When Nicolás Maduro and his wife walked into their apartment deep in a Caracas military base on an early January morning, they had no way of knowing that their every movement was being tracked by American intelligence. Or that the apartment, including the safe room, had been replicated in Kentucky by a Delta team that did dozens of practice runs figuring out how to immobilize the guards and breach the doors.

1月初的一个清晨，当尼古拉斯·马杜罗与妻子走进加拉加斯一处军事基地深处的公寓时，他们全然不知，自己的一举一动都在美国情报部门的监控之下。他们也无从知晓，这套公寓——包括安全屋——已被美国三角洲部队在肯塔基州复刻，该部队进行了数十次演练，只为摸清如何制服守卫、破门而入。

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei apparently ignored the evidence that the C.I.A. was tracking him and his top leaders, too, an operation that President Trump exposed in a social media post eight months ago. When the United States and Israel discovered that he and his national security team would be gathering Saturday morning, they advanced the timeline for their attack.

哈梅内伊显然也无视了中情局正在监控他与高层官员的证据，特朗普总统早在8个月前就通过社交媒体曝光了这一行动。当美国和以色列的情报部门获悉哈梅内伊与国家安全团队将于周六上午会面时，便提前了袭击计划。

Mr. Maduro is now in the federal detention center in Brooklyn. Ayatollah Khamenei’s state funeral is being planned for the coming days. And the rest of the world’s leaders are left to mull the combination of exquisite American surveillance capabilities and a president who seems to take delight in using that information to capture or kill his perceived enemies.

如今，马杜罗被关押在布鲁克林联邦拘留中心；哈梅内伊的国葬正在筹备中。世界各国领导人不得不重新审视：美国精密的情报监控能力，以及一位乐于利用这些信息来抓捕或杀死其眼中之敌的总统，二者结合会带来什么样的影响。

American intelligence agencies have long wiretapped, geolocated and monitored senior leaders, back to the earliest days of the Cold War. Fifteen years ago, WikiLeaks revelations included documents that gave glimpses of how the United States attempted to track China’s leaders and its nuclear weapons. Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel, was outraged to discover that her personal cellphone was tapped by the country’s closest ally, and complained to President Barack Obama that it reminded her of growing up in East Germany.

自从冷战初期，美国情报机构就长期对外国高层进行窃听、定位与监控。15年前，维基解密披露的文件曾让外界窥见美国如何追踪中国领导人与核武器。德国前总理默克尔得知自己的私人手机被最亲密的盟友窃听时勃然大怒，并向奥巴马总统抱怨，称这让她想起了在东德长大的经历。

Today, merely tapping into a foreign leader’s conversations seems like a quaint remnant of post-Cold War spycraft.

如今，单纯窃听外国领导人的通话似乎已是后冷战时代间谍手段的古旧遗迹。

Today, the real-time ability to locate a leader is the holy grail. And the surge in the number of electronic sensors deployed on street corners and doorbell cameras and toll highways, combined with artificial intelligence techniques to quickly parse truly vital information from billions of data points those sensors generate, has transformed the art form of surveilling V.I.P. whereabouts.

当下，实时锁定领导人位置才是情报界的圣杯。遍布街角、门铃摄像头与收费公路的电子传感器数量激增，再加上人工智能技术能从这些传感器产生的数十亿数据点中快速筛选关键信息，这已彻底重塑了监控政要行踪的手段。

It has allowed intelligence agencies to track motorcades. (In Washington, presidential and vice-presidential movements are usually still announced by blaring motorcycles and familiar helicopter flight patterns, but cabinet members and the C.I.A. director move more discreetly.) Around the world, spy agencies have learned how to monitor the opening and closing of electronic doors at leadership compounds, and to locate the cellphones of bodyguards and family members who may travel with a foreign leader but are usually a lot sloppier about encrypting their messages and using burner phones.

这让情报机构得以追踪车队动向。（在华盛顿，总统与副总统的出行仍然常以轰鸣的摩托车开道和熟悉的直升机飞行来宣告，但内阁成员与中情局局长的行动则隐秘得多。）全球各地的情报部门已掌握如何监控领导人官邸电子门的开关，以及定位保镖与家属的手机——这些人常随外国领导人出行，却往往在信息加密与使用一次性手机方面要马虎得多。

“If we had had this capability with a high degree of certainty to get Saddam Hussein through a precision strike, we wouldn’t have had the Iraq war,” said Glenn Gerstell, the general counsel of the National Security Agency from 2015 through 2020, a period that included part of Mr. Trump’s first term. “The only way to get him was to have boots on the ground. But now, with heightened capabilities, we can target individual leaders.”

“若当年我们拥有如此高确定性的精准打击能力，能定位萨达姆·侯赛因，就不会爆发伊拉克战争了，”2015至2020年（涵盖特朗普首个任期部分时段）担任美国国家安全局总法律顾问的格伦·格斯特尔表示。“当年只能靠地面部队抓捕他。但如今，凭借升级的能力，我们可以精准锁定特定领导人。”

(In fact, American forces tried to take out Mr. Hussein in the opening hours of the war. But he had left the home they targeted a few hours earlier.)

（事实上，美军曾在战争爆发头几个小时试图除掉萨达姆，但他在目标住所遭袭前数小时离开。）

As Mr. Trump has shown, this targeting ability opens new options for presidents seeking to change the attitude of foreign regimes — or change their leadership.

正如特朗普所展现的，这种精准打击能力，为试图改变外国政权态度甚至更迭其领导人的美国总统，提供了全新的选项。

Mr. Trump’s decision to snatch Mr. Maduro from his bed, but keep the rest of the Venezuelan leadership in place, is an experiment in remote-control occupation. After the Delta team landed by helicopter that early January night, killed Mr. Maduro’s Cuban and Venezuelan guards, and seized him seconds before he could lock himself in that safe room, Mr. Trump blessed the installation of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as acting president.

特朗普决定从床上抓走马杜罗却保留委内瑞拉其他领导层是一场远程遥控占领的试验。1月初的深夜，三角洲部队乘直升机着陆，击毙马杜罗的古巴与委内瑞拉守卫，在他即将闭锁安全屋的瞬间将其抓获。随后，特朗普批准副总统德尔西·罗德里格斯就任代总统。

She will stay there, he has said, as long as she follows Washington’s instructions. And clearly he is enamored of the early results. In a brief conversation with The New York Times on Sunday, on the second day of the American and Israeli attack on Iran, he cited the Venezuela experience as a model for what he was trying to accomplish in Iran.

特朗普称，只要她听从华盛顿指令，就能继续留任。显然，他对初步成果颇为满意。周日，在美以袭击伊朗的第二天，他接受《纽约时报》简短采访时，将委内瑞拉的经验称为伊朗行动的范本。

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump insisted. “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people.”

“我们在委内瑞拉的做法，我认为是完美、完美的范例，”特朗普坚称。“除了两个人，所有人都保住了工作。”

In the Iran case, Mr. Trump had flagged for Ayatollah Khamenei that the United States was watching his every movement — a revelation that, had it appeared first in the media, might well have triggered a Justice Department leak investigation.

在伊朗问题上，特朗普早已向哈梅内伊明示，美国正监控他的一举一动——这一爆料若先由媒体披露，很可能会引发司法部针对泄密的调查。

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” he posted on Truth Social in June 2025, as he cut short his participation in a summit and flew back to Washington to talk about how the United States would participate in the attacks Israel had begun on the country.

2025年6月，特朗普在Truth Social平台发文：“我们已完全掌控伊朗领空。”当时，他缩短了参加一场峰会的行程，飞回华盛顿讨论美国如何参与以色列已发起的对伊袭击。

Then he added: “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”

他还写道：“我们精确掌握所谓‘最高领袖’的藏身之处。他是个容易打击的目标，但他目前还安全——我们不会清除（杀掉）他，目前暂时不会。”

For good measure, Mr. Trump added an all-caps demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”

为强化威慑，特朗普还用全大写字母要求：“无条件投降！”

It is impossible to know whether Ayatollah Khamenei was following Mr. Trump’s posts, but he certainly did not seem impressed by the warning. On Saturday, even with an American naval force deployed around Iran and fighter jets visible on satellite images massing on American and Israeli bases, Ayatollah Khamenei was in his official residence. So were national security leaders. And while the United States did not launch the missile that killed him, it was the C.I.A.’s warning, backed by indicators from other U.S. intelligence agencies, that killed him in one of the first Israeli strikes.

无人知晓哈梅内伊是否关注特朗普的发文，但他显然对此警告不以为然。周六，即便美国海军舰队部署在伊朗周边、卫星图像显示美以基地战机集结，哈梅内伊仍在官邸，国家安全高层也齐聚于此。尽管击毙他的导弹并非美军发射，但正是中情局的预警（辅以美国其他情报机构的佐证），让他在以色列的首轮袭击中身亡。

It is not clear how far the United States can push this new power — or whether it would risk using this targeting capability in the case of the leader of a country that had nuclear weapons available to retaliate.

目前尚不清楚美国能将这一新能力运用到何种程度，也不清楚当目标国拥有核武器可实施报复时，美国是否会冒险动用这种定点清除能力。

Notably, Mr. Trump is not messing with China’s Xi Jinping, or Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin or even North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who has an arsenal of 60 or more nuclear weapons. “I’m not sure you can extrapolate this capability into a universal ability to track every leader everywhere,” said Paul Kolbe, who served as the C.I.A.’s station chief in Moscow early in Mr. Putin’s rule. “But this is why Putin is so paranoid about his location,” and moves frequently among his many houses.

值得注意的是，特朗普并没有去招惹中国国家主席习近平、俄罗斯总统普京，甚至拥有60余枚核武器的朝鲜最高领导人金正恩。“我不确定能否将这种能力推广为全球追踪所有领导人的通用手段，”普京执政初期曾任中情局莫斯科站站长的保罗·科尔比表示。“但这正是普京对其行踪如此敏感的原因”——他频繁在多处住所间转移。

“If you are the leader of an adversary nation, you should be pretty worried,” Mr. Kolbe said. “But if you are Putin or Xi, not so much, because of the stakes at play. The lesson that keeps getting taught is that if you don’t have nukes, you are far more vulnerable.”

“如果你是敌对国家领导人，理应高度警惕，”科尔比说。“但普京或习近平则不必过度担忧，因为风险代价极高。反复印证的教训是：没有核武器，你就会脆弱得多。”

The Iranians do not have nuclear weapons, which might make them hesitate before naming a new supreme leader, who would move to the top of the target list. Nonetheless Majid Takht-Ravanchi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, said on CNN on Monday morning that the government remains in place and Ayatollah Khamenei’s replacement would soon be announced.

伊朗没有核武器，这或许会让它在提名新的最高领袖时有所犹豫——新领袖将立即成为头号打击目标。尽管如此，伊朗副外长马吉德·塔赫特-拉万奇周一上午在CNN表示，伊朗政府运转正常，哈梅内伊的继任者将很快公布。

“We have a president,” he said. “We have head of judiciary. We had the head of parliament. The supreme leader was assassinated — was murdered by Israeli and American aggression.”

“我们有总统，有司法首脑，我们曾有议会领袖，”他说。“最高领袖遭暗杀——是被美以侵略势力谋杀的。”

Now, he said, “the new leader is going to be elected. So everybody — everything is in order.”

如今，“新领袖将通过选举产生，”他还说。“所以一切——一切都井然有序。”