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Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking

If this boat was running drugs, why was it loaded with so many people?

NIne months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.

The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.

Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?

“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”

One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.

In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.

A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.

As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.

A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.

Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.

The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.  

Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull as the Americans watched from above.

According to officials, Bradley explained in briefings that because the September 2 attack was the initial strike of the campaign and was conducted by the secret plane, the survivors would have had no idea they were attacked by the aircraft. They probably believed the explosion was caused by a catastrophic engine malfunction, Bradley said in the briefing.

The two men were shipwrecked, helpless, or clearly in distress, six people who saw video of the attack said. Bradley watched as the injured men clung to what remained of the boat. “You had two shipwrecked people on the top of the tiny little bit of the boat that was left that was capsized,” Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on CNN after viewing video of the attack.

Three sources familiar with briefings by Bradley provided to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Senate and House Armed Services committees confirmed that the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for roughly 45 minutes. “They had at least 35 minutes of clear visual on these guys after the smoke of the first strike cleared. There were no time constraints. There was no pressure. They were in the middle of the ocean and there were no other vessels in the area,” said one of the sources.

U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly

Bradley again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance on whether he could legally attack the shipwrecked men. Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including that lawmaker who viewed the video, said that the survivors waved their arms and, logically, must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All believed the men were signaling for help, rescue, or surrender. “Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” said one of the sources, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising one’s hands is a universal sign of surrender for members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked — are considered hors de combat, the French term for those no longer in the fight, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit on this point. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

Bradley found a workaround. While he declined to comment to The Intercept, a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.” About 45 minutes after the men had been thrown into the water, a second missile screamed down on Bradley’s order, killing them. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that those killed by U.S. forces were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and members of a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But from the very beginning, questions swirled among members of Congress and their staffers about the identities of those killed in the attack — and why there were so many of them.

During a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last fall, Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — was asked if any of the people aboard the boat on September 2 could have been human trafficking victims. “They could be,” Bennett replied, according to two people present at the briefing. 

One of the government officials at the briefing explained........

© The Intercept