María Corina Machado emerged from her hiding place aboard a small fishing boat in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. It was the night of Dec. 9.
“It’s me, María!” the Venezuelan opposition leader shouted down into the darkness as 10-foot waves slammed around her.
Radar complications had delayed her at-sea rendezvous with Bryan Stern, a current U.S. Army reservist and veteran of both the Army and Navy, who was scanning the ink-black ocean for her silhouette.
Now they had connected. Machado descended onto Stern’s boat and they headed toward a landing site.
The moment marked the second phase of a multipronged clandestine operation to extract Machado from Venezuela and transport her to Oslo, Norway, where she planned to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. She had spent nearly a year in hiding from the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has, among other things, barred her from holding office and imposed a travel ban on her. She had not been seen in public since January.
“The maritime [environment] was a nightmare because we were really exposed. It’s the most dangerous environment that we operate in,” Stern said in an interview with Military Times. “The conditions were horrible. She was wet. We all were soaked to the gills. She was cold, tired and a little hungry.”
Stern leads Grey Bull Rescue, a nonprofit organization comprised of former special operations forces, intelligence veterans and Army and Navy reservists.
The team had three days to devise a plan to extract this year’s laureate. The mission, dubbed “Operation Golden Dynamite,” was a nod to the 18-karat gold medal and Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the peace honor. It needed 16 people, stitching together a complex and risky endeavor that encompassed land, sea and air components.
“A guy from Maria’s team reached out to me,” Stern said about the genesis of the operation. “At first, that guy was not transparent about the ‘who,’ but we figured it out in very short order. And that changed everything.”
The operation was carried out in one of the most heavily monitored areas in the Western Hemisphere. The details of Machado’s 14-hour journey would require skirting military checkpoints, ports and airports — and a heavy reliance on deception tactics to stay undetected by Venezuelan, Cuban and other regional security forces.
“She was being hunted for months,” Stern said. “But because of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, they knew this was the window she would be moving in. This is the time.
“We’ve done this before in way harder places, but she is very valuable,” he continued, noting that he never fully trusted the network until the mission was complete. “Were these guys loyal enough to not rat me out and burn this operation?”
Another concern for Stern was President Donald Trump’s escalating military pressure campaign against Venezuela. U.S. forces are positioned in the region, purportedly to counter the flow of illicit drugs. Trump has overseen more than 20 military strikes since September on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and has placed an armada of warships both in that sea and in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Stern said his team did not coordinate with the Pentagon to extract Machado, but they did deliver advance notice of the basic logistics of the operation to a myriad of U.S. federal agencies “to avoid being blown up.”
“We were able to transmit,” Stern told Military Times. “I call it the ‘bro network.’ We have our tentacles throughout the military and intelligence communities and diplomatic corps.”
Machado’s extraction was Grey Bull Rescue’s 800th mission, and its first in Venezuela. The company was founded in 2021 in the wake of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The group says it has since rescued 8,400 people spanning Russia, Iran, Sudan and Gaza. Many on the team are veterans and serving military members, yet since they are not in uniform at the time of these rescues, there has been no acknowledgement of their work by the U.S. government.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Stern said he considers Machado a personal hero. As they navigated rough waters, he says he urged her not to return to Venezuela.
“When I first met her at sea in the middle of the night, I was starstruck,” he reflected. “There hasn’t been an operation like this since the Shah fled Iran in 1979.”
Asked if he would help infiltrate Machado back into Venezuela, Stern paused.
“I’d think about it,” he said.
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