OPINION:
One of the great regrets of my decadeslong CIA career is that I never had the honor of serving under the legendary CIA senior clandestine services officer Ric Prado.
I made my way into the agency’s counterterrorism mission — where Mr. Prado made his mark as a creative and courageous paramilitary officer — a few years after he rang down the curtain on his stellar career.
Having grown up in Cuba and escaped with his family to the U.S. following Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution, Mr. Prado dedicated his life to defending the principles of freedom, liberty and democracy enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
As he recounted in his 2022 autobiography, “Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior,” the Castro regime confiscated his family’s business and designated Mr. Prado, then just 10 years old, for indoctrination in the Soviet Union. Instead, Mr. Prado’s father, who never took a welfare check, settled his family in Miami to embrace the freedom of opportunity denied them in Castro’s Cuba.
Mr. Prado’s life story is about serving his country, often at great personal risk.
After serving in the Air Force as a Special Forces pararescue jumper, in the Miami-Dade Fire Department and in the National Guard, he embarked on a remarkable career at the CIA. In his first tour of duty in the early 1980s, he had the distinction of being the only CIA officer allowed into the camps where the agency was training Contra insurgents to fight the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
“Embracing the suck” of living in the jungle where the enemies were “communists and communism,” Mr. Prado spent some 14 months teaching the fledgling rebel fighting force to use mortars and conduct hit-and-run raids.
Even at this early stage in his career, Mr. Prado embodied what today’s CIA leaders seek in new recruits: “We look for commonsense problem-solvers,” CIA Deputy Director of Operations Dave Marlowe noted in a recent fireside chat at Vanderbilt University, candidates “who can take your thinking and apply it in real-world situations, often on their own, and make significant decisions of great importance.”
Although it was the clash with a communist regime in Latin America that kicked off his CIA career, Mr. Prado went on to serve in the Philippines as a senior manager on North Korean operations and at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.
Then came a particularly dangerous overseas deployment in Africa to a contested space where every major Islamic terrorist group, including Hezbollah and al Qaeda, had fielded operatives.
On Sept. 11, 2001, when the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil turbocharged the CIA’s mission, Mr. Prado was serving as chief of operations in the Counterterrorism Center.
CTC officials would work around the clock tracking and disrupting global terrorist threats, while partnering with the U.S. military to launch Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Mr. Prado retired in 2002 after a 25-year CIA career, a career in which he said that he “helped crush the ideology that took everything” from his family.
Mr. Prado’s legacy continues to resonate decades later. He was present at the creation, as they say, taking the lead in the battle against al Qaeda and other transnational actors who had shattered the American homeland’s long record of invulnerability to threats from hostile forces abroad.
Mr. Prado also conveyed to the multitude of CIA officers in his command that intelligence is key to an effective counterterrorism strategy, that it’s all about interpreting signs, picking up on warnings, and preempting threats before they can be visited on our shores.
We must, in Mr. Prado’s words, “take the fight to the enemy on their turf, wherever that turf may be.”
In the decades after 9/11, CIA counterterrorism officers have followed in Mr. Prado’s footsteps, serving on the front lines, recruiting spies and stealing secrets. The best excel in the same sort of crucible that formed Mr. Prado, making him one of the agency’s finest leaders of his generation.
While we celebrate this Fourth of July with fireworks, parades and family barbecues, it’s worth remembering President Ronald Reagan’s eloquent words, which reflect Mr. Prado’s commitment to service above self:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.”
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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