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According to a report by the Washington Post, the agency running a secret bombing campaign against Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos this year was the CIA.

Getting into it: The Post’s source, who has direct knowledge of the operation, said the strikes were part of a covert action program, meaning a secret overseas operation the president approves and the government never publicly acknowledges. According to the report, three vessels were hit. The 52-foot longline boat Fiorella vanished on Jan. 20 with eight crew members still missing and presumed dead by the UN. The Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca were struck in March, and everyone aboard survived.

Survivors describe the same pattern. The attacks came from small quadcopter drones, some releasing explosives from above and others flying straight into the hulls, while a much larger fixed-wing drone circled overhead. Aboard the Don Maca, the cook noticed a drone hovering nearby and raised a hand toward it before it dropped what fisherman Jhonny Palacios described as a small black tube. The blast shattered the cabin windows and left a nearby crew member, who had been hanging laundry, bleeding from his eyes. A second drone disabled the engine.

Crews from both March boats say they were taken aboard a nearby vessel, where armed men immediately handcuffed and hooded them. Palacios said the men wore khaki uniforms, carried long brown rifles, and spoke English except for two Spanish interpreters. Some had tattoos. Roughly six hours later, they were transferred to a Salvadoran navy ship whose crew said the Americans had contacted them two days before the attack, asking them to pick up shipwreck survivors.

From there, the fishermen went to La Unión for police questioning, then to San Salvador, where immigration officials put them on flights back to Ecuador. Nobody told them why any of it had happened. “They treated us like animals,” one survivor of the March 26 strike told Drop Site News. El Salvador’s navy publicly described its role as a humanitarian operation that rescued 16 Ecuadorians from a shipwreck.

The CIA declined to comment, as did members of congressional intelligence committees contacted by the Post. No agency or government has claimed responsibility.

This all comes after Trump gave the CIA wider authority to kill members of transnational criminal organizations, many of which are now designated as terrorist organizations.