Exclusive: CIA escalates secret war on cartels with deadly operations inside Mexico
By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Evan Perez, Mauricio Torres, CNN
(CNN) — Earlier this spring, a mysterious explosion blew up a car carrying an alleged cartel operative in broad daylight on one of Mexico’s busiest highways just outside of its capital city.
Francisco Beltran was killed instantly along with his driver, their bodies found slumped over in their seats after the concentrated blast. Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.
Known as “El Payin,” Beltran was accused of being a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking syndicates, Mexican security analysts and sources familiar with his activities said.
Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.
The Beltran operation was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside Mexico — spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch — to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks, those sources as well as two additional people familiar with the campaign told CNN. President Donald Trump has designated several of those groups foreign terrorist organizations and deemed them to be at war with the United States.
Since last year, CIA operatives inside Mexico have directly participated in deadly attacks on several, mostly mid-level cartel members, the sources said. “The lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up,” said one of the people briefed on the operations. “It’s a significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico.”
The level of CIA involvement with operations has varied, according to the sources, from more passive intelligence sharing and providing general support to direct participation in assassination operations.
The CIA declined to comment for this story. Several Mexican government agencies did not respond to requests for comment.
The attack on Beltran was brazen even by the standards of typical Mexican cartel violence, and Mexican analysts debated in the days afterward whether it could signal a worrying, sophisticated new dimension of cartel-on-cartel warfare.
“We have been living in anarchic war for many months in Sinaloa,” Mexican journalist Jose Cardenas said on his television show broadcast by Grupo Informa in the days after the attack. “But attacks like this, if confirmed, in an area near the country’s capital, well, I have never heard of anything similar.”
A former CIA paramilitary officer told CNN that knowing how the agency operates, ‘They definitely wanted this incident to create the question in everyone’s mind of, ‘Who did this?’”
The CIA’s involvement in recent operations targeting high-profile cartel figures, like Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, has been well-documented, though much of that activity has publicly been described as intelligence sharing.
But the agency’s covert activity inside Mexico goes far beyond those few cases that attracted international attention and involves much more direct participation, sources told CNN.
The strategy, the sources said, is to dismantle entire cartel networks, which involves not only removing those at the very top but also identifying vulnerabilities throughout the organization and systematically targeting lower-tier players who serve as key cogs in the trafficking enterprise.
Those operations often attract little attention outside of Mexico, or in some cases, beyond even the specific region where they take place because the targets are not as well known. That has typically allowed the CIA’s involvement to remain a secret. The playbook is not much different than counterterrorism missions designed to destroy groups in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, current and former US national security officials told CNN.
The operations may also be illegal under Mexican law — without the express permission of the federal government, foreign agents are barred from participating in law enforcement operations under the Mexican Constitution.
“It’s not at all clear that all of their missions are coordinated with the [Mexican] government,” said one of the sources.
CNN contacted the office of the Presidency of Mexico, the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs and the Secretariat of Security but did not receive comment before publication.
The CIA has also continued to quietly play a key role in non-lethal operations, providing intelligence that helped Mexican forces arrest at least one mid-to-high level cartel figure in recent months, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The exact number of CIA officers operating inside Mexico has fluctuated over the last several months but has typically been a small force, the sources said.
The agency’s presence in Mexico still has room to grow, two of the sources told CNN. They noted that the CIA has not yet deployed the “full ecosystem” of ground branch assets.
The first hints of a clandestine CIA presence in Mexico burst into public view late last month, when two US embassy officials who were also CIA operatives were killed in a car accident in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Hours before, they and two additional CIA operatives had taken part in a raid on a meth lab that was led by the director of Chihuahua’s State Investigation Agency, sources told CNN.
All four of the CIA operatives, who’d been dressed in plain clothes and kept their faces partially covered, were members of Ground Branch, the sources said — and Mexico’s federal government said afterward that it hadn’t authorized them to be there.
Roots of a campaign
The administration has been putting the pieces in place for an expanded and more lethal CIA presence in Mexico since the earliest days of Trump’s second term, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe focused on expanding the agency’s role in counter-cartel missions and related covert operations since he was tapped for the job, a source familiar with his efforts previously told CNN.
Trump designated major Mexican cartels, including Sinaloa, Jalisco, and Nueva Familia Michoacána, as foreign terrorist organizations shortly after taking office, which provided legal cover for some additional US intelligence authorities. The CIA then began reviewing its legal options to use lethal force against cartels in Mexico and beyond, CNN has reported, and also began increasing the number of surveillance drones it was flying over Mexico.
Around the same time, Ron Johnson, a former CIA paramilitary officer, was confirmed as the US’ new ambassador to Mexico, putting an official with deep US intelligence experience in a key position to interact with Mexican authorities.
“He’s been integral to this whole effort,” said the former CIA officer, who remains in touch with ex-colleagues inside the agency.
A State Department spokesperson said, “Ambassador Johnson coordinates US collaboration with Mexican authorities in this joint effort.”
“The United States and Mexico continue to take decisive bilateral action to disrupt and dismantle the transnational cartels that threaten communities on both sides of the border,” the spokesman added.
The CIA’s ground presence and operations in Mexico then escalated late last year, after Trump formally updated and expanded the agency’s authorities to conduct lethal targeting and carry out covert action in Latin America, the sources said. Trump indicated in a speech last week that a “land force” was already in place in Mexico to eliminate traffickers but didn’t elaborate on the nature of the force.
“Drugs coming in [to the US] by sea are down 97%,” he said, praising the US military’s lethal campaign against suspected drug traffickers operating in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, although the source of the number he provided was unclear. “And now we’ve started the land force, which is much easier. And you’ll hear some complaints from …representatives from Mexico and other places. But if they’re not going to do the job, then we’re going to do the job. And they understand that.”
In a document released publicly this week outlining its counterterrorism strategy, the Trump administration said the “neutralization” of cartels in the Western Hemisphere is its “first” priority, adding that the US will continue targeting designated cartels abroad even if it means acting unilaterally.
“We will do so in concert with local governments when they are willing and able to work with us,” the document says. “If they cannot, or will not, we will still take whatever action is necessary to protect our country, especially if the government in question is complicit with the cartels.”
‘Pushing the envelope’
The CIA operations in Mexico are high risk, inviting possible retaliation from cartel members who frequently cross the US-Mexico border, the sources said.
“There is definitely concern this could easily spill over into the US,” the former CIA official noted.
While multiple sources acknowledged that not everyone in the Mexican government is briefed on every operation — sometimes by design to maintain deniability — they also stressed that the CIA tends not to conduct operations unilaterally.
“They’re going to be pushing the envelope,” a former senior US official said. “I think it’s dangerous. You have to watch your back for everything.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said she was not told beforehand about the CIA’s participation in the meth lab operation in Chihuahua and appeared furious in the aftermath.
“There cannot be agents from any US government institution operating in the Mexican field,” she said at a news conference after the incident became public.
Under a national security law passed in Mexico in 2020, all foreign agents are required to disclose their whereabouts to the federal government and deliver monthly reports about their activities, and Sheinbaum suggested the CIA’s presence in Chihuahua may have violated that law.
“Let us hope this is an exceptional case,” Sheinbaum said. “And that a situation like this never happens again.”
José Luis Valdés Ugalde, a senior researcher and professor at the Center for Research on North America from National Autonomous University of Mexico, told CNN that Mexico’s federal government is acutely aware of the CIA’s presence in the country, but it hasn’t decided how aggressively to try to control what the agency is doing there, or how transparent to be about it to the public.
Broadly, the Chihuahua incident “says a lot about the distrust that the United States has of the [Mexican] federal government,” Ugalde said.
“The fact that it was done on the side, through the Chihuahua state government, without the need to involve the federal Government, speaks to the very bad relationship Mexico has with the United States in terms of the intelligence groups that participate or do not participate in Mexican operations against the cartels.”
US collaboration with Mexico
Sheinbaum is walking a delicate political tightrope. Trump has threatened to deploy the US military to Mexico if her government doesn’t do more to rein in the cartels, which he has previously accused of working directly with Mexican officials. Turning a blind eye to covert CIA operations inside Mexico aimed at eliminating traffickers could keep Trump happy and forestall the prospect of an overt US military operation, the sources said.
For example, after Mexican special forces killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, “El Mencho,” in an operation in Jalisco in February, the Mexican government acknowledged that CIA intelligence had been instrumental in locating him, but Sheinbaum said there was “absolutely no involvement of US forces” in the operation.
The word “involvement” leaves some wiggle room, sources said. While CIA operations officers did not pull the trigger, they were in the area during the operation providing the Mexicans with real time intelligence, support and equipment.
When suspected cartel members unleashed a wave of violence in response to El Mencho’s death — torching buses and businesses while clashing with Mexican security forces — US officials were caught off guard and forced to scramble to try to ensure the safety of US operatives, according to a US official briefed on the matter. Administration officials worked to try to evacuate FBI and CIA personnel operating from locations that were at the center of fire-bombings and open-air shooting incidents, the official said.
In previous administration, US operations inside Mexico were mostly coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has spent decades building relationships training with vetted units in the Mexican Naval Marines known as SEMAR, current and former officials say.
In a nation with major corruption problems in law enforcement, known to be infiltrated by cartel operatives, working directly with vetted Mexican security forces has helped not only protect sensitive intelligence for anti-cartel operations, but also protect the lives of US and Mexican forces working together to help capture cartel leaders.
But the CIA has over the last several months been purposefully working more closely with select regional, state, and local Mexican officials than they ever have in the past, primarily due to the agency’s concerns that the cartels have effectively infiltrated some elements of the Mexican government.
Further underscoring distrust between US and Mexican authorities, the US Justice Department last month accused the sitting governor of Sinaloa , who is a member of Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena political party, and nine other current and former Mexican officials of actively conspiring with the Sinaloa Cartel.
An incident that occurred in 2012 continues to serve as a warning for the CIA. In August of that year, more than a dozen Mexican federal police officers, wearing civilian clothes, ambushed a US Embassy armored vehicle with diplomatic plates that was carrying two CIA operatives and their driver, a Mexican marine. US officials suspected at the time that the attack was an assassination attempt done at the behest of a cartel. Twelve of the police officers were convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to decades in prison.
“Ground Branch is very good at not getting killed by the guys they work with,” the former CIA paramilitary officer said. “But the one place we really worry about getting whacked is Mexico. The Mexican military and police are infiltrated by the cartels. And the attack in 2012 still affects the way the agency looks at the situation there now.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
CNN’s Jennifer Hansler contributed to this story.
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