0:00
(upbeat music)
0:02
- This is Undaunted Life Man's podcast.
0:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:22
Let's get into it.
0:23
All right guys, today we got a special guest
0:25
on the podcast.
0:26
His name is Rick Prado.
0:27
So this man had a legendary 24-year career
0:29
in the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
0:31
His career actually spanned two of the most important eras
0:34
in the history of intelligence.
0:36
And that's the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism.
0:38
He's right in the thick of all of that.
0:40
So Prado received a CIA distinguished career intelligence
0:43
medal, that's the highest award given
0:44
upon retirement from that community.
0:46
And also the George H.W. Bush Award
0:48
for Excellence in Counterterrorism among other awards.
0:50
So he is a paramilitary counter-terrorism
0:52
and special clandestine operation specialist and expert.
0:55
And he served as an operations officer
0:57
in six overseas posts.
0:58
He's literally served all over the planet.
1:01
Also, when he left public service,
1:02
Prado worked as an executive
1:04
at a private military contractor
1:05
where he built and specialized operations team
1:07
is really awesome, he talks about it.
1:08
And also, he is currently the co-owner of Camp X Training
1:11
where he continues his service training
1:13
and supporting the SpecOps community,
1:15
teaching advanced special operations and techniques
1:17
among other essential skills.
1:19
But he's also the author of a book.
1:20
And this is how he got on my radar.
1:22
The book is called Black Ops,
1:24
The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior.
1:26
And so whenever this book was pitched to me,
1:28
I was like, this is kind of unique.
1:29
I'd never knowingly talk to somebody from the CIA
1:31
and that type of thing.
1:32
Certainly not someone that had a legendary career.
1:34
But the thing that makes this book even more incredible
1:36
is the fact that he is actually the first covert operator
1:40
of any major rank to pin a fully operational memoir
1:45
in the history of the CIA, right?
1:47
So it just kind of give you a little bit of context.
1:49
He retired as the equivalent
1:51
of a two-star general in the military.
1:53
So that's what he was at the CIA.
1:55
This book has so much detail
1:56
and it's really impossible to go over all of that detail
1:59
here in this show.
2:00
But we do get into the fact that he grew up in Cuba.
2:02
So he grew up in Cuba during the Castro Revolution.
2:05
Like his parents kind of smuggled him out of the country
2:07
and then they reunited in the United States.
2:09
So we get into a lot of that
2:10
and kind of how his family had a deep and abiding respect
2:13
for the United States of America
2:14
and felt like we got to do something to honor this.
2:17
Like we have a debt to this country.
2:18
And so he goes in the military
2:20
and then he ends up at the CIA.
2:21
We go into all that.
2:22
And then he was right in the middle
2:23
of the Iran Contra scandal.
2:24
He was on the ground in Central America
2:26
kind of dealing with all of that for several years.
2:29
We get into Osama Bin Laden
2:30
and the fact that the agency knew about him in the 90s.
2:33
And yet we didn't take him out
2:34
and kind of what that's done for the country.
2:36
And we get into all of that.
2:37
We talk about his career spanning the Cold War
2:39
and the age of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism
2:42
and all that ideologies.
2:43
We talk about how he got out of the agency,
2:45
what he misses about the agency.
2:46
Some misconceptions that people have about what spies are
2:49
and what the intelligence community does.
2:51
And you know, how he's able to write a book like this.
2:53
But then we get into stuff that's outside the book
2:55
like his thoughts on, you know,
2:56
are pulled out from Afghanistan.
2:58
What's currently happening with Ukraine,
2:59
what happens when the United States is weak
3:01
on the international stage with countries like Iran
3:03
and China and North Korea and all those different things.
3:06
Then we get into something that was crazy.
3:08
Because several points in the book,
3:09
he talks about sleeper cells in the United States,
3:11
essentially known entities in the United States right now
3:14
that we know want to kill dozens and dozens,
3:16
if not hundreds, if not thousands of Americans.
3:18
And we know these people and yet we don't do anything about them.
3:20
We talk about the crisis at the Southern border.
3:21
We talk about Latinos trending towards the Republican party.
3:24
But if you stick with us all the way to the end,
3:25
I know it's a long intro,
3:26
but if you stick with us all the way to the end,
3:28
this guy's a man of faith.
3:30
He's a Christ follower.
3:31
And so I ask him, basically, how can you do that
3:35
and do the job that you do?
3:37
How can you be a Christian and do the job that you do?
3:40
A job that may require you to spill blood
3:42
and to steal things and to lie and all those different things.
3:45
He had a very interesting answer to that.
3:46
So you're going to have to stick around to the end
3:48
to get that answer.
3:49
But guys, I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
3:51
This is a great, great interview.
3:52
So without further ado, let's get into it.
3:55
Rick Prado, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
3:58
- Thank you for having me.
3:59
- Hey.
4:00
- This is a one that I've really been looking forward to
4:03
because when this was pitched to me,
4:04
I was like, I don't think I've ever knowingly talked
4:06
to somebody that was in the CIA before.
4:09
And so like that's going to at least be a unique experience
4:11
for me and the stuff that we're doing.
4:13
But a lot of the stuff that we're going to be talking about
4:14
today has to do with the book that you wrote
4:16
called Black Ops.
4:17
And we're going to really talk about a lot of things
4:20
from this book, it's a very unique thing that you did that.
4:22
And we'll wait till the end to kind of talk about,
4:24
you know, why you're one of the first people
4:25
of your ilk to really do that.
4:27
But as I gleaned from the book, you grew up in Cuba.
4:30
And so there's not a whole lot of people that I know personally
4:33
that have done that I know a handful.
4:34
But it was interesting, the timing,
4:36
you were just a child in Cuba during the Castro Revolution.
4:40
And so even people that grew up in Cuba,
4:41
maybe they were there after the revolution
4:43
or something like that.
4:44
So as a generic place to start, let's just start there.
4:46
What do you remember about that time growing up in Cuba
4:50
and kind of what was going on there
4:51
with all the consternation with the revolution?
4:54
- You know, my father, who lived with me
4:57
for the last five years of his life, was amazed
4:59
at how much I remember about those times.
5:02
And I explained to him, said,
5:04
"Dad, you gotta understand these were unforgettable times.
5:06
It's not like I went to kindergarten
5:08
or I went to finally remember any of that crap."
5:10
But, you know, we actually, we lived in the,
5:15
I'm sorry, we lived just below the Eskenbri Mountains.
5:20
Which is where Chegevara had his domain with the rebels.
5:24
So my town being a fairly sized town
5:27
but at the foothills was often raided.
5:30
So I literally saw my first firefight outside my window
5:34
two feet away when I was seven years old.
5:37
It was my first exposure to the violence of combat.
5:42
There was a guy underneath the window that I didn't see
5:46
when I was looking mesmerized.
5:48
And he let off two complete magazines
5:53
of automatic weapons and I'm just standing there.
5:56
But what really, really captures
5:59
and what is tattooed in my brain is what happened
6:02
shortly after Castro took over.
6:04
First of all, you know, he was suspected
6:08
of being a socialist.
6:09
- Yeah.
6:10
- Well, people don't understand often
6:11
that socialism is just a mask for communism to wear.
6:15
- Obviously, yeah.
6:16
He took that mask off almost immediately.
6:19
So you figure within six months after taking power,
6:22
he started, well, the persecution started immediately.
6:26
Anybody from the opposition,
6:28
anybody who had former links to Batista,
6:30
the confiscation of property was across the board.
6:36
My dad owned a small coffee roasting company
6:39
during the season he employed 10 guys.
6:41
So he was not exactly your capitalist.
6:43
That was taken over.
6:45
So just seeing all of a sudden,
6:48
I'm wearing a little uniform.
6:50
Our churches are shut down.
6:52
Our priests are not allowed to go to church.
6:56
They were praying at school for Castro, not to God.
7:01
Break a Castro.
7:02
So we are now wearing these little military like uniforms.
7:07
And at the age of nine,
7:10
'cause when he took over, I was just about eight years old,
7:13
nine years old, I would, me and my class,
7:17
would have to go out on the field
7:20
and teach the campesinos how to read and write.
7:24
Now you tell me how a nine year old
7:26
is gonna teach anybody, especially a campeso,
7:28
you know how to read and write.
7:30
- Right.
7:30
- Oh, the irony of it was it was just ridiculous.
7:34
But the persecutions and the abuses were so evident.
7:40
And when my dad decided that we didn't,
7:42
he said we're leaving, we gotta get out of this.
7:46
I'm an only child and he didn't want his only child
7:49
to grow under communism.
7:50
So we moved to Havana to do the process.
7:53
And the first day that we drove into Havana,
7:56
I looked to my right, I was in the backseat
7:58
of my dad's 57 Pontiac.
8:00
And there were three men hanging from trees
8:03
and telephone poles.
8:05
All of them had signs hanging from their necks
8:07
that said counter-revolutionaries.
8:11
My poor mom tried to jump over the backseat
8:14
to block my vision, but that's, believe me,
8:18
that's inked in here.
8:19
That further exacerbated, you know, the need to get out.
8:24
My parents could not get out initially
8:26
because they were still divvying up
8:29
their modest properties back home.
8:31
That's absolutely the word of work.
8:33
So my dad was able to find the program called Peter Pan.
8:38
Peter Pan was a program created by the Catholic Church
8:43
to get kids out of Cuba whose parents could not leave.
8:48
They wanted to leave with you.
8:49
So at the age of 10, being the little man of the house,
8:56
my dad was very good about always teaching me about,
9:00
you know, what does a man do?
9:01
What does a man stand for?
9:03
God, country, family, that kind of stuff.
9:06
And it takes me through the airport
9:08
to go on a plane by myself to Cuba.
9:12
And I will tell you, I will never forget that moment
9:16
'cause my mom was crying.
9:18
I mean, she was really, really crying.
9:20
And my dad says, I don't remember saying it,
9:23
but my dad says that I told her,
9:24
if you don't stop crying, I'm not going.
9:26
And he told me that, you know,
9:30
seven years ago before he passed.
9:32
And there was this glass divider.
9:35
They called it the, the, the fishbowl la pessera.
9:39
Because once you got passed there,
9:40
the parents had to stay behind.
9:42
And I remember turning around.
9:43
I had a little dark suit on and tied.
9:45
I remember turning around and watching my mom balling
9:49
in my dad biting his lip.
9:51
- Yeah. I mean, just, when I read that part of the story,
9:54
'cause obviously you're flying to the United States alone
9:56
and we'll get more into that here in a second.
9:57
But at that age, you had to have known
10:00
there was something that was broken.
10:02
'Cause some people grow up, like if you,
10:03
if you were born in North Korea,
10:05
it's like that's just, that's your world.
10:06
You don't really know that there's something different
10:08
than that plight and that level of suffering,
10:11
especially whenever you live in a Western country
10:12
or do something like that.
10:13
But before we get into your transition to the United States
10:16
and how that kind of affected your family and all that,
10:19
I want to know what you think growing up during the revolution.
10:22
And you said it perfectly.
10:23
Socialism is just a pretty mask that that's the candy.
10:27
That's the honey that attracts idiots.
10:28
That ends up getting them stuck in communism.
10:31
But what do you think about when, you know,
10:33
then President Barack Obama went to Cuba
10:36
and made nice with the Castro's going to a baseball game
10:38
and US college students worshiping guys like Che Guevara
10:41
and wearing his shirt and getting his tattoo
10:44
of his face on their forearm
10:45
and just Americans being attracted to communism
10:48
or Marxism or socialism overall.
10:50
Like I know that Cubans, especially Cuban Americans
10:53
have a tremendous opinion about that
10:56
because you've actually seen it.
10:58
You're not just reading about it in textbooks
11:00
from a time gone by, but what do you think about that?
11:03
- Well, you know, part of the problem
11:04
that we have in this country,
11:06
we have taken God out of everything.
11:08
We have taken loyalty to country out of everything.
11:13
But the worst is the fact that we as Americans
11:17
do not know how good we have it in this country.
11:20
We have nothing to compare it with.
11:22
When my oldest son was like 11,
11:25
well, actually nine or 10,
11:27
when we came back from one of our overseas tours,
11:29
it was the first time he was going to go to school
11:31
in the United States.
11:33
And I remember that when we went to church
11:36
that Sunday morning,
11:37
I took the envelope and passed it to my oldest son.
11:40
And he says, "What's this for?"
11:42
I go, "Alex, you're the oldest.
11:44
You've always gotten the envelope.
11:45
This is for poor people."
11:46
He looks at me, he says, "There's no poor people here.
11:48
We live in Northern Virginia."
11:50
- Yeah.
11:51
- Here you have a kid that knows
11:53
that when we walked out of church in the Philippines
11:56
or in Latin American countries,
11:58
but especially in the Philippines,
12:00
there were mothers lined up that were amputees
12:04
with defective kids.
12:06
And my wife would literally have a bag
12:08
full of clothing and food and stuff like that
12:11
when we came out of church
12:12
and she would pass that out.
12:14
So we don't know.
12:15
We don't have anything to compare it with.
12:18
And it scares me.
12:19
I'm 71 years old.
12:21
So, you know, if they're gonna come after me,
12:22
bring three 'cause I'm taking two with me, right?
12:24
- Right.
12:26
- But the bottom line is I do have sons,
12:28
both my sons are military in service
12:31
and my daughter is a schoolteacher.
12:33
So they're all in service.
12:35
And I have grandkids and I worry about this tendency
12:40
to go so far left.
12:43
I mean, there's always been a rightish
12:45
and a leftish in this country,
12:47
but this is very radical.
12:48
And it really scares my whole family.
12:52
- Well, that's the one thing that I feel like
12:53
and a lot of people said this maybe about every generation,
12:56
but it's like every generation of kids think
12:57
the world started when they were born.
12:59
And it's like everything that happened back then
13:01
was just kind of back then
13:02
and there's nothing we can learn from it.
13:04
And so that's the thing for me now,
13:05
I have two kids below the age of two right now.
13:08
And I'm thinking about what type of a country
13:10
am I gonna raise them up in?
13:11
And I was just thinking about the 4th of July here recently.
13:13
Like, yes, there's hot dogs and baseball
13:15
and apple pie and all that stuff.
13:16
But I wanna make sure my kids are getting
13:18
a tremendously accurate representation
13:21
and historical understanding of the United States of America
13:23
in comparison to the rest of the world.
13:25
Because most of these kids don't have the foggiest,
13:27
idea what that was like.
13:28
And neither did you, when you came to the US,
13:31
so let's kind of go back there.
13:32
You come to the US alone, you're part of this program
13:35
that kind of gets you out of the plight
13:36
of what's going on in Cuba,
13:37
but you do eventually reunite with your family.
13:40
So take us back through that.
13:42
- So yeah, it's funny as well and clear
13:45
as I remember getting into the fishbowl
13:47
and seeing my parents.
13:49
When I turned around, everything else is black.
13:53
I have no recollection of getting on the aircraft,
13:56
where in the aircraft I sat, when we landed,
13:59
only when we'd be playing
14:00
and we were coming into the terminal in Miami
14:04
and there was a priest with a sign.
14:06
That's the first thing that I remember
14:09
from the fishbowl to that, everything else is blacked out.
14:14
So my point is, no matter how calm I look,
14:17
I appeared on the outside because of my dad's tutoring,
14:20
I was in shock, I was littering shock
14:23
and now that I've been through it
14:24
in my more kinetic experiences,
14:28
total vision, auditory exclusion,
14:30
all the stuff that really happens,
14:31
I had it at the age of 10 going on this flight
14:34
and so did 14,000 other Cuban kids, by the way.
14:37
That's how many people came out
14:38
through the Catholic church.
14:40
So we went to Florida City,
14:43
which was one of the three camps
14:44
that they were in in South Florida.
14:46
And two weeks later,
14:47
I was sent to a Catholic war finish in public Colorado.
14:51
And of course, the second time on a plane,
14:54
now I'm in a big plane and going to a place
14:58
where when we land, there's actually mountains
15:00
that are snow-capped, landed in Denver
15:04
and drove down to Pueblo.
15:06
And I remember that very clearly,
15:09
they'd get into the orphanage.
15:11
The orphanage had a lot of good and some inherent bad.
15:15
I visited the orphanage a few years ago
15:20
or what was the orphanage.
15:21
Now it's a public home kind of stuff.
15:23
And a lot of the people that came out,
15:25
when I started talking with them,
15:27
were asking me, well, what was the treatment like?
15:29
I hear that the treatment here was awful,
15:31
that I said, nothing could be further from the truth.
15:34
I was never abused.
15:35
I was never, you know, the nuns were straight.
15:38
I mean, you have to have, when you have hundreds of kids
15:41
of four or five different racist cultures and creeds,
15:45
all orphans in a confined space, you know,
15:50
discipline is a must.
15:51
So I had no complaints about the way we were treated
15:55
at the orphanage, but what was rough was one, the isolation,
15:59
because obviously, no matter what,
16:01
I turn 11 at the orphanage, I'm an 11 year old,
16:05
thousands of miles away from his parents
16:08
for the first time ever in his life.
16:10
- Right.
16:11
- But what was rough was, there was a lot of fighting,
16:14
there was a lot of violence, because again,
16:16
you have a lot of frustrated kids,
16:17
you have a lot of disappointed kids,
16:19
you could hear some of the kids crying a night.
16:22
So that was another stealing experience.
16:27
And you know, if you look at, and you've read the book,
16:29
but if you look at my life,
16:31
I believe that God puts us certain paths in front of us.
16:36
And if we have the conviction and the fortitude
16:39
to follow the main path, he will help you along the way.
16:44
He will mold you along the way.
16:46
And because it's your path, it's never too hard,
16:50
'cause he will never give you anything too hard
16:52
that you can manage.
16:53
So from the revolution, to the travel to the United States,
16:58
to the rough environment in the orphanage,
17:03
these were all processes for my metal being forged.
17:08
- Right.
17:09
- I was blessed with the fact that my parents came out
17:11
a little over eight months later.
17:14
There were kids there that their parents never came.
17:17
Others that waited two or three years
17:19
before their parents came.
17:21
But you know, where we were middle class in Cuba,
17:23
we had a television, a telephone,
17:26
and my dad had a 57 Pontiac and a Jeep
17:28
and a two and a half truck for this business.
17:31
And all of a sudden, it's six of us
17:34
living in a one bedroom efficiency
17:36
in a real bad pair apart of town.
17:38
It was my aunt, my two cousins who were two and five.
17:43
My mom and dad and myself in an efficiency
17:47
was probably the size of my office.
17:48
My dad worked in two jobs.
17:51
He started loading trucks and mowing lawns.
17:53
My mom in a sweatshop for well over a decade,
17:57
sewing in Miami heat.
18:00
But you know what?
18:02
My dad never complained.
18:03
My dad never took a welfare check.
18:05
And soon thereafter, we started building the American dream.
18:12
My dad worked two jobs for as long as I can remember
18:15
he was a carpenter, he was a craftsman actually,
18:17
not just a carpenter, he was a craftsman.
18:19
And a few years later, I think it was around 66 or so.
18:24
So three or four years after being in country,
18:26
we bought a little house.
18:28
My dad bought a little house in Hailea
18:30
for a whopping $12,000.
18:32
And that was the beginning of the American dream.
18:36
- I think that's so awesome that you described it that way.
18:39
And as I was reading through the book,
18:41
there were a bunch of little quotes
18:42
that I made sure to underline
18:43
and then they just kept being more and more of them.
18:45
So these are all quotes from the book here.
18:47
And we knew we were blessed to be in America.
18:49
My dad never took a welfare check.
18:51
As my parents battled their way up the economic ladder,
18:53
they encountered that racism too.
18:55
But you know, you didn't define yourselves by that.
18:57
Another quote here, "They, your parents,
18:59
"became ardent patriots who never miss voting in an election."
19:02
Also, we may have had things rough since coming to Florida,
19:06
but this country gave us every opportunity to succeed.
19:09
And the last one I'll read here is this,
19:10
we were starting to live the American dream.
19:12
You work hard, you get to enjoy the fruit of your labor.
19:14
Now, I've got some breaking news for you, Rick.
19:17
I've been reliably informed that if you are a POC
19:20
in this country, a person of color,
19:22
that the white supremacist system will not allow you to succeed.
19:25
We will hold you down like,
19:26
and somehow I'm a part of this cabal as well
19:29
because I was born looking like this
19:30
and you were born looking like that.
19:32
And yet, here you are coming to this country
19:35
in the craziest of circumstances.
19:37
You started at the bottom 'cause that's where you had to start,
19:40
but then y'all didn't lament it.
19:42
Like, I don't get the sense that you and your mom
19:44
and dad were all together complaining about your plight.
19:47
I mean, you're an only child,
19:48
like it would have been very easy just to navel gaze
19:50
and be like, oh, this country hates us,
19:52
the world hates us, God hates us, that type of thing.
19:54
But y'all took the opportunity and ran with it,
19:56
but that's not a common refrain right now.
19:58
You know what I mean?
19:59
- Unfortunately, it isn't.
20:01
And I think it was probably, you know,
20:03
in my era was a little bit of a prominent,
20:05
but you know, even to a child,
20:07
freedom is palpable.
20:10
The freedom of speech, the freedom of practicing your religion,
20:14
the freedom of, you know,
20:16
when you have institutions telling you in school
20:19
that if your parents say anything against the revolution,
20:21
you have to report it.
20:23
They're going after that main fiber,
20:25
which is the family,
20:26
which is one of the problems we have here also,
20:28
divided families.
20:30
But absolutely my dad from the day he set foot in here
20:34
and as soon as he found a job,
20:36
people would ask him,
20:38
"Well, when Castro falls, you're gonna go to Cuba."
20:41
He goes, "Nope."
20:42
He goes, "We're staying."
20:43
He says, "I want my son to grow up in this,"
20:46
'cause I don't know what that's gonna be,
20:48
come back in the island.
20:49
How many years is gonna be?
20:52
He says, "We're not going anywhere."
20:53
And like you said, my dad and my mom
20:55
never missed an election.
20:56
We became residents and the minimum allotted time
21:00
and the same thing with citizenship.
21:03
It was around that time that I grew a conscience.
21:06
This is where as a teenager,
21:09
graduating from high school in 1970,
21:12
all of a sudden it was one of these Eureka moments
21:14
that I went, "I have a charmed life.
21:17
I have a car.
21:18
I have parents.
21:20
I have food on the table.
21:21
I can do pretty much what I want."
21:24
And it's funny because a lot of people say,
21:28
"Oh, poor Rick, he went through so much."
21:31
It was my parents.
21:32
The people that really paid the price
21:34
of my admission was my parents.
21:37
So I did what any stupid 19-year-old kid would do,
21:42
even though my draft number was astronomical
21:46
and my parents were celebrating
21:47
that I was never gonna be called.
21:49
I literally enlisted in a special operations unit
21:53
called Para Rescue out of the United States Air Force.
21:56
And of course, my mom fainted.
21:58
My dad wanted to stalk me.
22:00
It was pretty dramatic afternoon in my house.
22:03
But it was a debt of honor.
22:06
I honestly became aware
22:09
that this country is the best in the world,
22:13
but it doesn't come free.
22:16
Everybody's got to do their part.
22:19
And everybody contributes in their own different way.
22:23
We're all wired to do what we're supposed to do.
22:27
But for me, that was very evident.
22:29
And I wanted to go to Vietnam.
22:31
That was the main thing.
22:32
I wanted to serve in Vietnam
22:34
to be able to say I have tried to defend this country.
22:39
- Well, the interesting thing about that,
22:40
and spoiler alert, and guys, by the way,
22:43
the book is gonna be in the show notes.
22:44
We're gonna be skipping over so many incredible stories
22:47
like that we can't possibly make this
22:48
like a 10-hour long podcast.
22:50
So you're gonna have to get it to check it out yourself.
22:51
Don't worry.
22:52
You will be able to find it easily in the show notes.
22:53
But you did barely miss Vietnam,
22:55
but even just back up just a little bit.
22:57
I just wanna kind of say this
22:58
because it's something I think I've said before.
23:00
Some of my favorite people on the planet,
23:01
are second-generation American immigrants.
23:04
Because their parents know what it's like,
23:06
even if they were too young by the time they came here,
23:09
but that's why a lot of these second-generation American
23:12
immigrants do so well in this country
23:14
because they realize, look at all these opportunities
23:16
and they don't buy into this narrative
23:19
about their race or their gender
23:21
or any of these other types of things,
23:22
like holding them down.
23:23
And that's one thing for my sons is like,
23:25
"Look, I'm Irish and Choctaw Indian."
23:27
Like, so regardless of which way you look at my people,
23:30
we weren't the people that were buying people.
23:32
We'll put it that way, right?
23:34
And so like, I don't want my sons to think
23:36
just because of the neighborhood we live in
23:37
or the community that we live in,
23:39
that somehow he grew up on third base.
23:41
I want him to think that he's gotta go up to bat
23:43
with his head screwed on straight.
23:44
And so I just love that attitude.
23:46
But the other cool thing about you kind of skipped over this
23:49
and you spent a lot of time on it in the book,
23:51
you were a knucklehead when you were a teenager.
23:53
I mean, you were just like any other teenager,
23:55
but then you did some kind of street life stuff,
23:58
living in Miami and did a little bit of crime
24:00
and it had some bad decisions that you made
24:03
and some bad luck that befell you.
24:04
But you did make a decision at some point
24:06
that's maybe the conscious that you were talking about
24:09
to where it's like, okay, my parents gave up everything
24:12
to come here and they didn't do that.
24:14
So I could come here and be a complete moron.
24:17
And so I love that you kind of came there
24:19
and you're like, okay, you found this sense of duty.
24:21
And again, we're skipping over a lot of this
24:22
'cause you were in the PJs,
24:23
you did a lot of cool stuff with that.
24:25
But eventually you were attracted to the CIA somehow.
24:28
And so again, you missed Vietnam,
24:31
you kind of put some things in there,
24:32
but I really like how you described it in the book.
24:34
So talk about how you eventually found your way
24:36
into the agency.
24:37
- Well, with the frustrations of not being able
24:41
to go to Vietnam, if you're just jumping and doing scuba
24:44
and shooting every day, without a mission, it really gets old.
24:48
So I applied for the agency in '74.
24:53
And as you know, historically they were not hiring,
24:55
they were firing, that was the,
24:57
the downfall of the agency for quite a while there.
25:01
So I tried again, I think it was late '79, early '80.
25:04
I was still in the reserves.
25:05
I did an 80 years total between active and reserve.
25:09
And this time they said, you know, you are,
25:13
oh, because what happened was as I was in the reserves,
25:15
I went and started writing rescue in Miami Metro Day
25:19
because as a pair of rescue man,
25:20
I'm already an EMT too with experience.
25:22
So then I just ended that up.
25:24
So it was an easy fit.
25:27
So when I applied again in '79 or '80,
25:30
they see what I've been doing to see my background.
25:33
And they said, look, we could use combat medics
25:36
for working with our special activities division.
25:41
Of course, I didn't know what that was at the time.
25:43
- Right.
25:44
- Special activity center is called now.
25:46
But that is the special operations forces for the CIA.
25:50
And it's, they draft strictly from marine raiders,
25:55
green berets, seals, I was the first pair of rescue man,
25:59
but more have followed and a lot of combat
26:02
with controllers are follows.
26:03
So the whole gamut is there,
26:05
but that was special activities division.
26:08
So I worked contract with them for a little bit.
26:10
And then I realized that it wasn't,
26:13
that I was gonna have a job,
26:15
that it wasn't that I was gonna be able to have a job.
26:17
So, you know, I went back to the fire department
26:21
and a few months later, I get a phone call
26:24
from the agency saying, we have something for you.
26:29
And my only question was, you know,
26:32
is it long term or is it short term?
26:34
And they said it's long term.
26:35
And I said, I'm yours.
26:37
My, prayingly what happened was Reagan had taken over.
26:42
Iran had released the hostages.
26:45
Gee, what a coincidence.
26:47
- Yeah.
26:48
- Jimmy Carter couldn't do it,
26:49
but here comes Reagan before he finishes swearing in
26:51
to letting the guys out.
26:54
And Reagan draws a line on the saying
26:56
that he's not gonna let anybody cross
26:57
which is communism in my backyard.
27:00
So he immediately tasked the agency
27:02
for putting a covert action program.
27:04
Covert action program is Black Ops,
27:07
an operation that is not known outside of what you're doing.
27:12
You're hiding the American hand.
27:14
And that's why they needed me because at the time,
27:18
SAD did not have a native Spanish speaking native.
27:22
They have guys who spoke so Spanish, but native Spanish speaking
27:26
that had a paramilitary background that could pull this off.
27:30
So they were, where's that?
27:31
Remember that Cuban kid PJ blah, blah, blah?
27:33
And they put me down and they called me on a Thursday.
27:37
I was in the building on a Monday.
27:39
Two weeks later, I was setting foot in Honduras.
27:42
- Struggling with weight loss?
27:43
Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet
27:45
is a clinically developed nutrition program
27:47
designed to promote fat loss
27:49
while protecting lean body mass.
27:50
Developed at USC's Longevity Institute,
27:53
it assists the body in entering a fasting like state
27:56
that helps reset metabolism and target visceral fat.
27:59
In just five days, Prolon offers a science backed approach
28:02
to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork.
28:04
Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift
28:07
when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/now.
28:10
- Absolutely.
28:11
And we'll get way more into that here in a second
28:13
because you're gonna be able to give some context
28:14
at a lot of folks, especially of some of the younger generation
28:17
that didn't really know any of that stuff happen
28:18
or what's going on.
28:20
But even before we get there,
28:21
I know that when you initially got into the CIA,
28:24
you had some preconceived notions
28:26
about what the CIA was and what spies were
28:28
and what agents were and what they did.
28:30
And now we've got Jason Bourne
28:32
and we've got, at the time you're reading the novels
28:34
about James Bond and you have all these different ideas.
28:37
It wasn't exactly what you thought
28:38
whenever you made your way into the CIA,
28:41
but in a lot of ways you felt like it was way better.
28:43
It was a way better thing.
28:44
It wasn't as Hollywood and it wasn't as sexy,
28:46
but it was way better in your mind.
28:48
So give us an idea as a civilian,
28:51
what it's actually like when you're an agent
28:53
or a spy, if you will, at the CIA
28:55
and then we'll get into some
28:56
of your specific mission work you did.
28:58
- Okay, you know, we're the only federal agents
29:00
that we don't call our guys agents.
29:02
- Okay.
29:03
- We call operations officers or case officers.
29:05
- Okay.
29:06
- And the FBI has agents.
29:07
Agents to us are the people that we recruit
29:10
that provide the information
29:12
that we need to keep our country safe.
29:14
So, you know, there's two main things that the agency does,
29:18
for real.
29:19
One is collection of intelligence.
29:21
Now that is open source, that is through human,
29:23
that it's through signals intelligence
29:26
or human sources, everything.
29:27
The second is covert action.
29:31
And that is under the findings
29:33
that only the president and the White House can sign
29:36
that dictates to the agency what they can and cannot do.
29:42
- Right, perfect example is 70 September,
29:45
George Bush, Jr., sign the lethal finding post-9/11.
29:49
So, what, the bottom line on this though
29:53
is that this is the reason
29:55
that I ended up writing the book
29:58
because I don't want my grandkids
30:01
and more importantly, the grandkids of some of my friends
30:05
who are no longer here,
30:08
that their memories would be tainted
30:12
with the Jason Bourne, you know.
30:15
I often ask people to name me two movies
30:17
that portray the agency in a positive light
30:20
and there's silence.
30:21
Usually there's one poor soul that says Jason Bourne.
30:25
And I say, oh, I'm an Iowa assassin with 17 personalities
30:28
and was being chased by his own government,
30:30
by his own agency because they were doing covert programs
30:32
that the Congress wasn't aware of, right?
30:37
You know, we have 137 stars on our wall and we are a tiny
30:42
operational compartment in the federal government
30:46
in the United States.
30:48
And almost a third of those 137 are post-9/11
30:52
and many of them I knew.
30:54
So that was the catalyst for me.
30:56
So the contrast between what I was reading in James Bond,
30:59
I'm still waiting for my Austin Martin,
31:01
and to what the realities were, you hit a spot on.
31:06
It was better because what they cannot demonstrate
31:09
in movies is the feeling of successfully contributing
31:14
to your country, to your way of thinking, to your faith,
31:18
to everything that you believe in.
31:20
That is priceless.
31:22
That is priceless and I really resent the way
31:26
that my agency's portrayed and more specifically
31:29
because I'm not into organizations, but the people,
31:32
you know, the way that my folks are described
31:35
as usually treacherous, double-dealing, backstabbing,
31:38
and nothing could be further from the truth.
31:41
I work with some of the greatest people I've ever met
31:44
on this earth, many of them are still my inner circle friends.
31:48
So the contrast between what I thought the agency
31:50
was gonna be like to what it was
31:53
wasn't a negative reality in the contrary.
31:56
- Yeah, I think that's amazing to kind of look through
31:58
because again, I don't find myself
32:00
to be a conspiracy theorist person.
32:01
And when I watch Hollywood type stuff,
32:03
even if it's military or kind of spy stuff,
32:05
like I feel myself getting captivated by it.
32:07
And I'm like, well, I had several points reading your book.
32:09
I'm like, I wonder if he's swerving me.
32:11
I wonder if he's still secretly working
32:13
for the government and trying to say like,
32:14
oh, we don't have these things.
32:15
But it's kind of an Occam's razor thing.
32:17
Like the explanation that is, you know, the most probable
32:20
is or I guess the one that has the least amount
32:23
of things dependent upon it.
32:24
Like the simplest explanation is the one
32:26
that's probably the most accurate.
32:28
But to kind of go back, now you're in the CIA,
32:31
but almost immediately, Rick, you find yourself
32:33
on the front lines of the Cold War, right?
32:35
I don't even know if y'all were calling it
32:36
the Cold War at that time.
32:37
But eventually you were in the middle
32:38
of the Iran-Contra scandal on conflict.
32:40
Now, as a 35 year old and a lot of people
32:42
that are in my age range, we hear Iran-Contra
32:44
and we know that's a thing, but we have no idea.
32:47
No idea whatsoever what that was.
32:49
Like, 'cause we assume that this happened
32:51
in the Middle East, right?
32:52
But just because of the name, right?
32:53
But if you wouldn't mind, give us a little bit
32:55
of a 30,000 foot overview of what the Iran-Contra scandal was.
33:00
And maybe even people that don't even know
33:01
what the Cold War was, and then give us an idea
33:04
what you were doing on the ground
33:05
to kind of fight against what was happening.
33:07
- Yeah, let's start with the latter,
33:09
with the being in the ground and being in real operations
33:14
with on behalf of the US government supporting,
33:17
in this case, the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters.
33:20
These were in late '70-something, '78, '79,
33:25
the Sandinistas did a coup and with a help from Cuba,
33:29
and they announced themselves as communist.
33:33
And they were all, you know, the pipeline
33:35
was Soviet Union to Cuba to Nicaragua,
33:39
Nicaragua to Salvador and other surrounding countries
33:42
in Latin America, in Central America.
33:44
So my job was for the first 14 months of that program,
33:49
and I was there for a little over three years.
33:52
But for the first 14 months, I was the only CIA officer
33:56
allowed on the camps.
33:57
We had 10 camps, I would do two camps a week,
34:00
Monday through Friday, leave four o'clock in the morning,
34:03
Monday come back, three o'clock in the morning on Saturday,
34:07
sleeping in a jungle hammock,
34:10
and going from camp to camp, training them initially,
34:15
not even training them, initially seeing what they needed,
34:18
bringing in the logistics.
34:19
My first visit to the camps were humbling.
34:22
These people were barely eating, you know,
34:25
and malaria was, you know, there were no medical,
34:28
there was no, nothing that we provided everything for them.
34:33
And we made a very viable force out of it.
34:36
And, you know, as you know in the book,
34:38
there's three or four really cool adventures
34:40
that are in there.
34:42
But moving to the end of it is this covert action program
34:47
was the first successful covert action programs
34:53
in the agency in at least a decade,
34:56
because because we were able to provide the training
35:00
and the logistics for the countries,
35:02
as they call it, the counter-revolutionaries,
35:05
they forced the Sandinistas to go
35:07
to a overseeing democratic election and they lost.
35:12
And that would have never happened
35:15
if it had not been for the US helping the freedom fighters.
35:20
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that
35:23
this was my favorite of my tours,
35:26
because as a seven to through 10 year old living in Cuba,
35:31
I saw what he did to my first country,
35:33
I saw what he did to my family.
35:35
Here I am now, a couple of decades later,
35:39
and I am the pointy end of the stick.
35:42
I am helping these individuals cut off
35:45
several of those tentacles that destroyed my country.
35:48
And, you know, when I would go at night,
35:51
I would walk around with a cup of coffee and sit at
35:53
a different campfire every night,
35:55
and I would ask the people there would say,
35:57
"Why are you here?"
35:59
Not one said, "Oh, well, I read Marx and Lenin."
36:02
They burnt my church.
36:06
They raped my daughter.
36:07
They first took conscripted my son.
36:10
It was all personal.
36:12
So for me, I never had a morning when I got up
36:15
out of the jungle hammock that I went,
36:18
"Oh man, I'm still here, I'm the contrary."
36:21
It was really fulfilling,
36:23
and dealing with this kind of bravery
36:25
and this kind of conviction was really refreshing.
36:28
Yeah, well, then what happened was,
36:30
subsequently I went to Costa Rica to run the Southern Four.
36:33
This is after going through spy school or everything else.
36:37
Now I'm in a completely different theater
36:39
with a completely different kind of people.
36:41
But the Southern Front of the Contras
36:44
were former Sandinistas who had become
36:48
the solution with the regime.
36:50
So there was always a big chasm between the North,
36:53
the mosquitoes and the South,
36:56
where in the North the Hondurans helped us
36:57
with all kinds of support and logistics.
36:59
And obviously we reimbursed them for it,
37:02
but they were really our partners in this.
37:04
Costa Rica was actually trying to hunt us down.
37:06
They were totally against what we were doing.
37:10
So while I was there getting one of the things
37:13
that my job was coordinating air drops
37:15
to the Southern part of Nicaragua
37:17
where the Southern Front recited.
37:20
And this was a very, very basic
37:23
but well thought out process of, you know,
37:25
marking signals and all this kind of stuff and timing.
37:29
And all of a sudden I got a call
37:30
from the radio operator and our local command post.
37:35
This says, hey, you need to come in.
37:37
And what it was was this one of the resupplied planes
37:42
had been shot down by the Sandinistas.
37:44
Everybody in the plane died except one former Marine
37:47
by the name of Hasunfuss.
37:49
Hasunfuss unfortunately, even though he was a former Marine,
37:53
bypassed every rule of operations.
37:57
First of all, he had stuff in his pockets,
38:00
photographs, phone numbers, you name it of a lot of people
38:04
it could compromise an incredible amount of things.
38:06
The companies that were providing the air drops,
38:08
all kinds of information.
38:10
But the main thing that he didn't do was
38:13
the standing orders were,
38:15
if you are shot down or you have to do crash landing
38:18
below this latitude, you move south and you let us know.
38:23
So as soon as I found out, I turned on the heat,
38:26
I had probably a thousand, you know,
38:30
countries moving in a row towards an airplane kind of crash
38:34
because he's supposed to be walking south.
38:37
So I told him, I bring this guy back.
38:39
If there's anybody left,
38:40
'cause we didn't know them was him at the time,
38:42
whoever survived that crash,
38:45
bring him back and if not, bring the bodies.
38:47
And of course, pass him for us to stay there
38:49
and in a hammock and he turned himself in
38:52
and he had all kinds of compromising.
38:54
And of course, then the politics kicks in
38:56
like everything else,
38:57
which is the first, the worst thing that can happen
38:59
to the military or the intelligence communities
39:02
to be politicized as we have seen it become.
39:05
So the politics took over and that's when it was uncovered
39:08
that, you know, Ronald Reagan,
39:10
working through Wally North had found different sourcing
39:15
for providing for the countries during dry years
39:18
and one of those deals was selling weapons to Iran
39:22
and using that money for supporting the countries.
39:26
You know, that was a really big stink
39:29
and it cost a couple of agency folks
39:32
that were my bosses, their jobs.
39:34
Joe Fernandez for one, there was several.
39:38
And you know what, 20 years later,
39:42
the agency called them back in
39:43
and reinstituted all their stuff and gave them
39:45
their retirement metals and everything else.
39:47
And you figure as a GS-12,
39:50
I was in front of a grand jury.
39:52
Not as a subject, but as a, you know,
39:56
as a, you know, somebody that could be interviewed.
39:58
- Right.
39:59
- And it was great because I could personally say
40:02
what I wanted to say, what I saw,
40:06
the poverty that I saw, the abuses that I saw,
40:09
the criminality of that regime,
40:11
the importance of us being there
40:12
and the importance of us resupplying it.
40:15
So that's the Iran-Contra background and indeed.
40:19
- I appreciate that.
40:20
I appreciate getting into all that detail and again, guys.
40:22
There's so much more detail in the book
40:23
and you have a bunch of crazy stories
40:24
and I'll tee you up for some more crazy stories later.
40:26
I do want to get now into the part of the book
40:28
that I found the most interesting
40:30
just because of kind of my age range.
40:32
And that's Osama bin Laden, 9/11
40:34
and kind of the beginning of this age of terrorism
40:37
and the war on terror.
40:38
And we'll get to 9/11 in your experience here in just a minute.
40:41
But I'm going to go back to Osama bin Laden or UBL
40:44
'cause that was one of the spellings for him back in the 90s.
40:47
He was identified as a quote unquote bad guy in the mid 90s.
40:51
He didn't pop on our radar on September the 11th, 2001.
40:55
But we didn't take him out and you point out in the book
40:58
that a lot of blood and a lot of anguish
41:00
would have never happened had we done that.
41:03
So I mean, there's the people killed and wounded
41:05
in the US Embassy attacks in Africa.
41:07
There's the attack on the USS Cole.
41:08
There's the people killed in the Pentagon,
41:10
the Twin Towers and Flight 93 all 9/11.
41:12
There's all the soldiers that have been killed
41:14
fighting in Afghanistan and other places trying to,
41:17
you know, weed out Al Qaeda and AQI and then ISIS
41:20
and then all these other different things.
41:21
There's the Arab Spring.
41:22
There's a Syrian Civil War.
41:23
There's all these different things that happened
41:26
because we didn't take this guy out in the mid 90s.
41:29
And part of it is because we were doing what we called
41:32
kind of the, I guess, the moral play.
41:33
We wanted to fight clean, right?
41:35
There was all this nasty dirty stuff that came to light
41:37
and the agency just didn't have the stomach
41:39
for the nasty stuff anymore, the political assassinations
41:42
and all that.
41:43
And so a guy that we knew was bad,
41:45
a guy that we knew wanted to kill as many Americans
41:47
as possible until his last dying breath,
41:50
we just left him out there on the battlefield.
41:52
So take us through why we didn't take him out
41:55
to begin with.
41:56
- Well, I started the Belaudin Task Force
42:00
in late,
42:07
I'm having a senior moment here.
42:10
- Was it 2002, 2003?
42:12
- No, no, it was, it was around '95, '96.
42:14
- Oh, yeah, yeah.
42:15
- And the other part was, sorry.
42:17
It was end of 1995, real early, in 1996,
42:21
where I was called in by the Chief of Ops
42:25
at the CTC Counter-Terra Center and said,
42:28
you know, we want two to be the deputy,
42:30
the senior ops guy, but the deputy chief of station
42:33
for this task force that we're building.
42:35
And it, we're chasing Usama bin Laden.
42:38
And my answer was who?
42:41
- Yeah.
42:41
- Nobody had heard of him at the time.
42:44
Fast forward six months,
42:46
our files had been tenfold more robust
42:51
than they were six months before,
42:52
because now we had some really smart people.
42:56
And we had some of the best analysts
42:57
that I've ever worked with in my life,
43:00
in targeting officers and all these great ideas coming in
43:03
and then me trying to put the sanity,
43:05
operational sanity into things.
43:07
But in 1996, a very, very dear friend of mine,
43:11
an SF legend, Billy Waugh,
43:14
was in charge of doing surveillance
43:19
and counter surveillance in Khartoum Sudan
43:23
for the station, for the CIA station.
43:27
And Billy used to walk and run around bin Laden's compound
43:32
every single day.
43:34
He had a safe house that we have procured
43:37
in a higher building and he had these lenses
43:41
that he could take these, all these photographs.
43:42
The first photographs that we ever got out of bin Laden
43:45
that were ours, not from the Saudis or from the papers,
43:49
was taken, we're taken by Billy Waugh.
43:51
And Billy Waugh to this day has told me many times,
43:56
it's a wreck, I got so close to him
43:58
I could have killed him with a pencil.
44:00
He was in the white, he would drive his white Mercedes,
44:03
sometimes without his bodyguards,
44:05
he would go driving around because of the time Khartoum
44:08
was a terrorist hotel.
44:09
You had every kind of terrorist,
44:11
and that's where, again, Billy Waugh found the jackal,
44:15
Carlos the jackal, Ili Sarmita is the famous terrorist.
44:19
He found him, he made book on him
44:21
and we were able to turn him over to the French.
44:23
But at that time, there's no doubt in our minds
44:26
of two things, first bin Laden was bad.
44:29
We had satellite overhead of the camps he was financing,
44:34
the kind of training that were going on in these camps,
44:36
it was all terroristic insurgency kind of training
44:40
in the outskirts of Sudan, out of Khartoum.
44:45
So we knew that, all the source reporting
44:48
from allied countries and lateral from us
44:52
was this guy is bad, he is recruiting,
44:55
he aims to really unite the effort against the Americans
45:00
and of course the Israelis are wrapped into that
45:04
or we are wrapped into it.
45:06
So for that period, we recommended several times
45:12
to certainly kill him, but at least render him
45:16
because we knew, I mean, Billy Waugh is a greenberry legend
45:20
for God's sake, he looked at his security and he goes,
45:22
okay, we could do this, we could do that,
45:23
his plans were flawless.
45:25
So if we send in an adult the team
45:27
or a deaf group team in there,
45:29
it would have not been a fair fight.
45:30
I mean, it would have been,
45:32
we probably would have lost anybody, you know.
45:35
But you hit on something a little earlier
45:37
that's one of my pet peeves that people do not understand
45:40
and is that you cannot judge the morality of your enemy
45:45
by your optic.
45:46
The things that they are willing to do to us,
45:52
is stuff that we can never contemplate.
45:54
And the story that I often tell is what happened in Iraq.
45:58
There was a guy who had been cleared working in Iraq,
46:01
in the green zone forever and all of a sudden
46:05
he went in there and put a bomb, planted a bomb.
46:07
What they had done was they had taken his daughter,
46:11
shot her, killed her, right in front of his eyes,
46:14
then they took his son and they said,
46:16
if you don't put this backpack down there,
46:18
we're gonna shoot your son.
46:20
Now, I'm all God and country and there ain't too many things
46:23
that I wouldn't do for this country or for my family,
46:26
but that's something that is inconceivable to me.
46:29
- Right, right.
46:30
- As a professional, I have to understand that
46:33
when I plan to attack that kind of enemy,
46:37
I cannot go in there against a mixed martial artist
46:40
and I'm gonna fight, you know, Queensberry rules.
46:42
- Right.
46:43
- So that's a very important point that you touched on.
46:45
I wanted to add a little bit to that.
46:47
- Well, I appreciate that because there should be a moral
46:51
high ground as you're operating as a country.
46:54
'Cause look at the difference right now
46:55
with what's happening in Russia and Ukraine.
46:57
That the part of the reason why we're having this backlash
46:59
as a world as we watch this is because it's unfathomable
47:02
to us in the year, you know, 2022
47:05
to see some of the atrocities that we're seeing,
47:07
but also we live in somewhat of a post-Christian culture.
47:09
A lot of people aren't believers in any type of higher power.
47:12
They thought we had quote unquote evolved past
47:15
doing these horrible things to each other
47:17
or countries invading one another.
47:18
But again, you know, that's maybe a discussion
47:20
for another day, but kind of getting back
47:21
into the Osama bin Laden stuff.
47:23
So you're actually at Langley, I believe.
47:25
I believe I have that right, when 9/11 happens.
47:28
So you're all kind of crowded around a television
47:30
after the first plane hits and then it's like, you know,
47:32
you're thinking it's a little passenger plane
47:34
or something like that, but then you watch
47:36
the second plane hit and you know that you're under attack.
47:38
And so I want you to take us through that,
47:39
but I do want to read this quote because this was almost
47:42
immediate, but this may be my favorite quote
47:43
from the entire book I'll read it to you here.
47:46
Something happened inside me that moment,
47:48
like tumbling a lock, like tumblers of a lock
47:51
falling into place.
47:52
What happened, what opened was every fiber
47:54
of hate, fury, and vengeance I had ever felt.
47:57
It poured out of my heart like blood from an open wound,
48:00
pain racked and agonizing.
48:02
I stood there feeling it course through me,
48:04
watching the deaths unfold in front of us.
48:07
I trembled from its power.
48:09
That was a very visceral, like I could almost like
48:12
taste your anger as I was reading that part of the book
48:14
and I'm sorry, I didn't do the greatest job of quoting it.
48:17
I should have read it more before I said it out loud,
48:19
but that's how a lot of us feel.
48:22
That's how I felt as a young kid in ninth grade
48:25
feeling seeing what was happening,
48:27
seeing the lines of people trying to get gas.
48:29
And my mom worked at Fort Sill,
48:30
which is largest artillery base in the country at the time.
48:33
They're in Oklahoma and we're thinking maybe
48:35
Fort Sill's going to be targeted.
48:36
And I remember that crazy time and I also remember
48:39
that anger I feel every September the 11th.
48:42
When I watched documentaries on the History Channel
48:44
or Nat Geo or something like that,
48:46
and I forced myself to watch it and to listen to the people
48:49
on the planes desperately calling their loved ones,
48:51
to the people deciding am I going to burn alive
48:53
or am I going to jump to my death
48:55
given that impossible, impossible choice.
48:57
But I was a ninth grader.
48:59
I had nothing that I could possibly do
49:02
to affect a vengeance on that situation
49:05
or to try to make it right.
49:07
But you did.
49:07
You were standing in Langley at that exact moment.
49:11
So take us through that moment
49:13
in what you and your team felt and saw
49:15
and then kind of how you decided there after
49:17
and how y'all were going to fight against this terrorism
49:19
that we were seeing.
49:21
- Oh yeah, I was the front of the building
49:23
of our office's space there waiting for comfort black
49:26
who was my boss and to this day, a dear friend,
49:29
to go to a meeting.
49:31
And when the first plane hit, second plane hits,
49:35
the first thing that I did is I turned to the chief
49:37
of staff and I said, look, I want a cable out
49:39
to every single station in the world.
49:42
Watch your six and start finding out who is behind us.
49:47
All resources are to be focused on this.
49:50
So then everything else is a blur.
49:53
I mean, yes, I was chief of operations.
49:56
So I had three, four hundred people there
49:59
that were all part of our teams.
50:01
But we're divided into groups and branches
50:05
and everybody has their own expertise
50:06
and their own chain of authorities
50:09
that they know how high they can take decisions
50:11
or suggestions before you have to race them forward.
50:14
So it was, it was mad briefing by everybody.
50:17
We've heard this, we heard that often overwhelming
50:21
because there was just so much stuff at us.
50:23
But I have to say that just before 9/11
50:27
and I'm talking about probably a couple of months
50:30
but definitely a month before I'd 9/11,
50:32
we knew something was coming.
50:34
We knew something was coming.
50:36
The chatter was there initially, all kinds of traffic,
50:39
all kinds of keywords.
50:41
Things that we knew that had certain specific meanings,
50:44
all these things, but the who, the what and the where
50:48
were not easily discovered.
50:49
And again, from the movies, when you watch the movies,
50:53
at the end, they can figure out exactly how everything is.
50:57
It's a puzzle that comes perfectly together
51:00
and in real life, it's a puzzle, right?
51:02
But you only have about a third of the pieces.
51:05
And that was our frustration that we had,
51:09
we knew, especially when we got closer to 9/11,
51:14
all of a sudden the communications died down,
51:16
some of the people we were surveilling worldwide
51:18
disappeared, that's a clue.
51:21
Something is brewing and it's imminent.
51:23
So the joke was tremendous to all of us
51:27
and everybody took it very personal.
51:29
And as you know, there's several stories in the book
51:32
of pregnant women refusing to leave.
51:35
And the CIA headquarters, which we were evacuated,
51:38
the whole building was evacuated because that flight,
51:41
that the heroes knocked Pennsylvania, wherever it was,
51:45
a lot of people thought they were coming to the agency.
51:48
They hit the Pentagon, they hit the economic,
51:50
they hit the military, makes more sense to hit the agency.
51:54
So we don't know.
51:55
And this lady literally stayed behind eight months pregnant,
52:03
trying to find out what the heck was going on.
52:06
And so intelligence is not what is played in the movies.
52:10
We very quickly, of course,
52:14
in coordination with the NSC and the White House,
52:17
we knew that now that it was bin Laden,
52:19
that we had to do something about it.
52:20
And we knew that his belly button was the Taliban.
52:23
And of course al Qaeda, which means the base.
52:27
And that's a point to be made,
52:29
when made bin Laden unique and why it would have been so great
52:33
to pull them, to neutralize them at that time you mentioned,
52:37
was that he became the Godfather of terrorism.
52:40
He breached, like the mafia went and started working
52:43
with the Jews and all this kind of stuff.
52:45
He did the same thing.
52:46
He started working with Hamas,
52:48
started working with Hezbollah, providing information,
52:52
providing all kinds of resources.
52:55
So here's a guy that was created from day one
53:01
to lead this brotherhood that was that hurt us on 9/11.
53:06
So the first boots in the ground in Afghanistan were my guys.
53:12
These were guys from a special activities division
53:15
and guys from the counter terrorist center.
53:18
When the first green beret ODA team came in,
53:23
it was our guys vectoring him into place.
53:26
Our guys had been there on the ground.
53:29
And the rest is kind of history.
53:31
I mean, there's a couple examples of me doing one
53:34
of those drone authorized shots and all this kind of stuff.
53:38
We were really hurting him in the theater.
53:42
And it was a war that we could have won
53:45
if we would have just stuck with it
53:47
turned some things around there.
53:49
- I feel like I hate that quote that you just ended with
53:53
and not because you said it because that's a reality
53:56
because we lose the political stomach for these things
53:59
or the generalized electorate gets bored
54:02
with some sort of a conflict.
54:04
And we'll get into this a little bit
54:06
so I don't wanna get the car to the head of the horse.
54:08
But this idea that, oh, we're in all these endless wars.
54:10
We need to pull our troops out.
54:12
It's like, there are tens of thousands,
54:14
hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the globe.
54:17
They're in Germany, they're in Japan.
54:19
I know World War II is over, but we still have troops there.
54:21
We still have a presence there.
54:22
We're not at war with those countries.
54:24
We're not fighting Nazis in Germany.
54:26
We're not fighting against imperialist Japan.
54:29
We have a presence there though.
54:30
But I hate that that's kind of how we get to.
54:33
And for you, Rick, you're in a very unique position
54:35
because in your career, this spanned the Cold War
54:39
all the way through the age of terrorism, right?
54:41
So that's a fairly unique set of circumstances for you
54:44
because you were in Central and South America.
54:46
You were in Korea, you were in the Philippines
54:48
and we had to skip overall that just in interest of time today.
54:50
You were also in the Middle East.
54:52
You were in places that you couldn't even name, right?
54:54
In the book, you called one place of Shangri-La.
54:56
Like you just had to, you couldn't exactly tell it,
54:58
but through context clues, you can kind of guess,
55:00
you know, what country that was in Africa.
55:03
But I guess from your perspective,
55:05
which do you consider between the Cold War
55:07
and let's use the age of terrorism,
55:09
between those two things?
55:10
Which would you have considered to be the biggest threat
55:13
when they were at their peak?
55:15
And then I guess now, like what is kind of the biggest threat
55:18
because there's kind of a looming Cold War,
55:21
if you will, with a country like China,
55:23
but then there's also Iran and North Korea and all that.
55:26
So is it terrorism, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism
55:30
that it was and is the biggest threat?
55:31
Is it communism, like just take me into wherever you wanna go?
55:35
- Yeah, you know, that's an excellent question.
55:37
And there is an answer for you.
55:39
Yes, the Cold War, which was in many cases
55:43
by my experience is not as cold as people make it out to be
55:46
'cause, you know, I almost got spoke two or three times.
55:48
- Yeah, it seemed pretty hot for you.
55:50
- Yeah, so, you know, and I'm not alone.
55:52
I mean, I was with my peers.
55:53
I was with my colleagues.
55:55
So the fallacy is that when terrorism emerged, okay,
56:00
in starting with, let's say, the coal and the bombings,
56:05
the two embassies in Africa and all this kind of stuff,
56:10
we describe that as a flashbang
56:12
that gets everybody's attention into terrorism.
56:16
And the fallacy is that we stop chasing the Russians
56:21
and chasing the Chinese.
56:23
Nothing could be further than the truth.
56:25
The real difference is, let me put it in medical terms,
56:29
terrorism is like getting shot.
56:31
Communism is like contracting cancer.
56:35
When you're shot, if you don't self-help,
56:39
put a tourniquet on, whatever it is, you're gonna die.
56:43
Now, with cancer, it's a process of investigation,
56:48
of treatment, of whatever.
56:52
So we never took our eye off of the,
56:54
and when I say we, we're talking about the community,
56:56
not just CIA, of the terrorism.
57:01
But admittedly, we all have limited resources,
57:04
both financial and personnel.
57:07
And if we, if terrorism wasn't around,
57:11
communism probably wouldn't have been either.
57:13
But one, you know, fed the other.
57:16
- Yeah, I think that it's an important thing.
57:18
I guess there's also this mindset in America
57:20
that we can't fight two wars at the same time.
57:22
And I don't always need literal wars.
57:24
It's like, people are like,
57:25
"Well, if we're fighting against terrorism,
57:27
"well, what about China?"
57:28
It's like, dumb, dumb, we can do both.
57:30
Like we can focus on, you know,
57:32
both of these things all at the same time.
57:34
But to kind of get back to the crescendo,
57:35
or I guess the end of your, of your CIA career,
57:38
you didn't exactly have the send off
57:40
that you would have wanted with your agency career.
57:43
And if you'd like to tell that story,
57:44
you can about, yeah, the decision that you made
57:47
to ultimately leave the agency,
57:48
which wasn't exactly your decision,
57:50
but it was all at the same time.
57:52
So you did end up retiring.
57:54
But I guess if you want to tell us that story,
57:55
tell that story as well.
57:56
But I'm really curious about what you miss the most
57:58
about the agency, because what's clear about your book,
58:01
about reading Black Ops is that you're a kinetic guy,
58:03
and you like the action, right?
58:05
Like, you know, you get scared just like anybody else,
58:07
but you use that fear to propel you to do things
58:10
that other people would just basically freeze up
58:12
and not be able to do anything.
58:14
So take us through how you ended your career
58:16
and kind of how you look back on it.
58:18
- Well, let me address the very first part of what you said,
58:20
which is, you know, we can't fight two wars
58:23
and all that other kind of stuff.
58:25
And I'm an intelligence officer, I don't do politics,
58:28
so I'm not gonna be naming names of current, anything.
58:31
So let's do a little history here.
58:32
What happened during Carter's years, Afghanistan?
58:37
The Iran hostage crisis, Panama Canal,
58:42
when the world sees weak leadership
58:45
in the United States, they're predators.
58:50
Guess what they're gonna do?
58:51
They're gonna try to eat you.
58:52
You know, we give a lot of credit to Ronald Reagan
58:55
for, you know, breaking down the Soviet Union the first time,
58:59
but you know, he had Margaret Thatcher
59:01
and he had John Paul II, and he applied.
59:06
What does any president here have as an ally?
59:10
So my point is, there's a Roman general's quote
59:15
that says, "If you want peace, prepare for war."
59:20
- Right.
59:20
- Anybody who, again, looks at the morality of our enemy
59:24
by our morality is being fooled.
59:29
They are always looking.
59:31
Anybody who thinks that we haven't been hit
59:33
in the United States because they've given up on us
59:36
is completely wrong.
59:37
They haven't hit us because we haven't let them, right,
59:40
been able to neutralize a lot of these things.
59:43
But the reason I left the agency was,
59:45
because right after 9/11, again, I'm not a desk guy,
59:50
and here I am spending, you know, six and a half days a week
59:54
to 12 hour days and behind a desk.
59:57
And I always knew that I was a better operator
1:00:01
than I was leader.
1:00:02
I mean, I'm a decent leader.
1:00:03
I got, you know, I did pretty well,
1:00:05
but my heart is leading people
1:00:08
in the actual operations,
1:00:09
not going through all the machinations that doesn't appeal to me.
1:00:13
So I, in a conversation with Kofi,
1:00:16
I said, "Boss, we're doing a hell of a good job
1:00:18
"killing these bad guys in Afghanistan,
1:00:20
"but you know, here's the problem."
1:00:23
That's not where the leaderships are.
1:00:24
That's not where the real targets are.
1:00:26
They are worldwide and we are not doing anything
1:00:29
against Al Qaeda outside of Afghanistan.
1:00:32
And he looks at me and says,
1:00:33
"Well, you're the chief of alps, so fix it."
1:00:35
And he goes, "Okay, well, home."
1:00:37
And this is a true story, that this was on a Friday.
1:00:41
Saturday, my youngest son had a football game
1:00:43
right across the street from St. Leo,
1:00:45
which was a church that we went to.
1:00:47
So I dropped my youngest son off at the game
1:00:51
and I walked over to the church
1:00:54
and I knelt down to the front and I said,
1:00:57
"I have some ideas, I hope you like them."
1:01:01
And one of the truth, if they're wrong,
1:01:04
hit me with a lightning bolt when I come out
1:01:06
because I don't want to bring down anything
1:01:08
that is not what you want.
1:01:11
So the program that I came up with
1:01:13
and Kofer bought off on it, the DCI bought off it
1:01:15
and I even briefed Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice
1:01:18
on this particular program,
1:01:20
was from the realization and the frustrations
1:01:23
that you so well described, pre-9/11,
1:01:27
the fact that we knew something was going on
1:01:29
and we couldn't do anything about it.
1:01:31
Part of the ethos of CTC is to disrupt to prevent
1:01:36
and we did not have that capability.
1:01:38
So what I came up with with a proposal for a program
1:01:42
where we would get X number of names of people
1:01:45
that we know are bad people in that organizations,
1:01:49
Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, Taliban, whatever it is,
1:01:53
narco-trafferers.
1:01:54
We were even open to those 'cause that's another scourge.
1:01:57
So with the concept being that you now put
1:02:02
full surveillance on these folks.
1:02:04
We call it making book on somebody.
1:02:06
Patterns of Life is a more correct and polite term.
1:02:10
But we make book on them, we know where they go,
1:02:13
what cars they drive, you know,
1:02:16
in some cases we could even make them,
1:02:17
we made the keys to cars that we needed to get into.
1:02:22
And then when we started getting this kind of chatter,
1:02:26
whether it's from Hamas or al-Qaeda or whoever,
1:02:30
that we would have three targets per organization
1:02:33
that we could disrupt.
1:02:35
Now we're not talking about going over against
1:02:37
the heads of organizations, they're too difficult to do,
1:02:40
and the shooters in the bottom feeders,
1:02:42
they're a dime a dozen.
1:02:43
You killed one 12 cousins, joined at the cause.
1:02:46
The support mechanism, the people that provide the money,
1:02:49
the banking, the transportation, the medical help,
1:02:53
the training, those people have to have an open persona.
1:02:57
You cannot do that from a mountain in Afghanistan.
1:03:01
And these were the people that I wanted to target.
1:03:04
Known terrorists who were key people
1:03:07
in the functioning of an organization.
1:03:10
And what happens is this,
1:03:11
if we get this kind of chatter with Hezbollah, let's say,
1:03:15
and all of a sudden, three different Hezbollah guys
1:03:18
and three different places get wrapped up.
1:03:22
Either kidnap, compromise, or lethal finding,
1:03:26
legally, you know, we could have shot them.
1:03:29
What do you think that organization is gonna do?
1:03:31
They're gonna put the brakes.
1:03:32
- Yeah. - We've been infiltrated.
1:03:34
'Cause it can be a coincidence that three of our top guys
1:03:37
and three different geographies are all of a sudden missing.
1:03:42
So they were panicked.
1:03:43
And that was the whole concept.
1:03:44
Having not retaliation, it was strictly having a tool.
1:03:49
And the way that I described it to Mr. Cheney
1:03:53
and to our DCI at the time was,
1:03:56
sir, we cannot build the firehouse
1:03:59
when our house is already on fire.
1:04:02
These are the things that we have to have
1:04:05
in our toolbox to implement.
1:04:07
And you can not come up with an operation
1:04:09
to kidnap three Hamas or Hezbollah leaders
1:04:13
two days before they're supposed to do an action.
1:04:16
- Right.
1:04:17
- We were very successful at the first part
1:04:19
of the mission.
1:04:22
When I started briefing on the specifics,
1:04:26
the fact that we actually had a division chief
1:04:28
that had come to us and he goes here's the target
1:04:31
that I really believe we need to go after.
1:04:33
It was the most legitimate target we would have had.
1:04:36
It would have been a good first scalp.
1:04:39
And, but you know now it was about a year and a half
1:04:42
after 9/11.
1:04:44
And the calcium from that backbone had melted
1:04:48
and politics were ripe.
1:04:50
And the decision was made that,
1:04:53
and I'll never forget the quote from our then DDO.
1:04:56
There's no doubt in my mind, Mr. Director,
1:04:59
that Prado and his team cannot not only do this,
1:05:03
but they can get away with it.
1:05:05
I'm going late.
1:05:06
- Yeah.
1:05:07
Let's go.
1:05:08
- We are getting a green light.
1:05:09
In two seconds later, he says,
1:05:11
however, Mr. Director,
1:05:13
we need to consider the political ramifications
1:05:15
of this action.
1:05:16
The division chief who was an SIS-5
1:05:20
didn't get any higher than that,
1:05:21
got up, adjusted his suit,
1:05:24
because he was a very dapper guy,
1:05:25
closed his notebook,
1:05:27
walked out shortly thereafter he retired.
1:05:29
So for me, it was a realization that as good as we had been,
1:05:35
as successful as we had been,
1:05:36
and I had picked up the litter.
1:05:38
I had picked up the litter.
1:05:39
I had the best of the best of the agency
1:05:41
was given to me for this program initially.
1:05:45
And these are people that needed to have careers.
1:05:47
If we were being utilized,
1:05:50
none of these guys would have complained.
1:05:52
But three of my guys ended up being SIS-4s and 5s,
1:05:56
by the time they retired last year.
1:05:58
So I had really a good crowd.
1:06:01
So I went down to Jose Rodriguez,
1:06:02
who was then a very dear friend of mine from way back.
1:06:06
He had taken over for Cofer,
1:06:08
and I told him what had happened.
1:06:10
And I said, boss, I can't keep my guys
1:06:12
retelling upside down popping grenades
1:06:15
for the rest of their careers,
1:06:17
for a paper tiger that is that we're gonna be letting loose.
1:06:19
So that's when we decided to shut the program down.
1:06:25
And shortly thereafter, I was disillusioned anyway.
1:06:27
I wanted to end in a high.
1:06:28
I had spent the last two and a half years on the ground
1:06:32
with some of the finest people I've ever worked with
1:06:34
doing some incredible stuff
1:06:36
under the noses of some incredible people
1:06:39
that were watching us,
1:06:40
but in that way, and never compromised ourselves.
1:06:43
So I was very proud, I wanted to end my career on that high note,
1:06:48
not go back as a division chief
1:06:50
or deputy division chief somewhere
1:06:52
and push more papers back and forth.
1:06:54
- Yeah, it would have been a nicer, cleaner ending,
1:06:57
but to use a sports analogy,
1:06:58
it's like you can't always end your career
1:07:00
by hitting a walk-off grand slam in the World Series.
1:07:03
Like that's just not something like most people,
1:07:05
if you're a fighter,
1:07:06
you typically go out on your face
1:07:07
and pull your own blood and spit and you're embarrassed, right?
1:07:10
That's just kind of how it goes for a lot of people.
1:07:12
But you said something at the beginning of that
1:07:14
before you got into everything
1:07:15
and I'm not going to let you off the hook, all right?
1:07:17
You said you're not political or you're just an intelligence guy,
1:07:19
you don't want to name names.
1:07:20
I'm going to name names if you're not going to
1:07:22
because I want to talk about the United States
1:07:23
and how we're viewed on the international stage
1:07:26
because when you're viewed as a paper tiger,
1:07:27
people will attack.
1:07:28
So we see the situation that happened in Afghanistan
1:07:31
and you saw the absolute debacle,
1:07:32
the unforced error that was created by Joe Biden
1:07:35
and the administration and the military
1:07:37
or whoever you want to blame,
1:07:38
pulling our troops out of Afghanistan,
1:07:40
giving up Bagram, an absolute mess.
1:07:42
And it's a mess that we will be looking back on
1:07:44
down the road, maybe decades from now.
1:07:46
Hey, remember when we gave up Bagram,
1:07:48
remember when we let this vacuum be controlled now
1:07:52
by Taliban and other people like that?
1:07:54
Also the Ukraine situation.
1:07:55
Say what you want about Donald Trump, everyone thought,
1:07:57
oh, he's a Russian cat's paw.
1:07:59
And yet, you know, Putin basically sat on his hands
1:08:02
for four years 'cause he was scared of the orange man
1:08:03
just like a lot of other people on Twitter are.
1:08:06
That's what I want to talk about.
1:08:07
I want to talk about when you're seeing this now
1:08:08
that you're retired, you're just a civilian, right?
1:08:10
I say just a civilian.
1:08:12
What do you think about how we are viewed
1:08:14
on the international stage?
1:08:15
Because the situation with Afghanistan,
1:08:17
how we're responding to Ukraine,
1:08:19
that's going to affect how China deals with Taiwan
1:08:21
and China deals with everybody.
1:08:23
That's going to affect how North Korea does things.
1:08:25
It's going to, you know, Iran in Venezuela pick a country
1:08:29
that doesn't like us or doesn't do the way
1:08:30
that the things, the way that we want to do them.
1:08:33
Talk me through how we can fathom where we're at right now
1:08:36
as a country and maybe how we can turn it around.
1:08:39
- Well, you know, you're a spot on.
1:08:42
There's no arguing that, you know,
1:08:44
we are dealing with predators and the same way,
1:08:48
that's why I use the Jimmy Carter analogy,
1:08:51
the same way he could not resolve the hostage situation
1:08:55
in Iran and before Reagan's hand went down
1:09:00
from swearing in, our guys were released.
1:09:04
The same thing happened with Ukraine.
1:09:07
And you know, as a guy who fought terrorism,
1:09:09
I mean, sorry, communism
1:09:11
in five different incarnations professional,
1:09:14
what amazes me is that we are surprised
1:09:18
that Putin did what he did.
1:09:21
He already just shocked and everything else.
1:09:23
He said that the day he took over power,
1:09:25
he said, I will reconstitute the Soviet Union
1:09:28
to its glory.
1:09:29
- Well, Rick, just to cut in real quick,
1:09:31
keep your train of thought,
1:09:32
because this is astonishing to me.
1:09:34
All of the quote unquote experts,
1:09:36
all the people that were advising people
1:09:38
and talking to people at CNN in the New York Times
1:09:40
and wherever else said,
1:09:41
Putin's not crazy enough to invade Ukraine.
1:09:44
He's not going to go hot in Ukraine.
1:09:46
Are you insane?
1:09:46
Those were the smart people.
1:09:48
And now they're sitting here.
1:09:49
Their entire world's been turned upside down,
1:09:50
but yeah, go ahead.
1:09:52
- Well, you know, it's funny because one question
1:09:54
that has been asked of me a couple of times earlier on
1:09:57
was, is the nuclear threat real?
1:10:01
And I said, yes, from the Russian side.
1:10:04
And they went, what do you mean?
1:10:05
This is, well, do you think that we have the credibility?
1:10:08
If we don't have the guts to finish Afghanistan
1:10:12
and we show our allies what happens when you work with us
1:10:17
that we eventually will leave you over the barrel.
1:10:20
It is incumbent on us to do look at things differently.
1:10:26
Absolutely, when they look at weak leadership
1:10:30
and not just the United States, let's face it,
1:10:34
look at Germany, Germany now, just yesterday,
1:10:37
decided, okay, yeah, we were lying.
1:10:40
Our stores were not empty.
1:10:43
We're going to give them tanks and guns
1:10:44
and all this other stuff.
1:10:46
And then they're next door neighbors to what's going on.
1:10:49
So there's no policemen.
1:10:52
There's nothing out there to keep a guy like Putin
1:10:57
from striking.
1:10:58
And I go back to my mantra,
1:10:59
you cannot judge your opponents' morality by our optic.
1:11:04
We would not start a nuclear war.
1:11:08
Right.
1:11:09
We would not invade a, you know, Mexico or Canada or whatever.
1:11:14
You know, without argument, why don't we go after Cuba?
1:11:18
Right.
1:11:19
Because Putin's argument is Ukraine is a NATO incline
1:11:24
entity in my backyard.
1:11:27
Well, Cuba is a Russian controlled entity,
1:11:31
90 miles from my house.
1:11:33
Yeah.
1:11:34
So absolutely, whose in power makes the difference?
1:11:38
The fact that an individual can come across,
1:11:42
and this is very apropos even in my field
1:11:45
as an operations officer.
1:11:46
You know, when I had to sit down with the terrorists
1:11:49
and you know, there's a story there
1:11:50
where I recruited a terrorist
1:11:52
or working with some really rough characters
1:11:54
from the local, you know, law enforcement
1:11:56
and investigative is they're rough people.
1:12:00
But they got to look at you
1:12:01
and they got to see you and go,
1:12:02
okay, this guy is serious also.
1:12:04
Well, the same goes for our presidents.
1:12:06
The same thing goes for our Congress.
1:12:08
The same thing goes for our military leaders.
1:12:10
Our military leaders have been pretty wishy-washy of late.
1:12:14
And I don't appreciate that
1:12:16
because we are supposed to be apolitical.
1:12:18
We should not be playing that game as the agencies.
1:12:21
But absolutely.
1:12:22
And it's what I tell people in my neighborhood
1:12:24
because, you know, they all know my background.
1:12:26
And when there's a little petty crime or something,
1:12:28
they all know what I should do.
1:12:29
I said, just look at my house
1:12:31
because my job is to make the thief or the criminal
1:12:35
go to your house.
1:12:36
- Yeah.
1:12:38
- I have a fence, I have two dogs, I have lights, you know,
1:12:40
and I have my posture that when I walk out of my house,
1:12:43
I'm not food.
1:12:44
That applies.
1:12:46
That's the micro, well, the macro is the same.
1:12:49
When people see the United States and our allies,
1:12:53
lightweight, unprepared, unwilling to show
1:12:58
that we are not going to be messed with,
1:13:02
they'll take advantage of us.
1:13:04
- When it goes back to Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's,
1:13:07
you know, the wolf's the sheep and the sheep dog.
1:13:09
And it's just like the sheep dog doesn't have to be aggressive
1:13:11
until he has to be aggressive.
1:13:13
But if the sheep dog just rolls overall on his back,
1:13:15
you know, every time the wolf shows up,
1:13:17
the wolf's just going to keep coming
1:13:18
and there will be no more sheep.
1:13:19
And so I think that's a very important thing for us
1:13:21
to look at.
1:13:22
I think that kind of came to mind as you were describing that
1:13:24
as Americans, right, as lazy, fat, stupid Americans,
1:13:28
we can't fathom country pride.
1:13:31
Like what some people are doing, like we can't fathom
1:13:33
how hundreds of thousands of free people
1:13:35
that have Ukrainian ties have gone back to Ukraine
1:13:39
in order to fight for them right now.
1:13:40
We can't fathom that.
1:13:41
It's like, wait, you were living, you're a professional boxer
1:13:43
and you're living in a mansion in America
1:13:45
and you're going back to fight to protect your homeland
1:13:48
because there was a recent poll and I'm going to mess
1:13:50
up the numbers.
1:13:50
It's an overwhelming amount of Americans of both parties
1:13:53
but really a whole lot of Democrats said,
1:13:55
if we were attacked in some way
1:13:56
that they would not fight to save this country.
1:13:58
Now, if they come to my neck of the woods,
1:14:01
they're going to have a hell of a time with me and my friends.
1:14:03
I can just tell you that much and that's not posturing.
1:14:06
That's just reality.
1:14:07
But I really like that you described that.
1:14:09
But with our limited time that we have left,
1:14:11
there's a couple of random things I wanted to kind of talk
1:14:13
through and get your opinions on
1:14:14
because they came from the book
1:14:16
but you didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about them.
1:14:18
So I wanted to kind of get your overall impressions.
1:14:20
You mentioned a few times in the book
1:14:22
about sleeper cells in the US, right?
1:14:26
And how there have been sleeper cells
1:14:28
and how we've maybe with some unique immigration things
1:14:31
have created some sleeper cells.
1:14:33
But when I read those sections of that book,
1:14:35
I automatically was like, I went to code orange, right?
1:14:38
I'm like, oh, I need to be looking around
1:14:39
and you talk about the codes in the book and all that as well.
1:14:42
But that is astonishing and frightening to me
1:14:45
as a free American, you know,
1:14:47
second amendment, loving American, prideful, patriotic American
1:14:50
that right now in the United States,
1:14:53
our intelligence agencies know that there are terrorists,
1:14:57
sleeper cells and they're just letting them operate.
1:15:00
They're letting them breathe air and buy food
1:15:03
and go to groceries and go to their fake job
1:15:05
and hang out with their fake wife and fake kids
1:15:08
and walk their dog that's not technically theirs.
1:15:10
And it feels like the UBL thing all over again,
1:15:13
but maybe in a minor degree, held me understand that
1:15:16
'cause I know I'm dumb, I know this isn't my way
1:15:18
of thinking about things.
1:15:19
How is it possible that we know about sleeper cells in America
1:15:23
and we're just kind of letting them chill?
1:15:25
Is it because they, we want their bosses
1:15:26
and we're willing to let them, you know,
1:15:28
do a couple of skirmishes here or there, help me?
1:15:30
- There's two stories in the book
1:15:33
that show what you're talking about
1:15:36
and the fastest one to go into
1:15:41
was the, when I was meeting right after 9/11
1:15:45
with my FBI counterpart, a very good friend of mine from years
1:15:48
and when we told them that he was bin Laden
1:15:50
who had done the hit, he said, thank God.
1:15:55
And I went, what are you talking about Mike?
1:15:57
What do you mean thank God?
1:15:58
He goes, give it a bit, if he had been Hezbollah
1:16:02
and we went after Iran and they would bleed us
1:16:05
in this country, I was indicative.
1:16:07
I said, I'm the chief of operations
1:16:09
at CIA's Counter Terror Center.
1:16:11
- Yeah.
1:16:12
- This is the first time I hear about this.
1:16:14
I know that I don't operate in the States
1:16:16
but these guys are coming from opponents
1:16:18
and that they're here.
1:16:20
So that was their reality.
1:16:21
In places like Detroit and places like that,
1:16:23
they are some very active dormant
1:16:26
and you know, we do have a legal system.
1:16:28
We can just not go and grab somebody
1:16:31
and start waterboarding them
1:16:33
to get them to confess that they're indeed
1:16:37
part of Hezbollah or Hamas or whatever the crap.
1:16:40
We can't do that.
1:16:42
So they're dormant, they're smart enough to know
1:16:45
that they can only activate when the time is right
1:16:49
or when they're directed to do so.
1:16:52
But I take your point.
1:16:54
The second one was even creepier
1:16:55
because the one that I wanna refer to was,
1:17:00
I neutralized a North Korean agent.
1:17:02
They allowed me to say, I actually did two
1:17:05
but they only let me talk about one in the book.
1:17:08
And this guy was recruiting Latin Americans
1:17:13
and infiltrating them to America
1:17:19
and others from Canada,
1:17:22
infiltrating them to the United States.
1:17:24
Now, not so much for terrorism
1:17:26
but primarily because as you know,
1:17:29
they're embargoed about everything.
1:17:30
So technology, if now you live in the United States,
1:17:33
you could go to the Apple store
1:17:35
and buy a three Apple computers.
1:17:37
Nobody's gonna blink an eye.
1:17:39
Now you smuggle them and they go to North Korea.
1:17:43
So I compromised this guy.
1:17:46
We took him down and we work with the FBI on
1:17:49
because we knew we had people inside.
1:17:51
We're foolish to think that we there are not no cells
1:17:57
inside of our country.
1:17:58
We have no borders to speak of to begin with.
1:18:05
There isn't a week that I don't hear.
1:18:07
Oh, they caught some Iranian guy
1:18:10
or they thought some, you know, this guy
1:18:11
or this major narco traffickers.
1:18:14
You know, not all the people coming across that border
1:18:18
are benign family people trying to find a better way of life.
1:18:22
And even those need to be documented.
1:18:25
But yes, indeed, we, you know, they're bad guys here.
1:18:30
You have guys like Amil Kanzi
1:18:33
who in front of my agency killed two of our people.
1:18:38
Right there, he shot several, but he killed two.
1:18:41
And this guy was just a very angry Pakistani.
1:18:45
He, you know, he went that radical flip
1:18:50
and he's here and he had an AK-47.
1:18:52
But who knows?
1:18:54
We don't know that he wasn't said here before.
1:18:56
- I guess Rick, the thing for me is,
1:18:58
and I was jotting this down as you were saying that,
1:19:00
there's the evil we know and then there's the evil we don't.
1:19:03
The world can kind of deal with the evil that we don't know.
1:19:06
The person that just literally loses it one day, you know,
1:19:09
and I say deals with it, but like they lose it one day
1:19:11
and they kill a couple of people and then kill themselves.
1:19:13
It's like, man, we didn't, no one saw that one coming.
1:19:16
Everybody in the community, the pastor at the church,
1:19:18
his wife and kids, nobody knew that was coming, right?
1:19:20
But then the evil that we do know,
1:19:22
that that's somewhat unforgivable
1:19:24
because that's the thing like when a kid has tons of issues
1:19:30
at home and is violent and kills animals and all that
1:19:32
and then all of a sudden he goes up and he shoots up a school,
1:19:34
it's like, we had all these warning signs.
1:19:36
How can we not keep our community safe?
1:19:38
And it's because we're a place of law
1:19:40
and this is a minority report.
1:19:41
We can't arrest you for future crime, right?
1:19:43
Stuff that you've not committed,
1:19:44
but it does make it a little bit disheartening
1:19:47
and a little bit exasperating for a guy like me
1:19:50
to think like those types of things are happening,
1:19:52
but I at least do understand it.
1:19:53
And you brought something else up there
1:19:54
that I wanted to talk about because, you know,
1:19:56
you just mentioned it about the Southern border,
1:19:58
essentially we don't have one.
1:20:00
And my senator here in the state of Oklahoma,
1:20:04
we, he talked about, this is James Langford,
1:20:06
he talked about here recently
1:20:07
that in the last calendar year,
1:20:08
we have stopped at our border,
1:20:10
people that we know of,
1:20:12
people from every single country in the world
1:20:15
to include our enemies,
1:20:16
China and North Korea and Iran and everybody that hates us.
1:20:19
We have people just going to Mexico
1:20:21
or somewhere in Central and South America,
1:20:22
making their way up and coming into our country.
1:20:25
And we basically say, we basically usher them in.
1:20:28
We basically hamstrung our border patrol by dictates
1:20:32
a lot of the stuff about the Joe Biden administration.
1:20:34
Title 42 is about to come off.
1:20:36
And we're about to see this crazy summer,
1:20:38
a mass migration illegal migration here.
1:20:40
And everyone likes to say, oh, aren't you a country
1:20:42
of immigrants, you're being racist,
1:20:43
you're being whatever, you just hate brown people.
1:20:44
It's like, no, whenever my family came over here
1:20:47
from Ireland, like there wasn't immigration law
1:20:49
like there is today.
1:20:50
Like, is it that big of a deal to come in
1:20:52
through the front door?
1:20:53
Like your family did that type of thing.
1:20:55
But talk to me about that just from an intelligence standpoint,
1:20:58
but also from a national security standpoint
1:21:00
about our southern border.
1:21:01
Because a lot of people feel like they're
1:21:02
just screaming at the sky because I don't not want them here
1:21:05
because I don't like people that speak Spanish.
1:21:08
Like that's crazy.
1:21:10
I don't want them here now
1:21:11
because they didn't come through the front door.
1:21:13
I don't know who these people are.
1:21:15
We don't know who they are.
1:21:15
Does that make sense?
1:21:17
- It does.
1:21:18
And let me tell you, I personally believe
1:21:20
that there are greater forces behind these things
1:21:23
than just these people coming out.
1:21:26
I know a little bit about operational disturbances
1:21:29
in enemy countries and the things that you could do
1:21:32
to form some problems.
1:21:35
But imagine the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians,
1:21:40
supporting with corrupt governments,
1:21:45
send your people to the United States,
1:21:47
sneak these people in.
1:21:48
I think that there's a strategic effort here.
1:21:53
This isn't just a mass exodus.
1:21:55
This is a mass exodus that is the result
1:21:58
of pushing that exodus so they can overwhelm this.
1:22:02
The other thing that that also creates,
1:22:03
which is a problem that a lot of people
1:22:05
don't focus on the southern border.
1:22:07
The problem with it is that it is causing
1:22:10
a division in our country.
1:22:12
We are drawing lines left from right,
1:22:16
white from black.
1:22:18
I'm not used to that.
1:22:20
To me, this is the United States of America.
1:22:24
And if you behave as Americans,
1:22:26
you'll be treated as Americans.
1:22:28
But it is so perfect that if I was the bad guys,
1:22:33
I would have loved to have been the guy
1:22:35
that came up with that idea of,
1:22:38
hey, let's ferment all these people,
1:22:39
make them really agile,
1:22:41
pay some of the coyotes off,
1:22:42
send the search sending the guys in.
1:22:44
In three years, we're gonna have hundreds of thousands
1:22:46
of people coming in.
1:22:48
I would have been promoted to five star general.
1:22:50
- Yeah.
1:22:53
- It's just as heartening to hear that
1:22:55
because there's nothing we can do about it,
1:22:57
but we can see it.
1:22:58
It's like somebody burning your house down,
1:23:01
but all you have to do is watch.
1:23:02
And so I do hate that we're in this area
1:23:05
where it seems like we're splitting as a country.
1:23:07
No, I don't think we're on the brink of civil war,
1:23:08
but yes, left is splitting from right,
1:23:10
red state is splitting from blue state.
1:23:12
And one of the things is I hate talking about groups
1:23:14
of people as groups of people,
1:23:17
like the gay community or the black community or all that.
1:23:20
I look at everyone as an individual.
1:23:21
They're all created individually in the image of God.
1:23:24
Like, let's not take their lowest common denominator,
1:23:27
which is their immutable characteristics
1:23:29
and judge them as that.
1:23:30
So I say all that to set up a very judgmental question.
1:23:34
Latinos as a voting block seem to be making a lot of changes
1:23:37
in terms of how they're viewing the modern electorate
1:23:40
and specifically the modern democratic party.
1:23:42
Now, what we've always been told is that Cuban Americans,
1:23:45
especially the ones that live in Florida,
1:23:47
they could give a damn about the Democrats
1:23:49
and all their stuff and moving towards socialism
1:23:51
and the woke stuff because they know like you do
1:23:53
and like your family did what that leads to.
1:23:55
They know what a revolution smells like,
1:23:59
much less reading about it in a book.
1:24:01
But talk to me a little bit about how Latino Americans
1:24:04
of a bunch of different backgrounds and persuasions,
1:24:07
how they're kind of moving towards the right side of the aisle,
1:24:10
moving towards the Republican party
1:24:12
because aside from Trump and doing a few things here there,
1:24:15
the Republicans aren't necessarily attracting them
1:24:18
to their side.
1:24:18
They're just being repelled by the democratic side
1:24:21
or am I crazy?
1:24:22
Am I wrong?
1:24:23
You just tell me what you want to say about it.
1:24:25
- You're spot on.
1:24:26
And what you're seeing is not everybody is as insane
1:24:29
as they're made out to be.
1:24:30
The people coming across that border is forcing the people
1:24:33
that have come here before and that are now established
1:24:37
to realize that you cannot continue this
1:24:39
before everybody's downfall.
1:24:41
And go back to what we talked about very early on.
1:24:45
Those people know the difference between living in Mexico
1:24:50
and living in the United States or in Guatemala
1:24:54
or Venezuela or Cuba.
1:24:56
So those people that come to this country legally
1:24:59
are the ones that eventually become legal.
1:25:02
They're seeing the writing on the wall,
1:25:05
but they're smart enough to vote against it.
1:25:09
I have friends in Colorado, I used to work out there
1:25:11
with the 10 Special Forces guys.
1:25:13
And I was amazed at how many cars had stickers
1:25:15
on them and said, "Don't California am I Colorado?"
1:25:18
- Right.
1:25:19
- Because I don't care that you leave,
1:25:21
but if you leave a place because it was a mess
1:25:23
the way you voted,
1:25:24
how are you gonna vote the same way now
1:25:26
when you come to Florida,
1:25:27
when you come to Texas or something else?
1:25:29
So I think that that's what we're seeing
1:25:31
is an awakening, not a woken.
1:25:33
That's all, yeah, that sticks in my craw too.
1:25:38
It's the 10th of 1% driving the train here.
1:25:43
But these people are awake to the fact
1:25:48
that they could lose what they've gained
1:25:52
in their three, five, 10 years
1:25:54
and revert back to the poverty
1:25:55
that they were in in Honduras, Peru, Nicaragua
1:26:00
and all these other places.
1:26:02
- I absolutely agree with that.
1:26:03
And one thing I was jotting down when you're talking about
1:26:05
don't California my Colorado, don't California my Texas.
1:26:09
This is my concern.
1:26:10
So if you look at Zillow or any of these other places
1:26:13
I pay attention to these things,
1:26:14
these mass exodus that we've seen
1:26:15
from New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California,
1:26:19
people moving to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Idaho,
1:26:21
South Dakota, all these different things.
1:26:23
Most people vote with their hearts and not their heads.
1:26:26
I know I'm painting with a broad brush here,
1:26:27
but I think that's pretty accurate,
1:26:29
that a majority of people vote with their hearts.
1:26:31
So you're a Californian
1:26:33
and you're leaving your refugee from California
1:26:35
because of the taxation,
1:26:37
because of some of the woke stuff in the public schools,
1:26:39
whatever your situation is.
1:26:40
And you move down to Irving, Texas or something like that.
1:26:43
But when you get to Texas, you love the relaxed taxation.
1:26:49
You love the government not telling you exactly what to do,
1:26:52
but then a presidential election rolls around
1:26:53
and now you're voting about abortion
1:26:56
because you think a woman should have a right to choose
1:26:59
whether or not to kill the baby inside of her womb.
1:27:01
You're talking about illegal immigration.
1:27:03
Well, I have a lot of people that are brown
1:27:05
that are my friends.
1:27:06
I don't want them to not be able to come here.
1:27:07
Shouldn't we just be able to love them and take care of them?
1:27:10
And go down the list.
1:27:11
It's all these emotionally attractive things
1:27:14
that the Democratic Party basically keys in on.
1:27:17
So that's my concern with these red states, solidly red states,
1:27:22
all of a sudden flipping blue at some point
1:27:23
'cause these people aren't moving to rural Florida,
1:27:27
they're moving to the major cities
1:27:29
and they're moving to these blue spots
1:27:31
in these otherwise red states.
1:27:33
So we obviously can't tell the future.
1:27:35
Obviously we got a few more election cycles to come
1:27:37
before we can see if anything I'm saying is legitimate,
1:27:39
but I do want to wrap up with this question here.
1:27:41
And I really appreciate all the time that you've given us today
1:27:43
to go into all these different areas.
1:27:45
Obviously you're a man of God.
1:27:46
You described yourself as a man of God.
1:27:48
You talk about it throughout the book.
1:27:49
You talk about consulting God whenever you're making
1:27:52
these decisions and all that kind of stuff.
1:27:56
Now help me square being a spy
1:27:59
or being a member of the United States government
1:28:03
where you might be forced to use violence on somebody
1:28:06
in order to protect somebody else.
1:28:08
'Cause some people, whether they've read their Bibles
1:28:10
or not, they think that's not really a Christian thing to do.
1:28:13
In your job, you may have had to stretch the truth
1:28:15
or just straight up lie in order to save your life,
1:28:18
save the lives of someone else
1:28:19
or to save a mission or something that you were doing.
1:28:21
So I know my audience is gonna be like,
1:28:23
how can this guy be a Christ follower?
1:28:24
How can this guy be a Christian?
1:28:26
How can this guy believe in God
1:28:27
and also do all this shady shadowy stuff?
1:28:30
So give it to me, tell me.
1:28:31
- It's real easy.
1:28:33
You have to be doing it for the right reasons.
1:28:36
First of all, the Bible does not say that I shall not kill.
1:28:38
It says that I shall not murder.
1:28:40
- Right.
1:28:41
- And we all have the right of self-defense
1:28:43
and my business is a right of preventive self-defense, okay?
1:28:48
I have no qualms whatsoever.
1:28:52
I have never gone in harm's way
1:28:54
that I haven't straightened things out with a man upstairs.
1:28:56
This is what I do for a living.
1:28:58
This is what I'm gonna be doing.
1:28:59
And I mean it.
1:29:00
I honestly, to save my soul,
1:29:02
I rather he hit me with a low lighting
1:29:04
when I walk out of this house.
1:29:05
I'm gonna go do something he doesn't want me to do.
1:29:08
So I think that it's naive to think
1:29:12
that you can fight an enemy from a different posture.
1:29:17
Our enemy, going back to that, they want to kill us.
1:29:22
They want to do us away.
1:29:24
Can you imagine if the United States folded
1:29:27
in any shape or form,
1:29:30
name me one country left in the world
1:29:32
that could take our place and lead against the Russians
1:29:37
and the Chinese and the Iranians.
1:29:39
- Right.
1:29:40
- There is none.
1:29:41
- No.
1:29:42
- So the morality is based on the reasons what you're doing.
1:29:47
I have stolen, I shall not steal.
1:29:50
I have stolen secrets from all countries
1:29:53
and all levels of generals and diplomats.
1:29:56
But it wasn't so I could come home
1:29:58
and invest in magnesium
1:30:00
because I know that now, MacDee's or whatever,
1:30:02
I'm holding something there.
1:30:04
I'm not coming home to benefit financially
1:30:06
from this on the contrary.
1:30:07
Most of the stuff I did,
1:30:08
I was a hand to mouth kind of GS12.
1:30:12
So it's why you do it.
1:30:15
You do it because you believe in your country
1:30:18
but you believe that your country
1:30:20
is one nation under God, indivisible.
1:30:24
And when you take that into consideration,
1:30:30
your conscious is clear.
1:30:32
I am not doing, I am not gonna go attack that village
1:30:36
because I wanna kill people.
1:30:38
No, I'm gonna attack that village
1:30:39
because they're attacking the civilians in Nicaragua
1:30:42
and I'm watching those mothers come in with dead babies
1:30:46
that get caught in a firefight
1:30:48
but with the Sandinistas.
1:30:50
So the morality is based on the end result
1:30:54
and it isn't the unjustifies the means kind of thing.
1:30:57
It's just having a purpose.
1:31:00
And then those decisions that you make with those?
1:31:02
Farce, obviously within the parameters of that purpose,
1:31:05
I believe they're legitimate.
1:31:07
- Yeah, I think obviously there's a much longer discussion
1:31:10
that could be had about the theology of all that
1:31:12
and everything, but certainly it makes sense
1:31:15
as why you would say that.
1:31:16
And it reminds me a quote that you had from the book
1:31:18
where you were quoting George Orwell.
1:31:20
And I can't remember if this was a 1984 animal farm
1:31:22
or what, but we sleep safely in our beds
1:31:25
because rough men stand ready in the night
1:31:27
to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
1:31:30
And so that's one of the ways that you can kind of get through
1:31:34
with your way of thinking in terms of everything
1:31:36
and how you were able to do your job
1:31:37
over such a legendary career.
1:31:39
But Rick, we've touched on a lot of different things here
1:31:41
and believe it or not guys, even an hour and a half long chat,
1:31:44
we left a whole lot of stuff on the cutting room floor
1:31:47
in terms of what we could have talked about in the book.
1:31:48
But I really, really appreciate you chatting with us.
1:31:51
Is there anything else you wanna get off your chest?
1:31:52
- No, just thank you very much for having me.
1:31:54
And the only thing that I will say is
1:31:56
that I wrote the book for the right reasons.
1:31:58
And what brought it to mind was why you do something.
1:32:02
I can look in the mirror and know that I wrote the book
1:32:06
because I believe that my agency, my colleagues
1:32:11
and the average American needs to take off
1:32:13
the rose color glasses and see what the agency really
1:32:18
is supposed to do and is capable of doing it
1:32:20
and so with our military.
1:32:22
- Right.
1:32:23
It's a unique read and I really appreciate you
1:32:24
and your team sending it in my way.
1:32:26
Rick Prado, thank you for coming on
1:32:27
on Daunton Life of Man's podcast.
1:32:29
- Thank you very much.
1:32:31
- There you go guys.
1:32:32
I hope you enjoyed my interview with Rick Prado.
1:32:33
But before we let you go,
1:32:34
we are gonna do a quick resilience boost.
1:32:36
And on Daunton Life, our mission is equipping men
1:32:37
to push back darkness with content
1:32:39
that for just spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:32:41
So I've got two links for you today.
1:32:42
I've got a link to the book Black Ops,
1:32:44
The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior
1:32:46
and also a link to Rick's website.
1:32:47
All right guys, thanks so much for listening to the show.
1:32:49
We do appreciate it.
1:32:50
Wherever you're listening to this,
1:32:50
please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star review.
1:32:54
If you wanna come speak live at your event
1:32:55
or on your podcast, you shoot me an email
1:32:57
to info@undonta.life.
1:32:59
That's I-N-F-O @undonta.life.
1:33:01
You can follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
1:33:03
and check out our website for everything else,
1:33:05
including how to donate to keep more content
1:33:07
like this coming your way.
1:33:07
Just go to www.undonta.life.
1:33:10
And as always, we wanna thank the band August Burns Red
1:33:12
for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:33:14
The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Tides"
1:33:16
which is off their 10th anniversary
1:33:18
re-recording of their album Leveler.
1:33:20
The links are in the description.
1:33:22
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:33:24
Remember, keep pushing back darkness,
1:33:27
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience,
1:33:30
keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
1:33:33
♪ I know I'm dying ♪
1:33:37
♪ There's a heart in life ♪
1:33:39
♪ I know you want ♪
1:33:41
♪ It's a side to make sense ♪
1:33:45
♪ It's a virtue ♪
1:33:48
♪ You will be reinforced ♪
1:33:54
(dramatic music)