The President's Daily Brief - December 4th, 2025: Maduro Now Fears His Own Military & Hamas’ Aid Network Infiltration

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

In this episode of The PDB Afternoon Bulletin: Signs of deepening paranoia inside Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle. New reporting shows he’s relying more heavily on Cuban operatives—not to stop a U.S. strike, but to protect himself from his own officers. Newly uncovered documents reveal how Hamas quietly embedded operatives inside U.N.-affiliated aid groups in Gaza, influencing relief operations from within. CENTCOM unveils a new one-way-attack drone force in the region, part of a push to get inexpensive, fast-deploying strike drones into the hands of U.S. troops. And in today’s Back of the Brief—Russia claims it has captured the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after more than a year of grinding combat. To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting https://PDBPremium.com. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief. YouTube: youtube.com/@presidentsdailybrief Debt Relief Advocates: Learn what debt reduction you may qualify for. Go online and visit https://DRA.com BUBS Naturals: Live Better Longer with BUBS Naturals. For A limited time get 20% Off your entire order with code PDB at https://Bubsnaturals.com Birch Gold: Text PDB to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Mike Baker. your eyes and ears on the world stage, and by all indications, still on the road. All right, let's get briefed. First up, signs of deepening paranoia around Nicholas Maduro. New reporting shows he's relying more heavily on Cuban operatives, not to stop a U.S. strike, but to guard against his own officers. We'll break down what that means. Later in the show, new documents reveal how Hamas quietly embedded operatives inside U.N.

affiliated aid groups in Gaza, influencing relief operations from the inside. Plus, Centcom unveils a new one-way attack drone force in the region, part of a push to get inexpensive, fast-blowing strike drones into the hands of U.S. troops. And in today's back of the brief, after more than a year of grinding combat, the Kremlin has announced that they've captured the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. But first, today's PDB spotlight. A few overlooked lines tucked into a recent New York Times story are offering a clearer look into Nicholas Maduro's inner circle

and into the mindset of a man who may no longer trust those closest to him. According to the report, Maduro has dramatically expanded the number of Cuban intelligence officers in his personal security detail and inside Venezuela's military. Now, these aren't advisors, their counterintelligence specials. Their job isn't to protect him from the U.S. Their job is to protect him from his own officers. And that tells us something important about the moment. Maduro is acting like a man worried as much about betrayal from within as he is invasion

from abroad. Now, the Times notes that Maduro has begun rotating where he sleeps, he changes phones constantly and appears unannounced at public events. He's bringing in more Cuban bodyguards, more Cuban counterintelligence officers, and a betting them across his security structure. These moves aren't random. They come straight out of a regime protection playbook that Havana has mastered over the last six decades. Because if there's one thing that the Cuban regime is really good at, it's counterintelligence. The Cuban state has built an entire system designed to identify dissidents early, infiltrate potential rivals,

and prevent coup attempts before they even materialize. It's how Havana has kept a one-party system in place since 1959, and it's why regimes around the world from Angola to Nicaragua and later Hugo Chavez, of course, in Venezuela, quietly turned to Cuban intelligence for assistance. Today, Nicholas Maduro is doing the same, and he's doing it at a moment when U.S. pressure on his government is at its highest level in years. The Trump administration, of course, says Maduro runs a narco-terrorist cartel, and U.S. warships are in the region. The White House has warned airlines to avoid Venezuelan airspace, and there are credible reports that the U.S. is preparing options that range from special operations raids to precision strikes on high-value targets. Obviously, there's

good reason for Maduro to worry. Venezuela's armed forces have a long habit of turning on the government. Remember, even Hugo Chavez launched his political career by leading a failed coup attempt in 1992. Maduro has survived attempt coups before. He survived purges and conspiracies involving people who once stood at his side. And he knows that many Venezuelan officers do have close ties to the U.S. or Colombia or even the opposition. Cuban intelligence officers bring something no Venezuelan can, and that would be detachment from internal politics. They don't have any loyalties to Venezuelan factions, clans, or commanders. They have no stake in. succession battles. Their only mission is to keep Maduro in place, because Cuba's economic

survival depends on it. Venezuela has been Cuba's largest foreign partner and critical energy provider for two decades. If Maduro falls, Havana risks losing billions of dollars in subsidized fuel and hard currency deals that keep the Cuban economy from collapsing. So Cuba has every incentive to keep them alive, and Maduro has every incentive to lean on them. And this, symbiotic relationship, of course, complicates the overall situation. For one, the presence of Cuban personnel inside Maduro's security apparatus means that the U.S. has to factor in an extra variable if it does take action. It's another complication in an already complicated standoff. But more importantly, it makes internal change far more difficult. The Venezuelan military can't

easily defect or split if Cuban counterintelligence has embedded itself in the command structure. It's not just that Cuban operatives protect Maduro. It's that they keep tabs on Venezuelan officers who might be thinking about switching sides. Meanwhile, Maduro is putting on a show of confidence for the public, dancing at rallies, posting TikTok videos, delivering speeches that promise peace and stability. But, of course, behind the scenes, he's behaving like a man who expects trouble from within. And that's the story that the Times reporting reveals. Not a strong man standing firm against outside. pressure, but a leader increasingly insulated by foreign intelligence and security officers, because he no longer trusts his own. All right. Coming up next, new documents reveal Hamas operatives quietly embedded inside UN-linked aid groups in Gaza, and CENTCOM rolls out a new one-way attack drone force built to give U.S. troops fast, inexpensive strike power. I'll be right back. Hey, Mike Baker here. Let me take just a moment. To talk, personal.

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The unraveled North America with special guests. Get tickets Thursday, May 7th at Olivia Rodrigo.com. Welcome back to the PDB. For those watching Gaza's aid ecosystem over the years,

this won't really come as a shock. Israel says newly seized Hamas security files show how the terror group embedded loyalists in roles across UN-affiliated in Western organizations to ensure that aid groups served their interests. The documents don't introduce a new theory, so much has confirmed the one that Washington and Jerusalem have been pointing to for years. According to Israel, Hamas wasn't simply influencing the aid sector from the outside. It was wiring itself directly into the system, mapping out

where its operatives should sit and how much access they could gain. And once you read the files, the through line is fairly hard to miss. Khamas didn't stumble into this. The Iran-backed Terra Group drafted a playbook circulated inside its own internal security apparatus, spelling out which nonprofits were most useful, which positions offer the best leverage, and how foreign personnel could be monitored

without triggering alarm bells. A December 2020 memo lays it out. The goal was to embed operatives who could be, quote, exploited for security purposes, giving the Terra Group direct instance, into organizations that the international community wrongly assumed were insulated from Hamas influence. Now, these revelations land, of course, at a sensitive moment. Washington is

sketching out how post-war humanitarian assistance will function under President Trump's 20-point peace framework. That is, if the parties involved can solve the Hamas problem. Thus far, the organization refuses to disarm and abandon any governing role in the enclave. What we do know of that framework draft, is that UNRWA is barred from future roles, but the plan still leans heavily on UN agencies and NGOs. That's the same infrastructure that Hamas appears to have been burrowing into for years. That's why Israeli officials see a risk that some aid groups may already be compromised, providing Hamas with an informal pipeline to preserve influence in the strip. Hamas built the whole scheme around what it called the, quote, guarantor system.

The idea was simple. NGO wanted to work in Gaza, it had to bring on specific local hires, usually people that Hamas already relied on, all the way from loyalists to full-on Hamas intelligence officers. Those guarantors then served as the bridge between international aid groups and Hamas ministries, giving the terror group a say in how projects ran and handled aid, while allowing Western NGOs to say that they weren't dealing with Hamas at all. An April 2022 intelligence report made the arrangement clear, noting that American NGOs, quote, do not engage with the Gaza government directly, but via an intermediate individual. A separate December 22 file lists 55 guarantors embedded across 48 NGOs, at least 10 of whom the terror group itself identified as supporters or employees of Hamas-run bodies.

The files also pull back the curtain on how Hamas used NGO projects, to shield its own fighters. A June 2021 intelligence report highlights an irrigation project in a sensitive border zone, noting that the fruit trees planted there would conveniently double as cover for, quote, resistance activities. An implementing partner in that report was, quote, affiliated with the Hamas movement and noting that the project created tactical positions for Hamas fighters. The new tranche of security files also lines up with previously released Hamas communications from September, which showed the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders operating inside medical facilities that Hamas used as command centers.

Those disclosures triggered accusations that some NGOs knowingly positioned themselves alongside Hamas infrastructure while publicly condemning Israeli strikes on those sites. Okay, staying in the region, U.S. troops in the Middle East are arming themselves with a new piece of battlefield kit, a low-cost one-way attack drone. Now, these are not dissimilar to the Iranian Shahed drones being used by Iranian proxies and, of course, Russia. U.S. Central Command, in a statement yesterday, gave the first real sense of how the U.S. is stepping into the cheap drone business. The command rolled out Task Force Scorpion Strike, confirming it has quietly assembled a full squadron of low-cost unmanned combat attack system drones. Now you ask, is there an acronym,

for these drones? Well, of course there is. It wouldn't be a military program if it didn't have an acronym. Low-cost unmanned combat attack system drones or Lucas. Due to security sensitivities, CENTCON did not say where the unit is based in the region, but their press release shows rows of delta-wing drones with nose-mounted sensors and stabilizers, a design modeled on a combination of Iran's Shehead 131 and 136 drones used by the Houthis in Yemen and Russian forces. forces in Ukraine. For those unfamiliar about the specs, the difference between the two head drones is the 131 is a smaller, short-range harassing drone meant to overwhelm defenses, while the 136 is the heavier, longer-range variant built for deeper, more destructive strikes.

The Lucas combines both of those attributes. Now, when it comes to the price, each Lucas drone costs about 35,000 U.S. dollars, which doesn't sound like a low-cost option, but it is just a fraction, of course, of traditional precision weapons, and it finds itself in the same price band, generally, as Iran's Chehed series, which defense analysts estimate it between $20,000 and $50,000 each. And that price point is the chief appeal. American units now have access to a disposable,

fast-deploying strike option that can keep pace with adversaries who have long relied on such technology. Secretary of War Pete Heseth put it bluntly, saying, quote, we now find ourselves in a new era, we cannot be left behind, end quote. Meanwhile, the CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper underscored the shift from the operational side, saying, quote, equipping our skilled warfighters faster with cutting-edge drone capabilities showcases U.S. military innovation and strength, which deters bad actors, end quote. I want to mention that Washington has been preparing for this moment for quite some time.

American teams have recovered multiple downed drones from Ukraine and from its allies across the Middle East, studying their airframes in an effort to reverse engineer the technology. Lucas reflects those lessons, giving American forces a mass-produced system designed to counter the asymmetric tactics that Tehran has pushed into every corner of the Middle East and the battlefields of Ukraine. Okay, coming up in the back of the brief, Russia declares victory in Pokrovsk, after more than year of brutal fighting, heavy losses, and attrition. I'll have those details when we come back. Hey, Mike Baker here.

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The Kremlin released footage of soldiers raising a flag in the city's center, calling it a major breakthrough and proof that Russian forces are still advancing. Ukraine disputes that claim, saying fighting continues in the northern parts of the city. Independent analysts also aren't ready to confirm full Russian control. But even with the picture still developing, several important points are already clear. Pukrovsk used to be one of the most important logistics hubs that Ukraine had in the Dernetsk region, a rail and road junction that helped keep Keeves forces supplied. But that was before this battle turned the city into a shell of itself. Months of artillery strikes, drone attacks, Street-to-street combat have flattened neighborhoods and gutted industrial facilities.

Even if Russia now holds the ground, what they've taken is essentially a ruin. Whatever logistical value the city once had has been erased. The cost of getting there was enormous. Reports from both Western analysts and Ukrainian officials point to high casualties on both sides, with Russia in particular absorbing significant losses. Pekrovsk didn't fall because of superior tactics or a sudden collapse, and defenses. It fell, to whatever extent that it has, because Moscow was willing to pour bodies and armor and ammunition into a grinding urban fight that chewed up entire units. Ukraine's defenders

fought hard and inflicted heavy damage, but they were up against an attacker willing to spend whatever it took to push forward. And that gets to the larger significance of this moment. Even if Pokrovsk is now a little more than a symbolic gain, it demonstrates the Kremlin's willingness to continue this war. Russia may be capturing ruins, but it's still capturing ground. Putin has made it clear he's willing to absorb staggering losses in personnel and equipment to produce gains that he can point to as momentum, especially with international negotiations and diplomatic pressure intensifying. So the situation in Pukrovsk is still fluid, but the broader picture is, well, unmistakable. The battle was costly, the city is shattered, and the Kremlin

is signaling that it's prepared to keep grinding forward, even when the battlefield rewards are measured in rubble and high body counts. And that, my friends, is the President's Daily Brief for Thursday the 4th of December. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at PDB at thefirsttv.com. And remember, if you'd like an ad-free version of the PDB, well, that is simple. Just become a premium member of the President's Daily Brief by visiting PDB Premium.com. I'm Mike Baker, and I'll be back later today with the PDB afternoon bulletin. Until then, stay informed.

Stay safe. Stay cool.