The US Special Forces veteran who rescued Nobel laureate Maria Colina Machado from Venezuela has begged them not to return home after a dangerous rescue mission that lasted nearly 16 hours and was carried out in rough seas in the middle of the night.
“By far, this is the most difficult, highest profile and most sensitive operation we’ve ever conducted,” Brian Stern, founder of the Gray Bull Rescue Foundation, told CNN on Friday.
Stern earlier told a virtual news conference that Machado boarded a boat from the Venezuelan coast to a confluence at sea. There she met Stern, who was waiting for her on another boat.
She reached and boarded a second ship by Tuesday night and was ferried to another location.
The night sea voyage was long, cold and stressful, made all the more difficult by her high profile.
“Because of her face, because of her signature, because the entire Venezuelan intelligence service, the entire Cuban intelligence service, parts of the Russian intelligence service have been looking for her for months. And this week in particular, especially because of the Nobel Prize, this operation has become much higher risk than it has ever been before,” he said.
He told CNN that his team had conducted 800 operations and rescued more than 8,000 people, and that he was “the first person to have a Wikipedia page.”
Stern previously told reporters the boat arrived on shore early Wednesday morning. From there, Machado boarded a plane to Norway, where he was scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and see his daughter for the first time in two years.
The plane Machado used to reach Oslo took off from the island of Curacao near Venezuela on Wednesday morning, stopping in Bangor, Maine before heading to Norway, according to flight tracking data reviewed by CNN. The Dutch embassy in Caracas, which is responsible for representing the interests of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, denied any involvement in Machado’s escape.
Machado arrived in Oslo just hours after the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and her daughter accepted the award on her behalf. She was welcomed and waved by a crowd of cheering supporters from the balcony of Oslo’s Grand Hotel, but said afterwards she met many Venezuelans who hope to one day return to their liberated country.
It has been almost a year since Machado last appeared in public. She went into hiding after Venezuela’s government moved to suppress opposition following last year’s disputed elections, only briefly emerging during protests in January against President Nicolás Maduro’s oath of office.
Machado’s team on Friday declined to comment on the rescue operation and would not confirm with CNN whether the Gray Bull Rescue Team was involved.
Machado previously told reporters that he was receiving support from the U.S. government, but declined to provide further details. “I’ll tell you at some point, because certainly I don’t want to put them at risk right now,” he said.
Mr. Stern said the operation was funded by anonymous donors and, to his knowledge, received no support from the U.S. government.
But in a virtual press conference early Friday, he acknowledged that his team had contacted the U.S. military to alert them to its presence at sea. He said he wanted to avoid becoming a target of U.S. operations against suspected drug smuggling in the Caribbean.
“In this case, we were very concerned that we would be targeted by the U.S. military because they operate in this part of the world,” he told reporters.
“We communicated in such a way that the U.S. government and the U.S. military knew that we were doing something in the region. They didn’t know the details of it. They knew where we would be operating, where some rally points were. And in the last minutes at the highest level, we made it clear what our objectives were,” he added.
Asked if his team would support Machado’s return to Venezuela, Stern said: “We advised against it.”
“When we were on the boat together, we talked about this and I begged her not to go back,” he told CNN. “She’s my true hero and symbol. Who knows, I’d put her back in a dangerous place where she could be arrested, killed, and tortured. I really don’t want to do that, but she’s a leader, just like the rest of us, and she wants to be there for her people.”
