ALTHOUGH THE number of people who work at the Central Intelligence Agency “cannot be disclosed” the actual number is thought to be around 21,000. Among this sprawling empire of intelligence specialists are men and women like Ric Prado, members of the elite Special Activities Division (SAD). Prado, a 24-year veteran of the CIA, had very personal reasons for joining the Agency, as he explains in our first installment of a Popular Mechanics video series on his life and career as a “shadow warrior” (below).
Ric
Prado was born in Cuba in the time of
revolution, and one of his first memories was a firefight between Fidel
Castro’s guerrillas and regime troops. Prado fled Cuba at the age of 10,
settling in with his family in Miami, Florida. Prado joined the U.S. Air Force
after high school, becoming a Pararescueman trained to rescue and medically
treat aircrews trapped behind enemy lines. Prado intended to volunteer for the
Vietnam War, to give back to the country that had taken him and his family in,
but the war ended before he could deploy.
Instead,
Prado found himself in the CIA’s Special Activities Division; SAD is
responsible for paramilitary operations worldwide, and trains for direct action
missions, training missions, propaganda and political actions, computer
operations, and managing shell companies that provide cover for SAD personnel
in foreign countries. Prado spent 10 years in Ground Branch, the operational
arm of SAD.
In
the 1980s, one of the Agency’s main covert operations was support for the
Nicaraguan Contras, a guerrilla group that opposed the Sandinista regime. The
Sandinista regime was a client state of both Cuba and the Soviet Union, opposed
by the United States. Prado was the first CIA officer sent to advise the
Contras, and on his arrival promptly got into a fierce firefight with regime
troops—his first real taste of combat in a lifetime spent in covert warfare. He
would spend 36 months in the jungles of Central America on behalf of Ground
Branch/SAD.
In
the 1990s, Prado joined the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC). In 1995, he
was assigned to the Bin Laden Task Force, an agency group assigned to track
down the (then) little-known terrorist Osama bin Laden. Living in Sudan at
the time, bin
Laden had been assembling a terror network that later came to be known as al-Qaeda.
Prado worked with other Agency operatives, including legendary Green Beret Billy
Waugh, to
locate bin Laden’s compound in Khartoum. Unfortunately, the team could take no
action against bin Laden, who went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks on New York City and
Washington, D.C.
The
job was not without its dangers. In the Philippines, working to dismantle the
New People’s Army guerrilla group, Prado came face to face with the “Sparrows,”
assassins that famously used M1911A1 .45 pistols tucked in their waistbands. “I
drew my weapon,” Prado recalls, “you get tunnel vision, you get auditory
exclusion, I didn’t know anything else that was going on in the world except
for these three guys obviously meaning to do us harm.” The three Sparrows
abruptly changed plans, giving Prado and his teammates a “we’ll get you next
time” look.
Prado
retired from the CIA in 2004 as a Senior Intel Service-2, the Agency equivalent
of a Major General in the U.S. military. He was also the head of the CIA’s
Korean Operations and Chief of CIA Liaison in Seoul, South Korea. He was
awarded the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal & the George Bush medal
for Excellence in Counterterrorism. His last assignment was as Chief of
Operations, CIA Counterterrorist Center. His book Black Ops: The
Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior, was published in 2022.
(Kyle Mizokami / Popular Mechanics)
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