A boat in the darkness, the roar of the wind, and a clandestine crossing on the open sea. This is how the video released by the company Grey Bull Rescue begins, revealing, for the first time, unprecedented scenes of the dramatic operation that enabled the departure of opposition leader María Corina Machado from Venezuela.
The audiovisual material confirms what was previously known only through testimonies: a high-risk clandestine operation, carried out between December 9 and 10, 2025, that combined overland movements and navigation in extreme conditions to transport the leader to Norway, where she would receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
The images show a vessel approaching a meeting point at sea in the dead of night.
The sea is rough, the sound of the wind is deafening, and the operation is operating under the radar to avoid being detected.
At that moment, one of the operators is heard exclaiming with a celebratory voice: “Jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. Target: golden dynamite.”
Minutes later, a boat transporting Machado joins the rescue team's vessel.
It is Bryan Stern, founder of Grey Bull Rescue, who greets her: "Hello María, my name is Bryan, nice to meet you, I have you", he says as he approaches.
“Hello!” the leader replies. “Everything is so wet and so cold,” she adds as they exchange a few words about her luggage.
Frontal to the camera, and in a firm tone, the opposition figure delivers her message of proof of life: “I am María Corina Machado, I am alive, I am safe and very grateful to Grey Bull.”
A movie ending
The operation, which was planned with just three days' notice, was carried out by Grey Bull Rescue, an organization made up of elite former military personnel and intelligence veterans.
They transported Machado overland from his clandestine hideout to a speedboat, which took him far out to sea in complete darkness.
From there, she was taken to Curacao, where she boarded a flight to Oslo to attend the Nobel ceremony.
“It was dangerous. It was terrifying. The sea conditions were ideal for us, but they were not waters anyone would want to be in,” Bryan Stern explained to CBS.
Along the way, they had to evade checkpoints, coastal radars, and maritime surveillance points set up by the Venezuelan regime and its allies.
The risks were not only strategic. Machado recounted this Friday in Washington that during the journey, he fractured a vertebra due to the waves.
"The sea was very rough, with waves over two meters high and strong winds. We lost the GPS signal, and the satellite phone wasn't working. It was an incredible experience," he said to the press.
The video shows part of that navigation in complete darkness, with the occupants of the boat huddled together, guided only by electronic instruments.
A quiet operation with international repercussions
Grey Bull Rescue worked for weeks in Venezuelan territory preparing routes and extraction points. Stern himself explains in the video:
“We have been in the region for a month. This is the big enchilada: getting it from where it is to where it needs to be.”
The release of the material on January 16 has had a significant impact.
For the first time, the level of planning, difficulty, and risk of an operation that allowed one of the most prominent figures of the Venezuelan opposition to escape the repressive encirclement and attend a high-profile international event is visually documented.
The controversial awarding of the Nobel Prize to Donald Trump
After the ceremony in Oslo on January 15, 2026, María Corina Machado surprised everyone by meeting with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, at the White House.
There, he symbolically presented the physical Nobel medal, framed and accompanied by a message of gratitude. He claimed he was doing it for Washington's decisive support of the Venezuelan cause.
The gesture sparked immediate controversy: for some, it was an act of political gratitude; for others, an improper use of an acknowledgment that is not transferable. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had to clarify that the prize cannot be ceded or shared, and that Trump is not officially listed as a laureate.
Filed under: