Morning Wire XX
[0] The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel have resulted in thousands of civilians, including Americans, being trapped, detained, and even held hostage.
[1] In this episode, we talk with the founder of Project Dynamo, a rescue and evacuation non -profit team that has brought thousands of people to safety from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Israel.
[2] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howe.
[3] It's Saturday, November 18th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
[4] joining us to discuss the rescue and evacuation efforts in recent conflicts by Project Dynamo is the non -profits founder Brian Stern.
[5] He's a multiple tour army and navy combat veteran.
[6] Brian, thank you for joining us and thank you for your service.
[7] First, tell us about Project Dynamo.
[8] You're the founder and heading it up.
[9] How did it come into existence?
[10] We're a veteran -led, donor -funded, Florida -based international rescue organization.
[11] And the best way to think about Dynamo is is we work where the U .S. government is not for whatever the reasons are, either if they left, like in Afghanistan, and that's where we started, or if they're never going to come, like in Ukraine, we're never going to send a SEAL team into Ukraine to rescue somebody.
[12] We're not going to do that.
[13] Or until they get there in the case of Hurricane Ian and Maui, and then to a recent example in Israel and Gaza, where it took a minute, it took about a week for them to figure out how to rescue Americans that were stuck, we kind of fill that gap.
[14] So we're not supplemental.
[15] We're in lieu of.
[16] If the government is there, we're generally speaking not there.
[17] Dynamo started as a result of the failed evacuation of Afghanistan.
[18] We knew people were getting left behind.
[19] We had a lot of people reaching out to us.
[20] Lots of different veteran groups were trying to figure out what to do.
[21] I was a 9 -11 first responder.
[22] I was in both collapses.
[23] I'm an Afghan vet myself.
[24] Like many veterans, I was trying to figure out what do I do and whatever, then I saw the breaking news of the C -17, the big military plane at Kabul with Afghans jumping to their deaths.
[25] And it shocked me like it shocked so many.
[26] But for me, it was a little bit different.
[27] It brought me right back to 9 -11.
[28] It rubbed me raw, set a fire off in me. And what we did was is we packed our stuff.
[29] I got some guys together.
[30] And we packed our stuff and we deployed forward.
[31] And that's a big difference between Dynamo and and all the other groups out there, is that we don't know a guy who knows a guy, who knows a guy.
[32] We actually do operations.
[33] We're actually on the street.
[34] If you go to any of our social media, what you'll see is me and my team in all these places with thousands and thousands of people that we've rescued.
[35] Since we started in August 2021, to date, we've completed over 600 rescue missions, and that turns into just under 7 ,000 people.
[36] We've done everything from Americans left behind in Afghanistan to, we've rescued 68 American babies under the age of a month old from the war in Ukraine.
[37] We've broken Americans out of jail from inside Russia.
[38] We've landed airplanes in Sudan.
[39] We are in Gaza and we started doing Israel.
[40] So somewhere in there, we did the fires in Maui and also Hurricane Ian too.
[41] So what started off as a let's help our interpreters and commandos and journalists in Afghanistan turned into a real global enterprise of Americans stuck.
[42] Not Afghans, not interpreters, blue passport holding American citizens who are left behind or trapped or arrested or unlawfully detained or what have you.
[43] We've rescued people from 25 different nationalities.
[44] We've rescued Mexicans.
[45] We've rescued Japanese people.
[46] We've rescued Swedish people.
[47] All kinds of stuff.
[48] British, Canadians, our priorities are always Americans.
[49] Our secondary priority are great.
[50] green card holders who we give special attention to.
[51] And then kind of everybody else.
[52] We wouldn't leave someone behind that we can take out just because they don't happen to be American.
[53] We don't do that either.
[54] Obviously, Israel has become a top priority.
[55] How many trips have you made to Israel?
[56] How many Americans have you brought back so far?
[57] From Israel, we're over 300 people that we've personally touched.
[58] We've coordinated an extra 400 or so, but we didn't meet those.
[59] So we're very careful.
[60] When we give numbers out, we're very careful to say what we've personally done and what we've assisted with.
[61] How many trips we don't like to really give that out?
[62] What I'll say is, is that I was in Israel the day after.
[63] We went wheels up.
[64] I went wheels up the night of the seventh, night of the seventh, and then got to Tel Aviv pretty quickly thereafter.
[65] It took a minute to get there.
[66] But we immediately deployed once we saw it on TV.
[67] Now, it sounds like a lot of times your organization is evacuating people out of dangerous regions where people are in desperate need of flights out.
[68] What about hostages?
[69] Are you also evacuating people considered to be hostages?
[70] So we have four lines of effort in Israel, Gaza.
[71] As a whole, that portfolio is called Promised Land.
[72] And under it, we have four lines of effort.
[73] One is called Moses.
[74] Those are the big flights that you've seen on TV, and that's part of what Florida paid for.
[75] We have another line of effort called Noah.
[76] And Noah are people who are stuck in Gaza.
[77] who are trapped in Gaza.
[78] They're not hostages, but they're stuck there nonetheless.
[79] We have another line of effort called David.
[80] David are true hostages, people that are in captivity held by Hamas or the Pidge or what are the other friction fringe groups.
[81] And we have another program called Genesis, which is kind of an outlier.
[82] Genesis is our humanitarian aid program, which if we have the opportunity to bring things into the war effort, tourniquets, diapers, food, that kind of stuff.
[83] We have a whole line of effort just for that too.
[84] All right.
[85] So actual hostage rescue operations are part of the potential mission.
[86] Absolutely.
[87] Absolutely.
[88] We specialize in hostage rescue.
[89] In particular, in the Russian -Ukrainian war, we've broken a number of people who were hostages or otherwise unlawfully detained by the Russians and broke them out of captivity, both through negotiation and non -negotiation.
[90] We've done both.
[91] Do your missions ever bring you into friction with the United States government?
[92] Do they ever block your efforts?
[93] I would think there would end up being a lot of risk in these operations and officials might not be comfortable with a private entity doing this.
[94] How is your relationship with the U .S. government?
[95] We have a complicated relationship with the U .S. government is how I would characterize it.
[96] Not good, not bad, but generally speaking good.
[97] And you got to remember that more or less, where we work, they're not there.
[98] So we really can't be friction.
[99] At the institutional level, there's sometimes challenges.
[100] but at the individual level, from very senior leadership all the way down to more junior people, there's a lot of admiration.
[101] I mean, I get resumes constantly from people who are government who are like, yeah, I'm going to retire real soon.
[102] Can I come work for you?
[103] So it depends on the issue and it depends what's going on.
[104] And bureaucracy is inherently process driven.
[105] It's inherently risk averse.
[106] It's inherently not creative.
[107] Well, all those things that it's inherently not are.
[108] the things that we are inherently for.
[109] We are creative.
[110] I don't answer it to anybody.
[111] I have one customer and one customer alone.
[112] That's the people that we're rescuing and their families.
[113] And that's it.
[114] So if you talk to an ambassador of a country that we're working in, that ambassador to no fault of his own, it's not a negative reflection on the ambassador, but he's got a number of priorities, many priorities, from world opinion to answering to the president to answering to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the country, to weapon sales, to trade deals, all kinds of things.
[115] We are singular in focus.
[116] So it's one of the reasons why we're so successful because we really don't have other things to distract us.
[117] These things are incredibly difficult.
[118] They are risky.
[119] We're not a bus service.
[120] Not Uber for the war zone.
[121] That's not us.
[122] It's very dangerous.
[123] It is very risky.
[124] It is very scary.
[125] We've had many, many, many close calls.
[126] Because we do the operations ourselves, of the almost 7 ,000 people that we've rescued, I've personally met myself, 4 ,000, almost 5 ,000 of them personally.
[127] It sounds incredibly rewarding.
[128] It's wonderful.
[129] It's absolutely wonderful.
[130] But it is very complicated.
[131] And the things that we're able to do and the ways that we're able to do them, because there's no approval process, we're able to do what we need to do when we need to do it on Q. And that makes us very, very lean and mean.
[132] Obviously, your entire enterprise depends on donations.
[133] How do you maintain transparency, as I'd expect that for so many of these missions, there's necessarily a lot of information you can't fully reveal.
[134] How do you maintain transparency with donors that allows people to feel confident in what they're helping fund?
[135] Sure.
[136] From a transparency perspective, one of the best things to do is go to our social media or just Google us.
[137] There's a lot of different nonprofits out there.
[138] Many of them are very, very, very good and legitimate.
[139] many, many, I would argue even more of them, are not.
[140] And what I always tell people is, is if you're considering donating to a rescue cause, go to their social media, figure out who you're talking to, and look.
[141] And if you don't see lots and lots of pictures of people doing the work, not locals, the actual people, then maybe you should reconsider.
[142] When you go to our social media, all you'll see is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures and videos of me personally and my crew in all these crazy places with the people that we're rescuing, not receiving them in America saying, look what a good job we did, you know, on the ground, doing the thing with the people.
[143] It's one of the reasons why we showcase that is for transparency purposes.
[144] And we've done this with some of our bigger donors where they're a little skeptical.
[145] I've said, look, I'll put you in contact with someone who we rescued.
[146] They're our friends.
[147] I laugh with them.
[148] I cry with them.
[149] I've gotten shot at with them.
[150] I've been arrested with them.
[151] We've starved together.
[152] We've laughed together.
[153] We've cried together.
[154] These relations, because we're with them, we're part of the rescue experience, if you will.
[155] So we always tell people, you know, you want to talk to a hostage.
[156] No problem.
[157] It takes two minutes.
[158] And then also, of course, financially, we audit ourselves.
[159] We have an auditor that we pay to make sure that our books are good and our money is good and all the nonprofit stuff, that all that's doing the right thing.
[160] You know, a picture tells a thousand words.
[161] I towed a guy during Hurricane Ian for 12 miles.
[162] And we have pictures of that, video of that, made the front page of the New York Times.
[163] So we do media to demonstrate transparency.
[164] That many reporters can't be wrong.
[165] Well, we've certainly been impressed, which is why we invited you on.
[166] Have you found that there's a lot of generosity from people in the excitement about the work you guys have done?
[167] Do you guys have momentum?
[168] Is your operation growing?
[169] You know, philanthropy in America is down 47%.
[170] My donors are extremely loyal.
[171] But the reality is, is Israel and Gaza is the seventh time in 26 months that I've had to go to them and beg for money.
[172] Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Hurricane Ian, Maui, and now Israel and Gaza.
[173] that seven full -scale deployments in 25 months.
[174] They're tired.
[175] Well, let's hope that this conversation will help gain some more attention for you guys.
[176] Brian, thank you so much for the work you're doing, and again, for your service.
[177] That was Brian Stern, founder of Project Dynamo, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.