CIA cyber operators created a “flawless intelligence picture” that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, the agency’s deputy chief said on Tuesday.

Operation Absolute Resolve, in which the U.S. plucked Maduro and his wife from their bunker in the capital Caracas in January, was only made possible by a “flawless intelligence picture and that flawless intelligence picture was built on cyber operations enabled” by the CIA’’s Cyber Mission Center, agency Deputy Director Michael Ellis said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C.

“Without that kind of operational picture, being driven by cyber, we wouldn't have been able to help enable U.S. special forces to identify the location of Nicolas Maduro and apprehend him within four minutes of landing on the ground,” he added. 

Ellis’ comments mark the most public acknowledgement to date of the role that digital resources played in one of the major military operations that have come to define the second Trump administration. The U.S. has since unsealed narcoterrorism charges against Maduro and his wife, which they are seeking to dismiss under immunity claims.

The remarks are also a rare public recognition of the CIA’s cyber activities, which are traditionally among the agency’s most closely-held secrets. Director John Ratcliffee elevated the agency’s longstanding Center for Cyber Intelligence into its own mission center late last year.

That promotion “allowed us to both focus priority on the cyber mission as well as to better align resources around that mission,” Ellis told the audience.