The Truth About CIA Hit Teams, Black Ops & Covert Action | Ric Prado (throwback)

Ric Prado (0:00)

Hi, everyone.

Jack Murphy (0:01)

Welcome to The Team House. This is episode 145, I believe. Yes, episode 145 I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. I'm back after my little stay in quarantine last week. But JC and his boys didn't want me quite yet, so I'm back. And we are here. We're very happy to be here tonight with our guest, Ric Prado. He is the author of Black Ops, The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior.

He started off kind of an interesting entry into the Central Intelligence Agency coming from being an Air Force Pararescueman, and then a paramilitary guy, and then rising to be the CTC Chief of Operations.

So a very interesting career. I really enjoyed this book. And Ric, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Ric Prado (0:49)

Thank you for having me, guys.

Jack Murphy (0:51)

Absolutely, man. And I was wondering, you know, as we ask all of our guests about their origin story and kind of their upbringing and where they came from. And you, like several of the other guests we've had on the show, are Cuban-American. And that experience and that immigration experience, I think had a really profound effect on you as a person, as a man.

Could you tell us about that, about your family and how you came to America?

Ric Prado (1:15)

Yeah, I'll be honored to. I was about seven or eight years old when the revolution was peaking. I lived in a town near the mountains where Che Guevara supposedly was operating in. And so at that age, I actually saw firefights right in front of my house, literally one guy that was on the other side of the window. And I was looking through the window to see what was going on. So I saw what war does very early on. But what was really sobering for us was how quickly, once Castro took over, that socialist mass came off. And it was full communism pretty much off the bat. Confiscation of properties, persecution of the opposition. I remember being barely 90 years old, 8 1 1 2 1 2 years old, and being told that I had to go to the fields and tutor farmers on how to read and write. And I'm 8 years old. But I was in uniform. And in school, we were in uniform. They inculcated. If you hear your parents say anything bad about the revolution, you got to turn them in. So it was a very toxic environment that even for a nine-year-old, I could understand and feel that this was so different to what I grew up with. My father, who was always a very decisive man and my first hero, he made up his mind and says, we're leaving. Unfortunately, he couldn't get out, my mom couldn't get out. I was able to get out through a program called Peter Pan Program. The Peter Pan Program was sponsored by the Catholic Church.

During the two years that it ran, they brought out 14,000 plus kids whose parents could not come out. In early April of 1962, I came to the United States by myself.

Ten days later, two weeks later, I was in an orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado, the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado.

That in itself was also an experience.

It's funny, guys, a lot of people go, oh my God, you were so little, you had to go through this so much. And I'm amazed that I was not as shook as I should have been perhaps. But I always remember more than anything else, and this is part of my impetus for things that I have done in life is the courage of my parents to put an only child on an airplane to a country that never been into, and may not even be able to visit. Not for economic reasons, we were middle class in Cuba, but for freedom. My dad had that innate passion for freedom, and his only child was not going to grow up in a communist country.

Jack Murphy (4:12)

Yeah, they loved you so much, they're willing to roll the dice like that with their boy.

Ric Prado (4:17)

Yeah, when our oldest son was 10, I asked my wife, I think, do you think that we would have the courage to do same?

We both agreed that you never know how you're going to react until you really do it. So it's a very tough decision. But at the same time, it was a hell of a lesson for me because that's the ultimate price that a parent can pay for the freedom of a child.

David Parke (4:45)

Right.

Ric Prado (4:46)

Letting them go.