How to Get Away With Murder in America (11 page)

Having been released from prison in 2009 after serving time for the 1980 murder-beheading, El Oso agrees to meet me at a diner in Little Havana. He strides in, smiling and relaxed. Though past sixty, he looks closer to forty-five. The man positively glows. In prison, he says, he “really got into yoga.”

He has beautiful teeth and an open smile, but you can still imagine him shooting and chopping up a person. He has a presence common to really good martial arts fighters: speed and strength you can see even when they’re still, a sort of charisma of violence. He tells me that his nickname—the Bear— has nothing to do with his size or ferocity. While working as the enforcer for the Tabraues, he collected pumas and bears. Three were named Yabba, Dabba, and Do, after the tagline of his favorite cartoon,
The
Flintstones.
He was closest to Dabba the bear; hence his nickname.

El Oso is a man of surprises. The convicted murderer is enormously proud of the fact that his son—and Ricky’s godson—is now an MDPD cop. When I ask him about the statements he made to the OCS and to a grand jury implicating Ricky in numerous arsons and assaults, he smiles and says, “I retracted everything.”

“You mean those things you said about Prado weren’t true?” I ask.

It’s a little more complicated than that, El Oso explains. Perhaps a decade earlier, when he was in prison, his son, the cop, passed him a message from Ricky: Men from the federal government might come to interview him. If they did, Ricky asked him to keep silent. Men from Washington did come, El Oso says—possibly FBI— and questioned him about statements he made in the OCS reports. “I took all the blame,” he says. “The things we did for Albert, I told them I did them.”

I ask if Ricky told him to lie. He answers, “Ric just told my son, ‘Tell him, “Bushido,” ’ and I knew what he meant.”

“What does Bushido mean?” I ask.

El Oso leans forward, closer to my cassette recorder, and lowers his voice. “The code of silence.”

Why he is explaining this to my tape recorder is a mystery, but I roll with it. “Did Prado thank you for retracting those statements?”

“Yeah. He thanked me.” He adds, “I saw him not too long ago with my son. We met in Coral Reef. He’s always been the same. Clean-cut. Works out every day. He retired as a two-star general. Prado did dirty work for the United States that you will never hear about.”

I ask El Oso if he could ask Ricky to speak to me.

“He’ll probably say no. He’s very—how do you call it?—a CIA type of person.”

“What type of person is that?”

 “He’s scared about everything that he’s done and scared of the government.”

The strangest chapter of Prado’s life, for him and for his country, began in 2001, when he was on duty as chief of the CIA’s counterterrorist operations during the 9/11 attacks. Prado was among a handful of officers who guided the United States’ response to the attacks. He was not the most senior among them, but he was by most accounts the most trusted deputy of their leader, J. Cofer Black. For Prado, Black filled the role that Albert had: the powerful man whom he loyally served. Unlike Albert, whose greatest civic feats never extended much beyond his ability to bribe a judge, Black acquired enormous influence over a president. And Prado helped him implement covert programs that changed the character of American government, perhaps the democracy itself. Put simply, the changes they helped bring about made it a lot easier for the government to kill people with no accountability.

Black, who today serves as a national-security senior adviser to Mitt Romney, is a perplexing figure. To his critics, he is one of the most dangerous incompetents ever handed the levers of power in Washington. Others see him as a bold thinker who was ahead of his time in recognizing the threat of Al Qaeda and in advocating doctrines, once considered radical, that are now central to American national security. In 1999, CIA director George Tenet named Black head of the Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), the agency’s primary unit dedicated to fighting terrorism. After Al Qaeda’s twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Tenet had declared a CIA “war” on Osama bin Laden. When Black took the reins of the CTC, he became in effect the CIA’s top general in that war. Black believed that the CTC should wage war by essentially becoming a covert military organization. He advocated building secret bases in the Middle East from which CIA officers could strike Al Qaeda camps; arming tribes to use them as surrogates against terrorist groups and their political enablers; and arming drones, which at the time were used only for surveillance, to carry out assassinations.

The CTC was not an especially warlike entity when Black took over. It functioned sort of like a global detective bureau. Based at Langley, with about four hundred personnel, the center received a flood of data from CIA stations, other agencies such as the National Security Agency and the FBI, and foreign intelligence services. From this and its own analysis, it worked up missions aimed at disrupting or, better yet, destroying terrorist operations around the globe. But since CIA officers generally didn’t have the authority to kill people, or even arrest them, CTC officers spent a lot of their time coordinating with agencies in other countries to bring about arrests or detentions. Their most aggressive, though seldom-used, tool was the “rendition”—kidnapping wanted suspects on foreign soil. But since the CIA had no prisons, it quickly delivered captured suspects to other agencies. The darkest form of rendition involved handing captives over to secret police in places like Egypt for torture. In some instances, renditions simply resulted in captives, who were wanted by the FBI, being handed to allied police agencies that in turn delivered them to U.S. authorities for extradition. For all of Tenet’s talk of war on Al Qaeda, the CTC was essentially a collaborative entity, with many of its activities subject to review by the Justice Department.

Black’s vision of the CTC harked back to Bill Casey’s CIA of the early 1980s, with its aggressive embrace of paramilitary operations in Central America. Black had little actual authority to mount the sorts of operations he proposed at the CTC. Assassinations required presidential approval. Even putting CIA officers in harm’s way, as he proposed with his secret base plan, wasn’t likely to be approved by Tenet, who had a reputation as a cautious bureaucrat. But with the threat of Al Qaeda making news by the late 1990s, Tenet permitted Black to talk and to plan, and even held out the possibility of allowing the CTC to undertake a more aggressive rendition program. Black began searching for lieutenants inside the CTC to help implement the plans he envisaged.

Ricky Prado had been at the CTC since returning stateside in 1996. He had been assigned to its Bin Laden Issue Station, at the time a relatively obscure subgroup of about twenty officers working from a satellite office fifteen minutes from CIA headquarters. Prado was made a deputy—a senior manager—and reportedly helped come up with one of the earliest plans to capture bin Laden: a rendition that turned on using mercenary tribesmen to abduct the terrorist in Afghanistan, hustle him to a plane, strap him to a dental chair inside a shipping container, and fly him to Egypt. Though it was never executed, the plan earned Prado a reputation for audacity that Black admired. A source told me that Black “liked Prado a great deal. He saw Prado as a hard guy.” Black promoted Prado to chief of operations, among the top three posts at the CTC, a few months after he took the reins there.

Prado’s background as a paramilitary and a veteran of Casey’s covert wars in Central America no doubt added to his qualifications to serve as Black’s chief of operations. As the title implied, the job made Prado responsible for all the moving pieces at the CTC—supervising field officers on surveillance, rendition, or other missions, and making sure that logistics were in order, that personnel were in place. The job required Prado to be both super spy and super office administrator. Henry Crumpton, another senior deputy of Black’s and author of the recently published
The Art of Intelligence,
describes Prado in his CTC role: “Selfless and dedicated to the mission, he served his country with a burning passion. He spoke just as he ran his operations, with focus and discipline.” Among Black’s top deputies, Prado became one of the most essential, the one always by Black’s side and at the ready to carry out his orders, the one who at times spoke for him inside the CTC. It was perhaps a familiar role. Prado became the institutional equivalent of Black’s enforcer.

Black, who has never publicly commented on his relationship with Prado (and did not respond to my attempts to contact him through his representatives), couldn’t have come from a more different background. While Prado was pumping iron with Albert in Hialeah, Black attended the Canterbury School, in Connecticut. While Prado was charging through the Air Force’s “Superman School,” eager to get to Vietnam, Black was working on a postgraduate degree at USC, apparently racking up college deferments. After joining the CIA in the mid-1970s, Black found his role as a politically skilled staff officer, more bureaucrat than man of action. Despite his doughy, milquetoast features—some have noted his uncanny resemblance to Elmer J. Fudd—Black cultivated a swashbuckling image. With a penchant for telling stories of his alleged near-death experiences, he spoke in profane, colorful terms—though with a clipped, faintly British accent he’d somehow acquired in Connecticut. One source described him to me as a “woofer”—military slang for “blowhard.”

Prior to assuming the leadership of the CTC, Black’s reputation as a counterterrorism expert stemmed from two episodes that occurred when he was the CIA’s station chief in the Sudan in the mid-1990s. As he has tirelessly recounted in interviews, Black helped capture the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Describing the operation in 2008, Black said, “Carlos was extremely dangerous, a psychopathic killer who had machine-gunned previous surveillance teams. When you are going against people like this you’ve got your work cut out for you.” Often left out of Black’s accounts was the fact that his only known role in the mission was to pass information to foreign authorities, who quietly arrested the Jackal after he visited a medical clinic to have a varicose vein removed from his scrotum. Another story that enhanced Black’s reputation—verified only by him and by anonymous sources—involved bin Laden trying to kill him. As far as one can determine from accounts such as Steve Coll’s in
Ghost Wars,
Black and his bodyguards became convinced that Arabs following his car in Khartoum were assassins sent by bin Laden. Black thwarted the would-be killers by having the U.S. ambassador lodge a complaint with the Sudanese government. Black’s rescue of himself from the alleged plot appears to be the only terrorist scheme he foiled before becoming head of the CTC.

Whatever truths were behind the stories he told, Black was at least talking about terrorism at a time when many in the agency weren’t. After Al Qaeda became a top CIA priority in 1998 with the African embassy attacks, Black looked like an expert. When he took over the CTC in 1999 he quietly instituted wise reforms, in particular reaching out to recruit American officers with Middle Eastern backgrounds, an area in which the CIA’s record was weak. Officers who worked for Black felt invigorated by his enthusiasm. But soon after taking control of the CTC, he oversaw one of the most catastrophic intelligence failures leading up to 9/11.

It began as a classic surveillance operation. A few months after Black took his post, the CTC received intelligence that two known Al Qaeda militants were traveling to Malaysia in early 2000 to meet with a top bin Laden supporter. The CTC dispatched a surveillance team, which tracked the militants to their meeting and photographed them. Somehow, the CTC officers lost them, but a few weeks later, Thai intelligence authorities informed the CTC that the two had boarded a flight for Los Angeles. The CTC quickly learned that the militants had entered the United States under their real names. CTC officers made a cursory search of a law enforcement database to locate them, but then abandoned the effort. In violation of its own protocols, the CTC never notified the FBI or the Federal Aviation Administration that the two Al Qaeda militants were in the United States. Using their real names, the militants moved to San Diego, rented an apartment, purchased a car, and enrolled in flight school. For the next eighteen months they trained, traveled around the country, met with other Al Qaeda members, and, on the morning of September 11, 2001, boarded American Airlines flight 67 and helped hijack it and fly it into the Pentagon.

Later, White House national security adviser Richard Clarke accused Black of covering up the failed operation before the 9/11 attacks in order to protect his reputation. Black denied the allegations and testified before the 9/11 Commission that the CTC had notified the FBI. The members of the commission rejected this claim, writing in
The 9/11 Commission Report,
“We conclude this was not the case.”

Prado did not receive his promotion as chief of operations until a few months after the operation began, so it’s not clear how much oversight, if any, he exercised over it. Had the CTC followed protocols and notified the FBI, it’s not absolutely certain that the bureau would have pursued the terrorists and unraveled the 9/11 plot, though that outcome would have been far more likely. Had the CTC notified the FAA, which maintained a no-fly watch list of suspected terrorists, the militants almost certainly would have been prevented from boarding the plane they hijacked, as well as earlier flights they took during their sojourn in the United States. Had the CTC properly carried out the detective work and intelligence sharing that had constituted its central mission before Black took over, the 9/11 plot may well have been exposed and thwarted. That this didn’t happen represented a failure not of the old methods but of the administrative skills of the CTC’s head. For all his ambitions, Black didn’t get his officers to follow basic procedures.

But his lapses had a paradoxical effect on his career, and on American policies. It would be an understatement to say Black failed up. Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Black was able to announce that the CTC, using passenger lists from the hijacked planes, had determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. The fact that two of the passengers on the jet that struck the Pentagon were the same militants the CTC had tracked to the Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia made the identification fairly simple. Word of that bungled operation hadn’t gotten out yet, so when Black presented his superiors with proof of the Al Qaeda connection so quickly, he appeared to be a counterterrorist whiz.

He soon got the president’s ear as well. Two days after 9/11, Black took center stage in a briefing with President Bush at the White House. Bush was eager to strike bin Laden in Afghanistan, but the military wasn’t ready, and George Tenet warned that any effort would take months to succeed. Black then pitched a wildly optimistic scheme: Send in CIA paramilitaries immediately and, with the help of Northern Alliance rebel forces and massive amounts of air power, they could topple the Taliban and wipe out Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks. As Dan Balz and Bob Woodward recounted about the meeting in the
Washington Post
: “Black was theatrical in describing the effectiveness of covert action. … [H]e kept popping up and down from his chair as he made his points, gesturing wildly. … It was a memorable performance, and it had a huge effect on the president.” Black closed the deal by vowing that if Bush gave him authority to unleash his CIA operators on the Taliban, “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

Bush gave Black everything he asked for. He was given the authority to send a CIA paramilitary team of about one hundred officers into Afghanistan. Prado handpicked the officers who led it, though it’s unclear what role, if any, he had once the operation was under way. The paramilitaries entered Afghanistan on September 26 and, largely through alliances and air power, routed the Taliban weeks before the Pentagon put any troops on the ground. Black’s operation was hailed as a great success. Small details such as the escape of bin Laden and the top Taliban leaders could be dealt with later.

Black’s Afghanistan operation, however, was hardly his most lasting achievement. In the hours after 9/11, he also authored a memo that President Bush used as a template to rewrite national policies regarding assassination and the powers of the CIA. Written in consultation with White House attorneys, Black’s memo called for authorization for the CIA to arm drones for attacks on militants. It also called for altering the rendition program by permitting the CIA to incarcerate captives (in what later became known as “black site” prisons); to interrogate them using enhanced techniques (later to include waterboarding); and to conduct assassinations using human operators on the ground. Perhaps the most significant change Black’s memo called for was removing Justice Department oversight for renditions and eliminating the need for presidential authorization to carry out specific assassinations. His memo called for the most radical revision of law and policy regarding the CIA since reforms had been enacted in the mid-1970s. It went beyond even what the CIA had been permitted to do in its untrammeled, Bay of Pigs days in the 1960s, by essentially asking that the president codify the agency’s authority to conduct violent, lethal operations without specific oversight.