Eusebio R. Sheffield 
The Lonestar mission unfolded like an intense war drama worthy of the great fiction writers of our time. Only it’s not fiction.
The attempted rescue of American scientist John Spor from war-torn Mariupol, Ukraine by a team of military veterans from the Project Dynamo organization was a dicey task for Spor and the team trying to extricate him. He found himself trapped in the city as Russian forces wiped it out and targeted himself as a high-value target.
“My field that I’ve been in for a long time is electro-optics, and it has a lot to do with military stuff like laser-guided weapons, laser ranging, LED displays. I mean, my business here in Texas builds one of the sensors on the Abrams tank and tells the gun where to point,” Spor said in a phone interview. “Pretty much every weapon system that’s been built and so on in the last 20 years or so I was involved at one point. The Russians wanted me for what I had in mind.
He resided in Mariupol in a beautiful house on a hill overlooking the sea with all the amenities one could wish for, he said.
“I saw myself living there until I died, basically. And now I can’t even go home and, believe me, 90% of Mariupol, the houses are destroyed. My house is still there almost completely intact.
It’s time to go out
He had no choice but to leave.
His wife got out safely before him, but it took Spor much longer to leave the country.
He knew a few days before everything seemed to implode that he had to find a safe way out.
“On February 21, I was watching Putin’s speech that he gave, and he was talking about a history lesson he wanted to give Ukraine and the anger and everything in his voice and the way which he said. He said something along the lines of Ukraine decommunizing. They wanted to get rid of the communist stuff,” Spor said. “And he says, ‘I’m going to show them what really looks like decommunization.’ And that’s when I knew he was coming, on the 21st. And I’m in Mariupol and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.’ There was already shelling and all that not happening until the 24th when the official war started I could hear and see it from my house because I was 6 miles from the border with the separatists .
Spor’s sister, Lake Jackson resident Lauri Weigle, was desperate to bring her brother home.
“I originally contacted (Senator Ted) Cruz’s office and the State Department right after the war broke out. But at that time, we weren’t that concerned about Johnny’s safety,” Weigle said. “It wasn’t until April 28, with a couple of cases that happened, that I then contacted the State Department again and Ted Cruz’s office and (Congressman) Randy Weber’s office.”
This led to the introduction of Project Dynamo – and the rescue mission to get Spor out of Ukraine officially began.
The task of getting him out was not easy, said Project Dynamo co-founder Bryan Stern.
“John Spor is a bit like the Mick Jagger of Mariupol. He’s a very successful American,” Stern said. “Everybody knows he designed something to do with bombs or ordnance or something for the United States, which is a problem. Right? Everybody knew who he was. Everybody knew to what he looked like. Everyone knows their house with all that. So for me, from a rescue or evacuation standpoint, it becomes a pain in my existence for a long time because, how do you hide Mick Jagger?
The danger increased for Spor when Chechen agents knocked on his door in Mariupol.
“The Chechens came to my house to look for me twice. I was not there at that time. Chechens don’t come to your house just to say hello. They come to your house to shoot you,” Spor said. “They are crazy. What do I do? I work for various government agencies and corporations that manufacture weapons. So I got other information that the FSB was looking for me. It’s the Russian security service, the internal security service. And they weren’t happy that I was leaving.
Action plan
It took weeks of planning, secret messages and rehearsals to create a safe but risky course of action to get Spor out of Ukraine. Every little detail mattered, Stern said.
“There are roughly 900 data points that we played with for context,” Stern said. “For example, we gave him a set of crutches. Part of our thing was to make him kind of a handicap, okay, an invalid. We gave him crappy, mean old crutches. Looks like he’s had it all his life.
“He practiced sitting and standing using crutches, and people say, ‘Well, why did you do that?’ Well, because of the border guard watching the guy get out of the car. Because… you can tell if someone has never walked on crutches before in their life or if they are used to them. You know, all those little detailed things, to project what I wanted to project and hide what I needed to hide.
The most intimate details of the mission cannot be discussed in order to preserve the integrity of future efforts, but Spor made it to Poland and was safe, Spor said.
“When I saw the Ukrainian flags, I started crying,” Spor said. “I mean, when I first came from the occupied territories to the Ukrainian territories and saw the Ukrainian flags there, I knew that I was in a relatively free place and these guys weren’t going not shoot me if they found me. I mean, Ukrainians wouldn’t do that, Russia would.
He had spent four months behind Russian lines in the midst of total war. Spor reunited with his sister and son in Poland and returned to Texas. They feel like he’s relatively safe now that he’s on American soil.
“I think he’s safer. The theory is a concern that Russia is not known to respect borders or borders. So I think that’s probably the safest place for him in that moment,” Weigle said. “It was great. It was wonderful to see my brother and be able to give him a hug and know that he is safe and that I can spend another vacation with him and talk to him without having to worry so much about it. “
Dynamo Team
Spor and his family are extremely grateful for the Dynamo project and their success in saving it.
“I wouldn’t have come out if they hadn’t come for me. There was no way for me to get out on my own. I mean, it’s as simple as that,” Spor said.
Project Dynamo began operating in 2021 during the US embassy crisis in Afghanistan and is now helping Americans, Ukrainians and surrogate babies out of war-torn countries. To date, they’ve helped about 4,000 people with a list of 10,000 more that keeps growing.
The association is entirely non-profit and managed by volunteers.
“My immense gratitude and appreciation to them. These individuals risked their lives to get my brother out. They are not paid for what they do. They are all volunteers,” Weigle said. “Everything they do is privately funded. Every dollar means another life. It means someone they brought out of Mariupol. That means it’s someone they brought out from other regions. It’s another baby. He’s an American.
Donations can be made at projectdynamo.org or through their Instagram or Facebook pages, Stern said.
“I understand that this war has been going on for a while and people don’t care about it, but the war is still going on, and there are people there every hour, dying 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it’s for no reason. It’s one man’s greed and lust for power – Vladimir Putin,” Spor said.
