Black Ops

Ric Prado grew up in Manicaragua, a small mountain town in Cuba, where his father ran a coffee company and his grandfather owned a gas station and cigar-rolling business. Around age seven, he witnessed his first firefight when Castro's guerrillas raided the town. After Che Guevara's forces captured Santa Clara on New Year's Eve 1958, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled, and Castro's 26th of July Movement, his revolutionary organization, seized power. The regime conscripted children as informants against their families and confiscated the Prado family's businesses. When a family connection warned that Prado had been selected for ideological education in the Soviet Union, his father pulled him from school, relocated the family to Havana, and enrolled Prado in the Peter Pan Program, a U.S.-funded effort to evacuate Cuban children. At age 10, Prado said goodbye to his parents and boarded a plane for America alone.

He was sent to Sacred Heart Orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado, where he spoke no English and learned the language from reading primers. In late fall 1962, his father called to say the family had reached Miami. They reunited in a ramshackle apartment off Biscayne Boulevard. His father mowed lawns and unloaded trucks; his mother sewed shirts in a sweatshop for five cents apiece. His father eventually bought a house in Hialeah, a Miami suburb. Dime novels about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's World War II forerunner, ignited Prado's fascination with espionage.

After a karate mentor's unexplained rejection sent him into a downward spiral, Prado joined the Miami Crowns, a street gang. At Miami Dade Junior College, he and fellow gang members stopped antiwar protesters from burning the American flag, stirring a sense of higher purpose. A classmate introduced him to the U.S. Air Force Pararescue Jumper (PJ) program, a combat search-and-rescue unit combining medical training, SCUBA, and parachuting, and Prado enlisted without telling his parents.

He completed the PJ training pipeline and was assigned near Miami, later becoming a firefighter and paramedic with Metro Dade Fire Rescue. A short-lived first marriage collapsed. He applied to the CIA, which hired him on a short-term contract with the Special Activities Division (SAD), the branch responsible for covert and paramilitary operations. After impressing operators during a desert survival course, he accepted a long-term position.

Prado married Carmen, a Cuban-born woman who accompanied him overseas and gave birth to their first child in Honduras. At CIA headquarters, he was briefed on Nicaragua: The Sandinistas, a Soviet- and Cuban-backed Marxist regime, had overthrown dictator Anastasio Somoza and were stoking insurgencies throughout Central America. Along the Honduran border, Nicaraguan refugees called the Contras had formed a ragtag resistance but lacked weapons, training, and food. As the sole native Spanish-speaking CIA officer, Prado entered the camps to provide training and earn their trust. His base commander, "Colonel Ray," a World War II veteran, became a critical mentor.

CIA Director Bill Casey and Latin America Division Chief Dewey Clarridge visited on secret trips; Casey used Prado's photographs of camp conditions to lobby Congress. The Contra program grew into a central component of the Reagan Doctrine, the strategy to roll back Soviet-sponsored communism. Prado carried out increasingly complex operations: extracting rogue subcommanders, training Indigenous Miskito divers in underwater demolitions, and directing them to destroy the Puerto Cabezas pier, Nicaragua's primary Caribbean supply point. When 600 Miskito fighters mutinied, Prado flew to the camp alone, promised resupply, and warned of consequences. Ray delivered supplies the next morning, and the mutiny collapsed.

Ray arranged for Prado to attend the Farm, the CIA's training facility, to become a case officer, a CIA officer who recruits and manages intelligence sources. He finished in the top three percent of his class. Assigned to Costa Rica, he supported the Contra southern front. On October 5, 1986, a supply aircraft was shot down over Nicaragua, and crew member Eugene Hasenfus was captured with incriminating documents, triggering the Iran-Contra scandal, the revelation that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had funded the Contras. Despite the fallout, the program achieved its objective: In 1990, opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega in a free election.

Prado deployed to an unnamed South American country in 1988, confronting a Maoist insurgency that had killed over 70,000 people. He developed intelligence sources and traced connections from foot soldiers to senior leaders; the insurgency's leader was captured in 1992. He deployed to the Philippines, where the Marxist New People's Army (NPA) had waged the world's longest-running insurgency. He narrowly escaped an NPA assassination squad by drawing his pistol first. When Mount Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991, Prado led a team to Clark Air Base to recover sensitive CIA equipment, fleeing through falling volcanic debris.

Back in the United States, Miami-Dade police investigating Prado's old friend Albert San Pedro for organized crime pressured him to inform on former associates, triggering FBI and CIA investigations. For over a year he was sidelined at Langley, but he passed six polygraphs, and physical evidence matched nothing. At a review board, legendary officer Dick Holm read his file, declared Prado should stay, and walked out. Every Division Chief agreed.

Prado oversaw worldwide programs targeting North Korea before becoming deputy chief of Alec Station in 1995, a new unit within the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) dedicated to Osama bin Laden. Led by analyst Mike Scheuer, the team attacked Bin Laden's financial networks and increased surveillance. CIA contractor Billy Waugh shadowed Bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, closely enough to jog past him, but executive orders banning assassinations prevented action. After Sudan expelled Bin Laden in 1996, he relocated to Afghanistan and declared war on the United States.

In 2000, Prado returned to the CTC under its director, Cofer Black, and deputy Hank Crumpton. He volunteered to reopen a CIA station in "Shangri-La," an unnamed African city ruled by Islamic radicals, leading a team amid armed militias and constant surveillance. He became CTC Chief of Operations in the summer of 2001. On September 11, standing outside his deputy's office, he saw smoke from the World Trade Center. As the second plane struck, he ordered a cable to every CIA station worldwide. He called Crumpton to lead the covert war in Afghanistan; Crumpton accepted immediately. The armed Predator drone proved decisive in the fighting that followed.

Prado proposed a new initiative to interdict terrorist cells outside combat zones. He demonstrated the team's capabilities in a shoot house, a training structure for room-clearing drills, subduing a target with zero shots fired in 90 seconds. He briefed Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Months later, however, Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt raised political objections before Director George Tenet, who concurred. The initiative was killed, and Prado's applications for senior positions were blocked. He filed retirement papers, receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

After a brief corporate stint, Prado joined Blackwater Inc. at Carmen's urging, building covert capabilities for founder Erik Prince. He deployed to Iraq and conducted intelligence operations, including penetrating a hostile nation's government with a fictitious persona that astonished U.S. officials. Eventually, an elderly Dewey Clarridge summoned Prado to his San Diego home and asked him to take over ongoing overseas initiatives. Prado accepted, recognizing that his mentor had passed him the torch. Prado reflects that the book is his attempt to correct misrepresentations of the CIA, honor those who serve anonymously, and recruit the next generation to what he describes not as a career but a calling.