Behind the Venezuelan Opposition Leader’s Daring Escape to Oslo

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was determined to make it this week to Oslo, where she hoped to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in person. Emerging from hiding and finding a safe route to Norway would require skirting military checkpoints, enduring hours of rough seas, and making a leap of faith that no U.S. drone strike would obliterate the small vessels smuggling her to a Caribbean island where a private plane was waiting.
She arrived in Norway too late for the prize ceremony. But her perilous escape exhilarated her supporters and underscored how Ms. Machado — who spent the last year in hiding from the regime of President Nicolás Maduro — remains a key player in the intensifying standoff between Caracas and Washington.
The emerging details of her evacuation have also shed light on the usually secretive operations of a company run by U.S. veterans with special operations and intelligence training, who orchestrated the effort to slip one of Venezuela’s most recognizable political figures out of the country without getting caught.
“We were not the first people to try this,” Bryan Stern, the combat veteran who leads the firm, Grey Bull Rescue, said in an interview. Ms. Machado’s rescue was the 800th for his Tampa-based group, which was organized in the wake of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he said. But it posed a unique challenge, even for operatives with long experience in being hired to evacuate clients from risky environments.