Shadow Wars and Black Ops

Abdullah Talks to Ric Prado, a shadow warrior who spent 24 years with the CIA. His journey has taken him from the jungles of Nicaragua to the tough terrain of Afghanistan and other countries. From being a Cuban orphan in the US to becoming one of the most well-known CIA officers, Ric takes us through his life journey and its different intricacies in this 1-hour and 20-minute long conversation.

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Abdullah Najjar

What is In The East Wing?

Stories of espionage, war, and politics, with a primary focus on the Middle East. This podcast will bring together individuals who were involved in the region in different capacities and lived long enough to tell their stories. This will be raw, balanced, and undeniably suspenseful. Join Abdullah Najjar, as he takes you through a journey to a different world. A podcast by WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.

Abdullah Najjar 0:00
Alright, so in this conversation, I'm going to be talking to Rick Prado. Rick is a paramilitary counterterrorism and special clandestine Operations Specialist with a focus on international training operations and programs. He spent 24 years at the Central Intelligence Agency where he's where he served as an operations officer in six overseas posts. Rick recently published a memoir, described in his website as a memoir by the highest ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam era. This conversation explored many areas, and we delved into a variety of topics together. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Rick Prado. All right, I believe we just started recording. Mr. Prado, I'd like to welcome you to The East Wing. Thank you for joining me.

Ric Prado 1:03
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Abdullah Najjar 1:04
Absolutely, so I would love to maybe kick start this conversation on a very, I guess, very light note, and that is, I'd love to ask you about two pictures that I've seen online, where one is is with you wearing a vest, and there's a clock behind you. You have a tie and a vest. And I'm wondering where that's the first picture what I ask you about. And I'm wondering where does it go back to? What was the context of that?

Ric Prado 1:35
It was actually my oldest son's wedding. But the photo came out so well that the when we were publishing the book, that was one of the photos that they said we needed to use for promotion, yeah.

Abdullah Najjar 1:49
Mm, hmm, I like it. No, I like it. And there's another one where you had, it was in black and white, and you, you were holding it like a big gun. And I think you were younger at the time. And I'm wondering what, what that picture is. You know, what is that picture?

Ric Prado 2:04
I've been so many places where I've had a big gun that I can't, I can't quite relate to which specific photo it is. And most likely, as if it's black or white. I was much younger, most likely my days in the jungles of Nicaragua and Honduras when we were supporting the the Contras against the communist Sandinista regime there in Nicaragua.

Abdullah Najjar 2:28
Yeah, yeah. That's one of the that's one of these things that I actually wanted to explore with you. I'm glad you brought it up, because when I was, funny enough, I was I was reading about now, I come from Libya, and I don't know if I mentioned that before, but I was reading about Gaddafi's, different, his support of different factions and entities around the globe, particularly terrorists. And I think one of the entities that he supported were the Sandinista, if I'm not mistaken. So can you maybe take us back a little bit to what your role was, your Paramilitary Operations Officer at the CIA, one of your I guess, many hats, right? And you were embedded with with the Contras fighting in Sandinista, if I'm not mistaken, maybe you can take us back a little bit into what the situation was like for you and how you ended up being involved with with the Contras.

Ric Prado 3:30
Well, I was Air Force pararescueman, which is the the special forces for the Air Force, and they brought me, the agency brought me on, on contract to be a medic for their Special Activities Division, which is where the agency's special operations forces come from. And they all come from Green Berets and SEALs and guys like myself. But I was there on contract when Reagan came to power, and he declared war on terrorism in Latin America. The first program that he did a lethal finding on was the Contra program. And as you know, as you just said, the Contras were the the people that were fighting against the, the current regime, which was communist backed, Libyan backed. Their main source, of course, was Soviet Union via Cuba. And they were also cooperating with, you know, in further infecting places like El Salvador. So when Reagan came in, the agency post Vietnam had, had a huge attrition. So they did not have a native Spanish speaking guy who could look like a native Spanish speaking guy who had my parent my military background. So that's when they brought me in staff, and I spent the next three years and three months living in a jungle hammock. From Monday through Friday, working with the Contras for the first 14 months, I was the only guy, the only agency guy I allowed in the camps. Because, again, you know the title of my book is Black Ops, with Black Ops, or those, those operations where the American hand, the US hand, has to be hidden. Thus, I was there as a major in Honduran intelligence and plausible denial was there. So

Wow, you said it in a hammock from Monday to Friday alone.

Best job I ever had.

Abdullah Najjar 5:37
Oh my God.

Ric Prado 5:38
Well, we're actually different camps. We had 10 camps on the border. And of course, you know, when we say the border, we're not talking about like here, when you cross the state border, says, Welcome to whatever. No,

Abdullah Najjar 5:49
Right.

Ric Prado 5:49
It's very, very, very vague out there. So we had camps all along the border area. And I would go from camp to camp, two days at a time, two days in a camp, travel two days in another camp, and then come home for the weekends. Because, like I said, for the first 14 months, I was the only guy that could train them, the only guys. And I trained them on everything from patrolling to communications to headspace and timing in a 50 Kyle to the RPG seven. I was getting a lot of coaching on that myself, but I was the interlocutor with them at the camp level.

Abdullah Najjar 6:24
Oh my God. I mean, the, this was what back in the 80s, right? This was, this

would be,

Ric Prado 6:31
Right, yeah, 81 I was starting.

Abdullah Najjar 6:33
So in that whole process of, you know, you're training these people, you're you're providing enough for them, enable for them to be able to counter to Sandinista. How did you, can you describe to us what it was like for you to handle such a I guess, a tough terrain, also to be responsible for these people and at the same time be able to report what is unfolding. I mean, that must have been a complex task for, I mean, for just one guy, right?

Ric Prado 7:09
Well, it was, it was challenging to, to many degrees. Communications was easy. We use world war two one time pads to communicate emergency stuff. Okay? Those are breakable, no matter where, you know, you carry them. But like I said, I would come back every Friday night, and I would spend the weekend in in tegucigapa, the capital of Honduras. Saturday, I would go to work, write up everything, talk to my boss. Sunday was my day, and then, you know, 04, 4 o'clock in the morning on Monday, I'd be back to the to the next set of camps. So for me, it was, I mean, I had a blessed career, but for me, these were arguably the best times I ever had. And when I say that to people, and then they go back to sleep in a jungle hammock five days a week for three years, they kind of raise their eyebrow, and it's real simple, you know, here I am now a 30 year old American, as you know, I'm Cuban born. I lived under communism. I came to this country as an orphan, to an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado, and here I am now working for the Central Intelligence Agency, helping warriors fight the very same monster that destroyed my, my family in my first country.

Abdullah Najjar 8:32
That's just when it dawns on you like that you're like, gosh, I feel like I never would have expected to be in that position. Wow. What? What was the mindset like to be able to actually operate in a, first off, a dangerous environment, but also in a sense, you're alone, right? And you're handling all of this responsibility. Like, what does it take in terms of mental prowess and physical preparedness to actually do all these things for what three years you said, like this, this, this. I mean, how would you describe it to someone who is not at all accustomed to any of that? I mean, what would it take? What type of person would that take?

Ric Prado 9:18
The very first thing that comes to mind, and it's definitely in my personal case, is you gotta be a believer. You do not put up with that kind of life if you don't believe in what you're doing. I did 20 plus years and 24 years, years of the agency, and I never had a morning where I regretted getting up to go to work. Wow, because I always believed in whatever I was doing, whether it was counter terrorism, whether insurgency, or what was running the Careers Program for, for CIA. So that's that's part of the mindset is that you have to be a believer. You have to believe that what you're doing is important enough that you suck up. You know, you. Embrace the suck, as we say in the military, so physically and emotionally, I think, let me put it this way, I'm a firm believer that God puts a path in front of all of us, and if we're willing to pay the price of admission, that path becomes sometimes hard, but always rewarding. And I now that I look back, I had now that I have the time to look back in my life, you know, from from my days in Cuba during the revolution, to being an orphan to being in para rescue, it was like if God was forging my metal along the way for the end product. That was, you know, Rick Prado CIA kind of thing. So I think we all go through those grooming processes. You know, you you yourself come from, from a problematic country, you guys, you know, this country has suffered a lot of warfare, so you're aware of the secret with your families and everything else. So believing, and again, I have the faith that I didn't build myself. I believe that something greater than myself built me to do what I was supposed to do.

Abdullah Najjar 11:10
I love the way you put it. No, I think you're right. I mean, even for me particularly, I think, you know, I come from a very humble background, and you know, oftentimes I do have to sort of sit back and think about the path that I've chosen and where I where I currently stand, and the things and the hurdles that I had to overcome to maybe get to the place where I am today. I mean, I'm still 23 years old. I still got a lot of, you know, I still got a whole life ahead of me. So I always, I think, engaging in that process of, first off, gratefulness, and at the same time, you know, the thoughtfulness also, and thinking about your life, I think it's, it's it was, it's rather helpful for me. It's a reminder of the things that I had to overcome, and it's a reminder that there's still a hell of a lot more to overcome as well.

Ric Prado 12:05
Yeah, well, that's that's part of life. Life is a struggle. And for for me, I think that the the biggest impetus for doing what I was doing is the fact that I realized fairly early on that I that I owed this country an incredible debt of honor for what they did with my family. You know, taking my family and my kind and with all the help and coming to a country that, with all this warts, is still, as far as I'm concerned, the best place to live. But I grew a conscience fairly early, right after, right after high school, and that's when I enlisted in the Air Force for, to go to the power rescue.

Abdullah Najjar 12:46
Wow, I want to, I want to maybe go into a little bit of detail here about the, some of the I and I like asking that question, some of the failures in your early career. Maybe particularly with with, you know, your assignment in training, the Contras. Can you maybe walk us through a failure, maybe a task, maybe a mission, where you were like, man, that, that taught me a lot, you know, and I learned a lot from this experience. Maybe there's something here to go over.

Ric Prado 13:21
Yeah, I think that the most germane is, and definitely was probably the highlight of my three years. I created a team of divers, underwater divers. They were Miskito Indians. Miskitos are a natives of that east coast of, of Nicaragua, and they we put together an operation where we successfully blew up Puerto Cabezas pier. Puerto Cabezas was the pier at the port that all the military logistics was coming from Cuba. That was the point of entry. So I came up with a plan, and we executed the plan where we blew that bridge, I mean, that pier, up, negating them access for several months, and obviously they rebuild it. Subsequently that that same team my headquarters asked me to try to do the same thing on the west side in Corinto. And although the planning was pretty good, meticulous, in fact, it was a perfect storm of problems. My, I send in my two two boats full of guys that were going to now blow up the bridge that connects the port of Corinto with the mainland. And they came under scrutiny. The intelligence failed us there. We did not know that there was so much patrolling activity, and both, both the boats suffered a mechanical difficulties. They were literally stuck in Nicaraguan waters with guns and bombs and grenades and, you know, everything else. And I went and got them. I personally went in and I extricated my guys. It was a two, two part mission. The first one, I rigged a helicopter with ropes so I could jump in and secure these guys to the to the helicopter and then extract them. So I jumped into the water. Luckily, I had brought tools and sparklutch. We were able to spark the boat, and thus I brought my guys back. We use that same boat once we fixed it. We went back that night and started looking for the second boat, which is actually stuck in the mangroves in Nicaraguan territory, on land, almost mangroves areas. And it was an all night search. The Sandinistas knew we were there because of the activity of the helicopter earlier in the morning indicated to them through, you know, obvious intelligence that, hey, something was going on here, something is going on here. So they were shooting flares and and doing recon by fire, where they shoot in an area and see if you shoot back. And they know where those kind of tricks, obviously, we were going to shoot back. Eventually we were able to extricate my guys. The following morning, we went in there and forced with some very fast boats that we had that were very well armored, and nobody messed with it, we were able to pull the boat back. And I think that there was so there was so much that I learned from, from, from that, that experience, first of all, leadership starts from the front. You lead. You don't ask people to do things that you haven't done yourself. I had trained every single one of these guys. They knew that I could, you know, walk the walk. But for me, getting those guys back was something I was not going to take lightly and thus, as a matter of fact, this this resulted, even though the mission was a failure, it This resulted in my first medal in the agency for going in there solo and getting our guys out. So I think preparation is always important. Obviously, intelligence is always important. But commitment to the mission. Once you get once you commit to a a task or a mission, especially something that is complex and difficult and challenging, you have to have that mindset that no matter what I am going to succeed and in our world, no matter what I'm going to come back. So,

Abdullah Najjar 17:39
You know this, this the that dedication that you just told me about, the idea of wanting to go back for your men. I remember someone else telling me something similar, who is in who's an Army Ranger being deployed to Afghanistan, telling me that all I wanted was to actually go back to the people that I trained and to my men, there were things that I felt like, oh, I don't want to do this. I want to do that. But sometimes, because of the I guess, there are certain policies that you cannot violate, or certain rules that you cannot, you know, override, like you have to, you know, sometimes you have to sacrifice whatever your urges are telling you to do, or whatever your motivation is telling you to do in order to maybe do something else. But it seems like you went back for your men. And I wonder if that was something that you know, headquarters was, you know, approved of, or if they felt like, oh, that, you know, it might be too dangerous to embark on that. What do you, what do you think?

Ric Prado 18:40
Headquarters found out about it after the fact.

Abdullah Najjar 18:44
Okay.

Ric Prado 18:45
The base chief, he was a GS 13, Leon Williamson, very good friend of mine to this day, and he was the base chief. And I walked into his office as I said, let me put the let me put it on the line. I'm not leaving my guys behind. And he looked at me says, I figured you were going to say that. How are you going to do it? I talked him through it, and that was the approval. That's one of the things that the agency has that the military doesn't have. The military has a very rigid chain of command, rightfully so. Don't get me wrong. I'm former military. Both my sons have served. So I understand the community, and I understand the reasons behind it, but we have a level of flexibility, because the agency, for the most part, our case officers, our Operations Officers operate so we do not, can we take a short break?

Abdullah Najjar 19:41
Yeah, of course. I like, I like your pet, by the way,

Ric Prado 19:44
My dog, my dog, just went bananas out here.

Abdullah Najjar 19:47
Sorry for the interruption here. Uh, Rick's dog's, little bit excited, so he's trying to get him out of the way, and in about 10 seconds, we'll be resuming the conversation together, so brace yourselves. And in the meantime, maybe you would want to consider looking into the different conversations that I've had so far with a variety of other guests, and maybe you'd consider leaving a load of feedback, whether it be on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from. Thank you.

Ric Prado 20:25
I'm in a cabin in Georgia.

Abdullah Najjar 20:27
You're still there

Ric Prado 20:29
I'm here until October. This is, this is my real getaway here. We love it here. But anyway, sorry, I had to cut off on that they were starting to bark and because they one got in, the other one couldn't. So

Abdullah Najjar 20:42
That's all right, yeah. But you were, I think you were describing the, I guess, the rigidity maybe, of the chain of command, right? That, yeah, maybe we can go back a little bit to that.

Ric Prado 20:52
Yeah. So I think that one of the advantages of the CIA has over military is we have great flexibility. You know, the military has a very rigid, and understandably so, a chain of command. You know, the lieutenant doesn't go to the general, the lieutenant goes to the captain, the captain, and it's up the ladder. But in the agency, the greater amount of our work that our operations officers do, you're flying solo in some places, especially after terrorism got much more advanced and more international, we started having surveillance backup and that kind of stuff. But even then, you're going to meetings in dark alleys in dangerous places, with people that can betray you tomorrow, and you're flying solo, you're by yourself, so you have to be able to make decisions on your own. And I would like to think that for the most part, I was always, you know, backstop my by my bosses, because whatever I was doing and I wasn't doing it for any self serving purpose, I was doing it because it was part of the mission. Yeah. So I think that that's one, one thing that we have that that helps us tremendously, the fact that here you have, like I said, you know, my my base chief was a GS 13, I was a GS 10, and he said, Go do it. You're talking about going, an American, going into enemy waters. And even though I was there as major, you know, Alex Mendez and Honduran, after three weeks of torturing Cesar, I would have spilled some beans, right? So politically, it was a hell of a risk.

Abdullah Najjar 22:36
Gosh.

Ric Prado 22:37
But we never focused. I mean, we knew that that was a reality, but we focus on the fact that we owed those eight lives that were hanging by a thread to come back home, because they were there for for us collectively. So,

Abdullah Najjar 22:50
Wow. You know one thing I was just recently, I heard a former, you know, retired agent saying, is that when you talk to a Navy SEAL, you start to realize that that person is a trained human weapon. But when you talk to maybe a Delta operative or paramilitary operations officer, you realize that they have, there's depth, they're smart, they're well trained, and they're quiet. But what underlines, or what undergirds all of that is, I guess, threat, or the ability to use threat or lethal action. And so since you said you had a military background, and then you join the agency, and then you can Paramilitary Operations Officer. Would you say that that sort of description applies to your, your, your early career in the CIA? Or, how would you, how do you, how would you say that that description? How would you categorize that, that, that description,

Ric Prado 24:01
I think, is very accurate. You know, the the selection for, first of all, we, we always say you cannot have an elite unit if you don't have good recruitment and attrition, you know, if you don't recruit, right? And if there's no attrition, and everybody makes it through your training. You're not elite. So the Special Operations Forces in our in our military, which are a tier two category, Delta and SEAL Team Six, are tier one, but the rest of us were what they call tier two operations, and that SEALs, Marine Raiders, Pararescue, car controllers and, of course, Green Berets. They are selected extremely, you know, hard looked at for background, capabilities, physical prowess, but most importantly, for conviction and the ability to not quit, no matter what they put you through, not to quit. The attrition rate for entering any of the pipelines that I mentioned, Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines, the attrition rate is 80%.

Abdullah Najjar 25:12
Wow.

Ric Prado 25:13
80% of the men that go into these pipelines do not make it for physical reasons. Some may get hurt. Others say, you know, I'm a great athlete and I'm really good at everything, but I don't want to do this kind of tension, this kind of discipline, for 10-20, years. So the and then just some just don't cut it. Some just quit in the middle of a run or in the middle of a hike or in the middle of a swim or in a simulated combat something they they don't, they don't, they don't step up to the game. So it is what the commonality among our Special Operations Forces, and don't get me wrong, I'm not just perishing, you know, the massive military that we have, because anybody that serves, deserves, you know, recognition and gratitude. But like everything else you know, the 2% of the population of the United States, at any given time serves in the military. Now you're talking about 1% of that 2% is what becomes our Special Operations Forces.

Abdullah Najjar 26:20
Wow.

Ric Prado 26:20
So already there-

Abdullah Najjar 26:22
That is a very, very, I'm sure, cumbersome process selection, maybe not just for the people that get in, but for the people that are selecting as well. Wow. How much of your, how much of your training Can you, can you talk about how much of it is secret, and how much of it can you reveal for your, your missions in Nicaragua?

Ric Prado 26:44
Well, you know what was beautiful again about my tenure in Nicaragua is that that the only training that I had, they didn't have time to train me up. I I literally was brought on staff, and two weeks later I was in the Nicaraguan border. So it wasn't like, Okay, we're going to teach you, you know, Jiu Jitsu or anything like that. You're gone. But you know the, again, because para rescue is a kinetic unit. You know, we have from basic training to preconditioning. We're advanced medics, but we are also elite mountain climbers, elite scuba divers. We go through scuba school with SEALs. We are, you know, elite parachutists in, you know, both static land and free fall, we go through SERE school. SERE school is where our guys and gals go through an interrogation phase. Your compromise is a three week course. Sorry, yeah.

Abdullah Najjar 27:40
I was saying, Oh, wow,

Ric Prado 27:42
Yeah, it's a three week course, and about 10 days of that, you're in a POW camp, you're in a prisoner of war camp, and you're being interrogated, and you're living in a four by four box that is dark, and you have two cans, one for peeing, and you can imagine what the second one is for. And they're coming in, putting hoods over your heads and dragging you and smacking you on the side of the head with a telephone book. And it's all it's all the kind of training that is called enhanced interrogation. They're trying to teach you how to survive and navigate that, that terrible situation you could be put yourself in. So I had the hard skills from pararescue, and the beauty of it, I was able to use them with a Contra program. The first example, I am a navy certified diver. So I was trained these guys into putting the bombs, doing compass swims, learning you know more about scuba, because they were, they were lobster divers, as their profession was so and then second, when, when I did that, jump in from a helicopter, from a substantial altitude to, with no parachute, just mask and fins, that's, that's helo cast that we used to call them low and slows, they call them helo cast now. And I learned that in pararescue. So for those three years, other than that, some of the training, for example, I did not know how to do the space and timing in a 50 Cal. I was taught that, and then I taught it in the camp. Same thing with the RPG I was taught that got good at it. Then I taught it at the camps. So but everything else that I had in my bag of tricks was what I learned in the military. Now, once I got into post the Nicaragua thing, my next adventure was I went through the very, very secret place called the farm that everybody knows where it's at. That's right, but that's a very, again, that's a very different kind of intensity. You know, I went from, you know, carrying AR 15, a pistol to grenades and living in a hammock to coat and tie, recruiting, running agents. Uh. Um, you know, and being under the scrutiny, because literally, the the farm is a thing is about five month process where you get put through, you are in a foreign station, and you have missions to do, and they walk you through it, but you go through this is you're you're living. So I think that was probably more stressful for me than than being in the camps, the camps, I knew what the hell I was doing there. You're learning by the hard knocks, but so that's kind of the process, and that's the process for all our paramilitary officers, the agencies are full fledged case officers or operations officers. By the way, we're not agents. Hey, FBI, are agents. For us, an agent is the person that we recruit to provide us with information that we restarted them as sources or agents. So for in my agency, when you go in, after you go through all the scrutiny of entry and polygraphs and everything else you go to the farm, and that is the beginning of your, of your formal training in espionage and clandestine operations.

Abdullah Najjar 31:09
Yeah, I like that you mentioned the part of the that you're not an agent, you would be a handler, right? You'd be handler to a source or an asset, and that's the person that's got access to the secret information that you maybe in your headquarters, or maybe where you're stationed, that's the information that you're receiving, or the intelligence you're receiving. Yeah, so there's something I came across recently about the now, this is going to be a little bit, I think, funny for some of our viewers, but there's one training, one aspect of training where you have to get, like, I don't know, free cup of coffee or something. I don't know if that was around when you got went through training.

Ric Prado 31:53
Every class, you know, the instructors change around and they, they always come up with, I mean, there's some really hard, uh, curricular math factors, you know where you have to how do you conduct the surveillance detection route? How do you plan for for a recruitment How do you, how do you carry out a recruitment process which is a substantial, very well thought out and with great oversight before we recruit anybody as an agent or an asset. But there's, there's instructors that would get creative, and they would say, okay, you know, you know, you gotta go over there and get a date with that girl, or you have and get that guy talking about politics, or you can go and, like you said, you know, get, get yourself a free cup of coffee or something, and it's just their way to watch you with not only whether you succeed or fail, but how you handle yourself, the level of confidence. And I think that one of the things that makes a CIA officer successful is when they can think on their feet, right when they are you know, they start here, they know they need to go there, and they plan the route that they're taking. But there's a saying in the military, no no plan survives the first fire, the first shot, because things happen to go south really, really quick. And that's where that ability to adapt and improvise and overcome our essential in our business.

Abdullah Najjar 33:25
Yeah, you know, there's one thing that I'd love to, you know, explore a little bit with you. I think you were one of the co founders of the task force that was aimed at maybe targeting Bin Laden, right? Or sort of tracking Bin Laden. And this is there. Here, before I proceed any further, are you able to reveal when that task force was established?

Ric Prado 33:59
Yeah, anything that's in the book I can speak about. So anything that I talk to you about is already been cleared by, by my agency. Okay, yeah, the the I was called into the front office, I think I was, yeah, I just got my GS 15 and, and

Abdullah Najjar 34:16
Me for context, the GS 15 for some of our viewers,

Ric Prado 34:19
it's to say it's a lieutenant colonel military, yeah, so I'm sorry, the colonel in the military, in the military, that's our equation. And I was offered to be Deputy Chief of station of the task force for Bin Laden. Mike Sawyer was the chief of station for it, but he was an analyst, so I was not only his deputy, but I was the senior operations officer, and our job was to find out what bin Laden was up to, document it, geo-locate him, Patterns of Life, and coming up with ideas how we could once. Proven that he was bad. How could we do away with that? Whether it's get him captured, you know, get him compromised, or whatever other means are necessary. So we started that task force in January of 1996 and I'm very proud to say that being a plank owner of that of that organization or that unit. That is the very same unit that a decade later, or a decade after 911 found and facilitated for the capture and kill of Osama bin Laden.

Abdullah Najjar 35:34
Wow.

Ric Prado 35:35
So that was, but you know, here's, here's the part that where reality, the agency gets a really bad rap with a lot of things, because we cannot flaunt our successes, but our mistakes and our failures are definitely, you know, found you know, they found out pretty quickly. And our business is worth some baseball. If you're batting 300 you're, you're an all star, right? So for, for us to to conquer that takes, takes a level of commitment and, and when politics comes in, the point is, when we came up, when we knew what Bin Laden was up to. We had sources telling us that he was creating terrorist camps. We had satellite showing that he was building and training people in Sudan and other places that had foot in the bill for it, and when we had NSA intercept communications, that pretty much stated what he was up to. He was creating a disruptive force. The US administration at the time would not allow us to act. When Bin Laden was in Khartoum, when he was in Khartoum, Sudan, we had him down so pegged that we could have sent a 12 man, you know, Green Beret team, or a, or a SEAL Team platoon, or a CIA paramilitary unit go in there and dragged his ass out, and probably not software any Council, because Khartoum, at the Time was like a terrorist heaven, haven. You know you had, if you had money and you were running away from the law, Khartoum became the place that you could go to for sanctuary, and you just paid for it. So he was totally comfortable. He didn't ever think that he had any enemies. And here's the crux here, yeah, imagine if they would have allowed us in 1997 or 1998 to neutralize Bin Laden.

Abdullah Najjar 37:48
There would probably be no 9/11.

Ric Prado 37:51
There would not be no coal. There will be no twin embassies bombing in Africa. It would be the equivalent of shooting Hitler in the head in 1938

Abdullah Najjar 38:02
Gosh

Ric Prado 38:04
And we missed that opportunity, and our Americans pay the price for that.

Abdullah Najjar 38:11
That's so surreal to me, because I was definitely going to ask you about the Kenya bombings in Tanzania and that. I mean, if that wasn't enough for you guys to feel like, oh, we gotta get this guy. I mean, then you have 911 you're like, god damn it. You know, we missed an opportunity here. Gosh. And I also remember there was another legendary officer who was, who was providing, I think, training in 1979 to you Libyan Special Forces. Billy Waugh, right? He was in Libya, and I think he was also in Sudan, right? Was he part of your maybe team at some point? Or, I don't know if that's something we can delve into.

Ric Prado 38:56
One of my best friends, big mentor of mine, unfortunately, we lost him about a year and a half ago. As a matter of fact, I had the honor of being one of three speakers at his event at SOCOM, but we were both very good friends. We met in 1990 and he was in Khartoum, early 90s, like 92-93, 94-95 and he's actually the guy who spotted and geolocated and found where he lived. Carlos, The Jackal, Ilich Ramirez, the great terrorist, the renowned terrorist The Jackal. Billy is the guy who, as we call it, in the Business Bay, book on him, and we were able to bring in the French to arrest them, because we did not have any legal he had never killed Americans, so we could not act directly upon them. But it was us who turned them over to the French, and he had killed French police officers, and to this day, he's, he's in jail. In France, but Billy was a legend in Vietnam, a legend in the Green Berets, one of the most exemplary human beings I've ever met in my life. There's a book I cover it in black ops to a good degree, but there's a book called surprise, kill vanish, by Annie Jacobson, and he is the primary protagonist in that book. I got three pages. He's got 300 let's put it that way, right. But he was the most unpretentious, most courageous, most you know, a wonderful friend and committed. And he is the one that used to tell me, because as soon as I took over, as soon as I started the task force. Yeah, I called Billy in because I knew that he had had eyes on on on Bin Laden, and he told me so many times, this is Rick. I got so close to him that I could have killed him with a rock.

Abdullah Najjar 40:53
Wow.

Ric Prado 40:54
And we missed all those opportunities, and Billy was at the epicenter of planning it, detecting it, and he was willing to execute it himself, if we would have let him.

Abdullah Najjar 41:07
Gosh, and then we, we maybe fast forward to Afghanistan right the fall, the Taliban being ousted, and then Bin Laden escape into, I guess, Pakistan at the time. How did that register with you guys, the ones that had that task force early on into the process and had eyes on him from the beginning? I mean, how did that feel for you guys?

Ric Prado 41:32
Well, you know, it was very infuriating. And, I mean, we do have a chain of command, and you respect your elders. And I think that was one of the the faux pas that Mike Sawyer made. Mike Sawyer took it very, very personal when the the coal and the embassies were were bombed, right? And he stormed into the to the director's office and said, the blood of these people is in your hands. You don't do that, that, that was just a very emotional moment for the what was one of the most stoic guys that I've ever met, but, but that, that really clarifies the burden when you're working 50 hours a week, every single week, trying to track somebody like this down, and you keep having them bracketed, and you say, I got them, I got them. I got them. No, you can't pull the trigger. No, you cannot execute, not, you cannot activate. And so on. The frustration grows. But once there's outcome to that lack of decision, and we get the coal and we get the bombings and we get 9/11 it is demoralizing, because you you you look in the mirror and you go, what else could I have done to convince, you know, my front office, and especially the the the then administration, to the fact that we need to take care of this guy. We need to confront this guy now, while he's still vulnerable. So when 9/11 happened, the first thing that happened was, of course, which was brilliant. I mean, terrible, but brilliant. It was the assassination of Massoud. Massoud was the leader of the Northern Alliance who had great alliance with the United States, we have Gary who went out there, did, knew them personally, and worked with them before. So once the Afghanistan phenomena happened, he went into hiding in the caves in Afghanistan. And people say, Well, why couldn't you find him. People have no idea of the geography that you're dealing with, right, you know? And the example that I use as a, again, as a pararescueman, if we have, in the United States, a plane that went down, this is a true story, a plane that went down with four priests in it, and it was in the snow, and we were, we were tasked with with finding them. Well, here you have people on the ground that are trying to be found. Okay, they want to be found. They'll start fires. You have a flight plan. You know where they where they left, or where they came, and we still weren't able to find them. And that was in the Rockies. Imagine trying to find a man in a cave in a country like Afghanistan, which is not your turf, and that the locals are trying to protect them and they don't want to be found. So that, that, that, that is the perspective that you got to look at when you say, why did we get them sooner? Well, the legitimate time was where we had access to him, right? But once he got into Afghanistan, a country that is primarily anti US and very supportive of those radical ideas, he was invulnerable.

Abdullah Najjar 44:55
Yeah, and what's interesting to me was that a lot of the. The analyzes that was put into trying to track him and where he went, and Where's he hiding, and all of that. I remember it turned out that that wasn't what you guys should have been looking for, right? He was hiding in plain sight in Pakistan, right? Like, he wasn't, like, it was a very hard process, but it seems like a lot of times, all of that effort that one puts into, I guess, the task of tracking, or the mission, sometimes you feel like, oh, wait, maybe I'm missing something, right?

Ric Prado 45:34
Yeah, and you're absolutely right, you know, he, he was hiding in plain sight, but hiding for real. I mean, we only had eyes on him once, a six foot five guy in the roof of the place that that's what went on with the core operation. But the effort that the Task Force started in 96 that culminated and captured, you know, in identifying where he was at. It was a an orchestra of efforts. You know you're talking, following their, their couriers. They knew that everything that they would say would be intercepted, so they relied very heavily on couriers for funneling money and for passing information. So us tracking those individuals, which is a chess game for years, and finally, you know, some led us to that particular area. And you know, the rest is history. And you know, it brings a point that a lot of people do not understand. The Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden. CIA found Bin Laden

Abdullah Najjar 46:45
Oh

Ric Prado 46:45
And as a matter of fact, the SEALs, the SEALs were under the authorities of CIA, because the agency is the only organization that has what we call Title 50 authorities. Title 50 is authorities. Means that you have the President's blessing to do whatever the hell he or she tells you to do. And you gotta understand that going to Pakistan could have been considered an act of war, because they don't, you know, military has Title 10, they can do anything allowed in a wars theater. The agency's the only one that has Title 50, authorities to conduct these kind of missions into other places. The other example that is often overlooked, and obviously this is my soapbox, the first boots on the ground in Afghanistan were not the Green Berets. First boots on the ground in Afghanistan three weeks after 9/11, were my guys.

Abdullah Najjar 47:49
Oh my goodness, and

Ric Prado 47:52
12- one of the guys, RJ is one- one of my classmates; he's a classmate of mine, former Green Beret guy. They were the first guys, because they through- through Gary went in to formalize our or reactivate our relationship with the Northern Alliance. Masood gets killed two days before 9/11 which was a genius stroke on the part of Bin Laden, but nonetheless, we were able to coalesce the alliance again, and that was instrumental in us being able to go there. Then came in the Green Berets a couple of- about three, four weeks after we did, they were delayed because of weather and everything else. But I always like to clarify, because in the in the movie 12 Strong, they gloss all over that. They, you know, the Green Berets come in, they hit the ground, and the only mention of a CIA guy is this white guy on a donkey with bags full of money, and that- one of the- the SF guys says, "man, I don't know who that guy is, but he's got some stones," (Najjar chuckles).

That's- and that's not true, because once the Green Berets got there, each one of them was assigned a CIA officer to be with them.

Abdullah Najjar 49:08
Wow.

Ric Prado 49:09
So when we were lazing targets, when they were lacing targets, when they got in firefights, our guys were working together. And again, I'm not taking any credit away from the Green Berets. They did an incredible job, and so did the rest of the military, once they were able to spin up. But the agency's flexibility, the same as in the chain of command, is that we were able to get three or four million dollars within 24 hours to take out their inboxes. And the guy that did this, Forest Olvis, is not even Treasury Department can do this. They have a bureaucracy of- that- that's a mile long. So that flexibility that the agency has is what- what implements us here, and that was, that was one of the cases.

Abdullah Najjar 49:53
Oh, my God. And that's what you call the third option, right? Tertia optia, yeah. That's, yeah, I think I should credit, I think here Andy Jacobson, because that's what I heard her say. But I would love to say here that it's very, very surprising to me and intriguing to know that the Green Berets were assigned a CIA partner. I mean, for all of the training that the Green Berets have to go through as a Special Operations Unit, and all of the- the- the selection process that they have to endure. I mean, they were assigned a CIA officer. I mean that- that- that to me, speaks volumes of how much of the experience that you guys have had, and the depth of the knowledge and practical I guess- I guess the know-how to terrain as well, right?

Ric Prado 50:46
Yeah, you know, and I would like clarify that a good number of the guys that were on that team were from Special Activities Division, which only recruits from tier one and tier two from the military. Everybody in the military side of the CIA, which is our Special Forces-

Abdullah Najjar 51:06
Right.

Ric Prado 51:06
-in the CIA, are- come from Army, Green Berets, Air Force, pararescue, combat controllers, SEALS and MARSOC Raiders. So those guys that were on the ground, Gary was probably the one that didn't have, at least current, military he was an older guy. As a matter of fact, he was- he was actually retiring when this happened, and he tore up his papers and went into Afghanistan. But the majority of the rest of the guys who were on the ground had a very strong paramilitary background, just like I did for the conscious.

Abdullah Najjar 51:42
Wow. So that- that- that's- that makes also the paramilitary operation selection process, very, very hard and- and I guess, just- just very tricky to be at the at the top-tier of military operations. Wow.

Ric Prado 52:00
Well, for us, it's a very proud moniker to be called the third option. Obviously, the first option is diplomacy. If that fails, the second option is war. And that's always, you know, counterproductive. There's no such thing as a productive war, right (Najjar chuckles)? But sometimes it gets to the point where you have to. So the agency and the rest of the Utah community, you know, we have- we can become the third option, where we can do things, either clandestinely or through influences or undermining something to prevent or neutralize an enemy without having to go fully kinetic in a war.

Abdullah Najjar 52:37
Right, and what's interesting to me is that here we see a combination of the second option and the third option, right? You've got war and you've got these clandestine operations, or the CIA present as well. I mean, how? That must be very tricky to bring about a joint operation of that scale. I mean, that seems to be quite hard, because you guys come from different, I guess, backgrounds, right?

Ric Prado 53:03
Yeah, you know, like always there's, there's some growing pains, but, but I saw this firsthand in Iraq, because I was in Iraq three times. I never set foot in Afghanistan because I was Chief of Operations at CIA's counter terrorist center when 9/11 happened. So I was at headquarters and, you know, with- with Hank Crumpton, and, of course, our boss, Cofer Black-

Abdullah Najjar 53:03
Cofer Black, yeah

Ric Prado 53:03
-and, you know, we were, you know, that- that was- that was the, the chain of command there for, for that scene.

Abdullah Najjar 53:37
Wow. So in here, I'd love to maybe ask a similar question to one that I asked previously. Can you maybe walk us through- and I like asking about failures, because that's where I think true growth and learning happens, right? We can talk about the successes for sure, but left to maybe hone in on a or highlight one failure that you think has occurred during your tenure as part of the counter-terrorism during your- when you worked with Cofer Black in headquarters. Can you Is there an example of a failure during your oversight of what was happening in Afghanistan that you think is worth highlighting here?

Ric Prado 54:21
Absolutely, you know, I covered- I was very pleasantly surprised that they allowed me to cover some of this in the book, because I started the Bin Laden task force with Mike Sawyer, and now I'm chief of ops when 911 happens. That puts a lot of burden of guilt on me, because we had all these years that we could have done something about it, right? So for- for us, the frustration was we knew something was coming. We knew that it was big, and we were almost sure that it was going to be in the United States, but we did not have the granularity. You know, when you look at movies, you know the CIA or the Russians or the, they know everything; everything is like a photograph. And the intelligence business is more likely like a puzzle that has no instructions and it's missing parts, and you have to try to cobble it together and come up with a hypothesis of what is it that you're trying to handle. So at the end of post-9/11, a year- I was chief of ops for for an additional year after- after 9/11. I started a unit and a program that was briefed to Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, and it was designed to do exactly the goal of the Counter Terrorism Center, which is to disrupt and prevent. One thing is to retaliate to an act that you have suffered. The other is to be able to negate that- that attack from- from happening. So it's a concept- is described in Black Ops to substantial detail. They don't allow me to talk about the things we actually did. But the concept and the- the end game of that, was having targets already, you know, fully-documented, already approved, from different terrorist groups. So when you had this kind of immense chatter, as we call it, from- from- from a terrorist organization, we know certain key individuals that we can go, you know, find, fix and finish, and disrupt whatever they're doing. Because if you have three of your main guys in three different places get compromised or neutralized, you're going to put your air brakes on something you feel that you're- and hopefully that would allow you. We have such things just before 9/11 that all the people we were monitoring, both through NSA and through physical surveillance, disappeared.

Abdullah Najjar 56:59
Oh,

Ric Prado 57:01
Shortly before 9/11 Well, that's a clue. They- we knew that there was something imminent, but we did not have the ability. You'll never have all the intelligence, like I said, it's not like Hollywood. You'll never have all the intelligence. But we had the ability to be able to preempt future attacks by using some of these programs, which unfortunately got politicized and eventually they were shelved, which was when I retired.

Abdullah Najjar 57:33
Gosh.

Ric Prado 57:36
But yeah, that that is, that is, that is our perspective on on how to do Black Ops, and for the reasons of doing Black Ops, and the potential benefits of having that third option be successful.

Abdullah Najjar 57:56
Do you think when you had a lot of experience in this field in the field in the beginning, and then you transitioned to headquarters, did you feel like you wanted to be with your team in the front lines again? You know, the ones that you're sort of providing some level oversight for? Like, did you- do you feel like, you know- I want to get into that, you know, I want to be there.

Ric Prado 58:21
Well, I will correct you that I did most of my career overseas.

Abdullah Najjar 58:25
Oh, okay.

Ric Prado 58:26
Very little time- and the times that I had at headquarters were all very intense. You know, the first time, of course, was the Bin Laden Task Force.

Abdullah Najjar 58:35
Yeah.

Ric Prado 58:37
Which again, you know, we were trying to accumulate all this kind of data, and traveling all- I was traveling all over the world, going to liaison services to help us understand the other. The second time was when I was made Chief of the Koreas. That- that's what got me my- my senior grade, because I was a deputy Division Chief for the- owning the Koreas, and I was the- the rep for the NSC or Korean matters. Those are the only two. And then when 9/11 happened that I was Chief of Ops, a year later, I put together these programs and I was in the field with my guys.

Abdullah Najjar 59:15
Wow.

Ric Prado 59:17
I had, you know, I received some very nice medals and commendations at the end of my career. But the one that that really hangs in my heart is our when our Director of Operations said- says, "Prado is the only guy I know that could be tasked with putting together a team to go hell- to hell, and would have people lined up the door all the way down the hall." And that is, for me, the biggest compliment. And my guys would tell me, since you're the only senior officer that we've worked with, that is first through the door, first on the mat, first on the gym, first of the range, first picking up brass. Because in my mentality, I cannot ask you to do anything that I haven't done before.

Abdullah Najjar 1:00:05
Yeah.

Ric Prado 1:00:06
I think that's a- that's not- it's leadership. The word says it: you are the leader. You're not the pusher, you're not the- the- you know, you are leading. Now, you may not be in harm's way every time, but you're when you're sending people in these kind of missions, they have to have the confidence that "he didn't read a good book about this; he has done this kind of stuff before, and we've seen some of it." So I- the last two and a half years of my career, I was barely at home, and I was bouncing all over the world trying to make book on terrorists.

Abdullah Najjar 1:00:42
Wow. So let me say this: three- three elements I would love to explore before we wrap it up. First is is the element of compromise. The second is the- the title of your book and where it sort of came from. And the third is something about your post-CIA life and how it sort of looks like. So I would love to start off with the first thing here, which is the element of compromise. I know that for most- for a lot of years in your career, you had to maybe recruit assets. You had to be a handler for some people, right? Maybe you, you had to- you needed some someone with access. I'm wondering if- I'm wondering how difficult it is to protect someone, an asset, from being, I guess, compromised, or if there was something here that you can share with us about a situation where that happened and you have to maybe sort of fix it. Yeah,

Ric Prado 1:01:42
Yeah, we covered some of that in the book, because it is very important. You know, one thing that I'm very proud of, of my agency, is that we take great care of those who we recruit. I have been witness to guys that were missing for 10-15 years, and all of a sudden they reappeared somewhere. And "here's your back pay for 10 years, we'll extricate you and your family," that's what we do, because that is, that is our lifeline, right? So the compromises happen. Because, again, like I told you, this is not a- even by baseball standards, you're not going to be batting 300 so they change for compromise, especially when you're dealing with a source. Remember the United- the CIA does not operate in the United States, not like the FBI. The FBI always operates in their turf. They own the turf. We don't. We are always- the CIA works always in somebody else's turf. So if you're running an asset in a first-world or a second-world country or a third-world country, and the intelligence services are trying to find out what their leaks are coming from, you're in their turf. So it's a very elaborate process that would take us two hours for me to even walk you through it (Najjar chuckles). But you know, for us to plan our meetings and to conduct our meetings, and the importance of covering everything in the meeting, because if you forget to ask a question, now you have to have another operational act, another risk, another exposure, to get the rest of the story. So that preparation is super labor intensive is very, very counterintuitive, because it's not what normal people do on a normal day. It's a very different way of doing I personally have not had a compromise in the ranks. I have been in or- in sections where something did happen, somebody got compromised, coming through a checkpoint. I think that the closest I came to, and this is also in the book, I had- I was in a Latin American country, South American country. I'm not allowed to say the name, but we were there helping the locals fight a- a- both a Communist and a Maoist insurgency that were also connected with narco-traffickers. And I recruited a terrorist from the- from that Maoist organization, and I ran that guy for a year. And of course, here's a guy, he was not a senior guy, don't get me wrong, but he was a full fledged soldier for this particular organization. And the amount of information that I was able to extract from him, as far as who's who, infrastructure, modus operandi: it was a gold mine. And not to mention the fact that twice he provided threat information, and one of those times we were able to do something about it. Well, at the end of the year, he disappeared; never heard from him again. Now, I sleep well at night because I know that I did everything in my power to go out and meet this guy, you know, in the middle of the night in some really crappy neighborhood, in a beat-up car, by myself, and run him as clandestinely as I could. So- but in my self-conscious what I thought was, "well, you know, they that- this organization had a habit of taking their city-guys and say, hey, it's time to go in the field. You need to go to the mountains. You need to go out there and start attacking people. You're not- no longer a suburban or an urban, you know, militant. You gotta go out there." And that's what I'm hoping. If he was compromised- I the reason I don't think that he was compromised is because that would have probably had ramifications, direct ramifications, towards me. And here's what I mean, if I'm meeting with this guy and they find out that he's collaborating, the first thing they're going to do, they're going to put a gun to his head and say, "you're going to lead us to who your handler is, or we're going to kill you, or we're going to kill your family."

Abdullah Najjar 1:01:44
Right.

Ric Prado 1:01:51
Which is, again, something that people don't understand, that we cannot guage our morality or the morality of our- of our enemies by our morality. They will shoot your kids, especially this organization was extremely, extremely ruthless. So I think that if he had been compromised- if he had been suspected- they would have either surveil him, so he would bring, you know, bring the surveillance to my meeting with him, or compromise him to where he would say, "this is where I'm meeting him today, and I'll be there, and I'll give you the signal when you can come in and grab them." That also highlights the, you know, the danger in our business. You're out there by yourself, dealing with somebody who you're hoping remains loyal. But life has a way of twisting things around, and this guy could flip on you, and you're the one- hell holding the bag.

Abdullah Najjar 1:07:01
Wow. Would that be considered- this is my way of transitioning to the title of your book- would these missions of clandestinely meeting with your assets, would these be considered Black Ops missions? And what do people get wrong about Black Ops missions?

Ric Prado 1:07:21
Mission are a step beyond the- the recruitment and running of this asset was very well documented and very well planned and- and we took all the precautions that we could. And I had even entered, you know, he- I was- I was dealing with him as a non-American. I was dealing with them as a Central American businessman that got him out of trouble through some cop friends of mine and forced him to work for me. So the American hand was hidden to a degree. So in essence, it could be considered a black or at least a dark gray. Real Black Ops are, or the- the- the textbook Black Ops are those operations where the American hand has to be completely hidden, like the culture programs, like some of the programs we ran in Libya. Like some of the programs that we, you know, we ran in cartoon, where you actually have people operating in a way that you are under these authorities that are usually, if not always, based on the signature of the President of the United States. George Bush Jr. showed up at our building September 17 and signed the lethal finding that allowed us to deploy our guys and start killing the Taliban and the Mujahideen that were that were with them. That- that is the kind of authorities that was, again, a Black Op, until it wasn't, once we started having American troops in there. But let's face it, you know, the the presence of my CIA brothers being on the ground first in Afghanistan, that's about as black an op as it gets (Najjar chuckles).

Abdullah Najjar 1:09:12
Oh, my God. Tell me- tell me how hard it is to actually write about a life journey that is fraught with so many complex experiences, world- worldly events, you know, deployments, and then sort of narrowing it down into a book, into between two covers. Like, how hard that- like, how hard is that?

Ric Prado 1:09:39
You know, it's funny because you mentioned what was going on in the world. What would you got to understand that when we're focused on a mission, a lot of times we're missing everything else that's going on in the world, because we're omnifocused on what we're doing. And so it took a lot of research, and I did have help with the research on what was going on in. In the greater world picture while I was doing A, B or C. But the writing the book was was easy, because the book is chronological of my life. It starts with my life in Cuba, me leaving by myself, being an orphan, joining pararescue, then the Contras, then this, this, that and the other. So it goes in sequence. So it's a matter of me sitting down and walking through memory lane. The second hardest thing is getting it approved by the agency. I had some very senior friends left in the agency. As a matter of fact, my last deputy was an SIS five at the time, which is like a five-star general in our building, and it still took me six months to get the- the book approved. There's people that have waited a year, year and a half. There's people that have had to go to a lawyer to get the books approved. So it's a very tedious process that you have to challenge them and then prove. The agency doesn't care if it's something that is out there by leak, they will not allow you to use that in corroboration. So it's very stringent the way that we do things there. But if you have a book that has been written before that does talk about that particular topic and it has been approved by the agency, then that's an end for you to further discuss or to augment or update. But the actual writing was just time-consuming. It was also very emotional, because, you know, when you're living the kind of lives that we live it's like being in a car doing 110 miles an hour. You focus on your driving. You know what the next curve is. You know what it is, but everything around you that's going on, you're still aware of it, but it's a blur. Well now you go back and you sit down and you start writing of something, you go, "whoa. I didn't- I didn't focus on the fact that this happened, or that this could have happened, or that I missed this, or I was lucky enough to see this." One example was a case in the Philippines where the NPA Sparrows, New People's Army, was a very strong- had a strong presence in the Philippines in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As matter of fact, I got there about eight months I think it was after Nick Rowe, Colonel Nick Rowe, was assassinated in the streets of Manila. So the the MPA had a hit team called the Sparrows, and we got ambushed by a team, me and a small group of us working in devout. And the fact that we were able to see them first, recognize their modus operandi by the way that they dress and the way that they carry themselves. And we were able to draw our weapons first.

Abdullah Najjar 1:13:01
Woah.

Ric Prado 1:13:03
And that's what- I wouldn't be talking to you here if that- we- if that had not happened. If me and my partner, my- my associate, had not noticed these three guys with their left hands in their- in their pocket, because they would carry a 45 and inside their pants, no holster, and all they would do is push the gun up. Shoot you, put it away, and when people look around, they were were ghosts. You could look you could Google that online, NPA, sparrows.

Abdullah Najjar 1:13:32
Okay.

Ric Prado 1:13:32
There's a sparrow that was captured, and he demonstrates, and it is, even to me who actually witnessed it, you know, when- every time I look at that video, I go, "holy ,moly," you know? Because they were extremely good at what they did. So at the time, none of that registered. Yeah, the adrenaline was high and all this other thing. And I think the other comical part about all this is that my wife never heard of that until she read the book (Najjar chuckles). 80% of what she now knows is because she read the book.

Abdullah Najjar 1:14:10
Oh, my God. So even with family members, there are so many things you can't disclose.

Ric Prado 1:14:15
And it's not only that you can't but that you don't want to, I mean, you don't want to impact,- you know, like me meeting this terrorist in the middle of the night. Yeah, I was coming home at 10:00, 10:30 at night, you know, and I had a small- a body armor underneath, and I had a radio, and I had two guns and all kind of crap. So my, my wife, knew that I wasn't out at a canasta club (Najjar chuckles), but you know, but she had no idea. And I wouldn't- I wouldn't allow her to know that, not because of, not only because of the- the- the- you know, the compartmentation issues in the intelligence community, but because I don't want her suffering every time that I go out of the house. As it was, I know that she did, but always in back of her mind, you know, she- she had no idea. And I remember when she was reading the book, every once in a while she would walk in my office and go, "so that's what you were doing on such" and then she would roll her eyes and walk up so (Najjar chuckles).

Abdullah Najjar 1:15:13
Oh these are- these are life's little moments, I'd say (Prado chuckles). Gosh. So when you- when you- when you were writing that book was there and someone that you saw it as an inspiration, a person, or maybe something, maybe, you know, even an idea that, you know, that was sort of like a an element of inspiration that led you to maybe finish it or even write something like that? I mean, there must have been something that triggered-

Ric Prado 1:15:42
Yeah, Cofer Black was my boss at CTC. He was the director of the Counter Terrorist Center when 9/11 happened, and before. And when I went post-agency, I went to work for Blackwater. I was one of their vice presidents, still doing the same thing, but now on a contract basis with, initially CIA and then subsequently, the special side of the military. I can't go any further on there, but I brought Cofer to Blackwater. And so we literally had two doors apart from each other in the office. And he always told me, he says, "Prado, you need to write a book." Because he knew my story. He knew where I came from, the fact that I had lived under communism, that I had fought it in five different incarnations. He was my boss. He knew everything about me. He read my file, as we say, and he kept saying, "you have a story to tell." So that was- he was like Woody Woodpecker with that. It was every month he would come in and say, "you gotta start doing- at least taking notes," this that and the other. So the next thing that happened was Billy Wall. Billy Wall was working with Annie Jacobson for the book "Surprise, Kill, Vanish," and he- she- she asked him. She says, "look, I've talked to like, 15 or 20 of the paramilitary guys in the agency, and this, this guy's name, Rick Prado, keeps coming up. Who the hell is he?" "Ah he's one of my best friends. You want to talk to him?" Gets on the phone, and Annie Jacobson starts talking to me. Like, two weeks later, she's in my house. She spent two days with us, debriefing me on her book. And like I said, I have, you know, I think three and a half pages in her book, but it was her at the end of our social intercourse, and the- besides the debriefing, the fact that we could sit over a glass of wine and talk about, "hey, I did this. I did that." And she said- she reached into her purse, got, her agent's business card, and she said, e"xpect the call from Jen Horn-Fisher. You need to write your book." And that was- that was the tipping point where I actually put- I had already started because, like I said, Cofer was a pain. I had already taken notes and making an outline. I had a fleshed out outline, mainly because I figured that it'd be nice for at least my family, post-Mortem, know what daddy did during the war kind of thing, right? So I had that outline, and then that's that. But Annie Jacobson was the the final kick in the butt (Najjar chuckles), putting pen to paper and getting the book.

Abdullah Najjar 1:18:22
Oh my. And, you know, before I wrap it up, I wanted to ask about life, post the career and post the release of the book. What has been- what's it been like for you to be away, maybe to a certain extent, away from all the action? I mean, it must be a change of scenery, to put it mildly.

Ric Prado 1:18:44
Yeah, well, now it is. You know, it's funny because I left, I left the agency in 2004, and in May of 2004 I was working for Blackwater. And my job was vice president for special- govern- vice president for special U.S, government programs. Hello (Najjar chuckles). So that was- I was out on the street. I was, you know, recruiting. I was building my teams again. I was all over the place. So I had eight years between Blackwater and subsequent two years that I did it on my own, where I was still operational. Around 2010 is when I said, "okay, I'm getting a little too long in the tooth of this. I'm a little too known. It's time to dial it back." And then what I started doing was training. I taught at- there's a course in Fort Bragg called advanced Special Operations and techniques. Can't say anything more than that, but I taught there for seven years. So I got to meet a lot of their special operations forces from all four branches and and that was- that was- that was- that was challenging and very rewarding. But after seven years that too got old, just like I am. Then came the book that was a full immersion of two years between writing, getting it approved, and the hardest part, believe it or not, is, is the- the promotion, that's where the real work is. I kid you not, I've done over 140 podcasts and TV interviews, you know. So it's a lot of work that I've put in behind the book, which, by the way, is a New York Times bestseller. It was number eight-

Abdullah Najjar 1:20:21
Congratulations.

Ric Prado 1:20:21
-in the New York Times bestseller list. Post-the book, which I promised my wife that the book would be my last firefight. I have done very little. So the last year and a half, I'm a gentleman of leisure. I ride a horse. I ride a motorcycle. I chase my wife around the house. I go see the grandkids. I read. I love to read. I always love to read. I think that's one of the reasons that I got into the business, that I grew up on Edgar Rice borrows Tarzan and Ian Fleming's James Bond, you know. So it was that mixture of- of I want to do things, so it's been good, and I'm adapting well to the actual retirement. I'm still fairly fit, and I think that this dog could still hunt, but there's plenty of young talent out there that- that is their turn to serve, you know, and I'm very proud of the fact that now I went in the military when I was 20, and I didn't stop doing this stuff till I was 70.

Abdullah Najjar 1:21:28
Wow.

Ric Prado 1:21:29
So that's a lot of years of of nothing but God-and-country-work. I'm very proud of that.

Abdullah Najjar 1:21:36
Gosh. And I do want to say one thing here, and I don't know if you get this compliment a lot, but I think you have a way with articulating your thoughts that's admirable. So yeah, thank you so much, Mr. Prada, for doing this. I really appreciate your time, and I truly, truly enjoyed our conversation together. So thank you for doing this.

Ric Prado 1:21:55
Same here. Same here.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai