Transcript of The Truth About CIA Hit Teams, Black Ops & Covert Action | Ric Prado (throwback)

Hi everyone, welcome to The Team House. This is episode 145, I believe. Yes, episode 145. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. I'm back after my little stay in quarantine last week, but JC and his boys didn't want me quite yet, so I'm back. And we are here. We're very happy to be here tonight with our guest, Rick Prado. He is the author of Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior. Started off kind of an interesting entry into Central Intelligence Agency, coming from being an Air Force pararescueman and then a paramilitary guy, and then rising to be the CTC Chief of Operations. So a very interesting career. I really enjoyed this book. And Rick, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Thank you for having me, guys.

Absolutely, man. And I was wondering, you know, as we ask all of our guests about their origin story and kind of their upbringing and where they came from and You, like several of the other guests we've had on this show, are Cuban American, and that experience and that immigration experience, I think, had a really profound effect on you as a person, as a man. Could you tell us about that, about your family and how you came to America?

Yeah, I'll be honored to. I was about 7 or 8 years old when the revolution was peaking. I lived in a town near the mountains where Che Guevara supposedly was operating in. And so at that age, I actually saw firefights right in front of my house. Literally one guy that was on the other side of the window, and I was looking through the window to see what was going on. So I saw what war does very early on. But what was really sobering for us was how quickly, once Castro took over, that socialist mask came off and It was full communism pretty much off the bat, confiscation of properties, persecution of the opposition. I remember being barely 9 years old, 8 and a half years old, and being told that I had to go to the fields and tutor farmers on how to read and write. And I'm 8 years old, but I was in uniform. And in school, we were in uniform and they inculcated If you hear any— your parents say anything bad about the revolution, you got to turn them in. So it was a very toxic environment that even for, you know, a 9-year-old, I could understand and feel that this was so different from what I grew up with.

My father, who was always a very decisive man and my first hero, he made up his mind and says, we're leaving. Unfortunately, he couldn't get out. My mom couldn't get out. So I was able to get out through a program called Peter Pan Program. And the Peter Pan program was sponsored by the Catholic Church. So, and during the 2 years that it ran, they brought out 14,000+ kids whose parents could not come out. Wow. So in early April of '62, I came to the United States by myself. 10 days later, 2 weeks later, I was in an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. at the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. And that would itself— in itself was also an experience. So, you know, and it's funny, guys, but, you know, a lot of people go, oh my God, you were so little, you had to go through this so much. And I'm amazed that I was not as shook as I should have been perhaps. But I always remember more than anything else, and this is part of my impetus for things that I have done in life, is the courage of my parents.

Yeah.

To put an only child on an airplane to a country they've never been into— been to and may not even be able to visit. Not for economic reasons. We were middle class in Cuba, but for freedom. My dad had that innate passion for freedom and his only child was not gonna, you know, grow up in a communist country. Yeah.

That they loved you so much, they were willing to roll the dice like that with their boy.

Yeah, when, when I, uh, when our oldest son, uh, was 10, my— I asked my wife, I think, do you think that we would have the courage, uh, to, to do same? And, um, we both agreed that, you know, you, you never know how you're going to react until you really do it. So it's a very tough decision, but at the same time, it was a hell of a lesson for me because that's the ultimate price that, that a parent can pay for the freedom of a child.

Right.

Letting him go.

Right. Did you have, you know, you were very young. Were you aware of what was going on? You know, when they were— when you were with this Catholic organization and they were bringing you to the States, did you have an overarching awareness of like what was going on?

Yeah. You know, it's amazing. And I think that when you live a normal life, it's easier to forget the mundane stuff. But this was such a drastic change, such a different period. When we first moved up to Havana to try to get out of the country, as soon as we drove in, I saw 3 guys hanging from trees and telephone poles with signs around their necks that said, Contra revolutionaries. So those things get imprinted in your mind very, very early on. Now, it's funny because I remember clearly getting into the airport with my mom and dad, my mom crying. My dad, not too many years ago before he passed, told me that I told my mom, if you keep crying, I ain't going. And going through the glass that divided them from me. And that's the last thing I remember. I do not remember getting on the plane. I do not remember the flight to Miami. I do not remember where I sat. I only remember when I came through the doors is what my psyche, you know, my memory comes back. And I saw the priest that was there with the sign for the 4 of us, that, uh, there was 3 other kids, 2 girls and 2 guys.

So I was very aware of it. And I, and I think that these experiences, um, in retrospect now were God's way of forging my metal so I would end up doing what I was supposed to put on, put on this earth to do.

And you did get reunited with your family. You grew up in Hialeah outside Miami, right?

Yeah, my parents came out a little over 8 months later. I was one of the lucky ones. Um, there were kids whose parents never came out or came out 5, 6 years later. So I lucked out, uh, and in 2 reasons. One, uh, they were, you know, the orphanage was, uh, a little violent because, you know, you have 5 different cultures in there and all orphans and all, you know. But the treatment in the, the place was, was, was decent. You— there was no abuse that I knew of. And the main thing for me is they taught me English. That's all I did for those 8 months was learn English from C-Spot Run books. And way before your time, guys. But the thing was, when I went back to Miami 8 months later, I could at least help my parents catch a bus or do something like that. So—

That's amazing. Yeah.

And then as you grew up and, you know, went to American high school and so forth, What was that path that initially took you into the United States Air Force?

Well, you know, I grew a conscience in my senior year, just as I was about to graduate. It's, I guess it was a maturity shift. And I realized how good I have it. You know, I live in this wonderful country. I have a wonderful family, stability. Nobody's trying to take my dad's business away. And my parents are the ones who paid the price for that admission. So I developed a debt of honor. I honestly believe that I needed to show this country my gratitude for taking me and my family in and a lot of my other family, extended family in. So the turning point actually was kind of interesting. It was like, it was my first semester in college and the hippies put out a sign that the following day they were going to take down the American flag in protest for Vietnam and burn it. And I said to myself, that ain't going to happen. So I called a couple of my buddies from high school, and there was about 20 hippies. There was about 4 or 5 of us, maybe 6. And it wasn't a fair fight. And at the end of it, that flag was still flying.

And I will tell you, I can still remember The blue sky and that flag waving and me feeling for the first time really, really good about myself.

And you didn't just join the Air Force either. Like, you already must have had something in the back of your mind that you wanted to be an elite soldier.

Well, you know, I was— I've always been competitive. I started martial arts when I was 15, had some great instructors that were former Marines and former this and that. But again, I think that God puts us where we're supposed to be. I chose pararescue because I was taking an oceanography class. I was going to be a marine science technician. And one of the guys in the class was a former PJ. And we ended up sitting together. We ended up talking. And eventually he told me all about pararescue. And I said, sign me up. So 6 months after— not even, About 4 months after that incident with the hippies, I joined the Air Force, pararescue. Yeah.

And went through that pipeline and got qualified. And in the PJs, you had some sort of formative experiences too. I remember in your book, you talk about a plane crash that you responded to one time and for the first time really seeing kind of death on a large scale.

Yeah. I had just literally just gotten my beret. When the— that, I think it was Flight L-1011 in Miami, '72 Christmas Eve or something like that, that the altimeter was screwed up and they thought they were X altitude and they literally plowed into the Everglades. And we were summoned. You know, I was doing 100 and some odd miles an hour to get back to base because I was at my parents' house and down at Homestead. And yeah, I didn't get to do much because by the time I got there, you know, the active, you know, the duty team was already on the ground. But we did get to pull some of the bodies out and it was pretty gruesome. And at the same time, some magical moments, you know, 90-some people, I believe it was, that survived. So it was, again, part of that lessons in life that you see the fragility. and the endurance of the body, you know.

And then what was your, uh, your first exposure to the Central Intelligence Agency?

Well, you know, uh, my, my reason for going into pararescue was I wanted to go to Vietnam. And my number for draft was astronomical. My parents were very happy because they, they were confident that I would never get called. And I show up and go, hey, I'm leaving in 30 days. So, um, my goal was to go to Vietnam. And when I got out of, you know, when I finally got my beret and the follow-on training, it was already married, 1973. Vietnam was winding down. So, in '74, I decided to stay in the reserves completely. And I applied to the agency the first time. They were not hiring. Those were really bad years for the agency and the military. Subsequently, around '79, I reapplied. And this time, they asked me to come in as a contract medic. I was riding rescue with Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. And, you know, again, being a pararescueman, I was already an EMT too. So there was, you know, easy, easy, easy day for me to get into that. And so they needed a paramilitary medic to help their Special Activities Division ground branch guys. And that was my first exposure to those guys.

They got to know me. I obviously made a good impression on them. I did my best to carry my weight. And as luck would have it, in '81, when Reagan took over and he decided to do something about the growing communist threat in Latin America, he declared a covert action program against the Sandinistas who had declared themselves communist. And the agency did not have a native-speaking a native Spanish-speaking guy with paramilitary background. So they tracked me down and that was my backdooring into a staff job.

And that was kind of like this moment for you where you were like, not only yes, but hell yes. Like they didn't really need to recruit you. You were already recruited.

Yeah. I mean, it was a lifelong dream. And it's funny because I remember when the guy called me, he says, look, we have something for you. When do you think you could come in? I said, I only have one question. Is this full-time or is this part-time? I wasn't going to take any more part-time. And they said, no, this is full-time. And I said, I'm there. When do you want me here? He says, you don't want to know what it's about? I go, I'm there.

I'll sweep the floors. I'll— yeah, I'll do whatever.

Exactly. Bring coffee to the boss. I don't care. I just want to get in.

Yeah.

So what was that like? Now you're kind of getting brought into the belly of the beast You didn't have a lot of like formal training with the agency at this point either?

Zero. I had my street smarts. I had my martial arts background.

Your medical training from the Air Force?

Yep, in my pararescue training, which was beyond just the techniques of stuff, is learning your limits, which are not what you usually think, and being able to do things above and beyond. So that steels you. I was pretty confident going in, but I had no training. There was no time. I literally was in the headquarters area for less than 2 weeks before I went to Honduras.

Wow.

And so what was the alias?

Wow.

That's Alex, right?

Yes, that's correct. Captain Alex, originally.

So what was that like hitting the ground in Honduras and some of the people you worked for and the mission that you received at that point?

Well, you know, again, I've lived a blessed life. I land in Honduras. There was only 5 of us when this program started. You know, 5 years later, there was probably 100 guys on the ground there. And my boss was Colonel Ray. He was legendary. He had jumped into Corregidor at the age of 17 or 18. Special Forces guy, went to— he was our guy in Laos during the Vietnam time. Bigger than life guy, both physically and everything else. And he was just a wonderful boss. And he mentored me a lot. I mean, he was always very, very good about explaining what I needed to do. But at the same time, there was no time for micromanagement. I lived in those camps by myself. For the first 14 months of that program, I was the only American allowed to set foot in the Contra camps. Because again, this was a covert operation. And as the title of my book, Black Ops, says, indicates, that's when you're doing operations where the American hand has to remain hidden. So I was there as a Honduran captain. Eventually I got promoted to major.

With the requisite pay bump, of course.

Of course, yeah.

And I thought it was really interesting in the book too, you talk about how it started off as an Argentinian program and then America jumped on there and you, as a young PM guy, had to balance America's objectives with this Argentinian force there that was really not up to snuff?

Yeah, you know, the Argentines didn't do much for the cause, but they were the ones that were helping bringing in some old Mauser rifles and stuff like that to give the Contras. And they're the ones that reached out to the CIA even before Reagan took over. It's just nothing was being done until Reagan took over. So they were there, but they were literally just a city presence. I remember only one time that one of those guys went to the camps with me, and I stayed and he went back in the helicopter. So they were— and these guys were not paramilitary guys. These guys were primarily a thuggy police force that ruled Argentina at the time. And they were not contributing. And Yeah, I mean, my boss put me in charge of their finances just to really dig into them because we knew that they were screwing with us and eventually they got kicked out.

And you said there was some sort of institutionalized racism, I guess, in the sense that you had these Mosquito Indians, the indigenous people that you assessed could be a very effective fighting force, but these guys were like, nah, fuck them. We don't even want to deal with them because they're inadequate or whatever.

Yeah, it's again, the Argentines that were there were very prejudiced. The Nicaraguans a lot less because again, they're all Nicaraguans. They just happen to be, although the Mosquitos do not consider themselves Nicaraguans, they want to be an autonomous nation, but they are natural hunter-trackers, fighters. The jungle for them was their terrain. And it was obvious to me from the very beginning that they had the fire in their belly. But for me, my job was to be equitable with all the camps that I had. And I had a real big fight with the one general that was there. And I remember clearly, we're sitting across from each other at the Estado Mayor. And he said, well, you know, this is going to go here and there. And I said, sorry, General, that is not A third of that is going to the Mosquitos. And he started to say something. I said, sir, I'm— you know who I am speaking for, and that is the decision. That's the logistics, how it's going to be split up. And he literally had a pencil in his hand and he broke it. He was so angry. There wasn't much he could do about it because it was our money and we, uh, we weren't going to put up with that crap.

It's kind of reminiscent of like when we have the, like, the former Vietnam guys on and the way like Vietnamese treated the Montagnards and the other natives, the indigenous around there.

That's correct. Yeah. Good analogy.

And so in the meantime, you're going around these camps, you're trying to train these guys up, potentially prepare them for an offensive against the Sandinistas, doing some limited cross-border raids, setting in some cache site locations to maybe support that offensive. Kind of what was a I guess the escalation, you could say, of trying to build up this capability that you've been charged with?

Well, the first time I went to the camps, I was slack-jawed. I mean, these poor guys and gals had nothing. Most of them were barefoot. They had old Mauser bolt-action rifles, a few rusty AKs captured from the Sandinistas, no medical facility. Food was almost nonexistent. So the first thing for us was logistics, getting the logistics in there to provide them with medicine and food, regular food budgets, money, and then subsequently starting the training. And because I was the only guy allowed in the camps, I did all the training for these guys from patrolling to radio communications to headspace and timing on a .50 cal to the RPG-7, which I became pretty darn good with. after training. We had 10 camps and I had to train them all. So I lived in the camps for the 3 years that I was there, a little over 3 years. And Monday through Friday, I slept in a jungle hammock.

Wow!

And, you know, guys, not once did I wake up in the morning and say, what am I doing here?

Right!

Or, geez, I wish I wasn't here. You know, I had a wonderful career. I've had a wonderful life, but that period in my life was blessed. And at first I didn't really, you know, understand why it felt so good because again, I'm, you know, I'm 30 years old. I'm still more testosterone than brains. And, um, I realized that I was now being able to pay back for what they did to my parents because the same monster that had consumed Nicaragua, um, the Soviet Union, using Cubans as proxy and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas being proxies for the Salvadoran insurgencies. I was now there helping these guys and gals cut off some of those tentacles from this monster. So it really felt good. And every night I would talk to the different guys in different campfires, and eventually I would always ask, why are you here? And each one had a very pure reason for being there. You know, they burned down my church, they raped my daughter. It wasn't geopolitics, it wasn't Marxism versus capitalism. It was the purest, I want my freedom back for me and my family. Right.

It was freedom versus tyranny.

Indeed.

Yeah.

And over time, they did go on the offense, as I recall reading, but it was difficult as a covert program to keep those kind of logistics lines fed and keep these guys supplied, right?

Yeah, they, uh, we, we did, uh, they started doing some raids and ambushes and patrolling and, uh, some sniper work and that kind of stuff that I taught them. Um, but again, the incursions were hit and run and come back, or, or once they had certain little safe areas, but they were all within 10, 20 miles of the border, uh, and that's pretty, pretty thick country out there. So we needed more logistics, and eventually that started developing, you know, the logistic capability of airdrops and helicopters to at least the camps, and then buying them horses and mules and whatever it took to carry some of that stuff inside.

Do you want to talk a little bit about— eventually you kind of moved over to doing, I guess you could say, strategic-level operations with some of these sabotage missions that you coordinated with the Mosquitos and some of the other players, some of the other Contras that were in this game. I thought that was a really interesting part of your book.

Yeah, like I said, I was fascinated with the Mosquitos because for one thing, with the regular Nicaraguans, there was no culture shock. I spoke native Spanish, I know the customs. There's a few words that are different, but there was no culture shock. But with the Mosquito, It was very different. This is a very different society with a different language. There's probably more Miskitos that speak English than they speak Spanish. It's really a fascinating bunch of folks. But what happened was the headquarters came in, our headquarters came in and said, hey guys, all these raids and ambushes are really good and you guys are doing a great job with building this force up, but we need to get the Sandinistas' attention. We need them to understand that this is not a ragtag bunch of rebels just trying to overthrow them. We need to smack them. So during one of my trips to the Mosquitia, I had my hat with my scuba badge on, and one of the Mosquitos comes up to me and he goes, are you a diver? And I go, yeah, I'm a military diver. And he goes, well, the 6 of us are lobster divers.

And these guys were hard as woodpecker lips. I mean, you know, I kept that in mind. So that's when I came up with the idea of creating a team of— we call them the Barracudas— of Mosquito divers that could infiltrate Nicaragua and do damage. And the first place that we chose, you know, after talking to them about, you know, realities, was Puerto Cabezas. Puerto Cabezas is the northernmost northeastmost port for Nicaragua. And that was the belly button where Cuba, or I should say the Soviet Union via Cuba, was bringing in all the paramilitary ammo and equipment and fuel and everything that they needed. So doing damage to that pier was a very high priority and it would send a message. So the requirement went back to headquarters and says, look, we got Prado says he's got some divers that he can train to military standards. I took the 6. 2 washed out and the other 4 were, like I said, just really dedicated to the cause. And headquarters is the one that came up with the actual device, for lack of a better word, based on £80 of C4 that was placed under the pier.

We went out there and it was one of these beautiful missions which are rare in our profession. where just about everything goes right. And our guys were able to blow it up. I was with them in the water when they first launched. I was there, you know, when they got back, we went back to Honduras. And 2 days later, for the first time in my life, I saw satellite overhead of Puerto Cabezas. And that was pretty thrilling.

And then there was another operation where things— it was a bridge, I believe, you guys tried to take out. And that one kind of went a little disastrous, but you had some balls, I think, going in to kind of pull your boys out, right? That was an interesting one.

Yeah, you know, when I speak to my brethren in pararescue, that's the mission that I always talk about. And I gave a talk down at scuba school a couple of years ago in Key West for the combat swimmers exactly on that, because I did go in and got my guys out. But the Reader's Digest of the story is, you know, all of a sudden our success in Puerto Cabezas motivated headquarters to say, we need to do the same thing against Corinto. Now Corinto is on the opposite side, on the west side, northwest side of the country, and it is the economic belly button. This is where all their goods that they would sell or goods that they would buy would transit. And Port Corinto is actually like an island, for lack of better words, and it has a bridge that connects it to the mainland and to the main highway. So the idea that they had asked us to do was to topple the bridge, you know, 4 platter charges on the pylons on the same side, get them to buckle over with a weight, and, you know, it would take them at least a year or more to be able to repair that.

So that would've been a hell of a blow. So they asked me if my guys could do it, and I said, absolutely, that's easy day. But then there was a political curveball, and I've said this many, many times, you cannot run covert operations with politics, the optics of politics. And this was, well, you know, the Mosquitos did it on the East Coast. We want this to be a mixed team so the regular FDN guys can also feel like they're contributing. There was a little bit of jealousy about the Mosquitos scoring the very first left hook to the jaw to these guys. So what they insisted on was, since I had the divers, that The boat crew was going to be what the Mosquito called the Spaniards, the Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. And I told my boss, I said, boss, you know, this ain't going to fly. These guys do not trust each other. He went upstairs with it and they came back and said, no, we're doing it that way. And I sent my team in, 2 boats, 2 divers each, and 2 boat pilots each. And they made it into Corinto. When they got to Corinto, they noticed a lot more traffic than they had— that we had predicted.

Maritime traffic.

Than they had expected, yeah. So, you know, the tensions were high and the guys were jittery. And my divers said, look, you know, we're not going to get in the water because we know that you're going to leave us here. And, you know, you're talking 8 guys on 2 boats, everybody's got guns and explosives. So, uh, you don't want to get into a contest. And they decided to regroup and said, look, you know, we'll abort and come back and do it another time. Well, unfortunately, we had given them these very high-speed boats, but they were not seaworthy as far as reliability. So both boats developed engine problems coming back. The first boat conked out and actually was able to get into the mangroves just outside of Corinto. And, uh, the second boat made it out to the Gulf of Fonseca, but still in Nicaraguan waters. when the boat went kaput. And I've been up for at least 24 hours already with these guys. You know, we had secure comms. I'm following their tracks, you know, what they were doing. I knew they were coming back. And I went to my boss, Leon, who was the base chief.

And I said, Leon, you know, I'm not leaving my guys behind. He says, I know that. What do you have in mind? So what I did was reverted to my pararescue training. I got my helicopter pilot, these young Honduran pilots, in their early 20s. And I told them that we were going to go out to sea. Before we did, I made some field expedient stable rigs, 6 of them, so I could get my, you know, my 4 guys and myself out if that's what it took. And what we were going to do was I jumped in. Well, I was carrying water, gas, tools, spark plugs, and all that kind of stuff. and 2 sticks of C4 because I wasn't going to let that boat, a high-speed boat to the Sandinistas, and the evidence, because it was, you know, obviously, you know, something that was not native to the area. So I jumped into the water in what, in pararescue back then, we used to call them low and slows. It was 15 knots and 15 feet above the water. Well, my Honduran pilots, as good as they were, they were not water pilots. So the 15-foot rule did not apply here.

So this was a high and slow. It was at least 35 feet when I jumped out of that damn thing. And, and it's, you know, I'm used to the shorter ride. I'm going like, oh my God. But no, it was, it was a good entry. And we were able to start the boat. And the boat, it was spark plugs, it was spark plugs issue. They had all fouled up there, their systems were not up to par. We went back to base to the island that we were at, and that same boat, we refitted it. And now I went out with 2 of our boat captains. One was a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran who was a senior captain, and the other one was an American from our maritime branch. And we needed to go back and get our second boat because our second boat had now spent, you know, 24 hours hiding in a mangrove just outside Corinto, and they were dead in the water. They could not get the boat to start. So, uh, we went out there and the seas got really rough. There were at least 12-foot seas beating the crap out of the, out of the boat.

Uh, we lost first— I think it was our UHF we lost first. There's an aircraft in the air supporting us. We had VHF and, and, uh, uh, ICOM radios. And, um, the Sandinistas, obviously because of the helicopter incident that morning and all the chatter going back and forth, they knew something was going on. So they were out there in force. And they started popping flares, you know, probably a mile or so away from us, but we didn't know that. We just seen flares coming up and light, trying to light up the sky. And then they started doing recon by fire where they would take and put rounds downrange, stop and see if anybody returned fire, and then they could, you know, gaggle on there. So, well, I had an M16, you know, an AR-15 and a Browning 9mm. So I was not exactly set for a firefight.

Right.

So we were out there. We were able to triangulate where the boat was actually with the help of the aircraft and the communications. And we were able to triangulate where they were at. And we hightailed it back to the island, our base. But our guys knew that we were getting them in the morning. I promised them that. And I mean, I was beat to hell. Once the adrenaline wore off.

Right.

You know, I've been up for probably close to 48 hours by then. 2 adrenaline dumps, once with the jump into the water and now spending hours out there bouncing around, getting chased by Sandinistas. So I was smoked when I got back from that. But the next morning we went out in 6 piranha boats that went out there and got the guys back out. So the mission was an abortion. But the rescue was what we're supposed to do for our folks. And I'm very proud to say it got me my first medal in the agency.

That's amazing.

And so you were down there for quite a while doing ops. I guess, did this whole thing come to— the COVID program down there come to its conclusion with Eugene Hasenfoss parachuting out of an airplane into the jungle? You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. You know, the American hand became obvious after the first year and a half or so. That's when they— after that, I was able to have some help at the camps. They brought in some former SF Spanish-speaking guys. And so we had 3 of them, very good guys. And they were at different camps, but I would still go to the camps because I was the equities. I was the guy that they knew. in the camps. So I still did my regular, you know, visit 2 camps a week kind of stuff. So the American hand was starting to show. And, but the Hacifas incident was much later. I mean, I was already gone. I left in '84. I went through spy school. And then lo and behold, I got sent to Costa Rica at the last minute. I was supposed to go to Salvador. My household goods were actually in Salvador already. And we were supposed to— I was just recently married. I had a, you know, my son was a couple of months old, my oldest son. They asked for me by name in Costa Rica because they wanted me to run the southern front, which was in stark contrast to the way we ran things in Honduras side of the house, because the Costa Ricans were actually hostile to the Contras.

They were afraid that the Sandinistas would retaliate if they supported the Contras. So they were literally hunting us down. And by us, I mean me included. They wanted to see who was helping these guys. So now I'm running these programs, trying to, you know, recruiting people to get me— help me get people out through maritime means or air means. And at the same time, having a job at the embassy, coat and tie.

Right.

So it was more of a little— the miniature French Resistance kind of concept where, you know, car pickups and all this, you know, crashed cars, picking them up, taking them to meetings, you know, exfiltrating them out of the country so they could get training, bring them back in and all that kind of stuff. So it was a very, very different, uh, um, you know, mission. And that's when Hassan Fuss happened. Hassan Fuss was an airdrop that was not meant for the South. It was actually meant for the North FDN guys who had ventured, uh, further south. So when his, uh, when his aircraft was shot down, I got— that night I got a call immediately from the, uh, our radio, our comm center. And the Nicaraguan comm center said, hey boss, you need to come in. There's something huge going on. So I hopped, went over, and they told me, says, an American plane was shot down. Well, a resupply plane was shot down, and we don't know if there's any survivors. But I said, I want every single available Contra to form a line and start walking in that direction. We need to get to that site, recover anything classified, and see if we have any survivors.

Well, you know, the ops plan was always for our pilots, if you crash landed in the south, start walking south because you're going to run to some country somewhere because we'd be looking for you. Well, Hassan Fuss didn't. Hassan Fuss, even though he was a former Marine, he just stayed put. He made a jungle hammock out of his parachuter, was there when the Sandinistas came, and he had all kinds of compromising stuff on him, you know, phone numbers and names and, you know, who the pilots were and all that kind of stuff that were doing the resupply. And that got the ball rolling. And yeah, that was the beginning of what eventually became the Iran-Contra scandal. Wow.

Hey, Jack.

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Yeah, absolutely. Oh, Rick, I do want to point out, you mentioned briefly your time down in Honduras. I mean, you were a CIA contractor, a paramilitary contractor, And then they realized, I guess at a certain point, they're like, we have to formalize this guy and bring him in as a CIA officer. They put you through like a crash program at Georgetown so you could get your degree because you need a college degree to be a CIA officer. And then you go to the farm and now you're legit. And then, and then we kind of swing back to Costa Rica, which you had mentioned, and then you get sent down to, I'm guessing, a South American country. targeting another Marxist group. You want to tell us a little bit about that experience?

Yeah, and again, it wasn't a planned thing the same way that Costa Rica materialized, this South American country that had 2 major communist insurgencies there, one Soviet-backed, Cuban-backed, and the other one is more of a Chinese mentality. You know, they're And both were very in close affiliation with the narcotraffickers, and that's how they got their money and guns. So I ended up going to this country because, again, my bosses said— this was a time where terrorism was just coming up. One of my mentors, Dewey Claridge, started the Counterterrorist Center in 1986. So this is 1988. So just 2 years after the center was created, the agency started seeing the writing on the wall that we are going to be switching, not switching, but adding on to our operational directives, the fact that terrorism was going to be high on the OD. And you got to understand that there's a lot of difference between dealing with and recruiting people from the diplomatic or business circuit and you know, meeting and developing and recruiting people from a walk of life where violence is a way. And so that's why I think the beginning of the paramilitary guys really coming up to the forefront because now you had guys who had military training, that kind of backbone, and were operations officers.

They started calling them dual-track case officers.

Wow!

And that's why they asked me, they said, you got native Spanish, you've proven yourself, This place down south is a mess. They really need you. And I said, yes, sir, I'm gone. And it was a great tour. I mean, it was my first CT tour. I actually recruited a terrorist, which is well detailed in the book, through some coercion, but nonetheless, he provided some incredible information for about a year. Took down a couple of cells of terrorist guys that were planning attacks against the US Embassy. Worked together with the DEA there. They had the program Snowcap, was huge. And there were times I would go out with them in their helicopters and go out and debrief people out in Ayacucho and Tingo María and all these places that were super Indian territory. So, it was a great tour.

There's one operation you talk about where at some portions you kind of disguised yourself as like a hobo out on the street and put an electronic bug in the leg of a kitchen table. I thought that was pretty Cool.

Yeah, we had, we had some intel that these guys, they were a terror cell that was meeting at this lady's house. And the lady, what they didn't know, the lady was friendly with a cop that reported it, the fact that these guys were kicking her out of the house to have meetings. So we infiltrated a table with a, with a bug in the, in the leg of it. And, you know, battery pack that would last months. But now we had an observation post and a listening post, an LPOP, in a building not too far back that was pretty high. But there's a thing called a path loss test that has to be done. You have to go and check to see what frequencies work best because this is a very fragile connection. So my job was to walk in front of that house back and forth a couple of times while hitting the button. that would activate different signals. And the guys up there are doing their tech stuff that I don't quite understand. And, um, so I'm walking, and I did— I didn't, I didn't shave for 2 or 3 days. I didn't bathe for 2, and I had this, you know, local garb.

So I looked more like a, you know, a regular native, uh, guy there with a, you know, growth of beard and a hat and dirty clothes. And I'm walking by the house and As soon as I'm literally in front of the house, the door opens and 5 of these guys come out and literally bumped into me, the 5 guys. And being the kind of people that were, they started chewing me out and, you know, I had a Browning 9mm, carries 15 rounds and I'm going like, I could ruin your day! Right, right! You know, but at the same time, I already knew from, you know, my experiences before that in our business, if you draw your weapon, your mission's compromised. Right! So I had to really swallow my pride and say, perdone, you know, and just walk off like a little cholo that was hurt. And they were laughing and, you know, they had a soccer ball in their hand. But we got the Pavlov test and we got them. Eventually, we broke up that cell. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

You talk about in your book about that very notion, that subject that a lot of people see the CIA, especially guys like you, as like assassins, like you're these cold, cold stone-cold killers. But the reality of being a CIA officer is like, if you have to draw your gun, if you have to get into a high-speed pursuit with a car chase, your mission has failed. Like, you blew it. You blew it.

Yeah, absolutely. And your mission not only failed, it could most likely be compromised, which then becomes a political embarrassment to, to us because we are Americans no matter how much we try to hide it. And, you know, you guys hit on something that's very important to me, and that's the reason why I wrote the book. was because, as you know, most people learn from Hollywood. And the perception that my agency— the perception that people have of my agency is a maligned organization full of backstabbing, treacherous, you know, maniacal killers that—

Break the law.

You know, overthrow governments without congressional approvals and, you know, womanize and drink and everything. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that was the main impetus for me to write the book because, look guys, we're a small agency. We're smaller than the FBI. We're definitely not major services like Army, Navy, or Air Force. And we have 137 stars on our Wall of Honor. And those are 137 souls, a lot of them anonymous, who gave up their lives for this country. And to be portrayed in the way that Hollywood portrays the agency is something that I cannot watch those movies. I can watch a fantasy movie. I can watch a James Bond movie and enjoy it because it's fantasy.

Right.

It's not real. I'm still waiting for my Aston Martin. Right? But, you know, seeing these guys, it's just, it's a completely different way of life. Yes, you have to have some skills. Yes, you have to know how to shoot. Because you have to survive, you have to be able to crash and bang and pit and do all these things. But if you are doing that, that mission is compromised. And that's where awareness really kicks in over, you know, and the story is in the Philippines, where awareness saved our lives.

Do you want to talk to us about that?

Actually, if you don't mind, because Rick, like, you bring up a really interesting point. And the fact that you were involved in you know, the, the Contra and Sandinista thing, like, that was kind of— that's probably your first exposure to how you would get represented in the media back here, because a lot of the media at the time was like, the CIA is building these death squads, right? The School of Americas and all this stuff. But that wasn't what was going on. You weren't building these teams to go in and savage villages.

No, on the contrary. I mean, that was something that they were prohibited from doing. You know, we always told them, if you have collateral damage, you're doing more harm than good to the cause. And we, you know, we— I'm not saying that didn't happen because war is war.

Right.

But it was pretty much over with oversight. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the Chuck Norris Good Guys Wear Black kind of mentality that people think that we have all these teams that are gonna go out there and shoot things up. Now, as you know, from our Special Activities Division, Special Activities Center now, a ground branch, all those guys, we all come from the soft side of our military. So that's what makes us dual-track case officers. We are regular case officers that happen to have these paramilitary skills that we can go to crappier places. And one of them was the Philippines. That's why I was sent there.

So You're saying that you were never on a hit team that was stationed in France, ready to get called up at any moment to eliminate a target inside of Paris?

No. We did put— I did put together and propose a program at the end of my career. And that's later in the book, that did establish a team that was supposed to be multipurpose. But, you know, the reality is the The greater majority of CIA officers never shoot in anger because that is, you know, we're a tradecraft base. We need to do— whereas bugging a safe house or recruiting somebody or doing a B&E into an embassy, whatever it is, we have to be able to not be noticed.

Right.

We need to fly under the radar. So there's places where you can't even carry a weapon.

Right.

So yeah, the HIT Team concept, I mean, you know, there's a difference between stuff that goes on in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, and Yemen, you know, Yemen and a couple other places.

War zones.

The rest of our work is on the streets, especially we're back to that now. After 21 years of war, the military and the US government had realized that. And this started about 4 years ago, I guess. Hey, we got to do less warfighting and more war prevention. So that's why some of the restructuring that's going back on to train the trainers in different countries, buttress places like Ukraine, and get that going. But no, no HIT teams.

Right.

My tour in the Philippines was my first liaison tour, and I worked with the police constabulary, the Navy, and the Army there to fight the New People's Army who were brutal. They were in the streets. As a matter of fact, 6 or 8 months before I got there, they had killed the legendary Nick Rowe in an assassination in Manila. And literally a month or so before I got there, they shot 2 Air Force guys up at Clark Air Force Base. And the teams that did this were called Sparrows.

Yeah.

The NPA Sparrows. And they were lethal. I mean, these guys knew what they were doing. They were stone cold killers. And then the other group that was down there that we were also working against was the Abu Sayyaf down in Mindanao, and those are the radical Muslim guerrillas down there.

Did you ever get to meet Teddy Medina after he was captured?

No, sir. Nope.

He was the Sparrow hitman. I think you referenced him in your book.

Yeah, he's the one that makes the video that's on YouTube that you could actually see how these guys operate, and I saw it firsthand. I mean, you know, these guys are Pretty, pretty cold.

I have a question for you about that, but I wanted to bring up first, there's a bit in Rick's book where you talk about as a young paramilitary guy, you'd always heard these rumors in the agency that there's this secret elite team behind the scenes, even more secret than we are, that goes out and does these hits and super secret stuff. And then you went up to be like SIS 3 or 4. I mean, you were a pretty senior guy and you came to realize that actually none of that exists. Those teams don't exist.

No, I mean, we used to call it the agency in the basement. You know, we kept saying, there's got to be more to this. Listen, let me tell you, the agency does some incredible stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, every officer in that agency was worth his or her salt. And you know, from reading the book that I have a lot of good stories about the dedication of some of our female officers. I'm a big fan of using females in the ways that we do for tradecraft and stuff. And, uh, but yeah, it's, it's a completely different game. We always thought that, you know, and it was more of a joke, but we're going like, there's got to be, you know, I bet you there's something in that basement where there's somebody with the elite, you know. It's one of these fantasies in the back of our minds, even though we're doing stuff that other people are fantasizing about doing.

Right, right.

It's pretty, pretty cool.

I think that everybody who's ever been like at, you know, at a high-tier unit, you're always, you know, you always joke around about Eventually somebody's going to tap you on the shoulder and go, you passed. Welcome to the real unit. You know, welcome to the real organization. Yeah, everybody jokes about that.

And in the Philippines, when you're dealing with the Sparrows, could you tell us the story about that time where you guys were coming out of a restaurant and like you almost got smoked? Like if you weren't paying attention to what was going on around you, you probably would have been in a pretty bad situation.

Yeah. The lesson that I learned really quickly there was that awareness beats fast draw every single time. What happened was it was 6 of us, 2 local captains, Army, and I had 2 of my techs and my office partner, Davis, very good guy, Vietnam vet. And we would bring the techs over to help them. They were doing a lot of signals intercept. of the insurgencies and decryption and all that kind of stuff. So we were giving them that kind of gear. And of course, we were also training them on asset handling and recruiting and getting intelligence and all this kind of stuff. So we had spent a long day and we went and had dinner. We came out of this restaurant and we were— me and Davis were the last 2 guys. I was the last guy. Davis was second to last. I walked out and we moved to the right. And as soon as I broke through the door, I looked to my left And I see 3 guys. Now, the MO for the Sparrows is that they carry a .45 cocked, no safety, in their crotch.

Round in the chamber.

What we call appendix now, but no holster. What they do is they have their left hand in their pocket and that's what holds the gun and they push it up, bring it out, shoot you twice, reholster and walk off and before anybody even looks, you're gone. So We walk out and I look to my left and there's these 3 guys and they're huddled and as soon as we come out, they looked at us, they stopped talking and they got 3 abreast and they started walking in front of us, towards us.

Mm-hmm!

And I mean, we're talking yards here. We're not talking, you know, a big distance. They were fairly close and the 2 guys on the outside had their left hands in their pockets. So I immediately drew my weapon And I tell you, when I took the safety off, that was the loudest click I've ever heard in my life. And, you know, unbeknownst to me, my buddy Davis was doing exactly the same thing. As you know, you know, when you get that bolus of adrenaline, the first thing that happens is you get tunnel vision.

Mm-hmm.

You're only focused on just that threat. And also, auditory exclusion. You don't know, Davis might've been saying to me, Holy shit! Holy shit! I couldn't hear it.

Right!

All I could see was these guys and, you know, imagine if somebody points a gun at me, I'm gonna— this got to be a reaction like, whoa, whoa, hey, what's going on? Or I'm going to go for my weapon or something. Nothing! These guys, when they saw these 2 guns come up, they kept eye contact and they just walked right in front of us, 3 abreast, all the way down the street and the guy in the middle, I could read his mind. He was saying, we'll get you next time. And I said, no, no, you're not. Um, but that, that was, uh, and what was really sad was that the only 2 of the 6 that noticed these guys was me and Davis.

Right.

My 2 techs got chewed out badly when we got back to, to, uh, to headquarters, you know, for not, you know, not paying attention. Because if we, if we would have tried, if I would have, if I would have reacted to these guys weapons being out, I wouldn't be talking to you, right? Neither would Davis, right?

Rick, at this point, I'd like to ask you about some of the controversies that came up. Um, you were fast-tracking, I guess you could say. I mean, you were having a successful career in the CIA. If you Google Rick Prado today, I mean, there's some pretty wild stuff that comes up about you, about how you were a hitman down in Miami. You're doing these bombings and assassinations. In your book, you at least allude to how some of this stuff came about, and I'd like to really give you the opportunity to kind of address some of this stuff and talk about how this came about, because I think that you've kind of been unfairly tarnished, to tell you the truth.

Right.

I even had a misperception about you, I think, until I read your book and heard your side of it. I was like, oh, okay, that's where this came from.

Well, I'll make no excuses for my upbringing. I hung out with the wrong crowd when I was in high school. We weren't robbing banks or doing shoot-'em-ups, but we were always fighting and getting in trouble and that kind of stuff. I had good grades and bad conduct. You know, we all thought that we were tough guys. Everybody else was smoking dope, but we were lifting weights and doing martial arts and getting in fights on the weekends, kind of stuff.

With hippies at the flagpole.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that was, that was, that was a justified one. Like I said, that's the first one that really felt good. But, you know, the, the, some of the guys I grew up with became cops. Some of the guys that I grew up with became robbers and drug dealers. And when one of them became very, very famous, I got dragged. This was in 1990, late '91, I believe it was. I was in the Philippines when I got called in because, you know, this is a, you know, you were associated with this guy. And we have sources saying that, you know, that you were, well, you know, his strong arm and all this other stuff, which is— it was all BS. I survived that. I mean, they did all kinds of background checks. They— fingerprints, you know, you name it, blood tests.

They even took castings of your foot at one point.

Yeah, there was— it was actually handprints, I believe. It may be footprints also. There was a crime scene where there was bloody prints And they mentioned that to me, and I said, guys, I'll give you whatever you want. Yeah, feet, hands, whatever you want. You could do all the testing you want, all the polygraphs.

Polygraphs, yeah.

And, you know, anybody who's been in the community or even in the periphery of the community, you know 2 things. First of all, you know, um, the, the filtering process is very strict. The background checks are very deep— financial, psychological. Neighbors are asked, school teachers are asked, um, you know, and you do go through several polygraph tests where all these questions get addressed. So they're lifestyle polygraphs. It's not just, uh, you know, have you ever stolen something? I'm talking about, you know, major stuff that will be addressed. So that's the first thing that is a, you know, points to the fallacy. The second part is, if I indeed had been involved with any of that, that they could even justify, much less prove, there's no way I would've continued in my career and rise to the ranks that I did. The sad thing is, is that what you're reading, that what you got to read was much later. In 2009 is when my name was first ousted. I was working for the community. I had left CIA and I was working with Blackwater. pretty much doing the same thing, supporting the US special operations world writ large, our community.

And I was building some very good capabilities worldwide. And that was my job. Well, come the political downfall of Blackwater, I became that sticky booger between Black Ops, Blackwater, CIA. I recruited Colford Black into Blackwater, who was my boss in CTC and to this day one of my greatest friends. So that's when this myth started coming out. There was a guy, and I won't even mention his name, who came out with a stupid book that sold probably 20 copies and became an ebook. And it was based on a narco trafficker who had been jailed He was dying of cancer and he decided he was going to tell all, tell-all kind of book. And this guy put it out there. It was shut down. A lot of people in Miami, prominent people in Miami, not me included because I wasn't prominent nor in Miami, lawyered up and they kind of shut it down. But that's the sad thing. It became popular because it was what people were looking at. It was CIA black operations, Blackwater doing stuff that they weren't really doing. I mean, they did a fantastic job with protecting our State Department and our agency folks.

But yeah, it was a very hard period coming home to my wife and telling her on a Thursday that tomorrow I'm front page in the newspaper saying that I'm the head of CIA's You know, hit squads.

You point out that you had a pretty airtight alibi for some of the crimes they were accusing you of because you were actually deployed with the agency overseas when they— when these crimes supposedly took place.

Yeah, this was like I said, this was all the fantasy stuff that people can spin up. You know, we love conspiracy theories.

Right.

And because most people do not know what the agency is really about. And that's one of the purposes of my book. The second is communism. Guys, this is not a joke. It's— It's our enemy long-term. So, excuse me, for them, it was a way of— now you had the guy who could tie in former CIA guy operations, had this bad background when he was a kid growing up.

Right.

And now he's doing this stuff at Blackwater, and that just snowballed into these hit teams and all this kind of crap. So, yeah, thank you for allowing me to clarify that because it was very painful. But, you know, I retired as an SIS-2, which is Major General rank equivalent. And you guys know that there's no way that as a GS-14, I was going to survive and that they were going to cover up murders and stuff like that for me. It was—

Maybe like, Rick Prado? Who's that? Never heard of him.

Right.

They would have been like that.

Yeah. Never heard of the guy. Yeah.

You're telling me that, Rick, that like as a senior CIA guy, you were not taking off your coat and tie at the end of the day and leaving your home, your 2 kids in high school, the wife you've been married to for 30 years and going doing hits for the mob. That didn't happen?

No, no. All right.

So I'm sure that they would have paid like $5,000, $10,000 a hit. Oh, yeah. You know, like that's chicken change. That's some walking around money, right?

Chrome for my Harley. Right.

So, Rick, I think the next thing the agency had you doing, going after hard targets, they sent you— I guess they're trying to make an honest man out of you after your paramilitary years, sending you after North Korea. And you could tell us a little bit about what that entailed?

Yeah, there's actually 2 episodes. I'd like to address the first one, which was the bin Laden task force.

Okay.

I had just left Seoul. I was the liaison guy in Seoul dealing with our sister service there in the 8th Army, US 8th Army. And I went back to CTC and I was a branch chief, Palestinian branch. And I hadn't been in the job 2 months when I got called up to the front office and the chief of operations, Jeff, came to me and says, your name has come up, has surfaced. to be the Deputy Chief of Station for a station that is going to be dedicated to a single terrorist and terrorist organization. And he said, are you interested? I go, of course. I mean, you know, Deputy Chief of Station for a CTC station? Hell yeah. And he said— and I said, who are we targeting? And he says, Osama bin Laden. And I said, who? And he said, exactly. So I'm a plank owner of the original task force station. I was the deputy chief of station and senior ops guy. The chief was an analyst by the name of Mike Sawyer, brilliant analyst who kind of went off the rails later on, unfortunately. But that's the very same unit that captured bin Laden later on.

You know, not captured, but allowed our SEALs to go over there and shoot him in the face kind of stuff. So I'm very proud of that association. And that would, again, that was a polishing kind of a job for me because it was definitely, you know, dealing at a pretty high level. The North Korea accounts are very dear to my heart because again, I have fought communism in 5 different incarnations by now, you know, and they're a pretty lethal bunch. So that's how I made senior grade. I was awarded the Korea program, which was the deputy division chief position. And I, for 2 years, I had several very successful operations against the North Koreans where we took some of them down. They allowed me to talk about one of those in the book to some pretty good detail because the main thing was, you know, the ethos was that if you pitched a North Korean, they would spit in your face, taekwondo you to death, and walk out. And I said, well, that's not going to happen to other guys. So we made sure that when we pitched, we started doing these pitches, we already had them compromised.

Right.

We had them false flagged into activities that we could then go to our liaison counterparts and show and get them kicked out of the country. And of course, that's a huge black eye. You know, the biggest thing with North Korea that a lot of people do not understand, and I've briefed pretty high up in the military about it, is that everybody's only focused on the peninsula. Everything North Korea is on the peninsula as far as people are concerned, and that's not true. They have over 50 missions worldwide that are primarily intel collection and procurement of embargoed goods.

Uh-huh.

That's what they do. And at the same time, they're also making bulk and targeting Americans because if we ever go to war with North Korea, Guess what those people are going to be doing to our missions? They're going to try to attack it.

Right. I don't know, like, how expansive your general knowledge is, but given your, like, relationships in the agency and stuff, would you say that the North Koreans are as sophisticated or more sophisticated or less sophisticated, whatever, as, like, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians in how they conduct their operations?

No, they're a lot rougher. The Cubans are better than they are also because the Cubans got a lot of training from the Soviets. Yeah, the North Koreans are ruthless. They control their country. It's the most hermetically sealed country in the world, and it has been for decades.

Right.

Their operation overseas are not sophisticated because let's face it, they only have 2 enemies, South Koreans and Americans. They don't have any other enemies. They're not going to attack Germans or British or anything. They don't care about them. It's Americans and the South Koreans, because that's what they want, is to take over South Korea. And so for them, their operations are mostly illegal operations to get funding in order to buy the computers and the materials and whatever it is that they cannot get because of the embargo. That's how you make it up the ranks in their intel service. So they're more of a criminal organization with 2 enemies, you know, us and the South Koreans. And they deal in drugs, they smuggle people into the United States. That's the one they allowed me to talk about in the book. And they're really dirty players. I mean, they're super nuts.

Yeah, the counterfeiting.

Oh, the supernode. Yeah, that's a world-class operation and their hacking capabilities. Yeah, you know, for a country as— but again, it's closed, it's controlled, and is sanctioned by the government to a degree that is fine. I mean, that's how they get their goods and their money.

How does North Korea though? Because I would think that when these people get out to another country, to another station, or location and they see how life is outside of North Korea, they have to be a true blue believer.

They're here in New York.

They have to be a true blue believer to not go walk straight into an agency, an embassy or whatever, and go, hey, I have information on North Korea. How do they keep them under thumb?

It's actually very brutally. First of all, you got to understand these people are heavily brainwashed. But we do get defectors. We actually got a couple of high-level defectors during my tenure, but those are few and far between. What they do is they do not send anybody overseas that doesn't leave at least one of their children behind.

Mm-hmm.

So if you have a daughter and a son, your daughter or your son will remain in North Korea, and that is their assurance that because if you do defect, that kid will be killed or worse.

So in the book, I mean, you're saying you did get a couple of them to flip, but it sounds like a lot of them you compromised and they basically told you to fuck off and went back home. But it almost— I mean, I'm trying to read around the redactions that the agency put in here, of course, but it sounds like it was kind of like a death sentence for them. Even though they rejected you and turned you down, going back home, they were going back home compromised.

Yeah, they were going back home compromised and they were, you know, they had embarrassed the North Korean government and we had helped them. That was the bottom line. Yeah. Their careers were finished and their operations were shut down because the one that I talk about was a guy that was actually, you know, doing some pretty nasty stuff targeting the United States. And, you know, all that blew up and that was a pretty big embarrassment for them. And in that country, they were PNG'd.

Yeah, there's another way to take them off the chessboard.

How do you—

That's right.

I, I, I don't want to like throw salt or whatever, but like, how do you feel when you see Americans like professional basketball players or celebrities or whomever who think that they're— who might think that they're doing good by going over there to be an ambassador? Um, but how does that make you feel?

Well, it, it irks me because you got to understand that the same thing happens to Cuba. You know, you have These movie stars primarily that go to Cuba and they worship the revolution and they come back with Che Guevara t-shirts without ever really knowing what Che Guevara really did.

Right.

He was an assassin. He killed people tied to telephone poles kind of stuff for interrogation. So there's this— we have politicians that go to Cuba. We have movie stars that go to Cuba. and go to North Korea. And what they don't understand is this is, you know, Hanoi Jane kind of stuff. Uh, you're undermining your country and legitimizing a ruthless regime. I mean, Castro has been in power— well, the Castro regime has been in power for over 60 years.

Right.

And so has North Korea.

Right.

And those people have been, you know, annihilated, the opposition killed people enslaved, you know, uh, and how do you forgive that? And when, when I see people being that naive— and what scares me even more, guys, is this socialist utopia idea that is circulating in our youth, uh, where, you know, hey, everything is free and everybody's equal and let's go far left. Um, you know, people got to understand that, that socialism is just a mask that communism wears.

Well, and you know what they say about that, that Marxism just hasn't been done right, that they have the answer, right?

That these other countries haven't done it right. Of course, but that's the joke since 1917, because name me one single country that has been under communist rule that has prospered.

Right.

Poland? Czechoslovakia? Cuba? Venezuela? Come on. I mean, Nicaragua? all those countries become worse no matter what their problems are once communists take over.

Yeah.

And it's long-term.

Well, as you said, when the mask drops, you often end up with Bolsheviks and Gaddafis and Castros, and it's not a pretty situation.

Absolutely. And guys, I mean, you know, one of the things that was amazing to me is that we were surprised that Putin did what he did with the Ukraine.

Right.

If you look at the history of the Soviet Union, from Stalin to Khrushchev to Putin, that kind of individual is the rule, not the exception. Second, he even said it when he took over power, was the first thing he said, I will reconstitute the Soviet Union to its old glory. That's a clue. Right, right, right, right.

Because we have heard modern politicians praise the Cuban literacy program.

Yeah. Oh, and their medical program. It's amazing. There is free education and everybody does get to learn to read and write, just like in a lot of the other countries of the world now. And that was the literacy campaigns. And they taught the fact that they have more doctors than anybody else. And they do have a lot of doctors, but you know what? Most of those doctors do not work in the island. They literally prostitute those to Venezuela and other countries to be doctors, and they charge that country a fee, and the doctors get crapola. So, and in Cuba, medicines— if you go to a pharmacy in Cuba, you're lucky if there's 4 bottles on the shelf. A lot of the families from Miami have to send stuff to, you know, to their family for antibiotics. And God forbid that you have major, major illnesses. So they have a lot of doctors, very bad medical capability. They have a lot of literate people, but they have no work. You could graduate from college and you're still on the streets hustling because there's very little business, although that's changed a little bit. There's a few little cracks on the vase there that we're hoping lead to bigger things.

But it is very, very, very disturbing for me because I know people that have died in every single one of those different incarnations fighting communism. And it's just naive. So naive.

Americans often have a very naive view of Cuba. I agree. you know, very— oh, they drive these old cars and it's very quaint for them. And it's like, that's because they live in poverty, man. Like, it's not cool. You know, it's actually sad.

Well, you know, and the biggest problem that we have here, guys, is that as Americans, we have it so good, we don't know how good we have it. We have nothing. The average American has nothing to compare their lifestyle. You know, go to a third world country for 30 days and no iPad, no iPhone, get Montezuma's Revenge as you try to teach kids how to read and Right, or purify water. And then you come back and say, oh gee, this place isn't so bad after all.

Speaking of which, Rick, can you tell us about Shangri-La, where you're in an East African country, I believe, although it's not named in here, and you kind of got sent in to stand up a burgeoning intelligence capability? It was felt that our intelligence gathering capability was inadequate in this country, and they sent you in to stand up a new station, I suppose?

Yeah, we were there as a team. All my guys were former this or former that. They were all case officers, but they also had strong paramilitary skills. And we were sent there because the place had been dormant. We had not been doing much there. And this place was, at the time, and for the longest time, it was a radical Muslim country in Africa. It was a hotel for terrorists. Terrorists of all ilk could go there, and if they paid a fee, they had protection. So we were there in the country trying to recruit sources that would tell us what was going on. We were also there trying to, with the information that was provided from headquarters, from other human sources or signals intelligence sources or satellite, trying to geolocate possible safe houses and stuff that the bad guys were operating out of. So in case we did have to go in there, at least we would know, okay, so-and-so lives in that house and drives that red car. So the biggest challenge for us though is this is an African country. 99% of the people are Black. So most of our snooping and pooping was done with— in disguise, literally wearing masks that resembled Black Africans, um, that, you know, if somebody saw you in the car would never have a second thought that you were not Anything but a person from that country.

A lot of fun.

It sounds like it was pretty austere out there too.

Yeah, it was. We were top of the food chain. I mean, we were loaded up, we were always gunned up, we were body armored and going to places even at night in soft-skinned vehicles because we couldn't have diplomatic vehicles going on these operations. So we use Local vehicles, thin skin, and body armor, and guns, and packs of cigarettes in case we came to a—

A checkpoint.

To a guard post or something, checkpoint, that you could give them a box of them, they would just let you go.

Even with that, though, like, they're— you know, they're even, like, with body armor and loaded for bear, like, there's still gotta be that adrenaline spike because against a couple technicals, like, what's your thin-skinned vehicle?

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, you know, and you just touched on something that is very, very important. You may have guns on you or not have guns on you, but in our, like I said earlier, in our business, you're trying to fly under the radar.

Right.

You're not reacting to, you know, you're not targeting somebody for, you know, you're not taking down a house in Afghanistan, you know, an A-team outside, squeeze, squeeze, flashbang, go in kind of stuff. you are doing tradecraft-based stuff. So when anything that is an anomaly, whether you're carrying a pistol or an M4, and whether you have body armor or not, you're reacting to a threat. And it's like in the Philippines situation, the adrenaline jolt is substantial. So when you're doing these things at night, you're doing it cool, calm, and collected, but you have to be ready for a reaction. And we had a couple of episodes, I think one of them at least is demonstrated in the book where they were following us and we made sure that they understood that that wasn't going to lead to anything good for them.

Yeah.

Wow.

So as time goes on, Rick, we're leading up to 2001. I was wondering, you were in CTC. I was wondering if you could tell us about that morning of 9/11 and what it was like in CTC that morning. when the attacks happened?

We all know where we were that day and we all have the scars from it. I took over as Chief of Ops at the Counterterrorist Center in May of 2001. That's when I came out of that Muslim radical country and I replaced my friend Hank Crumpton. And come 9/11, you know, we were getting an incredible amount of chatter about something going on with al-Qaeda. We knew that they were planning something major because of the words that they were using, the level of transmissions that were going on, the activities of people that we had under surveillance worldwide. And then the opposite beginning to where all of a sudden the people we were following disappear. And that's another clue that they're planning something. But we did not know what it was. So yeah, I was standing outside Kofor's office when that first airplane hit the building, and I saw it on the TV. And shortly thereafter, we, you know, CTC was very eclectic in the sense that we had representation from every federal agency there. We've always had Secret Service, DS, you know, military guys, DEA guys, And we had an FAA guy that came to me after the first plane crash and he says, sir, we have a problem.

And I said, what's up? He goes, we have 4 aircraft that have activated their emergency signal and they're not responding. And right about that time, we see the second, because at first we thought it was a Cessna that had hit a building in New York.

Mm-hmm.

That second was a lot clearer and that it was a very big aircraft. Now we knew this was not a coincidence, that this was an attack. And, you know, obviously we rose to the occasion as an agency. You know, the rumors and the thought was that one of those planes was destined for the agency. One hit the Pentagon, one hit the Twin Towers, and that one of them was going to be used against the agency. Because, you know, what a great place to take down if, you know, if you're going to be fighting a long-term war. And the CIA and most federal buildings were evacuated. And the building was evacuated except for a great amount of people from CTC stayed. Kofod made it clear, hey, if you got family issues, you got to go get your kid out of school, go. If you want to come back, come back. But it was an inordinate amount of men and women that stayed behind. And people that were not even in the center would come from other divisions and say, we want to and they would stay. So it was a very painful moment because we knew that something was about to happen.

Nothing of this magnitude or of this impact, but it activated us and we started working on finding out who it was and what we were going to do about it.

The way you write it in the book is like people were tacking up maps of Afghanistan up on the wall within an hour.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, the energy level went through the roof. I reached out to Hank Crumpton, who had just gone down to Canberra to be the chief, real cushy job, especially for a great outdoor guy like him. He's a big hunter. And I called him up and I say, hey, man, you know, we're talking, we need a guy like you here to lead, you know, from headquarters, put together the stuff against Afghanistan. And God bless him. I mean, you know, his household goods were still unpacked and he came back. He came back to do that. So a lot of people stood up. We had 2 or 3 guys. The guy that became Hank Crumpton's deputy in special operations literally walked into my office 2 days after 9/11 or a day after 9/11 with his orders, said, I have my retirement orders in my hand. If you give me any job, including bringing you coffee, I will tear these papers up. I said, I like this guy. Well, I G2'd him and the guy was a stud, you know, former this, former that. And so I called Hancock and I said, hey, I think I got your deputy.

And to this day, we're great friends and he's a great patriot. But we also had 2 other paramilitary guys who had actually left the agency and were working for Coca-Cola in executive comp— level of jobs, and they came back, same thing. They gave everything up to come back and not miss this fight. So that's very rewarding, and it's very telling of the quality of people that really, that are really drawn to the agency, not the Jason Bornes or the American-made crap that's out there.

Could you tell us about rolling up, quote unquote, Mustafa that month? In your book, he was on an, in air quotes, Mustafa, he was on an airliner. He was a terrorist?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the name that we used for him because we were not allowed to say the real name. This guy was a terrorist, and he was captured after an op that went bad for him, hijacking, and he had killed some Americans. So this analyst from the center came over and tells me about this guy that is getting out of jail. in this particular third world country. And that, uh, and I said, so this is right after 9/11. And I said, so he says, well, we got paper on him, you know, he killed Americans. So long-winded story is that we actually approached the right people in that country and made sure that when he got put on a plane, he would go the route that we wanted him to go through. And, um, he got on this airplane. He'd been in the jail in one of these third world countries for 14 years. And he gets on the plane. He had window seat 17A. B was bought, but nobody showed up. C was a Japanese guy with Playboy and Hustler magazines who was actually a case officer. So, and behind him was one of my Navy SEAL buddies in case he got any ideas of doing anything Awkward.

And so the idea of the Japanese guy was no threat because he's an Asian.

Right.

Playboy magazine and Hustler magazines, this guy hasn't seen a woman in 14 years. And the Japanese guy says, yeah, dozo, look at him. You know, they're used to look. So that distracted him for part of the flight because the rules were when we got to that stop point in another country, a very, very good ally. We had to get him before he set foot on the ground. We had to get him off the ladder because then, you know, if he said, I want asylum, you're done.

Right.

And everything's compromised. So this guy was well-behaved all through. When we landed, this is one of these aircraft that you either go forward, half the plane goes to the front and half the plane goes to the back, and they have these long ladders. He was supposed to go out the back. And when he got up, there was a lady that was part of our surveillance there, and I think she was FBI. And she made like a nanosecond eye contact with this guy. That's all it took. He freaked out and started going through the front of the airplane. Well, the van with the 2 FBI guys and our SAD guys were in the back. The FBI guys were going to put the cuffs and read him his rights. But we, you know, our guys were the ones who were going to duct tape him and grab him. So he starts, instead of going out the back, he starts going out the front. We're trying to get comms to the van that it needs to go to the front. And my SEAL team buddy starts following the guy out to the front of the airplane. And the guy starts running.

He doesn't even notice that this guy's behind him. He starts going down the stairs when the van pulls up and he immediately looks at it, turns around, starts running back up. And my buddy grabbed him by the neck and said, Hey! Welcome to America, motherfucker. And threw him in the van. So it's—

He ran right into the SEAL, right?

Yep. Yeah, he was right there and he bumped into him. He grabbed him by the throat and told him, welcome to America.

You must have to have a lot of coordination, not only with you guys and the FBI, but you have to know if there's an air marshal on board, because if they see something funny, they might respond in the wrong way.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this was a foreign— this was foreign aircraft, right?

Okay.

It wasn't an American aircraft and everything else. But no, that, that is a reality for us. They could be a regular, you know, a security guy from that country, right?

Right.

It's on that aircraft. But nothing was going to be done in the country, in the aircraft. It was done at the debar, you know, where they were deplaning, right?

So, Rick, a kind of common theme in your career is that people come to you and ask you to stand up some new capability or some new intelligence station. Can you put together a team, find a guy to run it? And you keep putting your own name in it because you can't step away from it. You can't let it go. You love to be there on the ground. That's like a theme through your whole book, that you love to be that guy that's there. In 2002, they ask They want to stand up a new capability at CIA. Could you tell us about the team you put together, the training you started to do, what you were trying to accomplish there?

Well, actually, it was— it was— I was Chief of Ops at the center. And you got to understand, for a guy like me, Chief of Ops of CTC doesn't get any sexier than that, right? It's a very cool moniker and a great job and working with some incredible people. But I told Kofra, I said, you know, we're running short here. On we're doing great in Afghanistan. We're really kicking the bejesus out of them. But these guys are in all over the world with impunity, and you know we need to be able to target these individuals and have the capability to neutralize their activity, disrupt their activity. You know if if if if we see that there is intelligence indicated that whether it's Hezbollah. Or Hamas or Al-Qaeda or whoever. ISIS didn't exist at the time. So Cofer looked at me, it was a Friday, he says, well, you're the chief of ops, fix it. So I spent the weekend writing up my op order and Monday I briefed him and I said, this is what I want to do. And I told him, I said, look, we're not going to be targeting heads of organizations.

We already got the bin Laden task force for that. Plus they're hard to get. They're not as easy. We're not after the shooters. This is not a punitive capability. This is a preventive and disruptive capability that I'm proposing. And the idea, the concept was target the soft underbelly of any criminal organization, and terrorists are criminal just like everybody else, and that's the support mechanisms because the support mechanism has to have and a public persona. You cannot be a support element if you cannot go to the lawyer or to the bank or to the safe house or get the doctor.

Right!

You know, those are the individuals that really move organizations, and when you eviscerate them there, that's major damage. So in a nutshell, the concept was, give me, say, 30 guys that we start making book on in different parts of the world. They're all terrorists or narco-traffickers of that we know who they are, we know they're bad, but we know that they're crucial elements of their support mechanisms. And we know that we have the intelligence to support that. So the idea was we— our— my team would go out and make book on these guys, establish patterns of life, and then come up with, you know, okay, so what car is he driving? Where does he live? What boyfriend he has or girlfriend he has? You know, what mosque he goes or what bar he goes to, whatever it was, we knew what that individual was doing. And then we would come up with 3 operational scenarios where we could disrupt members of that organization when we had intelligence like we had in 9/11, prior to 9/11, that indicated that something was happening.

Right.

And my argument to Kofor was, and to the DCI, I said, sir, if we would've had this capability before 9/11, and we would have been able to grab 3 different Al-Qaeda support guys in 3 different parts of the world, what do you think they would have done? Slammed the brakes.

Right.

We're penetrated. How did they know? They neutralized 3 of our major guys. And I'm not talking about just killing them. I mean, I'm talking you could duct tape them, rendition. You could, you know, you could put drugs in their car or fake explosives in their car and compromise them to the locals, whatever. Everything was on the table. But it was being able to have that capability on the books. And then Kofor says, I love it. I like it. Get ready to brief the DCI and find me somebody who can lead this team. I said, I already got them. He goes, who? I go, me. He kicked me out of his office. He says, you're my chief of ops. You're not going back on the street. Well, I circled back in the afternoon with his deputy, Ben Bark, who was a very dear friend of mine. And we talked to him and said, well, look, boss, you know that me giving up the chief ops job, It's hard, but I know that this isn't— this is in my wheelhouse, and it's my concept. I believe in it, and I can make it work. So he gave in, and he allowed me to, uh, to run the, uh, that, that program.

Unfortunately, um, by this time, we're, we're already talking late 2002 by the time we get the group together and started doing our snooping. And, uh, you know, the, the calcium from the spine and the testosterone started dropping. with time, and politics kicked in. And, you know, you can't run special operations through the optic of— with politics as an optic.

But you did get the chance to brief Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice on the capability.

Yeah, and I was very, very, very pleasantly surprised that they allowed me to, uh, to talk about that, that part of it. They allowed me to talk about the concept and the briefing, they did not allow me to talk about the cool stuff that we did, and we did cool stuff, but I can't talk about that. Yeah, but I did brief Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, uh, on a particular one of these operations and the overall concept.

So it did go operational? There were some things that got greenlit?

No, that was the problem. Cheney and Condoleezza said, we love this, keep developing it. When you are ready, to pull one of these, come back and brief us, and we'll brief the right people in Congress, and we will get this done. This is the kind of stuff we, we're, we're supposed to be doing. And you're right, Rick, we wish that we would have had this capability before 9/11, um, but nothing was ever, um— we were not allowed to do what we were supposed to be doing.

And not from that level, but from levels above you inside?

No, it was internal. Yeah, it was more in the agency.

What was that like for you, from having gone— having gone from a PJ to like a paramilitary guy on the ground, you know, in, in the whole country of Sandinista?

Several years of work into this, and then be— to be told, yeah, we don't need you.

And then as you get up into the more SIS, which for people who don't know in the government is like an executive position, and You run into these internal blockades, even when the higher-ups in the government are saying, yes, we want this, but people above you in the agency or whatever organization are saying, it's a political risk for us.

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, it was a sobering moment because there was a tipping point. And to clarify, they would have loved to keep the team on paper training because it briefs really well. You know, when you've already told the Vice President of the United States you could do this. So their goal was— and my deputy, who was always smarter than I ever was, he told me one day, he says, boss, the problem is they didn't expect us to succeed to the level that we have this quickly.

Right!

Being able to stand up the team. So we had one particular target that was being sponsored by a very senior division chief who to this day is a very dear friend of mine. And, um, we went and we were— we, we had done incredible sleuth hunt work on this guy. We had him coming and going. We had, you know, literally we knew what he had for lunch. And, um, we went to present it to the DDO and our DCI, the Director of Operations, the director of the agency. And I'm sitting there briefing from notes, no, nothing electronic. All my, all my programs were standalone stuff. And I'm briefing and briefing, and they're asking questions. And we already had gone through a, uh, through a screening process by other senior guys about our tradecraft and CI and all that. Passed with flying colors. And when I finished, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the DDO said to the director, he said, well, Mr. Director, um, I'll never forget the words. He said, there's no doubt in our minds that Prado and his team cannot only do this, but get away with it. And I went, oh yes.

And then he said, however, comma, we have to look at the political implications of making this happen. The division chief that was on the table closed his book. He was a very dapper guy, straightened out his jacket, his suit, and walked out. I went downstairs. Jose Rodriguez had taken over for Kofar Black, and so now he was the director. He was my boss in CTC. Jose and I've been great friends since the 1990s, early 1990s. And I went to him and said, hey, Pepe, you know, this just happened and I can't keep this team. I had pick of the litter. Imagine you mentioned SIS, you know, SIS for us is flag rank in the military, it's executive and high order. 3 of my guys that were in the team with me, 3, when they retired, one was an S— 2 were SIS-4s, one was an SIS-5. So I had pick of the litter, I had the guys with the, with a PM intel background that were meat eaters and intellectual and could run things. It could be at the NSC and all this happy horseshit. And I couldn't keep these guys rappelling upside down, popping grenades, flashbangs.

You know, they had a career that they deserved. So that's what I, you know, I told Jose, I said, we need to put this on the shelf. If they ever get serious about it, then we can try to resuscitate it. But we gotta get these guys back into mainstream careers because if not, we're doing them harm.

Right.

And then shortly thereafter, I decided to pull the plug. I, you know, I had had such a great ride But up to then, including what we were able to do then, just because the fact that I was able to put that together was a huge feeling of, here I am, a senior officer. And I went from leading and managing 300, 400, 500 people, 300 before and 500 after 9/11, to a team of 12, including 2 analysts. So it was a demotion for lack of it. Those were some of the best years of my life on the street. And I didn't want to end up in another bureaucratic position pushing paper as a this, that, or division chief or deputy division chief. Right. And I decided to pull the plug.

Rick, I mean, you, you talk about applying to other jobs in the agency, and it became clear to you that— I mean, sadly, you know, not a— not the ending of your career that you really wanted, but it became clear that they didn't really want you anymore. And so, you kind of left the agency in a way that I think it would be natural to be very bitter about. And I think you were. You had some consternation about that. But I really respected what you wrote in your book that you kind of did some self-reflection and thinking about that. And you realized that there are guys like us, all of us, who come away with some bad experiences. But if you let that make you bitter, it really comes to define who you are as a man, who you are as a person, and the entire rest of your life. And that if you become that person, it's like you're flushing everything you worked for and everything you fought for through your whole life down the toilet.

Absolutely.

Your entire career, 20-some-odd years in your case. And you made a conscious decision not to be that person. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about that. I thought that was really the message that really resonated with me reading this.

Well, it was crucial for me. I had a couple of friends that had been ousted themselves, you know, and they didn't get that one promotion that they knew that they deserved because it was politically given to somebody else. And this is the dangers of having agencies that are not run by operators, you know. Operations needs to be run at the leadership level and on the street by people that know what the hell they're talking about. But so I, you know, I was disappointed. I put in for 3 jobs. They all said I was very qualified. But there was always, oh no, we— they gave it to so-and-so because he just came back from Bujumbura or whatever the hell it was. And after the third one, one of my friends did come up with a job, which was to take over his— he was in charge of military affairs. And Dick was a very dear friend of mine from the Contra days. And he said, Rick, I'm retired in 6 months. Come be my deputy for 6 months and then you could take this. It's your SIS-3 automatic. And I was going to take it, but then I said to myself, you know, I have spent the last 2 years on the ground, a year before that in Shangri-La, before that Bin Laden station, before that, you know, after that Korea, and so on and so on and so on.

Why do I want to end up my job holding hands of generals that are coming to my building to get briefed on things? You know? And that's basically the way I looked at it. I said, I want to go on my high. And so I put in my papers to retire. And, you know, again, you heard about my upbringing. I learned very early on from my father and my grandfather, who's highlighted a lot in the book because he was, again, one of my first heroes. that a man has to have a certain calmness when things are bad. And I didn't, you know, I didn't blow a fuse. I didn't start throwing things. I was feeling it. And I remember when I turned my badge in and I got in that car, I had to lower the window because I, you know, I was choked up. I mean, this was, it was a very hard decision. I got home. We had a little gazebo that we had just built in back of our house in Fairfax. And my wife, you know, we'll be married 40 years this year, so she knows me fairly well. And, uh, she saw me and she just turned around and started going the other direction.

So I grabbed a, a very nice cigar, an Arturo Fuentes Maduro, and a bottle of Barolo— I'm sorry, Barolo Italian wine. And I sat in that gazebo and I started going through my career. And, you know, I believe in divine intervention. I believe that God does put us in our path. And I also believe that God puts things in our, in our hearts and in our minds that it's— we got to listen. And all of a sudden it came to me, and I started from the very first day of the agency, going through the people and what I did. And every time that it was a good person or a good op, I, I imagined taking a crystal marble and put it in, in a vase. And every time that it was some Alpha Hotel that had really no business being my boss, or, or, or political things, I would put that in a black marble and throw it in the trash can. And I went through the bottle of Barolo and the cigar through this whole process. And at the end, I was cleansed because I, I realized, I said, you have had such an incredibly charmed life, much less career.

I mean, being a PJ was the highlight of my life at that time.

Mm-hmm.

And then, you know, getting into the agency. So how are you gonna, like you said very eloquently, how am I gonna flush that down the toilet along with all this good stuff? And to this day, and I'm looking at it right now, it's across from where I'm sitting, I have a— I bought a vase that has a dragon on it because that's my, uh, that's my— that was my call sign. And it's full of crystal marbles and it's got a knife stuck through it. And every time I get frustrated with things, I just look over there and it reminds me to focus on the positive things that we can do and quit bitching like, uh, like, you know.

Can you show us, Rick? Can you show it to us?

Uh, yeah, I, uh, I, I don't have to see it. Let me see if I can turn this thing around. You have to guide me here a little bit. Uh, are you seeing that wall?

We see the wall, the back wall.

Yep.

Uh, we see your monitor right now.

Okay. And the lamp too. Okay, so you see that there's a photo of me in 2 cars?

Okay. Uh, tilt your laptop screen up for us, please.

Up?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we see the plaque.

Okay, and then there's—

Oh yes, I do see it.

Yes. Yep, there's a vase there with the marbles and the knife through it.

Ah, that's what—

okay, that's, uh, you've got, you've got— I mean, honestly, for most people, just the, the, the, um, the hero wall that you have behind you, like, is a ma— is, is massive. And then for you to turn your laptop around And it's an entire room of that. It's just, I mean, it's just a testament to your incredible career.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, thank you guys. But, you know, at the same time, it's a testament to the quality of people that we have in my agency.

And I think that was a really nice part of your book too, is that you spent some time talking about like people who looked after you, mentored you, taught you, people who kind of like looked after you even when they didn't even know you. they didn't really owe you anything, but they're like, yeah, this guy's doing the right thing. We want to keep him on track. And I thought that was a really nice part of your book.

Yeah. I mean, there's no successful operations officer in the agency that doesn't have memories that they can, once they retire, they could put up on the wall. Of course, I have my pararescue stuff. I always harp about that. I would've never gotten into the agency if I had not been a PJ. That was my path. So I have my pararescue stuff, I have my family stuff, and then I have, you know, it's my I love me wall. These are the things, you know, training with the DEA guys, Secret Service firearms instructor course, you know, jumping in middle— in the Middle Eastern country and getting my jump wings, and all that kind of stuff is on the wall. And this is where I work, and that kind of motivates me.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Post-career Rick? Not a whole lot in your book about it, but you went— Dewey Claridge asked you to come and meet with him. I mean, a spymaster if ever there was one, a guy who knew how to run human networks like nobody else, asked you to come and see him out on the West Coast. There's a little chapter here in your book about that. Can you tell us about that meeting and how that happened?

Yeah, well, Dewey Claridge was the quintessential CIA James Bond guy. He was the dapper dresser. He always had Brioni suits on. I mean, he was always— and he became a mentor of mine because he was Casey's pit bull in the counter program. And he knew that for the, you know, the first year plus of that, that I was the only guy in the camp. So here I am, you know, a GS-10, GS-11, And he knows who Rick Prado is, Alex. So he was my mentor in many occasions, including getting me, you know, the education. And he was instrumental in me getting into Ground Branch. So when he retired, obviously, you know, I was there for him and we stayed in touch. And he was running some really incredible things. I mean, remember, he's the guy that created the Counterterror Center. That was his idea. And his— he's the one that— the first chief of that was Dewey Claridge. So he calls me. And what happened, I was running some other things and I would go to California out of San Diego, a couple of SEAL Team buddies of mine there. And he lived just outside San Diego.

So I would always call him, hey, are you free for lunch? This and the other. And one of the times he called me at the house, he goes, hey, next time you come across, I need you to come over. I want to run some things by you. I said, sure thing, boss. No problem. So I go over there with my SEAL buddy, Steve. And we sat down and he says, look, and you talk about I love me wall, he had an I love me living room. He had a .30 cal water-cooled machine gun at the end of the hall. I mean, he had the coolest stuff I've ever seen. And he says, you know, Rick, I'm getting old. There's going to come a time when I'm going to have to back off this stuff. There's some programs that I want you to take over. And, you know, I'm sitting here, I'm slack-jawed. He started to talk to me about these programs. And he says that, you know, these are leads that I know that you could make. And I did. I cannot talk about any of that. That's why it's not in the book. It's never been compromised.

It's never made the news. So it's a very good period in my life, the things that I was able to do post-retirement for God and country again. You know, guys, since I went into pararescue, I never worked in anything that wasn't trying to contribute back and pay my debt of honor to the United States. I'm very proud of that.

It's amazing. And, you know, it's funny because we've had other Cuban Americans on, and this is a very strong theme amongst Cuban Americans who have found their way into the military and whatnot, that, you know, that sense of getting out of Cuba and knowing what those forces that are arrayed, you know, against freedom look like up close and personal. And then the debt that they feel to the United States or, you know, to liberty that many of us, we might be patriotic or whatever, but we've never had to deal with that firsthand, you know, and how strongly that that flame burns is— it's just incredible.

Well, I think it goes back to the comment that I made earlier, Dave, that, uh, you know, we don't know how good we have it in this country.

Yeah.

And guys like myself and, you know, our Vietnamese, uh, folks that came over, the Venezuelans that have come over, uh, fleeing terrorism, fleeing communism, um, those individuals have something to compare it to. I mean, if you look at our special operations, I taught at Fort Bragg for 7 years at the ASOT course. And I was always in awe of how many Asians and Hispanics were in the SOF course. It was really refreshing for me to say, hey, these are all guys that we don't— I don't call myself, nobody in my family calls themselves Cuban Americans. We're Americans that happen to have been born in Cuba. And by the way, I got 2 boys that have been in service, and one of them has combat creds. I won't go any further because that's, you know, that's his life. And, you know, we'll have him on down the line on another interview. I'll hook you guys up in about 10 years. He's just a major right now.

Haha.

2 combat tours and a whole bunch of stuff. And the other one, the other one also did 6 years. in the military, and he's going back now as an officer when he finishes his schooling. So, um, anyway, the— for, for, for us who have come from a different place, we worship the United States because we see that it is far from perfect. It's made from humans, let's face it.

Right.

But it is the best thing that we have out there. And I don't care if, you know, if you're in Italy or if you're in Germany, I wouldn't trade, and I've been to all of them, I wouldn't trade any other country for what we have here in the United States. And I try to make that part of my book also. That's that debt of honor that we should all have. And I'm very proud to say that all 3 of my kids are serving in one way or another.

Well, I'll say that, I mean, we and the United States in general, like, we are very fortunate to have men like that.

Yeah, we obviously benefited from having so many Cuban Americans come here. We've interviewed Ruben Garcia, Eric Miyares. I mean, we've really had some incredible folks on here with incredible stories.

And even though it feels like our government gets like this, it got like this after Vietnam. It goes through these phases where it ramps up these programs, and then the guys who can do those things, when the government is done. Like, oh, like, that's all a little, like, much for us or politically intense for us. Like, uh, let's, you know, let's bring in the guys who, who haven't, you know, accomplished these missions for United— you know, for America to represent us now or to write these policies now. Where I, I feel as though, like, our government has a tendency to Use people like you— not use you because you're there for the purpose, but to, to use your abilities.

That they're not using you. I think the correct terminology would be that they don't use you the way that you're capable of being, right? I think that that is—

That they use your capabilities, but then when it— when, when they want to distance themselves from it, you know, you, you guys aren't like— you're not running the CIA now.

Right.

You know, it's like, okay, we're good.

So, Rick, again, the last part of this I think that we haven't really covered is you got hired by Erik Prince to go work at Blackwater after your time at the agency. What was going on there?

I was the first CIA officer employed at Blackwater. And what happened was when I was doing the alleged training that I did at the end of my career. I didn't want to do it in any of our black sites because people know me. And if we're doing this kind of stuff, they're going to come to the right conclusion. So I already had met Eric because he was providing the security for our guys in Kabul.

Mm-hmm.

So I, you know, in Blackwater at the time was, you know, a hut with a couple of ranges. It was, you know, it was a pretty modest setup, a little clubhouse and, you know, very, very sterile. And I went to him and I said, look, you know, there's certain skills that I need to train on. And, you know, don't ask any questions and I'll tell you what I need for training. And so that's when we got close and he was watching us, you know, using suppressed weapons and, you know, jump, you know, riding motorcycles and dumping them and shooting over the tanks and all this kind of ninja stuff. And he was just fascinated. And so he said, look, you know, when I retired, he called me up and he said, I want you to come. And I don't know exactly what you were doing, but I believe that that's the kind of stuff that our country needs to be able to do. And I don't want this to be part of my business. I want to be this my payback to the country. And I'm going like, okay, so you mean I'm going to be doing exactly what I've done all my life, but now you're going to pay me corporate money?

He goes, yeah. I said, okay. That'll work. And the rest is history. Like I said, fortunately, I won't talk about those things because none of those capabilities were ever compromised. We had substantial successes, intelligence successes. This wasn't hit teams, guys. We were not shooting Abu Abu out of windows and stuff like that. We were bringing home some really great intelligence with the capabilities that worldwide that we developed. And, you know, there's a lot of controversy with Erik Prince now. There was back then also, but that was a political thing. Now, you know, supposedly he's involved in this and involved in that. I don't know anything about that. I still have him in high regards. I'm an intelligence officer, so I work from facts.

Mm-hmm.

And the facts are that I know that the Erik Prince that I worked with for 8 years was a patriot. And these operations were not a business thing. As a matter of fact, they really just reimbursed us for our expenses to put these networks together and all my travel and all my recruiting and all this kind of stuff and all the training of teams and all that other stuff. They would just reimburse us for it. So it was a very, again, blessed again. I landed in a place where I know I made a difference for those years. And, you know, the book is my last firefight. You know, the book is my last attempt to— I just turned 71 last week. So, you know, it's time I grow up and I just want to, you know, ride my horse, ride my motorcycle, and chase my wife.

You say in the book that you're working for the intelligence community, but not the CIA during that timeframe.

It was actually both, on and off. It was— we had the menu of capabilities. And when they needed to visit one of our capabilities, all— it was open to all intel and military, whoever wanted everything. Yeah.

But this was not assassinations. It was not renditions. It was intelligence.

Well, it could have been renditions. I'm not going to say that. I mean, we created overseas teams that were capable of doing intelligence work, etc. And that's as far as I will go. But it was not a punitive assassin squad. That, I guarantee you, wasn't anything we were doing.

Rick, you know, because you also mentioned Dewey Claird, who also sort of maintained this sort of intelligence apparatus, even after—

sometimes for profit and sometimes just for fun. It was like something that he enjoyed doing.

What are your views on, on maintaining civilian, outside of government or government-sponsored, but maintaining civilian intelligence, uh, vehicles, um, when the government doesn't see you know, like, who do we have in Afghanistan prior to 9/11? Like, why do we care about Afghanistan? But you have civilians who can or do do this kind of stuff. Where do you see their role in the future and going forward?

It is— it has always been there, guys. Uh, you know, first of all, the main job of the agency is to recruit foreign assets that can give us the intelligence that our country needs to make the right geopolitical decisions and to survive. It's how we take care of our folks, whether it's counterterrorism, counternarcotics, whether it's communism, how do we protect them? So that's the first thing that we do. The second thing that the agency does is covert action, black ops. And that is those operations mandated by the White House under our Title 50 authorities, to do whatever they tell us is legal for us to do. Those are the things, because we got to hide the American hand. So for us to develop networks overseas, for example, you used the Afghanistan analogy. Well, we did have people in Afghanistan. We had the Northern Alliance. We had an incredible relationship with the Northern Alliance. I remember being in front of Congress and some staffer that looked like he still had pimples in his face asked me, well, why? I understand that you just approved a large budget to supply helicopters to those narco-trafficking guys in the Northern Alliance.

And I said, you better go back and read your history here. The Northern Alliance is the only ally that we have in Afghanistan. And those guys abhor the Taliban and they abhor narco-traffickers. We had just given them some helicopters, parts, and money for their F-17s. So we developed these kind of sources. and they can act as surrogates for us, collecting intelligence, doing surveillance. I mean, you know, you take 3 tragically white guys and you put them in Africa, you know, your surveillance capabilities are limited, even if you're wearing the fancy stuff.

Right.

Well, the force multiplier is recruit locals that you can vet, polygraph, train, and they become your long-term sources on the ground. That's what the agency does And when—

and then outside of like the CIA and the DIA, these civilian organizations that are sort of a little bit more nebulous but are still conducting these ops, do you feel like there's a place for them to fill in the gaps?

You know, that's the— taint is not the right word, but that's one of the things that they alleged about Blackwater. You know, that, uh, and, and the thing is, these organizations that do work for the community from civilian platforms are first and foremost, for the most part, um, led by people that are former this, that, or the other, whether former agency, former SEAL teams like Eric, and so on and so on. And second, they are under the same scrutiny that the government is. You know, they cannot just go out there and start whacking people or, you know, or doing illegal— everything is approved. The way that these things work with the private sector, or at least it did when I was in it, is the customer, USG, would come to us and say, can you get this?

Right.

Can you get access to this? Can you recruit this? Can you compromise this? Let's say a web, you know, place so you could get to some people's computers, whatever it is. And then we would develop a plan, we would propose it, they would bless it, they would fund it, we would go out, we did it, we came back, they got the goods, and everybody lived happily ever after. So are they necessary? Of course. I mean, look, we are the only police in the world. world. And this is why I pray that the United States never gets forsaken, because the day that we are forsaken, God has decided that the world is going to end, because we are the only thing standing between us and select allies, don't get me wrong. But let's face it, neither my good friends the Brits or the Aussies can take over for the United States if we are destroyed.

Amen.

Right.

So, you know, that capability has to be there. We have to have those kind of tools in our toolbox, whether they're contractors, whether it's foreign nationals, whether it's black ops. We have to be able to do that in order to fight the fight. You know, we play by pretty clean rules compared to our competition. Right.

Rules that—

We recruit for strengths where the Russians and the Chinese will recruit for weaknesses. They'll compromise somebody, you know, dope them up or put, you know, dope them and put an 18-year-old girl in the bed with him or whatever and take pictures. We don't do that, right? But we still have to fight an MMA fight, not by Queensberry rules, right?

Ricks, on that, on that note, uh, I have one user question, uh, from a folk, uh, guy watching the show. He wants to ask you, did you ever have any run-ins with the KGB or with Chinese intelligence during your career?

No, I never worked directly against the KGB. I did have an experience when I was in China that they— obviously, when I go any room overseas, I trap everything. So they had actually gone through my room and that kind of stuff, but I wasn't operational there anyway. I was there with my family. I have worked the North Korean account face to face and the terrorists and the other stuff face to face, but not the KGB.

Guys, we have a couple, couple other questions from him real quick. Also, BPA Izzy, thank you very— he said another great interview. Keep it up. Thank you very much for your generous donation. When you were looking into OBL, Usama bin Laden, what were your opinions on Alex Station? Was it like a Manson family thing in the—

or Mason family thing?

Like in The Looming Towers.

Yeah. That is, again, Hollywood dictating what the agency is supposed to be.

Right.

No. The Bin Laden Task Force, we started in late '95, early '96. And like I said, I'm a plank owner of it. I was a senior ops guy. We had 2 other case officers that were junior to me. The rest were analysts, including the chief, which was an analyst. They became the nucleus that grew and grew and grew into the full bin Laden task force of 9/11 kind of thing. There were some individuals in that task force that had been there for the duration. And that's where the Manson Family idea comes from. You know, that Mike Sawyer is the god and all these people drink the Kool-Aid. And that wasn't true. Now, later on in the career, after he was— after Mike got crushed, because Mike took everything very personal. That's what made him good.

Yeah.

I take everything personal too. But he took, you know, the— when we started seeing—

let me back up.

When we started bin Laden, 8 months afterwards, we knew what bin Laden was doing every day. We had a guy named Billy Waugh who was in charge of surveillance in Khartoum, a very dear friend of mine, legendary Green Beret from the Vietnam MACV-SOG days that was photographing, following, evaluating bin Laden on a daily basis. And at that time, he proposed, and we proposed through Alectation, a bunch of operations where we could have kidnapped him, brought him to justice. We knew what he was doing. All the intel sources, human and everything else, were indicating what he was doing, training terrorists and becoming a godfather. And we didn't. So when we had these opportunities, even after that, we had opportunities to neutralize bin Laden, and we didn't because the political will wasn't there. When we got hit with the Cole—

Yeah.

And then the, the, the 2 embassies in Africa, uh, there was a lot of people in the bin Laden task force that took it very personal.

Right.

They took it very personal because they knew firsthand that we could have stopped this if we would've interdicted back then. So again, it is prostituting the reality of what the agency is. Did we have people that were strong-nosed and, you know, really fanatical about bin Laden? Absolutely. That's what makes us good.

Right.

You know, you can't— you gotta believe in what you're doing if you're working, you know, 50-hour weeks speaks all your life, right? You know, um, but obviously what sells in Hollywood is the Manson Family and the, uh, the inner scene kind of stuff. So the answer is no.

Yeah. And I mean, that must— I can't imagine how crushing that would be to be like the people on that task force, to, to have, I guess, that foresight, right? And then, and then, and then it happens, and then like you said, the Cole, the embassies, and then 9/11. And people are like, how did this happen? And these people who have been working this going, yeah, we know how it happened. We told you it was going to happen.

Yeah. You know, and that's something that Mike did that ended his career. And I can't say I blame him.

Right.

But at the end of the day, we are a military-based organization. where the chain of command and respect for the chain of command is something that, you know, we're a little better than the military because we could have a lieutenant talk to a general.

Right.

But you still have to be respectful and you still have to make your point in a civil way. And my understanding, I was not there when it happened, Mike and a couple of other folks that were with him, you know, they really put the blame on the leadership and, you know, the blood this blood is in your hands, right? And you, you don't do that, right?

That's, you know, yeah, well, it's kind of unfair.

Um, we have a couple more.

The book is Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior by Rick Prado.

Yeah, guys, check it out. It's on Amazon. It's wherever you buy your books.

I, I read a lot of these books for this show, as you can tell. Um, this was a, this was a really insightful one, and I hope you guys will check it out.

Um, Katie, thank you very much. Please ask Rick if he has an opinion on the Cuban Patriot Carlos Bringuer or Valery Kostikov, KGB chief in Mexico City?

No comment on those.

Okay. And Brad, thank you very much. Was there any separation focus from DOD intel operations versus CIA/SAD in Afghanistan, Iraq?

There was collaboration in force. I mean, you know, like when 9/11 happened, happened immediately. I mean, days after, we had representatives from Delta Force and representatives from SEAL Team 6 there. One of them to this day is a very good friend of mine. He ended up being the Chief of Ops at Delta. So, you know, we have that cross-pollination, has always been there. Like I said earlier, CTC especially has always been very, you know, full of sister agencies and military and stuff like In Afghanistan and Iraq, we worked a lot of things together, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan when it came to exploitation of intelligence and being able to real-time bounce it back to the action forces. And as I know you've read about this, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were times where the guys would go out to hit one house and they would end up hitting 3 because they would come out with with, you know, the photo of somebody or a phone, and then that would lead to another house. And before they even got back into their vehicles, they would go to the next house.

And we were—

they were hitting 2 or 3 houses a night. So it was a very robust cooperation. And yeah, it existed, and very proud of that.

So last question I have: what's next for Rick Prado? 71 years old, wrote your memoir, Here we are. What is— what's next? What's in your sights?

I want to stay in shape. I want to ride my horse. I want to ride my motorcycle. And I want to spend as much time as I can with my wife and my kids and grandkids and all that other stuff.

So, so no, no mafia, no renditions, no, no assassinations?

No, definitely, definitely no mafias. I gave those up for Lent back when I was 17 years old. But look, I would be lying to you if I told you that if they knocked on my door tomorrow and they said, hey, could you handle this? And if I thought that I could, obviously I'm not going to be jumping out of airplanes anymore. I've had 3 neck surgeries because of free fall. And I am 71 years old. I'm in pretty good shape for an old man. But when you consider the model year and the mileage, the ninja stuff isn't there. But, you know, if they called me to do something, I could never say no.

Yeah.

But that's not my intent. I'm not looking for it. I'm not looking for work. I've given up my stuff at Fort Bragg, which I loved. I loved working the ASAT course because I was working with Raiders. I was working with SEALs. I was working with PJs, combat controllers, and Green Berets. And it was so revitalizing for me to see these young guys with 3, 4 tours in the combat wanting to go back, willing to go back, it would recharge my batteries for months. But I gave it all up because I need to, you know, I think I did after 51 years. This is it. This is really it.

Yeah. We didn't talk about it enough in this interview, but about your wife Carmen, who stuck by you through all this insanity, just sounds like an incredible story in and of itself.

Well, there's a couple of cool stories about her.

In the book.

Little things that she was able to do. And there's 2 stories that I'm very proud of that women that I highlighted because of their courage and conviction and ingenuity and dedication. And yeah, I'm very proud of my wife. She's Cuban-born also, by the way. So I think that that had a lot to do with her support. She knew And, you know, she's finding out about all this stuff now that she's reading the book. And 90% of the stuff she had no idea except the things that she did for me. Yeah.

Hey, Rick, we have a question from one of our Patreon subscribers that might— like, a lot of people listening to this might have a lot of younger people. And he says, dear Mr. Prado, I was medically, uh, I was not medically qualified for the military, so I stayed in school. Right now I'm in my first year of university going through my bachelor's in computer information systems, and he wants to get his master's in cybersecurity. However, I want to join the agency when I'm done, but I want to be part of like PM missions like you were, but I'm afraid it'll be the same story like when I tried to enlist. Can you tell us a bit about the different courses and how people who are interested in the agency might get in it?

Well, you know, there's 2 distinct paths in the agency. One is through the paramilitary side, and that is Mostly 99.9% former military folks. I can tell you an example. A very dear friend of mine who was a case officer came to me and said, I want to go do this ninja stuff. And he started at CTC and he went to ground branch and he retired as a GS-15. And he's a rotary and fixed-wing pilot, skydiver, shooter, looter, and he's got like 4 or 5 tours in the sandbox. but he did not have medical restrictions to do the paramilitary stuff. And you got to understand that the main problem with paramilitary stuff is you have to be physically able to help your partner. Let's face it, we fight, you know, we go into combat for God and country, but we end up fighting for the person that's left to you and right of you.

Yeah.

So you have to be able to do certain things. That said, there are so many jobs in the agency that are exciting, that they're dangerous, that will let you get good training for shooting and driving and all that other stuff. I know guys that have prosthetics. I have guys that have really bad eyesight and some handicap. They end up being very successful operations officers, but not skydiving out of a C-17A to go into Iran. You know, that's not going to happen.

And some of those tech guys, from what we've talked to in the past, some of those tech guys work side by side with paramilitary officers in a lot of these countries.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, we could not exist as an agency without our intelligence officers, our collectors, our analysts, the people that really have the brain cells and the patience to comb through thousands and thousands, the Mike Scheuers of the world. Okay. Our technical capabilities are paramount for us in both the protecting our communications and exploiting communications. Technology, cyber, all these things are incredible careers for the agency. We even have a paramilitary-like organization in the DDS&T, the Director of Science and Technology, which are— for the longest time, they were called also Specialty Activities Division. Because these are guys and gals who are super high-tech at bugging and doing all kinds of fancy stuff or compromising computers, but they're going out there and doing it themselves. So there's plenty of action in the agency at every level. Don't let your physical limitations keep you from applying to the agency. You will have I mean, I'm a believer, guys. You will have a great career in the agency in spite of the politics, uh, that, that exist and permeate all, all forms of government life. You will have a rewarding career. You really would, folks.

Thanks, Rick.

Rick Prado, Black Ops. This is the book. I hope you guys will go and check it out. Rick, thank you so much for joining us tonight on a Friday evening. We really appreciate it and you sharing your story with us. Next week we're going to be back. We're going to have a MARSOC Raider on the show, talk about his experience deploying overseas. And Rick, final thoughts? Anything you— any final things you want to lay on us before we go?

No, I really appreciate the support, guys, and I would be remiss if I didn't say that, you know, my book made the top 10 in the New York Times bestseller list 10 days after it came out. So I'm very proud of that. And the goal is to educate as many people as possible about what our agency and, and our government and our, our unsung heroes really do on a daily basis.

Folks, like, read the book. And you know what is great about books like this? And we've had these on before, but you know, when, when somebody like Rick writes a book, it has to go through the pre-publication review board. The CIA has to— they read They approve what's in it, and you can go in and literally see where the CIA has blacked that out and said, nope.

Yeah, if you, if you read my book, you can see where I filled in the blanks with my pen.

But, but read this book, you will not regret it. Rick, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys, and thank you for what you do because you guys are supporting us, and that's, that's huge. Thank you very much. God bless.

We're really happy to help share the story, man. Thank you.