operation golden dynamite (13. 000)

Though absent from the traditional pre-ceremony press conference with the prize to accepted on her behalf, awarded in absentia, Nobel peace laureate María Corina Machado (previously) did make it safely to Oslo thanks to a fraught extraction mission, codenamed with the above for the medallion and Alfred Nobel’s explosive legacy, carried out in large part by members of the Grey Bull Rescue Foundation, a group of US military veterans and expatriates that have pulled off hundreds of such operations globally. In hiding for years, the team deemed it was too risky to travel overland for the opposition leader and decided, with only a week to plan and despite the presence of the US navy off the coast and the targeting of supposed drug-trafficking boats entering international waters, to take a sea-route and rendezvous with a larger ship in the Caribbean. Secreted into the United States, a flight originating in Bangor, Maine brought her to the Norwegian capital in time for breakfast with St Lucy.