TEHRAN, September 23 (MNA) – Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said that Trump's administration gave its approval to the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out recent "covert and terrorist operations" against an array of targets in Venezuela."They have given the CIA the green light to come with direct agents to covert and terrorist operations against oil, electricity, military, electoral targets and other dirty covert actions like those used by the CIA," he told state television in Spanish on Tuesday, speaking of the Trump administration, Sputnik reported.

This comes amid a series of developments that followed the capture of a US spy near Venezuela's largest oil refinery earlier this month.

Following an investigation into the matter, the Venezuelan president said that the spy, who was arrested alongside three others in Falcón State, served as a communications operator at a CIA base in Iraq between 2006 and 2016.

Maduro noted that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been used by the White House to attack Venezeula and overthrow Caracas.

"It has placed the DEA as the operator agency of the attack against Venezuela, what is new today is not that the DEA is involved with the Colombian drug trafficking group to attack Venezuela, the new thing is that they have approved that the CIA get involved in operations terrorist attacks against Venezuela," he stated on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, a group of 13 individuals were captured by Venezuelan security forces.

Two of the 13 detainees were later identified as US citizens Luke Denman and Airan Barry.

A testimony published soon after showed a detainee saying the group was made up of "intermediaries of the security chief of the USA president, they say they are from the security advisory of Donald Trump," according to a translated tweet.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said that one of the men was a DEA agent.

However, the DEA has denied these allegations.

MAH/Sputnik