At a coaching facility in Saint Augustine, Florida, you may watch Ric Prado at work. The bullets are actual. He is retired from the CIA, however nonetheless trains native SWAT groups.
"You are a harmful man," stated CBS Information nationwide safety correspondent David Martin.
"To not my allies," Prado replied.
He calls himself a meat-eater – and he is not speaking about his weight loss plan. He confirmed Martin a show of his "instruments of the commerce." "I like knives as a result of they scare me," he stated. "So, I determine they scare everyone else, too. So, they seem to be a good weapon to have."
Prado spent 24 years with the CIA, and has written a e book, referred to as "Black Ops: The Lifetime of a CIA Shadow Warrior." It begins in Cuba, when Fidel Castro got here to energy and seized the Prados' espresso roasting enterprise.
"Castro cracked down actually, actually onerous," Prado stated.
The household gathered for a last dinner collectively, earlier than placing their 10-year-old on a aircraft to the U.S., by himself. "Think about placing your solely little one on an airplane to a rustic that you have by no means been to, with no ensures that you are going to have the ability to observe, for freedom."
He lived in an orphanage till his dad and mom made it out eight months later, and settled in Hialeah, Florida. In 1971, he joined the Air Power and have become a pararescueman.
"I beloved it," Prado stated.
"In case you beloved it a lot, why did you get out?"
"Vietnam was gone. My dream was to go to Vietnam."
"So, 'No battle, I am outta right here'?" requested Martin.
"Precisely, yeah, no actual mission."
He discovered his mission within the CIA, working undercover with anti-communist rebels at jungle camps in Honduras. "I used to be the one CIA officer working within the camps," he stated. "All of the coaching that they received, I used to be the one conducting that for them. It was one of the best job I ever had."
The rebels had been referred to as contras, and like him they'd fled a communist revolution (this one in Nicaragua) and had been making an attempt to take again their nation.
Martin requested, "The contras had been your type of folks?"
"I beloved them," Prado stated. "I noticed what that communist octopus monster did to my household, what it did to my nation. To be there, serving to these people who've confronted the identical monster, it would not get any extra primary than that."
He took a bunch of lobster divers and turned them into frogmen who blew up a pier at a Nicaraguan port. "Right here I'm, the little Cuban man, and now I simply minimize off a few of these tentacles of that rattling octopus," he stated.
The child from Cuba was the purpose man in what turned often called the Reagan doctrine. However some contras had been accused of atrocities. "These guys had been undoubtedly unhealthy, however they had been the exception," Prado stated. "The vast majority of the contras that I labored with had been easy, God-loving and really non secular, entering into hurt's approach simply to get their nation again."
All of it got here out when a CIA aircraft was shot down over Nicaragua, and considered one of its crew, a former Marine named Eugene Hasenfus, was captured.
Prado stated, "Very first thing they train you if you exit, shake down, ensure you do not have something that compromises you. He had every kind of stuff. So, that blew the entire program out of the water."
"Growth! And all of it goes to hell?" requested Martin.
"It was very demoralizing, not just for me, [but] for everyone that was concerned within the station. How may one thing so good go so unsuitable?"
It mushroomed into the most important scandal of the Reagan administration, however Prado's title by no means surfaced. Nonetheless undercover, he stayed on the entrance strains of the CIA's black ops towards communist insurgencies in Peru and the Philippines.
Prado stated, "I received referred to as as much as headquarters by our workplace of medical service. They needed to do a psych analysis on me, of why I used to be going from hazard publish to hazard publish."
"What did you inform the psychiatrist?"
"I imagine in what I am doing, and I am good at what I do," he stated. "And I'm making an attempt to pay again to the unhealthy guys what they did to my household."
However with the autumn of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the unhealthy guys had been altering. In 1995 Prado was assigned to trace a rising financier of terrorism named Osama bin Laden. Prado had by no means heard of him, however he had heard of the CIA operative who had been watching bin Laden. "There's just one Billy Waugh on this planet," he stated.
Now 92, Waugh is a legend on this planet of black ops. He took the CIA's first surveillance photographs of bin Laden, who again then was dwelling in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.
"I did take lots footage of him," Waugh advised Martin.
"What number of photographs do you suppose you took?"
"Thousand."
"In case you're shut sufficient to take these type of footage, are you shut sufficient to shoot him?" Martin requested.
"Sure, sir," stated Waugh. "And we requested it many instances. You may put that down. I may have killed him daily of the week."
However Waugh's principal goal was a infamous terrorist often called Carlos the Jackal, who had orchestrated the spectacular kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. He was the world's most needed man, dwelling in Khartoum the place Waugh discovered him, and took footage from the fifth flooring of his hideout throughout the road.
The Jackal was arrested and sentenced to life in jail. Bin Laden remained a free man.
Martin requested Prado, "Was there any thought to making an attempt to take bin Laden out?"
"Sure, after all," he replied. "Sadly, the political fortitude was not there but. We may have kidnapped him at the moment, however we weren't allowed to take action."
"Clearly if bin Laden had been taken off the panorama, loads of historical past would have been very completely different. However the CIA cannot simply go world wide kidnapping each fledgling terrorist."
"No, they cannot."
"So, if you say there wasn't the political will, ought to there have been the political will?"
"I believe so," stated Prado. "I am not saying we should always have killed bin Laden at the moment. However abducting him and getting him into interrogation and see what he may cough up, I believe that will have been one thing doable and justifiable."
Two years after 9/11, Prado retired, annoyed that the CIA had turned down his plan for going after terrorists.
"How do you justify a goal being taken out by a drone, however they're abhorred by the truth that you are prepared to place a bullet in the identical single particular person's head?" he stated. "That is why I retired. My time had come."
Martin stated, "Lots of people are going to take heed to you and say, 'There's an awesome American.' And there are going to be individuals who take heed to you and say, 'Whoa, who let this man unfastened?'"
"Or who did not let that man unfastened?" Prado stated. "And what would have been the distinction? If we might've taken out bin Laden when he was in Khartoum, likelihood is 9/11 wouldn't have occurred."
READ AN EXCERPT: "Black Ops: The Lifetime of a CIA Shadow Warrior"
For more information:
- "Black Ops: The Lifetime of a CIA Shadow Warrior" by Ric Prado (St. Martin's Press), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio codecs, obtainable March 1 by way of Amazon and Indiebound
- ricprado.com
Story produced by Mary Walsh. Editor: Ed Givnish.