The Wall Street Journal's longtime correspondent, Juan Forero, published two riveting pieces on how this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, managed to escape from the Venezuelan socialist hellhole, an arrest warrant with her name on it having driven her into hiding for more than a year.
His first piece begins this way:
Wearing a wig and a disguise, María Corina Machado began her escape from Venezuela on Monday afternoon. The Venezuelan opposition leader was trying to get to Norway by Wednesday in time to receive the Nobel Peace Prize that she won for challenging Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.First she had to get from the Caracas suburb where she had been in hiding for a year to a coastal fishing village, where a skiff awaited her.Over the course of 10 nerve-racking hours, Machado and two people helping her escape hit 10 military checkpoints, avoiding capture each time, before she reached the coast by midnight, said a person close to the operation.She rested for a few hours, the person said, before the next leg of her journey: a perilous trip across the open Caribbean Sea to Curaçao. She and her two companions set out on a typical wooden fishing skiff at 5 a.m., the person said, with strong winds and choppy seas slowing them down.
It got worse. Forero's second piece described how her flimsy, beat-up boat, chosen so it would not be mistaken for a go-fast drug boat that the U.S. Navy is looking for, sailed at night into the stormy waters, with ten-foot waves battering it. It ran into extreme distress and almost didn't make it:
Forero wrote:
It was early Tuesday morning when the extraction team rescued her. Part of it was recorded on video viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
For the past three hours, Machado and a small crew had drifted on a skiff in the Gulf of Venezuela after its GPS fell overboard on rough seas and a backup failed. She didn’t meet the extraction team at a designated pickup point, setting off a scramble to find her in the hazardous waters.
She was literally lost at sea this week while the rest of us were in our beds, adrift for three awful hours in the inky black ocean in a storm, nobody knowing where she was, blown off course until her rescuers, who had expected to meet her at a specific GPS point to take her to Curacao, finally found her 25 miles from the meeting point, along with the two people she was with, presumably guides shepherding her. Dangerwise, Chavista thugs were nothing compared to the might of the sea.
And yet -- the stunningly competent team found her.
Was it the ace operatives of the CIA doing this?
It was not. It was a private company of ex-military and intelligence officials who were hired by someone (probably from the states) to extract her from the country. Maybe it was Trump himself who paid for it. Maybe it was someone in the Venezuelan-American community.
Or maybe the U.S. government found a workaround to keep their fingerprints off it to pay for it.
There did seem to be some coordination in this passage:
[Grey Bull rescue leader Bryan] Stern said he was in constant touch with senior U.S. military officials before and during the operation: sharing their live location, describing the roadblocks, sending updates, and at one point asking if the military could spot Machado’s boat when they had lost communication with it.
The State Department and the Pentagon referred questions to the White House. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment and administration officials had earlier disputed military contact.
The operation was funded by private donors, said Stern, without U.S. government money. But American officials—from the White House to senior military officers to regional diplomats—followed the journey in real time through WhatsApp messages and voice memos from Stern and his team.
It's possible that what's below shows the flight paths the U.S. Navy looking for her lost boat -- Forero wrote that they were looking -- and note the date on the tweet:
Two U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets with Strike Fighter Squadron 213 (VFA-213), assigned to Carrier Air Wing Eight (CVW-8) onboard the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), are currently flying over the Gulf of Venezuela, roughly twenty miles from the coast of Mainland Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/RnDDwpcHYN
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) December 9, 2025
Or it may have been this:
2 US Navy F-18 jets are currently circling between Punto Fijo and Maracaibo #Venezuela pic.twitter.com/U5okzJvfhC
— CNW (@ConflictsW) December 9, 2025
This is video 💯 💣 pic.twitter.com/sC10dMyUre
— defense watcher (@yakub583) December 9, 2025
In a rare nighttime mission over the Southern Caribbean, a U.S. Air Force B-52H “Stratofortress” Long-Range Strategic Bomber with the 5th Bomb Wing from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, briefly appeared earlier tonight circling off the coast of Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/nUCjvH694D
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) December 11, 2025
Or this:
🇺🇸🇻🇪 NEARLY INTO MADURO’S AIRSPACE: WHY THE U.S. MILITARY IS PUSHING THE LIMITS IN VENEZUELA'S BACKYARD
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) December 10, 2025
The United States just flew 2 F/A-18 fighter jets over the Gulf of Venezuela, the closest known approach to Venezuelan airspace so far. Officially, it was a “routine training… pic.twitter.com/CcdW4kuvGb
The bottom line is that they got her out alive, and completed the rescue mission with perfect competence.
Here's the first picture of Machado landing in Norway -- and yes, she does look like she just got rescued at sea after a dangerous, exhausting, terrifying, ordeal -- look at her messy, sea-salted hair and that clunky men's jacket they put on her. I am amazed she was able to handle the public so graciously after such an ordeal:
🚨🇻🇪🇳🇴 The future has landed in Oslo.
— Terror Alarm (@Terror_Alarm) December 11, 2025
Venezuela’s rightful president, María Corina Machado, arrives at the Grand Hotel. pic.twitter.com/gjpwZzveML
After 16 months in hiding, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado meets with U.S. Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar again.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 11, 2025
The two met in Oslo after Machado’s escape from Venezuela
🇺🇸🇻🇪 pic.twitter.com/J8O6lGnnH6
Reuters ran this headline:
Venezuela's Machado is safe, but won't make it to Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Nobel institute says https://t.co/BrS6DYqODY
— Reuters Venezuela (@ReutersVzla) December 10, 2025
Again, she was late because she was literally lost at sea.
Forero reported the glee of the ruling Chavista thugs, gibbering at this news unfolding:
Meanwhile in Caracas, [former bank robber-turned-] Vice President Delcy Rodriguez accused Machado and the opposition of working to advance U.S. imperialist interests to loot Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth. “The show failed. The lady didn’t show up,” she said. “Those extremist, fascist lackeys who have been asking for blockades, invasions and bombings against Venezuela are going to be defeated again, the same way their cheap show in Norway fell apart.”
It's disgusting. Any normal Nobel laureate would easily fly from her homeland to Oslo through normal airport channels. But this is Chavista Venezuela she was coming from, a vile, dark, place where torture and murder are what happens to those who call for fair elections and freedom in general. Machado escaped, with the help of a very competent rescue team whom she thanked from the bottom of her heart.
For us, it raises questions why a private company was involved in this instead of the ace operatives of the CIA or some of the defense forces. It may have been for political reasons that Maria Corina chose to be rescued by a private team instead of the CIA, or it may have been from CIA competence issues. My money's on competence.
The CIA, as we recall from this Wired magazine piece here, showed itself to be unusually incompetent in operating on a clandestine mission to Venezuela during the first Trump term. If competence is the issue -- if they don't the kind of expertise that the Grey Bull group, which did the rescue, has, what good are they and why are we paying them six-figure salaries?
How could a private group be so competent, so equivalent to SpaceX, on the rescue front, while the government's intelligence apparatus is now so inept and blunder-prone? This, of course, is not in reference to the Navy pilots who may have helped in the rescue, but the supposed James Bonds of the U.S. intelligence community who are being bested by contractors now. Did DEI ruin their capacity for reliable clandestine operations? Have they lost all of their talent and mojo, becoming an army of leakers and deep-staters without enough to do?
Maybe it's time to scale down and clean house, then, given that groups like Grey Bull are out there and they insist on results for their clients, something we don't see much of from the government.
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