I made my way into the agency’s counterterrorism mission — where Mr. Prado made his mark as a creative and courageous paramilitary officer — a few years after he rang down the curtain on his stellar career.
Having grown up in Cuba and escaped with his family to the U.S. following Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution, Mr. Prado dedicated his life to defending the principles of freedom, liberty and democracy enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
As he recounted in his 2022 autobiography, "Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior," the Castro regime confiscated his family’s business and designated Mr. Prado, then just 10 years old, for indoctrination in the Soviet Union. Instead, Mr. Prado’s father, who never took a welfare check, settled his family in Miami to embrace the freedom of opportunity denied them in Castro’s Cuba.
Mr. Prado’s life story is about serving his country, often at great personal risk.
After serving in the Air Force as a Special Forces pararescue jumper, in the Miami-Dade Fire Department and in the National Guard, he embarked on a remarkable career at the CIA. In his first tour of duty in the early 1980s, he had the distinction of being the only CIA officer allowed into the camps where the agency was training Contra insurgents to fight the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
"Embracing the suck" of living in the jungle where the enemies were "communists and communism," Mr. Prado spent some 14 months teaching the fledgling rebel fighting force to use mortars and conduct hit-and-run raids.
Even at this early stage in his career, Mr. Prado embodied what today’s CIA leaders seek in new recruits: "We look for commonsense problem-solvers," CIA Deputy Director of Operations Dave Marlowe noted in a recent fireside chat at Vanderbilt University, candidates "who can take your thinking and apply it in real-world situations, often on their own, and make significant decisions of great importance."
Although it was the clash with a communist regime in Latin America that kicked off his CIA career, Mr. Prado went on to serve in the Philippines as a senior manager on North Korean operations and at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.