The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was determined to make it this week to Oslo, where she hoped to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in person. Emerging from hiding and finding a safe route to Norway would require skirting military checkpoints, enduring hours of rough seas, and making a leap of faith that no U.S. drone strike would obliterate the small vessels smuggling her to a Caribbean island where a private plane was waiting.

She arrived in Norway too late for the prize ceremony. But her perilous escape exhilarated her supporters and underscored how Ms. Machado — who spent the last year in hiding from the regime of President Nicolás Maduro — remains a key player in the intensifying standoff between Caracas and Washington.

The emerging details of her evacuation have also shed light on the usually secretive operations of a company run by U.S. veterans with special operations and intelligence training, who orchestrated the effort to slip one of Venezuela’s most recognizable political figures out of the country without getting caught.

“We were not the first people to try this,” Bryan Stern, the combat veteran who leads the firm, Grey Bull Rescue, said in an interview. Ms. Machado’s rescue was the 800th for his Tampa-based group, which was organized in the wake of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he said. But it posed a unique challenge, even for operatives with long experience in being hired to evacuate clients from risky environments.

“All of our infrastructure is designed for nobodies, and Maria is a somebody,” said Mr. Stern. “The challenge with this operation was her.”

While a representative of Ms. Machado’s confirmed that Grey Bull Rescue handled her evacuation, not all elements of Mr. Stern’s account could be independently verified. The Wall Street Journal was first to report details of her escape.

Venezuelan operatives had been trying for months to devise a way to spirit Ms. Machado, 58, a former lawmaker and election-monitoring activist who gained renown for uniting Venezuela’s fractious opposition to challenge Mr. Maduro, out of the country so she could make it to Oslo. But it was not until last Friday that a personal contact introduced Ms. Machado’s team to Mr. Stern, he said.

Grey Bull Rescue had spent the last few months working from a base in Aruba to expand its Caribbean operations, anticipating that as the Trump administration escalated a pressure campaign on Venezuela, its extraction services would be in demand. The firm dubbed Ms. Machado’s rescue operation Golden Dynamite — gold, for the 18-karat medal Ms. Machado would be awarded, and dynamite, in homage to the most famous invention of Alfred Nobel, who established the prize.

Four days later, Ms. Machado, wearing a disguise, set off on her journey.

Ms. Machado had a long history in Venezuelan opposition politics before she became a hunted woman in her own country. In 2023, she won an opposition primary to challenge Mr. Maduro in last year’s presidential election. But when she became the front-runner, the country’s highest court barred her from running.