Ric Prado - Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior

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I dedicate this book to my family, past and present.

From my Abuelo Emilins constant example of stoic calm in times of tension, to my courageous mom and dad who put me on a plane, solo, to escape communism at the mature age of ten.

In the present, I would not have been successful in my vocation without the unwavering support of my loving wife, Carmen. In the same category, I enjoy the blessing of three wonderful kids, all successful and contributing adults, and my beloved grandson, Christopher. I am also blessed with four wonderful godsons and goddaughters: Betty, Michael David, Vicky, and Marc.

My career was focused on making the world a better place to live for my family, for my God, and for my Country: the United States of America. Long may our flag wave.

Until I began my own journey through the Agency, I had no idea what it took to protect the United States from dangerous forces and people bent on inflicting Americans harm. I was a street kid from Miami with a past, seeking adventure with a purpose and a way to strike back at the revolutionaries who stole my roots. I longed to wear the white hat!

My family had once lived in middle-class comfort in small-town Cuba. We owned a television and a beautiful 1957 Pontiac that was my fathers pride and joy. Then the Castro revolution dumped our world upside down. We lost everything and everyone we loved in a bid to escape and have a chance to live in freedom once again. In desperation, my father got me out first, and I spent my first eight months in the U.S. in a Catholic orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. America offered that freedom, but those first years in Florida were hardscrabble ones indeed. My father worked two jobs and dragged me with him to work on Saturdays. My mother labored away in a sweatshop making shirts. We lived in tiny, run-down apartments and learned to get by on a fraction of what we once enjoyed in pre-Castro Cuba.

We fought our way back to prosperity, chasing our version of the American dream. The path was rocky, and more than once I strayed from it as a kid. I learned to fight, I learned to hustle. I also learned that loyalty is the greatest gift you can share or receive, while betrayal inflicts the brutal wounds to the heart.

The U.S. Air Force gave me purpose and discipline. I became a Pararescueman in 1972, just missing the tail end of the Vietnam War. My path to the Agency was as atypical as the rest of my life in America. Call it fate, call it Gods will, when you find your calling, the tumblers in your heart click into place and suddenly the future makes sense. For me, that moment came as I walked past the Memorial Wall at Langley and realized the depth of my love and appreciation for America. Where else could a Cuban-born, once-orphaned boy go from Miamis back-alley brawls to the heart of the nations first line of defense?

Those fledgling days in the Agency opened the door to a world I did not know existed. Sure, I avidly read Ian Flemings James Bond books, but 007s spy universe bore no resemblance to the full-contact, dark world that became my life for the next few decades. Bond had his Goldfingers and Dr. Nos, but in the shadows we operated in, we faced no such cartoonish villains. Instead, we battled caudillos in communist guise, anarchist insurgencies, narco-terrorist groups, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, traffickers of people, drugs, and illegal weapons.

Id seen my familys life in Cuba destroyed by such people. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency gave me a chance to strike back at them. I started that new life in the jungles of northern Nicaragua, working closely with the Nicaraguan Contrasmen and women vilified by the American press, yet who I knew to be true patriots wanting to liberate their country from the depredations of a carbon copy of Castros regime. With them, I saw firsthand how the Sandinistas marauded through the Nicaraguan countryside, plundering from the already impoverished, inflicting starvation upon a long-suffering population. I saw how their vicious tactics drove desperate, traumatized people into the ranks of the Contras, where they were willing to live in the most primitive conditions imaginable, armed with ancient weapons cast off by the Israeli army. They faced every manner of jungle disease, privation, and sudden death. They did it with virtually no pay, armed only with the resolve that the Sandinista reign of terror had to be stopped if Nicaragua was to ever be free.

For three years, I helped fight the covert war against the communist Ortega regime. I emerged from the jungle, hardened to the realities of the dark world. Id become a blunt instrument, at ease with a weapon in hand and a target to take out. That Cuban kid who lost his native country to revolutionaries now helped cut off some of the communist tentacles that threatened to engulf Latin America.

Ultimately, our Contra program was a definitively successful black op carried out solely by key personnel from the CIA.

But under legendary Bill Casey and Dewey Clarridge (the latter a beloved mentor of mine), this program grew a hundredfold, and our collective effort with the Contras resuscitated the post-Vietnam, decimated CIA back to relevance.

In 1984, the Agency ordered me from the Honduran jungles and sent me to the Farm to learn to be more than a paramilitary operator. I was trained on dead drops, running agents, conducting surveillance, and evading enemy tails. This was another new universe for me, one of finesse in the shadows of everyday life. It stood in stark contrast to the years I spent being at the pointy end of the spear. Yet it was a new way of standing on our nations ramparts that appealed to me. The men and women I met at the Farm were not the Jason Bournes and Ethan Hunts of the silver screen. They were men and women devoted to one cause: keeping our country and our people safe from those who intend to do us harm. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we failed, but that was always our mission, our calling. Our lifes purpose. The same courage, conviction, and guile that it took to operate in the jungles applied to how my colleagues and I operated in a much more complex and more traitorous jungle. A jungle of criminality, corruption, betrayals, and atrocious human rights abuses we were determined to help eradicate.

In the back alleys of the world, I saw how we fought back against these forces, and how sometimes our own sense of right and wrong undermined our ability to stop a foe that behaved with absolutely no scruples or humanity.

From the point of the spear to the velvet fist of the shadow world, my career took me through a full spectrum of how the Agency defends America. When the wall fell, I joined the counterterrorism fight. Like for most of us, 9/11 was a life-changing event for me. I owned the best job in the CIA at the timeChief of Operations with the Counterterrorist Center. But the truth is, that role behind the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda wasnt my course. Every time Ive strayed from the path set forth for me, Ive felt an unease that resonates through my spirit. In this dark hour of our nations history, I knew headquarters was not the place for me.