Private Rescue Founder Disputes State Department Claims on U.S. Evacuations from Iran Conflict Zones

The State Department's account of its evacuation efforts clashes with reports from private rescue teams that helped extract U.S. citizens from conflict zones in the early days of the U.S.-Iran conflict.

Bryan Stern, founder and CEO of Grey Bull Rescue, a nonprofit evacuation service, contests claims that the State Department offered help to every American who requested it. He asserts that thousands of U.S. citizens remained trapped amid missiles, bombs and security threats that crowded airspace in the region.

"It’s not for lack of effort. Our State Department colleagues are tremendous. But their process doesn’t work. There is also no one — there's no job specialty," Stern told Fox News Digital. He noted a lack of a dedicated government position for handling evacuations.

The conflicting accounts question the logistical efficiency of American rescue operations. They also prompt calls from lawmakers for more specialization to extract U.S. citizens from conflict zones in the future.

Stern blames slow-moving bureaucracy for preventing the government from fully using its rescue options.

As one example, Stern cited a video sent to Fox News Digital that showed a mostly empty flight from Israel to Florida near the conflict's start. A source who recorded the video confirmed they had been evacuated by the State Department on flight LY1017 from Tel Aviv to Miami on March 8. At that time, Stern said, Grey Bull Rescue faced hundreds of evacuation requests.

State Department officials did not explain why they booked only a handful of seats on the flight in response to questions about the video. Government teams sometimes buy individual tickets on commercial flights for evacuations but rarely purchase an entire plane's capacity, sources familiar with the department's practices told Fox News Digital.

Department officials said their offers of assistance exceeded on-the-ground demand beyond that flight.

"The State Department has reached out to every American who has registered interest in our support," one official said. "Most Americans who requested assistance have declined seats when offered, opting either to remain in country or book commercial flight options which offer greater flexibility in terms of destination and luggage."

Stern called that response misleading.

"That answer is inaccurate in totality," Stern said. "There’s a difference between a State Department-contracted aircraft that is filled with Americans to come out and getting them to safety. That’s an evacuation. That’s different from: ‘Hey, go book a commercial ticket. Good luck to you.’"

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who joined Grey Bull Rescue operations in Israel last month, praised government efforts but sees a need for reform.

"It really opened my eyes to some of the challenges that we have, the bureaucracy that we have," Mace said. "I'm going to come back to Washington with some ideas on how to streamline what we currently have and how to ensure that we're allocating resources to the State Department, to [the Department of Homeland Security]."

Like Stern, Mace pointed to the absence of a single State Department position focused on rescue efforts.

Stern's group has conducted over 800 missions to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan, Israel and Venezuela. He said current operations involve too many moving parts.

His team's approach allows direct communication with Americans seeking help, he added.

"We know them, we talk to them 10 times a day. The current manifest we're working right now has 338 people on it. We do a Zoom call once a day with all the families. Because of that kind of thing, the chain between the person and the airplane is zero, because it's us," Stern said.

"With [the Department of State] you’re calling a center in West Virginia, talking to somebody reading a script who doesn’t know anything; they refer you to a website that goes to a data processing thing somewhere which gets [put] onto an Excel spreadsheet."