The Fishing Boats
Nobody Would Claim
A fishing boat vanishes off the Galápagos in January. Eight men, gone — no wreckage, no distress call, just silence. Two more boats get hit in March, and the survivors don't talk about weather. They talk about drones dropping out of the sky, English-speaking men in unmarked uniforms, hoods, zip ties, and a flight to El Salvador nobody in Washington will explain. That's not a Coast Guard story. That's a covert action finding wearing a fisherman's disguise.
The Washington Post spent months chasing this one, and this week they closed the loop: the strikes on those Ecuadorian boats were run by the CIA under a presidentially approved covert action program — the kind where the money moves, the drones fly, and the U.S. government's name never touches the paperwork. The vessel Fiorella disappeared entirely on January 20 with eight men still unaccounted for. The two crews who survived March's strikes described quadcopter drones circling low and dropping explosives while a larger aircraft tracked them from above. Then came the English-speaking men — hoods, cuffs, a flight to Ilopango airport in El Salvador, a field with its own long history as a staging ground for American covert work — and eventually, without a word of explanation, a quiet trip home.
"The strikes were part of a 'covert action' program... approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged."
— The Washington Post, August 2026What gets me isn't the operation itself — covert maritime interdiction is nothing new, and the Agency has run stranger plays in murkier water. It's the deniability architecture built around it. A business jet flying under a fictitious U.S. registration, call sign FENIX 701, threading between Tennessee, El Salvador, and San Antonio, while the Pentagon publicly denied any knowledge of the strikes at all. That's not sloppy tradecraft. That's the system working exactly as designed — compartmented so tightly that even the people running the loud, camera-ready campaign against drug boats next door didn't know this one existed.
For readers who assume "covert action" is a Cold War relic, this is the update: it's alive, it's funded, and it runs in parallel with — not in place of — the operations politicians like to announce. The real intelligence world doesn't pick one lane. It runs the public campaign and the deniable one at the same time, and the only reason we know about this one is that a plane got photographed and a family kept asking questions about a missing father.
Key Takeaways
- The CIA ran a presidentially approved covert action program targeting boats off the Galápagos — separate from the Pentagon's public campaign against drug-smuggling vessels.
- The fishing boat Fiorella vanished January 20 with eight Ecuadorian crew members still missing and presumed dead.
- Survivors of two other strikes described drone attacks, armed English-speaking captors, and transport to El Salvador's Ilopango airport before quiet repatriation.
- A business jet with a fictitious U.S. registration, call sign FENIX 701, was tracked between Tennessee, El Salvador, and Texas — the CIA and Pentagon both declined to comment.
The Blake MacKay Connection
Blake has flown on planes like FENIX 701 — the kind that don't exist on paper, carrying people nobody will admit exist to airports nobody will confirm they used. A covert program that runs parallel to the public campaign, invisible even to the people conducting that campaign, is exactly the kind of compartmentation Blake has to fight through just to learn who he's really working for. Start the series free with Intercept and see how deniability actually works in the field.
Read the Full Article at The Washington Post → ← Back to Intel Briefing