Veteran who rescued Machado begs her not to return

Saturday, December 13, 2025

The US special forces veteran whose rescue team spirited Nobel laureate Mara Corina Machado out of Venezuela has begged her not to return to the country, after a perilous extraction mission that lasted nearly 16 hours and was carried out largely in the middle of the night through rough waters. "Overwhelmingly, this is the hardest, most high profile, most delicate operation we've conducted," Grey Bull Rescue Foundation founder Bryan Stern told CNN on Friday.

Posted by REDIAL at 12:58 AM | 4 COMMENTS | permalink

At a virtual press conference earlier on Friday, he acknowledged that his team did communicate with the US military to make them aware of their presence at sea. He said he wanted to avoid being targeted in the ongoing US operation against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. "In this case, because the US military is conducting operations in this part of the world, I was worried about " I was deeply concerned about being targeted by the US military," he told reporters. "We communicated in such a way where the US government, the US military, knew that we were doing something in the region. They did not know the details of it.

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More from the cited article ...

... "Because of her face, because of her signature, because the entire Venezuelan intelligence service, the entire Cuban intelligence service, parts of the Russian intelligence, were all looking for her for months, and specifically this week, in particular, because of the Nobel Prize, (it) made this operation significantly more high risk than we've ever done before," he said.

He told CNN that his team has carried out 800 operations and rescued more than 8,000 people, but this was "the first person that has a Wikipedia page." ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-12-13 01:18 AM