Ric Prado, a 24-year CIA veteran and former Pararescueman, details his career in black ops, from training Contras in Central America to leading the "Alex Station" targeting Osama bin Laden. He recounts missed opportunities to strike bin Laden in Sudan under Clinton, arguing this failure allowed Al-Qaeda to form, and critiques the Iran-Contra scandal's impact on operations. Prado emphasizes that U.S. credibility suffered after the Afghanistan withdrawal, urging leaders to restore a moral high ground to prevent future global chaos rather than relying solely on fear. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Dirty Work and Rendition Teams00:05:30
Your book is fascinating, Black Ops, and as well as Annie Jacobson's book where she mentions you, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, where she talks about some of the wilder aspects of the CIA.
I think it's called Rendition Teams, where they have to go in and kidnap people or basically do kind of like the dirty work.
That's correct.
The hands on work.
In your book, you quoted George Orwell.
You said, In the sleep, we sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us.
What does that quote mean to you?
Well, it means that people need to realize the risks that our warriors take.
And I'm not just talking about the agency.
I'm talking about our special military guys.
I'm talking about our DIA counterparts, DEA counterparts.
The risks that some of our men and women take to keep us sleeping nice at night, most people do not, they cannot grasp that.
You know, the vision of the agency is primarily Hollywood.
And so everybody associates it with Jason Bourne, you know, a maniacal assassin with 17 personalities doing something that Congress doesn't know about.
That's all BS.
And, you know, the drug dealing CIA and, you know, the honey traps.
None of that is true.
So that's the difference.
I mean, I started out as a paramilitary officer.
I'm a former Air Force pararescueman, which is part of our Special Operations Forces.
And became a legitimate case officer and had a legitimate case officer.
Jobs and ranks, but I was more on the go out and do it, even though I was a senior guy.
So, you weren't a political guy.
You were more on the ground, hands on, dealing with human beings, which is what I love about your book it's a first hand perspective of being on the ground, dealing with human beings in some of these situations.
And you may, in your time working, for example, in Honduras or Costa Rica, you weren't necessarily paying attention to all the politics, the things that were going around, things that were going on behind the scenes or what was happening.
In the media, how do you think about your career now?
Like, now, how old are you now?
I'm 72.
So, when you reflect on your childhood and your career, your upbringing, all the different things that you've done, all the countries you've been on, all the countries you've been to, when you think about it, how do you reflect?
What do you think about the CIA now that you've been through everything and that you're able to like sit back and look at the big picture?
Well, first of all, I've lived a charmed life.
Um, for a young kid like myself to come to this country as an immigrant and to end up working as a senior officer in the CIA, that was a dream come true.
I wouldn't change anything in my life, and I don't regret anything that I did in my life, especially professionally.
The agency still, look, again, it's an organization made of human beings, and we do have black sheeps here and there, just like the FBI does, people that reveal secrets, whatever it is.
But for the most part, what I really treasure from my days, my 24-plus years, is, first and foremost, the people.
the quality of people that we have.
And there's a vignette I'll tell you a little later about the kind of persons that actually work at CTC.
We'll do that more than the 9-11 part.
But you hit on something a little earlier, which was politics.
And the problem is you cannot run special operations, whether they're military or intelligence or drug interventions, through an optic of politics.
Politics would always be the brake on anything that operators are capable of doing.
So I'm very proud of the agency.
You know, the agency has something that nobody else has, which is Title 50 authorities.
Title 50 authorities means that whatever the President of the United States signs that you can go do, you can go do.
So military has Title 10, which means they can do anything that they're told to do in a war theater.
So, for example, when the Navy SEALs so rightfully shot Bin Laden in the face, it was CIA's alex Station, that I helped start, who had tracked him down, and that SEAL team was under agency on paper control because they have to use Title 50 authorities because they were not in a war theater.
It was done in Pakistan.
Now, well, obviously, we're going to go deep into that on this podcast, but on that specific mission where the team went in there to kill bin Laden, there was a lot of red tape they had to maneuver around to make that happen.
because of the bureaucracy and because of the laws that were in place.
Those guys were SEALs, right?
Yeah.
But they were officially for that mission, they were CIA.
They were attached to the CIA for the authorities.
Okay.
For the legal authorities.
Right.
You're talking international law here.
Right.
When you do this kind of thing in somebody else's country, that is an act of war.
So they had to weigh in.
The president's the only one that could do that, and he only signs Title 50 stuff.
Okay.
Yeah.
Early Life in Colorado00:15:05
Okay, so let's go.
Going back to the beginning, your childhood, what was your childhood like being born in Cuba and being raised in Cuba during the revolution?
Well, it started out as a wonderful childhood.
My dad was actually a cowboy, literally a cowboy, ran my grandfather's ranch until he married my mom and she domesticated him and he became a businessman.
So, you know, at the age of six, I had a horse before I had a bicycle.
I had a BB gun at the age of six.
It was great life.
My dad had a 57 Pontiac in 1959.
So it was nice middle class, very close to the family.
My grandparents lived across the street.
The other ones lived behind us.
So it was a very family town and small town.
But that changed.
And the first part that it started changing was when the rebel attacks actually started happening in my town.
The town that I lived in was Manicaragua.
It was at the foothills of the Escombrai Mountains, which is where Che Guevara had his rebels.
So the town that I was at got hit several times as harassments.
Well, my parents were gone and I had a nanny who's, she was like 13 years old and I'm eight or seven, whatever.
And huge firefight in front of the house.
And I literally went up to the window and opened up the window.
Well, that's the first time I saw somebody get shot.
And then what I didn't notice is on the other side of the parapet was a guerrilla fighter with an automatic rifle and he pops up.
Right in front of my face, starts shooting that way all the round, all the spent rounds are hitting the uh, the jealousy window in front of me.
Um, that's kind of a wake-up call for for, for a seven-year-old, you know.
And and then what continued was uh, how quickly communism eviscerated the freedom that the Cuban family people were enjoying.
I'm not saying that Batista was great, i'm not saying that changes did not need to be made but um, for me, communism will never be to be the solutions.
You figure when they confiscated my dad's business six months after Castro took over, roughly, and he decided we were going to leave the country.
We moved to Havana.
And when first time that we drove to Havana to stay there, the first thing I saw was three guys hanging from trees with signs around their neck that said counterrevolutionaries.
That was politics six months after he took over.
So a lot of it is glossed with Che Guevara photos and you know, the idyllic revolutionary, they murdered more people than second only to the Nazis, I guess.
How old were you when you saw this?
I was probably around nine when I saw the guys hanging from the trees.
Well, I was ten.
Well, no, nine, because a year later is that I was able to leave and I turned 11 at the orphanage, so I left when I was 10.
And how long did you stay in Cuba?
during that time before you escaped on the freedom flights?
I left in 1962, April 1962.
And actually, it was part of the freedom flights, but my parents couldn't get out because my parents owned property that people were still fighting over.
It's part of the attrition process.
When you say that you're leaving the country, everything is confiscated.
So they wouldn't let my parents go.
And there was a Catholic church program called Peter Pan, Pedro Pan.
And that brought out thousands of cuban kids whose parents could not come out.
So that's how it came out in 62 by myself to an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado.
And then how long did it take before you went back down to Miami?
Nine months.
My parents got out about eight months later, and it took a little bit of time to get me back down there.
And so when you first got to Colorado and then went to Miami, what was America to you?
And what was your perception?
How different was it from how you perceived it would be?
Well, you know, at that age, perception of a country that's outside of yours is almost non-existent, even though my dad had educated me about everything really early on.
But you've got to understand that the first part of it is in shock, even though I was raised to be the little man, be stoic, be this, be that.
You know, men don't do this, men don't do that.
So I had a little bit more backbone than the average 10-year-old, but you're still on a flight to a country that you've never been, no matter what great stories you've heard.
You don't know what to expect.
And then of course I go from landing in Miami and two weeks later I'm in an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado and an orphanage is an orphanage.
You know, we had three or four different ethnicities and languages there and a lot of pissed off kids because nobody likes being an orphan.
So it was rough.
Discipline had to be rough because there was a lot of violence.
But I still, I coped with it fairly well.
When my parents came out and I went back down to Miami, We were living sub-poverty.
I mean, we were, my dad didn't have a dime to his name.
Everything he had lost back in the country.
My aunt and my two cousins had also left.
So it was six of us living in a one-bedroom roach-infested, what do you call it, efficiency apartment in a real seedy area in Miami at the time.
That's how we started here.
But you know what?
My dad started mowing lawns, started unloading trucks.
He had learned carpentry as a kid, and he was an artisan, actually.
And that's where he gravitated.
He bought some tools for this lawnmower money and all that.
And, you know, two or three years later, he bought this first house.
So it was very different than my original life.
And it was rougher than the average lives.
But we became part of the American dream very quickly.
And I give my dad a lot of credit for that because we had been in this country maybe a year, year and a half.
And the dream of a lot of the Cuban families that were leaving is that someday they'd be able to go back to Cuba.
My father, a year and a half into the country here, he says, we're not leaving.
We're staying.
So we go visit, but we're staying.
Would you have stayed even if Castro wasn't there anymore?
If it would have gone back to normal, what it was like pre-Castro, would you have still stayed?
That was his decision.
And that was the point.
When Castro falls, everybody's going to flood back.
We're not going.
We're staying here.
We're going to become Americans.
And my dad and our family, the three of us, we got our residency the day we could get our residency.
We got our citizenship the day we could get our citizenship.
And my dad I lost him about seven years ago.
Until the day he died, he never missed a voting opportunity.
Never, ever missed voting since he became a citizen.
When you were being raised by your parents, did they teach you Spanish and English at the same time?
I was learning English on the outside, but at home, Spanish was the language.
So when you first came here, English was.
You still had a little bit of English or none?
When I first got here, I knew how to say two words yes and no.
Wow.
And one of the benefits of the.
Of the orphanage.
Besides the immersion and we there was very few Spanish speaking kids there was the fact that all I had to do was go to school and learn to read and write in English.
Everything was spot run c, spot run, little books from from the 50s that we had to memorize.
So um, by the time that I came down to Miami, I was able to help my family, you know, ask for directions or you know, or make an appointment or something like that.
So And so, in your early days growing up in Miami, once you guys started to get your foothold in the country, what were some of the things that you were doing to make money?
What sort of foundational things were you learning from your dad that helped you turn into what you turned into today?
Well, my dad was big about responsibility and consequences.
So, you know, in the summers, I worked every summer.
I mean, even when I was 13 years old, I would go with him to his work when he was now doing boats and he got into the the boat refurbishing business and pick up trash, dust the things off, vacuum thing.
I mean, I was always working.
But it was also bonding with my dad because we're doing stuff together for months at a time.
So, yeah, the ethos was there, the work ethic was there, but what I think that I can give my dad the most credit for, besides being the best parent I could have had, was the fact that He inculcated to us the responsibility to look for freedom and provide freedom for your family in whichever capacity that is.
You know, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, I don't care.
If you're donating from your time to a cause that makes life better for other people.
So that was the mantra from my dad.
And that's what he loved about the United States because that was the very public ethos of the United States.
So you became.
One of your first jobs was working as a paramedic.
Is that right?
No, no.
I actually went to the military first.
Oh, you went to the military first?
Yeah, that's correct.
Yeah.
I worked, you know, a bunch of, you know, manual labor jobs.
The summer before my senior year, I loaded and unloaded trucks at the factory my dad was a foreman of.
And I was the only teenager there.
Everybody else were adults.
And loading trucks in July in Florida was a lot of fun.
Oh, yeah.
But I went into, for my senior year, I got a job at a clothing store, which helped me a lot because I learned a lot about dressing up and that kind of stuff.
And then when I started junior college, there was a couple of things that happened that kind of triggered my guilt.
I said, you know, I have a debt of honor to this country.
And that's why I first started with Air Force Pararescue, which was my first real job.
And how did you decide you were going to get into Air Force Pararescue?
Did you know somebody?
Did you have a friend?
I know throughout school and stuff, you got into martial arts very early.
You got into a lot of scraps with a lot of people on the streets in Miami.
What did that have anything to do with you wanting to get into the military?
I think it was look I believe that God puts people in their path to do what they're supposed to do and if they're willing to pay the price of admission They'll always have a good life and and God will groom you and you know work your metal so from my childhood He started forging my blade.
That's my retrospective now that I can look back so yeah, when I was in high school I was I was a B student with D for behavior because I was always getting in fights And it was the times, too.
I mean, you know, you had the white kids and the Hispanic kids and the black kids all going in the same schools, and there was a lot of friction there.
It's part of the growing pains of any democracy.
Yeah.
But so I hung up what you would call the rough crowd.
Not necessarily all bad crowd, just rough.
Half of the guys were cops.
The other became thieves, and I became a spy.
But so the military was always, I've always read a lot.
And for me, the special.
But I didn't know anything about the military.
I didn't know anything.
I didn't know the difference between ARMY NAVY, AIR Force, before you could google things right.
And and again, the proud old luck.
I was in an oceanography class and there was a guy that sat next to me.
We became friends, Glenn Richardson, and he had been a PJ and he was now in the reserves with PARA Rescue.
And um, there was a pivotal uh, a moment for me at the college which coincided with me meeting Glenn.
Um, you know, this is 1971-ish, and the hippies was a big deal.
You know, the anti-war protesters.
So the hippies at Miami-Dade Junior College announced that tomorrow we're going to take down the flag and we're going to burn it.
Come join us.
I went, that ain't going to happen.
I didn't have any friends in high, in college yet, so I called my homies from high school, had four of them come over, and let's just say that when they try to lower that flag they didn't get very far.
There was like 30 of them and it was four or five of us, but they were running and we were hitting.
So it was uh.
But here's the moral of the story, though.
When I finished that, I looked up and I tattooed in my brain.
I could see that American flag flying in a blue sky and it was the first time in my whole life that I was proud of doing violence.
Wow and uh.
As I say, four months later I was in pararescue or in the pipeline to become a pararescue man.
Wow, that's heavy man.
So when you first got into pararescue, what was that like?
Well, like you said, I got into the martial arts real early and I was fit and I lifted weights.
And then that's why I did.
You're doing taekwondo?
I started out with karate.
Okay.
I eventually did taekwondo also in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
I've dabbled around because of my travels.
But the main thing with pararescue is I thought I was a tough guy going in there and realized that I wasn't that tough.
It was brutal.
You were a swimmer first, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, the pararescue, the job of pararescue is to bring back from denied areas downed pilots or special operations units that are stuck out there.
So the first thing that we have to be is really, really good medics because people, when they're in that shape, they're usually screwed up.
Right.
But in order to do the task I mean, at the end of pararescue, you're an EMT-2 level, just like you have in the fire departments.
But you have to be mountain climbing qualified, scuba qualified, airborne qualified, guns, and everything else.
So it's the physical training, the pipeline for all special operations forces, whether it's Green Berets, SEALs, Air Force special operations groups like pararescue and combat controllers, Marine recon, the attrition rate is all the same, 80%.
Pararescue in Vietnam00:04:10
Out of every hundred guys that tries, 80 fail.
Wow.
So, like I said, I thought I was a tough kid until I was puking for the first three days.
Then I got the hang of it.
And how long did you do that for?
I did two years active, and then the rest was reserves.
I did about six years.
I did eight years total.
And it was during my last, well, when I went fully into the reserves, because, again, after Vietnam, everything was being shrunken down.
The military was decimated.
They were asking people to leave.
You know more than anything else, the agency was firing all kinds of people.
Um, so I, I joined the FIRE Department uh, in Miami, so I rode rescue for six years as a paramedic uh firefighter, paramedic.
Yeah, what was that like the end of the Vietnam War when uh, what?
What was the?
Uh like the, the vibe in the military like during that time after, after all, that went down devastating?
Um, you figure I, I did not get to go to Vietnam, which You know, I regret it all my life, except now I can look back and say I probably would be here if that was the case.
Right.
Yeah, like I said, I wanted to, I joined Pararescue because I wanted to go to Vietnam.
I wanted to fight.
You wanted to.
I wanted to go to Vietnam.
And as a matter of fact, we had a draft at the time.
And my number, the higher the number, the less chances you were going to be called.
And my number was so high, and I was in college, and my parents were so happy that, you know, they celebrated the fact that, You can't go in the military.
Well, I volunteered.
What made a kid like you at that young age want to go fight in Vietnam?
I was struck with the bug of what this country is all about.
You know, the price that I was willing to pay to maintain this country and the debt of honor primarily.
And I think that's probably the number one thing was the debt of honor that my family has, notice I say has because it's never paid, to this country.
And that's the only service that I knew.
was the military.
You know, I never contemplated being a police officer, but again, got a lot of respect for those guys.
I got a very tough job also.
But back to the Vietnam era mentality, you figure even though I had not set foot in Vietnam, I remember coming back from Hill Air Force Base for home leave the first time, and we had to probably be in uniform, and I'm walking down, and of course I got my beret and my jump wings, and people would stop and spit on the ground in front of you.
You know, now it's very refreshing because, you know, somebody is sitting down and they see their military, somebody will go, thank you for your service, or I got the tab.
I've done that several times.
You know, just pay the tavern leave.
And you've done it for other people?
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, wow.
All the time.
I'll be at an airport.
I'll see a couple of military guys are having breakfast.
I'll call the waitress and go, put that one on me.
Wow.
Because, you know, I know how badly we were treated.
Yeah.
And these guys and gals deserve a lot better than that.
They're the reason we have what we have.
Yeah, the country really was in an uproar after the Vietnam War.
Yeah.
And you were in, so you were still in pararescue when that all happened?
Yeah, I went into pararescue December of 71, late 71, and I got my beret, I think it was early 73, which Vietnam was obviously pretty much shutting down.
And I still had some post-post-beret training that I had to do and all this stuff, advanced mountain climbing and advanced parachuting and all this crap.
But that time, that's when Vietnam was officially shutting down.
So there was no chance of.
Did you at that age, you said you were very well read at that age.
You spent a lot of time reading.
Was it about like history?
Did you read a lot about the history of the United States?
Did you, you know, read a lot about like the history of like the 50s and 60s with the CIA and Kennedy and all that stuff?
Recruiting Narcos and Terrorists00:15:12
Were you familiar with all that?
You know, first of all, I was infatuated with the OSS, which was the predecessor for the agency during World War II.
That was my main reading.
I mean, I had, you know, growing up, I had three American heroes.
You know, one was, Teddy Roosevelt, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Donovan.
Wild Bill Donovan is the guy that started the OSS.
So any book that had to do with the resistance, French resistance, all these guys doing all this stuff, I read a lot of those.
I have to admit I read every James Bond novel ever made as a kid.
So all that is back there.
You feel the urge or the attraction into having that kind of purpose.
And I can tell you honestly, Neither in pararescue nor in the CIA did I ever wake up one morning and go, Man, I got to go to work.
Never.
Never.
Even when I was in the three years that I slept in a jungle hammock in Central America, never did I wake up in the morning and go, What the hell am I doing here?
I always find it so fascinating how people who come from some of the most adverse environments have just like that burning desire in their belly to do something.
And they're always, they're so interesting.
And they are just, it's, they find a mission in life compared to people who kind of like grow up wealthy or grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth.
People who come from places like you came from in Cuba during that time and seeing some of the shit you saw when you were really young and the drive and the motivation that you had to do something and to, and to, you had like a sense of purpose at such a young age.
I find that fascinating.
Yeah, you know, and I'm very proud of that.
I'm very proud of the fact that all.
Three of my kids turned out exactly the same.
Both my sons are military, and my daughter's even worse.
She was a school principal.
So she's the toughest of the three.
But yeah, I mean, for me, that purpose was driven, but it wasn't solely unique.
And it wasn't solely because of the poverty that we lived through and, you know, the getting ahead better.
For me, it was having seen what Cuba was, seeing what Cuba became so quickly, and then coming to a country where.
Everything was right compared to the rest of the world.
So falling in love with the United States was a very easy thing.
But again, my father was my first hero.
He was my first mentor, and he always talked to me about nothing is free in life.
And that applies to freedom.
Freedom is not free.
Did you ever have that fear after being in the United States that this could happen here too?
Well, that remains today.
I mean, for people like myself, without my background, and not just the paramilitary ninja stuff, but just Americans, now Americans that come from a communist regime, the scariest thing is this worldwide trend going far left.
You name me one single country that is under communism that is thriving.
Venezuela's got more oil than anybody else in this continent.
They're starving to death.
Cuba, before Castro took over in Cuba, Cuba had the first or second highest living conditions in Latin America.
The Cuban peso was equal to the U.S. dollar.
So tell me you know, where communism makes a country better, I haven't, I've yet to see it.
Right.
And you see it in the Soviet Union, you see it in Poland, you see in all these countries that all of a sudden they're freed and they thrive.
So, yeah, even like Cuba today.
Have you, when's the last time you went to Cuba?
I've never, never gone back.
I can't.
Are you kidding?
Right, right, right.
I'd be in jail probably the minute I got out of the airport.
Really?
Of course.
You don't have any desire to just like walk those streets one more time.
Absolutely.
It's, it's, it's one of my dreams.
My wife is also Cuban born.
She went through a lot of stuff herself.
And that's always been in the back of our minds.
We want to take our children out there and show them our modest homes, you know, where my grandparents live, go visit the graves of my parents, the beauty of Cuba.
Cuba is a beautiful country.
But first of all, my dad did not subscribe to the idea of putting any money in these guys' pocket, right, in Cuba.
And the second one for me was, you know, once I became a CIA officer, that's that's not a place you want to go, especially after I get more senior where I'm known and everything else.
I wouldn't last a day in the streets in Havana.
Really?
Oh, they'd put an ounce of Coke in my car or in my suitcase and put me in jail for 20 years.
Imagine the headlines.
Cuban-born CIA spy caught smuggling dope into Havana.
They would have a field day.
Wow.
And the government could throw all the lawyers at me that I would still do 10 years there before it goes out.
So the answer is no.
Why can't we be friends with Cuba?
Why can't we figure out a way to make it work?
I've never understood that.
Well, I think you've got to look at it from the other side.
What is it that Cuba does not want to be friendly with the United States?
Is that it, though?
They're the ones?
Of course.
Well, look, they.
Because Obama opened it up, right?
Well, Obama opened it up.
I mean, we're talking current history.
I'm talking about the roots of this whole thing.
Right, right, right.
When Cuba, Castro came into Cuba with a false pretense.
Of he being the savior.
We're going to have better democracy.
We're going to have better this.
We have better that.
He never admitted during the early days that he was a communist.
Shortly thereafter, a couple of years later, he actually physically signed treaties with the Soviet Union.
So that became a pariah state 90 miles away from our country.
So we're natural enemies.
It's like asking why do Palestinians cannot get away along with Israelis?
Because Both sides have suffered incredible atrocities, and it's personal.
So in the sense of the United States, we have a duty to protect not only the world, but definitely our hemisphere, which we're not doing.
That's a pet peeve.
We're not paying attention at all what's going on in Latin America.
But for us to continue, I would love to open up some kind of dialogue with Cuba.
Yeah.
But there's certain things they have to do.
And one of them is to have free elections.
Cuba has had the same leadership for 62 years.
Castro went through the other Castro.
After Castro retired, he still runs the show through the present president, which runs every four years without opposition and with a guaranteed job that he's going to win.
The other is you have to understand that there is a price for crime that you have to pay.
People don't understand the thousands of people that that regime has killed.
I'll give you an example.
Che Guevara.
I've been in Europe many times.
I'll see kids walking around with a Che Guevara shirt.
Oh, yeah.
I want to knock him out.
Because what people don't understand, he was that glorified, the romantic gorilla that was out there, that was the shining light for freedom.
You know what he used to do?
A lot of bad things.
He would take political prisoners, bring them out to the courtyard so the rest of the prisoners could see.
He would put three of them on poles, and he would walk up. with a revolver and go click, boom, boom or click.
You never knew.
Just like roulette.
Just like Russian roulette.
And he did that weekly.
When you look at the thousands and thousands of Cubans who have perished trying to leave that island at the bottom of the ocean here in the Gulf, those are all criminal acts and the oppression.
Like I said, six, seven months into the revolution, there were people hanging from trees.
Because they, in school, the first thing after he took over, when I was in school still, they would tell you, if your parents say anything bad about Castro or the revolution, it is your duty to report it.
And there's kids that did.
Just like China and just like North Korea.
Exactly.
I mean, there's no the money state.
Yeah, completely.
For people who aren't familiar with Che Guevara, can you give me some sort of context around who he was and where he came from?
Yeah, Che Guevara, you were talking about a moneyed kid.
His father was a doctor.
He was Argentine.
And he had real leftist ideas even there because, again, he was living – he was upper class, but he was living – it's easy to be a communist when you're going home and having champagne and lobster.
That's right.
I have no – I mean, if people want to leave the United States to go to Cuba because they like communism, hey, go for it.
But so he came – he joined revolutionary groups.
He got radicalized as he was.
And he ended up hooking up with Castro.
Even though he was Argentine, he became a very key figure in the Castro regime.
Now, Castro had a reputation and a penchant for getting rid of competition.
The first real hero of the Cuban Revolution was a guy named Camilo.
And I can't remember his last name.
But Camilo was, he was a god.
People loved him because he was charismatic.
He had fought.
You know, Castro didn't fight.
You know, these guys, he had fought.
This guy was, well, when he started getting too popular, he went up on an airplane to go somewhere.
Gee, the plane blew up.
Rumor has it that that's why he sent Che to Bolivia, because he was getting too popular in Cuba.
And he said, you know, we got this here.
Why don't you go help us foment these problems in other places?
That's when he went to Bolivia.
And that's where we got him.
How long ago?
What year did we get him?
You have friends that were part of that force that got him, right?
Yeah, I can't remember the year, but Shea was in Bolivia.
I guess it was the early 70s, probably late 60s or something like that.
But anyway, he was in Bolivia trying to run an insurgency, and he was doing a real shitty job of it.
I mean, he was stealing food to survive kind of thing.
And the agency, the CIA, well, the Bolivian government asked for help trying to counter this new you know, a threat in the country.
Right.
And they send out a team, like we always do, to help them, you know, work better.
We give them communications, we give them intel, we teach them what to do, whatever it was.
And there's one particular individual which I am very honored of having known and continuing in touch with him is Felix Rodriguez.
Felix Rodriguez was a Bay of Pig veteran.
Yep.
Came to the United States, joined Green Berets, got out, did Vietnam, came out.
Went and worked for the agency.
But during the time that he was deployed down there in Bolivia, he is the one that is credited for helping the Bolivians track him down and hunt him down.
So the only reason I'm familiar with Felix Rodriguez is that we spoke on the phone about, I saw that documentary, The Last Narc, about Kiki Camarena.
And there, you know, he was, for people that don't know who Kiki, I doubt there's many people who don't know who Kiki was, but he was a, and correct me if I mess any of this up, but he was a DEA agent stationed in Guadalajara, I believe.
Fighting the cartels in the 80s.
And he was murdered by one of the cartels.
And apparently, there was a CIA officer in the room he was being tortured in who was talking to him.
And part of his murder there's multiple sources, whether it be DEA agents or other cartel members, who said there was a CIA guy in there.
And according to The Last Narc, Felix Rodriguez was the CIA officer.
Officer that was in there.
I I i've, i've heard those rumors, but they don't, they don't add up.
Um, we did not get into the counter narcotics side of the business until waiting the 80s.
Um, the uh CNC, which was the first Center Center or Counter Narcotics Center, uh did, wasn't created until the early 80s.
Um so um, the fact that there was a CIA person there um, I would like to see the proof, because i've never, I have never, and internally I have never heard anybody say yeah, we had somebody there.
Do you think the CIA is at all working with or using the cartels in Mexico, or has been for the last few decades?
We're prohibited from doing that.
Really?
Yeah, literally by statute.
We can infiltrate them by recruiting people or something like that, but cutting deals with narcos or cutting deals with terrorists, that's a bad business because sooner or later you're going to be compromised.
So, no.
I mean, the CIA or the U.S. government was not selling cocaine from Mexico in Los Angeles to undermine the minorities.
That's the reason, again, that I wrote the book.
Because when you hang out for 25 years and you rub shoulders with the kind of people that I rub shoulders with, and when you walk in the shadow of the giants that I saw in Pararescue and the ones that I saw in the CIA, you understand the morality of it.
Again, I'm not saying that we had names.
We've had people that are traitors that deserve to be shot as far as I'm concerned, not just put in jail.
The greater, greater majority of the people that serve in our military, especially the special military, in our federal agencies like the DEA, like the FBI, like the CIA, are way above average when it comes to morality, conviction, and patriotism.
Right.
Securing the Borders00:05:46
But we have a lot of interest in Mexico, number one.
Number two, it's right on our southern border.
And there's a lot of foreign interest in Mexico, including China, which is big.
I know.
They're buying a lot of land in there, including lithium mines and.
So, why wouldn't we just the same way Russia would have agents in Ukraine as well as we do?
Why wouldn't we want to have people in there gathering intelligence?
Well, we could have people in there gathering terrorism, and we do.
There's a difference between gathering intelligence and cutting deals with narco traffickers.
Correct.
Okay.
You know, hey, listen, I'll tell you what, I'll cut you some slack.
You can bring the dope in as long as you tell me what he's doing, and I'll take him out for you.
That's movie stuff.
That's movie stuff.
We're not allowed to do that kind of stuff.
Now, what we are allowed to do is to recruit locals that are on the fringe of narcotics and teach them how to swim upstream.
And now they get into the trusted level.
And now you have a validated reporting source on particular things.
But that's very hard to do.
People don't understand.
People go like, why can't you penetrate Al Qaeda?
Are you an idiot?
These people grew up together.
They've known each other.
Every cell. knows the history of every single person there.
And it's the same thing with the cartels.
You just don't, you're not a doctor in Mexico City and all of a sudden say, I'm going to start a cartel.
You know, you live a criminal life.
People know who you are.
And that's how you get ahead.
So we are allowed, and we do, recruit sources.
I recruited a source in a Latin American country who was a member of a Baoist terrorist organization.
Right.
Okay.
So we are allowed to do that.
We're supposed to do that.
But there's a big difference between that and collaborating with them in order to cut a deal.
Yeah, the problems south of the border is tremendous.
We are not paying attention to it.
The Chinese own Panama, including the Panama Canal, the mines and everything else.
But you know, the real they're also bringing a lot of the fentanyl into Mexico.
Absolutely, in tons, in tons.
Well, but bringing it into Mexico brings up to the point that I was trying to make: secure your borders.
When people get into the look, I came to this country legally.
But I came to this country because the mentality of the U.S. is give me your masses, okay?
Personalize it.
Take it down to the micro level here.
You live in a decent neighborhood and a couple of neighborhoods back, some modest family, they get desperate, they break into your back room, they take over your bedroom and your bad bathroom, and now you gotta keep them in there.
Right.
You allow them to be.
I mean, what would you do?
If that neighbor came to me and I knew him.
I knew him.
Yeah.
I knew him.
Yeah.
They came to my door and said, Mr. Prado, you know, we're in hard times.
Can you help us out?
Then it's my choice to bring him into my fold.
But if you break into the back door of my house and take up one of the rooms, I'm not going to be happy.
Yeah, I know exactly what that feels like because the person, my next door neighbor, just sold their house to an out of state investor who made it an Airbnb.
So now we have people coming into our neighbor's house every other day, speeding down the street, you know, crazy.
We have kids, there's lots of kids in the neighborhood.
So there's people speeding up and down the street, people partying in the house next to us from who knows where, where, you know, It was much better before when it was just a family that we knew that was there and they were like part of the neighborhood.
So I understand what that is.
You do have to kind of like bring things down to the micro level to really understand what it is.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, the solution obviously it is to regulate the entry, you know, whether it's by fences or whatever.
But the other part that nobody talks about is how do we expedite the process of legal immigrants?
You know, for example, If you were, let's say you're in Peru or Costa Rica and you want to come to the United States and you are a businessman, you have a bank account, your kids are in college and you apply and it takes years.
It takes years and money.
You cross the border, you just pay, you know, a coyote to bring you across the border and now you're in the United States and that makes you illegal.
I'm not saying that everybody that crosses that border is an illegal because they're not.
The majority, I would say, they're just people that are trying to do something for their family in desperation.
I get it.
And the cartels benefit, though, from that work.
Of course they do.
Of course they do.
They benefit from the strength at the border because the harder it is to get across, the more money they can make.
Absolutely.
So, you know, they have all that in place.
So, yeah, it's a tough equation, but for me, it's strengthen the borders, patrol the borders, control the borders, but at the same time, start a real robust program of how do you recruit foreign nationals to come to this country at all levels, not just doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs.
Because we do need immigrant workers.
And let them come and do the American dream.
But it has to be a process.
And that needs to be expedited.
And I think that that and controlling the borders would be a hell of an equation to entice people to do it legally.
It's a polarizing topic because a lot of people are just like, close it off, don't let out any immigrants.
But they don't understand that this country is made of immigrants and that immigrants are the backbone of this country.
If you look at any construction site where there's anything being actually built, People using their hands, it's 90% immigrants.
Central America Missions00:14:40
Yeah, well, remember the only Native Americans are Native Americans, right?
Yeah, that's a great point.
Great point.
Um, so we got a little bit off topic.
Where were we before we went?
We went okay, we went deep into Cuba, we were talking about Cuba, Che Guevara.
Um, you said that you would like to go back there one day, but it probably will never happen because uh, you're a former CIA only if there is a change of government, if it was a legitimate change of government, we would be the first people on the plane, right?
But uh, not till then.
You're back in Miami.
You joined the pararescue and then you got out of the pararescue.
What did you start doing after that?
Yeah, I stayed in the reserves.
Okay.
And I started riding rescue with Miami Metro Police and Fire Department.
So I was part of the rescue squad.
And this is during what time?
What year?
This was 74 through 80.
Okay.
So during that time, which were really interesting times in Miami for a paramedic because the drug wars were already starting and I saw as much action as.
as far as treating people as you did in the combat zone because people were getting shot and killed and everything else.
It was pretty rampant.
But what happened was in 19, around 1980, I approached the agency and I wrote to the agency.
I had done it once before and they had said, we're not hiring.
It's like in 74 when I was, you know, looking for, because again, now I have all this training and I have no war.
I have no way.
Yeah, okay, I am a pararescueman, but I'm still not earning or paying my debt of honor.
I'm a, in case of emergency break glass, I don't know.
I want to be, you know, the instrument that's already out of the glass.
So I applied for the agency again in 1980.
And again, I told you earlier that I believe that God's got a plan for us.
And as my luck would have it, they hired me on contract because they needed a paramilitary medic to go on special operations or in special training scenarios.
So I didn't leave the fire department.
I would go take two weeks leave and go work at the agency, working as a paramedic.
Paramilitary guy with our Special Activities Division, which was this Special Activities Center now, but back then it was Special Activities Division, which is the paramilitary, the special forces for, like a better word of, of the CIA.
And uh, when Reagan took over um, two things happened right away.
The first one was, as soon as he was sworn in Gee, they released our our, you know, our hostages in Iran the next day because they knew what was coming.
Uh, the second thing was he declared war on communism in our hemisphere because he knew the problem that at the time Cuba was fomenting problems in everywhere, from Angola to Salvador, to Nicaragua, to Bolivia, it was, it was all over.
So he declares war and he wanted to first and foremost take down the Sandinista, the communist Sandinista regime because again, the atrocities were there from from day one, I mean, the crimes were there from day one, and so the agency did not have at the time a single native speaking Native, Spanish looking guy that had that kind of military background.
So they're all scrambling, What was the name of that pararescue guy?
Remember the Cuban kid from Miami?
And that's how I got hired in full time into the agency in 1990.
In 1980.
Oh, 1980.
1980, 81, yeah.
Wow.
So that's when you got sent down to Central America.
That is correct.
And you were how old?
I was about 30.
About 30 years old.
That was my prime.
Can you walk me through what that was like, that process of going down there?
That was your first.
official like deployment.
Yep.
And the best job I ever had in my life.
I got called by the agency on a Thursday and I was at headquarters on a Monday and talked to them, came out, called the fire department and resigned because what they offered me was they said, you want to come on board?
I said, well, if it's contract, no.
If it's staff, yes.
So they say, no, we want to keep you.
I said, okay.
And, you know, I thought I was going to go through some kind of training or something like that.
No.
Nothing.
They gave me alias documentation.
They gave me some briefings on what was going on in Nicaragua, the dynamics, the geopolitics of the area and everything else with Salvador, blah, blah, blah.
Two or three days of that stuff and put my ass on a plane and sent me down to Honduras.
Wow.
And we had, that program ended up being 100 plus guys, but the program was started with just five.
And I was blessed with a guy named Colonel Ray.
Colonel Ray was a, he jumped into Corregidor when he was 17.
He was a Green Beret and he was our man in Laos running a lot of the programs for the agency.
So he was a legendary, legendary, really legendary operator.
He became my first mentor.
So my instructions from headquarters was, go do whatever Colonel Ray tells you to do.
Got it moving.
Got down there and report, and he goes, okay, what is it you want me to do?
I want you to become indispensable to them.
I need you to live with them.
I need you to break bread with them.
I need you to train them.
Because for the first 14 months of those three years, I was the only CIA officer allowed to go to the camps.
because that's why my book is called Black Ops.
Black Ops are the operations that the U.S. hand has to be hidden.
So at that time, the program was not, later on, obviously, it became a very open country.
Pretty much at the end of my tenure there in 84, early 84, it was publicly known that the United States was supporting.
By accident, right?
Well, eventually there were some accidents, obviously, later on with Hassenfuss, but that was much later on.
But it was obvious.
I mean, Congress was leaking it.
All these things were going on, the Bolden Amendment, all this competition back and forth.
But that's what black ops are, those operations that have to hide the hand.
So my MO was I lived in the camps Monday through Friday.
And I would come to Tegucigalpa to my brand new wife.
Is that where you met her?
No, no.
I met her in Miami.
Can you imagine meeting another Cuban in Miami?
That's hard to do.
A lot of rare, right?
So, but no, she, we got married.
I had been in country about eight, in Honduras about eight months when I came out, got married and then brought her in.
But for me, I would leave 4 o'clock in the morning, go to a camp, spend two days there, train them up on everything from headspace and timing on a 50 cal to RPG-7s to medical stuff to patrolling to intel gathering and giving them the intelligence.
I was the only guy that was there.
And I would do that for two days, go to the next camp.
tribal day in the middle, two days there and then come home for the weekend.
And I did that for pretty much all of three years.
So who were the people in these camps?
Can you give some general context to what exactly was going on there?
I'd love to because that is another people that have been defamed.
You know, that was the best job I ever had in my life because the rewards of my sacrifice of being living, like I said, sleeping in a jungle hammock five days a week for three years.
and never regretting it was the people that I was dealing with.
You know, they have a bad reputation about all being right-wing Somoza radicals.
I'm not saying that there weren't a handful of those.
And there were certain guys who actually went rogue, and that's in the book that I'm the one that, you know, rendered them back, both of those guys.
You know, brought them to justice.
But what I would do is I would train the trainers, because primarily I was training the people that already have some military, and then I would help them train.
The next layer and the next layer and the next layer.
But every night what I would do is I would grab a cup of coffee and I would go to a different campfire and I would ask them.
I said, why are you here?
Lo and behold, there wasn't a single one that said, well, you know, I read Marx and Lenin and I don't agree with communism.
This was all personal.
None of them read anything.
No, they didn't even know what the Soviet Union was.
Right yeah, they they'd heard of Castro, because that was the friends of the Sandinistas.
But when I asked them, why are you here?
And it was real simple they'd look in your eye and go.
They raped my daughter, They burned my church.
They beat up my priest.
They took my cattle.
They conscripted my 15 year old into the military.
And he got killed.
So it doesn't get any more pure than that that you're willing to give up everything and go live in infested jungles where leishmaniasis and malaria and everything were prevalent just to try to get some freedom in the future for your family.
Their lives were all individually affected.
100%.
Or dismantled somehow.
100%.
So who were the Contras?
Like, where did they come from?
There was a couple of different factions.
There was actually three factions.
Like in all these revolutions, you know, in wars, there's always factions in there.
So in the north, under the FDN, was what the Mosquito Indians called the Spaniards.
These were people that most of them were led by, you know, lieutenants that had been military lieutenants.
You know, they were not, you know, big shots in the military, but they were just like, you know, people.
people that knew enough about leadership and they recruited just from the masses.
The peasants in all these towns, Nicaragua was a very poor country.
So a lot of these people gravitated to the camps in the hope that they could fight and get their stuff back.
So the majority of, you had the North faction on the east side of the country and then on the west side of the country you had the Mosquito Indians which are their Native Americans.
They're Native.
to that area.
Miskito, Sumo, and Rama are the three tribes.
And Stebban Faggoth was their leader.
I'm still in touch with him and still friends with him.
He's grateful that I saved his butt one time.
But again, the purity of these guys, these guys were hunters, gatherers, very religious, very religious, and very tight-knit families who knew how to work in the jungle.
So they were formidable, formidable warriors.
Then the third faction was in the southern part of Nicaragua.
And those were the former Sandinistas, the people that fought as Sandinistas got dissolutioned by what Sandinist regime was doing, and they rebelled and they established their camps in the southern part of Nicaragua.
And when we first started there, they wouldn't even talk to each other.
By the time that we left there, they were one fighting force.
Wow.
And you know, at one point that people never, everybody focuses on the Iran-Contra scandal, and it's politics, okay?
But let's look at the facts.
That was the first black operation program after Vietnam that was successful.
We brought, we forced the Sandinistas to the negotiating table.
We forced them to have elections and they lost by vote, not by guns, but without the pressures.
They went to the table because they were losing.
They knew they were going to be taken off power.
So they figured, hey, let's cut a deal, cut the heat off.
It didn't work.
Obviously, it's reverted back to that with the Ortegas because of all the money they stole.
But that was a project that revitalized the agency and revitalized covert operations.
Now, what was the genesis of the Sandinistas and their ideology?
The Sandinistas, well, Nicaragua had a real alpha hotel for a leader.
His name was Somoza.
And he was just a brutal dictator.
And most importantly, he was a thief.
And one of the tipping points was, I think it was in 72, that they had a massive earthquake and millions and millions and millions of dollars were pumped into Nicaragua.
He kept most of it.
There was a famous baseball player, Roberto Clemente, who was Puerto Rican, who started bringing in food and he would be coming the flights and his plane crashed and got killed at the prime of his life trying to help the people survive after the earthquake.
that Somoza so blatantly stole the great, it never baited down.
The parts that were destroyed were never rebuilt.
I've been to Managua.
Everything is new on one side, but the old side of town, everything is ruins.
So they had a legitimate gripe against a very, very brutal and corrupt leader or president, whatever the hell you want to call him, dictator.
The Sandinistas, however, came in with a different facade than the Cubans did.
Cuba's revolution under Castro was a fig leaf hiding communism.
Right.
Well, the Sandinistas couldn't do that because they were being supported directly by the Cubans.
The Cubans were there.
The Cubans were training them.
The Cubans were supplying them.
So they were known.
People knew that they were a communist regime from day one.
It wasn't a surprise, like it was to most Cuban people.
So it was, again, you know an extension of Cuba.
It was an extension of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union through Cuba.
Through Cuba.
Right.
And by de facto also Salvador because things were being funneled.
There was a port which I ended up blowing up in Puerto Cabezas.
Fighting the Sandinistas00:15:03
I like how you just casually throw in there.
I ended up blowing it up.
Yeah, we blew the place up.
So anyway, that's where all the military logistics from Nicaragua, I'm sorry, from Cuba, from the Soviet Union via Cuba came into Nicaragua.
Right?
So then they would export some of that to Salvador for the guerrillas that were in Salvador.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So they were very active there.
They had leaders there.
Their intel guys were training.
You know, once the Sandinistas took over, the Cubans' military and the Cuban intel services there were en masse.
So this is all part of the Cold War.
It's a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Exactly.
Okay.
So you're down there, you're going to camps, you're sleeping in a jungle hammock five nights a week, and your wife moves there with you.
And so you're training these guys, teaching them how to use RPGs, teaching them how to gather intelligence.
What is your, like, other than your day to day kind of training these guys, at what point do you guys start sort of like going in and gaining territory and gaining ground on these Sandinistas?
Very, very early.
Obviously, not me going across the border, although I did get caught across the border in a couple of firefights just by happenstance.
And there's no border there that's marked.
That says you're now entering Honduras.
I mean, it's all jungle and rivers, you know and uh, but we started infiltrating them um, doing ambushes and raids.
They would, you know, venture in with enough supplies for maybe a week or two.
Hit a town, just like that.
You know that's revolutionary, you know 101, you know that's what you do.
It's you.
You fight the enemy with a hit, hit and run kind of uh tactic.
And that started moving and started getting, you know, momentum in denying the Sandinistas more and more territory near the border, which allowed the camps to be a little safer.
And I'm talking about months down the road.
I mean, at the beginning, you had a Sandinista camp 200 yards on that side of the border, and you had a Contra camp 200 yards on the side of this one.
Wow.
So there were several scrimmages there that would happen pretty spontaneously.
But we started pushing them down and they started gaining territory.
Not so much putting up a flag and saying, we're declaring liberty here.
No.
It was denying the Sandinistas power into that area, which played into the peasants because that's what they wanted now.
They wanted to join something that was getting them.
They just got them this.
They got this little bit of peace for the family.
The Sandinistas cannot come readily into my village.
You know rape, pillage and plunder.
Right, because there are going to be some consequences.
So that that was the the goal from at the beginning which, of course, is what every you know insurgency does you try to undermine.
You know what's going on.
So the um that's when the special programs again black ops started kicking in um.
The headquarters came in with a mandate saying, look, you know, we are.
You guys are doing a great job with harassing and ambushing these guys, but we need a left hook.
We need something that lets them know that this is not a ragged, not only them, but the world, to know that this isn't just a ragtag, a bunch of peasants uprising, kind of thing.
So that's when I came up with a plan for blowing up Portico Basis.
The plan to do the damage to Portico Basis wasn't my idea.
How we did it was.
So the headquarters came in and said, look, we've got to come up with something that is going to really knock them on their ass, something that's going to get their attention, that they're going to go, oh, this is for real.
the world to focus on this, not just the Sandinistas.
So I had met some mosquito divers.
When I was there, I was in military uniform.
I was there as a Honduran major.
And I had my scuba badge on my hat.
And one of the mosquitoes came up and said, are you a diver?
I go, yeah, I'm a military diver.
He says, I'm a diver.
I said, oh, yeah?
What do you do?
He says, I'm a lobster diver.
So he introduced me to six or eight of his guys that were now Contras that had been lobster divers.
So I came up with the ideas as I can militarily train these guys.
And we go in there and blow Puerto Cabezas a pier up.
And we did very successfully.
So what was the purpose of this pier in Puerto Cabezas?
Well, Puerto Cabezas was the belly button for all Soviet aid coming through Cuba.
It's on the side of the Caribbean side.
On the Caribbean side.
So it was the main port.
There was another one, Bluefields, but that was a lot further south.
So Puerto Cabezas was the number one belly button for them to receive.
the military supplies and fuels and stuff coming in there.
So negating him that and making him vulnerable, it was very impactful.
It was very politically impactful.
What were the supplies they were receiving?
Like was it?
Everything from ammunition, weapons, fuel, food when needed, whatever they needed to provide to keep the regime money and a lot of weapons because again, they were infiltrating them further into Honduras and into El Salvador.
What sort of numbers are you talking when we're talking about all the Contras together, all the three camps of the Contras and all the Sandinistas?
Well, I can't tell you about the Sandinistas because obviously that's the standing army.
So, whatever, you know, 100,000, I don't know.
Roughly.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't remember what would be, I couldn't do that justice.
But the Contras were in the thousands.
The thousands.
In the thousands.
Not necessarily tens of thousands, but it was in the thousands.
I know we had, at one time, we put in 3,000 men and women across the border at one time.
Started just moving in.
It was one of the big offenses that we made from the north.
So there were several thousand between the Miskito, the Spaniards, as they call them, and then the former Sandinista, which were, again, they definitely contributed to the fight.
So when you went to go blow up the pier at Puerto Capesa, can you walk me through what that was like?
Did you guys go in in the middle of the night with scuba gear and just strap C4 to pilings?
Close enough.
Yeah.
I spent three weeks on a deserted island in the middle of, outside of Puerto Limpira.
called the Vivorillo Keys.
And I started training these guys, compass swims, how to do buddy breathing.
I mean, they knew how to put out a set of tanks and go grab lobster.
There's a big difference.
Were they mainly free divers?
No, they actually used the scuba tanks.
They would have bags and they would go down with scuba tanks and because a lot more efficient.
And they have real rough gear, but not necessarily.
So they were divers.
They were legitimate divers, but they were not military divers.
They were not Manny Quigg.
Exactly.
Exactly.
No, far from it.
Not from our mutual friend Manny Quigg.
But, you know, things like compass swims.
You know you can't just swim on the surface to an area and then I, so you know, be able to get a reading and keep it and get to your point.
Uh, counting the distance and and all the logistics and then what we tasked our headquarters.
Our headquarters has a component called OTS, Office OF Technical Services.
They're the guys that blow up everything, bug everything they're.
They're ops officers, mostly from the special military community, but who are very technical and scientific and bomb experts and all this kind of stuff okay.
So they came up with a bomb that was 80 pounds of C4 in a tubular-shaped device that I swam back and forth for two days getting the buoyancy on the right.
The techs were there.
We've got to float this because you have to be able to drag it behind you without it impeding your accuracy of getting into the target.
So the way that this works is we went into the, well, we left Honduras in a Honduran PT boat.
And we had put the native boat on top of the PT boat.
And I had my four divers.
Well, my boat captain and my three divers.
And we had their weapons and the explosives.
The bomb was there and everything else.
We left and got into Nicaraguan waters at night.
So we were in probably 10 o'clock at night or so.
We were already, we could see Puerto Cabezas.
So we timed it so we would be there under darkness.
Then we put the panga on the water.
Lupanga was the native boat with the guys in it and now we took them a little further in until they were a couple of miles from the target and that's when they deployed.
And what we had to do here is you have the two pylons on the one side that we were going to attack and you tie this device from one end to the other and you put it two-thirds of the distance of the depth.
So two-thirds from the bottom of the actual depth and what it does is lifts the water is not compressible.
So when the explosion happens, it's like a tsunami going this way, and that's what tore up all the pipes and everything else in the pier.
So the water is like shrapnel.
Exactly.
It's just like a solid mass of being exploded.
It becomes shrapnel.
That's a very good way of putting it.
And I will tell you, I had never seen satellite overviews until I got back from the mission, and Colonel Ray says, check out your work.
And seeing that pier with a big-ass hole in the middle, that was cool shit.
Holy cow.
I can't fucking and in the pitch black, pitch darkness, you guys are down there doing this?
The guys were what we gave them was they had some IR lights.
Okay.
And we at the boat, we had night vision, very rudimentary, but we could pick up IR so we could all it was was a red blob that just to the naked eye, you could never see it.
But with these special glasses, you could see the fact that they were there.
So that's when the boat picked them up and we came back in into Nicaragua.
I mean into Honduras.
Wow, man.
Those kinds of missions are so, those are like, that's like a movie right there.
Like listening to that part of your book, I felt like I was watching a Tom Clancy movie.
Like it was insane.
Underwater divers in the middle of the night, strapping C4 to the bottom of a pier.
And so you guys, that was unscathed.
You guys got back unscathed.
Unscathed.
No one even saw you guys.
No one even.
No, we lost the boat captain in a future mission.
He, uh, boat capsized and he, uh, he drowned.
But, uh, that, that mission overall was 100% successful.
Um, So, you mentioned earlier that there were two guys who went rogue that were managing some of the Contra camps, a couple of the Contra camps.
One of the Contra camps.
They were managing one of the Contra camps.
But there was a guy who was their predecessor.
His name was Suicidas.
Yeah, who means suicide.
They called him Suicide.
Commander Suicide, yeah, because he was a badass.
He was a very good friend of mine.
We were very, very close.
He had some problems, which I cannot go into.
So he had to leave the camp for a while.
And there were two sub commanders.
One's name was Creel and the other one was Cara de Malo.
And they both started going rogue.
They were going in town.
Honduras is a very humble military.
It's gotten much better.
But back then, any of these villages, you had three local police guys or something with a bolt-action rifle.
And here are these countries they got.
Everything from fouls to Ak-47s and M60s and you know, and uh, so they started cattle wrestling, they started going into town and demanding stuff and they were drinking and whoring and, you know, beating people up and it was, it was, it was bad word got to us and immediately the um, the Hondurans came to us goes, you guys got to fix this.
I said okay, so they send me.
So uh it's it's, it's.
It's a pretty long story, but we'll keep it real short.
I mean primarily, I went back there and I and I kidnapped their asses back on one at a time.
The first one I fooled into getting there, told him that I was bringing a Honduran captain, which I did, that wanted to talk to him about the future of what was going on, blah, blah, blah.
So the helicopter could only land like a mile from the actual camp.
So he came out with two of his bodyguards.
Okay.
And this was Krill?
This was Krill.
This was Krill.
And so what happened was I told him, my stomach is really bad.
Can you go into the little, it was a little tiny village.
and get me some Pepsi's or something so I can rehydrate.
Here's, you know, I gave like $10 worth, which was a mint for them.
So he runs off to get this stuff, and as soon as the guy leaves, I grabbed this guy and I threw him on a plane, on the helicopter.
Disarmed him and threw him in the helicopter.
How do you do that?
You just grabbed him?
Yeah.
Was he armed?
Was is the operative word.
Yeah, I disarmed him and threw him in the helicopter.
There was a Nicaraguan Contra officer, I think he had been a lieutenant in the Somoza, that was there with me.
and another, more of a strap hanger, junior guy, and of course the Honduran captain.
So the Honduran captain takes off with Krill to go back, to take him back.
And you stayed?
I stayed.
I'm supposed to pick up.
I wanted to find the other guy.
So I had befriended this young guy.
He was, and the moral of the story here is never underestimate the lower people in your organization.
This young guy came to me months before.
His wife was very sick and he didn't have money for the medicines that she needed.
I reached into my pocket, gave him $20 worth of lympyrus.
And he never forgot that.
Well, I go into the camp after getting rid of Krill and people are asking me, where is Krill?
Oh, no.
He went back with Captain Luque.
He agreed to go back there and get debriefed.
So I'm walking into the camp.
We're going to the area.
Usually they would put us in the center of the camp for protection.
They didn't want guys like me to get captured by the Sandinistas.
So I'm walking to where I'm thinking we're going to be staying, and I hear from behind the bushes, I hear this, major, major.
And it was this young guy.
He says, they're planning to kill you tonight.
And I said, okay.
They didn't take us to the center.
They took us to the outskirts, the back outskirts of the camp.
There was a hutch there, and that's where they put us.
And who were you with?
I was with two Nicas, two Nicaraguan Contras, yeah.
Two other Nicaraguan Contras that had come from their headquarters.
The Camp Escape Attempt00:16:22
And I told the guys, look, I just got told this.
So what we did is as soon as it got dark, we crawled out of the back windows with our weapons.
We carried grenades.
We carried all kinds of crap.
And we went up on the hill and set up a perimeter because we weren't about to walk back.
to, you know, anywhere.
If they come after us, we're going to just have to fight.
And sure as hell, around midnight, all these guys are in there with flashlights coming into the house and, you know, and wondering where the hell we were at.
How far away were you from that house?
Oh, a few, I would say maybe 300 feet.
300 feet?
Sorry, yards.
300 yards.
And it was a hill, rocky hills, and we had set up a perimeter, you know, and all that other stuff.
They would have paid a heavy price coming after us.
And they knew that because I had trained them.
Right.
They knew what we were capable of doing.
Right.
So that's amazing.
That's incredible that they thought that they could pull something on you.
They were rogue.
I mean, they were desperately rogue because they had committed certain crimes that they definitely, and I'll get into that in a second.
So what happened was the next day, I walked down before sunrise, went back there, went back in the hooch, we went to eat breakfast, and there's people that are going like, how are they still here?
And others were going like, oh, they're still here because the majority of them were pro-us.
So I asked them, I said, where's Karay Malo?
And one of the guys coughed up that he was in town in the little village that he had stayed up there overnight.
Well, lo and behold, there was a whorehouse there that he would frequent, get drunk and take two girls into the room and, you know, and somebody else would pay for it, you know, kind of stuff because he forced them to.
And so I showed up again.
This time I came in a helicopter with the same captain, Honduran captain, and my two Nikas.
And we landed in the village, in the center park of the village.
And they had four.
military guys there.
I mean, the highest ranking was probably a corporal, right?
And they had bolt-action rifles, and they're scared shitless of the Contras because they're armed to the teeth and trained.
So we come in, this is where the Honduran captain came in.
Even though I was there as a Honduran major, I'm not really a Honduran, you know?
So he did the talking, and he says, where is this guy?
And they said, he's over there.
He says, well, you go get him, tell him Major Alex is here and wants to talk to him.
He needs to talk to him now.
These guys are going like, oh, shit.
They went over there, and they told him.
He was drunk, gets in his Jeep that he had taken from one of the local ranchers.
He had usurped as the Jeep, and he had his driver, who was his bodyguard, he comes up to helicopters here, the part of the park here, and he comes to the street, and he starts walking over to me.
I have my AR-15 slung on my shoulder and my Browning on the side, and he walks up kind of, you know, semi-staggering kind of thing, and so what's going on?
I said, look, you know, I need to take you back.
The Estado Mayor, the chief of staff, I need to talk to you about, you know, what's going on and future plans, and he says, well, I ain't going back, I said.
Look, Caramalo, I'm not requesting this.
As a courtesy, because I've known you now for two years or whatever it was, I guarantee your safety, but you need to come back with me.
And he goes, I ain't going back.
And he looks over to behind the Jeep, and he nods, and the guy takes out an Uzi out of the Jeep and does this.
And I take the IR-15, and I put it about from here to you, right at his crotch.
And I said, you know you're going to lose this one, right?
You better turn your guy down, because if he fires one shot this way, you're dead.
So he did one of these, hey, put it away, put it away.
And same thing took this weapon away, threw him in the air helicopter and we went.
This time I left also.
We all came back to town.
So this is what you would call a quote rendition.
Yeah, it would be a form of a rendition yeah, okay.
Yeah, it definitely.
It was definitely enemy territory.
Getting somebody that didn't want to go out want to be taken out yeah, that's wild.
Those guys went under a military trial and they were punished accordingly, And so did Suicidas ever come back?
No, he died shortly thereafter.
Oh, no.
Yeah, yeah.
I wanted to also get into a little bit of the Argentinian angle to this whole thing.
How were the Argentinians involved in this whole operation?
They were the catalyst at the beginning.
There was a very right wing, very brutal, repressive regime in Argentina at the time.
And these guys that.
They befriended.
They knew some of the, the former Samosa guys that were in the Contras and all this other stuff.
So they started trying to provide aid, but we're talking a drop in the bucket.
So they came up and they had about 10 or 12 of them.
One was a general that came in and out, the other one was a colonel that stayed there most of the time and then the rest were just thugs.
I mean, these were guys who were part of their, their death squads.
You know, if you were suspected of being a communist in Argentina, they would just knock your door down, take you, shoot you in front of your family and take you away.
That's, that's how tough these guys were.
Right, they were Kind of like the Che Guevara mentality of terrorism.
And so they were a thorn in her side, but they were the ones that brokered the first introduction and everything else.
And the program started.
They were part of it.
Not once in the year or so that they were there did any one of these Argentines ever stay at a camp.
Twice I had one that showed up at the camp and left with a helicopter after I was dropped off.
So they never contributed to this.
They were just milking the crap out of it.
A lot of U.S. dollars coming in.
And they were getting funded by the U.S.?
Yeah.
Well, the Contras were being funded by the U.S., but they were part of the system that they needed their support.
And these guys were supposed to be there to train their guys.
And so now we're training them in military stuff so they can go out to the camps and help me train the others.
They never did.
They just didn't.
They just took the money.
No, they just took the money and ran.
As a matter of fact, that general got busted.
I think it was in Miami Airport.
He had two AK 47s and $300,000 in a suitcase.
It's a lot of money.
And he would make monthly trips.
So you do the math.
They were very corrupt.
And it was good riddance.
Everybody was very relieved, including the Nikas, because they felt obliged to them because they were the first ones to help them.
Because remember, before Reagan, this was not a popular idea.
So all they had was the Argentines.
So, yeah, they were corrupt.
They were very brutal.
I had a couple of encounters with them, with a general one time.
They despised the Miskito Indians because they're racist.
I mean, these guys are very Nazi mentality kind of stuff.
Well, the Nazis went there after it was over.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's part of their blood there.
And so they looked down on the Mosquito Contras, and they were my favorite anyway.
So I'm sitting across the table from him.
Here you have a major talking to a general.
And actually, I was a captain at the time.
I hadn't gotten promoted to a major yet.
And he's making decisions about the logistics.
Well, we're not going to give them that right now.
We're going to put this over here.
And I said, no, we're not, sir.
They're getting their fair share of the stuff.
He says, I said, you're only a captain or something.
I said, yeah, but I'm the American captain.
These are my resources.
These are my boss's resources.
So if you want to do it that way, we'll pull out.
And you're on your own.
He had a pencil in his hand and he broke it.
That's how angry he was.
But I got my way.
So my mosquitoes got supplied.
So I was persona non grata from the Argentines too.
Wow, so that put a pin in that.
That pretty much it started their downfall because now the station got really involved in the need, recognizing the need we need to weed these guys out of here.
So after all of this transpired with the planned assassination on you, what else were you able to accomplish during your time down there before you left?
Like, what happened?
Like, can you explain the time period between that and when, what was the guy's name whose plane crashed?
There was a Marine who was killed.
Yeah, Hassanfuss, Hassanfuss.
Yeah.
And that was in the, I left in 84, the Contras in the North.
He went down.
87, I think it was, I was in Costa Rica running the southern front at that time.
Okay, so you.
Okay, so you had left.
I had left for several years and then I went back because I went through spy school and everything else.
Then I got sent to Costa Rica to to help the the southern front Contras.
So why did you leave the area in the first place?
Well, I mean, I've been there three years.
Okay, come on, you know as much as I enjoyed it.
I had a brand new baby and right, right everything else.
So we and we limit our tours.
We have to.
Okay, our guys get burned out.
As a matter of fact, three years is the exception.
Usually it's two-year tours.
If it's a danger zone, it's usually just a year.
Oh, wow.
And I've been there for three living in the camps.
So this is when you went to official spy school and became an actual spy?
I finished my college.
I had a little bit to go, and they sponsored me for that, and then I went to spy school.
But what happened, the other big thing that happened while I was still in Nicaragua, I mean, when I was still in the northern part of Nicaragua, was the idea of the success we had had at Puerto Cabezas.
They wanted to emulate that.
in the port on the other side of the country, Corinto.
On the Pacific side.
On the Pacific side.
And Corinto was the commercial belly button.
This is where all the import and export of foodstuff, that's where they send the Nisas wood, crops or cattle, whatever they were sending.
This was the port that handled all that.
So they came to me and said, do you think your divers can do it?
Hell yeah.
Of course they can do it.
Who came to you and asked you this?
My boss.
Oh, okay.
My head of the agency there, Colonel Ray.
He says, Do you think your guys, headquarters is asking, do you think you guys could hit Corinto?
I said, Yeah, I know we could hit Corinto.
We just got to do it right.
And he said, okay, well, start planning it.
When I briefed my plan, they came in, the senior FDN guys and the Contras there and the other station officers were saying, well, you know, we need this one to be a joint operations with the Spaniards, as they call them.
So we want to use your divers, but we're going to have the boat captains are going to be regular Nicaraguan white guys.
They don't trust each other.
They don't get along.
So I wasn't being asked.
I was being told.
But I had a good relationship with Colonel Rand.
I went afterwards and said, hey, boss, this ain't going to work.
These guys hate each other.
They're only fighting in the same fight because they hate the Sandinistas more.
But Mosquitoes want autonomy.
That's what they're really fighting for.
They're not fighting for the Spaniards.
I was overruled because, again, the politics, go back to politics, you had to have the optic that this was now, because if not, it would be Mosquito, Mosquito, Mosquito.
If we would have done this just with Mosquito Indians, they wanted to boost the morale.
And it turned into a goat rope.
Because what happened was we came up with the plans.
I trained these guys for weeks and weeks and weeks.
And again, now we're using platter charges to take down.
Corinto is a port and has a bridge that hooks it up to the mainland.
And the bridge had these pylons.
And the idea was to blow four of the pylons on one side so it would tilt.
And that's not an easy repair, right?
Right.
So the guys had their platter charges.
And we showed them how to stash them and how to put them and how to arm them and all that kind of stuff.
But when they went in the boat, and we got them these fast boats, these bats, these boats were fast as hell, but they were not very robust.
Like cigarette boats?
They were kind of, they were open fishermen, but they had huge engines on them.
They could do 60 miles an hour.
Oh, wow.
They would haul ass.
And so we had given them two of these, and the boat captains had been trained on using these boats.
And they went in to Corinto at night, as expected.
There was a lot more vigilance there than we had expected.
There was a lot of patrols going on.
So that kind of also set their mood of kind of panic.
They made it to the mouth of the part of the ocean that goes into under the bridge, and that's where the mosquitoes were supposed to get in the water.
And the mosquitoes said, we're not getting in the water because I know you guys are going to leave us.
And the guy said, no, we're not going to leave us.
So they get into an argument.
You got eight guys who are armed to the teeth, you know, and they're getting in an argument.
So they decided to scrap the operation.
Which I'm not saying that it was wrong.
It was a good decision probably.
Because I believe that they would probably left it.
If there would have been any conflict all of a sudden surfaced, they weren't going to wait for these guys.
They were going to leave them hanging back there.
So they started to exfil back into, well, both boats broke down.
The first one broke down almost immediately, got all clogged up, and they had to go into the mangrove and spend the night there.
They were hiding.
They weren't moving.
The other boat who had gone ahead broke down in the Gulf of Fonseca, still in Nicaraguan waters, like a bobbing cork up there, and no means of getting anywhere.
So that's where my pararescue training came in.
I went to my boss at the time.
Well, the guy was ahead of the program, Leon, great guy.
I went to Leon.
I said, I ain't leaving my guys behind.
He says, I figured, what do you want to do?
I said, well, here's what I'm going to do.
And this is what we did.
The first boat, like I said, was bobbing in the ocean right there in the Gulf of Fonseca.
So I rigged what we call a stable.
Stable is where you have harnesses that come from the side of a helicopter with seats at the other end.
So it can come to the water, people get on it, and you could bring them out.
So I set it up for five because it was four on the boat, but I had to get into the boat to teach them what to do.
So helicopter comes in.
It's called a, we used to call it low and slows because you're supposed to be going, I think it was 15 knots and be 15 yards or something from the water, you know.
And bass fin snorkel.
two sticks of C4 because if the boat didn't start, I was going to blow it up.
I was going to leave that to the Sandinista because it was armored and it had incredible capabilities and deniability.
Any way you put it, it was something that could, even though we don't buy things in the open, but it could come out.
So my plan was if we could restart it, I had spark plugs, tools, fuel, water, and I said if we can't start the boat and recover it, we're going to blow it up, put everybody on a stable rig.
Helicopter would go up.
I'd pop it, swim out, get in the helicopter, and get the hell out of there.
We were able to start it, which was magical.
How do you jump out of a helicopter with fuel, tools, spark plugs, C4, and all this stuff?
Very carefully.
No, what we had was flotation bundles on both, on the fuel, on the water, and then on the equipment.
And I pushed those out, and then I went out.
But the C4 was on me.
That I have.
The actual charge was with me.
I had the caps and everything else, too.
to set it off.
And I had and so you swam with all this shit?
Yeah.
And I had my Walther PPK on my ankle because that was all I could carry at the time.
But anyway, so we got them out of there, but we still have the other boat that's stuck in the woods, in the mangroves.
So we go back, we fix the boat.
The boats were very prone to clogging up.
Sub Agents and Explosives00:11:54
They foul up and they would break down.
So they refurbished the boat.
The guys didn't know what they were doing.
We had one former cuban Bay of Pigs veteran was a contractor for the agency and there was an agency officer there was a maritime officer and they were the boat captains that took us.
Now I went with them to get the second boat.
Well we had been there the night before.
First of all now I'm going on 30 hours from no sleep.
Okay so we're going out in the night and the seas were brutal.
It was 10 to 12 feet beating the crap out of the boat but we were determined to vector but what happened was You don't think the Sandinistas noticed that helicopter in their waters and all the traffic and all the communications?
The Cubans monitor that for them.
That's the kind of intel that they provide.
So they knew something was going on.
And as soon as we started getting close to the landfall, the Sandinista boat started popping flares, these flares that go up and trying to light up the sky to see if they could detect us because they figured there was something going on.
Plus, we had an aircraft that was a communications link with the station, us, and trying to get a hold of the guys in the boat.
And when that didn't work, they started doing what's called recon by fire.
They will shoot at a certain area and wait to see if somebody shoots back.
Well, I had an AR-15 and a Brownie.
I wasn't about to shoot back anybody, right?
So we bobbed out there.
Our radios went bad.
But we were able to geolocate exactly where the second boat was.
We were forced to go back because the seas were killing us.
And we were, you know, again, no communications.
We couldn't even triangulate that.
So we went back to base and then the next morning I did get some sleep.
The next morning we went out there in these small boats that we had given the Hondurans and trained them on and they were like, you know, little super fast little boats with M50s on them, you know, 50 cows on them.
And six of them, you know, in formation, we went in, got the boat, pulled it out and brought it back to.
Wow.
So it was a failed mission, but I am very proud of that rescue and I don't think that if I had been a grunt rather than a PJ, I would have been able to pull that one off.
Were you guys ever able, were they ever able to compromise that bridge after you left?
Unfortunately, they, again, politics kicks in.
They made the political decision that they were going to mine the port.
And that became a real, that's an act of war.
That's an open act of war.
So they mined the Corrigo port.
They, meaning somebody in the U.S. government, it wasn't us.
Okay.
You know, that's not our.
Our purview.
So it was probably some of the special military guys who were sent out there to do that.
So this wouldn't, when you say mine, what do you mean?
I know what a mine is.
Yeah, so ships couldn't come in.
So they just play like above water explosives?
Just under the surface, usually.
So you can't dodge them.
They usually put them just below the surface.
So they actually mined the harbor, and that became a huge political football.
By that time, I was leaving.
Okay.
So, and getting into, finishing my college and getting into spy school.
So I was totally disconnected from the rest of the world.
But.
But for me, that was a very important mission because, first of all, I brought my guys back.
I'm very proud of that.
Those guys would have not survived it.
Second, it was the first time I did a real para rescue rescue, even though I was now CIA.
And so my roots were validated.
It was my validation of, yeah, I am a PJ, you know.
I've had all the training.
I have the pretty beret that just gets the chicks from the BX, but I finally done something under that, you know, on the auspices of para rescue that worked.
And.
The rest is history.
I mean, you know, the guys got out and the porch were mine and became a huge political football for quite a few months.
And this is after you went back to the States and started getting into spy school and learning.
Yeah.
When you were going through spy school, what did you have anything in mind that you wanted to do next?
Or did you want to just kind of get into the same kind of stuff, like hands on, nitty gritty?
Well, I was, you know, the agencies were broken up before into geographical areas, geographical divisions, East Asia Division.
Right.
Southeast Asia Division, Latin America Division, European, blah, blah, blah.
And then there's a couple of other divisions.
One of them is Special Activities Division, which is the paramilitary side of the agency.
As I mentioned earlier, the special forces of the CIA, all recruited from the four branches of the services, their special side.
So I was home based with them.
That was where I belonged.
But at the time, before that, a lot of the paramilitary guys were strictly that, just paramilitary guys.
The decision, a very smart decision, was made.
that we have to have fully rounded operations officers that are case officers.
So that's where the PMO, paramilitary operations officer, came over.
So you were, they call it dual-hatted.
You know, you were a bona fide case officer.
You could recruit.
You went through the farm, through the whole farm, just like everybody else, except the paramilitary side, because you didn't need it.
But you went through the class for the whole three, four months that we were at the farm learning how to spy.
And so I was still home-based in a special activities division.
But the program was start to send our guys to do conventional, you know, case officer operations overseas.
Right.
So I was a blend of that.
And I guess the blend, what it made it was, I was a case officer in real shitty areas where a lot of people didn't want to go.
Right.
I love how you described, which I didn't even, I just, for some reason, I just learned from reading your book what an agent actually means.
I never knew like the actual definition of an agent, but an agent is, I'll let you explain what an agent is.
A case officer is somebody who is actually an employee of the CIA.
That's right.
And an agent is somebody who you recruit.
You recruit.
Yeah.
If you want to tell a fake CIA guy, if he says, oh yeah, I was a CIA agent.
No, we don't call ourselves agents.
We have security guys that are agents, but we don't call ourselves agents.
We're operations officers or case officers.
Agents are the people that you recruit to help you in, to carry X mission, whatever it is.
It could be a terrorist.
It could be a political figure.
It could be somebody with access to narcotics operations.
It could be espionage.
It could be bugging a Cold War embassy somewhere, whatever it took.
So so I was that breed.
And I think that's one of the differences between me and my friend Jim Lawler is that Jim was a Main Street case officer, did some incredible stuff for the agency.
But I was both a paramilitary officer and a case officer.
Okay.
Now, what is the difference between an agent and a cell?
Is there a different definition for a cell?
Yeah, well, a cell is if you build a network of agents in a particular area, it becomes a cell.
So let's say that I recruit you.
To carry out x task and then, after you start doing, you come back, you go hey, I need more people.
I said well, who would you recommend?
And you would group?
Yeah, and then we start building, we train them too, we polygraph them, whatever it was, vet them, and then your, your cell starts being created.
So you may be the, the principal agent, which is what they call them, the principal agent.
The other are sub agents, because most of the time we run those through the main guy we don't deal with them particularly.
Sometimes we peel them off when we do, if they're really good or we want to do something different.
But yeah, that's the difference between a cellar and an agent.
I'm sure there were obviously a lot of things you learned, right?
Like a lot of tactics you learned.
But what was your biggest takeaway from the spy training and what did it teach you about human beings?
Well, it's the contrast of the world that I was coming from, which is a very kinetic paramilitary world, to the real world of the agency.
You know, we are the, on our special activities division side, our paramilitary side, we are the, in case of emergency, break glass kind of folks, right?
The rest are individuals that you've got to learn.
You know how to recruit, how to develop the whole recruitment cycle.
You know how to spot somebody say gee, I met this guy at this party, very squared away, let me check him out.
Oh, his cousin is so-and-so, yeah.
And then I may do a bump, meet you somewhere hey, weren't you at the?
Oh yeah, how you doing.
Hey, let me buy you a coffee and you develop a relationship.
And then one of the things that they teach us is how do you recruit for strengths?
And i'll give you an example this, the communist block countries recruit for weaknesses.
That's their main goal.
In other words, if you're a drug addict or if you're having affairs or if you've got money problems or drinking problems or gambling problems.
They're exploiting weaknesses.
They love that.
They love that.
Now, I'm not saying that we don't use it, but we try to recruit for strengths.
And the advantage that the United States has as a country and definitely as a CIA, as a service, is that for anybody that is in a country that he feels that he needs to make a difference, he needs to make a change, he needs to emulate.
He needs to move in that direction.
We, the agency, we, the Americans, are the white guys with a white hat for them.
So we recruit for strengths because we have the same ideology.
So let's say you and I were talking, you're the guy I'm developing, and I start asking you questions.
So, man, you know, I was reading this in the paper.
What's your take on this?
Oh, this, that, and the other.
I'm going like, okay, there's a button.
Oh, there's a button.
Oh, this is compatible.
And little by little, you know, you talk to that individual and you work with him.
Of course, this is a Reader's Digest version of it, but let's say a couple of months down the road, now, you know, I start telling these people, well, Why aren't you doing something about it?
I mean, what are you going to do?
I mean, you're very educated.
I see how hard you're following all this stuff, but what do you think is going to make a difference here?
And then listen to what he says.
And then eventually you turn that around and go, okay, remember when we had that conversation that said, that you said that you wanted to, and I just had an opportunity come my way that I want to turn you on to.
And that's how you start the recruiting process.
That's, again, that's the Reader's Digest version of it.
Because then there's agent handling, there's a vetting, it's very big.
You know, a lot of people don't understand the difference between a confidential informant and an agent.
Confidential informant is somebody that you bust and you grab them by the nuts and you go, you're going to cooperate, right?
Yeah.
And they do because they don't want to do 30 years in jail or want to get another clipping in the jail.
Our agents, and this is something I am so proud of, of the agency, and it's one of the many wrongs that I wanted to right, is nobody in the federal government takes better care of their sources than we do.
Nobody.
Nobody.
We have had guys who've disappeared and we take care of their families and then they come out and we take care of them.
It is, it is, that's sacrosanct for us.
I mean, that is, we can't lose that.
That is the very nexus of all what we're trying to do is through this individuals, you become a force multiplier.
Even after they're no longer of value?
Especially if they're no longer of value because you don't want them to sour on you.
Protecting Contra Families00:14:46
We, you know, in the movies, they have what they call the, geez, terminations, you know, hostile terminations because I think you're stealing from me and you son of a bitch.
We don't do that.
I would rather go up to you and go, hey, listen, man, you know, I'm sorry, you know, the money that we had for this program, it was shut down by the government.
I have your number.
Let's cut it loose for six months or so.
Here's your bonus.
Love you big time.
Thanks for everything you did.
And then when he walks out, he says, okay, I got rid of the son of a bitch.
And you never call him back.
Because what you don't want is that guy all of a sudden going to the papers or going to the narcos or going to the terrorists and saying, I was pitched by that guy and that guy's CIA.
So we take care of the good ones and the ones that we weed out, very, very, very seldom do we really interrogate somebody when they've done something wrong.
And it's primarily if we feel that they've compromised stuff that we can't afford to lose.
So once you finished spy school, where did they send you?
I was supposed to go to Salvador and I was excited about it because, you know, again, this was more the paramilitary kind of program.
But then the chief of station in Costa Rica, a very, very dear friend, became one of my mentors, and Joe Fernandez, legendary dude.
And Joe asked for me by name.
He had met me in the Contra North and he says, I need Prado down here to run the southern front on the Contras.
Now, the contrast is in Honduras, I was in uniform carrying two guns, three guns, knife, grenades, whatever it was.
Now I'm working out of an embassy coat and tie.
Why?
Because in Honduras, I was there as a Honduran major, and the senior military guys knew who I was and what I was, that I was part of the CIA.
In Costa Rica, oh, and these people were trying to help the Contras.
In Costa Rica, it was the other way around.
They were hunting down the Contras because they were afraid that the Sandinistas would get pissed at them and start fomenting trouble in Costa Rica.
So their deal with the Sandinistas was, I can't remember Alvarez, I think it was his guy's name.
was that they were persona non grata, the conscious.
So everything that we had to do, beating them, ex-filling them out of the country, which I love doing this shit, in black kind of stuff, and training them where you could, it was all done in coat and tie.
And it was all done under the auspices of I'm a third secretary at the U.S. Embassy.
I rented some, bought some vans, some air conditioning, put desks on there, and we had rolling meetings because Unless you know tradecraft, if you know how to protect yourself, and these guys don't, they would just go, oh, we're having a meeting in such and such a place, and everybody would know where it was, and everybody's going there, and that's where they get wrapped up.
So it's one of the things that I changed was that we would meet in vans.
I would have them get picked up by a car with a driver that knew how to do a surveillance detection route to the point where I was going to pick them up, put them in my van after doing a surveillance detection route, and then we drive around town and have a meeting.
So it was still supporting the Contras.
And it was still a paramilitary.
I mean, I was in charge of the airdrops.
I was in charge of their training.
I was in charge of their exfills.
But I was doing it in a lot more polished way than my own knuckle dragger days.
What is an exfil?
Exfil is when you take somebody out of the country black.
Okay.
Again, the word black keeps coming up with black ops and everything else because that's what we do is the operations that need to be hidden.
So I'll give you an example.
We had a couple of dozen Contras in country that were leaders.
These guys were.
Top guys that not leaders so much, but they were warriors.
These are the guys that we needed them get further training.
They were fighting well and everything else.
But you can't just take them to the airport in San Jose and put a you know a U.s visa on their passport and said no, you know, they don't even.
They can't even know that they're going to the United States.
They may not be going to the United States for training, but wherever they're going, they don't, they will not know where they're going.
So it's a way of exfilling, whether maritime or air, very seldom through land, because of obviously, this particular case.
You know you exfill them out black and you take them to a black training site, and a black training site is a site that is unacknowledged.
It's classified top secret and the guys and gals that get there for training do not know where they're at.
They could be in the United States, they could be in another Latin American country everybody, everything is, the compound is sterilized, don't look, cars don't have license plates and everybody there is an alias and they train these guys up and it's a very friendly environment.
I mean it's very pro them, But they're kept completely in the dark about, again, to protect the U.S. Hand.
And how long did it take you to recruit your first agent?
It was actually pretty easy, the first ones, because there were some in Costa Rica, it was really interesting.
Costa Rica is a fascinating country.
And there were some very conservative individuals that were very worried about the Sandinistas, and they were worried about the fact that their government wasn't doing anything about it, that they were actually katawing to to the Sandinistas for fear of them attacking them or subverting them.
So these people were taking this very personal.
Most of them were cowboys.
They were former military guys, you know, and so there was a lot of strengths to recruit from.
And the first guy was somebody that I met through an introduction.
And I think that took two weeks because I mean, the guy saw me from the beginning.
He was, okay, I know who this guy is.
You know, he was a smart dude and he was like, he just wanted to do something.
And he was tremendously successful at helping us.
But then at the same time, you know, later on, there was a, a minister of uh, I can't say any further than that, but he's a guy that I I bumped in at a social event and I ended up recruiting him.
So there, I had some some good recruitments there, some with the Contra, some with the with Us Costa Ricans, some with the you know other.
But uh, it's a lot of fun.
And how long did it take for the situation with Eugene Hasifus, whose C-123 got shot down?
I think it was by like a surface-to-air rpg.
Yeah he um, this was a the.
The fact that this guy was a marine is an embarrassment because, I mean, it's just he.
He embodied all the contrary qualities of a Marine, and I'm a big Marine fan of Marines.
Hassan Fuss was a former Marine.
He was a drinker.
He was a very lone wolf kind of guy.
And what happened was he was flying as a kicker, the guy who kicks the bundles out of the airplane for resupplying the Contras in different parts of the country.
Mostly up north, but they kept creeping south, and some of them were into our area of operations.
So Hassenfuss was on this plane.
It gets shot down.
I was in Costa Rica at the time.
And as soon as the helicopter went down, my guys called me from the Contras.
The plane went down.
One of the resupplies went down.
This is the general location.
I said, I want every Contra in the southern front to gun up and start walking in that direction because his job is supposed to be walk south.
Or if you're further north, walk north.
But you go in the direction where friendly forces are.
Well, Hassan Fuss just pitched a hammock and just stayed there by the plane, by the downed plane.
So when the nieces came in and picked him up, he had all kinds of compromising shit on his phone.
Phone numbers, photographs, names of people.
And that became the beginning of that end, yeah.
And this sort of blew up the whole operation down there.
Yeah, it became a very public thing, especially coming from somebody, an actual American, getting caught.
That was always the fear for guys like me.
Not of getting killed.
I mean, everybody dies anyway, but compromised.
Now you're going to sit in a jail somewhere for whatever length of time.
They didn't do that with Husseinfluß because he cooperated, you know, and they showcased him and then they did a token release kind of crap.
But he was not a warrior.
He was just a guy that happened to be the only survivor in that plane because he was with a parachute and he was at the tail when the plane got hit and he just jumped out.
And this is when the whole Political fiasco broke out in Washington.
That led to the Iran Contra, which, of course, I didn't know anything about until way after it surfaced.
Now, the story with Iran Contra, that was correct me if I'm wrong, but there were seven hostages that were taken by Hezbollah, and there was a negotiation where we were to give them weapons in exchange for the prisoners, right?
And somehow we used those.
So, we basically, what we did was Israel gave the weapons directly to the Hezbollah captors, and we resupplied Israel with some of our arms.
And in exchange, they gave us money and something else, and we basically siphoned it directly from them to the Contras.
So, basically, we were kind of out of the loop, right?
We kept ourselves out of the loop by resupplying the Contras with the stuff that we were getting from Hezbollah.
Is that how?
Yeah, it's what I have read.
I've never been officially briefed on anything, so I cannot comment with authority, but yes, I've heard, and I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle, whatever.
But the bottom line is they were cutting deals with the Iranians in order to resolve some problem, in this case where there were hostages for the Israelis or whatever, and then using that money to support the Contras because the Boland Amendment had kicked in and other regulations that prohibited us. from lethal aid to these guys that could only do medical aid.
And of course, they would get killed left and right because they were running out of ammo and running out of medical aid.
What was the Bolin Amendment, and why was that put into place right in the middle of the I-Rank or the Contra War?
You know, I know very little about it because you've got to understand, when all this shit is happening, I wasn't there.
Right.
You know, I was either in the jungle or I was in Costa Rica working, you know, 12-hour days.
I'm, you know, I don't have time for that.
Focusing on the mission, you really become myopic when you're in that environment because that consumes your life.
So uh, just what you have read, what I have read, you know kind of stuff, so I I have no insider uh information, never had anybody tell me exactly what it was about.
So that, how did that affect your operation down there when that, when that all happened well, down there, pretty much shut it down, shut it down, shut it down temporarily.
They cut off all the, all the supplies.
Yeah, we could not, we could not resupply um, but again, eventually they were brought back on.
You know, the Bollinger amendment was amended and uh, you know, we started resupplying them again and that led to the resurgence and that led to forcing the Sandinistas to a negotiation table, which resulted in them losing the election.
And there was a lady, I can't remember her name, maybe by Chamorro, I don't remember, but a lady that took over as president.
And it was a democratic government for the four years that lasted.
And then second elections, Ortega bought the elections.
And now, and Ortega.
Ortega is still in power.
Ortega is still in power down there.
Oh, wow.
He was one of the top Sandinistas.
And what I have heard from knowledgeable folks is that they stole so much money that he became a political power.
Because in those countries, you know, you've got a couple of million bucks to throw out for elections, everybody's going to vote for you.
So, yeah, very corrupt.
So what happened to you after all that happened?
Well, Costa Rica, I was stuck there for six months without a mission.
And it's funny because I started working counter-narcotics because I had nothing else to do.
And you mentioned Kiki Camarena.
Two of Kiki Camarena's best friends was the special agent in charge and the number two in the DEA office in Costa Rica.
And both of them are very good friends of mine to this day.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
And so they would come to me and go, hey, could you help us?
We're trying to bump into the sky.
We're trying to recruit this guy.
Who do you know in this area?
So I literally was, that's what I was doing, helping them gain access to individuals that could provide information for them and helping them recruit them.
So, but that was a drop in the bucket kind of keep me busy for the last six months I was there.
I still melt with the Contras that were there, but it was very infrequent and it was very discreet.
So, but yeah, that's why I wrote Kiki when you mentioned it, because I could see the pain and the anger in these DEA officers that their great, great friend Kiki was, you know, he wasn't only killed, he was tortured.
Right.
He was brutally murdered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So after all this happened, you went down to a country.
I figured it out.
We won't mention it, but I figured out what country it was just by doing a couple of Google searches somewhere in South America.
where there was a Maoist Marxist philosopher, philosophy teacher.
Well, it was a Maoist insurgency.
It was a Maoist, the ideology was, and they did have intellectuals that ran it.
But again, I can't talk about the specifics because even though you figured it out and so did half the other world, because I was surprised that they left some of this stuff in there.
Right.
Or actually, I was more surprised that they omitted the place because it's two and two is four.
Right.
It was very easy to find out.
It was.
I mean, I've had that come up before, but again, I stick by my word, and no matter what I do, I ain't talking about it.
How many times did you have to go back and forth with the CIA to get before you published your book?
Like, how many different versions did you have to go back and forth to get stuff redacted?
Publishing Redacted Stories00:04:29
It's a very labor intensive process, but I was fortunate enough that three of my proteges in the agency were now heavy hitters.
One specifically was my deputy in the last.
programs that I talked to you about earlier.
And he retired as a five-star in our outfit.
So it took six months to get the book cleared.
And the publisher was extremely flexible because I couldn't even put something on paper in front of them.
I could brief them orally.
I would never say that I was in the Philippines or Costa Rica or whatever.
I was in this country.
This is the kind of stuff I was able to do.
I was here.
I did this.
I was in Diba and on and on.
And then I had to do a draft like a executive summary of the book, present that to the agency, they approve it, now I can put that in front of the publisher.
Then I wrote the book, and the publisher never saw it.
When the book was ready for scrutiny, I brought it to the CIA.
We had back and forths, quite a few of them, and the Costa Rica one was one of the big ones that I was able to win back because it had been acknowledged in previous books that were cleared by the agency.
But it only took six months, which is actually pretty quick.
Wow.
And the reason was that my senior guys would send their lawyers over to the production board and say, the boss wants to know what's the status of Prado's book.
He's dying to read it.
They already read it.
And so they take it from the bottom of the pile and put it back on.
And after a few of those, within six months, it got approved.
So when you were down there in South America working, what was going on?
Were you doing basically the same thing you were doing in Costa Rica?
You were trying to find people to recruit.
To get more intel on what was going.
Well, what?
First of all, I guess, give me some context on what was actually going down in that country.
There was yeah, there was, a major corruption, huge corruption in that country, and there were two terrorist factions, one being a Maoist, the other was a Marxist one.
Only um, there were rampant in in the capital.
They were literally blowing up in the capital.
Uh, we would go to a restaurant on a thursday and then next monday they would, you know, we hear that they burned it to the ground because there were capitalist, you know places.
Uh, so the terrorism and and again remember, Before 9-11, a lot of the terrorism was geography-based, Latin America, Southeast Asia.
With 9-11, and even before, but it began the international aspect of terrorism when you're actually having international terrorists flying from different places to do damage.
So my job was to be the terrorist restaurant there.
So I worked with some of the locals that were in the business.
I helped them recruit.
I helped them get training.
Terrorist that I recruited, um was.
It was not one based on strength.
That's why I said we don't always do it in strength.
It was actually pretty much extortion.
Oh wow, yeah.
Well, what happened was this guy we?
This guy was part of a cell of of the, the Maoist Organization, and he was what they call a mule.
He's the guy that would take the explosives to the dumb shits that were going to plant it, because they were too dumb not to get noticed.
It's suspicious and this kid was a college kid, so he would pick up explosives from them here and they would say okay, you need to drop it off over here, and then something would blow up nearby that area, kind of stuff.
So we knew that, that he was a.
We had a source, they had the.
Our counterparts had a source that was reporting on on the cell and uh, one of the guys the one that I recruited was he liked to smoke pot, and that is a no-no for these guys.
They can sell cocaine because it's going to the United States of western government.
You cannot use any of the drugs that are existing in this country.
So we knew that if he got caught smoking, they would shoot him.
They would literally just put him against a tree and shoot him.
They were brutal.
They were brutal.
So we busted their cell, and everybody else went into interrogation.
He got pulled aside by this friend of ours, and he says, I got a one-time offer.
Interrogating Drug Traffickers00:08:11
I want you to talk to this guy.
So whether he believed it or not, I don't care, because he said yes and gave us some incredibly good insights into everything that this group was doing.
But I was playing a foreign Latin American businessman that did security.
So my pitch to him, I showed him my alias passport.
And I said, this is who I am.
This is where I'm from.
I don't give a shit about your country.
I don't give a crap about your politics.
I don't give a crap about the terrorists.
I'm a businessman.
I provide security to major corporations here.
I need to know what's going to happen before it happens.
If you help me with that, you get whatever it was, a month, and I don't turn you back to Bubba over here who's going to put you with the rest of the guys.
And I ran this guy for a year.
He lasted a year, and he provided, he did one in particular, it's in the book, that he called me, and this was Harry, because a lot of the times, not all the times, but a lot of the times, I would go meet him with my counterpart, with the local counterpart, the legal counterpart.
My counterpart was out of town.
And this guy activates our very sophisticated communication system.
He's called Beepers.
Remember when Beepers came out of here?
Yeah.
That for us was a, you know, that was great, great technology for us.
So he calls me, and it's a coded number that says who it is, where we're supposed to meet, and the level of urgency, depending on the numbers.
So I get this call from this guy, I need to see you tonight.
I say, okay.
So now I'm going solo.
So I'm body armor on.
I got two guns and all this good.
because now I got to go into his neighborhood because he can't come to mine because he stands out.
So I go over there, do what we call a car pickup.
He comes around the corner.
I pick him up and we go, we drive around.
He tells me that he had just passed a bunch of explosives to three knuckleheads and that his concern was he don't know the target, but I know that the Marine house is not too far from there.
So I went back to the station, drew on the map the circle that said, okay, it makes sense that it would be in here.
And the Marine House was at the very border.
But what happened was they attacked the Chinese mission because Chinese are not Maoist.
They're not, yeah, Chinese are communist.
There's a difference between Maoism and communism.
In the old days, yeah, there was a Maoist regime.
Well, anyway, so they, as a statement of their being pissed off at the Chinese for not supporting them, they blew up two or three of his cars.
But you talk about validation?
This guy tells you, hey, tomorrow they're supposed to blow up something in this one mile circle.
And lo and behold, kaboom.
So it was pretty cool.
And that would build their credibility.
Yep.
Were there, I mean, there had to have been times where people would give you good intel just because they were quote unquote double agents or were like working for them, like trying to give you like so much good information, getting you to trust them and then give you some bad information down the road.
Absolutely.
That's the name of the game.
And that's why validation is very important.
You know, a lot of people focus on the polygraph, and it is a tool.
But what we do is we operationally test the individuals.
Again, I'm not going to go into great detail, but we would set up a scenario where he's instructed to do A, B, and C, and either by surveillance or technical means, we know where he did it or not.
And that's a validation process.
He's reporting to somebody else or something like that.
But it is a chess game.
It's not a checker game.
You know, this goes on very, very frequently.
You know, there was a very blatant incident.
In that same country we're talking about, the DEA had been running a source, a narcotic source, who was golden.
They had busted, I don't know how many dozen labs because of this guy's intel.
Well, unbeknownst to us, the guy lost access.
He got in a pissing contest with the couple, and he was kicked out of the fraternity.
But he was used to this money that he was getting from DEA.
So he started talking about threat information from the Maoist group against the U.S. ambassador.
Everybody spun up.
Everybody spun up.
And Dean Hinton was the ambassador.
He'd been the ambassador for CT, for counterterrorism also.
And he told the chief of stations, he says, where's Prado?
I want him in on these meetings.
So she says, okay, yeah, we'll have him here.
And they started telling me all about what this guy was reporting.
So the DEA had the source.
The ambassador was getting all kinds of threat information through the reporting.
And they asked me to sit in the briefing.
And the guy, they were reporting.
He said, oh, you know, the guy says this and they did that and they did this.
And some of it was right.
So there were certain things that were right.
But remember that these terrorist groups and these narcotics groups, coexist and in certain places the terrorists run the narcotics trade.
In a lot of Latin American places, you know, including Colombia, you know, during the day.
So the for me something smelled wrong.
It was like yeah, I couldn't pinpoint it at first.
So I said look, you know, I would be willing to work with you guys and even meet this guy.
If it's so under DEA cover, you know, they would bring me in as one of theirs.
I started meeting with the guy that was handling to friend of mine to this day and the the source, and after about two or three meetings I came back to my boss and I said this ain't right.
He goes.
Why he goes?
This guy knows too much.
This organization is known for compartmentation.
He's talking about what's going on over here and who the.
Yeah, he would knew some of the people that were pretty much common knowledge in their surroundings, but it was just too much.
It was just too much and that's something that you guys look out for, of course.
Of course it was just.
You know it would.
You know, In a terrorist organization, only a couple of persons know everything that's going on.
And it ain't going to be a former narco guy on that level.
So we set him up.
He came in with some information.
And actually what happened was he called in at the last minute.
And he kept saying that so-and-so and so-and-so were meeting and that they were planning to take down the ambassador and they had RPG-7s and all this kind of crap.
And so he called me and I had told him, I said, listen, all this stuff is great.
But we need to get in front of the action here.
You're reporting things that have happened.
We need information of something that's about to happen.
That was the bait.
I said, if you score on that one, you could retire.
I'm telling you right now, I will set you up.
So the guy, of course, gets greedy.
That's what we were hoping.
He wants to get out of this crap anyway.
And he calls me at the last minute, said, hey, tonight is 7 o'clock.
They're going to have a meeting at this particular house.
And Pedro's going to be there, and Pablo's going to be there, and Juanito's going to be there, the same names he'd been regurgitating.
I said, oh, wow.
Gee, man, well, thanks.
Next time, try to give me a little bit of a heads up because it's already 5 o'clock.
But what he didn't know was we already had talked to our local counterparts, and they had a raid team going to the safe house, the safe house.
And all that was there was an old man sitting in the toilet and an old lady knitting or something.
It was all bullshit.
And so we were able to confront him, and he started crying and broke down and admitted that he had lost his access to the narcotics side of the house, which he had incredible credibility, to reporting on terrorism, which he had peripheral vision at best.
So what ended up happening to that guy?
Well, he was fired.
He was just fired?
Yeah.
But you guys made sure not to make him sour.
Exactly.
Your punishment is you're out of the business.
Raiding a Fake Safe House00:02:33
And again, he wasn't a political guy.
It's not like somebody was a penetration of another service or another government.
He was a drug dealer.
So it's not like he could go to the cops and go, yo, CIA was trying to recruit me.
Right.
And what year was this?
88 through 90.
88 through 90.
So we're getting up close to the point in time where you went to the Philippines, and then did you actually go to North Korea?
Not North Korea.
I went to South Korea.
You went to South Korea.
I was the chief liaison in South Korea, and eventually I became the chief of the Koreas for the agency and the NSA.
You mentioned in your book how they're such an insignificant part of the world, and they're such a locked-down police state.
It's the number one highest locked-down police state on Earth.
But they have like such an incredible vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and nuclear capabilities.
What was the CIA's like level, like on the scale of concerns for the CIA and for national security, where did the Koreas go?
Very, very, very high.
As a matter of fact, in East Asia Division, which is where I was when I got the job, I was the deputy division chief for the Koreas program.
It's that big of a deal.
It was China.
Korea, Russia.
Not so much because of the, you know, besides the nuclear threat and everything else, you've got to remember is how it would destabilize an area that is all surrounded by our allies.
South Koreans, Japan, Australia ain't far away.
Philippines, all these countries would, you know, could be affected by a major war, especially a nuclear war in the peninsula.
So the, yeah, it was very high on our operational directors.
Every year, the administrations through the heads of the services come up where they list of how we're going to prioritize the funding and the resources that we have.
And the Korea issue was always very high.
So what kind of stuff were you doing in Korea?
I can only talk about a few things, but primarily we were working with our Korean counterparts, helping them to do worldwide operations.
And one that I was very surprised that they allowed me to talk about was I was already chief of the Koreas.
I had just made flag rank with the outfit.
Compromising North Korean Spies00:02:54
One of my guys came over and says, hey, you know, there's this guy that the military has that's, that's talking to a North Korean in Latin America, and the guy is really greedy, he's asking for more stuff.
And I said, so what's your plan?
He goes, well, you know, we need somebody that that will go in there like this guy's boss or something, that he's bringing his boss in to meet him and and see if we can recruit the guy.
And I and I said okay, what do you?
Who do you think he goes?
You chief native Spanish speaker, blah.
I said damn, that's a good idea.
So we did, I went out there and um, we had the room wired and um for video and and and sound.
And this young guy who's the, the agent of the North Korean, um, had told him, hey, you know, senior friend of mine's coming down.
You know, I trust him, he's got great stuff.
So I show up with a briefcase and put the briefcase down.
It's 11 o'clock, i'm, we're drinking scotch at 11 o'clock because Koreans drink like fish.
So we're doing shots and we're talking about, you know, and what he didn't realize is that I had planned the whole conversation.
So, you know, I would say, hey, Dan, what do you think of John?
And, oh, John's a flaming asshole.
And so what do you think about Jim?
Oh, Jim is a great guy.
Now I got your own voice that I could go flip.
And now John's the asshole and Jim is the good guy.
So I asked him loaded questions that I could adult, like, you know, your great leader, Kim Jong-il, you know, what do you think of him?
Oh, he's the greatest.
So what do you think of President Reagan or whoever the hell it was?
Oh, he's a son of a bitch, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I agree.
Now, we could help them compromise.
Anyway, this was a compromise too.
So finally we got into, you know, I figured I need to do something here because I can't keep drinking like this.
And I said, look, let's get down to business here.
You know, you've been staring at my briefcase because I had the briefcase on top of there.
It was full of money.
And I said, you know, let's work together on this.
He goes, yes.
And we reaches over to shake hands.
I open up the briefcase that, of course, is being photographed of him taking money.
Oh, my God.
And I held on to his hand and I said, welcome aboard.
Great for you to be working with the Americans.
And he got, he tried to pull my hand out.
I was pretty beefy back then and it wasn't going anywhere.
I'm crushing his hand.
This guy almost had a heart attack.
We knew that his wife was dying of cancer, that he was, you know, he was getting old.
He was an older guy, almost as old as I am now.
And that was my pitch.
I said, look, you help us and we will take care of your wife.
We will take care of you.
Wow.
Smile for the cameras.
Yeah, smile for the cameras.
And he said, look, I need to think about this.
I go, you got 24 hours.
Recruiting from North Korea00:04:06
Well, he didn't, but we were able to, we had enough that we were able to compromise him, that he was doing illegal stuff in that particular country.
And he got kicked out.
And our understanding is he went back to one of the infamous gulags in North Korea.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
I had a special drink that night.
What, like, what do you think is going on right now?
Between how embedded are we in that part of the world, especially North Korea, when it's a place that's so locked down like that?
Yeah.
And it's such like a place that doesn't even exist on earth.
You know what I mean?
Especially when you hear stories about what's going on there and some of the people that have come out and talked about their experiences there.
How much do we have that place?
How much control do we have of that part of the world?
Look, they don't call them hard targets for a reason.
You know, come on.
They're very hard not to crack.
Their leadership is self-contained on the same little boat.
If one sinks, everybody sinks.
The masses are completely brainwashed and controlled.
They're starving.
There's one radio station, government owned.
There's one TV station, government owned.
Nothing gets in there.
It's like you said, it's the hermetically sealed country in the world.
So getting information from them or sending people.
Like you know, I remember the James Bum movie where he goes to North Korea and gets the guy with the diamonds and all this kind of crap.
That's you know.
Now, do we have contingencies for going into North Korea?
Of course we have to, militarily and otherwise, but that's, that's off the topic.
We target those in the North Koreans worldwide when they're overseas serving.
That's where we work with other liaison services to target North Koreans and try to recruit, compromise or whatever, because part of the, the uh the.
The North Koreans only have two natural enemies, U.S.
And South Korea.
Those are the only people that they are enemies with.
Everybody else, they're just business.
So they could be in Latin America.
They could be in Southeast Asia.
They could be anywhere and be there as diplomats.
But in reality, the main thing that so China and Russia are friendly with them?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
China fully supports.
Yeah.
Right.
So, yeah, China is the floater.
And what people don't remember is that North Korea after the Korean War was actually an expansion of the Chinese.
Right.
And they used, when the 38th parallel was established as the DMZ, the Miller Triassone, that became a buffer for China.
They don't give a shit about North Korea.
They didn't want the Americans through the South Koreans to have access to their border, so they supported North Korea and created North Korea.
And of course, as they grew, they got their own power.
The original Kim was a real warrior.
His subsequent sons and grandsons and great-grandsons are all idiots, but he was a real deal.
He was a major fighter.
The Chinese respected him.
He had a great relationship with the Chinese, and they made him leader.
And he was smart enough to really crank down and crack down and crack down and develop things.
So it's a very important target because it could destabilize a very important area of the world for everybody.
Do you think we would try to recruit people like Dennis Rodman, people that go in there and be friendly with Kim Jong-un and sit next to him while they watch basketball games?
Would that be something that we would do?
Or would that be too risky?
Yeah, it's very risky.
Usually the way that it works is you find people that already have the access, foreign nationals, and you ask them to report or at least be debriefed.
You cannot in good conscience send somebody to spy in North Korea.
That's immoral.
You're not going to survive.
The Al Bayoumi Connection00:12:12
But if you are having natural meetings with Mr. X and he's of interest, I can ask you a thousand questions that you would be able to just notice.
How's his health?
Does he have drinking habits?
Whatever it is, that's how you start.
What was the atmospherics?
What was the town like with the gasoline?
Because we don't know.
Other than overhead, we don't have no eyes in North Korea.
So, yeah, that's the way that we were working.
And so at what point, I think you went from working in Korea to working for Alex Station, is that right?
Yeah.
I left.
Korea was a great tour for me.
I did a lot of good work with the guys there.
I got my GS-15, which is our colonel rank, and I went back to CTC, to the Counterterrorist Center.
And I was a branch chief.
I had the Palestinian branch, which was kind of cool.
I had all the Palestinian diasporas, groups, and stuff like that.
It was a lot of fun.
But I had only been there like a couple of months when I got called up to the front office, and the then chief of ops, I became chief of ops a decade later, but the then chief of ops, called me in, he says, you've been selected to be the deputy chief station for a virtual station.
I go, what the hell is a virtual station?
He says, well, it's the first thing that we're creating.
It is a station dedicated to one target that will not be housed at headquarters.
So that means you, because the way that we have to work things, if you're working, if you have something in Latin America that affects the Chinese, you have to go through headquarters.
You're in for that country, but you have to coordinate the thing.
As a station itself, this bin Laden station was going to take care of anything bin Laden we could go out to any station in the world and go we need you to look into this So he gave us that that focus and that granularity But the funny part was he says he's telling me all about this and you know,
you're gonna be the deputy chief of station and senior ops officer Mike Scheuer is the the senior analyst and he's the one that knew all about the target and I asked the chief I said so who are we going after he goes Osama bin Laden I go who he goes exactly Who said that?
The chief of ops.
I said, well, I asked him, I said, who are we going after?
And he said, Osama bin Laden.
And I said, who?
I never heard of him.
Right.
And lo and behold, now I'm the deputy.
I'm learning really fast about what this guy was.
And we worked that.
I was only there for about 18 months.
My wife had a medical emergency and I had to leave.
But I'm a plank owner of the Alex Station that eventually got bin Laden and Sawahiri and a bunch of other people.
So I'm very proud of that one.
Alex Station was run by.
Explain to people who Michael Scheuer was.
Michael Scheuer was one of the smartest guys I ever worked with.
Unfortunately, he became very bitter with the agency and became very bitter with a lot of people.
Most people that I know don't talk to him anymore, which is a shame because he was.
Definitely a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant Intel officer.
Mike was already a senior grade.
He was already flag ranked.
He was an SIS-1.
And I was his deputy.
And the guy was brilliant.
He just knew everything that was going on all the time.
And he had an incredible memory and an incredible work ethic.
We used to kick him out of the office.
Really?
You got a baby.
Go home.
We'll stay here.
We'll take care of this.
So he was a guy that was a lot of fun to work with.
He had a great following because he was a leader.
He led by example.
Unfortunately, when politics again kept preventing us from doing what we wanted to do, people started getting bitter and uh, there was a couple of tipping points for, for during my short well, not short, but but by my initial uh, tenure there in in, in Alex Station um, we had, Bin Laden was in Khartoum,
we had eyes on him and he was there what we call in the white.
He was totally unaware, he didn't care, he did not feel threatened, He did not foresee, because at the time, Khartoum was a safe haven for terrorists.
That's where Carlos the Jackal was hanging out.
The deal was in Khartoum that if you were a wanted man and could pay your way, you were welcome.
You were not in hostile territory.
So Bin Laden was, yeah, he had a few guys with him once in a while.
Sometimes he would drive his white Mercedes all by himself.
And a legendary agency guy by the name of Billy Waugh, a former Green Beret that that came to the agency, very dear friend of mine.
Unfortunately, we lost him a couple of months ago.
But Billy had complete knowledge of where he was doing.
He had a blind spot where he could photograph him when he came and come.
He followed him.
He'd run around the compound, count weapons, you know, all this kind of stuff.
He was an incredible dude.
And we kept proposing disruption.
We need to disrupt this guy.
We know what he's doing.
All the intel that's coming in is that he is training terrorists.
All the overhead is showing, you know, terrorist camps that are training in terrorist activity that he's sponsoring, and so on and so on, and so on, and the administration did not, would never allowed us to do something while he was in Khartoum and this was Clinton at the time.
Uh yes, it was, it was definitely Clinton.
And then, when he would, when he had to leave uh Sudan, he went to Afghanistan and that was, that was a game changer, because now we had no access to him and, and the moral of the story here is, if we would have been allowed to render Bin Laden, Forget killing him.
We could have killed him anytime.
But if we would be able to render him, think of the outcome.
Al-Qaeda would have not continued.
The coal probably wouldn't have happened.
The attack on the coal, the ship, the coal.
The bombing of our two embassies in Africa probably wouldn't have happened.
And if you want to stretch it, even 9-11 would be a much lesser probability.
So we had a chance with minimum risk in a country that can't do a damn thing about it because if if a 12 man Green Beret ODA goes in there and snatches this guy's ass out and goes out, what are the Sudanese going to do to the Americans?
Right.
Close the embassy?
Okay.
Right.
Right.
Right?
Yes.
Yeah, send me back home.
Thank you.
You know, rather than being in the shithole.
So a lot of people like to put blame on people like Michael Scheuer and what was going on with the competition between Alex Station and the FBI, hiding information and not working together.
A lot of people like to say that that is exactly why 9-11 happened, is because of the incompetence and the unwillingness to share information.
What do you say to people like that?
Adulterated bullshit.
Okay.
And I'll give you an example.
From the day, from the day that we started Bin Laden Station.
There was an FBI agent in Alex Station.
GS-14 FBI agent.
Great guy.
We worked great together.
Who was he?
I can't tell you.
Oh, you can't say nothing.
I don't reveal names unless they know that I'm doing this.
Okay, okay.
But thank you.
Fair enough.
The other part of it is, and I think when we were having our social talk, I mentioned this, that our director was Kopher Black.
And we had three deputies.
One was for intelligence, which was Ben Bonk.
One was for the FBI.
FBI for law enforcement, which was a senior SIS whatever FBI guy.
And I was the chief of ops.
I was deputy for ops.
And so anything that the station put out or anything that went, they're seeing this.
They're the belly button, both at the station level and at the other.
That there were bad communications?
Absolutely.
Did the FBI know things that we should have known?
Absolutely.
Are there things that maybe we could have done better?
Absolutely.
Look, if you're batting 300 in the espionage business, you're Hall of Fame material.
Right.
Okay.
So it's one of these things.
There's a lot of bloody noses before you get gold.
But that is unadulterated bullshit.
There was a story, I believe, that recently came out about a guy named Al Bayoumi who was trying to recruit two Al Qaeda operatives.
And I believe, I forget, I think it was Saudi intelligence trying to recruit two Al Qaeda guys through the CIA.
And I guess they lost track of these guys and the FBI.
Are you familiar with this story?
No.
It's after my time, but it does happen.
I mean, we work, again, we work that target with compatible allies, you know, and in some cases, the Saudis are compatible on the things that is convenient to them, too.
You know, the Egyptians could sometimes help, other countries out there would help.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I guess the story is it's about, you know, the Saudis, the Saudi guy was trying to recruit these two Al Qaeda guys for the CIA, and they kind of like lost these guys.
And two of these guys that they were trying to recruit ended up being one of the hijackers.
Both of them were part of the hijacking team on 9 11.
And I guess that just goes to, you know, part of the, all of the incompetence.
And, you know, a lot of people love to speculate about, like, okay, what was going on with these pilots that were, that were here training in Florida and they were, you know, Saudi Arabia was protecting them or whatever.
I'm not, I'm not super technical on the details, but Saudi Arabia had heavy, heavy involvement in it and Bin Laden wanted a war, right?
Yeah.
He wanted a war and they knew about it.
Well, yeah.
And they wanted us over there, right?
Like, um, Israel wanted us over there and Saudi Arabia wanted us over there.
And then bin Laden, obviously, he wanted to start a war.
So there's just, there's so many moving parts to this whole thing.
It's just, it gets so convoluted.
Yeah.
And the problem is, is the conspiracy theories that kick in.
You know, I'm an intel officer.
I do not speculate.
I work on facts and I don't no longer have access to facts.
All I, I read the same thing that you're reading.
Right, right.
But the agency would have not, he would, the Saudi would have not been recruiting.
This guy for the agency.
He would have been in coordination with the agency.
Okay, right.
The agency hand might, he may, the recruited person may never know that FBI is behind, I mean, that the CIA is behind this particular operation because we're doing it through the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Egyptians or whoever the hell is helping us.
The conspiracy theories are there that there's people that tell you, well, the Saudis knew and supported the 9-11.
I've never seen any proof of that.
That they were contributing money to bin Laden, yes, but bin Laden was also extorting them.
He was a very powerful man financially.
His dad was a huge construction guy.
He was one of the richest guys in Saudi Arabia.
And he would, you know, he would, Bin Laden would extort money from, you know, you're not a good Muslim if you don't give me money for my cause.
And they would go, shit, that's going to kill me.
And they would.
So he was exploiting that.
The level of complicity on the part of the Saudis, I cannot speak to.
If they were.
If there were not some rogue elements or some elements that were supportive, I would be surprised because I'm sure that they were.
And we see this in Pakistan is another example of you never know who you're dealing with.
You may have one guy in the local service that is straight, narrow, anti-terrorist, blah, blah, blah.
And then the guy sitting next to him is just sitting there going like, okay, now I know what you're doing.
So it is a tough game.
But I have never seen anything internally, And even externally, that has convinced me that the Saudis had a direct pipeline into this kind of thing.
I mean, there's people saying that the Saudis left New York before the 9-11 happened and all this kind of bullshit.
I don't know.
I've never seen true documentation of that.
Hunting the Jackal00:06:18
Remember, we don't do anything in the United States.
So, yeah, we are forbidden from working in the United States.
When we do anything in the United States, we have to do it with our FBI counterparts.
So let's say that you're a Joe American that is traveling to this country and dealing with a president on business and we want to know more about it.
And I approach you to recruit you.
There has to be an FBI person in front of me.
We are not allowed to work in the United States.
Okay.
So Billy Waugh, how did you meet Billy?
I was in the Philippines.
It was 1990, early 1990.
And Billy was in charge of our surveillance and counter surveillance for the station.
We hit it off right off the bat.
I mean, I knew who he was because I was a ground branch paramilitary guy, which is where he was home based after his incredible Green Beret career.
And he was actually the guy in charge of following us around, making sure that we're safe, checking our houses, looking for suspicious people.
So we hit it off.
We became friends.
And then obviously later on, when I opened up Alex Station and knowing what I knew that he knew on the ground, we got even closer because I would sit down and pick his brains every chance I got.
So what's the layout here?
We've stayed friends ever since.
Unfortunately, we lost him a couple of months ago.
I'm very proud to say that I got him an interview with my friend Tom Marshall at Recoil Magazine.
And that is the last cognitive interview of Billy Waugh on record.
And it's important to me and it's important to the family because the community cannot afford to forget individuals like Billy Waugh.
They are the heroes and the icons and those those giants that we walk into the shadows.
I have people tell me, say, oh, you're this, you're that.
I go, no, no.
I am a warrior and I am a patriot, but I'm not a legend.
I'm not a hero.
Billy Waugh is a hero.
Dewey Claridge was a hero or a legend, you know.
So Billy was the real deal.
I'm very honored to be friends with him and seeing him to the end.
Yeah, some of the stories about him are incredible about how he was, you know, he hunted down the jackal and he got within a couple hundred feet of bin Laden many times.
Oh, he was getting closer.
He was doing photography of bin Laden, like tracking him down.
What was he actually doing?
He was surveilling him.
Sometimes through cameras, sometimes through cars, or sometimes, you know, follow them around.
This was in cartoon.
It's cartoon.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So he was doing that.
And at the same time, Billy and the guy that he was with, Greg, noticed a shady character.
You know, in Khartoum, everybody's 99% black.
And here was this Middle Eastern looking guy or Latino looking guy, I couldn't tell what, kind of thuggish.
And the guy came out and did one of these looking around like, what's out there?
And they looked at each other and said, that guy's got to be somebody.
White guy here with that kind of so they started taking pictures of him.
And I'm shortening the story for the sake of not spending a whole day with you here.
We crunched it, but he knew where he was.
When he sent the photos back to headquarters, they said, that is Carlos, Elise Ramirez, Carlos the Jackal.
And immediately, of course, and Copher Black was the chief of station at the time.
So they got very, very happy about it.
We're going to render him.
Well, they came back.
He had never killed an American.
So we had no paper on him.
We could not legally extradite him to the United States because he had never killed an American.
But he had killed French police.
So we went to the, you know, we, you know, the agency went to the French and brokered a deal that, okay, look, you bring your guys in and we'll take you there and we'll hand them over to you.
And he's rotten in jail in France.
So this bureaucracy, this red tape you guys had to navigate, that's part of the reason that I'm sure Billy Wall was able to take out bin Laden many times.
He could have.
Billy would tell me after we'd be sitting around shooting the breeze that he would say, Rick says, I could have killed him with a rock.
What?
I got that close to him.
And he did.
Did he try to get permission to?
Oh, of course.
We all try to get him permission to do this kind of stuff.
And you're talking to a Green Beret legend that is eyes on the ground and is a hell of an operator and he's telling you, This is the weakness.
We can go in here.
We can do this.
We can do that.
Who are you going to believe?
Meanwhile, the guy's like in his 70s, right?
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he was 71 when he went into Afghanistan for us.
Good Lord.
Yeah.
He's just a special kind of human.
He is.
And as I mentioned to his wife, Lynn, who I stay in touch with, weekly I talk to her, how she doing and everything else.
I said, you've got to understand that for Billy to call me friend is probably one of the best medals I wear.
Because that's what higher compliment to having a guy like Billy Walker, so to you a friend.
I take that very, very much at heart.
So you worked for Alex Station for a little over a year, is that right?
Yeah, about 18 months.
And then from there, I had a management job in the CTC, all the logistics and everything else.
I just couldn't afford to be 12 hours a day.
I needed to go home because my wife had a medical emergency.
But shortly thereafter, I think after about six or seven months, I was deputy chief of their management group, which handles logistics, security, and everything else for CTC.
But after about six or seven months of that, the guy who had been the chief of station in Seoul, Korea, became the division chief for East Asia Division.
And he called me up, and he asked me to come back.
9/11 Logistics and Loss00:03:06
Oh, really?
And that's when he gave me the Koreas.
That's where he made me chief of the Koreas program.
I was the senior rapper of the agency at the NSC for the for the program.
And that's how I made senior grade thanks to that job there.
Wow.
And so when you were going back to when you were like the third ranking guy in the CTC, what sort of stuff were you guys doing to bin Laden to sort of like to pin him?
Like you guys were cutting off his funding certain ways?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
We were attacking him in all fronts.
I mean, you know, we were trying to shut down his money.
We were trying to get every liaison service to work with anybody because, again, Al Qaeda is we used to call him the Godfather because he was the guy that had his fingers in every organization he could approach because he had money.
And, you know, the enemy of my enemy is, you know, that kind of stuff.
Right, right, right.
So they definitely, we went after their money through liaison guys, trying to recruit some of the people on the ground, trying to disrupt his operations, and most importantly, trying to geolocate him.
But this is one of the things that, again, people always say, well, God damn it, you know.
With all the resources the United States has, you know, in Afghanistan, we could never find him, you know, when he was there.
And I will tell you, professionally, as a former pararescueman, I've been on searches of people that have gone down in the United States that wanted to be found, and we knew the flight path, and we never found them.
Wow.
This happened in the Rockies.
I was at Hill Air Force Base at the time, and they put us on planes trying to look for these guys.
Point of the story, and you see this every year, people that get caught out in the in in the wilderness and they perish out there, and people are looking for them right when and and those people want to be found now.
Imagine getting them out of the United States, putting them in a hostile country where everybody hates you and loves him, and how are you going to find out which of the 10 000 caves he's in?
Come on, you know yes, we had opportunities early on.
We might, we might have been able to to to grab him.
Before he went to, Michael Shore actually wanted to do a lot of strikes on different places that he could have been and he got denied on that.
Yep, yep.
What was 9-11 like for you?
Where were you at?
What were you doing?
I was watching a program a couple of days ago and they they showed the planes going into the towers and you talk about PTSD flashbacks.
That one, that one's, under my skin because it happened in our, in our watch.
We, we have friends.
I had a very senior FBI guy, John O'Neill, who had befriended me, who was one of the ones that was killed in that attack into the building.
He had become the head of security for the Twin Towers, and he went in there.
He got a bunch of people out.
The last time he went in, never came out.
So it was very personal.
PTSD After the Towers Fell00:03:31
It was very visceral.
I was literally standing outside of Kopher's office waiting for him to get off the phone, and they had a big TV there, and I saw the first plane hit.
I thought it was like a twin-engine Cessna or something that it hit, because he had no way of imagining the size or the magnitude.
And about a few minutes later, you know, the counterterrorist thing, one of the reasons I love the center is we have representatives from every federal agency in the United States.
We have Secret Service, we have diplomatic security, ATF guys, DEA guys.
They're all part of the counterterrorist center.
So that way they can coordinate with their agencies and help us with their expertise, right?
So we had an FAA guy.
And the FAA guy comes to me and goes, hey, Chief, we got a problem.
I go outside.
He says, we have four aircraft that have switched on their emergency signal and none are responding to our calls.
I said, oh, shit.
And just at that moment, second plane hits the buildings.
And I remember turning over to Kofr's chief of staff and I said, I need you to get a cable out to every station in the world.
Number one, watch your sick.
This is not an isolated event.
Number two, all resources go to finding out who the hell is this.
Hit liaison, Hit's assets, anybody who may have information on this.
And then the fight began.
I mean, I literally, I would spend, not me, everybody there would spend two or three days in the office.
I slept in the office three days.
I would shower in the gym.
I would go home on the third day to see my wife, my kids, new change of clothes and come back.
Those were the hours we were keeping.
And I told you that there was a vignette that represents in my mind and in my heart, the ethos of the agency officers that we have.
As chief of ops at CTC, I owned all the components, including the UBL's part of it, but primarily Hezbollah was another one that I was very attached to.
So hair's on fire.
It's like 7 o'clock at night.
I haven't probably fed 13 cups of coffee in a protein bar.
And I'm walking back to my office, and there's this lady named Christy.
She was the deputy chief of the Hezbollah branch.
And she was at her computer looking at things.
She was seven and a half months pregnant.
So I walked up to Christy and I said, Christy, what the hell are you doing here?
She goes, well, you know, until now, nobody has killed more Americans than Hezbollah, and I need to make sure that it wasn't something that we missed.
And you know Boston.
She's poking fingers at me.
And I let her talk, and I looked at her and I said, look, Christy, I've delivered two kids in my life.
None of them were mine.
I ain't delivering a third.
You're getting your ass home.
And the reason I tell the story is this, because later on she told me, one of the times after she had the baby and everything else, she says, Rick, it says, every birthday that my daughter has, I remember what you did.
And he says, what the hell was I thinking?
And here's the point.
What is the strongest impulse in humanity?
A mother.
You don't mess with mama bear when she's got cubs.
Delivering Babies for Others00:11:28
Right.
So imagine, imagine the level of focus, determination that you were in a building that could have been a target because we were evacuated.
The whole CIA was evacuated because we thought that fourth plane was coming our way.
The only people that stayed were people in CTC.
You stayed.
No, we stayed.
Well, we were all in the building.
Very few people left because they had to pick up kids or whatever it was.
Most of them would come back the next day or whatever.
But yeah, the building was emptied.
And here is an eight-month pregnant woman totally obfuscating the realities that she's got a baby in her belly and she sells.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I said, you were being a patriot.
You were being a patriot.
Look, if that doesn't typify a good CIA officer, I don't know what the hell does.
Wow.
That's heavy, man.
It is.
That's why I love that story.
It really crystallizes it.
Yeah, man.
I mean, the people, there's people, you know, like we talked about earlier, from the people you were working on, On the ground in Nicaragua and Honduras, you're dealing with human beings with shit that affects them personally in their daily lives.
And it's myopic.
They're not looking at the big picture and politics.
And they don't have the benefit of 20 year hindsight to look back and figure out everything that was uncovered or discovered.
These people are trying to do the right thing for their government and for their families.
And these are good people, patriots, like you said.
And it gives, like everything that you've done, just such an incredible perspective on this.
How.
What changed after that?
How did your work, your daily life change?
How did the direction of the CTC change?
Well, obviously, we became only focused on Beloit.
We needed to get into it.
You know, and it's funny because it never comes out.
There's a movie called 12 Strong, which is about the first Green Beret team that went into Afghanistan.
And it's a great movie for the Green Berets.
It's a great movie for Task Force 160th guys because they played.
The agency played no role in it.
And that is.
Criminal.
The first boots on the ground in Afghanistan were my guys, guys that I knew personally.
Gary Schroen was a team leader because he spoke the language and he had worked with the Northern Alliance before when the first helicopters with it, that ODA came in green Beret Oda came in, it was our guys vectoring them in, and that's never mentioned.
And Mike Spann was one of those guys that eventually got killed down there.
So um, It was nothing.
The world stopped.
Yes, we still looked at Russia.
Yes, we still looked at China.
We still looked at Iran.
But the number one on the OD, operational directive, became Al Qaeda.
So everything was focused on them.
So, again, we're working with every liaison service.
I had foreign liaison coming into the building to meet me and talk about things at least twice a week, every single week that I was there.
So we were really turning it up, turning up the heat.
Obviously the targeting, providing the intelligence for the targeting and the targeting that went on from the air support side of the house, both Navy and Air Force aircraft.
We were kicking the shit out of the Taliban really, really pronto.
This was happening in real, real time.
But what really developed was I realized that we were kicking the crap out of these guys in Afghanistan.
But these guys are working the world with impunity.
So I went to Kofr and I said, hey, boss, something in right here.
I said, you know, we're doing all of this, but what are we doing about these guys who are in this country or that country and that continent or whatever?
And I said, we ain't doing much.
So he looked at me and he says, you're the chief of ops.
Fix it.
I know.
That's Kofr.
I love him.
I would go to hell and back for Kofr.
So I said, okay.
Went home.
It was on a Friday, so I had the weekend.
And my youngest son had a football game, and it was across the church.
So I dropped him off of the game.
I went into church, got on my knees.
I said, I'm going to try to do something that hopefully you're on board because I'm going to do it.
So if you don't want me to do it, hit me with a lightning bolt when I come out of here.
So I'm just telling you up front, boss.
I walk out, I'm going like this.
Shit, don't hit me.
And I sat there with a yellow pad while the football game's going on and started the concept.
And the concept was this.
It was a cumulative input from my experiences in Latin America, my experiences in the Philippines, and of course the 9-11 phenomena, what we saw.
The problem that we had during 9-11 is we knew something was going on.
We knew there was something going on.
We just didn't know what.
It was.
We even knew that it was in the United States, but we didn't know where in the United States.
So we knew that that was out there.
The sources were all indicative of that.
But, you know, we didn't have it.
And one of the mottos of the Counterterrorist Center is disrupt, prevent.
So I came up with an idea, which is a program where I asked them to give me two to three known members of terrorist organizations who were in the support side of the business.
Why the support side of the business?
Shooters are a dime a dozen.
You shoot one, three cousins show up and they'll blow you up.
The heads of organization are very difficult to get, although we get them eventually.
But they're easily replaceable.
They always have a deputy, they have somebody else that will rise and the thing goes on.
But the soft underbelly of any illegal organization, whether it's narcotics or terrorism, the soft underbelly is their support mechanisms because those have to be visible.
You cannot be a support mechanism out of a cave in Afghanistan.
You have to be in a second or first world country with contacts that you can exploit for money, for papers, for medical care for somebody, you know, and for explosive, for whatever.
You need to have that support mechanism.
So the idea was they gave us two to three guys from every major organization that was out there, and we were going to go and establish their patterns of life.
A patterns of life is what does that person do every day?
Where do they live?
What kind of car does he drive?
What routes do they take?
What little girlfriend he's got on the side?
What drug use did he have?
What gambling habits?
Whatever it is, we know where that guy is going to be.
And we made the surveillance on them very successfully.
We identified all the targets that we were given.
Because the concept was, imagine this.
Imagine that you have Hezbollah is planning something big against the United States.
And we are hearing it from everywhere.
But we don't know when or where.
Or even what?
We just know it's an attack.
And all of a sudden, in three different countries, three senior Hezbollah individuals who are support mechanisms get taken out.
One maybe get compromised by putting stuff in his vehicle and calling the cops.
Is he going to beat it?
Maybe eventually, but he's neutralized.
Rendering another one?
And maybe shooting the third or not.
Whatever.
The options were there.
And the idea was, if you're a criminal organization, which terrorism is a criminal organization, And all of a sudden, three of your key operatives get snagged.
What do you think?
You're penetrated.
How the hell did they know to get Tom, Jerry, and Mo all in at one time?
At the time that we're about to do this.
Yeah.
And that would put the brakes and hopefully allow us.
And, of course, if we render one back to us, then he may be able to, you know, under enhanced interrogations, cough up the truth.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the logical way to do it is to, you know, cut off the head of the snake, not just take out the grunt guys, the guys that are shooting the guns, because that's not going to do anything, which always makes me.
Which makes, you know, it's so frustrating when you look at like the war on drugs, when we're just, you know, we're arresting the low level dealers or like the pawns or the people that are held at gunpoint and their families are threatened if they don't captain this ship into the port or whatever.
And all the big, the heads of the cartels, they all have lawyers and some of them are U.S. lawyers.
They fly down there and they meet with them and they don't get prosecuted.
They don't go to prison.
I mean, you have like El Chapo, but El Chapo is kind of a weird thing because he was like, you know, just a head of a certain part of, the whole now you had Escobar also.
I mean, we've had some successes, but you're absolutely right.
The hydra grows another head.
Exactly.
Power vacuums.
And they're filled very quickly.
But you've got to understand that one of the things that the narco traffickers have is limitless resources.
We even found out there was a time, I don't know if it stopped because again, but in my tenure, I remember reading about former British SAS and former Israelis guys going to Colombia and training the guerrillas in terrorist tactics.
and in communications, in security, in tradecraft, because they can afford it.
Every organization, I don't care, and I use those as examples, there's dozens of them, that are going to have real operators that are frustrated because they weren't promoted or whatever it is, and somebody comes up to you and goes, if you spend a month down in Columbia and you teach them A, B, and C, I'm going to give you $500,000.
$500,000 to be him is this protein bar that you gave me a few minutes ago.
That's it.
So now you have a guy who's starving.
is being neglected and all of a sudden they're going to put, they go down there and they set up special communications, submarines.
You think that these guys all of a sudden, hey, we'll buy a submarine.
You have people that advise them, hey, you could do this through a submarine.
We can get you the submarine.
We can get you trained people to go into the submarine.
So they can afford things that few countries can afford.
Right.
And with impunity because you can't get to them.
They have the financial resources and the autonomy more so than some countries do.
Oh, most countries.
Yeah.
Look, when you look at the monies that these guys have, when you have apartment buildings full of money because they can't move it or clean it all, for them to give somebody a million dollars to do anything is nothing.
And that's how they get their technology.
That's how they hire their lawyers.
That's how they get the special training, special communications, and all this kind of stuff that they do have.
We're getting close to our time limit, but I wanted to.
Kind of talk a little bit about your view on the world today and what's going on, not just like with the wars that are happening, but like, are you optimistic?
Are you pessimistic about the future of the world?
Where do you see the United States in the world in the next 50 years?
The Third Option Strategy00:12:34
Well, a lot is going to depend on how we continue, but you know, I have the advantage of having worked the counterterrorist account for decades.
I have tackled communism in five different incarnations during my time in the agency.
And for me, for what I've seen from before, we have three or four major predator enemies that will never go away.
That's China, Russia, Iran, to a lesser degree, North Korea.
And when we say Iran, we throw terrorism under that because there's such a big part of that.
But you could add it as a separate entity also, the fact about terrorists.
So we have these formidable enemies out there.
And we have lost, we as a country and we as a Western democracy clumped together, we have lost the credibility of what we can do and what we should be doing.
Now, one thing that I do not, I don't talk politics, so I'm not going to talk about this administration should be doing this, that, and the other.
But I'm going to give you an example.
Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter was a good man, a brilliant man.
A very god-loving man, an honest man, not a corrupt guy, but he was weak, he was of, he came across as food.
So anytime that you have leadership that cannot project the power that we do wield credibly, predators are going to eat you up.
Jimmy Carter, like I said, great president, what did the Soviet Union do under Jimmy Carter?
Invaded Afghanistan.
What did Iran do?
The capture of hostages.
What happened to the Panama Canal?
We gave up the Panama Canal, the single most strategic landmark in this hemisphere.
We gave up control of that.
The Panamanians weren't hobbling for it either.
I mean, you know, this is, like I said, like you said to yourself, even the Chinese have got a big piece of that now.
Right.
So we need to understand that we need to be a force to be reckoned with.
We still got to be the white hat guys.
We have to be doing it for the right reasons.
But I've always said that I hope god doesn't forsake the United States because the day that he or she forgets the United States, he's given up on the world.
Because we are the single power out there that with great allies, I have great friends that are Brits.
The Brits can't carry our water 100%.
They're always there helping us.
Same with the Aussies, things with the Poles.
There's a lot of people out there that are really loyal allies.
But the United States has to have the credibility to be point.
And the example again with with Jimmy Carter.
Um Reagan wins the election the very first day after he took power, or actually the first day.
Iran releases the hostages.
Why?
Because they knew that Jimmy Carter wasn't going to do anything.
Eagle Claw happened because of his delays, not because of the planning.
You know the.
The weather changed, everything changed and it was.
You know.
You could read a lot about that Eagle Claw stuff, but anyway, the uh, Those are the kind of things that happen when you have somebody that has the fortitude and sits across the table and looks at the guy next to him and you know that if you bite him, he's going to bite you back.
And we have to have the presence, the higher moral ground, but we cannot look as food.
You cannot be the champion of democracy without having carrots.
And be credible about the fact that I will use whichever one I need to use.
Right.
What do you think about when people like Vladimir Putin say, there's a video of him talking to some of his officers.
He's talking about the president of the United States.
He said, I've been through many presidents.
I know what they're like.
He's like, they have all these ideas when they're running for president.
They run on all these policies people vote for.
As soon as they get into office, a couple of guys in black suits just like that walk up to you and tell you how it's going to be.
And I guess he's alluding to the fact that the CIA runs the country.
It doesn't matter who the president is.
That's bullshit.
That's really, that's just him playing.
Remember, he was an intel guy.
He knows what to say.
He knows what to do.
The CIA cannot run anything.
CIA can only run the operations that we are allowed by Congress and blessed by the president.
We are what's called the third option.
First option is diplomatic.
Second is military.
The third is us, black ops.
We can do things for the president.
So those comments are very easily to politicize and to magnify because it plays into the present.
you know, political problems that we're having here left and right and all this tugging back and forth and being divisive.
But at the end of the day, the biggest difference between the enemy and us is we have three-year plans.
They have 50, 100-year plans.
So the Chinese in 1900 said, this is where we want to be in the year 2000.
And there's no deviation for that.
There's adjustments.
Hey, we need to start buying minerals in other these countries so we can come, or we need to start loaning money to these countries.
So they owe us and so they may.
But their goal is this, Russia is the same thing, Iran is the same thing.
They don't have a congress or anything similar that can say, no, this is not going to the way we're doing.
The Chinese are going to do what they're going to do forever until something happens right.
We elect the president for four years.
What happens when he or she has three years in office?
They have to start politicking.
Exactly.
And they have to take their eye off the stuff.
And if there is a change of administration, whether it's from a conservative to a liberal or liberal to a conservative, there's going to be changes.
And they're going to go back and say, no, we're not going to do that anymore.
We're going to focus on this.
And we started.
Our enemy doesn't have that problem.
They have a laser focus for the long term and no oversight and no argument.
The leaders say, this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it, and that's it.
So that's the price of democracy.
I'm not saying that we're wrong doing it our way.
I think we just need more central popularity in our politics than right wing and left wing.
I think we need to cater to the middle.
Like after 9-11, there was more cohesiveness in this country than ever.
Do you think it's important that we have a common enemy?
Of course, of course.
But we do have a common enemy.
I mean, you know, anybody who thinks that the Chinese are not our enemy is an idiot.
Anybody thinks that the Russians don't want to control as much of the world as they can is an idiot.
And Iran, in their sphere, they are predators.
They want to expand.
And look at the history.
I mean, the Chinese have been an imperial country since before Christ.
Right.
Okay?
The Russians come from Cossacks and Vikings.
Hello.
Right?
And the Iranians were the Persians, the biggest conquerors of their epoch.
So I believe that everybody's got their DNA, and ours is the cowboy.
You know, we're the guys that wear the white hats.
And I know I'm exaggerating, and I know we have, you know, there's holes to be poked there.
But in overall ethos, we have a country that's got a moral high ground.
It's a country that, for the most part, believes in God and believes in the right things and the rights of every human and so on and so on.
These people don't have any of that.
China will always want to control the world.
Anybody who tells you different, they're blowing smoke.
Russia has their goals, and they're going to achieve them.
If they do not have anybody pumping the brakes on them, do you think we have thought through this whole thing that's happening right now between Russia and China and pushing them closer together between this Ukrainian conflict?
Like, do you think we've thought through this?
Do you think that we, a lot of people like to fear monger that China and Russia together would fuck us up?
But do you, even if China and Russia, especially after reading.
Andy Jacobson's book, I find it hard to believe that we would be scared at all about China and Russia, even if they did team up.
Just talking about some of the things that we experiment with and some of the technology that we have.
Well, look, in conventional warfare, they don't stand a chance with us.
We've proven for the last 20 years how vetted our military is, the capabilities that we have developed from drone warfare and everything else.
Right.
So in that part of it, I don't see as.
as an issue.
As long as you have somebody on this side of the desk that when they look at him and go, he will cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.
That's the credibility that we're lacking in many administrations.
The determination to be the power that we should be in order to help the world.
What really tilts it is the nuclear option.
Right.
Because you've got to understand, and this is a lot of people, we'll bomb them to shit.
I said, do you understand if one atomic bomb just one atomic bomb hits Moscow.
The world stops.
Airlines stop.
Electricity stops.
Pollution, contamination.
So imagine if you have a war where several why does that happen if a bomb hits Moscow?
Well, if an atomic bomb hits Moscow or whatever, if one, God forbid, hits the United States, you implode.
It is literally the Armageddon.
Because there's no benefit.
You know, when Pinatubo blew up in the Philippines, and I was there, they had to cancel all flights for weeks and weeks and weeks because the amount of pumice that was in the air that would damage the engines.
Everything was shut down.
And that was an act of God.
That was, you know, a natural disaster.
Right, volcano?
Yeah, the volcano by Pinatubo.
Imagine multiple nuclear bombs going off in different places, the level of damage, uh, you know the, the carnage, the disruption to everything from air travel to sea travel, and the contamination of for people in the sand.
Yeah, this is the center and everything evaporates, but this stuff moves for miles and miles and hundreds of miles right, contaminating and killing people, and so that's, that's the ace that they are playing.
Um, and the people say well, you know, even if it's a nuclear war, we could kick their ass.
I, I would venture to say yeah, but nobody wins.
Who wants to win that one right?
Let's say that, at the end of the day, half of the United States is intact and the rest of the world is done.
What are you going to do?
Because that's the consequences.
What do you think we would do if we got hit on our soil?
We would have to retaliate.
I mean, you know, once somebody goes nuclear, everybody's going to react.
Everybody's going to react.
Do you think we retaliate in a surgical way or do you think we retaliate with more bombs, more nukes?
The surgical way is always preventive.
Preemptive.
Once rockets are flying with nuclear weapons on it, there's only one thing that's going to get them out of the sky, and that's going to be your own firepower.
Worrying About Grandkids00:05:13
and you're talking some real serious stuff.
See, I'm 72 years old.
I don't care.
But I got kids and I have grandkids, and those are the ones I worry about.
What world are they inheriting?
Exactly.
Not just what the United States are inheriting, because our problem is global.
Yeah, I think about that a lot, too.
I bet.
If this were to happen, which country would you go to?
If the U.S. were not the, what are you going to tell your kids?
If the U.S. is no longer the number one superpower, where do you go?
I've used that line a million times, and I tell people, I say, you've got to imagine the courage that my father had to put his only son on an airplane to come to a country that he may never visit for nothing more than wanting freedom for his kid.
That is the definition of innate, visceral need for freedom for you and your family.
And, you know, that to me is the bottom line.
I mean, you know, we we sacrifice for our families.
We do everything for our families, God and country and all this other stuff.
But there's a very bleak perspective out there.
And we need to get back to be a respected power.
And by respect, I don't mean necessarily just feared.
But, you know, there's an old line.
I said, you know, everybody likes to be liked.
But I demand that you respect me.
Because if not, you're going to fear me.
And that's the kind of person's and leaders that we have to have, people who have the moral high ground, that they're not radicalized right, left or center or whatever the hell it is that bring the country together rather than rip it apart.
But when they sit across the table with our allies and say I will help you, our credibility, especially after this fiasco in Afghanistan, the way that we left it right, you know people don't understand.
It was terrible.
Uh, on the, the guys that were on the ground helping us, their families, that's all immoral But credibility-wise, when you go to another country and say, hey, will you help us with this?
They're going to go, yeah, we saw what you did in Afghanistan.
You're going to leave us hanging.
So we have to have that credibility.
We have to have the moral high ground.
I hope it doesn't take another 9-11.
I know you alluded to that a little bit earlier on.
I hope it doesn't.
But you're right.
9-11 unified this country.
Well, Mr. Prado, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate you doing this.
For people that are listening and watching.
Tell them where they can find your book and and your website.
I'll make sure I link it all below.
But uh, one more time, just tell us what the name of your book is, where they can find it.
Thank you yeah, the book is called Black Ops uh, the life of a CIA shadow warrior and um, you can get it on any of the outlets.
Um, but my website, Www.rickprado.com that's r I c p r a d?
O.com.
It tells you a little bit about the book, tells you a little bit about myself, and then it has, I think it's six links where you could buy from Amazon or Barnes AND Noble or Warwick's or whatever.
They have several there that you could choose from.
It's a New York Times bestseller.
It was number eight shortly after it came out.
And we've had great success with sales.
It's on audio as well.
And it's audio.
And yep, it's also an audio.
For me, guys, this is my last firefight.
This is my last operational act was to try to get the word out there of the world according to Prado, I guess.
And also, we were talking about before your inspiration or whoever the the person who pushed you to write this book was Andy Jacobson.
Yeah.
And he was the tipping point.
Koffer was a big deal in this.
Kopfer had been on my butt about writing a book.
When I brought him to Blackwater in, I think it was 2005, I mean, we were always friends, but now we're working literally next door to each other.
And he kept harping at me and says, you know, you're always bitching about how our agency is represented and how our officers are maligned.
You have a story because of your background, because of where you came from, the fact that you can say, I experienced communism.
This was the outcome.
I was there for the Contras.
He says, you have a story that you can glomp.
And as you know from the book, there's a lot of things that I talk about that I didn't do that colleagues did and stuff like that.
So that started the brain cells going, but it was definitely Annie when she visited me to interview me for Surprise Kill Vanish because my friendship with Billy Waugh and because of my connectivity to our special operations military stuff.
And she was the one that literally called her agent in front of me and said, got to talk to this guy.