Book excerpt: "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior"
Born in Cuba and sent as a youth to live in America after the rise of Castro, Ric Prado became a longtime undercover operative for U.S. intelligence, defending American ideals against insurgents, terrorists, and traffickers of people, drugs, and illegal weapons. He tells his story in a new memoir, "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior" (St. Martin's Press), to be published on March 1.
Read an excerpt below, and don't miss David Martin's interview with Ric Prado on "CBS Sunday Morning" February 27!
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. 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. I longed to wear "the white hat"!
My family had once lived in middle-class comfort in small-town Cuba. We owned a television and a beautiful 1957 Pontiac that was my father's pride and joy. Then the Castro revolution dumped our world upside down. We lost everything and everyone we loved in a bid to escape and have a chance to live in freedom once again. In desperation, my father got me out first, and I spent my first eight months in the U.S. in a Catholic orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. America offered that freedom, but those first years in Florida were hardscrabble ones indeed. My father worked two jobs and dragged me with him to work on Saturdays. My mother labored away in a sweatshop making shirts. We lived in tiny, run-down apartments and learned to get by on a fraction of what we once enjoyed in pre-Castro Cuba.
We fought our way back to prosperity, chasing our version of the American dream. The path was rocky, and more than once I strayed from it as a kid. I learned to fight, I learned to hustle. I also learned that loyalty is the greatest gift you can share or receive, while betrayal inflicts the brutal wounds to the heart.
The U.S. Air Force gave me purpose and discipline. I became a Pararescueman in 1972, just missing the tail end of the Vietnam War. My path to the Agency was as atypical as the rest of my life in 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. 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. 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?
Those fledgling days in the Agency opened the door to a world I did not know existed. 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. Bond had his Goldfingers and Dr. Nos, but in the shadows we operated in, we faced no such cartoonish villains. 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.
I'd seen my family's life in Cuba destroyed by such people. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency gave me a chance to strike back at them.
From "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior" by Ric Prado. Copyright © 2022 by the author, and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
For more info:
- "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior" by Ric Prado (St. Martin's Press), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available March 1 via Amazon and Indiebound
- ricprado.com
