84: Shadow Warrior with Ric Prado

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: In this episode, we’re focusing on the life of Ric Prado, former CIA operative who has played a significant role in conducting intelligence operations and developing strategies to combat global terrorism.

Chris: Ric’s rich history of espionage and general behind enemy lines badassery has led to his first book, published by St. Martin’s Press, which recounts his CIA and military operations through Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, Korea, East Asia, and everywhere else. The most feared leaders and terrorists hide out. But before we get our ride started with Ric and his intense adventures hunting terrorists, enemies, spies, and rogue leaders across the world, let’s dive into our signature barcode, drink made just for Ric and his story.

Chris: It’s a simple libation for a complex man. What you’ll need to do first is grab a bottle of four Branches Kentucky Bourbon, founded by former Navy, Army, Marine, and Air Force veterans. You pour 2oz into your jigger, drop it into a low ball glass, and enjoy it neat for full flavor. Now, that’s neat. In 1959, Fidel Castro and his army of rebels successfully ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista, taking control of Cuba and forever changing global politics by bringing communism to America’s front doorstep.

Chris: Ric Prado was just seven years old when he witnessed the violent overthrow of his government, an act that would have a profound effect on his future, uprooting his family, separating him from his mother and father, and leading him into an inspired, lifelong path towards living and protecting the American dream. Now, 50 years later, Ric still fights to preserve and protect our freedom and provide those who are searching for a better life with the opportunity to live in a democratic nation free of political oppression.

Ric: Yeah, I’m Cuban born. I was born in 1951, so I was eight years old when the revolution won over at the age of seven. They attacked my town several times, and I was about 2ft away from a guy with a machine gun blasting outside my window, which got my attention. Luckily, my parents weren’t home and saw a lot of violence. I mean, there was dead people in the street. They would hit the town and attack the local pub where the cops and the military guys would hang out. And that was one of where there were some Kias there.

Ric: But what was most evident as far as change, negative change, was how soon the crackdown from Castro started. And you figure less than six months after my parents, after Castro took over, they confiscated my dad’s small coffee roasting company. Then they started confiscating all the all the private businesses they were all systematically being and no compensation, no nothing, not even asking you. It’s just literally, get the hell out. We’re taking over.

Ric: So I go from a childhood that I had a horse before I had a bicycle, and I had a bicycle and a BBE rifle. Lived a nice middle class existence to all of a sudden having to wear a uniform to school. A little soldier type uniform that they issued everybody with a bandana that showed their grade or something. Again, at the age of eight or 80 years old, they’re sending me out to the nearby farmers, to teach them how to read and write.

Chris: In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro set out to eliminate illiteracy in Cuba by sending urban teachers to rural areas in an effort to equalize classes. The literacy campaign had a far reaching effect on improving quality of life, but it came at a cost to those whose lives were forever transformed by communist rules.

Ric: It was part of their literacy program. So you got an eight year old walking into your hut and saying, ABC. So it was pretty ironic, but the crackdown was there. It was incredible how them telling us in school, if your parents say anything negative about Castro, it’s your duty to report them. And there’s kids that did. There’s kids that actually did. So the next big shock was when we decided to move to Havana in order to try to get out. My dad had made up his mind that he was going to get out. That means all his private stuff gets confiscated besides his business. Now his private stuff is confiscated, and it all goes to the government once you leave.

Ric: So we moved to Havana, and that same day that we were driving into Havana for the first time to stay, there were three guys hanging from telephone poles to my right. My mom jumped from the front seat to the back, trying to cover my eyes. I saw it all, and they had signs around their neck that said, Connor revolutionaries. That was very sobering.

Chris: Castro’s new Cuba teetered on full blown civil war, with rebels stationed in the Escombre Mountains, invading towns to capture and hang Castro loyalists, while Castro’s army captured rebels and executed them by firing squad. As tensions escalated between factions, Ric was put on a plane and sent to an American orphanage in the hopes that he would have greater opportunities. At just ten years old, he never knew if he’d see his mother and father again.

Ric: Of course, getting on a plane at the age of ten without your parents not knowing if they will ever see me again or me see them again, that was a game changer, definitely for my parents. I was brought out to be the little man, and I have the composure that I have now that when things get really shitty is when I get calmer. I’m usually that’s just the way I was wired, or that they wired me. But what it did to my parents, it devastated them because they did not know.

Ric: So I ended up in an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. It’s blue collar. Now, you could badge him back in 1962, but I made do with it. Learned to fight, learn to stand up for myself, learn to make friends, all the things that paid off later on, even in my career. So that was our humble beginning. When my parents got out about eight plus months later, we moved into from a nice house in Cuba with a 57 Pontiac and a Jeep and a deuce and a half a phone and a TV in the house.

Ric: To six of us because my two cousins and aunt had come out to in a one bedroom efficiency in a real ghetto in South Miami area.

Chris: Ric’s new life in Miami was anything but comfortable. But his experience in the orphanage is what drove him not to only survive, but also thrive in his new country. He walked through life with a chip on his shoulder, equipped with the determination and intelligence to live an adventurous and meaningful life.

Ric: It was quite a crude awakening for my parents, and it was a lot tough when you’re ten years old. Eleven years old. I turned eleven at the orphanage. When you’re eleven years old, as long as you’re happy, you’re fishing, you’re playing, whatever. You don’t see the burden that the parents went through. And the reason I mentioned this is because my cousin, who was about four years younger than me when my dad came home from mowing lawns or loading trucks, whatever he was doing that day, ice cream truck came by.

Ric: And we being kids, hey, dad, can you he started crying. He didn’t have a nickel in his pocket to buy his son an ice cream. But you know what? Best thing that happened to us collectively, we became part of the American dream. And I’ve had a life that I pinched myself there’s in a day that I don’t thank God for what he’s allowed me to try to do.

Chris: After Castro’s coup, many Cuban parents feared that they would lose parental rights and that their children would be forced into communist indoctrination camps. Through Operation Peter Pan, a clandestine operation that evacuated 14,000 unoccupied Cuban miners to the US. From 1960 to 1962, Ric was able to escape Cuba. His father promised he would see him again, and then he was gone.

Ric: I came out through a program called Peter Pan, which brought out thousands of kids from Cuba under the same and there was a couple of Cuban kids in the orphanage where I was. But, you know, when you get to the airport, they had a glass wall. Your parents had to stay behind. And my mom was crying. I mean, my mom was bawling. And I told my dad, my dad told me later on in life that I said to him, I said, if mom doesn’t stop crying, I’m not going.

Ric: And he grabbed me by the shoulders and he says, you have my word I will see you again. And that was my security blanket for all the time that I was in the orphanage. I would go to sleep at night in the orphanage. I could hear kids crying. We had three or four ethnicities, two or three languages, and a bunch of pissed off kids because they’re all orphans. They don’t want to be there. But that was my security blanket, the fact that when in doubt, I always thought back to my dad, who said he’s always kept his word.

Chris: After reuniting with his parents, Ric moved to the Miami area, where his family struggled to make ends meet. Between the orphanage and his new life in poverty, Ric gained the street smarts he would need to survive later on in life.

Ric: Well, my dad and my mom worked my dad worked two jobs for as long as I could remember, and my mom worked in a sweatshop sewing for ten years in Florida. No air conditioning. I was going to school. I was making friends. But, you know, after a couple of years, probably less than two years in country or about two years in country, my dad had saved enough money that we moved to a house in Hialeah. Hialeah back then was considered the hinterlands.

Chris: In the 1960s, Hialeah, a suburban enclave outside of Miami, became a working class neighborhood made up of predominantly Cuban exiles. With its rich Cuban history, Hialeah is now considered one of the most economically successful immigrant communities in US. History. In its early days, it was considered an affordable Eden.

Ric: There was very little there, and that’s why the houses were cheap, and that’s why he moved out in that direction. So that became home. So again, I started having an enjoyable life. I played with my friends. I got into the martial arts when I was 15. I was living well. I was living well. Had my first little car, Dodge Lancer, when I went to high school for my first year. But, you know, in high school I got good grades, but I also got in a lot of trouble. I was always getting in fights because I hung out with a rougher crowd, because that was the wire and the adventure. What I grew up with, with the orphanage and everything else, I gravitated towards them.

Ric: And that all ended when I when I started going to college, and I grew a conscience and realized that I had a debt of honor to this country and a very short antidote, but I’m very proud of it. I just started Miami Day Junior College, and the hippies announced that the next day they were going to burn down the American flag. And I said so I called a couple of my homies back from high school because I didn’t know anybody in college.

Ric: And the hippies showed up. All that was left was torn T shirts and beads on the floor. But I looked up and I saw that American flag flying in a blue sky. And that was the first time in my life that I had been proud of doing violence. Six months later, I joined Pararescue.

Chris: Air Force Special Tactics, pararescuemen, known as PJs, are the only Department of Defense specialty specifically trained to conduct conventional and unconventional rescue operations. Translation: they’re total badasses. PJs must endure one of the longest special operations training courses in the world that transforms each recruit into an elite paramedic. Paratrooper, combat diver and sharpshooter with a motto these things we do that others may live.

Chris: PJs are continuously asked to put their own lives before others in some of the most dangerous military and rescue operations across the planet. If you meet a PJ at the bar, plant your ass next to him. You’ll hear a good story or two.

Ric: Yeah, again, in junior college, I was studying to be a marine science technician. I wanted to be a professional diver because I’ve been scuba diving since I was a kid. And I ran into a guy named Glenn Richardson in my oceanography class who had been a PJ. And when I made that switch to the fact that, look, I really want to enlist, and my enlistment number was so high that was a draft at the time, I would have never gotten called. So my parents were fat, dumb, and happy in the sense of, hey, we don’t have nothing to worry about. Our kids in college, and his numbers couldn’t be any higher.

Ric: So imagine how happy they were about me showing up and saying, hey, guess what? Next month I’m leaving. So I started, tried out for pararescue and went in that direction. I thought I was a tough kid, even though basic training. Once I got to pararescue, I was humbled. The physical, the mental, the amount of pressures they put you on it is another forging of your metal. And that goes to, again, what I said earlier on. I honestly believe that God puts us in the path we’re supposed to be.

Ric: And my childhood was the beginning of that forging. Pararescue was an instrumental part of my forging, and I would have never made it into the Agency if it had not been for pararescue. So I went through all the courses mountain climbing, scuba diving, parachuting, and of course, EMT two level medical training because after all, pararescue are combat medics and did well. Got my Beret in either late 72 or early 73.

Ric: Unfortunately for me, or maybe fortunately in hindsight, Vietnam was winding down because that was the reason that I joined. I wanted to go fight for my country, so I stayed in the reserves. I switched to the reserves. At the time, the Attrition in the military and in the Intel Agency was quite severe. They were cutting everything back. They were forcing people out or enticing them. And I applied to the agency in 74.

Ric: They came back and said, we’re firing, not hiring. But again, in around 78 or 79, I applied this time again. And I had been riding rescue with Miami Dade Fire Department for six years, and I was a pretty damn good medic. I honed my skills. In the late 1970s in South Florida, you were seeing combat injuries. And the agency said, hey, we cannot bring you on staff, but we can bring you on contract. So that’s how I got my toe in the door. I did several deployments with our Special Activities Division folks, which are the agency’s paramilitary force.

Ric: And lo and behold, Reagan takes over, and he declares war on communism in Latin America.

Chris: Shortly after assuming office, President Reagan vowed to end the spread of communism in Latin America, working to undermine the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and sending military aid in troops to El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, and Argentina, among others. His efforts were controversial, yet predominantly successful.

<President Reagan Sound Clip>: Central America’s problems do directly affect the security and the wellbeing of our own people. And Central America is much closer to the United States than many of the world trouble spots that concern us. So we work to restore our own economy. We cannot afford to lose sight of our neighbors. To the south, El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington, where we’re gathered tonight. But nearness on the map doesn’t even begin to tell the strategic importance of Central America bordering, as it does in the Caribbean, our lifeline to the outside world. Two thirds of all our foreign trade and petroleum passed through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. In a European crisis, at least half of our supplies for NATO would go through these areas by sea. It’s well to remember that in early 1942, a handful of Hitler submarines sank more tonnage there than in all of the Atlantic Ocean. And they did this without a single naval base anywhere in the area. And today, the situation is different. Cuba is host to a Soviet combat brigade, a submarine base capable of servicing Soviet submarines and military air bases visited regularly by Soviet military aircraft. Because of its importance, the Caribbean Basin is a magnet for adventurism. We’re all aware of the Libyan cargo planes refueling in Brazil a few days ago on their way to deliver medical supplies to Nicaragua. Brazilian authorities discovered the so called medical supplies were actually munitions and prevented their delivery. You may remember that last month, speaking on national television, I showed an aerial photo of an airfield being built in the island of Grenada. Well, if that airfield had been completed, those planes could have refueled there and completed their journey. If the Nazis during World War II and the Soviets today could recognize the Caribbean and Central America as vital to our interest, shouldn’t we also.

Ric: And at the time, believe it or not, the agency did not have a single native Spanish speaking guy with paramilitary skills. Now, they had native Spanish speakers, but they had no PM background, especially a special operations background, although that term didn’t exist back then. So they called me up again. I had just gotten divorced. I’ve been married 41 years now, but the first marriage only lasted about three or four years, and I had just gotten divorced when that phone rang, and it was them offering me a job. And all I asked him was is a staff or contract? That said to staff, I said, I’ll take it.

Ric: That was my toe in the door and the beginning of my career in the Agency. For almost 25 years.

Chris: Ric’s personal history, alongside his long career as a CIA operative and counterterrorism and paramilitary expert, has given him the opportunity to pass down his knowledge to new generations and inspire strong leaders. I’m feeling safer already.

Ric: Yeah. You know, I do a lot of mentoring. A lot of mentoring. There isn’t a month that I don’t have a project with some young guy that reaches out to me and says, hey, I’m a Green Beret. I’ve been doing this, I want to do that. And the reason I’m so involved in it is because I was blessed with mentors that saw something in me that I didn’t see for decades. I can’t pay them back for what they did for me, so I have to pay it forward.

Ric: So the basic advice is, obviously you do need a college degree. What matters that you have good grades and what I recommend to them that they take things that are more apropos to what we do. Remember, we are an international organization. We do not work in the United States. So cultural language, intercultural conflicts, geography, geopolitics, writing. Writing is extremely important in the Agency.

Ric: So usually going down the checklist, get your education. If you can get military credentials of any kind, that’s a job of preference. And if you speak a second language to any degree of performance proficiency, let’s say you have a two level in whatever the Agency believes that that means you can learn several other languages. I studied Japanese for 14 months. I got a two level in Japanese, had a two level in Japanese.

Ric: So it is one of the biggest things for us is language and cultural exposure. People that travel, people that have served overseas, either military or with their parents, whether they were business or military, those are the things that will tend to set apart an individual from the thousands of people that apply to the agency almost every week.

Chris: Like any other urban area experiencing a boom, Miami in the 1960s was an easy place to lose direction, and Trouble was no stranger to Ric. But his determination to serve his country is what led to his ability to turn his back on trouble and focus on his future success.

Ric: Well, you know, it’s funny because I’ve always been a very lucky guy, and I never got in serious trouble. There was one time we got in a huge fight at a pizza place, and I mean, it was a huge fight. There’s probably 20 guys going at it from both sides. And we had two cars jumping into the cars. When I went into the first car, they pushed me out and said, go to the next one. We’re full. And I jump in the next car. Well, first car gets pulled over, and they all went to jail.

Ric: We drove by and of course, look, I didn’t do breaking and entries and I didn’t rob 711s or any of that crap, but I did hang out with guys who eventually became either cops or crooks or were killed. And so, yeah, they did the background investigation, and they got more good than bad. They did know that I had gotten in a very large fight in high school that actually got me suspended for three days. And they quiz me on that a little bit, but I clean up well, and I convinced them that that was past history and it is.

Chris: Shortly after applying to the CIA, Ric was thrown into the Latin Americas to support President Reagan’s anticommunism policy. Equipped with his sharp instincts and paramilitary training, Ric found himself in the middle of the jungle gathering intelligence in a high danger environment.

Ric: Now, without a doubt, it’s not what you read about and it’s not what you see in the movies. And that’s the reason I had to write the book. But, yeah, I applied. And when they called me in for that particular program, it was to support the contrast in the Nicaraguan border. These were the people fighting for their freedom, the freedom fighters going against the Sandinista regime, which was being propped up by the Cubans, which were propped up by the Soviets, and spilling it into El Salvador and Bolivia and several other places. So that phone call was on a Thursday. I was at headquarters on a Monday.

Ric: Two weeks later, I was in Honduras. So I had no training other than this is your alias, this is your alias passport. This is your backstop story. Some briefings on what the hell is going on over there. And they said, you got a good boss. Just listen to them. That program, when we first started, was five men on the ground. And I was the only guy for the first 14 months of that program that was allowed to go to the camps.

Ric: Why? Because it was a Black Op. That’s why we call the book Black Ops. Black Ops are those operations that the American hand has to remain hidden. And I was there as a Honduran major. They had papered me. I was an intel officer with the Air Force. And I spent the next three years, 1st, 14 months by myself. Eventually we got three special forces contractors, guys who had retired from special forces and they stayed in the camps and I would still do the jumps from camp to camp and do the training and the collection and the, in the networking with the commanders.

Ric: I did, I slept in a jungle hammock Monday through Friday for over three years and I never regretted a single moment of it. I never woke up one morning, I went what am I doing here? It never happened. It never happened. So my exposure to the agency was very external from the beginning. Very beginning. Now I will tell you I could still remember the day, first day I walked into that lobby. I remember so clearly because I was in heaven.

Ric: This was a guy like me who’s always reading James Bond novels and watching Secret Agent Man and all this other stuff. This was a dream come true. A dream that I actually didn’t know or was very confident that I was going to make it into that experience. And one thing that I remember is walking in through the lobby, there’s a huge seal of the agency and I walked around it, I did not walk over it. And for the 25 years I was there I never stepped on that seal. Everybody else does.

Ric: I just couldn’t get myself to do it. To me this meant everything. So going to Honduras was a very atypical existence. My adult supervision was on the weekends when I came back and spoke with my, my bosses and, and my colleagues. There was a Navy Seal guy there and a former Green Beret who did all the sprucing up for me because I was the only guy allowed to, allowed to go to the camps and teach headspace and timing on a 50 cow, RPG, seven s patrolling, covert communications, blah blah, blah, all this stuff.

Ric: So they’re the ones that would tune me up and I would go out and teach and preach. I did that for a little over three years and then I went through, got my master’s in espionage at the farm. I did very well there and that was a huge change of channel. Here I go from being in jungle boots, two grenades in my pocket, a pistol and an AR 15 to now I’m in coat and Thai and I’m a state Department guy. So that was a pretty drastic change but not one that I was disassociated because again I believe that I was prepared along the way.

Ric: When I was a junior in high school I got a job at a very nice bench clothing store. I learned to dress, I learned the value of clothing, how to wear it so the thug could clean up.

Chris: Well after three years of risking his life day in and day out in Honduras, Ric returned with his sight set on even greater responsibilities within the agency.

Ric: So it was a little over three years and I finished off my college. I had a year to go. They paid for that, went to George Mason, graduated with Distinction and went into Spice School. That was 85 that I finished college, so 86 that I finished the farm. I didn’t have to go through all the other stuff that other college kids had to.

Chris: Soon after Ric completed his education in espionage, he joined the CTC or Counterterrorist Center, whose main focus is to preempt, disrupt and eliminate international terrorism. From there, Ric would become an integral operative in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and gathering intel on al Qaeda operations and leaders.

Ric: We have a very robust paramilitary phase. Obviously, I didn’t need any of that. So that all got wavered. So my training was probably about six months long in the arts of espionage, but none of the other stuff. From then, I’ve had six overseas tours. I’ve been a chief of station. I have been a deputy chief of station twice. I’ve been a deputy division chief running the whole Korea programs for not only the agency, but I was the agency’s rep to the NSC for anything that was Korea’s.

Ric: I was blessed to being in the right place at the right time. I was in CTC. I had just come back from Seoul, Korea, where I was chief of liaison there. And I had gotten my GS 15, which for us, that’s our colonel rank as far as protocol. And I had a branch, I had the Palestinian branch in the Counterterrorist Center. And this was my second tour with CTC. And they called me in. The chief of ops called me in, said, you’ve been selected as a candidate to be a deputy chief of station in a virtual station.

Ric: What the hell is a virtual station? He says, It’s going to be just like if you were overseas, but you’re going to be outside this building. You will have release authority. You would have tasking authorities. You would be a station independent of headquarters, except that you would be 10 miles from headquarters, or whatever it was, it was a task force. And I said, “So who are we going after? And my boss says, Osama bin Laden.

Ric: And I said, who? Back then, we did not know who Osama bin Laden was. So I’m very, very honored to be a plank owner of that of bin Laden task force, also known as Alex Station. And that is the same unit that grew, but eventually allowed us to geolocate bin Laden and have our Seals shoot him in the face. Same thing with Zawahiri and several others. So very proud of that association. I went out, I was a chief of station in a radical Muslim country in Africa.

Chris: In 1988, Osama bin Laden, a former guerrilla commander of the Afghan forces during their war against the Soviet Union, formed al Qaeda, an organization consisting of ex mujahideen and militant supporters whose mission was to recruit fighters and channel funds to the Afghan resistance. When. Bin Laden was forced to flee Saudi Arabia following his opposition to the Saudi alliance with the United States during the Persian Gulf War.

Chris: He traveled to Sudan, a country that allowed any Muslim to enter without a visa. Not surprisingly, Sudan quickly became a haven for suspected terrorists. A snake pit of international terror.

Ric: That was the only unaccompanied tour. My family, I left that behind. There’s no way I was going to take my family there. And they don’t allow me to say the name of the place because we were there on this very special cover. But we had teeth. I had a real well selected, well trained we trained for months before this deployment. And what we were doing was doing snooping and pooping right under their noses trying to find because there was a lot of terrorists, this place had become we used to call it the terrorist hotel. If you had money that you could contribute to the administration there, whatever the leaders, you were there with impunity, no matter whether there was everything from Hezbollah to bin Laden and all this kind of stuff.

Chris: In late 1995, Ric joined the Bin Laden Task Force to gather intelligence on the known terrorists by whatever means necessary.

Ric: Yeah, we stood up the Bin Laden Task force in January of 96, we got together in December of 95, but we literally moved out and officially broke the bottle in January. And within six months we had tenfold the amount of intelligence that we had before it was created because now we were able to focus just on that and sending that requirement to every corner of the world. Because remember back then before 911, a lot of the, a lot of the big terrorist stuff, or let’s say before Al Qaeda, the majority of the terrorism was geolocated. I mean, it was Latin America, it was Southeast Asia, it was parts of the Middle East.

Ric: It started becoming more and more of an international. So we were able to test the whole world for that. And I had a guy in Khartoum at the time, bin Laden was in Khartoum, Sudan, in the mid ninety s, and a legendary Green Beret and a legendary CIA guy who ended up being one of my best friends for 34 years. And unfortunately we lost him about three weeks ago. Sergeant Major Billy Waugh. Legend, legend. You can Google him and you’ll see that what this guy has done makes everything look like a pimple on a monkey’s butt. I mean, he’s just incredible guy.

Chris: Billy Waugh was a United States Army Special Forces soldier and CIA paramilitary operations officer who served more than 50 years between the US Army’s Green Berets and the CIA’s Special Activities Division. A Special Forces veteran of the Vietnam War, Billy eventually joined the CIA and was stationed in Khartoum, where he hunted some of the world’s most notorious terrorist leaders, including Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden.

Ric: He was on the ground. Cofer Black, who ended up being our director at CTC. One of the best guys I’ve ever worked for, Billy was the chief of surveillance and counter surveillance for Cofer Black during that period there in the mid-90s. He is the one that found Carlos the Jackal, renowned terrorist. And it was because of Billy’s surveillance geolocation that we were able to grab him and hand him over to the French.

Ric: But he and I were in very frequent communications when I was the deputy chief of station of the bin Laden thing, because he was coming up with all this intelligence of visual intelligence, photographs, patterns of life, their capabilities. He had some really badass guys with him, but they were guerrilla fighters. These were not VIP protection guys, and they would they not feel threatened. I mean, he would drive his car by himself, and time and time again, Billy would propose that we could kill him, we could kidnap him, whatever, but coming there with a team, we probably would sustain no casualties. And we didn’t have a relationship with that country anyway, so who cares?

Ric: And we kept proposing these up the ladder, and the administration wasn’t willing to do so at the time. They kept saying, well, how do we know he’s a terrorist? Because I got like 30,000 sources here what he’s extorting, the overhead of the camps that he is visiting and providing money to and et cetera, et cetera. So I always highlight the fact that imagine if we would have allowed like Billy says, I was so close to him once, I could have killed him with a pencil.

Ric: And if we would have neutralized him or just rendered him, brought him back to interrogation, look at the domino effect that we would have avoided. You have the coal, you have the bombing of our two embassies in Africa simultaneously, and of course, leading to 911.

Chris: After a year and a half in North Africa, Ric returned home to support his wife during an illness before heading back out into the field.

Ric: Yeah, I was in Korea from ‘93 to 95. I was in the bin Laden from 96 to 97. I did about 18 months, I think it was there. But my wife had a medical issue and had to pull out. And then I went back to East Asia division, and I became deputy chief of station I’m sorry, deputy division chief for the Koreas. That was from 98 to 2000. That’s how I made senior grade, got my SIS two, which is for us is two star.

Ric: And that was a great job because that was probably the biggest and most enjoyable job I had after the after the contrast, because I had the pleasure and the authorities to go out myself. I literally took down two North Koreans. They allowed me to talk about one in the book and literally took them down, that we compromised them. I would go meet with them in alias as a Latino crooked businessman. And this is where my street savvy kicked in. And I would ask them to smuggle shit for us, tobacco seats from Cuba, whatever the hell we wanted to do. And then when they did, we’d have our allies wrap them up and kick them out of the country.

Ric: So in one level, I’m working as an SIS officer on the street in alias, walking into North Korean embassies, and at the other, I am dressed up and going in front of the NSC and giving them the world according to Prado. And everything else was Korea. So it was quite enjoyable.

Chris: Ric’s long career has landed him in numerous live or die situations you can’t dream up. But this isn’t the movies. It’s real life. And when confronted with danger on a do or die basis, Ric used his superior training and natural instincts to come out alive.

Ric: When you’re living our lives, it’s like doing 100 miles an hour. A lot of things were to blur, but once you retire like I have, and you have time for introspection, you go back and you start seeing these building blocks that lead to and like I said, when my dad put me on that airplane, I didn’t cry. I was in shock, but I did not cry when I was in the orphanage, I never cried. So I think that the wiring was there to kind of, like, suck it up and then the training kicks in. I mean, pararescue was a humbling experiences physically and mentally, but once you come out of that, you deserve your cockiness because you’ve gone through something that 1% of the people in the military go through.

Ric: So I think that I’ve always had that wiring. I mean, I get nervous before. I worry a lot about screwing up. It’s always like, don’t screw up. And afterwards, sometimes you go, holy shit, that was a close one. But while it’s going on, I’m switched on. That’s just the way it is for.

Chris: People in Ric’s line of work, there’s no room for error. In fact, failure is not an option. Very few people have the composure to face death on a regular basis. It takes a strong belief system to prevail.

Ric: They have to have a certain wiring for that already. And I think that the single most important thing for going into harm’s way is believing in what you’re doing, setting it straight with the old man upstairs. And if you are, you’re confident that you’re doing the right thing in his name, you’re bulletproof. Not literally, but at least emotionally.

Chris: Training, mindset, repetition, emotional fortitude, amplify each one of those aspects to a nearly inhuman level, and you may have what it takes to walk into a nest of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and assassins and walk out with a mission accomplished.

Ric: There’s several stories in the book of Close Calls. I almost got killed twice in the Honduran episodes. One by the Sandinistas. Well, twice by the Sandinistas, and then once, by some rogue contrast. I was almost killed again in the Philippines when I was the liaison guy there with the locals, and they darkened at us, and we escaped that one. And every single time, we reacted because I wasn’t alone in a couple of these things.

Ric: We reacted in a calm demeanor, even though inside your heart is your adrenaline is pumping and everything else. And it’s afterwards that you sit there and you go, what was I thinking?

Chris: Ric is no stranger to the adrenaline boost that comes with near death experiences. It’s part of the job. The key to coming out alive on the other side lies in your ability to relate and calmly and intelligently react to the physical and mental chaos that occurs during such situations.

Ric: There’s a saying from a movie that says that the action is the juice, and it is. There’s a certain pride and confidence that comes from surviving something that you reacted correctly to, not just luck and happenstance, but the fact that you had your wits about you and that you were able to keep your cool and do what needed to be done. That’s a huge rush.

Chris: Let’s fast forward a few years to the day that the world changed. 911. Ric had taken over as chief of operations at the counterterrorist center. He was at the CIA headquarters in Langley when the first plane struck the world trade center. His reaction, much like the rest of the world, was that a terrible accident had just occurred. Soon after, he realized we were under attack.

Ric: Yeah, I had taken over the chief of ops at the counterterrorist center in May of 2001 when I came back from that radical African country, and shortly thereafter, we had the 911. I was standing outside of Cofer Black’s office, waiting for him to get off the phone because he had asked me to come down and talk about something. And big TV there on the outside. We see the first plane. Corner of my eye, see the explosion and then the banners coming through. And I went, what the hell was that?

Ric: We thought it was like a twin engine plane that had gone into a building in New York. That was the first reaction to us. One of the unique things about the counterterrorist center is that every single federal agency is represented at the center. We have secret service guys, we have DS guys, we have ATF guys, and we had an FAA guy. And he came up to me almost immediately and said, hey, chief, we got a problem.

Ric: I said, what’s that? He goes, we got four planes that have activated their emergency procedures, and none of them are responding to our calls. He hadn’t finished saying that. 30 seconds later, here comes the second plane, hits the building again, the towers again, and I will tell you, I only have a handful of dreams that come back at night and haunt me. And the thought of those people jumping remember, I was a firefighter paramedic for a foot. Six years I’ve been into fires. Those people jumping off those buildings because they were literally burning alive.

Ric: I cannot describe the level of anger and vindication that I wanted at that moment. It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just me. One of the vignettes that I love telling, because I think it encapsulates the purpose of my book, which was to show the real ethos of my colleagues, what we’re really made of. We’re not Jason born, American made crap that’s always put out there. I had a lady, a young lady then that was she was the deputy chief of the Hezbollah branch, and she was about eight months pregnant, and hair is on fire. I turned to my chief I mean, to Cofer’s chief of staff, and I said, I need a cable to go out to every station in the world. Watch your six.

Ric: This is not a loan operator thing. And number two, we need to find out and tap all our sources and liaison services for anything that can help us decipher this. So it’s about 07:00 at night. I didn’t go home for three days. I literally slept in my office for three days. Again, I wasn’t the only guy doing this. Everybody was doing that. And I’m walking back to my office, and she’s working at the computer.

Ric: And all of a sudden, I realized as I walked up to her, I said, Christy, what are you doing? She goes, well, boss, until today, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than anybody else. I just want to make sure that it wasn’t them, because I said, okay. But here’s the deal. I’ve delivered two kids in my life, and neither one of them is mine. I ain’t delivering a third. You’re getting your ass home. And she got all pissy at me. But I had one of my logistics guys drive her home, and shortly after I mean, a few years after that, when she had the baby and we would bump into each other, she would always tell me, she says, you know, every time my daughter has a birthday, I think of you, because what was I thinking? And what I’d always tell her is, you were being a patriot.

Ric: Guys, if you can override the maternal instinct for protecting your child for the mission, if that doesn’t describe the ethos of the ideal CIA operations officer, nothing does.

Chris: An unwavering love of country. That’s what it takes to become part of the Agency. And that’s what it takes to stare down the most horrific dangers in the world and run straight into them.

Ric: Like I said, you have to believe in what you’re doing. The Agency, like being a police officer, is a very ungrateful mistress. You can’t celebrate your successes. Your failures are always leaked. You know, if you’re if you’re batting 300, you’re hall. Of fame material. And so you are in a business where failure is one of the things that will humble you throughout your career.

Chris: After 9/11, the United States took a harder line on putting an end to terrorists. But those efforts were challenged by several organizations, including the Islamic state, or ISIS, which rose to global prominence when an international coalition led by the US. Intervened against them in Syria in 2014. Their methods of ethnic cleansing, alongside video recorded beheadings and torture of religious leaders and prisoners, shocked the world, while also attracting fellow terrorists.

Ric: Well, you know, we’re not the only ones that believe in our cause. And as much as I hate my enemy well, no, as much as I’m willing to kill my enemy, I have to respect them. A lot of people have the misconception that all these guys are a bunch of camel jockeys. They’re not. Those guys flew a 747 into one of our buildings, for god’s sake. A camel jockey doesn’t do that. So they have organization. They have education, they have connectivity.

Ric: They have doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, but they have a conviction, one which I don’t agree with, but nonetheless, they live and die for that. So that makes them formidable. And then, of course, it’s exacerbated by not only our mistakes, but the western world not responding, not acting in time. I go back to, again, us trying to get bin laden in the mid-90s. If we had had the fortitude at the time to go after bin laden, then the world would be a different pulse, and we’ve missed those opportunities in other cases time and time again.

Ric: So it became international. Like I said, initially, counterterrorist center was focused on primarily Hezbollah. Okay, well, yeah, Hezbollah did the thing in Argentina, and they did, but primarily they were there in the middle east area. That was their thing. Beirut is their home base. I worked there for in and out for over a year, so this became really international. So al Qaeda was the first organization to really like an octopus, like the specter from the James bond movies, that goes out there, and it’s got tentacles into every different organization.

Ric: Connectivity with people that you don’t expect them to have connectivity with, and that they exploit that. The phenomenon of ISIS was partially some of the mistakes that we made in Iraq. The war in Iraq was such a detriment to many things, and one of them is it took our eye off Afghanistan. Also, the way that it was handled politically, when they literally threw out the baby with the bath water, they got rid of the whole bath party, which, let’s face it, that was the backbone of ISIS. A lot of those guys were the backbones of ISIS. So instead of us going in there and I’m not saying we should have not kicked Saddam Hussein out, he was a monster, but we should have handled the post war, our war. There was, what, three weeks?

Ric: The actual beginning. If we would have settled back and talked to the bath party and said, we will support you. You do this, you do that, you cleanse this. Don’t make us come back, a lot of this probably would have been avoided. So those two phenomena are what has really internationalized this, the level of violence. I mean, I have long known that there’s no crueler animal on this planet than man. There’s no animal crueler than man.

Ric: The things that we can justify, it’s as incredible. But ISIS took it to a completely different level. It was nazi concentration camp kind of cleansings. It was violations, just the raping of women. Any woman that was not Muslim enough, to put it any other way. It was very is. I mean, it hasn’t totally died away. I mean, it is still out there, but not in the magnitude that it was. And coming close to creating that caliphate that they dreamt of. 

Chris: ISIS utilized their grotesque methods of execution as a recruiting tool to potential soldiers, selling the idea of a powerful Islamic movement that would soon dominate the planet and fulfill the caliphate that they set out to achieve.

Ric: And it was a great recruiting tool, because, as you know, ISIS is responsible for the creation of the lone bandit out there, the lone wolf that was masterful. Again, they’re not camel jockeys. These guys knew how to work the net. They knew how to work cyber. They knew how to recruit. They knew how to communicate covertly through all kinds of from games to you name it. But they were very successful in radicalizing people via wire.

Chris: During the Iraq war, the US. Government turned to several private security firms to guard officials and installations, train Iraq’s new army and police, and provide additional support to coalition forces. One of the more prominent PMCs, or private military contractors was blackwater security company, founded by ex-navy seal Erik Prince. Ric Prado held a prominent leadership role at Blackwater.

Ric: I was one of the vice presidents in Blackwater. I was doing the same thing that I did in the agency, only for better pay and less bullshit. But my title was vice president for special government programs. That’s a clue. But it was such an incredible positive phenomenon that we could people say, well, why don’t we increase our military? Why don’t we increase our state department? First of all, if we were able to bring 600 guys into the State Department, clear them, train them in a matter of a couple of months, then I would argue, okay, and if you were willing to own them for the rest of their careers, because now you have staff officers that are going to be needing insurance and everything else. So it was a very pragmatic approach, really. The beginning of this was after 9/11.

Ric: Our executive officer at the agency, a very dear friend of mine, Buzzie Krongard, his son was a Navy Seal. As a matter of fact, Buzz’s son Alex, started seal team seven. He’s the one that opened seal team seven. And Buzzie knew eric prince because of the seal connections. And he came to CTC and says, hey, guys, if you need some hard as woodpecker lips kind of guys like, now these guys can come up with it.

Ric: So that was the beginning of Blackwater’s association with the agency. They were immediately sent into Kabul to provide protection for our men and women in Afghanistan. So that’s where I met eric. He was a charming guy. I love working for him. We became very good friends during that period, but it was a phenomena how it grew. But they were delivering. It’s not about the dollars. Yes, it was more cost efficient anyway, but they were delivering. And it’s such a shame there’s such bad press, but it goes with the same with our agency.

Ric: Agency does well, doesn’t sell newspapers. PMC is doing well, don’t sell newspapers either. A lot of people don’t know that. Blackwater saved the life of the polish ambassador, and it wasn’t our watch. His team got hit. We had a group nearby. They responded, and they killed the bad guys, and they saved the good guys. And there’s stories after stories after stories of that that I could tell that are epic. So I came to blackwater at a wonderful time because what eric wanted me to do was to reestablish what I was working in the agency at the end of my career.

Ric: The reason he had a little bit of an insight in it was because the stuff that I did for the last two and a half years in my career, which is when I gave up the Chief of Ops, job to go back in the field. And I had a team of about ten people, including a couple of analysts, that we were snooping and pooping and finding terrorists in anything that wasn’t a war zone. We were not operating in Afghanistan or Iraq, but everywhere else.

Ric: We had a footprint. And so he wanted me to resuscitate something like that. So I had all the freedoms. I worked a little bit with the agency at the beginning, but a lot of the work ended up being with our special operations community in the military. And it’s not in the book, so I can’t talk about it. But I had as much fun, and we made as much of a difference as I did in the agency the eight years that I was associated with blackwater.

Ric: And I believe that if we had not we, the US. Government had the foresight and the pragmatism to bring in these private military contractors, we would have lost a lot more of our staff’s lives. Without a doubt.

Chris: Russia’s recent declaration of war on the Ukraine has had a far reaching global effect, both economically and socially, and has put the world on high alert in regard to a major multinational conflict. And although PMCs were vital in protecting civilians, ambassadors, humanitarians, and global leaders in rebuilding Iraq, Ric doesn’t foresee a resurgence in the use of PMCs.

Ric: Here’s the problem with using PMCs and sponsoring PMCs, which means you are engaging in a war footing. You’re no longer advising, you’re not only supplying, but you are also now paying a mercenary force. I hate using that word, but that’s what people understand. A paid for fighter to go in there, and most of them are going to be Americans. Now, we’ve done other things like we did in the UAE, where we brought in Colombians and Salvadorians and created a security apparatus there for the Emirates. I helped Erik Prince with that in the early 2000s.

Ric: So the use of PMCs in there is very politically volatile. They will escalate it into, hey, this is a proxy. This is just no different than your soldiers. And they’re all former this or former that. So you’re going to have Americans that wear former seals, green Berets, pararescuemen, whatever it is, getting captured out there. I’m a little bit pragmatic and a little bit prejudiced here with this particular topic because I see the world.

Ric: I have seen the world and how cruel it can be and how ruthless our enemies are and how predatory our enemies are. And I believe that us supporting the Ukrainians could hopefully lead to a second fall of the Soviet Union, just like Afghanistan happened. They have more body bags now that they had in Afghanistan. For me, it’s money well spent. Of the three or four major enemies that we have, China, of course, being number one, but they’re more as military potent as they are.

Ric: Their biggest weapon is finance and how they’ve controlled the global resources out there. So well, Russia, Iran, North Korea, to a much lesser degree, but nonetheless a nuclear entity. So if we could take one enemy like Reagan and John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were able to do with the Soviet Union back then, I think that’s a good investment in our dollar.

Chris: Support of Ukraine is widely accepted as a powerful tool in weakening Russia, which could also have a domino effect on China’s ever expanding strength, especially economically.

Ric: Well, the thing too, is you can’t turn the blind eye to any of this. Okay? We finally got smart a few years ago. We US. Government, especially our military, you know, our military fought wars back to back now for 20 some years in Iraq and Afghanistan, nonstop in Syria. And we came to the realization that we cannot keep that pace up. We cannot keep putting our guys to six, seven, eight tours into dangerous areas, getting shot up time and time again.

Ric: So the concept of shifting from kicking doors and shooting people in the face to actually trying to prevent some of these problems, like the Ukraine coming to a head. I asked this of civilians. I said, how long do you think it took the Pole, I mean, the Ukrainians, to get up to speed on all these great things that they’re doing public? Wow, it’s magical. I mean, they did it in three months. I said no, they didn’t.

Ric: We writ large, had people in there since 2017, and not only there, but in other countries, not fighting, not provoking, but training them in the art of intelligence and the art of military. You do not get as good as the Ukrainians have shown to be in 90 days. That’s impossible. So I’m very proud of that because I’ve so I’ve seen it. I helped train, I worked at Fort Bragg for seven years, teaching the advanced special option courses there.

Ric: And it is a great investment for the future where we are out there now. Buttressing democracies, some of them are less than ideal, just like ours is less than ideal. Let’s not throw stones, but be able to have a common footing against these common enemies and having our guys do less fighting, a lot more training, and a lot more leading in the sense of training in intel.

Chris: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a major impact on the global cyber threat landscape. Since the invasion, Russian based phishing attacks against email addresses of European and US. Based businesses have increased eightfold in 2020. Malware attacks increased 358% year over year and have steadily increased since then. To put it simply, everyone with a wallet has become a target. Ric believes by investing in security now, you can avoid disaster down the line.

Ric: Well, you have to invest in it, and that’s where the problem begins. In business, everything is overhead. So justifying the overhead of, you know, preventing and avoiding and making yourself less attractive target is something that many companies don’t entertain, you know? And I think that’s my OPIC. I think that it’s a lot easier. The concept is, why should I spend $3 million propping this up and nothing may happen?

Ric: Where if somebody gets kidnapped, okay, so I pay a million dollars, then if it did happen, and we’re square. So I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that in the private sector. So the ones that are doing it right are investing in that. They have the VIB protection for the principles. They understand the concepts of security, of guarding your calendar, your cyber vulnerability. I’m not going to talk to that because you guys know that 100 fold more than I do.

Ric: But I do know how vulnerable we are. So the cyber posture is something that they also have to invest in tradecraft sensitizing them to awareness, prevention. And you have to invest in that like in everything else. You have to make the enemy go to somebody else. That’s the goal of any individual. I always tell this to my neighbors. I say, Listen, my job is to make the crook go to your house. You look at my house, there’s a truck. That says stuff on it that says, don’t mess with me.

Ric: I have a fence. I have two dogs that say, don’t mess with me. I have cameras and I have am I paranoid? Hell no. Are there a chance of somebody coming up? No, but I don’t like to lose. If more of our CEOs adopted that posture of most people that are that successful in business are very competitive, I would sell it to the fact that said, do you like losing? Because if you don’t do this, you are going to lose sooner or later, and it’s going to take some skin, and here’s how to fix it.

Chris: Understanding your vulnerabilities as both a business and individual is vital to successfully escaping a cyber threat. Today’s wars aren’t necessarily being fought with guns and missiles. They’re being fought with keyboards, information, bribery, and bank accounts. By destabilizing economic institutions and leaders, it’s easier to bring targets, countries and organizations to their knees.

Ric: It is very important. I mean, it’s this leadership. It’s not just managing understanding that you’re not the only person that is vulnerable if you don’t buttress your organization.

Chris: In 2022, Ric Prado released his new book, Black Ops: The life of a CIA Shadow warrior to critical acclaim. The New York Times bestselling memoir documents Ric’s unique history of operating behind enemy lines while offering a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam era.

Ric: The book has been very successful. We have sold over 65,000 units since it came out a year ago, a little over a year ago. And that’s been an inordinate amount of work for me. It’s taken a lot of time, efforts like this to educate and also promote the book, but I am about as retired as it gets. Two years. While I was writing the book, I was co-owner of a company called CampX, and we were teaching tradecraft, for lack of better word, combat tradecraft, to our military.

Ric: We only taught soft guys. We had AFSA guys, we had Raiders, we had Green Berets, Seals come through the training. And it was that transition of how you go now from being in civilian clothes with a concealed weapon that cannot be seen, and you are doing trade craft to go find a target that you will eventually be able to action on. So I did that for two or three years. It was a lot of fun because it was a lot of range time and a lot of the martial aspects of things.

Ric: But, you know, after the book is my last firefight, I want to spend more time with my family. I want to spend more time with my two grandkids. I want to spoil the hell out of them, and I want to ride my horse and I want to ride my motorcycle, and I want to treat my wife to a little bit more. US. Travel I’ve sworn off overseas travel, so I’m pretty retired. I’m pretty retired. There’s still a couple of things that the military will come out and ask me to help with, but that’s maybe 15 days, 20 days a year kind of stuff.

Chris: In the last decade, several military style training camps have opened, teaching Navy Seal style tactics to civilians and offering what students hope will be an eye opening experience that will lead to greater personal security. Ric offers his perspective on this type of tactical training.

Ric: I’m a second Amendment guy. I honestly believe in that right. But like, with any right comes responsibility. I wish that the gun laws were easier, but that training and certification be more a requirement.

Ric: We have the right to drive a car, but to drive a car, you have to have a driver’s license, you have to go through a test and you have to show proficiency. And I will tell you, I’ve been blessed with never having an accident in, in training. But I’ve been in, in gun places, you know, ranges where I have literally looked left and right. I’ve packed my stuff and I left. Because you have people out there that are just being clowns with, with guns. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Chris: Gun related deaths have increased steadily year over year in the US. With over 40 states reporting more gun deaths than vehicular deaths in 2022 alone. Ric believes responsible training can help curtail the number of incidents.

Ric: The same with the car. Just the way I get angry when I see somebody running a red light in a truck without the consequences of because I’ve seen it as a paramedic. I saw the consequences of those kind of things. So every man and every woman has a right to train and be able to defend themselves. I believe as much as I work with police officers, I love them. We sympathize because we have similar professions in the sense that people don’t want to see us even when they need us.

Ric: But you cannot carry a cop with you everywhere you go. You have to be able to take care of yourself. You have to be able to secure your own family, your own house and your own life guarded and teach your kids and your spouses to do so, to do same. And for that, I’m all about it. When we get into these real paramilitary training things where guys are learning patrolling and bushing ambushes and shooting something at 2000 yards or whatever, again, I’m a hunter. I’ve never shot anything longer. Than 250 yards.

Ric: I’m not going to go chase it in the woods if I wound it. So I’m not going to find them. So I think that there is a line that can be crossed where a lot of the people but I think it’s a minority. The average American that is looking at gun safety and gun training is looking for self protection. Not because they want to be Rambo. As a civilian at the age of 57 or something, you have the responsibility to take care of your family.

Ric: But the only way that you’re going to make that happen is to go through the proper training. And it ain’t just a two hour lecture at the gun shop before they hand you your first gun.

Chris: It’s obvious Ric is no stranger to handling a weapon, but his choice for a personal carry may shock some of our listeners.

Ric: Well, I’m about to piss off a lot of my friends because we’ve been Glock guys since ever. The agency went to the Glock in the early 90s. DEA went through them a little before we did. That’s the first time I was exposed to a plastic gun. So I’ve been a Glock guy for a very long time. I have a very nice 2019. I mean, I have a 17 by my night table with a light. But as of the last six months, I have picked up a couple of Sigs because Sigs have come out with two guns that really fill my need for concealed carry.

Ric: I’m real strict about concealed carry. Not just doing it, but really concealing. And this is one of the things we had trouble with our military guys because they would come in with a Glock 19 and a T shirt over and they consider that concealed. Well that’s okay in the States because if you have a permit, you may get away with it, but if you’re operating overseas and some policeman sees you, guess what’s going to happen?

Ric: You’re compromised. So the SIG has the 365 series. I have the small one, which is my shorts and flip flop and t shirts that I wear. It accepts the mag for my bigger gun, which is the 365 X Macro which is a nine millimeter compensated factory, compensated with 15 round magazines. Sorry, 17 round magazines. So you have the firepower and magazines are interchangeable. So if I want to carry my little one as a backup, I have 17 on my main, I have 17 on my hip and I have another twelve in my ankle or in my crotch or wherever I have the other gun.

Ric: So yeah, I’ve jumped the fence towards Sigs. I love them. I love these too. I mean the other ones that they had the double action to single action stuff, I never appreciated that. But I still have my Glocks. There’s a 48 right here in this drawer. There’s a 26 by my TV stand and a 17 on my night table.

Chris: The proper usage of a handgun is crucial to effective security. Knowing what you’re comfortable with can make all the difference in a life or death situation.

Ric: Shot placement is everything. A 45 in the hand doesn’t do the damage that a 22 does in the eyeball. I could see the argument 1015 years ago, but ammunition has come such a long ways. And let’s face it, the lethality of a handgun is always going to be marginal compared to a rifle. There’s a math that says, look, 70% of the people that get shot with a handgun live. 70% of the people that get shot with a rifle die.

Ric: So the caliber argument, I’m a nine millimeter guy mainly because that’s what I train with and it’s what’s available worldwide. 45, all that stuff. You can’t find that overseas. So I’m a firm nine millimeter guy and yeah, I have a 45, but it’s more of a collector’s thing than anything else.

Chris: Now for the fun part, Ric’s seen the world, used up most of his nine lives and has rubbed elbows with some of the planet’s scariest villains. So what’s his drink to unwind from.

Ric: It all, I do like bourbon. I’ve had Pappy Van Winkle, which of course is supposed to be the epitome of, but if you can afford that, good on you. But I actually just tasted one that is coming out soon and it’s called Four branches. And it’s four branches because it’s four former military guys. One’s a PJ, one’s a guy who did he was an Air Force police guy, but he did 20 some years he was in the DCI and CIA’s DCI detail and they’ve come up with this bourbon. I’ve had the honor of testing the trial of it.

Ric: It is really smooth. What I find is that the average bourbon has a burn to it. A refined bourbon doesn’t have the taste, but it doesn’t give you a heartburn before it ever gets to your stomach kind of stuff. And I’m enjoying the hell out of that one. But yeah, I mean, I had one a couple of days ago at the FOP Fraternal Order of Police. I’m a full member here. They had open bar and cigar event. And I went to the bartender, I said, what do you recommend on bourbon? And she said, “The bullet” I said let’s have it.

Ric: You know what? That was damn good. Also. That was very good. I enjoyed it.

Chris: And as he man about the world, Ric’s visited his share of high and low cocktail and dining establishments. After all, one has to eat and drink, obviously.

Ric: I love East Asia. Thai Thailand is my favorite country in East Asia. Japan was because of the cultural stuff and the martial arts. But I think the most exotic bar, or the coolest one that pops to mind, this was a Vietnam. This is in the 90s. I’d flown to Hanoi and then from there I went to Cambodia. And the chief of station there was a friend of mine and she took me to this restaurant bar right on the Mekong River.

Ric: We had a balcony overlooking and these guys are dressed to the nines. Coming over with a nice handkerchief and they had every booze known to man. All the McAllen, eighteen S, and you name it but just the ambience. It was like the French experience in a third world country. By an incredible view and incredible service. That was my most memorable bar by far. That and the Babylon Bar in Iraq. That was the agency’s bar in Iraq. It’s called Babylon.

Chris: BarCode is a virtual cybersecurity bar serving up the finest stories and recipes that you can find. So it’s only natural that we find out just what Ric would call his own bar.

Ric: Ric’s cafe man from Casablanca. What else could it be? Or call it Casablanca. With Ric’s Cafe in it. It’s hard to beat Humphrey Bogart. I might have a new career.

Chris: To hear more about Ric Prado’s life or death clandestine operations around the world pick up his new book, Black Ops The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior. You’ll probably want to pour yourself a nice glass of bourbon before you dive in. It’s a wild one.