A covert CIA program authorized at the presidential level is behind a string of deadly attacks on fishing boats near Ecuador's Galápagos Islands, according to a Washington Post investigation published Thursday that pieces together survivor accounts, flight records and diplomatic sources to expose one of the darkest chapters yet in the administration's expanding war on suspected drug traffickers at sea.

The Post's reporting centers on three incidents. On Jan. 20, the fishing boat Fiorella vanished with eight crew members aboard; the United Nations now lists them as presumed dead. Then, on March 17 and March 26, two more Ecuadorian vessels were hit — but this time there were survivors to tell what happened. According to their accounts, drones struck the boats first. Armed, English-speaking operatives then boarded, hooded and cuffed the fishermen, and flew them to a facility in El Salvador, where they say they were tortured before being quietly returned home weeks later with no public acknowledgment from any government.

A Pattern Traced Through the Skies

Flight-tracking data reviewed by the Post shows a surveillance plane departing El Salvador's Ilopango airport ahead of each of the three strikes — a detail investigators say links the operation to a single command structure rather than isolated incidents. The Trump administration has publicly claimed responsibility for a separate campaign of strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, a campaign Democracy Now! reports has now killed more than 200 people since September. But no agency has claimed responsibility for the Galápagos strikes specifically, and the Pentagon has produced no public evidence that any of the three boats carried narcotics.

SURVIVORS SAY THEY WERE HOODED, CUFFED AND FLOWN TO EL SALVADOR — THEN TORTURED BEFORE BEING QUIETLY SENT HOME

Ecuador sits far outside the traditional Caribbean smuggling corridor the administration has cited to justify its boat-strike campaign, and the Galápagos Islands in particular are known more for eco-tourism and artisanal fishing fleets than narco-trafficking. That geographic mismatch is part of why human rights lawyers and members of Congress are now demanding answers about who authorized the operation and under what legal theory the government believes it can detain, interrogate and release foreign nationals without charge or judicial process.

Neither the CIA nor the White House has responded on the record to the Post's findings. Ecuadorian officials have likewise not issued a public statement addressing the specific allegations, though the disappearance of the Fiorella's crew was already the subject of an inquiry by Ecuadorian maritime authorities earlier this year.

What happens next likely runs through Congress: intelligence committee members from both parties have signaled interest in classified briefings on the program, while human rights groups are pushing for an independent investigation into the deaths and the treatment of the survivors. For the families of the Fiorella's eight crew members, there is still no boat, no bodies and no official explanation — only a presumption, recorded by the United Nations, that they are gone.