Around two o’clock in the morning of April 19, an SUV veered off a twisting dirt road in a remote corner of the Sierra Madre, plunged into a ravine and burst into flames. The dead were two Chihuahua state law enforcement officers and two unnamed Americans -- who were quickly revealed to be CIA officers.
A state official initially said that all four of the dead were returning from two days of fairly spectacular raids of methamphetamine super-labs in the highlands near a hamlet called El Pinal. That account was swiftly retracted, and the Americans were described as “instructors” teaching state cops how to pilot drones. Either way, the CIA had just put boots on the ground deep in Mexico’s Golden Triangle, a forbidding terrain infamous for vast fields of opium poppies and marijuana, clandestine landing strips for Colombian cocaine flights, and, lately, synthetic drug labs pumping out tons of methamphetamine and fentanyl. This might be a first, but at the very least it was rare, and the price was terrible.
“Why would CIA personnel go deep into Mexico’s cartel country - to a place that’s considered the turf of an extremely violent, heavily armed transnational group?” CIA clandestine service veteran Ralph Goff asked rhetorically and answered. “CIA officers go where their intelligence missions take them. And that includes dangerous areas like war zones and high crime areas - and Mexico is an unfortunate combination of both, with the added risk of dangerous roads. We are trained to deal with dangerous situations and events, which reduces risk but never eliminates risk, and we are aware of this.”
The Trump administration’s intensifying pressure on Mexico’s organized crime families is stirring furious protests from Mexico City, where political leaders are acutely protective of perceived insults to their national sovereignty. Yesterday Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters that her government had sent Washington a formal "diplomatic note” objecting to the CIA officers actions and suggesting they had gone rogue. “The [U.S.] federal government didn't know about the involvement of these people (in the operation) and we hope that it's an exception," Sheinbaum said in her daily morning press conference, according to Reuters. "...From now on, as has been done, our constitution and national security law should be followed." Sheinbaum’s remarks followed a statement issued Saturday by Mexico's security cabinet, charging that the U.S. officials had not been accredited to participate in security activities in Mexico and complaining that one of them had entered Mexico as a tourist.
The deaths of the two CIA officers have aggravated longstanding U.S.-Mexico tensions over security cooperation, particularly when it comes to operations against Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar cartels, which have diversified from drug trafficking into human trafficking, petroleum pirating, extortion and other lucrative crimes. President Donald Trump has repeatedly pressed for greater use ofU.S. military force to combat Mexican cartels and has threatened unilateral action, even inside Mexican territory.
Sheinbaum has pushed back, asserting that the U.S. cannot send U.S. agents or troops across the border but is welcome to share intelligence with Mexican officials.
For many U.S. CIA, DEA and FBI personnel assigned to Mexico and the border, passing actionable intelligence about specific high-value targets is a non-starter because of widespread corruption in the Mexican government. A number of U.S. informants have been murdered in recent years, according to U.S. officials, with leaks suspected though usually unproven. U.S. Ambassador Ron Johnson, a former Green Beret and CIA operations officer, appears to have taken the side of American agents and intelligence officers wary of cooperating with their Mexican counterparts because of corruption. Significantly, last Thursday, Johnson traveled to Los Mochis, the town where notorious cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was captured in 2016, deep in Sinaloa state, the second leg of the Golden Triangle, and spoke at a ground-breaking for a joint U.S.-Mexican methanol plant. “If we want projects like this to succeed – if we want our shared future to be as bright as it can be – corruption and extortion have no place,” Johnson said pointedly. The existing bilateral trade agreement, he said, “requires our governments to criminalize bribery and corruption and enforce codes of conduct for public officials. We may soon see significant action on this front. So, stay tuned.”
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By “stay tuned,” the Los Angeles Times reported, citing unnamed sources, the American ambassador was signaling an escalating Trump administration anti-corruption campaign, focused on Mexican officials allegedly linked to organized crime. This campaign would be more severe than the administration’s decision last October to revoke the visas of more than 50 Mexican politicians for “activities that run contrary toAmerica's national interest."
CIA officers have worked closely with some Mexican military and security units, since the Agency’s creation in the early Cold War. Officers based in Mexico City have long cultivated relationships with certain Mexican officials willing to help keeping tabs on suspected Russian, Chinese, and Cuban spies, Middle Eastern extremists and other shady characters suspected of using Mexico City as a base for espionage or violent conspiracies against the U.S.
Now the Agency is casting a broader net, in response to Trump’s second-term push for an all-of-government assault on the Mexican cartels. On his inauguration day in January 2025, Trump designated Mexico’s major cartels “foreign terrorist organizations” and “specially designated global terrorists.” In March of last year, as The Cipher Brief reported at the time, the administration designated drug trafficking as the nation’s top national security threat, a major departure from past practices. Since then, officials say, the CIA has been looking for ways to apply its technological and human assets to counternarcotics work, in the Triangle and beyond.
Experts say intelligence about the Golden Triangle and its gateway border city, Juarez, has never been more crucial, as that smuggling corridor has become a battleground between two ambitious emerging crime groups: La Linea, loosely aligned with underworld leader Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, CJNG, currently the world’s richest, most powerful cartel, and the Gente Nueva, a splinter of the Sinaloa Federation, a waning but still powerful and storied old-line cartel. Both of the upstarts operate in and around Juarez, on the border across from El Paso, a major American metropolitan area and one of the nation’s most important trade hubs, handling $106 billion in U.S.-Mexico cross-border trade in 2024.
“Paramilitary officers and Case Officers from the CIA's Directorate of Operations are tasked to fill the gaps that other USG agencies may have in their programs and to bring our unique skills to bear in support of law enforcement agencies like DEA and FBI as well as DoW,” Goff said.
In Mexico, the CIA strives to keep a low profile, because Mexican politicians, influential people and the press are deeply suspicious of Washington, especially its spy agencies. The current exceptional episode began last Sunday, April 19, when Chihuahua state Attorney General César Jáuregui announced the sad news that Pedro Román Oseguera Cervantes, commander of the state agency of investigation, AEI, a state policeman, and two American “instructors” from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City had been killed in a vehicle accident in southern Chihuahua. He said they had been returning to the state capital of Chihuahua City after taking part in a state police-military operation raiding six industrial-size methamphetamine labs in the thickly forested highlands. The destruction of a major cartel complex was heralded as a win for the good guys, but Jáuregui inadvertently ignited a political firestorm that’s still raging. Questions proliferated Tuesday, when the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the dead American “instructors” were actually from the CIA.
“There cannot be agents from any U.S. government institution operating in the Mexican field,” Sheinbaum told reporters Wednesday. “It is very important that something like this not be allowed to go unaddressed.” She said she was considering sanctioning Chihuahua law enforcement officials for dealing directly with the CIA instead of deferring to the central government.
Sheinbaum’s efforts to corral the CIA, and perhaps other U.S. agencies, brought a sharp rebuke from the White House. “I think the president would agree that some sympathy from Claudia Sheinbaum would be well worth it for the two American lives that were lost, considering all that the United States of America is doing currently under this president to stop the scourge of drug trafficking through Mexico to the United States,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
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Now Sheinbaum is caught between Trump, who last month issued a proclamation promising the “dismantlement” of the cartels, and Mexican nationalists who view yielding to Washington’s demands as a grave threat to their country’s hard-won sovereignty. Yesterday Sheinbaum tried to thread the needle by lodging a formal protest over the CIA agents’ presence, at the same time forgiving Washington’s transgression, just this once. “Let us hope this is an exceptional case ... and that a situation like this never happens again,” she said. Scolding from Mexico City isn't likely to win friends and influence people at the White House, or in American intelligence and law enforcement circles.
“It’s appalling to hear how Claudia Sheinbaum has responded to the tragic loss of life of two officers - presumably Agency officers - in the service of our country,” David Shedd, a CIA veteran and former acting Defense Intelligence Agency leader, told The Cipher Brief. “There was absolutely nothing illegal or extrajudicial associated with what these officers were doing in Mexico, as the cooperation to include assisting the Mexican security personnel in forward positions is not new. In fact, the kind of mission that these officers were on has led me to believe with a high degree of confidence that bilateral security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico has never been better. That cooperation has been sanctioned by Sheinbaum. For her to publicly distance herself from our joint security operations is again, appalling.”
Shedd said that the value of sending the CIA officers on the lab raid would have been to let them examine the labels and markings on the drums and sacks of precursor chemicals, so they could identify the chemicals’ points of origin. According to DEA intelligence reports, most of the precursor chemicals used in meth production come from China. “The mission that these U.S. officers were on was absolutely critical to the efforts, to not only destroy the lab but if at all possible, establish a fact-based pattern of Chinese ties to the Mexican cartels,” Shedd said.
Adding to the cross-border tensions: Mexican officials’ shifting stories about what happened on that dark night in the Sierra Madre. Jáuregui, the Chihuahua attorney general, was publicly chastised by Mexico City, then held a second press conference to say there had been a misunderstanding, and CIA officers hadn’t been anywhere near the actual lab raids. He said they had been in another mountain village – Polanco, pop. 403 – six-and-a-half hours away from the action, training state officials how to operate drones. He didn’t explain why the state needed drone operators – presumably to spot clandestine labs like the ones that had just been raided where the Americans were definitely NOT on the scene.
Jáuregui said that once the Americans wrapped up the drone training session, they contacted officials with the Chihuahua state investigation agency, AEI, who were coming back from the lab raid, and asked to hitch a ride to the state capital, so they could catch their flight home to Mexico City. (The number of CIA men involved is murky. The Los Angeles Times reported that there were four CIA personnel, two in the lead SUV with the AEI’s director, and another two in a pickup truck with other Mexican cops.) At any rate, the police-military convoy picked up the Americans. Around 2 a.m. the lead SUV, with two CIA men, went off the road, tumbled into the ravine and exploded. It all happened too fast for others in the convoy to save them. So far, no evidence has surfaced to suggest foul play, nor a conspiracy against the CIA. By all accounts, so far, it was just very bad luck.
“Unfortunately, long days followed by bad roads and being tired – there are car accidents,” says Goff. “There's 140 memorial stars on the wall, and our martyrs there. Not all of them were killed by enemy action. We have colleagues who were killed in car crashes, killed in plane crashes, killed in hotel fires, things like that. But it still makes them our martyrs. And we mourn them and we're saddened by their loss, but it's like any endeavor. It's part of what we take on.”
