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Langley, Virginia

Early 2002

What if we had killed Bin Laden in 1995? Billy Waugh, my old friend and mentor, legendary Special Forces icon, and CIA paramilitary contractor, had plenty of opportunities. He’d even come face-to-face with Bin Laden as he got out of his car one day in Khartoum. Billy jogged past him close enough to touch him.

The answer is clear, thanks to the history and hindsight. Those four thousand people killed and wounded in the U.S. embassy attacks in Africa would still be alive today, untraumatized, unscarred by their terrible luck to be nearby when those truck bombs went off. The USS Cole would never have been attacked.

The Pentagon would never have been hit by that American Airlines flight. The Twin Towers would still be standing. The three thousand people who died in the World Trade Center would still be among us, living ordinary lives of average Americans. Their families would still be intact. Their children would still have mothers and fathers. The rings of pain and anguish that rippled across the social fabric of New York City, then New York, and finally the entire country would never have been released.

Arguably, there would have been no invasion of Afghanistan. No invasion of Iraq. Arab Spring probably never would have happened. Syria’s descent into civil war? Wouldn’t have happened. Libya’s? Egypt’s? Probably not.

There would have been no ISIS burning people alive in cages.

And what of Europe? If Billy Waugh had killed or captured Bin Laden in 1994, would waves of desperate, illegal immigrants from Africa and the Middle East have deluged the EU, increasingly radicalizing the Islamic population there?

The entire world changed the day Billy Waugh was not allowed to kill a single man, a known terror broker. A man whose machinations foresaw a world redrawn under the crescent banner of jihad and sharia law.

William Colby and Bill Casey both banned assassinations internally within the CIA in 1972. Gerald Ford issued his executive order banning them a few years later, which Jimmy Carter strengthened. Meanwhile, our Cold War enemies creatively assassinated dissidents and defectors with poison-tipped umbrellas and other deviously clever means.

While we fought a clean fight, the unscrupulous enemies of Western civilization changed the world right under our noses. Not for the better, either.

I know I was not the only Agency officer to dwell on this reality in the wake of 9/11. The missed opportunities in Khartoum, then later in Afghanistan, plagued us all. It rightfully later came back to haunt former president Clinton, whose reluctance to go after Bin Laden received considerable press after we went into Afghanistan. Many cognoscenti in the CIA place the blame of Bin Laden’s actions squarely on Bill Clinton.

In early 2002, we assessed the Agency’s performance and role since September 11, 2001, evaluating our strengths and identifying our weaknesses. We were doing great work inside the combat theater in Afghanistan, where our officers, assets, and technology were busily carrying out Find, Fix, and Finish operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The three F’s were military jargon for finding where the enemy is, fixing his daily patterns, and finishing their/its existence. This even as Kabul XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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At a meeting with Cofer and Ben one morning, I mentioned this. He agreed that our counterterror efforts outside Afghanistan were almost anemic in light of the threat the homeland faced. We were still postured for the early post–Cold War environment of the 1990s, not a global war against a capable and deadly network of jihadists willing to die if they could murder Americans.

We needed a better way to react to cells plotting against us and our allies in other countries. After all, many of the 9/11 terrorists operated from Hamburg before they came to the United States for flight training. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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Cofer listened to my brief on the subject, then gave me curt instructions: “You’re my Chief of Ops. Fix it.”

I left Cofer’s office and went to work. As I crafted a concept, I drew upon every lesson and experience I’d had with the Agency for these past twenty years. I’d spent my adult life swimming in the shadow world, learning its rules and nuances. From my time working CT, I’d gained a thorough understanding of how these terror groups function and how North Korean criminals operate worldwide. They all had commonalities no matter their goals and purposes. Every underground network includes those features, and I set to work figuring out how we could attack them.

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Throughout my career, there’d always been rumors of ultrasecret elite teams carrying out vital operations in defense of our country. We operators would sometimes talk about those rumors, and I think we all wanted to be invited into that inner sanctum; that “other Agency in our basement.” But as I climbed the ladder, I learned that these rumors were just that. There was no ultrasecret elite operations team to join. It wasn’t like James Bond or the agency within the Agency of True Lies.

We learned from our 9/11 experience that you cannot develop these capabilities at the last minute. I remember briefing Tenet on this and saying, “Sir, we cannot build the firehouse when our house is already on fire!” Then I simply proposed to Cofer that the CTC start a program that most ordinary Americans assume is in the Agency’s toolbox already.

When I outlined the idea to Cofer, he loved it. Then he said, “All I need now is your recommendation for who’s going to lead it.”

“Chief, I already have someone in mind. Me.”

With that, he threw me out of his office. “You have a job. Now go do it. And find me a team leader not named Ric Prado.”

He didn’t think a fifty-one-year-old member of the Senior Intelligence Service had any business returning to the streets. But that’s exactly what I wanted to do; this dog could still hunt! After being strapped to a desk for many seven-day workweeks, my zest for doing ops hadn’t slackened. Working as C/OPS was pretty sexy, and as advertised. But there was no escaping the fact that fieldwork called to me.

I left the office, but in my heart, I wanted this assignment more than anything else in my career. It would be a lateral move at best, so from a professional, career-progression point of view, it did not make sense. But developing a counterterrorism initiative capable of filling the gaps in our capabilities would be a tangible, and crucial, way to have a direct impact on the war. Plus, the things I’d learned over the course of my career made me a natural pick for the job.

We needed an initiative that could determine who and where the threats lay, and for that, we needed stealthy professionals with a long history of getting eyes on bad guys.

The truth was, information was a key resource in the war on terror, as important as ammunition or food for the frontline troops fighting in Afghanistan. In past wars, we usually knew who the enemy was and where to find him. Even in Vietnam, when the Viet Cong slipped through villages in civilian clothes to launch attacks on our forces, we at least knew that they would be confined to one geographical area in the world. Not so with international terrorist groups. They operated on every continent except for Antarctica. We had no idea who most of them were and had virtually no inside assets to give us a better picture of who and what we were dealing with in this new war. Contribution from our liaison partners was spotty at best.

Years of CT work convinced me the low-level true believers are the “useful idiots” of jihad. They’re human missiles on a one-way mission of destruction and carnage. They’re as expendable as a magazine of hollow points. Once it’s empty, you drop it out and slap another mag home. They also receive most of the media coverage, as the attacks are designed to maximize shock and publicity.

Those guys are a dime a dozen. We could kill them for generations with drone strikes, special operations teams, JDAM satellite-guided bombs, with armored divisions and marine expeditionary forces, and they’d keep coming. Working against the Marxist revolutionary terror groups in South America showed me where the weaknesses lie in any shadow-world organization. I wanted to exploit those weaknesses and use them to really hurt al-Qaeda’s many tentacles.

As the usual Prado luck would have it, my good friend and future boss, Jose Rodriguez, had also joined the CTC front office. JR was yet another of those godsent leaders to join the CTC at the very start of the war. We had a dream team in place. I knew we would win the war with men like that around me. They were aggressive risk-takers willing to do what was necessary to protect American lives. They thought outside the box, listened to new ideas and operational concepts. This would be the exact right time to develop new capabilities we could use to hammer al-Qaeda, as well as other enemies of our country.

I needed to be on the tip of this spear!

Later that day, I corralled Ben Bonk, Cofer’s senior deputy, and the two of us went back in and pressed the case with Cofer. This time, we were successful, and Cofer gave me the job.

As we left Cofer’s office, Ben waved me into his office and asked me to close the door. He extended his right hand to me, and with his left hand on my shoulder, he said, “Look, Ric, I know where your heart is, and I could not be prouder to call you my friend. Just understand that whether you fail or even if you’re successful, this mission will be the end of your thus far spectacular career.”

Ben’s words haunted me as I drove home. What did he mean? I understood that at best this would be a lateral move, not a step up. But how could success doom my career?

In the years to come, my mind wandered back to Ben’s words many times. They were prophetic indeed. But I did not care about that then, nor do I regret any of it now.

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