The Trump administration claims that the boats it has destroyed in the Caribbean and the Pacific were transporting drugs. But the U.S. government has said very little publicly about how it reached that conclusion.
The government typically does not explicitly discuss the intelligence behind military operations, but officials often describe details of a strike or raid after it is complete.
With the boat strikes, the U.S. government has provided no specifics on how it knew the vessels were carrying drugs, or on the nearly 40 people killed in the attacks.
As a result, the details of the intelligence behind the strikes remain murky. Here is what we know.
What has the Trump administration said about the evidence?
President Trump said on Thursday his administration had “incredible intelligence” that drugs were being smuggled on the boats.
In earlier comments, he has spoken more expansively about the intelligence.
“We have recorded proof and evidence,” Mr. Trump said last month. “We know what time they were leaving, when they were leaving, what they had, and all of the other things that you’d like to have.”
He went on to say that the cargo was “spattered all over the ocean.”
“Big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” he added.
(Any drugs floating in the water and spotted by aircraft after a strike would probably be cocaine, or a bulkier drug. Fentanyl, which largely comes from Mexico, not Colombia or Venezuela, is highly concentrated and transported in very small packages, one of the reasons it is hard to intercept.)
Mr. Trump’s comments suggest he was referring to intercepted communications and overhead imagery. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, has reinforced the perception that the United States knows who is on the boats, where they are coming from and what they carry. “We track them from the very beginning,” he said this month.
Officials briefed on the strikes said that intercepted “signals intelligence” suggesting the boats were carrying drugs is the strongest intelligence collected.
Signals intelligence could mean radio traffic from the boats, or information from mobile phones. Officials have not specified, probably to protect their ability to collect information in the future.
How reliable are intercepted communications?
At first glance, signals intelligence can appear very strong. Such information can show a mobile phone associated with a drug trafficker has boarded a specific boat. It can also reveal text messages or radio traffic from a boat believed to be carrying drugs.
But signals intelligence alone can be misleading. Drug dealers, like terrorists, tend to speak in code. No one sends a message that says: “I have loaded up the cocaine, and we are ready to take it to Trinidad for transport to Europe.”
Sometimes drug dealers talking in code are not nearly as clever as they think. Other times, it is easy to read an elliptical conversation as proof positive, when it is not.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, played excerpts from recordings of Iraqi military officers talking about a “modified vehicle” and “forbidden ammo.” As presented by Mr. Powell, it sounded like evidence that Iraq was hiding chemical weapons from international inspectors. As we now know, it was a grave misreading of those conversations. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
Former spies say the best use of signal intelligence is to combine it with other information, like satellite imagery and reports from informants in other countries.
What are America’s intelligence capabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean?
Mr. Trump has dramatically reprioritized national security threats in his first months in office, pushing counternarcotics efforts to near the top of his list.
But intelligence collection on counternarcotics is not new. Gina Haspel, a C.I.A. director in Mr. Trump’s first term, began increasing collection on cartels, work that expanded under her successor, William J. Burns, the Biden administration’s C.I.A. director.
Those efforts have helped improve intelligence collection about trafficking routes and cartel operations.
Officials, have said the military, not the C.I.A., has collected the intelligence leading to the strikes. The military includes the National Security Agency, which oversees the collection of signals intelligence for the entire government.
The government has also collected an extensive amount of visual imagery from satellites and intercepted important communications about narcotics trafficking, allowing intelligence agencies to track drug dealers.
Some people briefed on the collection say they do not doubt the boats struck by the U.S. military are carrying drugs. But officials acknowledge that intelligence on Latin America is imperfect.
U.S. officials say they do not know as much as they would like about Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang. Mr. Trump has said the gang is controlled by the Venezuelan government, an assertion contradicted by the available evidence.
What is missing from the intelligence picture?
When the United States does a counterterrorism strike, officials collect information about targets and their movements. They also collect information about who else might be killed in an airstrike or special operations raid.
While the administration has spoken confidently about the drugs on the boats, it has not provided information about who else might be on the boats.
Some boats have been crowded, suggesting they could have been moving migrants as well as drugs. Some of the people on the boats have been from multiple countries, not just Venezuela, contradicting the administration’s assertions that officials knew all about the smuggling operations.
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has said a strike in mid-September killed a fisherman, and amounted to murder. U.S. officials have said there were Colombians aboard at least one other boat that was hit in strikes that were meant to target Venezuelan traffickers.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
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