The stunning late-night U.S. raid on Venezuela, resulting in the capture of dictator and narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro, was a highly secretive and successful operation, crippling the Venezuelan regime’s infrastructure and transporting the regime’s leader to a U.S. court of law to face justice for his crimes against Americans. Much of the operation’s success was thanks to an elite band of soldiers known as Delta Force, who led the raid and captured Maduro, eliminating his Cuban security forces in the process.

Officially the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, the Delta Force is one of the U.S. military’s most elite warrior units and has been involved in some of America’s most politically and strategically significant missions since its inception in the late 1970s. So what is the Delta Force, and why were its troops so crucial to the success of the raid on Venezuela?

A New Type of Combat

In the 1960s, the threat of terrorism was increasing globally and U.S. leaders began weighing the possibility of forming a new type of military unity to carry out a new type of combat: anti-terrorism. Then-U.S. Army Captain Charlie Beckwith came up with a solution. Beckwith was already a fairly accomplished soldier, having served in Korea in the 1950s and joined the Special Forces, which at the time largely focused on training and equipping rebel military groups in foreign countries. He was involved in training the Royal Lao Army to retake Laos from Vietnamese communist insurgents. In 1962, Beckwith was assigned as an exchange officer to the British Special Air Services (SAS), an elite special forces military corps founded during World War II.

Formed by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Archibald David Stirling in 1941 as a British Army unit, SAS conducted some of the British Army’s most secretive and successful missions throughout World War II, particularly in Northern Africa, but its first mission was a disaster. A November 1941 parachute drop in support of the Operation Crusader offensive resulted in the death or capture of two-thirds of the newly-formed unit: only 22 men returned to base. The SAS’s second mission, however, was a resounding success. The elite unit managed to secretly destroy 60 enemy aircraft across three airfields in Libya. Other missions included sabotaging German supply dumps, derailing trains, destroying Axis vehicles, blocking Panzer tank divisions from reinforcing German forces during key engagements, and disrupting German communications.

Following World War II, SAS was reorganized into a regiment and deployed to deal with the Malayan Emergency. There, Beckwith served with SAS forces conducting guerilla warfare in the Malaysian jungles and became acquainted with the elite British regiment’s use of counter-terrorism, direct action, and special reconnaissance tactics. Upon returning from Britain, Beckwith prepared a report recommending that the U.S. Army form its own equivalent to the SAS, noting that the absence of such a unique unit left the American military vulnerable. It took several years before Army leadership were willing to consider Beckwith’s proposal, and in the meantime he worked on revising the training for the Green Berets, who had focused on unconventional warfare to the exclusion of conventional warfare: some officers had never commanded rifle and weapons companies. The special forces expert also sought to revise the Green Berets’ recruitment process, disappointed that Green Berets were being recruited straight out of military schools without any experience in combat or special forces.

Beckwith spent the latter half of the 1960s and the first two thirds of the 1970s in Vietnam, leading Special Forces operations and, while recovering from a wound which doctors originally believed to be fatal, reorganizing the Army Rangers’ training. By 1975, Beckwith, now a colonel, was named Commandant of the U.S. Army Special Warfare School. During this time, Army brass finally gave Beckwith the greenlight to form his elite, SAS-style direct action and anti-terrorism unit. By 1977, Delta Force had been established. The first members of Delta Force were screened from volunteers and put through an intensive selection and training process. Training concluded in late 1978 and, by 1979, Delta Force was certified as fully mission-capable, just in time for the Iran hostage crisis.

The Rise of Delta Force

In November of 1979, in the midst of the Islamic Revolution, Iranian dissidents stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking hostage 66 Americans, including diplomats and civilian personnel. More than 50 of the hostages would be held captive until January of 1981, when the U.S. and Iran, with the assistance of Algeria, reached an agreement and the hostages were released. While the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collaborated with the Canadian government to rescue six of the Americans who managed to evade capture, the newly-formed Delta Force was tasked with rescuing the remaining 52 hostages. However, much like the SAS which inspired its formation, Delta Force’s inaugural mission would end in disaster.

In April of 1980, Delta Force had to abandon Operation Eagle Claw when three of the unit’s eight helicopters to be used in the mission arrived at the operation base damaged: one suffered hydraulic malfunctions, one had a cracked rotor blade, and another had been damaged by a sandstorm. A fourth helicopter crashed into a refueling aircraft while withdrawing from the base, destroying both aircraft and killing eight servicemen. Retired Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III led an investigation into the botched mission, attributing Operation Eagle Claw’s failure to deficiencies in mission planning, command and control, and inter-service operability, ultimately resulting in the creation of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (nicknamed the “Night Stalkers”), and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (colloquially known as SEAL Team Six).

Following the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw, however, Delta Force carried out numerous successful missions, including fighting the left-wing guerilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and assisting the right-wing, CIA-backed Contras against the Soviet Union-supported Sandinista National Liberation Front and Junta of National Reconstruction in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Delta Force played a key role in Operation Urgent Fury, the military invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Troops with Delta Force were dropped by helicopters into the jungle surrounding the unapproachable Richmond Hill Prison in an effort to free the political prisoners detained there.

In Operation Heavy Shadow, Delta Force and SEAL Team Six assisted Colombian national police forces in tracking, locating, and attempting to capture international drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, who had been responsible for much of the cocaine trade in the Western Hemisphere. When Colombian police tried to arrest Escobar, he returned fire and was shot and killed while attempting to escape across a rooftop. Author and reporter Mark Bowden has suggested that a Delta Force sniper was likely responsible for killing Escobar, although this claim has not been substantiated.

Delta Force was also active in missions preparing for the U.S. invasion of Panama late in 1989. Operation Acid Gambit successfully rescued Kurt Muse, a purported CIA asset, from a Panamanian prison, while Operation Nifty Package ultimately resulted in the capture of Panamanian military dictator Manuel Noriega. On Monday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, one of the first members of Delta Force and the unit’s eventual commander, compared the capture of Noriega to Maduro’s capture nearly 40 years later. “This is exactly the same scenario. You had a guy that was pushing drugs into America, and nobody had done anything to try and stop him, and finally it came to this,” Boykin related. “I think that it’s important to remember that those people that we have gone after — and these are just two of them, there have been others, most of which were on the highly secretive side — but those people are killing Americans. And our president’s first duty to the people is to protect the nation.”

Boykin recalled chasing Noriega to the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See (the Vatican’s embassy, basically) in January of 1990, where the dictator claimed sanctuary. U.S. forces used psychological warfare tactics to attempt to pressure Noriega to leave the nunciature, while Papal Nuncio Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa undertook his own psychological campaign, successfully convincing Noriega to surrender. “I think the thing that kind of puzzled me was, once we had him, everybody turned against him. Nobody wanted to be identified as being with him,” Boykin observed of Noriega’s capture, likening it to Maduro’s. “That’s how so many of these thugs are allowed to do the things they do, is the people that want something from him, they go, they get in behind him and, you know, just look at the streets of Venezuela today with all the people out there thanking America. He doesn’t have any allies.”

Addressing the spiritual component of Noriega’s “depravity,” Boykin recounted discovering the corpses of several individuals who had been murdered by the Panamanian dictator. “It was unbelievable how he had mutilated those bodies. … They had been in the ground for a while, but the mutilation was just unbelievable as to what he had personally done. According to the CIA’s informant, he had done those things, and it was brutal,” the retired Delta Force commander shared. “We had every safe house he had. And in every safe house he had a satanic altar on one side and he had a Christian altar on the other side.”

In the early 1990s, Delta Force was deployed during Desert Storm and the Gulf War, primarily tasked with identifying and destroying Iranian missiles, an effort in which the elite American troops were joined by SAS. In 1993, Delta Force soldiers were deployed alongside Army Rangers in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, in a move code-named Operation Gothic Serpent. When two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down by Somalia militia, five members of Delta Force were killed in the ensuing battle, alongside six Rangers, five army aviation crew, and two 10th Mountain Division soldiers. It is estimated that the U.S. forces present killed as many as 2,000 Somali combatants.

The 1990s also saw Delta Force operators take over security duties for American diplomats and the U.S. Olympic team, manage security preparations for the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, and carry out Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, targeting the regime of Haiti’s last military dictator, Raoul Cédras.

The Global War on Terror

Following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Delta Force played a key role in the Global War on Terror. As part of Task Force Sword, Delta Force was charged with hunting and capturing or killing senior leadership and high-value targets within both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. While pursuing Taliban founder and Supreme Leader of Afghanistan Mullah Omar, Delta Force operators and Army Rangers became involved in a firefight with a large Taliban force; while no U.S. servicemembers were killed, at least 30 members of the Taliban did not survive the firefight. Delta Force operators also assumed tactical command from the CIA during the Battle of Tora Bora. Assisted by members of the British Special Boat Service (the British Navy’s equivalent of the SAS), Delta Force provided cover for CIA operatives and the Green Berets. Delta Force troops further assisted in Operation Anaconda, captured or killed over 2,000 militants affiliated with the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, and continued conducting military operations into the 2010s.

In 2003, Delta Force began conducting operations in Iraq, in concert with Operation Iraqi Freedom, targeting the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Delta Force operators conducting surveillance and examination operations on suspected chemical weapons sites, identified targets for Western coalition airstrikes, occupied the Haditha Dam complex and held it against Iraqi militants for nearly a week, intercepted enemy convoys, assassinated Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay, and captured Hussein himself. Other Delta Force activities in Iraq included participation in the First and Second Battles of Fallujah, rescued hostages, and conducting various other operations and offenses in the region.

Over the course of the 2010s, Delta Force operators participated in the 2012 Benghazi embassy evacuation, captured Libyan militia leaders, and carried out operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In 2016, Delta Force was instrumental in the capture of Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In 2019, under the first Trump administration, Delta Force operators attempted to capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The two-hour raid on al-Baghdadi’s compound resulted in trapping the ISIS leader in a tunnel, where he denoted an explosive vest and committed suicide. Subsequent ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi similarly committed suicide-by-explosives when Delta Force troops surrounded his home in 2022.

While some of Delta Force’s activities have become public, most of the elite unit’s operations are still classified, and the Department of War closely guards information regarding Delta Force, often refusing to even acknowledge the unit’s existence unless it participates in a high-profile assignment or unless a Delta Force member is killed.

Lights out in Venezuela

On the night of January 2, Trump gave the order to strike Caracas in Venezuela and abduct Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who have both been indicted in the U.S. for criminal activity against Americans, including narco-terrorism. The operation involved a reported 150 U.S. aircraft in addition to one-way attack drones. U.S. air forces struck Venezuelan military sites, including Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base and Fort Tiuna. Helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment transported Delta Force soldiers into Caracas, where they led the effort to capture the Maduros, who were formally arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents.

In an interview Saturday, Trump touted the success of the mission, confirming Delta Force’s involvement. “They rehearsed and practiced like nobody’s ever seen, and I was told by real military people that there’s no other country on earth that could do such a maneuver,” the president boasted. “They just broke in — and they broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,” he added. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”