Now, the Central Intelligence Agency gave me a chance to strike back at them. I’d seen my family’s life in Cuba destroyed by such people. Instead, we battled caudillos in communist guise, anarchist insurgencies, narco-terrorist groups, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, traffickers of people, drugs, and illegal weapons. Nos, but in the shadows we operated in, we faced no such cartoonish villains. Sure, I avidly read Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but 007’s spy universe bore no resemblance to the full-contact, dark world that became my life for the next few decades. Those fledgling days in the Agency opened the door to a world I did not know existed. Where else could a Cuban-born, once-orphaned boy go from Miami’s back-alley brawls to the heart of the nation’s first line of defense? For me, that moment came as I walked past the Memorial Wall at Langley and realized the depth of my love and appreciation for America. Call it fate, call it God’s will, when you find your calling, the tumblers in your heart click into place and suddenly the future makes sense. My path to the Agency was as atypical as the rest of my life in America. I became a Pararescueman in 1972, just missing the tail end of the Vietnam War. Air Force gave me purpose and discipline. I also learned that loyalty is the greatest gift you can share or receive, while betrayal inflicts the brutal wounds to the heart. The path was rocky, and more than once I strayed from it as a kid. We fought our way back to prosperity, chasing our version of the American dream. We lived in tiny, run-down apartments and learned to get by on a fraction of what we once enjoyed in pre-Castro Cuba. My mother labored away in a sweatshop making shirts. My father worked two jobs and dragged me with him to work on Saturdays. America offered that freedom, but those first years in Florida were hardscrabble ones indeed. in a Catholic orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. In desperation, my father got me out first, and I spent my first eight months in the U.S. We lost everything and everyone we loved in a bid to escape and have a chance to live in freedom once again. Then the Castro revolution dumped our world upside down. We owned a television and a beautiful 1957 Pontiac that was my father’s pride and joy. My family had once lived in middle-class comfort in small-town Cuba. I was a street kid from Miami with a past, seeking adventure with a purpose and a way to strike back at the revolutionaries who stole my roots. Until I began my own journey through the Agency, I had no idea what it took to protect the United States from dangerous forces and people bent on inflicting Americans harm. He and his team carried out covert operations and developed assets that proved pivotal in the coming War on Terror.Ī harrowing memoir of life in the shadowy world of assassins, terrorists, spies and revolutionaries, Black Ops is a testament to the courage, creativity and dedication of the Agency’s Special Activities Group and its elite shadow warriors. Three years later, after serving as head of Korean Operations, Ric took on one of the most dangerous missions of his career: to re-establish a once-abandoned CIA station inside a hostile nation long since considered a front line of the fight against Islamic terrorism. In late 1995, he became Deputy Chief of Station and co-founding member of the Bin Laden Task Force. Operating in the shadows, Ric and his fellow CIA officers fought a little-seen and virtually unknown war to keep USA safe from those who would do it harm.Īfter duty stations in Central, South America, and the Philippines, Black Ops follows Ric into the highest echelons of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Black Ops is the story of Ric’s legendary career that spanned two eras, the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA equivalent of a two-star general. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. 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.Įnrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven.
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