Spook Story: Ex-US amb. to Venezuela monetizes coup-plotting alongside former CIA officials

While pushing for war on Venezuela in legacy media, former US ambassador Jimmy Story is soliciting clients for consulting firms run by notorious ex-CIA officials.

Left: Former CIA chief of station for Venezuela Enrique de la Torre. Right: Retired US ambassador to Venezuela James Story

Editor’s note: Former US ambassador to Venezuela James “Jimmy” Story has gone from de facto manager of the putschist, Washington-backed opposition in Venezuela to one of the most prominent voices promoting the Trump-Rubio regime change policy inside legacy media.

On December 7, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria featured his calls for toppling Venezuela’s government during a panel with convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams, while the New York Times provided Story with space to argue that “Washington should approach dismantling the Maduro regime as we would any criminal enterprise.” Story’s appearance on Piers Morgan did not work out quite as well because Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal was present to dismantle his neocolonial propaganda.

While he pushes a US war on Venezuela in the media, Story is also monetizing his coup-plotting experience by soliciting clients for a series of consulting firms, where he works alongside top former CIA officials who orchestrated destabilization operations inside Venezuela.

The first of these firms is Dinámica Americas, where Story serves as a senior advisor helping “companies, philanthropies, non-profits, and multilateral and other organizations successfully navigate evolving conditions in the Americas.” Among his colleagues at Dinámica is Juan Cruz, the former CIA director for Latin America, who The Grayzone exposed for his role in managing opposition assets in the lead-up to the failed Operation Gideon mercenary invasion.

At Frontier Advisors, a risk management firm he co-founded, Story works alongside Zodiac Gold CEO David Kol, whose company exploits the mineral wealth of Liberia, which suffers from rampant smuggling and deforestation due to foreign domination of its gold mining zones. Story’s fellow managing partner at Frontier, former Lt. Gen. Dave Bellon also runs a private equity firm, Global Frontier Capital, that “create[s] carbon credits to sell to investors and polluters in need of offsets” in South Asia and South America. These are precisely the kind of figures yearning to feast on the carcass of the Venezuelan state in a fantasy post-Maduro scenario.

Finally, Story is listed as “strategic partner” at Tower Strategy LLC, a lobbying firm founded by the ex-CIA station chief for Venezuela, Enrique “Rick” de la Torre. As journalist Jack Poulson explains in the article we’ve republished from his All Source Intelligence, de la Torre previously worked at a lobbying firm founded by one of the closest confederates of Secretary of State Marco Rubio – the lead architect of Trump’s regime change strategy in Venezuela.

Below is Poulson’s report: “Former CIA Venezuela chief is raiding clients from Rubio-affiliated lobbying firm while the US continues seizing oil tankers.”

By Jack Poulson

A former CIA chief of station for Venezuela, Enrique “Rick” de la Torre, last month formed his own lobbying firm, Tower Strategy LLC, advertising former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela James B. Story as a “strategic partner.” All four of Tower Strategy’s newly registered lobbying clients were picked up through Mr. De la Torre’s work at his previous employer, the D.C.-based firm Continental Strategy.

Continental was founded in 2021 by Carlos Trujillo, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) with close ties to current U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio, and De la Torre widely shared a photograph of himself wearing a CIA pin next to Secretary Rubio as part of his January announcement of joining Trujillo’s firm.

De la Torre was previously vague about which Latin American country’s CIA station he led, but the country was named as Venezuela in at least three recent interviews with conservative news outlets, including Breitbart, NTD News Capitol Report, and SiriusXM Patriot.

The rough date range of Mr. De la Torre’s tenure leading Venezuela operations remains unclear — beyond his retirement from the agency taking place circa June 2024 — but his lobbying partner Mr. Story led the State Department’s Venezuela Affairs Unit from November 18, 2020 until May 19, 2023. Story’s main post-diplomatic gig has been as a senior advisor to the Latin America-focused consulting firm Dinámica Americas, alongside former CIA Latin America chief Juan Cruz.

De la Torre in late November published a blog post entitled “The Case for Ending Maduro’s Rule,” which blamed the Biden administration’s reluctance to overthrow the Maduro government largely on Juan S. González, a former national security advisor for the Western Hemisphere. One day prior to De la Torre’s article, the Peter Thiel-backed Human Rights Foundation (HRF) released a series of social media posts claiming to have evidence of González’s conflicts of interest regarding Venezuela, vis-à-vis Greylock Capital CEO Hans Humes.

“I don’t lobby, represent, or do FARA work for anyone, and my views are not for sale,” González replied on social media, later repeatedly noting the hypocrisy of President Trump pardoning the convicted drug trafficker and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández.

Ambassador Story has been equally as supportive of U.S.-led regime change in Venezuela as De la Torre. After President Trump in October announced his authorization for the CIA to conduct covert operations against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Story told CBS News that, “The assets are there to do everything up to and including decapitation of [the] government.”

But the Trump administration’s intense naval build-up in the region has primarily led to the seizure of two Venezuelan oil tankers, the Skipper and the Centuries, with a chase of a third tanker, the Bella 1, reported to be ongoing as of Friday evening.

Former CIA director Mike Pompeo called the tanker seizures the “right course of action” in an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, further suggesting that, in the case of Maduro’s government being overthrown, “American companies can come in and sell their products — Schlumberger, Halliburton, Chevron — all of our big energy companies can go down to Venezuela and build out an economic capitalist model.”

The former station chief’s lobbying clients and foreign agent activity

After a brief tenure at the information technology arm of the Reston-based weapons manufacturer General Dynamics, De la Torre spent roughly 11 months as both a lobbyist and registered foreign agent through Continental Strategy, including for the Dominican Republic’s National Intelligence Department (DNI) and for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Guyana, whose western Essequibo region has long been a source of tension with Venezuela.

The former Green Beret and acting USAID administrator John Barsa registered alongside De la Torre as a foreign agent of both governments, and Barsa and De la Torre jointly lobbied the U.S. State Department through Continental for the Houston-based international ammunition exporter TXAT. Perhaps best known as the exclusive reseller of the Mexican ammunition manufacturer Aguilar, TXAT advertises the Houston Police Department, the Mexican Navy, and the Special Branch Bureau of the Royal Thai Police as partners.

De la Torre’s more senior predecessor as a station-chief-turned-lobbyist, Dale Bendler, was sentenced to one year in jail last month, including as a result of failing to register as a foreign agent for the Venezuelan media executive Armando Capriles, whom he visited on behalf of the D.C.-based firm BGR in the eastern Punta Cana region of the Dominican Republic two months prior to a raid alongside U.S. federal agents of the reported villa in the area of Samark López-Bello, whom the U.S. has sanctioned for alleged money laundering activities on behalf of former Venezuelan petroleum minister Tareck El Aissami. The U.S. State Department-backed media outlet Insight Crime has further noted the rumor that López-Bello was involved in the shadowy sale of Mr. Capriles’s family’s media outlet, Cadena Capriles, which later named to Ultimas Noticias Group.

Mr. De la Torre’s new firm, Tower Strategy, does not yet have any public foreign agent registrations, but all four of its disclosed lobbying clients have recently worked with Continental Strategies: the controversial treasure-hunting company Odyssey Marine Exploration, the Singapore-based and Tether-affiliated cryptocurrency company Bitdeer, the solar supply chain company T1 Energy, and the international solar power export company UGT Renewables / Sun Africa.

Though originally based in Norway and focused on lithium battery development, Freyr Battery relocated to Austin, Texas after facing intense competition from Chinese manufacturers and rebranded as an America-first company named T1 Energy in February. T1 lists David Manners — a former CIA chief of station in Amman and Prague — as a member of its board of directors and announced a partnership with the data analytics giant Palantir in September. “We’re partnering with Palantir to gain critical data-driven insights as we quickly build an ecosystem of suppliers in the United States to create jobs and meet new legislative requirements,” the company stated.

Of Tower Strategy’s four new clients, only Odyssey Marine Exploration can count itself as the source of three international scandals. An international arbitration tribunal ordered the Mexican government to pay Odyssey $31.7 million in September of last year, after the company sued Mexico in 2019 for backing out of a phosphate-mining deal, but the company is best known for its role in the “Black Swan” treasure-hunting scandal. After extracting 17 tons of gold coins from a wrecked Spanish ship off the coast of Portugal in 2007, the Spanish government’s Guardia Civil boarded two of Odyssey’s vessels and arrested their members. After a legal battle, the company was ordered by a U.S. court in 2013 to pay the Spanish government $1 million for “bad faith and abusive litigation.”

Shortly before Christmas in 2015, the Odyssey Explorer was boarded by the government of Cyprus in Limassol and, according to reporting in The Independent, “588 separate artefacts dating from the 18th century” were seized.

Tower’s Europe-focused solar supply chain client UGT Renewables, and its Africa-focused sister company Sun Africa, are the least controversial of the lot. A press release from the U.S. Export-Import Bank notes that its approval of a $900 million solar energy project in Angola was “initially announced during the 2022 G7 Summit by the Government of Angola, U.S. firm AfricaGlobal Schaffer, and U.S. project developer Sun Africa.”

UGT Renewables and Sun Africa CEO Adam Cortese transitioned from his role as CEO of AfricaGlobal Schaffer in the months surrounding the mid-2022 announcement and publicly noted UGT’s negotiations with Egypt’s Ministry of Petroleum and Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity earlier this year. Reporting from Bloomberg in April noted the Iraqi ministry’s agreement with UGT “to establish a 3-gigawatt integrated solar energy project, for which the US Export-Import Bank, the UK Export Finance and JPMorgan will provide financing.”

“Big week last week for UGT Renewables in the Middle East! In addition to our negotiations in Egypt, we executed an agreement with the Government of Iraq and are now off and running in Baghdad!” wrote Cortese on LinkedIn.