19

A Stranger’s Loyalty

Washington, D.C.

1991

One of the great challenges for Agency families are the transitions between overseas tours and coming home.

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Going into a foreign post, there are all sorts of resources there to help you with the chore of setting up a new household. The Agency will provide the support, so you never have to do that alone. It makes the transition much smoother and a lot less stressful—though they can still be very hard on families.

Going home is a different story. Nobody’s there to help you. It falls on either the husband or the wife to find housing, get furniture out of storage. Then waiting for all our household belongings to arrive from our overseas post frequently turns into a headache. Things get lost, stolen, broken. Each trip overseas requires replacing a lot of things or leaving them behind in the States. Ultimately, you end up with half a household in storage, half a household in transit. Trying to find a house, sort through your things, and figure out what needs to be replaced or repaired, all while trying to settle into a new job at HQS (CIA HQ in Langley), causes tension, frustration, and considerable angst. The best CIA families handled it like military families. The moves become examples of discipline and organization.

The return from the Philippines proved to be the worst transition our family endured. Finding a place to live in the D.C. area and turning it into a home was never easy. The town house we owned had been rented out. When we got back, we discovered our tenants had left it in a shambles—a parting fuck-you gift to us after they’d ceased paying rent for months.

In the middle of dealing with that, our boxes from Manila finally began arriving. We quickly discovered our belongings had been looted, the boxes torn open somewhere along the way. Much of what was left to us was broken beyond repair. It was as heartbreaking as returning home after a house fire. Carmen took it particularly hard.

If the homecoming was bad, things at HQ in Langley got worse. Way worse.

In the years since I’d left Miami, a lot of developments had taken place with my old friends from school. Some became cops. Some stayed on the street and accrued increasingly serious rap sheets. One, “Big Al,” allegedly became a major player in the local organized crime scene.

In the early 1970s, Al was convicted on a murder-conspiracy charge and sentenced to three years’ probation. According to newspaper accounts, he’d been offered money to rob a couple of local drug dealers—except the drug dealers turned out to be undercover cops.

Five years later, somebody tried to kill Al outside his mansion in our old hometown. He took two bullets but survived and continued to thrive. He had political aspirations and made connections all over Florida. But that 1971 conviction stood in his way when he began to think about running for office. He appealed to the governor for a pardon and reached out to others in office for help.

According to subsequent court records and news reports—none of which I saw until years later—South Florida police officers compiled over a thousand hours of recorded conversations between Al and his friends and business colleagues.

As the tape recorders captured every conversation, the police grew convinced they were dealing with a major organized crime figure. Al bragged about having judges, city councilors, district attorneys, and even state officials in his pocket. Al always talked a good game, and eventually some of the cops on his case realized that the vast majority of what he was saying was just idle boasting.

Still, the cops (and later the press) dubbed him “the Great Corruptor.” This was saying something, as South Florida back then was awash in graft and corruption.

Except for years the authorities couldn’t catch him doing anything wrong. Then in 1986, Al was caught illegally trying to obtain the documents of his early ’70s conviction. The police lowered the boom. They arrested him and charged him with bribery, then squeezed everyone they could find to add charges. A month after he was thrown in jail, the district attorney added thirty-nine more counts against him.

It wasn’t until the spring of 1988 that Al’s trial finally wrapped up. He was found guilty of seven of the thirty-nine counts, most of which had to do with bribery or drug trafficking. The DA wanted sixty years. The judge gave him ten, out in five with good behavior. It cost the police system $3.5 million to prosecute Al. The fallout was felt around Miami, and several prominent politicians were destroyed by their association with him.

Yet that didn’t end Al’s legal issues. The investigations continued and a select few of the police officers involved started to level threats against his associates if they didn’t start talking. They wanted to keep Al in prison and did everything they could to get something further to stick.

All this had gone down while I was overseas serving my country, and I knew little of it until I got home in late 1991. Within weeks of returning, a couple of Miami officers showed up to interview me about my association with Albert. It became clear that they’d been squeezing people to get them to talk—to say anything. People talked to save their own skins, but all too often they would tell the cops whatever they wanted to hear, not the truth. When somebody has your nuts in a vise, it is very, very hard to tell them to fuck off.

As these particular cops played hardball with Al’s known acquaintances, someone mentioned that I’d been Albert’s friend from way back in high school and a few years beyond graduation. That much was true.

When they came to see me, these officers played the same game. They made it clear that if I didn’t cooperate, they would destroy my CIA career. They pressured me to rat out my old friends so they could secure a conviction. It didn’t matter than I had nothing with which to rat them out. They just wanted names and a means to continue to prosecute the investigation in an effort ultimately intended to lengthen Al’s prison sentence.

I wasn’t a saint as a kid. Neither was Albert, but these cops were accusing him of things I know he never did—at least not around me when I knew him. When I couldn’t give them what they wanted, they spent the next year making good on their threats. In the months ahead, these officers tried very hard to destroy my career. Ultimately, they triggered a full investigation into me and my childhood back in Florida.

They accused me of committing violent crimes I could not possibly have done because I was not only outside the Miami area, I was out of the country deployed with the Agency.

The investigation brought my CIA career to a crashing halt. I was sidelined from further overseas tours until it was completed. For a year, I lived in a state of anguished suspended animation, taking language lessons and working a desk at Langley while the FBI and CIA went through my past with an ultra-fine-tooth comb. The lead FBI agent on the investigation was a former airborne soldier with combat experience. He was fair, thorough, and dogged at ferreting out the truth. I got the sense that he knew what was going on and being done to me.

This was the worst and most stressful time of my life. I’d seen careers destroyed over politics, over ops gone wrong. I’d seen good officers ruined over even the whiff of scandal. Though the Church Committee hearings were almost a decade and a half in the past, their specter hung over the CIA like a sword of Damocles.

Keeping the house in order was the highest priority at Langley.

Every night, I went home dreading what would become of my career. I had no worries that there would be any sort of criminal charges against me—I’d done none of the things the Miami-Dade cops “suggested” I had to the FBI—but I feared this would taint me in the CIA and tank my career anyway. I loved what I did. My entire identity, my purpose and meaning, all flowed from my role in the CIA. It was my life.

When the full weight of the two greatest investigative agencies in the world are directed at your past, you can be sure they will turn up anything and everything. I cooperated fully—I volunteered for multiple polygraph tests, I offered blood and DNA samples. When the police said they’d found a boot print at the scene of the decades-old crime, I gave them a cast of my own feet and boot size. It was not a match. Neither did my blood or DNA match any of the evidence gathered at the crime scenes relevant to their accusations against me.

In the middle of the investigation, the police revealed they had found a palm print they tried to link to me. I offered up my palms. Not a match, of course.

I cooperated in every way I could. I even handed over all my financial records, as well as everything the FBI asked for from me. Ultimately, I was polygraphed six separate times—and “no deception” indicated on all of them.

While the internal investigation continued, a judge in South Florida threw out the DA’s entire case. In a rare moment of judicial outrage, from the bench he expressed his fury for the strong-arm tactics the police were caught using to try to coerce witnesses in testifying against Albert.

That should have been the end of it for me, but the CIA and FBI are nothing if not thorough. The electron microscope pointed my way stayed fixed for months. In the end, they found nothing, because there was nothing to find.

Yet rumors swirled around Langley about me. The whiff of scandal is career cancer, especially in a secret organization like the CIA. They would have dumped me in a heartbeat if any of this were true.

In the end, my future at the Agency came down to a review board meeting between all the Division Chiefs and the security team that worked with the FBI to investigate me. I was not allowed to attend; all of them had read my file, they read the internal investigation’s report, plus they read what happened to the criminal cases in South Florida, that they were thrown out.

Dick Holm was one of the Division Chiefs in the room that day. I’d never met him, but he was another legendary officer with a storied career. He’d come up through the paramilitary ranks during the 1960s, serving in Laos and Southeast Asia before being posted to the Congo. There, he was nearly killed in a plane crash. He was burned over a third of his body, and local villagers found him and saved his life. He was one of the few men in the Agency in 1991 who wore the CIA’s highest award for bravery, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Around Langley, Holm’s word was solid gold.

The Deputy Director of Operations, Jack Downing, headed the review board that day. As he started, Dick raised his hand and told Jack, “Sir, I’ve got stuff to do. Can I make my determination now? Because I need to leave.”

Jack replied, “Yes, of course.”

Dick said, “Sir, I have read this young man’s file. I say he stays.”

All eyes in the room stayed on him as he stood up, tossed his copy of the investigation and my file onto the table, and walked out.

Every Division Chief agreed.

Though I was cleared of any wrongdoing, that whiff, the very fact there’d been an investigation, can still put the stake in the heart of a career. What Dick did that day was not only ensure I remained with the CIA, his reaction in the meeting showed everyone he knew what this was: revenge for refusing to play ball with the Miami-Dade cops. The whiff of scandal evaporated even before the other Division Chiefs left the room. My career would not be harmed after all.

When I found out what happened in that meeting, I was blown away. The last year had been devastating to me and to my family. Carmen, who loved the Agency as much as I did, fell apart over it. In truth, that was the worst aspect: seeing what those South Florida cops had done to my wife and family simply out of their fury against Albert.

Coming home every day knowing that the nightmare would be waiting in the morning was corrosive. Eviscerating. To this day, the pain from that time is like a half-healed wound. Even writing about it dredges the old anguish back up.

A few weeks later, I was in the language center working on a XXXXXXXX language test.

I’d been working to get more fluent in it while my career was in stasis in preparation for my next overseas tour.

Somebody came into the room. I looked up to see a distinguished older gentleman with burn marks on his hands. Some of his hair was gone, and he had burn scars on part of his face as well.

He sat down in front of me and started working on a test of his own. I got up to use the restroom, and when I passed by him, I glanced down to see Richard H. written at the top of his page.

This was the man who had gone to bat for me. A total stranger, but my loyalty to him was instant the minute I heard what he had done. I knew I had to say something to him.

I finished my test and waited outside in the hall for him. Thirty minutes passed before he came through the door.

“Sir,” I said. He turned his eyes to me. “Are you Dick Holm?”

“I am.”

“Sir, you don’t know me, but you did me a great right not too long ago. I’m Ric Prado.”

For a long moment, he looked me square in the eye. Then he slowly came to attention and saluted me. “Son, it is an honor to meet you.”

He offered his hand. I shook it in silence as I struggled to find words for the moment. I still couldn’t believe he’d been my advocate. He had no investment in me. But he did have a big investment in the truth, and doing what was best not just for the Agency but the people who gave everything to it.

He asked me how I was getting along. That broke the ice. I found my voice, and we chatted for a few minutes, but I don’t remember what we said.

Alone afterward, I couldn’t choke the tears back any longer. The nightmare was over, thanks largely to a hero’s loyalty and trust in a man he’d never met but knew everything about.

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