The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective sy aside of life the average person is never exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Rick Brada, welcome back to I Catch Killers.
I'm ready for you. Thank you very much. I'm really enjoying this.
Okay, Well, I have got so much to ask you. I just want to start off for just a little bit of left field. Here. There's a quoting your book by George all Will and this is a quote. We sleep safely in our beds because rough mans stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. I like that quote, and I understand that quote, but I just want to get your comment on that quote.
It's one of my favorite quotes because it's it, you know, typifies our culture. You know, when we have Veterans' Day, most people focus on the military. I'm always always post something that includes our law enforcement, our first responders besides the military, because it's it's what we do, you know. So it's the majority. You figure in the United States, for example, two percent of the population ever serves at a given time in the military. Another percent serves in
law enforcement. Right, that means that the rest of the ninety six percent have no idea what we do and what we sacrifice in order for them to have the life that we enjoy, whether it's in Australia or Brittany or the United States, anywhere where they're there, where there is are there are freedoms. So that that quote I think crystallizes and it's easier to explain to a lehman that, you know, you know, sometimes you have to cray habit and let slip the dogs of war. But those dogs
are not going to bite you. They're going to bait the person or the entity that is trying to destroy you. That's one of my favorite quotes, and it's one that I always love hearing.
Yeah, I like it, and it resonates with me as well, because I think sometimes you do things that it's not in your nature to do, but you do it because you have to do it, and it's an ethical thing. But it's not going to be pleasant, but you'll do that. And quite often I think people don't understand what goes on, what goes on behind the closed doors to make sure the world is safe.
Yeah, I mean you look at like I said that that ninety plus per scent of people that have never been shot at, uh, have never had to shoot back, had never had to fight to to neutralize an aggressor and somebody who was trying to rape a woman or whatever it is. So those are those are things that and they don't understand the risk and everything else, and mostly importantly, they don't understand the impact, the post incident impact that those things have on the on the on
the person that has to carry them out. You know, I'm like I said, I wrote Rescue in Miami, UH in the seventies, for God's Sake, which was when the drug wars were were rampant.
And uh, it would have sayn a bit then oh it.
Was, it was. It was brutal. And as a paramedic, there were shootings every night. There were you know, robberies, there were things. And it's it's funny because although, yeah, there are some things in my a CIA career that still give me a little bit of goosebumps, some of the worst memories came from pole that I couldn't see. Uh, people that were you know, we did everything we could,
but they still didn't make it. And and uh, I read somewhere not too long ago a phrase of the guy says, yes, said people don't understand that it is harder too. It is easier to forget somebody you had to kill then to forget that you could not see. What are your partners or what are your friends.
We've taken you back to Honduras for a moment when you were working in the in the camps, and then coming back coming back to your wife. You're living in country and your wife was living in country. Was it hard for you to go from yeah, you're in the jungle, you're fighting in the jungle basically, and everything else that you're doing. Then you come home and you walk through the door and Hi, honey, I'm home. Like, how did you how did you navigate between one extreme to the other.
That's that's an excellent question, and it's one that I eventually mastard. I mean, I was pretty rough around the edges of the beginning. You come out of these camps, you have to be thinking tough, you have to be you maybe you got shot at that day, because you know, all these camps were right in the contested areas. And but you know, I had two things going for me, and the biggest one was my wife is a believer. She didn't know exactly what I was doing. She knew
I was at the camp. She knew I carried a gun and a grenade and a knife and all this other stuff. But she was a believer because she lived Communism, so she knew that I wasn't out there drinking and hurrying around. I was out there trying to win, to win a battle. But you do learn to turn it off,
or at least to tone it down. I will tell you that one of the things that I that I try to mentor my my my subordinates and people that come to me, is something that I could have done better was to better sensitize my spouse of what I really do without going into operational details. But here's the here's the problem. When Johnny, whose dad works at the car dealer or owns a car dealer, has a bad day and comes home pissed off, it means it's sullen.
Of course, when a guy like you or a guy like me come home after we you know, and we've had a bad day, is compromised, mission is compromised, and or somebody is dead, there's a severity. There's a severity to the consequences that we live within that most people do not understand.
I found it hard sometimes if you're in operational mode and you come home and you're in an environment that's relaxed, whether your kids are there, your partner there, or a happy environment, and when you've been well. This is how I found myself. When I'm in operational mode, I make a decision, Bang, this needs to be done, that needs to be done. That's the way you've got to operate.
You've got to operate at that speed. So you could be doing that for days on end, and then you come home and it might be a comment like do you want to go out for dinner, and yeah, where do you want to go? I don't care. Come we get there, and it just the conversation escalates from there.
And that's just a silly example. But you're being in an environment where it's bang bang bang, I know this, done that, done this done, and then you're in this relaxed environment and then you have to check yourself and realize you're the one that'say out the step, not the people that are.
That is absolutely true, and guilty is charged many many times. But again with age. I mean, I've been married forty two years, so I must have done something right eventually. So but yeah, it's hard to turn it off. It really is, and there's people that don't. There's people that actually and those are the ones that unfortunately suffer the consequences you know, alcohol or drug abuse or or whatever,
you know, just violent temperament issues. When you cannot, you don't learn to turn it off, or at least to turn it down. You never turn it off.
I always had, and that's why thirty four years in the cops and I think I've come through relatively unscathed. But I could switch it off. And I know people that can't switch it off. I can be intense and then walk through the door and yeah, there'll be a debriefing type situation, but then I can just relax and then okay, game on when you walk out the door again. I think it's something that you're lucky, you're fortunate if
you can do that. Clearly, with the length of your career and the type of stuff that you're doing, you had the ability to cape with the pressures.
Yes, I think that that was part of the wiring and the eventual growth that I did. But like I said, having a family that really understood, you know, what I was doing and the reasons I was doing these things. Mix coming home a lot easier. Mix coming home a lot easier.
Yeah, Okay, we've had you in the jungle, you've been to the farm, We've polished you up. You've got all the skills. You know which side the knife and fork should be on. Communicate, you've got your edge. You get deployed to the Philippines, talk us through that deployment because a lot happens in the Philippines that, Yeah, it can be a crazy place.
Yeah, I mean the Philippines at the time that that was my third tour in my Latin American tour, which I cannot mention the country, but both were being assaulted by highly trained, highly financed terrorist communist terrorists. One was Maoist, the other ones where whatever. And the New People's Army and the ABUSAF group was starting to take Wayne down in mind now the southern part of the Philippines. So the Philippines has always been a violent place. And when
these things were, they were literally on the streets. There was a very famous colonel, Colonel Nick Roe wrote a fantastic book called five Years to Freedom or something like that, because he was a pow for five years and he became the military attache in Manila and he was assassinated like eight months before I got there, right on the streets. In other words, mp A was, you know, operating with
impunity in the very capital of the country. And that's what we were sent there to to butchers the local I work with this constabulary, I work with the Navy, and I worked with the army, the Special Operations.
GAY so and what what role did you go in there? Like, what was America's interest to have you in there? What you can then count site it's.
No I mean it's it's very basic. I mean, the you know, we're trying to, uh to buoy a democracy that is you know, failing because they don't have the capability or the training. Uh So we were sent there to work primarily with our counterparts and train them up and provide them the craft that they needed to learn. The logistics as you know, you know logistics in any businesses there is the main and drive being able to give them the resources financial and technical that they needed.
That was one of the things we were doing a lot of intercepts because back then communications were more vulnerable, and not that they're not now, but there it was. It was part of the being able to find out what the terrorists were planning or doing. So there was a lot of technical aspect to it also, but it was our mission there was to help the government survive. And eventually they did push the MPa out of the city and back in.
The woods, and a lot of that would be done. I would imagine Rick with human intelligence like getting people and I think there was a quite a new book that in the US you look for people's strength rather than targeting their weaknesses. So when you're looking for an asset, you're looking for someone that can help what you're trying to achieve. Can you talk us through that and the difference between target need someone for their strength rather than
their weaknesses. Hew, yeah, different different nations upright.
That's an excellent question in one of my pet peeves. You know, Soviets and Chinese and some of the more radical elements. They recruit our strengths, but they also recruit for weaknesses. In other words, you have a drinking problem, you are being unfaithful to your wife, you're doing drugs, you're doing something illegal, you're stealing from your company. They love having those people because now they have them, they have them, they you know, they're demand. You know they
have them. So that part is very problematic because that person will never be loyal to you because they're only there under duress. I did twenty four and a half years at CIA. Not ever did I see us recruit somebody for that reason. As a matter of fact, I've had assets that were developing drinking problems and we would
find them, you know, find them help. They're gambling problems, we would find them help because you know, a recruitment is a process of getting the person to understand what you're trying to do and make it, you know, mutually beneficial, and part of that is taking care of that individual. Training that individual and helping them were necessary. You know.
I think I recruited more people because their kids wanted to go to college and that was a thing that we could make happen, you know, to help in the long run. But those are the things you do to be able to run an asset for ten, fifteen, twenty years, thirty years, and those do exist. We do have those those kind of track records with that.
Well you break it down and the term, yeah, the carrot or the stick to get what you want and dangling the carrot. You made me reflect on a lot of my career was spent like nice crime and informants. And I think about the informants, the ones that I had long term relationships with and the ones that always delivered and could be trusted. Were the ones that were doing it not for their own mutual benefit, but doing it for the right reason. It was something that they
wanted to do. And yeah, so I understand the logic behind doing that. How it can be hypothetical, but you just tell me, you've gone into a new country, whether it be the Philippines or back in South America. You're perhaps there working within the embassy, have a role within the embassy. What do you how do you recruit someone you just get out there and socialized, or how does it work? Give us an example?
Absolutely, you know, so you know the data, the life of a case officer. You get up in the morning, you go to work, and well most people take the most straight line. Well you can't. You have to be watching to see if you're being watched because you may have a meeting that name and see what kind of screwed you're in and you're checking in the embassy just like everybody else. American embassies are kind of strange because
we do lie higher foreign nationals. Our secretaries and our phone operators and some of the other stuff are are foreign nationals. So you have to live your cover even inside the embassy because obviously there will be penetrations through those so those individuals. So you know, I've been a political officer, I was a science officer in the Philippines. I was liaison officer, which is what afforded me access to the military guys.
H So.
Yeah, it's it's it's it is a new challenge when you come into a country and you have look, you have to assume. Let me put it this way, foreign services assume that you are a spy until you convince them that you're not.
Okay, you're in art If you.
If you're an American working out of a US embassy, the intel, the local intel service, will look at you as a spy until if your tradecraft is good enough, they eventually go, oh, this guy's just the boring whatever is he in doing anything? And they put the resources on somebody else. And that is very, very difficult, and that is a huge process. And every time you start in a new country, you start from scratch. You know, you live your cover inside the embassy, outside the embassy.
But then you do either through existing assets, get new leads through intel research. You know, they say, hey, here's the guy that made this comment, and you know he may be willing to cooperate, and he works in the ministry of whatever. And then we there's a process by where we approach the individual under you know, false pretenses for lack of a better word, usually in a social environment. And once you become friends, you find out you know what I've always described it is find out what keeps
them up at night. Uh and that if you could resolve that for them, it is that is your entry point into into recruitment.
They've got something, You've got something they need and you bring them along there. You're also deployed with North Korea or not in North Korea, but working in that field. What was that lot? Because that's a yeah, SAI is a secretive organization, but North Korea it's very isolated. What what was that lot?
I actually did four years total working the Korea account. The first two was actually working in in Seoul and the embassy UH. There, I was a senior liaison officer uh so I had the US military J two was my counterpart, but the heads of the different services including the police, which I made some good friends there. So you know, the target is mutual. You know I was working with a South Koreans. The target is mutual, which is the North Koreans. The North Koreans have two natural enemies,
South Korea and the United States. That's it, That's all they care about. That's all they care about. So we obviously don't have ready access. I'm not saying that we don't have programs that we do have it as successes, but North Korea is a very prohibitive place to operate because there is no embassy, there's no you know, you're you're under surveillance twenty four to seven. You have a very controlled audience. So for us, that work is overseas.
There's about fifty some embassies, North Korean embassies throughout the world, and that's where we target those individuals for recruitment, is trying to find them and they're they're tough not to crack, but we've cracked them. And when you don't crack them, you compromise them. And that was something that I developed an act for you say no to me, you were going to get into trouble.
Somehow, and and again without giving away trade craft, but they could get in the trouble with an account created in their name or something that doesn't reflect well on them, or a picture of them hanging out with someone they shouldn't be hanging out. Is that the type of thing that they get compromised on.
Yeah, you know, it's it's it's a it's a it's it's very complicated in the sense of that it depends on the individual. What's going on. In the case of the North Koreans, what I was able to do, was I approach these guys as a Latin American private investigator,
a private businessman and spoke Native Spanish. This was in a Latin American country, and I went up to the Korean embassy in that country, knocked on their door and say, hey, my name is so and so, I'm from such and such a country and I want to talk business with you. That's very important because North Koreans have to earn their own money to operate, and most of it they do it through elicit businesses that they get into. A lot of it is procurement of embargo things for the for
the for the regime. So my thing was, I said, look, I'm a businessman. I'm in the tobacco business. You guys have access to Cuba. Can you smuggle me some Cuban seeds so I can improve my tobacco crop. And I reached into my sock and I had a lot of hundreds like this, And when I started doing that, that got their attention. And uh, when when the time came that I pitched them, they you know, they did not want to work. There was a long process in between.
We turned them into the local authorities that these guys were smuggling. They get caught smuggling something into the country and they get p Indeed, they get sent out of the country in disgrace. And for North Korean that's often a goolag type of existence. You embarrassed the regime by getting compromised overseas. You go buy, you're gonna.
Pay heavy price, so you're not going to have a good not having a good time.
Were subsequently a couple of years later, then I took over the whole career's program. That was where I made senior grade, uh, and I worked with you. I was the the CIA's nsc rep for anything to do with Korea, and that was a very very different assignment for me than all the other stuff that was more kinetic and more street wise than that.
Yeah, how did you find like climbing that climbing the corporate ladder or say ladder, whatever you call it, How did you find your career? Because were you getting pushed up and you're trying to stay at a level so you could operate?
Yes, and no, I never took an assignment for promotion. Never.
Well, Rick, can I just say I like you for that? That says a lot about the type of person. You are well done. Yeah, it is.
It is one of my badge of honors. I believe in the mission, and when you do well your mission, you're going to get recognized and moved up. I could not say no to that position because that made me a flank rack officer in the agency. But my heart was always in operations and that job. After that job, I took over in our counter terrorist center. I was the chief of operations for the counter terrorist Center where
ninety eleven happened. So now I'm you know, at first I wasn't out on the street, but I have fingers in the pie. I'm mentoring my guys, on my gals, I'm putting things together. We're doing renditions, We're doing all of this stuff. So at least you're still in the game. But to your point, about a year after ninety eleven, I went to my boss and I said, we're not doing enough on this outside of the military. You know, military theaters, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq kind of thing.
At the time, it was only Afghanistan. And I came up with a program for chasing bad guys all over the world and getting patterns of life on them, getting their tradecraft, who they see, where they live. In case we needed to operate against them to disrupt them, we
now had the ability to do so. So I went from you know, chief of operations, where I had about three hundred and fifty operators working for me, to having a twelve person team because I had almost as many women as I had guys to do this kind of work. And we were doing surveillance and targeting bad guys. And that's how I ended my career. The last two and a half years of my career were out on the street again.
Okay, And look, I think that operational experience that you get that you've managed to stay in that area for so long, and like some people might say, well you were managing three hundred and fifty people there and you've
gone down to fourteen. But I see quite often in policing, and I can only speak of law enforcement, that we lose a lot of the experience When people that rose, as you said, through operational and you rise the very thing that made them good, they take them away from it and then they're they're in charge of something with a rank, but all their operational skill has gone out
the door. So the fact that you ended up back there Another question I wanted to ask, as working under the false identifications, is that hard to get your head rounded? I know with my friend the French spy, at any one time, he'd had five different identities that he could rely on at different stages, didn't have to go from one to the other, but had them there if needed
in the type of work that he was doing. We had Joe Pistoni on the podcast Donnie Brasca who went undercover in with the mafia and speaking to him about a really impressive, impressive fellow. He was about always being alert and you've virtually got to live that life. Is that how you adopted the identities you became John Smith or whoever you were.
You have to and we people didn't understand is like again, James Bond, what walks into country acts and he is James Bond and he goes and does all this crazy stuff. You know, we walk into country X and we're if we're already in alias. We have to live that cover, whether it's business, whatever it is that you're doing, tourism, whatever it is, you have to live that character. And but the the attention to details is what is you know, precarious because I don't have to know the answer to
a question. All I need is your reaction to that question. If I ask you what kind of color?
What what? What? What?
What school did you go to in in the United States or where Holland or whatever the hell you and you sit there, well, I yeah, I want to You're done. So that's the time. I mean, what is the national anthem of of your of your of your country. It is just getting a piece of paper that says you're Joe McGillicutty with a photo of you, and you go out there and you go through that kind of security, especially when you work in denied areas, which we do, and swead.
The details counter terrorism the work when you got into there, and that was mid nineties and when you started working the canter terrorists.
By my first counter terrorism assignment, although I was still a paramilitary officer, was in nineteen eighty eight when I went to that South American country and I was resta wrong for CIA internally, you know, the outside folks did not know that I was there doing that. So that was my first. The center was created by one of my mentors, Dewey Clerage, one of the most impressive men
I ever met in my life. He started the counter Terrorism Center in nineteen eighty six, and in nineteen eighty eight, my first assignment for CTC was that Latin American country. From there I went to the Philippines. That was still under the same ct auspices.
And when you were assigned task with Osama bin Laden, it was at the the mid nineties.
Yeah, but the lod was. We started the Bladden Task Force in January of nineteen ninety six and I had just come back from from Saul, Korea. I was a branch chief. I had the PLO branch and all the Palestinian stuff. And I got called in and asked if that I by name had come up for being the deputy chief of station for a task force targeting Osama Bin Laden, And I said who, and my boss exactly. So I became the deputy chief of station for that for that for that mission, and that was in nineteen
ninety six. There was an incredible operator named Billy Wall. He was a being Bret legend, and he did thirty some years in the agency on contract and I knew that he had worked cartoon because I knew him. I met him nineteen ninety in the Philippines. So that was one of my biggest you know sources when he came to what cartoon like because that's where we're Osama bit lot all the time. So we started working against bin Laden and you know, when let's say that when we
started we had two files on him. Six months later we had twenty or thirty. A year later we had one hundred. I mean we were between working liaison services sources and then our technical overhead and singing and everything else, we were compiling a lot of information on bin Laden. We knew he was bad. We had over the training camps he was building, and unfortunately the administration at the time did not want to take the risk that we
were proposed. He was, let's take care of this guy now because he's building something that is huge and he's got Saudi money by the tenth millions of dollars. And it was always, well, we don't have enough proof. We had people coming out and telling us this guy is training terrorists to do this. We have the communications, but
they still wouldn't do it. And our thing was we either additional you know, when you capture the individual and take them out of country, or you you know, you neutralize them by you know which everyone ag sent a special team of military special team from the agency, from our Special Activities Division, and they would never buy off
on that. And the reason I you know, that's so important to me is because imagine if we would have been allowed in nineteen ninety seven, nineteen ninety eight to take down Usama bin Laden, it'd be like it would it would be Hitler in nineteen thirty eight, the coal the embassy bombings in Africa, you know, the ninety eleven all those things were probably been adverted and not happened.
And is that because there was a lack of appetite with the politicians, the presidents or various presidents about the SAII and you know, an assassination basically if this person is a target and there wasn't the stomach for it, is that what prevented it? Yeah?
I mean, you know there is a risk adverse in every in every uh uh you know organization. We had a few in the Agency, not many, but we did have a few that were just like you said, careerists. These are the individuals own up the ladder like this, and you know, because they were always smelling where the next promotion was.
So sorry, I'm laughing. I'm laughing, Rick, I'm with you. I under understand it. Every decision that's made. How will this further in my career? Yeah, that the top of the hand.
Those but you know, the things with politicians also are that they are in the art of compromising, and you know they they they look at things. I always try to teach people that you cannot run special military or special intelligence operations through a political optic. You got to put politics aside. You know, it's there's a mission. President tells you you need to do this, You do whatever it takes to get it done and not get caught. And that's how you get promoted. In my world.
I look, I think if people look back, if we're honest, that it would have been so much better. Like the means justify the ends. If you take someone out like Osama bin Laden. If an opportunity presented, and my understanding was there was ample opportunity, it could have been done, but the decisions above decided not to. And hindsight's a wonderful thing. But look where we're at now and the damage that was caused and the lives that were lost, So.
It must be The sad thing is that you know, it wasn't just killing the guy. You know, we are prohibited from doing political killings. I'm good with that. If you're an elected proper or even a dictator, that's off limits. But when you have a terrorist that you know is targeting Americans and it's going after other democratic allys that we have, and you have the capability to disrupt and
preempt their intentions, that is our job. As a matter of fact, that's one of the models of the count of Terrorist Center is to be able to deter or prevent acts of happening, not retaliate after the fact. So we had plans, we even proposed plans of not even shooting him. We knew that he was so comfortable in cartoon. Khartoum at the time was a hotel for terrorists. That's where Carlo the Jackal was captured by Billy Waugh, my friend in ninety two. Because he was there, he knew,
he knew the operations. But if you were a terrorist and you had money, you could go to Khartom and you were there with impunity, you had papers and everything else. So he was what we call in the white He was driving his own car going to places, so coming in with the team and kidnapping him and throwing him in a helicopter and getting out of there was very doable. Shooting is a lot easier when you try to take a you know, a six foot five guy that weighs
two hundred pounds against his will. That's a little harder than out of a country. But shooting him up, but we had the options. It wasn't just you know, shooting them. But the fordit to the political fortitude was never there.
It was never their stomach for it. So when that you guys were looking at him, knew that he was up to stuff. You disrupted him, financial trials whatever, why you can.
Yeah, I mean we went after the money as much as possible. That was one of the things the initiatives that that we were going after. I mean again, logistics is is what you know, experts really practiced, and logistics means money and the cost of that logistics. So we did attack that, but primarily was trying to go out and get sources that could report on these terrorist groups.
You know, we we you know, a national terrorism where like in South America, what I dealt with, what I dealt with in the Philippines, to international terrorism, which was any evolution of that, you know where I started spreading all over you know, like has wella hitting you know, the synagogue in Argentina, you know that, that kind of
international capabilities. So trying to be able to not only penetrate those groups, but work with friendly liaison services to help each other, like in the Philippines, like in the South American country, where we would help certain people be better at their jobs so we could help them take down the bad guys before they took us.
Now, the pressure that you carry with task like that, if you've been assigned that. It's not a nine to five job obviously, but you'd have to give your heart and soul to that. Then there's always something more, something more that I could do. Did you find that type of pressure working working cases like that?
Yeah? And And to tell you the truth is, I don't think that I did enough. I really look back and I think I wish I would have done this, or I would have done more, or I would have insisted it on this. You know, I think the people in our business are never satisfied with the damage that we could do to the bad gays, you know, the justice we can bring to the to the PURBs, you know, uh, and even to this day, you know, I sit here and I'm well retired and everything else, and I go like,
you know what I miss it? I missed being able to know what's.
Going on and doing something about it and making a difference. And you need, I think, to be good operators in that field or other other fields, you need that obsession or it needs to be bordering on obsession. I'd get criticized to say, are you too passionate? It's passionate with perspective, and I think you've got to be passionate about what you do. I think it's interesting. And you paid homage to some of the Intel operators that were just brilliant
at what they did. Information that they could analyze and see the links that me immortals down, see those type of things. I think on one of your teams you had a businessman accountant mindset, wasn't the most socially capable guy, but was very good at what he did. You need a team of almost misfits to a degree that come together to make something function with. What's your take on that.
You're the ring master of the zoo at the the the event, because yeah, you're right. I mean I had several paramilitary guys that were pointy, elbowed. They just wanted to go out and bite people. And you gotta you know again, you know, you know when to let them loose and went to control them. And we had people that you know, have really rough personalities. Now I didn't.
I was always from the other school. I only blew up a couple of times in the agency and just really they had to repeat my room after I got through a couple of these individuals that really really did something stupid. But for the most part, I would try to preempt by the gaiters. And like I said earlier, you know, our job in the agency, as we claim, is to ojt the next person. You know, rainom on what to do, how to do this, and you do
it by example. It's like with your kids. You know, your kids do what they see you do, not what you tell them to do. Same thing in business. You know, it's the same thing in our business that the people that you're mentoring look up to you and they go, oh gee, you know that that's not what Gary would do. He would do this, and that that's how you guide them in that direction.
Now, but it is I think the mentoring in the type of world you operate, because you can't learn it from a textbook. You need these good mentors. And throughout your book you pay homage to a lot of people that obviously had a big impact on you, and you took the way they'd operate and tried to adapt that to something that soothed yourself. Is that a fair assessment? How you navigated your way through the very is.
Very excell assessment. And it wasn't just the operational part, but was the leadership part. You know, learning to be a leader. You have some natural qualities, but they only need to be polished. All our strengths always need to be polished. And I was blessed with leaders, not managers. I was, you know, blocked with leaders. There's a huge difference. So learning how to you know, gain the confidence of your men and women. I will tell you that at
the end of my retirement. When I retired, I got some pretty pretty heavy duty medals, but the biggest badge of honor that I got was my guys coming up to me and going, you're the only senior officer we've ever paid working for That was first through the door, first in the gym first picking up brass. I never asked guys else to do nothing that I hadn't done before. You're not a leader on the world lead it's implied
to the name. You have to show them that you can do it better than them, and then they try to emulate you, and that's how you grow them.
I one hundred percent agree with your thoughts and philosophies there on leadership, management and leading. And yeah, I got criticized because I'm out in the field or I'm in the witness box. What are you doing in there? You're a detective inspector. Why isn't sergeant? It's not asking people to do stuff that you wouldn't do yourself. And yeah, and everyone in the team, I think another aspect of
working with dynamic teams. Everyone in the team is as important as anyone else, So it's not this sort of pecking order, or that's a junior officer. Sometimes the junior officer comes up with the best idea out of all You've got to draw all that information.
Absolutely, I'm a friend believer in that.
Nine eleven. On the day you're in the CIA, what was your position and describe how you became aware of it? And the flow on effect from that.
Well, for me, that was a pad peeve obviously, because like I said, I started to visit the task Force in ninety six and here we are in two thousand and one and now I'm the Chief of Operations for CIA's Counter Terrorist Center. In other words, I'm in charge of all the people that are trying to mess with the bad guys worldwide. My experiences from Bin laden Uh taught me a lot. And when we were getting all this noise that they were up to, we knew that
they were up to something. We knew that they were going to hit us. We didn't know when or where, but we knew that they were going to hit us, and that was very frustrating for us. And then of course when we got hit, I was there as a matter of fact that you know, we all know exactly where we were a lot on ninety eleven, and it changed the whole dynamics of the CIA all of a sudden, the diplomatic circuit was tritiary. Now it was kind of terrorism. We needed to go back and try to put that
genie back in the in the bottle. So for me, it was a learning experience that again, if we would have been able to do something about bin Laden before that would have happened. And number two, if we had things in place that would allow us to disrupt other organizations. And again this is what I gave up my big job for to go out on on the road with twelve men and women. And it was my concept was give me thirty names of key individuals that have a
public persona for every organization. Okay, so three from Hesbola, three from al Kaeda, three from this or that and the other. We went out, we made book on them. We had patterns of life, We knew what kind of cars they had. There was a guy that I even had a set of keys for his car that we have been able to finagle. So we had all these
things in place. And the idea was when Hesbolah, when we're hearing that chatter that Hesbola Hamas or any of these are doing are planning something, what do you think happens if all of a sudden, three of their senior guys in three different places get neutralized. One gets couple, one guests duck taped and brought to justice, the other one gets shot. What do you think they're going to do? They're going to stop their operations because they think they're penetrated.
So that's that's what I learned from my experiences and what I try to inculcate and what I try to set up at the end of my career.
It makes sense in the theory of it, like be proactive, have it there ready. If we need to, we roll because it's always hard playing catch up, isn't it? Life events already?
And when I briefed that program, one of the things I told them was I said, you can't told the directors is you cannot build the firehouse when your house is on fire. These are things you have to have. So when the fire starts, you have the firehouse, you have the water, hydrants, you have everything. It's the same thing. You can't wait until you've been hit to neutralize or preempty.
So yeah, you've got that, got the hose ready? Was there a finger pointing with what happened on nine eleven? Like I would imagine there would be people that be looking looking over why didn't we do this? Why didn't we do that? How did the organization react at.
The political level? Yes, of course, obviously George Bush had just taken over, so he was a very different individual, and he actually was extremely supportive of the agency and gave us free reign to go after but Laden, that's sweets. He's saying that, you know, the special authorities for us to go after Bin Laden anywhere that he was at. But there were some political comments, you know, people say you should have you know, I remember having Feinstein chastise
us about not doing this or not doing that. And the thing is I could go right back to him and said, I could have had been Laden in ninety seven. I could have had a lot of ninety eight it had been Laden in eighty nine. So yeah, you took away the tools that I had to neutralize them. And now he's doing this to you, and you want to say, why did this happen? And well, how we cannot prevent it?
We couldn't shuts down the appetite to lay the blame at your feet.
That's right, that's right.
And I think in operational phases and this is obviously at the extreme, but if it's documented there and make people make the decisions, will not just say I look reck, we'd rather you didn't put the report in. Make them sign off and go no, you can't do that, because when something does happen as catastrophic as that was, people look back and they look for blame and the only way they protect yourself because I've seen a lot of good people come on stark because they haven't got the documentation.
We know it wasn't their fault on what's happened, but people higher above or with more power, more influence of many to point the finger at them.
It isn't making never every organization, Like I said before, you cannot run in special ops through a political optic, and our bosses are political and you know we we are a military structure organization. So you know, just because I used to tell my guys, just because I'm saying please and thank you, which I always do, doesn't mean that is a request. Okay, Now an order is an order and you're gonna follow it whether it's yes or no or sir, I don't want to do that, and
I'll get somebody else that can do it. So you know that that that mentality at the political level doesn't doesn't doesn't calculate, and that is part of you know, getting your black built in bureaucracy as you go through the ranks, learning how do you can manipulate your your uppers. You know, you you manage down and you manage up. You lead down, and you manage up, because that's part of your job as a senior officer in any organization
is to get through the bureaucracy and get the mission done. Yeah.
I always if I was trying to manage up, I let the without naming names, let the boss think it was their idea. After I've told them what the idea is, and when they repeat it back to making that's a great idea.
Yeah.
I know, it's funny, isn't it. It does work simple. It's almost like good cop, bad cop. It's just so simple. Great idea, boss, Wow, Yeah, and then run with it. When did you decide it was time you got out of the CIA? It was there. It was there, just a time that you thought I'm done here, or what prompted you to leave?
Very painful. Those programs that I created at the end, and they allowed me to put that in the book, not what we were able to do, but the concept and what we were, you know, capable of doing. I briefed the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, on that program. He blessed it. But the time came
to execute. You know, here here we are a trial to all these first, second, and third world countries, making book on bad guys, risking our lives, coming up with these ops plans, and then when you go to present them, they go yeah. And in one partic the one case that made it happen, we had this one target, We had him down to a nat We knew where, we ate,
he knew where. We knew everything about this guy. And I briefed the director and the director of Operations and the DCI are the agency director, and I briefed them on our plan. Everything else well we were doing. It was a two hour meeting. They're asking me a million questions. At the end, the Director of Operations says to me, says to the director of the agency, says, sir, there's no doubt in our minds that Prado and his team can not only do this, but they can get away
with it. I'm going like yes. Then he said, however, Comma, we need to look at the political implications of doing this. Now. That was the second time that this had happened. I went back down to my Boston CTC said I cannot put my people at harm's way just because we brief well and capabilitton tiger on your mantle that you could go to the politicians is we could do this, but you're never going to implement it. I cannot do that to my men and my women.
And that was the time for me to go, Yeah, I understand, and walking away, you look back with fond memories of your time there and what you achieved and what you Yeah, you know.
And a lot of people don't there, especially when they leave under that kind of circumstances, they tend to get bitter. I actually, and I describe it in the book because it was one of these things that God put in my brain on how to survive this. I literally the day that I retired, I walked in my house, I got my favorite cigar, got a bottle of my favorite wine, and sat outside. And my wife knew to leave me alone because she knows me well enough that just let
them be. And I sat out there for two or three hours, and I started from the day that I started in the agency. I started recalling the things that happen and the people that I dealt with, and in my mind, every time there was a good op or a good leader, that was a crystal marble that I would put in one jar in my mind, the other was a black ball of the bad experiences. I would
put that in the toilet. That was my mental exercise until I drank the whole bottle of wine and smoked the whole cigar, and I can look at it right here. I still have that jar full of marbles. I actually went out later and bought a jar and put marbles in it, clear marbles, to remind me that I could not afford to be bitter with a career that expanded over twenty four years, and that I know the successes that we had and the colleagues, the friends that I made.
That when you know, when you go in harms way with somebody, there's a bonding that doesn't come out of the you know, the it's just different. And I could not afford to throw out twenty four years for a few black marbles.
If you get my drift, so full credit to you there, Rick. It saddens me, and obviously I speak to a lot of ex law enforcement military types on here and the ones that look back with fond memories. The way to get it. I look back at every single day I had in the cops. I enjoyed it. There were some bad things, yeah, but there's bad things in every way. The fact that you can look at your career it is so good for your own soul, isn't it. How would you be if you walk away and you just
bitter and and that just burns inside you. So full credit to you. But I like the marble idea.
Yeah, like I said, I literally I can see it from here. I still have it there, just a nice reminder what I'm having a bad day or something to go look at that, and you go, I've had worse and I've had better, and you march.
On, you know, and your life for you now, your wife is glad you're at home or does she want to send you back out in the field to get some time?
And I think sometimes she said, you know, there was a time there where she would have kind of aren't you going teddy y somewhere because we'll spend the time, you know, that kind of thing. But no, you know, we have we have a very strong relationship. We do a lot of things together. And I'm at this stage in my life where where I really just want to spend my time on you know, my my family, my friends.
I'm at that age where there isn't a month that I don't lose a colleague or a friend, you know, either either through you know, operational attrition or or you know, through illnesses. And it's the old. Hey. You know, the only day that you own is today. So we try to make the best of it. We take vacations, we spoil our grandkids, and you know, live live as best as we can. That that said, if I was called upon to help tomorrow, I would I cannot but say no to this. To my country, I couldn't do it.
You've you've still got that each I can say it, I can say say it in if I say it in your time. But look, you're looking good. I also heard you say you love jumping on the motorbike or jumping on the horse, and that gives you a bit of fun and fun and freedom. So look, I just want to thank you for coming on. I've enjoyed the chat obviously, and more importantly thanking you for the work
that you've done. I know the type of sacrifices people like you make to keep the world a safer place, and you come under criticism and everyone's got an opinion on different things. But yeah, you've demonstrated you've risen through all that and you've done some good. So full credit to you.
Thank you very much. I mean so lot to me coming from a guy like you, that means so light.
I appreciate it, appreciate it, and I just want to give a shout out to your book that we can see on your right shoulder, Black Ops, Rick Prade. I'm telling you, if you want to get a sense of the world, get yourself that book. I read a lot of books in lead ups to getting people on the podcast, and you just took me deep into that world. I think you're slightly crazy too. Rick got to say your first apparliament in Honduras. But full credit to.
You, Thank you very much. Like I said, I've lived a blessed life. Cheers, jeers. Appreciate it.