Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior by Ric Prado

Author:Ric Prado [Prado, Ric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage, Terrorism
ISBN: 9781250271853
Google: YC41EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St.Martin's
Published: 2022-03-01T20:43:19+00:00

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We did our best to assist our allies in this dark and terrible time. The country continued to writhe in the agonies of civil war. Such wars are always the most merciless. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. Passions run hot, and fury-filled atrocities mark the passage of the fighting. Bombs destroyed buses, trains, and neighborhoods. The army’s counterterrorism commandos descended on mountain villages whose people had been traumatized into supporting the revolutionaries.

As the war reached its bloody climax, the professor and the senior revolutionary commanders, including his wife, lived a life of luxury unbeknownst to all but a few close confidants. He was always a middle-class man with a taste for the good life. Living in caves was not for him. Instead of fighting in the countryside along with the rank and file, he cowered in mansions rented for him by engineers, doctors, and other academics who supported his cause. The homeowners had no idea their properties harbored one of the worst mass murderers in modern South American history. If ever there was a Marxist revolutionary who proved George Orwell’s point in Animal Farm, it was the professor.

And the pigs had become men.

After Miguel’s disappearance, we stepped up our efforts. Getting an asset inside the revolutionary cells proved an exceptionally difficult challenge, and foibles like drug use that could be leveraged into a recruitment proved few and far between. Nevertheless, our work with the local security teams on the network we’d uncovered helped take down some significant support personnel whose role in the city simply could not be replaced. Subsequent efforts ultimately did penetrate the professor’s organization again, this time at a higher level. We made a big impact, as did my handpicked replacement, Bob. A first-tour officer, Bob showed the grit and groin to handle these kinds of assets. When I rotated home in 1990 in preparation for a fourth high-threat tour, this time in the Philippines, Bob worked with singular devotion to expand that penetration. He succeeded brilliantly, and those efforts materially aided in ending the civil war.

Ultimately, one of the professor’s safe houses, an apartment above a ballet studio, was discovered and staked out by government forces. He was wrapped up in a raid a short time later, a frail, aging man devoted to a cause that had long since proven totally bankrupt. By the time he was captured in late 1992 and subsequently imprisoned in a cell on a remote island, the Chinese had gone full capitalist, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the adherents of Marx had spent a century murdering millions in the failed pursuit of their workers’ utopia.

The professor, like the ideology he embodied, was swept off the world stage at last. His revolution collapsed in most areas and barely survived in some inconsequential and distant strongholds, and the country spent the next three decades trying to heal the wounds the civil war he started had inflicted on the population he so ardently claimed to represent.

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