(CNN) — The US special forces veteran whose rescue team spirited Nobel laureate María 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.

Stern told a virtual press conference earlier that Machado had boarded a boat that set sail from the Venezuelan coast to a rendezvous point at sea. That’s where she met Stern, who was waiting for her on another boat.

She reached and boarded the second vessel by Tuesday night and was ferried to a different location.

The n

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