Preface

Until I began my own journey through the Agency, I had no idea what it took to protect the United States from dangerous forces and people bent on inflicting Americans harm. I was a street kid from Miami with a past, seeking adventure with a purpose and a way to strike back at the revolutionaries who stole my roots. I longed to wear “the white hat”!

My family had once lived in middle-class comfort in small-town Cuba. We owned a television and a beautiful 1957 Pontiac that was my father’s pride and joy. Then the Castro revolution dumped our world upside down. We lost everything and everyone we loved in a bid to escape and have a chance to live in freedom once again. In desperation, my father got me out first, and I spent my first eight months in the U.S. in a Catholic orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. America offered that freedom, but those first years in Florida were hardscrabble ones indeed. My father worked two jobs and dragged me with him to work on Saturdays. My mother labored away in a sweatshop making shirts. We lived in tiny, run-down apartments and learned to get by on a fraction of what we once enjoyed in pre-Castro Cuba.

We fought our way back to prosperity, chasing our version of the American dream. The path was rocky, and more than once I strayed from it as a kid. I learned to fight, I learned to hustle. I also learned that loyalty is the greatest gift you can share or receive, while betrayal inflicts the brutal wounds to the heart.

The U.S. Air Force gave me purpose and discipline. I became a Pararescueman in 1972, just missing the tail end of the Vietnam War. My path to the Agency was as atypical as the rest of my life in America. Call it fate, call it God’s will, when you find your calling, the tumblers in your heart click into place and suddenly the future makes sense. For me, that moment came as I walked past the Memorial Wall at Langley and realized the depth of my love and appreciation for America. Where else could a Cuban-born, once-orphaned boy go from Miami’s back-alley brawls to the heart of the nation’s first line of defense?

Those fledgling days in the Agency opened the door to a world I did not know existed. Sure, I avidly read Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but 007’s spy universe bore no resemblance to the full-contact, dark world that became my life for the next few decades. Bond had his Goldfingers and Dr. Nos, but in the shadows we operated in, we faced no such cartoonish villains. Instead, we battled caudillos in communist guise, anarchist insurgencies, narco-terrorist groups, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, traffickers of people, drugs, and illegal weapons.

I’d seen my family’s life in Cuba destroyed by such people. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency gave me a chance to strike back at them. I started that new life in the jungles of northern Nicaragua, working closely with the Nicaraguan Contras—men and women vilified by the American press, yet who I knew to be true patriots wanting to liberate their country from the depredations of a carbon copy of Castro’s regime. With them, I saw firsthand how the Sandinistas marauded through the Nicaraguan countryside, plundering from the already impoverished, inflicting starvation upon a long-suffering population. I saw how their vicious tactics drove desperate, traumatized people into the ranks of the Contras, where they were willing to live in the most primitive conditions imaginable, armed with ancient weapons cast off by the Israeli army. They faced every manner of jungle disease, privation, and sudden death. They did it with virtually no pay, armed only with the resolve that the Sandinista reign of terror had to be stopped if Nicaragua was to ever be free.

For three years, I helped fight the covert war against the communist Ortega regime. I emerged from the jungle, hardened to the realities of the dark world. I’d become a blunt instrument, at ease with a weapon in hand and a target to take out. That Cuban kid who lost his native country to revolutionaries now helped cut off some of the communist tentacles that threatened to engulf Latin America.

Ultimately, our Contra program was a definitively successful black op carried out solely by key personnel from the CIA.

But under legendary Bill Casey and Dewey Clarridge (the latter a beloved mentor of mine), this program grew a hundredfold, and our collective effort with the Contras resuscitated the post-Vietnam, decimated CIA back to relevance.

In 1984, the Agency ordered me from the Honduran jungles and sent me to the Farm to learn to be more than a paramilitary operator. I was trained on dead drops, running agents, conducting surveillance, and evading enemy tails. This was another new universe for me, one of finesse in the shadows of everyday life. It stood in stark contrast to the years I spent being at the pointy end of the spear. Yet it was a new way of standing on our nation’s ramparts that appealed to me. The men and women I met at the Farm were not the Jason Bournes and Ethan Hunts of the silver screen. They were men and women devoted to one cause: keeping our country and our people safe from those who intend to do us harm. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we failed, but that was always our mission, our calling. Our life’s purpose. The same courage, conviction, and guile that it took to operate in the jungles applied to how my colleagues and I operated in a much more complex and more traitorous jungle. A jungle of criminality, corruption, betrayals, and atrocious human rights abuses we were determined to help eradicate.

In the back alleys of the world, I saw how we fought back against these forces, and how sometimes our own sense of right and wrong undermined our ability to stop a foe that behaved with absolutely no scruples or humanity.

From the point of the spear to the velvet fist of the shadow world, my career took me through a full spectrum of how the Agency defends America. When the wall fell, I joined the counterterrorism fight. Like for most of us, 9/11 was a life-changing event for me. I owned the best job in the CIA at the time—Chief of Operations with the Counterterrorist Center. But the truth is, that role behind the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda wasn’t my course. Every time I’ve strayed from the path set forth for me, I’ve felt an unease that resonates through my spirit. In this dark hour of our nation’s history, I knew headquarters was not the place for me.

From Bill Casey’s “man in the Contra camps,” to plank owner of the Bin Laden task force, to SIS-2 as Chief of the Koreas in 1998, to Chief of Operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) on September 11, 2001, I found myself always in the right place at the right time. Always unplanned, always by fate. I followed where it took me and learned vital lessons on each point of this journey.

There is a war that goes on in broad daylight, in the everyday streets of cities around the world. It has its own rules, its own foot soldiers and leaders, and it is invisible to those simply wanting to live their lives in peace. Like a universal police officer walking a global beat of international crime and intrigue, you’ll never look at everyday American life the same. You’ll see that danger lurks from seemingly innocuous sources. You’ll find Hezbollah sleeper cells in your own town, North Korean agents sneaking across our borders. Terrorists lurking and lying in wait. It is a thankless, anonymous task stopping these forces, but my colleagues do so not for accolades and fame; they seek only to preserve the lives of strangers in the nation they love.

It is for them that I write this book. This is the story of the men and women I worked with who dared to go through a dark, ominous portal, to see the clandestine world others cannot. They are warriors whose courage and selfless devotion have been ignored or disparaged by our own media for decades. All too often, the Agency is painted as evil, rogue, filled with crazed drug-smuggling killers or “enhanced” super-killers like Jason Bourne. The reality could not be more different from these portrayals.

Imagine an American family sitting around a dinner table, and a young son or daughter announces they want to join the FBI when they grow up. What’s the immediate response? Pride, excitement? That child seeks purpose, wants to be a protector.

Now, what would be the typical first reaction if that kid said they want to join the CIA when they grow up? After all the decades of Hollywood portrayals, my guess is the average American parent would be appalled and might even drag their child to therapy to make sure they hadn’t raised a sociopath.

This book is my attempt to correct the misperceptions that make the Agency one of the least understood and most mistrusted institutions in America today. The reality we faced on the ground in places from Muslim Africa to East Asia, to our own streets here at home, is one of persistent threats that must be countered to keep our people safe. Those who shoulder this responsibility are rugged, intelligent, capable. They understand the stakes. They understand that if they miss one crucial piece of the intel puzzle, our folks at home in our cities and suburbs will experience tragedy.

To this day, I pinch myself as I review my life, amazed at how many wonderful people were placed in my path to help correct my weaknesses and nurture my strengths. My pops, a simple carpenter with the heart of a lion who risked all to ensure I would live in freedom. My first sensei, Jim Alfano, a tough Marine and Vietnam Vet who immersed me in the martial arts. Or Pararescue legend Chief Master Sergeant Wayne Fisk, who befriended me as a young and raw PJ student. CIA legend and mentor Dewey Clarridge, who introduced me to our greatest DCI, Bill Casey. Last, but not least, legendary Special Forces Sergeant Major Billy Waugh, who till this day is a role model. Few men can count on this kind of backup in life’s firefight.

The path set before me in the late 1970s opened the door to a world few see and even fewer know exists. It gave me a compass and course that tempered my vain adventurism into a life of dedicated service to a higher cause.

The words penned in the following pages are my way of passing the torch to our next generation, to show the mettle of the Agency and the quality people who are drawn to it. They are, as Paulo Coelho calls them, the Warriors of the Light. It is time America knows of these protectors. So come with me, the portal’s open. The shadow world awaits.

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