maduro.
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/x.com/marcorubio/status/1093960392378892290>
But points of tension soon emerged. Bolton asked then-CIA Director Gina
Haspel to support a broader sabotage effort against the regime. Haspel,
who didn’t want to be responsible for another Latin American coup, demurred.
Moshiri told U.S. officials they were setting unrealistic expectations
for the opposition. “It’s not going to work,” he said.
It didn’t. Without a strong CIA presence on the ground to smooth out the
operation, Claver-Carone was left to pace the halls of the Eisenhower
Executive office building, futilely haranguing his Venezuelan
co-plotters in Spanish on his cellphone as the plan floundered,
according to former officials familiar with the operation. Unlike their
Washington counterparts, Cuban intelligence agents moved freely in
Caracas and helped Maduro unravel the scheme, the former officials said.
By his second term, Trump had circled Venezuela and Colombia with a
Sharpie on a map of South America, according to former U.S. officials.
Trump claimed that Maduro was intentionally pushing a flood of
Venezuelan migrants and gang members into U.S. cities as a scheme to
undermine America.
Washington recognized Venezuela’s embattled opposition as the country’s
rightful leaders when in 2024 international observers declared Maduro
had stolen the presidential election
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/world/americas/venezuelas-opposition-releases-election-database-claims-big-victory-over-strongman-maduro-fee5bc0c>.
Rubio and other Trump allies, including his son Don Jr., have championed
opposition leader Maria Corina Machado as the courageous face of the
legitimate government.
The president ordered Chevron, the largest foreign investor in
Venezuela, to wind down its operations. Rubio, Trump’s new secretary of
state, said Chevron’s Biden-era license to operate there had “shamefully
bankrolled the illegitimate Maduro regime.”
Donald Trump Jr. broke the news himself to Machado. “Literally just now
my father killed the Chevron license,” Trump Jr. told Machado on his
podcast.
Machado, joyous at the news, asked Don Jr. to thank his father. “For
every $1 Chevron got, Maduro got $3,” she said.
*Losing visibility*
The president wanted Maduro gone fast, but the CIA had little insight
into Venezuela, having spent the past decades focused on terrorism and
China. It lost key visibility on the ground after the U.S. Embassy
closed in 2019, forcing it to shut down its station and remove personnel
operating under diplomatic cover.
“Venezuela was a black box. It is a territory in which we have blinded
ourselves,” says Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst.
John Ratcliffe, Trump’s new CIA director, was shocked at the agency’s
limited capabilities in the region, according to people familiar with
his approach. He was determined to reposition the CIA from its
decades-old central focus on fighting overseas terrorists to tackling
problems in America’s backyard. The idea wasn’t just to send spies to
gather more information, but return to the early days of the spy agency
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/the-cia-is-about-to-get-a-trump-makeover-16fc0cbf>when
it used hard-edged covert operations to shape the Western Hemisphere to
Washington’s liking.
In early months, Ratcliffe used employee buyouts offered across the
agency to shift new staff and hires toward the region. Trump disclosed
that he had issued a secret order
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-authorizes-cia-covert-operations-in-venezuela-b28dbbd2>for
the CIA to conduct covert action against Maduro’s government, later
saying that he did so because “they have emptied their prisons into the
United States of America.”
The CIA set up a team to target Maduro, people familiar with the
preparations said. As the plan took shape the CIA shifted case officers
from its counterterrorism division with experience targeting and killing
al Qaeda militants—operations the agency calls “find, fix and finish”—to
set up its plan to capture Maduro, the people said.
Trump had dispatched special envoy Ric Grenell
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/world/americas/trump-envoy-looks-for-venezuela-deportation-deal-in-rare-caracas-visit-499a03e5>to
Caracas to negotiate with Maduro on deportations and hostage releases,
which was taken as a signal that he was willing to keep him in power if
he cooperated. In the spring, Maduro turned down several U.S. offers to
step down, receive amnesty and leave the country, according to people
familiar with the proposed deal.
As the CIA began to create an alternative plan, Chevron—the last major
U.S. oil company with a sustained presence in Venezuela, found a more
receptive audience. CEO Wirth had several conversations
<https://archive.fo/o/DcnIJ/https:/www.wsj.com/world/americas/chevron-ceo-lobbies-for-more-time-to-wind-down-venezuela-operations-5afc2dee>with
Trump about Venezuela last year, according to people familiar with the
matter, explaining the situation on the ground and promising that
Chevron could boost oil production there.
Trump had vowed to voters to keep the U.S. out of foreign entanglements.
If the agency was going to oust Maduro it needed to be clean and have a
quick payoff that Trump could claim as a win. Oil is the backbone of the
Venezuelan economy and Chevron was the only U.S. company that could
ensure it kept flowing and avoided economic collapse. Trump is also
obsessed with low oil prices for American drivers, believing they serve
as an offset to inflation and a political windfall, making Wirth’s
promise all the more attractive.
The CIA turned back to former Chevron personnel who understood the
insular working of Maduro’s inner circle and its convoluted oil sector.
Moshiri explained to the CIA that the Venezuelan opposition wasn’t
capable of keeping the oil flowing, let alone running the country.
“We constantly talk to the government,” Moshiri said in the interview,
in which he declined to talk about any contact with the CIA.
“Constantly, because you need security. And if they reach out, we talk
to our government. We are citizens of the country. We talk to them,
whoever it is.”
Moshiri and others who had worked for Chevron helped sway the CIA toward
the succession plan that eventually took shape—leave Rodríguez and her
security-service backers in place. In the weeks before the military
action, CIA produced a report for the White House evaluating who would
be the most stable option for a transition.
Moshiri vouched for Rodríguez as the natural choice if the
administration wanted to ensure the oil kept flowing and avoid a violent
scramble for power. The CIA report concluded the same thing, assessing
that Rodríguez and two other Maduro loyalists were best placed to lead
Venezuela if Maduro stepped down.
The CIA sources helped inform the agency’s plan for how Rodríguez could
maintain control in a post-Maduro era. They provided input on
Venezuela’s new U.S.-backed hydrocarbon law that will increase foreign
oil company profits, and feedback on how to reform PdVSA, according to
people familiar with the discussions.
Since the raid, Trump has described oil as his primary motivator in
going into Venezuela, and hailed Rodríguez as “terrific.” “We just
received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80
million barrels of oil,” Trump said in his State of the Union address
last month.
It’s also looking good for Moshiri. He is now offering advice on the new
leadership of PdVSA, traveling to Brazil and elsewhere to recruit oilmen
and create a lucrative new era of partnership between the state-run oil
company and Washington.
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