Name: Inside the mission to get María Corina Machado out of Venezuela
Uploaded: 2025-12-12T00:20:22.825Z
Duration: 4 min 15 s
Description: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made her first public appearance in Oslo, Norway, after 11 months in hiding. CBS News correspondent Lilia Luciano spoke with the head of the mission that brought Machado to the Scandinavian country.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made her first public appearance in Oslo, Norway, after 11 months in hiding. CBS News correspondent Lilia Luciano spoke with the head of the mission that brought Machado to the Scandinavian country.

Oslo

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado made her first public appearance in Oslo, Norway, after spending 11 months in hiding due to threats to her safety in Venezuela. The operation to extract her involved multiple stages, including land, maritime, and aviation components, and required careful planning to avoid detection at numerous checkpoints.

Brian Stern, who led the mission, emphasized that the priority was ensuring Machado's safety rather than her attendance at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, which her daughter attended on her behalf. The operation was privately funded, with no direct involvement or financial support from the U.S. government, and involved coordination to evade intelligence services from several countries.

Inside the mission to get María Corina Machado out of Venezuela

Welcome back to The Takeout, thanks for hanging out with us. Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Carino Machado has made her first public appearance after 11 months in hiding. She's in hiding because she fears for her life inside Venezuela. Machado arrived in Oslo, Norway after her daughter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. CBS News has learned quite a bit about the difficult and intricate operation to get her there. Machado spoke with the head of the mission that achieved a pretty surprising result. The most dangerous thing in operations of any kind are moments of transition. What was that transition like in this case? Very complicated, very complicated. We had multiple transitions in multiple domains, through multiple vehicles, through multiple modes of transportation. Again, there was a land component, a maritime component, and an aviation component. And at any one of those moments, at any one of those transition moments, and there are transition moments through those areas, through that pipe, if you will, through that mechanism, which is what we call a mechanism, everything and anything can go wrong. Now Lilia joins me from the CBS Broadcast Center to break it all down. Lilia, take it away. Well, Major, I was just so compelled by every single detail that Brian Stern told me about that exit. I had been thinking about that. I specifically was curious about the timeline. Of course, it's an incredibly complicated operation. What I know from what he told me is that it took, that Maria Corina Machado had to hide, had to be not just disguised, but hidden so that nobody would see her, that there were many checkpoints that she went through undetected without giving me too much detail. But my main question was, OK, she made it to Oslo. Why couldn't she make it to the actual ceremony? Her daughter had to read her acceptance address. This is what he told me. I don't look at this operation as getting Maria to a ceremony on time. I look at this as saving a freedom fighter's life, saving a mother's life. I don't look at it as making sure she gets the Nobel Peace and all that other thing, all that. Certainly important. Certainly, I'm not minimizing it. But when we're in the middle of the operation, nobody really cares about the cameras at that moment. We're all just trying to stay alive. He says it took about four days before this all went down, that he started planning, that he started working on it, that she was in the water with him on a boat for something like 12 to 13 hours. And prior to that, there was an escape plan on land, not counting the maritime one, that lasted something like 15 or 16 hours. Of course, we finally saw Maria Corina Machado reach Oslo, greet her supporters, her allies, the presidents of Panama, Argentina, of Paraguay and Ecuador, who were there to greet her and, of course, hug her children. That's one thing that Brian told me, is that he told me I was starstruck. I had never rescued a Nobel Peace Prize winner or any kind of Nobel Prize winner or anybody at that level of recognition. And that was, on the one hand, a huge challenge to go undetected, given the amount of intelligence from multiple countries that are allies of Venezuela who could have been watching. The other aspect of that was, he said, how honored he was. I also asked him, how involved was the United States? Were you directly coordinating or following the guidance of the U.S. military? Look, you're in the Caribbean with all of this military escalation that we're seeing. Were you coordinating? He said he would send information up, but that there wasn't any direct coordination. I also asked, did U.S. taxpayers pay for this? He said no. It was private donors. No U.S. officials paid for any part of this rescue. Important details. Or the government. Lily Luciano, great stuff. Really love it.

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