Ric Prado: Black Ops - Danger Close with Jack Carr

this is the danger closed podcast beyond the books with me jack carr [Music] welcome to the danger clothes podcast an ironclad original presented by navy federal credit union before we get started just a quick reminder that in the blood the next novel in the james reese saga is coming in hot on may 17th in hardcover ebook and audiobook and is available for pre-order now my guest today rick prado he's a legend in intelligent circles it was such an honor to talk to him he had an incredible career at the central intelligence agency and is just uh an amazing individual his book black ops is out now be sure to go to rick prado that's p-r-a-d-o dot com to find out more about him and i cannot recommend this book enough as you'll and you'll find out why in the podcast so now without further ado rick prado oh my gosh what a ride you have had and what an amazing example you are this next generation of people that want to serve their country i mean there's so much to to go over with you i don't even know where to where to start um but uh your upbringing is i mean it is it's incredible that you were born in cuba you saw the effects of castro's uh regime and the revolution and made it to this country and then go on to this life of service and have touch points with these legends in special operations in intelligence circles and uh you probably won't say it yourself but become a legend yourself and uh as i go through this process uh on this journey so i mean incredible uh and i'm gonna let you say something here too because i know i'm just blabbing on here but uh this is the book that i i mean i would have loved to have read this book sixth grade seventh grade eighth grade high school um because books like this are going to inspire the next generation just like some of those books that you read growing up inspired you i mean you're now paying that forward and a whole nother generation is going to enter intelligent circles because they're inspired by the things that you did and i think it's just remarkable thank you very much i um i think that that's that's a great great start because the purpose of the book uh actually came out from my frustration that my agency is the most maligned worst represented by hollywood primarily and the fact that we have the secrecy that goes from the quiet professionals but they take it to the extreme so we don't capitalize on putting the word out of the things that we can in the book is a perfect example the book was cleared by the agency so everything in there was authorized you read it you see that there's a lot of examples there's some things that were taken out um but for the average american best case scenario you know the cia is this pit bull you keep in the backyard throw them a bone once in a while and let them kill whatever gets into your yard and nothing could be further from the truth uh jason bourne does not represent by michael and my clique american made definitely doesn't even some of the more benign a lot of people say three days of acandro was a great movie i said it was but it also depicts the agency in a very negative eat your own kind of thing so when when uh when i was confronted by primarily gopher black who was my boss and then my partner in blackwater um we talked about it incessantly you need to tell your story because your story can carry so many things um in the sense of being you know hyphenated american even though we don't hyphenate anything in my family we're americans so it just goes on and on you know the uh the amount of support has been humbling but the goal for me from the very beginning has been to honor those people in the agency that have sacrificed so much i mean divorces in in in family issues and sacrifices and separations and we have 137 stars on our wall we are very small organization we're not army navy or air force or marines and our director of operations is even smaller and 137 in a third of those are post-9 11. and some of those i knew personally so for me besides having a debt of honor to this country which is why i started what i started doing you know at age 20 i also felt that my colleagues especially those who were sacrificed the most deserves their grandchildren to be able to pick up that book and say oh wow so that's what they really did yeah yeah i want to read a couple things from it here but uh this first uh this is the first thing that i that i got to that i that i highlighted um and uh it's it's so well written and and uh and so cool you say there's a war that goes on in broad daylight in the everyday streets of cities around the world it has its own rules its own foot soldiers and leaders and it is invisible to those simply wanting to live their lives in peace like a universal police officer walking a local beat of international crime and intrigue you'll never look at everyday american life the same you'll see the danger lurks from seemingly innocuous sources you'll find hezbollah sleeper cells in your own town north korean agents sneaking across our borders terrorists lurking and lying in wait it is thankless anonymous task stopping these forces but my colleagues do so not for accolades and fame they seek only to preserve the lives of strangers in the nation they love that's pretty that's pretty cool it is moving and i think it really captures what uh what those who are drawn to a life of service do it for for people they'll never they'll never know for a way of life and i love how you talk about in this book uh your upbringing in cuba because you a lot of us in this country are so comfortable and we have the luxury of not having those experiences that would make us appreciate the freedoms options and opportunities that uh that people like you sacrifice so much for that generations from the inception of this country up until today sacrificed everything for um but you have that you have that tangible touch point with a dictatorship uh from which you and your family had to flee um and i wanted to ask you about your first fire fight at age seven well yeah i was born in cuba in 1951 and the revolution started around 56 57 castro's in the mountains the mountain range nearest my town was where che guevara was um held up with his guys so my town was the first it was a besides town it was a cattle town my dad was a cowboy um they would come down and they do raids on on the on the bars that the the military or the police would frequent and uh one of those nights i was watching tv with a nanny because my parents had gone out to dinner and we hear commotion outside you know a couple of shots random but nothing yeah but i knew that there was uh something going on so typical seven-year-old kid curious i walk i run up to the window and i crank the window open it's those jealousy windows and now i'm hearing even more gunshots well what i didn't realize was that below the parapet of that window was a gorilla fighter with a fully automatic weapon and he let off two blasts of that stuff and i was frozen partially with surprise but also there was a certain exhilaration about what was going on and then of course my nanny grabbed me by the neck and took me away and made me swear that i would never tell my parents when i didn't for 50 years but so you know but you know as as as impactful as that was because there were bodies and there were there was blood and all this other stuff what really started settling in my brain was when i saw castro take over shortly shortly thereafter i mean not even six months after his tenure began um the confiscation of private property the forcing of the schools to to teach his method methodology and his ideology um wearing uniforms to school you know they had you know the different segments of you know you know ages and all this kind of stuff and and then i started seeing the the oppression the uh the abuses and i will remember till the day that i die we had gone up to havana and i was probably nine nine and a half about nine and a half and uh we were going to havana and as we turn into this park there were men hanging from trees and lampposts with signs around them that said contra revolutionaries and of course my poor mom who was riding shotgun jumped in the back of the sea trying to cover my eyes don't look don't look that was a little late i had that's that's tattooed in my brain also so that and then the departure i mean uh as you mentioned you know my uh i'm an only child and my parents for nothing else than love for freedom especially my dad my mom was following my dad's leadership she was you know she believed it but uh she had a little bit more pain executing um was he did not want his son to grow up in a communist country and imagine you taking your 10 year old son your only child and putting him a plane to go to a country that you've never been and may never even visit for freedom when castro took over my dad had a 57 pontiac we had a tv and we had a phone in our house we were solid middle class and he was willing to give all that up and go into poverty as we started in the states for freedom and you could you can imagine what kind of lesson that is for a ten-year-old i turned 11 at an orphanage in pueblo colorado uh you think pueblo colorado is a blue collar town now you should have seen it in 62. uh but he never he never regretted and in the day he came to this country that we were able to get reunited he never took a welfare check he always had two jobs my mom worked the sweatshop and he told us we will be residents as soon as possible we will be citizens of this country as soon as possible and we ain't going anywhere so that that's kind of like the forging of my medal you know when you have that kind of beginning and that kind of parents and those kind of examples um i am i am very proud that god gave me this path and that i had the uh the fortitude to follow it because there is a price to admission to what we do you know oh yeah and you know i've studied a little bit mostly the the the insurgency and and uh and jake avara and on that sort of thing when i look at cuba and bay of pigs and i look at it through a uh uh standpoint of special operations and that and that sort of a lens but i hadn't read about the castro youth before i read your book i don't know why i missed that in uh in my reading up to this point but uh what was the castro youth well you know he immediately started militarizing everything um the first thing that actually happened was he designated in every neighborhood you know we say neighborhood watch now is to keep an eye out on the thieves neighborhood watch in cuba was every block had a person that would report what you said when you came in uh and they took shifts and they had to serve it that way so you know that that in itself was a big step into that militarization and then what he did was with the schools yeah you know all the kids have to wear these particular uniforms you know imagine i'm nine years old and i am having to teach how to read to farmers in the outskirts of my town how does an eight-year-old try to teach the absurdity of that still you know resonates in my brain i'm going like how does that make any sense but it was part of that indoctrination that you know uh bringing them into a completely different world the concept of uh ratting out your parents if they said something that was kind of revolutionary that's what they inculcated in these schools and in these youth clubs so it was very drastic change from the the family nucleus to the the explosion of the family and and even families reporting on each other much less neighbors you know i was going to ask you this this later um if it was appropriate but um because you bring it up now uh what have you noticed over the the last 20 years 25 years particularly the last five years six years seven years uh about this country and uh it's um getting comfortable with some of those things that you saw in your family saw in cuba but seeing that in this country as the as as progress um what do you feel about that or do you notice that i'm sure absolutely and it scares the living daylights out of me because um you know you hit on something very astute a little while ago that i've echoed several times we don't know how good we have it in this country you know i had a lady that i was talking to a couple of months ago and i mentioned that and she says well i've been to mexico i said no ma'am you were in cancun on a cruise there's a difference between going to mexico and living in guadalajara then then you're going on a cruise to to one of the the tourist sites and that is you know it's a blessing it is a blessing that we're so comfortable that our states are the size of other countries we have this homogenous you know continent that we are buffered by oceans and and uh and we're just spoiled but when people travel and live overseas or like in my case in my parents case because you know everybody feels sorry for rick rick is the luckiest guy in the world i am the luckiest man in the world i came to the best country in the world and served it and still trying to serve it that try to pay back that debt of honor but you know who paid the price my mom and dad they were never the same especially my mom because it was a very traumatic period so i see these trends of socialism or utopia and let's give everybody you know socialism and i've said this before socialism is the mask that communism wears to lure you into his lair there is no difference between socialism and in becoming communism and it's totalitarian is his complete control and one thing that they do say that is true is that everybody's going to be equal equally be miserable with the exception of the leadership there's a joke in cuba that if you see a house that has been painted in the last 50 years that's a senior party member yeah that's why i think this is so important for uh americans to read right now particularly those that are in that formative stage in their lives they're so impressionable to have an appreciation for for what we have because without books like this without people like you talking about this uh and these stories they just uh they just go to the next game on their their smartphone or their tick tock video or whatever it is and meanwhile we're headed down that path that uh to giving up these freedoms that so many people died for and uh i mean you you write about it here in such a powerful way um you say that in school our teachers told us to watch each other and our families if we heard anyone saying anything against castro we were to report it at once the new regime weaponized us against our own families in perfect 1984-esque fashion around town every block had a designated official who recorded his neighbor's movements ears were always open listening to the slightest critique of castro his revolution or of marxism in general once reported those people vanished taken in the night by the stormtroopers of the 26th of july movement as a marxist indoctrination soon dominated every aspect of our lives in school life back home became a growing nightmare for the middle class a lot of people in the town had always been jealous of my family's success we'd endured threats before but this seemed different various revolutionary committees were formed led by some of the true dregs of our city now that they had achieved a level of power they hadn't under a capitalist system they took revenge on those more successful yeah you can you imagine that when in cuba when you and my by the way my wife is cuba and she went through the same thing uh she's younger and she left later she came out in uh in uh i don't know 68 or something like that 69 and but when you registered yourself for a passport the communist party would show up at your house and inventory every single household item glasses silver spurs that my dad had whatever it was and when you got on that plane before you got on that plane to leave cuba they would do that that inventory again and if there was anything missing you could not leave and it was all corruption they were divvying up the prices and that was one of the reasons my dad could get out because he had a 57 pontiac that more than one general or captain or whatever the heck they were uh you know wanted or lusted after so it is there's no hiding what communism is and the fact that socialism is just it's just the lure and and i love that this you talk about this because this struck me as well and i hadn't thought about it before i hadn't read it anywhere else before and it's you looking back you know retrospectively on what would have happened maybe had you stayed there another month another year another two years you say your school had been tasked with selecting several of its most promising students to be sent to the soviet union for further education my name was on that list this would not have been optional the government would simply put me on a plane to the soviet union whether my parents agreed or not in the years since i've often wondered what would have happened to me if we had not received the tip that's something else that told you to get out of there what i've ended up a marxist ii would have joined an intelligence service like cuba's version of the kgb would i'd like to think not but the indoctrination those children were subjected to in the soviet union transformed most of them into revolutionary marxists who later held positions of importance in the regime i mean wow you were close to being put on a plane to the soviet union for further education yeah the prado luck holds out my my uncle was uh my my godmother's husband who's my uncle he um he was a socialist he was a communist so let's put it that way but blood is a little thicker than other things and he felt compelled to tell my dad that my name was on that list so that that was what precipitated me leaving even earlier um even though they couldn't get out so i mean it's it that's it's incredible uh the whole story is fascinating and you're not even 11 yet you're you're not even 10 yet and this is just the first opening chapter of the book um uh bay of pigs uh were you aware of what was going on at that young age or what yeah it was national news i was in cuba for the baby pigs and and and i knew the area fairly well because we used to go to a beach near there uh when we couldn't go to varadero because it was a little further and uh so i knew where about you know bay pigs was and i also knew um that this was happening but not that it was i mean it wasn't that obvious to me i know the fights were all going on that we could hear the planes we could hear the radio um but that for again these are all back to back-to-back cases where yeah it pushed my dad into i gotta get him out wow and looking back on that having studied it now uh as a as an adult um what are your thoughts on on bay of pigs and the political situation at the time um and how do you look at that uh that event because it is such a seminal event both in intelligent circles and then for you personally having been born in cuba yeah so definitely affected by both ends you know um the bay of pigs was the typical example of what not to do with an intelligence agency and we're living through it again and you'll and i know you've read some of this in there the worst you can think that you could do is politicize special operations covert operations those are have to be separate from political you know ambitions or or whatever the bay the the original plan for the bay of pegasus attack wasn't in bay of pigs it was in just south of siem fuegos which was a town a little further it was about almost straight south of where i lived but on the on the on the water side and the reason they had picked that because again the yes and bright mountains were there the central highway went right through that town and also um the the major uh the the major railroad the junction so they felt that if they landed there and it was a port if they landed there in force they could easily take the town over um the air support the castro joy was going to be neutralized and some of it didn't but by brave cubans not by anybody else coming as promised um but that became politically unpaddlable because they wanted to make it look like it was insurrection not an invasion so they move it to a mangrove and that's where we dumped our people at um it is i i you know i've had the honor of me and work with several real prominent guys who were there that time one of them a very good friend of mine named amado i won't go into last name he was 18 years old when he landed in the bay of pigs he was captured he was traded for medicines he went on to become a army officer green beret in vietnam came out went to georgetown got his advanced degrees and joined cia and retired as a senior operations officer wow now you talk about people to look up to that's humbling wow incredible yeah you've uh crossed paths with some uh quite a few characters over the years quite a few legends over the years um but hey your story starts out what was it called the peter pan program that they took people out of cuba and got them to united states and then got them to the orphanages while they waited for their families that may or may not ever ever show up yeah the peter pan program was initially uh started to try to get the children of the opposition out so they would remain and felt the kids were safe and then try to do it political but as the control was exacerbated by by the events you know that became uh a moot point and then when the bay of pigs happened it opened up to all any kid that wanted to leave and i think uh a little over 4 000 kids were taken out and put in different foster homes or different camps or three camps in in south florida uh designated as those i don't know if you want to call it the the short straw or whatever but i drew the orphanage and uh i don't regret it you know i love horses and that's the only thing i could go over there was rodeo so um but it was it was a culture shop because that orphanage was very mixed uh we had three or four different ethnic you know groups in there cultural groups in there and turning 11 there was was no picnic there was no picnic i bet did you always have hope that you would see your family again or did you did you know hey my parents are coming for me and uh and you never gave up that hope no you know absolutely and look my dad was a very simple man my dad had a seventh grade education but he was a great businessman and he was a very strong-willed determined guy my dad could make a decision on a heartbeat and uh he he saw the this coming but he also brought me up as the little man i mean you know this is what a man does he started brainwashing me to be able to cope with watching my mom and dad you know my mom crying my dad biting his lip as i'm as i'm getting on this airplane to go to a place i don't even know what it's called um but but he did that very early on but the one thing that really clinched it before he got me on that plane he looked at me said i give you my word i will see you again that's all i needed that's all you needed it's incredible incredible and you do see him again you see both your parents again somehow they track you down uh find the paperwork find out where you are you're reunited and you start essentially from scratch now in the united states but now you have opportunity and uh and and the story is an incredible american success story um and uh it just highlights what this country does it gives you which is opportunity and then you get to forge your own path um and you certainly do and i want to talk to you about reading because uh the importance of reading in your life as a young kid and you're reading the the ian fleming james bond books you're reading tarzan you're reading books about world war ii and you find out about something called the oss and wild bill donovan uh and you so you're reading these books and that's the influence of popular culture i had it too although my formative years were the 80s but very similar and that this is coming from books fiction and non um what was the importance of of those books to you growing up well you know it's funny again um i i believe that god puts a path in front of us and we take have the courage to walk it uh he makes it a little easier for us no matter how hard it is and i had on my seventh grade school teacher lee robert krenz was my english teacher and he was an avid reader and he infected me with that um so i was reading books uh you know in seventh grade that most kids are not looking at comic books and uh the uh i have three books separate from everything else that i have and one is while bill donovan teddy roosevelt and wyatt earp those to me are my american my american historical heroes from from those different periods and very very similar characters in the sense of uh their convictions and their courage but yeah reading became a passion for me it still is um and didn't make writing the book any easier but that i honestly believe that that's why this book i hope is a success because i want people to get that story i want parents to if their kid comes to them and says daddy daddy i want to be a cia operations officer they don't take him or her to therapy that they understand that it is an honorable profession of men and women men and women of incredible integrity hard work courage and sacrifice and you know i love the military that was special operations in the military uh air force para rescue i would have not gotten into the agency without without that ticket but at the end of the day we don't get to wear jump wings and cibs and and purple hearts or whatever uh everybody in the agency has the same stupid blue badge whether you are a gs6 or an sis 5. so you know recognition um outside of the agency is not something anybody expects yeah i think that's a draw for a lot of people as well operating in the shadows you don't really know too much about it so for some that's the draw as it as it was for you reading these books about world war ii and the oss and thinking about what's going on but as as you're growing up vietnam starts to starts to heat up you're hearing more and more about vietnam um you want to serve your your country you go into the the air force para rescue get this medical training uh and then you missed vietnam like you just at the tail end of it and uh and missed that that yeah right there and i think i think you you reach out to the agency initially um right around then uh trying to get in and uh they say hey we're not hiring anymore um kind of like the military everybody's trying to figure out what to do in this post-vietnam era um and so you you continue down the para rescue path for a little bit you become a firefighter and then eventually i think you're a pj and you work with some agency guys who call you though with the cuban pj and they remember you when they need somebody to do some paramilitary work in central america um how did that all come about well you know i i did apply the first time was in 1974 and of course this was the the attrition for both the military but definitely the agency was decimated by different you know political whims and so they sent me back a real nice letter you know i told them hey i want miss vietnam i want to do air america anywhere have gone we'll travel whatever you need you know and uh they said we're we're actually firing not hiring that's pretty much what they told me i tried again i i don't i'm 79 early 80 i tried again and this time they called me in because they needed um medics they needed guys like pararescuemen that would work with special activities division which is our special forces or special operations forces of the agency and um that's where i met the ground branch guys and some of these folks they were not still not hiring so i said guys i'm not going to lose my paramedic credentials to come over here you know every 30 days of work a week so i pulled the plug on that but then when the sandinistas declared themselves communists and started fomenting uh communism throughout latin america as surrogates of the cuban surrogates of the russian the soviet union they the agency did not have a single native uh spanish-speaking guy with paramilitary background and they're going like who was a cuban kid you remember the pj because i was the first pair of rescuer they ever saw in that building and um the less the rest is history i got dragged into it and my only question to them was is this long term or another short term and when they said long term i said i'm in and they asked me do you want to know what it is i said i don't care yeah i love it i love this story and then because now we're into my formative years reagan has become president things are shifting obviously there's a focus on uh soviet via cuba uh influence in uh and sometimes not even via cuba in uh in central south america and you find yourselves on the front lines essentially alone and unafraid i mean the things i was seeing in a newspaper and in time magazine and newsweek where i'm getting little snippets of things going on down there and i'm already into special operations i'm studying vietnam i'm reading these different works of fiction where people had backgrounds in vietnam as either army special forces or navy seals or marine snipers or uh cia paramilitary people but so i'm in this phase where i'm intently focused on what's happening in central south america because that's what i'm thinking hey this is going to be the vietnam for me for my generation because i'm 8 9 10 time frame um and obviously things progressed uh to different areas of the world after that but you are in the thick of it in the time when i'm reading those articles and imagining what's going on down there studying intelligence services as a young kid wanting to go that route into the military into special operations you're on the ground essentially by yourself and you have like a browning high power you have a knife you carry a grenade which i love by the way because i always had one on my belt in iraq and afghanistan also even when i took my body armor off and everything else and would go to different meetings with pistol and i had that had that grenade so i loved seeing that picture by the way uh you have a backup pistol i think on your ankle that no one knew about and you're going to these camps i mean you fly i think you fly into uh honduras and you go to the border and you start getting figuring out the lay of the land um what did they tell you before they put you on that plane and what was your what was your mission going in was it what you when you landed was it what you thought it was first of all it was it was probably arguably my my best tour uh i had nothing but great tours but this one was very visceral you know um here was the same monster that consumed my first country and my family and now i am having an opportunity to help these people that are actually fighting it so um i i i was in the agency for about a week before they sent me down i had no training other than what i had received in pararescue and uh and of course my spanish was decent enough that i could you know pull off being a honduran captain and then a major and uh so i spent three and a quarter years almost living in the camps and from monday through friday i slept in the jungle hammock uh but when i first started we didn't even have helicopters there was five people in that program and i was the only agency officer for the first 14 months that was allowed to set foot in the camps because again it was covert action that's where the shadows comes in we had to keep you know that deniability of the american hand that changed little by little and then we had you know 100 guys out there but uh for me it was such a rewarding thing because not only am i training these people uh not only am i you know giving giving them intelligence and and they're bringing back their intelligence but i sat every single night i would grab a cup of coffee and i would sit with a different group of peasant fighters freedom fighters and i would ask them why are you here not one said i read marx and lenin and i disagree with the uh everything was personal they had burned their churches they had stolen their cattle they had raped their daughter they had conscripted forced conscription of their 15 year old son they were all there fighting for the same thing that my dad threw me on an airplane to obtain and that was freedom so imagine the satisfaction for me that now i'm actually cutting off some of the tentacles of this communist octopus uh in a completely different area yeah i mean it's incredible the story is so incredible and you can tell reading it that it's so intensely personal for you for the reasons that you you just outlined um but also you're adapting down there and there's a story and i want people to read it because um if you hadn't done a sing this single act of kindness to one person in the camp he wouldn't have tipped you off later that you were targeted for assassination and you might not be here today you know that is recruitment 101 and uh i had not had any training but i was a street kid i i kind of knew the ropes of you know hustling and being on the street and this young man came to me a few months before his wife was ill and he needed some money to get the right medicine and i gave him the equivalent of 20 bucks which back there was a lot of money to him and he's the one that told me that because i had done a rendition on their commander who was a real scumbag i had actually physically forced him to come back that they were going to try to kill me and i've used that even in the agency as as a you know hey that little guy out there that you may want to take for granted may not be the person you want to take for granted i honestly don't think that i would have survived an attack because it was avoidance they i didn't confront them i i literally didn't while you read it i yeah i escaped and staged on the mountain and we were up all night waiting for them to come and get us but if it hadn't been for that they would i would have been totally surprised because i was for the most part surrounded by people that i that i knew and trusted yeah you had been asleep at the time and i mean it's an in absolutely incredible story the whole the whole thing um but uh there's al there's that what also surprised me there were so many amazing things in here um that commander suicide and the argentinians like argentina i didn't realize that we were working through argentina for a lot of this and you know once i knew that i could uh i could deduce that there was going to be some corruption in that system um but uh but it it it actually gave me some ideas for for for my books kind of to weave in there um but what was the the commander suicide in the in argentina's role in what was going on down there you know um commander suicides we see that was uh the only non-commissioned officer that ran a camp and he was a wonderful friend and he was the most loyal brave um you know that that's all you know media hype um the greater majority of these guys were just there for for all the right reasons and he his was my favorite camp because these guys we would do things together plus we got in our again my first firefight in nicaragua was arriving on this campbell we got lit up like a christmas tree and payback for mortar so we we won that one but uh he got sideways with the argentines and the argentines were there to broker they were the first ones to help the countries uh before we got involved and uh but when i say help the countries is they facilitated a few things there was a presence there in in tegucigalpa of probably 12 or 15 argentines and um these were not warriors these were not you know uh these were part of the the the police that in argentina at the time they were the storm troopers like you mentioned earlier of the 26th july uh movement that kind of individual if you were against the regime they would knock your door down and take you and you never see your father again so that's what they bragged about that was their call of fame was being that kind of thuggy so i was very very happy when they put me in charge of keeping them straight and eventually they got caught you know um badly you know with the malfeasance that was there the corruption they were a very negative uh part of of the equation and i'm glad that it was removed very early on very early on yeah i mean the story's amazing and then uh i had read about the mosquitoes before is that how you say it mesquite i don't know if i'm pronouncing it right but um i'd read about them before but uh but you had a uh an affinity for this for this group and they ended up being great divers and you do of course being a former seal myself i i started reading about the dive op that you guys did with a couple dive ops that you guys did um and uh what can you talk us about the mosquitoes and how that what uh what they meant to you yeah you know it's funny because another another form of reading that i love was the history of native americans i always had a an unknown attraction to native americans i thought that there was a certain purity about you know uh their their you know they're melding with nature and everything that they that they held the deer and uh so when i got to the musketeer um meeting these they're most they're native americans they're never americans of that area mixed with a lot of black slaves that were shipwrecked in the area during the spanish and the english and all that other stuff and they're they're autonomous they want they want to be autonomous completely that has never worked out for them but you know at the time i didn't catch on but my fascination was also curiosity because dealing with the spaniards as we call them you know as they call them of nicaragua there was very little culture shock for me i spoke the language i knew most of the costumes yeah there was a few words i had to learn but for the most part it was when i was the mosquito that they barely speak spanish there's three tribes mosquito sumo in rama and they have their own dialect uh they speak many of them speak better english than they do spanish so for me there was actual culture shock and and i'll never forget one of the times that after reading so many edgar reisboro's books uh i'm on the uh on the on the base of a uh of a river and there's a tree about 75 yards away and i'm teaching them how to shoot fire in rpg-7 uh anti-attack missile so i put cardboard behind us so they could see what the back blast did and all this other stuff and there there the ridge looking down at me at the riverbed and i fired that thing and it hit the tree and it splintered the tree up and i turn around and these guys are like this they're dancing they're they got no shirts on they got ripped off shorts i felt i was in africa it was the most exhilarating uh early memory of that whole thing and they i mean they were they were born fighters these guys were born fighters i mean there were hunters there were trackers that was their way of life so converting that into guerrilla warfare as you know better than i do uh it's it's it's a great founding it's a great foundation they became my favorite um and we did some good ops with them yeah so cool yeah i want people to read about those dive ops and uh something went well some that didn't um and uh it's also so fascinating we also touch bait you you start meeting now people in in the agency that pass through and um uh talk about colonel ray what was his influence on you yeah colonel ray was my first boss and arguably the best boss i ever had he was bigger than life physically and in in her reputation uh colonel ray jumped into corrigador at the age of 18. then he was green beret uh one of our guys in the the lao la la ocean part of the program and um he was a gs 15 or a carl equivalent and he was just a wonderful boss and he's the one that from the very beginning started grooming me and teaching me because i had again i had no training other than my street smarts and of course my para rescue stuff and uh he was a wonderful man and i'm very proud to say that i stayed in touch with him until the day he passed away yeah incredible um and then there's a a great story where you meet bill casey who flies down to honduras and i don't think you knew he was coming because it's uh maybe somebody was coming but maybe not him and he tells you something really cool about the work that you've been doing and what you've been sending back um what was that about yeah i had no idea of anything i was at the camps and we were used one-time pads that's way before your time but that's how we communicated by radio one-time pads and i got a message from colonel ray saying get your butt back to through the command i said okay so i make it back to uh to to the command i wasn't in the mosquito i was in in one of the the spaniard camps and by then by at that time we were still going by trucks so literally the next day i show up smelling like you know what you've been there and uh i walk in and he colonel ray says he says um i want i'm gonna introduce you to our director now you got to understand i was a gs10 okay so you have a gs10 that is going to meet the director of the central intelligence agency and a guy like bill casey which i knew of the kind of person he was because of the oss he was actually an oss veteran so but when i walked into the room the first character that jumped out was dewey clearage and dewey became a big mentor of mine throughout his career and even afterwards we were friends until the day he passed and here he is he's got the smart vest the sole presses his boots are pristine and he's got this you know two dollar you know expensive cigar in his mouth and he's you know and he's the one that introduces me to uh bill casey and bill casey looked at me oh and um dewey said to him says mr director this is alex that was my alias there this is captain alex he's your man at the camps that became my moniker for the rest of the time there and he looked at me and he said young man i just want to thank you because all these photographs that you're sending me i keep them on my desk and every time somebody tries to argue about our supporting this i beat him over the head with him keep him coming you know i was i was walking on air you know you talk about pinching yourself and then i had the honor of being his interpreter uh in a meeting that included the argentines and they were kind of making fun of him and he ate them up for bunch i mean he just he was a brilliant brilliant old guy that uh i i would say he is the greatest dci that we that we had director of central intelligence um bill donovan if he would have been a dci he would have been equally impressive but um i don't think there was anybody before him or after him that came even close yeah i mean he's old uh you know world war ii veteran cold warriors or something about those guys with the the touch points with the oss and i mean so much history and just yeah i mean yeah uh without dewey claridge so he uh so you mentioned him what was his was his background and what was his uh impact on you dewey was a a bigger than life individual uh dewey wore briony suits and he had the handkerchief coming out of his very uh very polished very educated but totally fearless politically and physically he took crap from nobody and he was bill casey's pit bull that's what they call him he was a casey's pitbull and he's the one that started our counter-terrorist center that was his idea in 1986 he started it from a minuscule point at that time he started our counter-terrorist center to try to globalize the effort of terrorism so he was brilliant uh very senior division chief several times and that kind of stuff but what i loved about him about he was a real person even with all his extravagant persona he remembered everybody's name that mattered to him uh he never backed off a fight uh if you were right he would back you uh and yeah to this day he's one of my heroes yeah amazing and you mentioned how he dressed and what i in the book what i loved is you talking about he was your mom that gave you this uh passed on uh this sense of uh of style and then i got to the photo section of the book and then i saw it so i read about it earlier on and then i got to the photos i'm like oh this is what he's talking about and you were a sharp dresser like that was that was serious there's some amazing pictures in there yeah that you know my mo we you know we are the product of our parents if we're lucky and my dad from my dad i got that i'm not a story because he is was i'm sorry because i lost him a few years ago as stoic as he was um but his strength of character and his conviction um is something that i learned a lot from my mom was the reader my mom was the one that even though she worked in a sweatshop she always saved enough money so her hair could be coiffed and her nails could be done and she wanted to make sure that i was always clean and dressing and uh so that was a pretty good yin and yang balance you know the diamond in the rough kind of getting a little bit of a velvet cover on him kind of thing um and i'm very proud of that to this day i can like i said i i lived in it in in a jungle hammock for three and a quarter years never complained because i was happy but i've also recruited generals and diplomats all over the world at uh receptions wearing a tuxedo so yeah your author photo even your author photo i was like dang this guy can dress like it's uh i'm like man still to this day uh it's fantastic um but uh you know you write something here about your time in uh in central america and uh and it's something i think that you you probably knew from before and you brought to the agency but you write treat people well but make it clear you're doing so from a position of strength and i think that's something you brought to you already had that you didn't learn that down there i don't yeah i mean you know i i grew up with um for most practical purposes the wrong crowd but the wrong crowd also has a certain ethic to it a certain um forging that you have to be loyal you have to be who you say you are you have to be credible and um when we transition from the cold war the cold war never went away guys that's bs the pole war has been ongoing for all of us nonetheless but the attention uh getting part of it was terrorism and when we shifted gears to start focusing on terrorism and counter-narcotics which again is something we helped a lot with a lot of people don't understand that we work very closely with dea at the strategic level of course um it was it was a way of of learning a new craft because now you're not meeting diplomats you're not meeting businessman you're not meeting local politicians you're meeting people from the shady side of the business and the advantage that i have is that i could sit across a table from one of these guys and look them in the eye and they knew that if they bit me i was gonna bite back i may not win but i was gonna bite them back and this was a a huge bump up for our special activities division folks because the paramilitary type of guys the guys who had the military medical i mean the military training like you yourself have they came in with a certain grittiness that our very bright very brave college kids had yet to learn they could sit across the table and knew that they'd been there and done that and they were still able to do it again and in that world that was very important getting getting that respect up front and not just from the terrorists or the bad guys but a lot of the cops that you work with and military that are extremely aggressive because they're fighting for their lives uh they gotta understand that uh you're serious and you're there for them but um we're we're equals we're equals in the sense of respect and and conviction and eventually you're you're spending that you're you're down there you're in these camps um incredible story but eventually you get word that uh it's it's time to go to the farm or you're offered a position to now become a case officer uh and and go that route um where were we when you uh when you found that out how did that how did you get that class update and start work at the farm start training at the farm um and what did you take from that experience in central america with you throughout the rest of your time in the agency yeah again i think that we're our medal is forged along the way and in the nicaraguan experience was was extremely important to me when my tour was over like i said i did a little over three years there um colonel ray wanted me to get home based in special activities division and uh he was getting a little bit of pushback well yeah let's bring him back and he said no so he called dewey clearage and he said dewey prado is coming out he needs this so he picked up the phone he called the chief of essay special activities division and said you've got two hours to home base them or i'm taking them to the latin america division so they hum based me in in the uh the paramilitary side which i was very happy with because that was my crowd and uh i needed to finish my college so they sponsored me for a year so i did two years of college in one year graduated with a distinction and went into the farm and both at the college and at the farm i had something a lot of the guys did not have one of my classmates henry uh i called him tokyo he was a vietnam vet green beret shot you know the whole nine yards and uh but the majority of the other young people did not understand you know that that grittiness of having lived with the contras and and the same thing in college when um when when i was taking my night classes the uh the students would come out at break and say rick we're so glad you're here because i was sparring with with with very liberal instructors you know i went to george mason university and uh which is a good school and i loved it but i had a couple of teachers and and the one teacher that became my biggest supporter and and actually you know recommended my graduation and everything else and read my thesis um she and i never agreed on a single thing ever because she was you know left the lenin yeah but she appreciated my arguments and she also appreciated that i always challenged her respectfully and we aspired but we sparred in in a very positive way so in in both occasions both at the at the college and at the farm that historical background um even though i couldn't say that i had been in nicaragua but the fact that i lived in cuba and that i had read and everything else gave me a lot of a little extra traction oh wow so what you did was still classified did they know that you were coming from the para military side of the house or any or they just thought you were just out of control i was dod uh contractor or some bs cover yeah wow so you're doing now at the farm you're doing the sdrs you're learning about that sort of a thing you're doing your scenarios of recruitment and and all that and you get to do they still have the uh uh or they call it crash and bang and you're doing the driving and doing that sort of sort of thing um so you go through the whole experience yeah the only thing that i did not go through was the paramilitary training that the regular students get because we already had that so guys like henry and myself were prior service in prior agency we're already in the agency we're uh now being professionalized so that that was a little different but yeah i mean it came from the blunt object mentality to now one of finesse and again i think that this is where that growing up with both sides of that yin and yang and my family uh allowed me to uh dress up and and work in alias and recruit highly educated senior government officials um while at the same time sitting in a back room in a safe house and uh reading somebody the riot act so yeah and they and you graduate and they you go right back to central america is that where you head yeah i was supposed to go to el salvador yeah and um that was my household goods i had just gotten married in honduras with my wife it was cuban and uh we had met in miami but uh when we our household goods were already in el salvador when this chief of station in costa rica who had met me up in the contra days said i want prada so i got called in to the division chief and this happened twice in my career where division chief calls me and says somebody wants you to go where you're not you know assigned to go and you know i'd never blink that i i for me was a little bit shocking because the reputation of the southern front of the of the contra program was heavily tainted with former sandinistas and there was a lot of infiltration costa rica wasn't honduras that was very supportive on the contrary they were actually hunting my guys down and and i had to avoid being so i went from in uniform carrying a car 15 and a browning high power and a grenade in my pocket like you mentioned right and my back up walter and my my ppk and my ankle uh to literally doing french resistance kind of stuff that we're having meetings in vans and picking these people up covertly and try to you know exfiltrate them out through maritime means so they could go and get the military training that they needed so uh it was a huge contrast but it was also a another growth period you know again now i am gone from the parallel military to the training now i am in cotton thai working out of an embassy as a diplomat and doing my snooping and pooping in on the side so uh pretty pretty pretty fun and and what is that what is the soviet influence like down there at the time and um was there a difference that you noticed between your time working directly with the contractors in those camps and then what you ended up doing more as a case officer yeah uh because again you know the the the southern front was uh primarily former sandinistas that had had a change of mind under commandant pastora and uh but i will tell you uh there there's several commanders one in particular i call him his his uh nom de guerra was ganso the geese the goose and he was the best commander we had him to this day we we're we're friends we stay in touch so they had some really good people but we also knew that they had been infiltrated by the sandinistas and that there was a lot of reporting and again the problem was that costa ricans were actually afraid of the nicaraguans and they wanted to remain neutral they're they're remaining neutral men putting our guys in jail and then throw them out and throw them back into nicaragua so um there was a lot of uh interesting stuff going on and and uh you know the russia the communist sensation of costa rica was there there was parties that were growing and which was great because it allowed the more conservative folks in that country to be willing to help a guy like me exfiltrate these guys through their farm or out of the on their boat back to a safe haven where they can go and get some training so it was a stark contrast and we had some great successes there too incredible and where do you first hear the term what would become known as iran contra uh are you working at the time are you in the farm at the time yeah where are you when you when you hear that for the first time i was in costa rica and um this was all the whole iran contra became a little later but the incident that that that was the tipping point was when hessenfuss was shot down and was the only survivor on a plane and that was a resupply flight for for uh for the fdn the northern contras that were gone that far south it wasn't a drop to my guys but my radio operator called me out our secure phones and said uh on radio and he said you need to come in there's a plane down so i went straight to the place and they told me so this i said why didn't i know of this this airdrop he says it isn't for us it isn't for us it's for the other it was for uh um another commander so i immediately gave out the order i said i want every able-bodied guy to start combing north and get this guy and bring him back whoever any survivors bring them back and and uh and protect them well unfortunately hassan fuss uh decided he wasn't going to go anywhere he stayed right there by the wreck um pitched a hammock out of his parachute and he had all kinds of incriminating stuff on him phone numbers names all kinds of stuff that became uh [Music] a big deal for the sandinistas to showcase and that began the the investigations and subsequently you know the actual iran contra uh scandal came out i was dragged into as a gs12 into the grand jury oh wow uh not as not as a subject but as a witness which was kind of fun because i could you know just because you asked me a question doesn't mean i have to answer it in the way that you expected so i got to be able to tell the guys what i saw what you know how badly these resources were needed and the fact that i had documented every single air drop that we had given to our folks for resupply wow i mean at least these incredible just touch points with history that you have over your time in unifor or not in your time in the agency is uh i mean it's astounding um and then uh they send you to the philippines so uh is that is obviously you you have all this time in central america this expertise this language uh the relationships um why do they move you to the philippines is it career development type of a thing or to someone that you know hey we need this guy he's a solid operator grab him and put him where we need him right now i think it was a combination um first of all i have shown i've always been fascinated with with asia i you know because the martial arts early on and to me japan and all that area there was always a mystery and but it was it was one of my uh it was the chief of ground branch at the time uh who called me in and he said look we have a a slot for a paramilitary officer uh first in in in in uh south american country uh and then the same thing happened in the philippines we have a spot we need bonafide case officers who have paramilitary skills to start filling these jobs because that's the future we need to be real dual track they call them dual track case officers so for me it was a win-win i got to go to asia and again i like growth i like challenge and now i'm dealing with a new culture very different than my latin america years so uh it was very rewarding it was very hairy um the the philippines at the time i got there about six months after nick rowe colonel nick rowe was assassinated and asked about uh a very very freak way um so you know the mpa the new people's army was in manila and of course we had the abu sayyaf growing in in the mindanao area which i i we tackled both so there were there's uh in the books there's a couple of closed scrapes there where uh you know and it taught me really early on that awareness beats fast draw anytime there you go yeah i love how you pay tribute to jeff cooper and the the color system that he came up with and training and uh and all of that in the book um so you spend your time in the philippines i spend a little time there uh there myself fascinating place obviously with a incredible history um but then they pick you up again and now you're focused on korea like what is uh what when you get picked up and you you're first out of central america boom now you're in the philippines now you're out of the philippines now you're focused on on korea what is the uh what is the the training that they give you or that you do yourself to prepare yourself for what you're about to step into are there there are turnovers with people or are you miss are they just out and you're in how does that how does that work well it it was a little more complicated than that because what happened was i was in the philippines when uh the then east asia division chief jack downing a very dear friend and mentor uh was visiting and we're sitting at a dinner and i'm sitting to his left and the chief of stations tell them you know prado is doing a bang-up job he did this and he did that and he you know he managed this or whatever and jack i was still home based in ground branch and jack downing looked at me he says when are you going to get a real job i said sir he goes yeah when are you going to come to a real area division i said i i don't know sir what do i have to do and he looked at me and says you just did it two days later i was home based in the east asia division um you know my time in ground branch had been done i was already getting a little older i was at gs14 i knew that i wasn't going to be going to the camps in nicaragua or something like that and i wanted to follow the other kind of action so but i actually wasn't going to korea i was going to another place that i cannot mention and i spent 14 months learning that language and similar to what happened in costa rica the chief of station in seoul said i want prado so the division chief calls me in and he says look this is non-binding you know i know you're going to turn it down um but when chief of station asks for something we got we got it we got to follow through and he told me you know who he was and all this other stuff and he had a pretty rough reputation and uh which i have like you i don't have a problem dealing with you know rough rough reputations that's that's where we're surrounded by most of the time so uh he uh i go in there and i and i said well sir i i have one question can you tell me what the job is all about and he says no i said i'll take it i love it my clearance is x y z after uh you know uh if if it's something you can't tell me up front that's the kind of stuff that i want to do and it was a very very rewarding assignment for me completely different this was international trade craft uh you know it was it was a lot of fun a lot and again a lot of growth then it got me my gs15 i got my 15 and when i left there which has some other repercussions but i love that they tell you hey we can't tell you what we're going to be doing and you say i'm in i love it i love it um but you so eventually here you're doing this and then you make gs15 and there's something that has been started up a few years prior the the ctc the counterterrorism center um and is is that what is your path then into that uh part of the agency well my my first ctc assignment was 86 i'm sorry 88 through 90 in that southern south south american country where i literally recruited a terrorist and ran several big operations down there um so i always had an affinity for that and i had put in to go back to ctc when i was leaving korea so they gave me a branch i was ahead of the palestinian branch which was a pretty big deal but about two months into my tenure i got called in and my he was the the chief of operations which i eventually became myself five six times removed uh he called me in and he said your name has been surfaced to be the deputy chief of station on a task force special task force that's going to be called a an issue station and you know are you interested i said of course i'm deputy chief of station are you kidding and i said uh sir who who are we targeting he said osama bin laden i said who and he said exactly mike shoyer was the chief he was an analyst so i was the senior ops officer and the deputy and uh he knew all about bin laden and that became the passion for me for for quite a while after that and you know this is as a former seal um yes the seals shot bin laden but we found him and it was the same little nucleus that 19 years later through sleuth hound work and and a lot of a lot of digging were able to geo-locate him and and target him and then your brethren went in there and did a hell of a good job but uh that that was again a big big change for me because now i'm dealing with not latin american terrorism not east asia terrorism uh like in the philippines i am dealing with radical muslim kind of of terrorism of what we saw in afghanistan and in the rest of the middle east so yeah it was uh it was a good ride and is that is that alex station when you step into that so it's already alex station and uh i noticed that there is quite uh when you talk about those redactions you talked about earlier there uh there are a few around around this section uh especially we're talking about billy wahl and what he was doing down there and i wanted to ask you about executive order uh 11905 signed by gerald ford and what that meant to you guys when you possibly could have removed bin laden from the battlefield uh before what transpired on september 11 2001 eventually did yeah you know again we all benefit from the 2020 hindsight we all have that ability but you know the agency has title 50 authorities that can include lethal findings like after 9 11 17 september president bush signed the lethal finding of going after al qaeda and the taliban so you cannot be the premier service to the most powerful country in the world and not have that capability in your toolbox and i'm not talking about just killing people i'm talking about being able to disrupt major you know events if you have the groundwork done so um that that whole era was um i mean of course which is led to to 911 and everything else but bin laden in in 1996 when we started the the the task force late 95 early 96 by mid to late uh 96 we had we we had made big book on them billy wall who's just talked to him yesterday oh yeah and she's 92 years old 92. purple heart yep i just talked to him yesterday we were coming back on the car and i had to give him a call but billy was literally in charge of surveillance of bad guys in cartoon and i don't know if if you've read his book but he's something the jackal he captured the jackal he's the one that identified put glass on him and triangulated him and had him coming and going that we were able to hand him over to the french but he was also doing bin laden and he used to run by bin laden's place you know and he told me one day he told me he says rick he says i was so close to him one time when he was coming out in his mercedes driving it himself i could have killed him with a pencil i never forgot that because billy could kill you with a pencil legend yeah for those who don't know who billy wall is uh put it in the google it google uh and then get his book as well and uh i i distinctly remember reading that book i think i was in iraq at the time when i read it uh maybe around 2005 or so anyway whenever that whenever it came out i read it and uh i remember that him jogging and him talking about the the walls i haven't read it since then i've only read it that one time but that stood out to me uh how close he was and how he saw this guy almost every day he had him coming and going he knew uh and of course being with his background he had evaluated the resistance what we could get away with and he was adamant that look at the very least we could render this guy with minimum blood shell if we send in the right team uh in there it'd be easy day um but again the political fortitude wasn't there right yeah right i mean we would have avoided uh a lot of heartbreak and a lot of blood imagine that history would be would be different if uh he'd been removed from the uh from the equation back then um yeah i know yeah there's a lot of redactions in the jihad factory chapter uh and then i want to ask you about tombstone rules i love the the title of course of that chapter and then shangri-la and your experiences there yeah shangri-la was a radical muslim country in in africa and i'm not allowed to say the name so that's why we call it shangri-la and we were sent there it was strictly a counterterrorism uh unit that i put together um we had gone through one of our black sites training with guys from your you know your generation steve bailey who's a force master chief uh for seal team three uh till one i'm sorry um is to this damn one of my closest friends so he was one i brought him to the ages that he was training us so we had a pretty sharp bunch of guys um you know former uh combat veterans rangers from mogadishu and all this kind of stuff and our job was trying to pinpoint uh where the terrorists were because khartoum at the time was a hotel for terrorists if you were willing to pay the price they would you have safe haven so that's where carlos was there there were hezbollah folks there there was all kind and of course bin laden who was pumping millions and millions of dollars into the economy building roads and terrorist camps so we were there post bin laden but pretty much trying to again make book on some of these guys we would get intercept information you know a house near this place that has a blue car in front of it then we go check it out get the license plate that kind of process so but that was that was again this is the most you know 99 black area uh i had one black officer that that was in and out but the rest were tragically white guys and but we had masks and disguises that we could pass at least you know casual if they saw you driving down on a thin-skinned vehicle non-diplomatic you just look like another african and uh that's how we went into some of these really nasty neighborhoods and did geolocation for for some of these guys for the future we're gonna need them so yeah i had a lot of fun there what a run i mean it's just incredible everything that you that you did and then where were you on on september 11th i was chief of office of the counter-terrorist center i had just taken over had come out of shangri-la in may of 2001 and uh yeah late may of 2001 and when 9 11 happened i was chief of ops there and obviously you know all our lives changed at that moment and everybody knows where they were at when 9 11 happened were you physically in the in the building or how did that how did you get word that something had happened oh no i i was actually in front of the office waiting for cofer to clear and for ben bonka's deputy to come back like i said i was his chief of ops and i was talking to the secretaries and the tv was on and we see this plane hit the building and at first i thought it was a cessna or something like that i said that looked like a small plane god that's a weird accident but you know and we're all fixated on the tv and ctc at the time uh well the ctc creation was bringing in just about every federal agency and home basing it there so we had ds folks we had fbi folks we had secret service folks we had all kinds of people from and we had an faa guy in in the in the in the union and he came out and said mr prado um we got an issue and i say yeah okay i saw the plane he goes no no we have four aircraft that are not responding to their post you know uh call that they said we're being hijacked and i it wasn't 20 seconds later here comes the second plane hits the building and i remember turning to the chief of staff that was there and i told him and said my first order was get a cable worldwide to everybody with two things first watch your six this this is not a nice you know isolated event this could be a major you know initiative here and number two all resources go to finding out for any source that we have who could have done this uh and and start tracking those people so um needless to stay it was very intense period for us i i slept there for three days before i would ever want to go home and we worked incredible hours but getting back to being in the building the the building was evacuated because that other plane that was in the air that luckily through some brave individuals ended up in a dirt field um we didn't know where it was and a lot of people were betting that hey look if you really know what you're doing you want to take out the agency you know as part of you know you hit the pentagon hit the agency so tenant declared complete evacuation and cofer came on and said you know what uh anybody that has to go pick up their kids from school or whatever you're free to go anybody that wants to go but i'm staying and you'll be surprised and there's a story that i'm very fond of in the book where i had the deputy of hezbollah a eighth month pregnant lady case officer christy and uh i'm making the rounds like at eight o'clock at night and there she is at her desk with a belly out to here and i went up to her like what the hell are you doing here she says well i'm not sure that it the like everybody thinks that it's bin laden hezbollah has killed more americans than than anybody else to date and you know i want to make sure that it isn't something we missed so i told her i said look i've delivered two babies in my life and neither one of them was mine you're going back home right now you want to make it a third uh i wasn't about to deliver a third that wasn't mine and it's funny later on in life when uh when we would cross paths you would always tell me since ricky said every year that my daughter has a birthday i think of you and the reason i have it in the book the reason i have it in the book is because the strongest natural tendency is motherhood you know we just mess with a with a with obama bear that's protecting their cubs right and here is an eight-month pregnant lady with her only child and she is staying in harm's way forgotten country if you can override that maternal instinct that's that's conviction that is true conviction to the mission it is and then what do those next few years look like for you then until you uh until you depart the agency and then uh move over to blackwater for a little bit what are those what are those next years because there's been a shift now i mean you're a cold warrior central america you're going around the world philippines korea a few other different different places in there and uh and now we have this paradigm shift when it comes to international terrorism we've been attacked on home soil what do those next few years look like for you well you know as much as i love the moniker of being chief of ops of the kind of terrorist center i mean come on it doesn't get any sexier than that right so i was enjoying good visibility into ops senior management i was on sis 2 by then and but i just didn't want to be behind a desk and i came up with a program that i actually briefed the vice president of the united states dick cheney at the time and condoleezza rice which was a in a nutshell it was a sleuth hound intelligence collection exercise with teeth at the end my concept was during 9 11 we kept hearing all this chatter that something is going on uh but we couldn't we couldn't know what it was um and and my point was if we could make book on a number of targets that are those support mechanisms that are essential to a terrorist organization and the reason i say support mechanisms because they are reachable they have to have a public persona in order to operate and provide the safe houses the medical the money you know the documents everything else that terrorists need to move about it and do their damage so the concept was to have x number of people that we had under full surveillance we had full patterns of life on them and then we would come up with three different scenarios for disrupting them or neutralizing so let's say that uh three years down the road we get wind that hezbollah is up to something well you pull out the file on the three hezbollah guys and guess what they get disrupted one way or the other whether it's with your guys or ours or combination they get either kidnapped or compromised with the cops or whatever we're authorized to do and um that was brief to the vice president he loved the idea he blessed it then became politics again you know when um that's the distance between 9 11 to now which was a good year later the testosterone had dropped the uh the the spinal calcium had also uh evaporated quite a bit and politics took over again and and it was like well yeah this is great and i know you could do it but the political ramifications are and that's when i said my time is done here wow this is my hurrah and and i retired out of the agency so okay so it's very clear to you hey it is time to move on it's been a solid run but in the page if we're not look i i have on my wall i have a little thing as a baseball and says sometimes you got to play hardball and i'm a firm believer in that i mean we we cannot be the you know the agency the intelligence agent to the us government and not have that capability in our toolbox we are we only have two jobs in the agency as operators collect intelligence and do covert action we have our analytical side and of course we have our security and everything else but operationally you know that that is what we do and this was nothing more than a very well thought out in in you know it's very successful in in this inception um to provide that capability that was it briefed well and i don't sit for paper tigers um i like it man well i've been so generous with your time i do want to ask you quickly about your uh your the next phase of your life the uh the blackwater phase and how what was that experience like for you well you know i had met eric uh when i was chief of ops because he he took a team out to uh kabul to provide our security-free guys and when i say he took a team out i don't mean he was a team leader he was one of the nugs so i had a lot of respect for him from the very beginning so he pitched me to come over i was the first agency guy to come to blackwater later on i brought about three four months later i bought cofer black he became the big talking head for for blackwater and um eric was a wonderful guy to work with uh he was extremely patriotic extremely loyal and he told me he says look i don't know exactly what you were doing training down at blackwater but the stuff that you were doing was cool so he says we need to you know we i want to replicate some of that so uh we began helping the the intelligence community writ large and that's as far as i can go uh and i will tell you um it's not in the book because fortunately for me none of the stuff we were able to do has ever leaked unlike the contra programs and all these other things uh that are things that you could they can see that later the light of day because they're they're obe as far as tradecraft or anything else um but we did some really good work and what i'm very proud of was that this wasn't contract he didn't charge the government a dime on this stuff wow yes he did with this stuff in iraq and then you know afghanistan and air and guns and psds and all that other stuff that's where he was making his fortune but these programs that i was initiating and subsequently running successfully um it was reimbursement only they reimbursed me for my from my travel for my pay for my pay that i whatever it was and i always thought that that was really high ground for for eric um and i have a lot of respect for him i haven't seen him in years he's gone his own way a lot of people ask me what do you think of eric now i go i'm an intelligence officer i don't deal in gossip all i can tell you is facts the fact was that when i worked with him for eight years wow he was a patriot and a friend yeah what he's doing now i i know what other people are reading in in the uh journals and i don't believe half that stuff anyway so right probably probably very wise um but yeah i was at steel team two we did a lot of training at blackwater out there on that track and those ranges and um you had a great time doing the driving stuff out there that was that was incredible of course a lot of my my friends went over to to work there and contract and do that sort of a thing but uh you know i'll tell you what the one of the highlights of my time over this 20 years in in uniform was a time that i got detailed over to the agency in baghdad in 06 for the stu program and i'm sure you know what that that is and i was the only military person attached and i got to tell you that was the best assignment ever because uh my job was battlefield deconfliction uh tactical radios we'd move through these different battle spaces uh just touching base with the qrf so we would go hit our targets and it was had an aircraft above a special aircraft um and it was just a uh a highlight working with those it was an honor to work with those guys learned so much from from them uh of course we had our partner force there and and all that but uh uh and then my novels it became the foundation for particularly my second novel true believer but it that experience uh has touch points with with all of them because it was such a powerful experience and and i almost almost went over there it was the uh i won't say the name of the program just in case it's i don't know why it would be classified it's just a name but uh similar to one of vietnam where they had guys that were typically sf at the time and then they brought them over to the agency side of the house so um i was in that that program and had my little meeting with somebody in a uh in a hotel room in northern virginia and then got the thumbs up from that and then went through the whole medical and lifestyle poly and all that and had my class update at the at the farm doing that the dual track to go of course do the case officer stuff but i was headed to ground branch and uh and then at the the last second got uh got offered an oic position officer in charge platoon commander uh to get back in the fight and i just wanted to get back in the fight as soon as i possibly could so i ended up going that route but it was uh i mean it was essentially hours away from uh from from going after having done all that all that that work and going through all that whole process and having my date at the farm the whole thing and then ended up staying in the in the seal teams but uh but yeah my time my experience with the agency was nothing but uh but positive uh total professionals across the board uh from analysts to the paramilitary side of the house and uh i want to thank you for for putting that time in in for our country sacrificing so much for our country and then for telling the story because people need heroes and uh people need uh inspiration today particularly young people who have grown up with these luxuries that we talked about before so um there are very few books that are as powerful as this that kids can read today high school people college people this is a must read parents grandparents buy it read it buy second copies third copies give it to your kids give it to your grandkids can't recommend this book enough you just did a fantastic job with it and uh thank you for your your service to this nation thank you for yours and thank you for having me on you know your books are very credible because of your background and that's what i think is is what differentiates novels from you know uh from just you know people that have the background so thank you for your service and thank you for having me on board because this means a lot to me to get that word for the same reasons you just stated out to the people oh i sincerely appreciate it and if i can ever do anything for you please reach out i'll be standing by goes both ways navy federal credit union the name would suggest that it is just for members of the navy but that's not true it is open to all members of the military regardless of branch veterans and their families so go to navyfederal.org check them out federally insured by ncua they have certainly financed a few of my motorcycles over the years i've been a member since 1996. so car loans home loans motorcycle loans whatever it might be be sure to check them out and if you're just getting started and need some help investing they can help you there too so be sure and check out navyfederal.org i want to thank my friends at black rifle coffee for sponsoring the danger clothes podcast i've been a huge fan for the longest time drink black rifle coffee every day and if you keep your eyes peeled you will notice that perhaps chris pratt is wearing a black rifled coffee t-shirt not unsimilar to this one in the amazon series adaptation of the terminal list now you can go to blackriflecoffee.com dangerclose and use code close 20 at checkout for 20 off your purchase and your first coffee club order black raffle coffee america's coffee keep crushing today's gear segment is sponsored by paleo valley and i'm so glad that i found these guys because their products are delicious go to paleovalley.com check them out um but look at this 100 grass fed beef and these beef sticks right here one they're delicious two they're good for you and three i love that it has this best buy date on there so if you're like me and maybe you're stashing some in the car in your backpack and your desk and you pull one out and you're like how long has this been there it tells you best buy right here you don't just search for it so i love these things they are so good and 100 grass-fed and grass-finished they are the beef is sourced from small domestic farms in the united states keto friendly and paleo valley refuses to cut corners they prioritize health over profit and they want to bring nutrient density back to the dinner table it's an accessible family-owned company and they have a passion not only for health but environmental restoration animal welfare they're just a great group of people with an amazing product so once again paleo valley dot com go there and enter code danger close 15 at checkout to receive 15 off your first order once again that is danger close 15 for 15 off that order at check out paleo valley dot com these things are awesome thank you guys for making these because uh they are fueling my next novel welcome to the gear highlight portion of the danger clothes podcast this is a special one because i got to run this sig pistol not too long ago and absolutely loved it so this is the sig p210 carry right here and this thing it just feels really good and has two eight round magazines that it comes with night sights right here but if you can see that this is like old school and it feels really good i think i'm gonna have to get some leather for this one it feels like this is a pistol that uh lends itself to leather holster rather than kydex i'm just getting that getting that feeling but i shot this the other day and it was awesome so bam sig p 210 carrie right here and uh this might just have to end up in a future james reese novel sig thank you thank you for tuning in to the danger closed podcast in ironclad original presented by navy federal credit union find out more about rick prado at rickprado.com be sure and pick up his book black ops gift it to as many people as you can it's an important read especially right now and uh what an amazing guy so that was such an honor rick thank you for taking the time to come on i can't tell you how much i appreciate it and how much i appreciate your service to the nation you can follow me at jack carr usa on the social channels officialjackcar.com is the website jackcarusa.com is the merch in the blood the next novel in the james re saga is coming in hot on may 17th in hardcover ebook and audiobook and is available for pre-order now if you enjoyed that conversation be sure to leave a five-star rating interview wherever you get your podcasts until the next time take care out there stay safe be strong keep fighting you

Channel: JackCarrUSA

Views: 34,996

Keywords: ric prado, CIA, Jack carr, Black ops, the terminal list, ironclad, danger close podcast

Id: j3wMkzq8oqg

Length: 94min 6sec (5646 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022