The Team House - Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior | Ric Prado | Ep. 145

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA equivalent of a two-star general. Black Ops is the story of Ric’s legendary career that spanned two eras, the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism. Operating in the shadows, Ric and his fellow CIA officers fought a little-seen and virtually unknown war to keep USA safe from those who would do it harm. After duty stations in Central, South America, and the Philippines, Black Ops follows Ric into the highest echelons of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia. In late 1995, he became Deputy Chief of Station and co-founding member of the Bin Laden Task Force. Three years later, after serving as head of Korean Operations, Ric took on one of the most dangerous missions of his career: to re-establish a once-abandoned CIA station inside a hostile nation long since considered a front line of the fight against Islamic terrorism. He and his team carried out covert operations and developed assets that proved pivotal in the coming War on Terror. A harrowing memoir of life in the shadowy world of assassins, terrorists, spies and revolutionaries, Black Ops is a testament to the courage, creativity and dedication of the Agency’s Special Activities Group and its elite shadow warriors. Ric's book: "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Ops-Life-Shadow-Warrior/dp/1250271843 Today's sponsors:👇 SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection) https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed. Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The...Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Hey folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in, rate this podcast, let the Teamhouse know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes, or Spotify or whatever else, those ratings really help us out. And we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the team house and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page

and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations. covert ops espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park hi everyone welcome to the team house this is episode one hundred and forty five i believe yes episode one forty five i'm jack murphy here with david park i'm back after my little stay in quarantine last week um but j c 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 the Central Intelligence Agency coming from being an Air Force pararescumann 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 seven or eight years old when the revolution was peaking. I lived in a town near the mountains where Che Guevada supposedly was operating in. And so at that age, I actually saw firefighters 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 mass came off and it was full communism pretty much off the bat. Confuscation of properties, persecution of the opposition. I remember being barely nine years old, eight 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 eight years old. But I was in uniform. And in school, we were in uniform. And they inculcated, if you hear any,

if parents say anything bad about the revolution, you've got to turn them in. So it was a very toxic environment that even for, you know, a nine-year-old I could understand and feel that this was so different to what I grew up with. My father, who was always a very disdictive, 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 was a program was sponsored by the Catholic Church. So, and during the two years that it ran, they brought out 14,000 plus kids whose parents could not come out. So in early April of 62, I came to the United States by myself. Ten days later, two weeks later, I was in a orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado, the Sacred Heart Orphanish in Pueblo, Colorado. And that in itself was also an experience. So, you know, and it's funny, guys, 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 to put an only child on an airplane to a country that never been into, 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 going to grow up in a communist country. Yeah, that they loved you so much, they're willing to roll the dice like that with their boy. Yeah, when I,

when our oldest son was 10, I asked my wife, I think, do you think that we would have the courage to do same? And we both agreed that, you know, 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. So it's such a different period. You know, when we first moved up to Havana to try to get out of the country, as soon as we drove in, I saw three guys hanging from trees and telephone poles

with signs around the next that said contra revolutionaries. So, you know, those things getting printed 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 my memory comes back and I saw the priest that was there with the sign for the four of us that there was three other kids, two girls and two guys. So I was very aware of it. And I think that these experiences in retrospect now were God's way of forging my metal.

So I would end up doing what I was supposed to put in this earth to do. And you did get reunited with your family. You grew up in Holi, outside Miami, right? Yeah, my parents came out a little over eight months later. I was one of the lucky ones. There were kids whose parents never came out or came out five, six years later. So I lucked out in two reasons. One, the orphanage was a little violent because, you know,

you have five different cultures in there and all orphans and all, you know. But the treatment in the place was decent. 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 eight 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, eight months later, I could at least help my parents catch a bus or do something like that.

That's amazing. Yeah. And then as you grew up and 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 starting to take my dad's business away. And my parents were 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 why 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 four or five of us, maybe six. 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, he must have had something in the back of your mind that you wanted to be an elite soldier. Well, you know, 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 six months after, not even, about four months after that incident with the hippies, I joined the Air Force, Paralympers. 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 got my beret. And when the, that, I think it was Flight L-1011 in Miami, 72 Christmas Eve or something like that,

that the ultimatum was screwed up. And they thought they were ex-altitude and they literally plowed into the Everglades. And we were summoned. You know, I was doing 100 and some of 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, the lessons in life that you, that you see the fragility and the endurance of the body. And then what was your first exposure to the Central Intelligence Agency? Well, you know, 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 were confident that I would never get called.

And I show up and go and, hey, I'm leaving in 30 days. So my goal was to go to Vietnam. And when I got out of, you know, when I finally got my beret and in the follow-on training, it was already 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 writing rescue with Miami Day Fire Rescue. And, you know, again, being a pararescu, and 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 do 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 that was my backdooring into a to 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 going to getting brought into the belly of the beast. Without, you didn't have a lot of like formal training with the agency at this point either. Zero. I have my street smarts. I had my martial arts background. Medical training from the Air Force?

Yeah, in my pararescue training, which is 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 steals you, you know, I was pretty confident going in, but I had no training. There was no time. I literally was in the headquarters. voters area for less than two weeks before I went to Honduras.

Wow. And so what was like... 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 five of us when this program started. You know, five years later, there was probably 100 guys on the ground there. And my boss was Colonel Ray. He was legendary. He had jumped into Corrigador at the age of 17 or 18. Special Forces guy went to, it 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 good about explaining what I needed to do. But at the same time, there was no time for micromanagement. And 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 be remained hidden.

So I was there as a Honduran captain. Eventually, I got promoted to, quote-unquote, major. With a requisite pay bump, of course. Of course. Yeah. I thought it was really interesting in the book, too, you talk about how it was sort of like it started off as an Argentinian program. And then America sort of jumped on there. And you had to, 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. helping, bringing in some old, you know, Mouser 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 and that ruled, you know, you know, Argentina at the time. And they were not contributed. And yeah, I mean, my boss put me in charge of their finances just to really dig it 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 like institutional. I guess in the sense that you had these, the mosquito Indians, the indigenous people that you assessed could be a very effective fighting force. But these guys were like, no, fuck them. Like 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 Nicaragans are a lot less because, again, they're all Nicaraguan.

They just happen to be, you know, although the mosquitoes do not consider themselves. those 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 state of mayor. And he said, well, you know, this is going to go here and there. And I go, I said, sorry, General, that is not. A third of that is going to the mosquitoes. And he started to say something. I said,

sir, 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 you could do about it because it was our money and we, 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 the Vietnamese treated the Montenards and, you know, and the other natives, you know, 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 cash site location. to maybe support that offensive. What was, I guess, the escalation you could say of kind of like trying to build up this capability that you've been charged with? Well, you know, the first time I went to the camps, I was slack, John. I mean, these poor guys and gals had nothing.

Most of them were barefoot. They had old Mouser bolt action rifles, a few rusty AKs captured from the Sandinistas. No medical facility. You know, food was almost nonexistent. So the first thing for us was, you know, 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 cow to the RPG 7, which I became pretty darn good with.

after training. We had 10 camps and I had to train the ball. So I lived in the camps for the three years that I was there, a little over three years. And Monday through Friday, I slept in a jungle hammock. Wow. And you know, guys, not once that 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. with 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 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,

the Soviet Union using Cubans as proxy and, you know, the Nicaragua and Sandinistas being proxies for the Salvadoran insurgencies. You know, I was now there helping these guys and gals cut off some of those tentacles from this monster. So it really felt good. And, you know, every night I would talk to the different guys and different campfires. And eventually I would always ask, you know, 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 that 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? Right. Yeah, we did, they started doing some raids and ambushes and patrolling and some sniper work and that kind of stuff that I taught them. But again, the incursions were hit and run and come back or once they had certain little safe areas, but they were all within 10, 20 miles of the border. And that's pretty thick country out there. So we needed the board 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 kind of coordinated with the mosquitoes 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 mosquitoes because for one thing, you know, with the regular Nicaraguans,

there was no culture shock. You know, I spoke native Spanish. I, you know, I know the customs. There's a few words that are different, but there was no culture shot. But with a mosquito, it was very different. This is a very different society with a different language. There's probably more mosquitoes that speak English than they speak Spanish. It's really a fascinating, fascinating bunch of folks.

But what happened was that headquarters came. in, our headquarters came in and say, hey, guys, all these raids and ambushes are really good, and you guys are doing a great job with the building this force up. But we need to get the San Dinosta's attention. We need them to understand that this is not a rag tag, a bunch of, you know, rebels just trying to overthrow them. We need to smack them. So during one of my trips to the mosquito, I have my hat with my scuba badge on, and one of the mosquitoes comes up to me, And he goes, you're a diver? And I go, yeah, I'm a military diver.

And he goes, well, the six 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 bisquito 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 porto cabezas porto caes is the northern most northeast most 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 the paramilitary you know ammo and equipment and fuel and everything that they needed so doing damage to that pier was a very high priority and it was sent a message. So the requirement went back to headquarters. It says, look, we got Prado says he's got some divers that he can train to military standards. I took the six, two washed out. And the other four 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 better word, based on 80 pounds of C4 that was placed under the pier. We went out there. And it was one of these. beautiful missions where, 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, when they first launched. I was there. You know, when they got back, we went back to Honduras. And two days later, for the first time in my life, I saw satellite overhead of Forta Cabas. And that was, that was pretty thrilling. And then there was another operation where things, it was a bridge, I believe, 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 that was an interesting one yeah you know i when i speak to my brother and in para rescue that's that's the mission that i always talk about and i gave a talk down in scuba school a couple of years ago in key west for the uh combat swimmers

uh exactly on that because um i i did go in and got my guys out but the but the the readers digest of the the story is, you know, all of the sudden, our success in Puerto Cabezas motivated headquarters to say we need to do the same thing against Carinto. Now, Carinto is in 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, four 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 have 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 a, well, you know, the mosquitoes 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 that. There was a little bit of jealousy about the mosquitoes 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 Nicaraguan. 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 two boats, two divers each and two boat pilots each. And they made it into Corintho. When they got to Corinto, they noticed a lot more traffic than they had that we had predicted. Maritime traffic. 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 eight guys on two boats. Everybody's got guns and explosives. So you don't want to get into a contest. And they decided to regroup and say, look, 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 conquered out and actually was able to get into the mangroves just outside of Corrinto.

And the second boat made it out to the Gulf ofonseca, but still in Nicaragua 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, the early 20s. I told them that we were going to go out to sea. Before we did, I made some field expedient stable rigs, six of them. So I could get my four 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 two 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, was something that was not native to the area. So I jumped into the water and what, in pararescue back then, we used to call them low and slow. So it's 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 it's, you know, I'm used to the shorter ride, I'm going like, oh, my God.

But, no, 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. 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 two. of our boat captains. One was a Cuban Bay of Pigs, a veteran who was the senior captain, and the other one was an American from a 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 Carinto. And they were dead in the water. They could not get the boat to start. So we went out there and the seas got really rough. There were at least 12 foot seas beaten the crap out of the boat. We lost first, I think it was our UHF, we lost first.

There was an aircraft in the air supporting us. We had VHF and ICON radios. And 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, I'm probably a mile or so away from us,

but we didn't know that. We just seen flares coming up and trying to light up the sky. And then they started doing recomb by fire. They would take and put rounds down range, stop and see if anybody returned fire. And then they could, you know, gaggle on there. So, well, I had an M-6, you know, an AR-15 and a browning nine millimeter. So I was not exactly set for a firefighter. Right.

And 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 him 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. two adrenaline dumps once with a jump into the water and now I was spending hours out there bouncing around getting chased by Sandinista.

So I was smoked when I got back from that. But the next morning we went out in six 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. got me my first battle 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 covert program down there, come to its conclusion with Eugene Hassan Foss 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, you know, after that, 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 three 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 visit two camps a week kind of stuff. So the American hand was starting to show. But the Hesipfus 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, the son. And 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 contours. 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 give me, help me get people out through maritime means or air means. and at the same time having a job of 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,

crash cars picking them up, taking them to meetings, you know, infiltrating 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, you know, mission. And that's when Hassanfuss happened. Hasn Fuss was anirdrop that was,

not meant for the south. It was actually meant for the North FDN guys who had ventured further south. So when his aircraft was shot down, that night I got a call immediately from the radio, our com center

and the Nicaragua in con center said, hey boss, you need to come in. There's something huge going on. So I hopped, went over. And they told me, since the American plane was shut down. A resupply plane was shut 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, Hassanfuss didn't. Hasan Fuss, even though he was a former Marine, he just stayed put.

He made a jungle hammock out of his parachute. I was there when the Sandinistas came, and he had all kinds of compromising stuff on him, 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

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Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. 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 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 two major communist insurgencies there, one Soviet-backed, Cuban-backed, the other one is more of a Chinese mentality. You know, they're, they're, and very, both were very in close affiliation with the narco traffickers, 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 Clarege, started the Counterterrorist Center in 1986.

So this is 1988. So just two 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 that the fact that, 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 away.

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. And that's why they asked me, you 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 U.S. Embassy, worked together with the DEA there. They had the program, Snowcap, was huge, and there were times where I would go out with them in their helicopters and go out and debrief people out in Ayacucho and Tingo Maria 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 were a tarot 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 bug in the leg of it and, you know, battery packed that would last months. But now we had an observation post and the 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 so I'm walking. And I did. I didn't, I didn't shave for two or three days. I didn't bathe for two and I had this, you know, local garbs. So I looked more like a, you know, a regular native 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 five of these guys come out and literally bumped into me, the five guys. And being the kind of people that were, they started chewing me out. And, you know, I had a browning nine millimeter carries 15 rounds. go like, I could ruin your day. Right, right.

You know, but at the same time, I already knew from, from, you know, my experiences before that in our, in our, in our business, if you draw your weapon, your mission is compromised. Right. So I had to really swallow my pride and say, but, pardone, you know, I am, you. And they just walk off like a, like a little cholo that was hurt. And they were laughing and, you know, they had a soccer ball in their hand. And, but we got the path loft test. So 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, 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. 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, you know, 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. I can watch a fantasy movie. I can watch a James Bond movie and enjoy it because it's fantasy. It's not real. I'm still waiting for my Austin Martin, right? But, you know, seeing these guys, it's just 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 San Dena 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 the we always told them if you have collateral damage you're doing more harmed and good to the cause and we you know we i'm not saying that didn't happen because war is war right but um it was it was pretty pretty pretty much over with oversight um yeah i mean you know the it's the chuck norris good guys were black kind of a mentality that people think that we have all these teams that are going

to go out there and shoot things up and Now, as you know, for 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 that was sent there. So you're saying that you were never on a hit team that was stationed, France, ready to get called up

at any moment to eliminate a target that 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 multi-purpose. But, you know, the reality is the greater majority of CIA officers never shoot in anger.

because that is, you know, we're a trade craft base. We need to do, whereas bugging a safe house or or recruiting somebody or do it a B&E into an embassy, whatever it is, we have to be able to not be noticed. We need to fly under the radar. So there's places where you can't even carry a weapon. Right. So, yeah, the hit-tim concept, I mean, you know, there's a difference between stuff that goes on in Afghanistan. in Iraq, for example, and Yemen in a couple of other places.

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 U.S. government had realized that, and this started about four years ago, I guess, to, hey, we got to do less war fighting and more war prevention. So that's why some of the restructuring that's going back on to, you know, train the trainers in different countries, butchers places like Ukraine and get that going. So, but no, no, no hit teams. My tour in the Philippines was my first liaison tour.

And I work with the police constabulary, the Navy and the, the army there to fight the new people's army who were brutal. They were in the streets. So matter of fact, six or eight months before I got there, they had killed the legendary Nick Rowe. in an assassination in Manila. And literally a month of it, so before I got there, they shot two Air Force guys up at Clark Air Force Base. And the teams that did this were called Sparrow's. Yeah.

The MPA Sparrels, and they were lethal. I mean, these guys knew what they were doing. There were stone coal killers. And then the other group that was down there that we were also working against was the Abu Sayyaf down in the Mindanao. And those are the radical Muslim guerrillas down there. Did you ever get to meet Teddy Medina after he was captured? No, sir.

No. He's the sparrow hitman. I think you reference him in your book. Yeah, he's the one that makes the video. It's in 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, like, hits and super secret stuff. And then you went up to be like SIS three or four. I mean, you were pretty senior guy, and you came to real, it's actually none of that exists. Those teams don't exist. No, I mean, we used to call it the agency of 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, every officer in that, 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, but yeah, 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 back of our minds, even though we're doing stuff that other people are fantasizing about doing.

Right, right. It's 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 their shoulder and go, you passed. Welcome to the real units. 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 faster every single time. What happened was it was six of us, two local captains army. And I had two of my techs.

and my office partner, my 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 at Davis were the last two guys. was the last guy. Davis was second or last and 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 three guys. Now, the ammo for the sparrows is that they carry a 45 cock, no safety, in their crotch. Rounded in the chamber. What we call 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. Rehoster and watch her. walk off and before anybody even looks, you're gone. So we walk out and I look to my left and there's

these three guys and they're huddled. And as soon as we come out, they looked at us. They stopped talking and they got three abreast and they started walking in front of us towards us. And I mean, we're talking yards here. We're not talking, you know, a big distance. They were fairly close. And the two 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, when you get that bolus of adrenaline, the first thing that happens is you get tunnel vision. You're omnipocused on just that threat.

And also, autotary exclusion. You don't know. Davis might have been saying to me, holy shit, holy shit. I couldn't hear it. All I could see was these guys. And, you know, imagine if somebody points a gun at me, I'm going to, 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 two guns come up, they kept eye contact and they just walked right in front of three 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. But that was, and what was really sad was that the only two of the six that noticed these guys was me and Davis. Right. My two techs got chewed out badly when we got back to headquarters, you know, for not, you know, not paying attention.

Because if we, if we would have tried, if I would have reacted to these guys' weapons being out, I wouldn't be talking to you. Right. And neither would Davis. Right. Rick, at this point, I'd like to ask you about some of the controversies that came up. 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. 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 from my upbringing. I've 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 of bad conduct. You know, we all thought we were tough guys. Everybody else was spoken dope, but we're 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 a justifiable. Like I said, that's the first one that really felt good. But, you know, 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, says, you know, you were associated with this guy. And we have sources saying that, you know, that you were, 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, the fingerprints, D, you know, you name it, a blood test. They even took castings of your foot at one point.

Yeah, there was, it was actually handprints, I believe. It made me 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 can do all the testing you want, all the polygraphs you want.

And, you know, anybody who's been in the community or even in the periphery of the community, you know two things. First of all, you know, the filtering process is very strict. The background checks are very deep, financial, psychological, neighbors are asked, school teachers are asked. You know, and you do go through several polygraph tests where all these questions get addressed. They're lifestyle polygraphs. It's not just, 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, you know, points to the fallacy.

The second part is, if I deed had been involved with any of that, that they could even justify, much less prove, there's no way I would have 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 U.S. 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 that sticky booger between black ops, blackwater, CIA. I recruited Kofa Black at the 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 e-book. 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 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, black water 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 on the newspaper saying that I'm the head of CIA. 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 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, for them, it was in a way of now you had the guy who could tie in former CIA guy operations, had this bad background when he was kid growing up. Right. And now he's doing this stuff at Blackwater. And that just snowballed into, you know, these, these hit teams and all this kind of crap. So, yeah, thank you for allowing me to clarify that because it was a very painful. But, you know, I retired as an SIS II, which is a 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 on Rick Prado? Who's that? Right. Never heard of him. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Never heard of a guy. So 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, leaving your home, your two kids in high school, the wife you've been married to for 30 years, and go and do it and hits for the mob. That didn't happen? No.

No. All right. I'm sure that they'd pay, would have paid, like, five grand, ten grand a hit. Oh, yeah. You know? That's chicken change. That's some walking around money, right? Chrome for my Harley.

Right. 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 two episodes. I like to address the first one, which was the Bilauden Task Force. Okay. I had just left Seoul.

I was the liaison guy in Seoul dealing with our sister. There was a service there in the 8th Army, U.S. 8th Army. And I went back to CTC and I was a branch chief, Palestinian branch. And I hadn't been in the job two months when I got called up to the front office. And the chief of operations, Jeff came to him, came to me and says, where 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, Usama 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 Opsky. 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 them in the face kind of stuff. So I'm very proud of that association. And 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 five 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 opposition. And for two 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, taekwanda you to death and walk out.

And I say, well, that's not going to happen to other guys. So we made sure that when we pitched, we started doing these pitches, we were already had them compromise. 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 omnifocus on the peninsula. Everything North Korea is in 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. That's what they do. And at the same time, they're also making book 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. But given your 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, and 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 trade 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. Their operation overseas are not sophisticated, because let's face it, they only have two 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, 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 two 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. They're violent folks. The counterfeiting. Oh, the supernote.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a world-class operation. And they're hacking capabilities. Yeah. You know, for a country as, but again, it's closed, is control and is sanctioned by the government to a degree that is fine. I mean, that's how they get.

their goods. 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, like 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, you know, an embassy or whatever and go, hey, I have information on North Korea. Right. Like, how do they keep them under thumb? It's actually very, very brutally. First of all, you got to understand, these people are heavily brainwashed, okay? 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. 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. Yeah. Their careers were finished and their operations were shut down. Because the one that I talked about was a guy that was actually, you know, doing some pretty, pretty nasty stuff targeting the United States. And, you know, all that, all that blue. up and that was a pretty big embarrassment for them. And in that country, they were P&G'd. Yeah. There's another way to take them off the chess board. How do you, that's right.

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? But how does that make you feel? Well, it irks me because you've got to understand that the same thing happens to Cuba. You know, you have these movie stars primarily that go to Cuba and they, you know, 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.

I mean, he killed people tied to telephone polls kind of stuff for interrogation. So there's this, you know, we have politics. that go to Cuba. We have, you know, movie stars that go to Cuba and go to North Korea. And what they don't understand is, you know, Hanoi Jane kind of stuff. 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, and how do you forgive that? And 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 where, you know, hey, everything is free and everybody's equal and let's go far left. 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 have done right that's that's the joke for for the for this is 1917 because name me one single country that has been under communist rule that has prospered right Poland Czechoslovakia Cuba Venezuela

Venezuela? Come on. I mean, Nicaragua. All those countries become worse, no matter what their problems are, once communist takes over. And it's long term. Well, as you said, when the mask drops, you often end up with Bolsheviks and Gaddafi's and Castro's. And it's not a pretty situation. Absolutely. And guys, I mean, you know, one of the things that that was amazing to me is that we were surprised that Putin did what he did. with the Ukraine. 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. So, you know, because we have heard like modern politicians, politicians praise the Cuban literacy program. Oh, and their medical program. You know, it's amazing.

You know, the Cuba, 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, you know, 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 Cropola. And in Cuba, medicines, if you go to a pharmacy in Cuba, you're lucky if there's four bottles on the shelf. A lot of the families from Miami have to send stuff to their family for antibiotics, and God forbid that you have 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 bus there that we're hoping to 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, you know, incarnations fighting communism and it's it's just naive yeah so naive americans often have a very naive view of cuba i agree um you know very well 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 it's not cool you know it's it's actually sad and the big the biggest problem that we have here guys is that as americans we have us so good we don't know how good we have it yeah we have nothing the average

Americans has nothing to compare their lifestyle. Right. You know, go to a third world country for 30 days. Right. And no iPad, no iPhone, get Montezuma's revenge as you try to teach kids how to read and write 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 a 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 like a new station, I suppose. Yeah, we were there as a team. All my guys were, you know, 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, 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 a 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 that, um, that you know, if somebody saw you in the car, we'd never have a second thought that you were not, anything but a,

but a person from that country. And it sounds like it was, it was pretty austere out there too. Yeah. Yeah. It was, we were top of the food chain. I mean,

we, we, we were loaded up. We were always gunned up. We, we were body. armor and going to places even at night in soft skin vehicles because we couldn't, you know, we couldn't have diplomatic, our 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 checkpoint guard post or something checkpoint that you could give them a box. 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 got to be that adrenaline spike because against a couple technicals like, what's your thin skin vehicle? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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, 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, when you're doing these things at night, you're doing it cool, calm, and collected, but you have to be ready for, for a reaction. And we had a couple of episodes. I think they're one of them at least is shown, you know, they're demonstrated in the book where, you know, they were, they were following us and we made sure that they understood that that wasn't going to lead to anything good for them. Yeah. So, 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. And 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 that's that's that's another clue, you know, that they're planning something. But we did not know what it was. So yeah, I was standing outside Koffer's office when that first airplane hit 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 said,

sir, we have a problem. And I said, what's up? He goes, we have four car, four aircraft that have activated their, you know, 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 it hit a building in New York, You know, that second was a lot clearer and that it was a very big aircraft. And now we do 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. Kofor made it clear, hey, if you've got family issues, you've 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 stay behind. And people that were not even in the center would come from other divisions and say, we want to help.

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 are tacking up maps of Afghanistan up on the wall like within an hour. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah, the energy level went through the roof. I reached out to Hank Crumpton, who has just gone down to Canberra to be the chief, real cushy job, especially for a great outdoor guys like, here. He's a big hunter. And I called him up and I say, hey, man, you know, we're talking. We need, 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 two or three guys. The guy that became Hank Crumpton's deputy in special operations literally walked into my office. Two 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 j-tut him and the guy was a stud, you know, former this, former that.

And so I called Hank 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 two other paramilitary guys who had actually left the agency and we're working for Coca-Cola in executive level of jobs. And they came back. It's the 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 are really drawn to the agency, not the Jason Borns 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 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 up that went bad for him and hijacking. And he had killed some Americans. So this analyst from the center came over and said, tells me about this guy that is getting out of jail in this 13. world country and that uh and i said so this right after 9-11 and i said so he says well we got paper on him 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 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 seat, 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. 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. Playboy magazine and Hustler magazines. This guy hasn't seen a woman in 14 years. And the Japanese guy says, yeah, gozo. 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 things compromise. So this guy was well behaved all through when we landed. This is this 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, 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, with the two FBI guys and our SAT guys were in the back.

The FBI guys were going to put the cuffs and read them those rights. But we, you know, my guy, our guys were the ones. ones that are going to duct tape them and grab them. 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 steel 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 is behind him. He starts going down the stairs when the van pulls up. And he immediately looks at it, turns around and starts running back up. And my buddy grabbed him by the neck and said, well,

Welcome to America, mother. And threw him in the van. So it's a, he ran right into the seal, right? Yep, yeah. He was right there and they bumped into him. He grabbed it by the throat and told him, welcome, welcome to America. That, you must have to have a lot of coordination, not only with you guys in 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 air. Right. Okay. It was an American aircraft and everything else. But no, 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 debarer, you know, where they were deplaneing. 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 you can't step away from it you can't let it go you love to be uh be there on the ground that's like a theme through your whole book that you love to be that guy that's there um 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 of the center and And you've 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 Kofras, you know, we're running short here on we're doing great in Afghanistan. We're really kicking the bejesis 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 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 Kofar 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 them, I said, look, we're not going to be targeting heads of organizations. We already got the Binald and task force for that. Plus, they're hard to get. They're not that 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 or criminal just like everybody else. And that's the support mechanisms because the support mechanism has to have a public persona. You can not 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 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 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 grow? he has, you know, what mossy goes or what bar he goes to, whatever it was, we knew what that individual was doing. And then we would come up with three 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, and said, sir, if we would have had this capability before 9-11, And we would have been able to grab three different al-Qaeda support guys in three different parts of the world. What do you think they would have done? Slam the brakes. We're penetrated. How did they know? They neutralized three of our major guys. And I'm not talking about just killing them.

I mean, you could duct tape them, a redition, 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 he was being able to have that capability on the books. And then Kofa says, I love it, I like it, get ready to brief the DCI and find me somebody who can lead this team. He 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 circle back at the afternoon with his deputy, Ben Bach, who was a very dear friend of mine. And we talked to him and said, Bullock boss, you know that me giving. up the chief ops job is hard. But I know that 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 run that program. Unfortunately,

by this time, we're already talking late 2002 by the time we get the group together and started doing our snooping. And, you know, 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 Condoleezer Rice on the capability. Yeah. And I was very, very, very pleasantly surprised that they allowed me to to talk about 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 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. The 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're supposed to be doing. And you're right, Rick. We wish that we would have had this capability before 9-11. But nothing was ever,

we were not allowed to do what we were supposed to be doing. And not from that level, but from levels above you inside. It was a turtle. 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 the whole country, San Annesa.

To put several years of work into this, then to be told basically, 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 we 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, you know, whatever organization you're 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. Right. Because it briefs really well. Right. 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 we went and we were, we had done incredible sleuthan work on this guy. We had him coming and going. We had, you know, literally we knew what he had for lunch.

and 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, nothing electronic. All my programs were standalone stuff. And I'm briefing and briefing and they're asking questions. And we already had gone through a screening process by other senior guys about our tradecraft and CI and all that passed with flying colors. And when I finished, the DDO said to the director, he said, well, Mr. Director, I'll never forget the words. He said, there's no doubt in our minds that Prado and his team can not 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 Kofa Black. And so now he was the director. He was my boss in CTC. Jose and I've been great friends since 1990s, early 1990s.

And I went to him and say, hey, Pfe, 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 in high order. Three of my guys that were in the team with me. Three.

When they retired, one was two where SIS fours was one was an SIS five. So I had pick of the litter. I had the guys 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 could keep these guys repelling upside down, popping grenades flashbanks. 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 got to get these guys back at the mainstream careers. Right, right. If now we're doing them harm. Right. And then shortly thereafter, I decided to pull the plug. I, you know,

had had such a great ride. you know, 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, you know, here I am a senior officer. And I'm on, you know, I went from leading and managing, you know, three, four, five hundred people, three before and 500 after 9-11 to a team of 12, including two analysts. So it was a demotion for lack of it.

But 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 distaddered division chief or deputy division chief. Right. And I decided to pull the plug. Rick, I mean, you talk about applying to other jobs in the agency and it became clear to you that, I mean, sadly, you know, 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. 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 in 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. 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 us. Well, it was crucial for me. I had a couple of friends that had been ousted themselves,

else, you know, and I, they, you know, they didn't get that one promotion that they, 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, 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 three jobs. they all said I was very qualified, but there was always,

oh no, they gave it to so-and-so, because he just came back from Buzimbura, 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 six months. Come, be my deputy for six 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 two 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 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. 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, 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, in Fairfax. And my wife, you know, we'll be married 40 years this year. So she knows me fairly well. And she saw me and she just turned around. started going the other direction. So I grabbed a very nice cigar and Arturo Fuentes, Maduro,

and a bottle of Borlo, 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 we've got to listen. And all of a sudden, 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 up, I imagine 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 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 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. And then, you know, getting into the agency. So how are you going to, like you said very eloquently, how am I going to 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 bought a vase that has a dragon on it because 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 a, like, you know, Can you show us, Rick? Can you show it to us? Yeah, I guess I could.

Let me see if I can turn this thing around. You have to guide me here a little bit. Are you seeing that wall? We see the wall a little bit. The back wall, yep. We see your monitor right now. Okay. And the lamp.

Okay, so you see that there's a photo of me in two cars? Okay, tilt your laptop screen up for us, please. Up. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see the plaque. Okay.

And then there's a vase there. 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, 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 have never gotten into the agency if I had not been a PJ. That was my path. So I have my para rescue stuff. 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 the middle, 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's kind of kind of motivates me. Yeah. That's amazing. Post career, Rick. Not a whole lot in your book about it.

But you went. Dewey Clarege asked you to come and meet with him. I mean, a spy master, 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 Clarege was the quintessential CIA James Bond guy. He was the dapper dresser. He always had briani suits on. I mean, he was always, and he became a mentor of mine because he was Casey's Pitbull in the Contra 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 a, you know, a GS-10, G-S-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, 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. He's the one that the first chief of that was Dewey Clarech.

So he calls me and what would happen. 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, you're 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, 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 be living room. He had a 30-cal water cool machine got 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 the stuff. There's some programs that I want you to take over. And, you know, I'm sitting here. I'm slack jawed. He's starting to talk to me about these programs. And he says, 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 forgotten country again. You know, guys, since I wanted to par rescue, 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. we've had other Cuban Americans on and this this is a very strong theme amongst Cuban Americans who have found them 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 flame burns is, it's just incredible.

Well, I think it goes back to the comment that I made earlier, Dave, that, you know, we don't know how good we have it in this country. And guys like myself and, you know, our Vietnamese folks that came over, the Venezuelans that have come over, fleeing terrorism, fleeing communism, those individuals have something to compare it to. I mean, if you look at our special operations, I taught at Ford Brack for seven years at the ASAT course, and I was always in awe of how many Asians and Hispanics were in the soft course. You know, it was really refreshing for me to saying, 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, you know, born in Cuba. And by the way, I got two 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. There you go.

Another interview. I'll hook you guys up in about 10 years. Sounds perfect. He's just a major right now. Ha ha. Two combat tours and a whole bunch of stuff. And the other one also did six years in the military and it's going back now as an officer when he finishes his schooling. So anyway, 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. But it is the best thing that we have out there. And I don't care 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 three of my kids are serving in one way or another. Well, I'll say that, I mean, we and the United States and generally, like we are very fortunate to have them in my time. Yeah, we obviously benefited from having so many Cuban Americans. come here. We've interviewed Ruben Garcia, Eric Miaris. I mean, we've really had some incredible folks on here with incredible stories. And, you know, and, you know, even though, you know, and it feels like our government gets like this. It got like this after Vietnam. You know, it goes through these phases where it ramps up these programs and then the guys who can do those things when the

government is like done, like, oh, like, that's all a little like much for us or politically intense for us like let's you know let's bring in the guys who who haven't you know accomplished these missions for you know for America to represent us now or to write these

policies now where I feel as though like our government has a tendency to use people like you're not use you because you're there for the purpose but to to use your ability 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. They use your capabilities, but then when they want to distance themselves from it, you know, 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 Eric 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 wool. 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, 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. you know,

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 by my payback to do.

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'll say, 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, you know, shooting Abu Abu, Abu out of windows. and stuff like that. We were bringing home some really great intelligence with the capabilities that worldwide we developed. And, you know, there's a lot of controversy with Eric Prince now. There was back then also, that 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. And the facts are that, that I know that the Eric Prince that I worked with for eight years was a patriot and that 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 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 time frame. 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, it was open to all, 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, you know, capable of doing intelligence work, et cetera. And that's as far as I will go. But it was not a punitive assassin's plot. That, I guarantee you it wasn't anything we were doing. Rick, you know, because you also mentioned Dewey Clarets,

who also sort of maintain this sort of intelligence apparatus even after. Sometimes for profit and sometimes just for fun. It was like something that you enjoyed doing. What are your views on on maintaining civilian outside of government or government sponsor, but maintaining civilian intelligence vehicles 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 in going forward? It has always been there, guys. 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, counter narcotics, whether it's communism, how do we protect them? So, you know, 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. Because we've got to hide the American hand.

So for us to develop networks overseas, for example, you use the Afghanistan analogy. Well, you know, 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, you know, they looked like you still have 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 North Alliance, 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 MEP 17s. So we develop these kind of sources, and they can act as surrogates for us. Collecting intelligence, doing surveillance. I mean, you know, you take three 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 extremely well. 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. And the thing is, these organizations that do work for the community from civilian platforms are first and foremost, for the most part, led by people that are former this, that, or the other.

Whether they're former agency, former SEAL teams like Eric, and so on, 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. 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. And this is why I pray that the United States never gets forsaken. Because the day that we're 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. 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 is foreign nationals, whether it is 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, right. You know, 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 a, 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. Rick, on that note, I have one user question from a folk 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, would I go any room overseas, I trap everything. So they had actually gone through my room and that kind of stuff. But I was an 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 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, Usan 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, you know, they're dictating what the agency is supposed to be. Right. No.

You know, the Belmont Task Force, we started in a late 95, early 96, and like I said, I'm a plank owner of it. I was a senior ops guy. We had two other case officers that were junior to me. We had the rest of our analysts, including the chief, which was an analyst. They became the nucleus that grew and grew and grew into the, you know, you know, the Fulbin 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 Bansom family idea comes from, you know,

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

and let me back up, when we started Bin Laden, eight 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 cartoon, a very dear friend of mine, legendary Green Beret from the Vietnam Mac V-Sog days

that was photographing, following, you know, evaluating bin Laden on a daily basis. And at that time, he proposed and we proposed through, through, through, through, through, uh, adaptation, 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 a coal. Yeah. And then the two embassies in Africa, 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. Right. If we would have it interjected back then. So again, it is a.

is prostituting the reality of what the agency is. We have people that were strong nose and, you know, really fanatical about bin Laden. Absolutely. That's what makes us good. Right. You know, you can't, you got to believe in what you're doing if you're working, you know, 50 hour weeks all your life. Right.

You know. But obviously what sells in Hollywood is the Manson family and the, 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 test force to to have, I guess, that foresight.

Right. And then and then and then and then like you said, DeKold 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 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.

and Mike and a couple of other folks that were with him, you know, they really put the blame on, on the leadership and, you know, the blood, this blood is in your hands. Right.

And you don't do that. Right. Yeah, that's kind of unfair. We have a couple more real. 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 read a lot of these books for this show, as you can tell. This was a really insightful. one, and I hope you guys will check it out.

KT, thank you very much. Please ask Rick if he has an opinion on the Cuban patriot Carlos Bringware or Valerie Kostakov, KGBB Chief of Mexico City. No comment of those. Okay. And Brad, thank you very much. Was there any separation

focused from DOD, Intel Operations versus CIASAD in Afghanistan, Iraq? There was collaboration in force. I mean, you know, like when 9-11 happened immediately, I mean, days after, we had representatives from Delta Force and representatives of some CEL 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, we have that cross-pollination has always been there. Like I said earlier, CTC specially,

has always been very, you know, full of sister agencies and military. and stuff like that. 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 three,

because they would come out with the photo of somebody or a photo, 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 they were hitting two or three three houses a night so it was a very robust um cooperation and yeah it's it existed and very proud of that so last last question i have what's next for rick prado 71 years old wrote your memoir here we are what 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 I can with my wife and my kids and grandkids and all that other stuff. So, so no, no mafia. No renditions. No, no, no assassination. No, definitely, definitely no mafia. 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 three 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 call 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 Ford Bragg. which I loved. I love working the A-SOT 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 three, four tours in the combat, wanting to go back, willing to go back. It will recharge my batteries for months. But I gave it all up because I need to, you know, I think, I think I did after 51 years, this is it. Yeah. 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 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 two 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. 90% of the stuff she had no idea, except the things that she did for me. Hey, right, we have a question from one of our patrons subscribers that might, like a lot of people listening to this might have a lot of younger people. And he says, Dear Mr. Prada, I was medically, I was not medically qualified for the military. So I stayed in school. Right now,

I'm my first year of university going to 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 me 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 how people who are interested in the agency might get in it? Well, you know, there's two distinct paths from 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 in CTC, and he went to Ground Branch. And he retired as a GS-15, and he's a rotor. and fixed wind pilot, skydiver, shooter, looter, and he's got like four or five 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 handicapped. They end up being very successful operations officers, but not skydiving out of a C-17A to 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 like paramilitary officers in a lot of situations. Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, we could not exist as an agency without our intelligence officers, our analysts, the people that really have the brain cells and the patients

to comb through thousands and thousands, the Mike Sawyers 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 DDSMT, the Director of Science and Technology, which are, for the longest time, they recall also especially a, 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'm a believer, guys. You will have a great career in the agency in spite of the politics that exists and permeate all forms of government life. You will have a rewarding career. You really wouldn't. 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 Barsock 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 today? 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 our government and 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 that, you know, when somebody like Rick writes a book, it has to go through the pre-publication review board. The CIA has to, they read it, they approve what's in it. And you can go in and literally see where the CIA has blacked that out. and said, no.

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

Thank you very much. Yeah. We're really happy to help share the story, man. Thank you. And so we'll see all of you next Friday.