You're listening to The CyberWire Network, powered by N2K.

Welcome to Spycast.

My name is Dr. Andrew Harmon, a historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.

Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations, spies, spy masters, intelligence officers and authors.

We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of everyday life.

Welcome to this week's episode of Spycast.

Quit, fail, give up.

Rick Diaz refused to acknowledge the meaning of these terms.

This week's episode is a humdinger straight from the pages of a comic book, except it happens to be true.

Rick was a young man in the United States Air Force who was just about to attend the FBI Academy when tragedy struck.

He was out jogging along the side of the road in West Texas when a truck hit him and drove off.

Within a matter of weeks, Rick would lose his father in a plane crash and his left arm would be left permanently damaged.

To find out the rest of Rick's journey, you'll need to listen, but from the title of this week's episode you'll know that he overcame discrimination, prejudice and struggles with his own mental health

to become the first disabled case officer in CIA history.

Rick Diaz won arm twice the punch.

I was deployed to Athens, Greece as an intelligence officer, and there were a group of us that were running around that area doing some operations.

We were supporting RC 135 flights over Southern Comfort for Turkey for the part of the Gulf War, and there's a group of us that were hanging out together, we were running around Athens, we would do a lot of things.

At that time frame, the terrorist group 17 November was hot and heavy in the area, and they had conducted several assassinations during those years, especially the year that I was there.

And I had a friend of mine, your name was Ronald Stewart, he lived there in the area, while the rest of us lived in a secure facility at a hotel that they're there, therefore he lived on his own.

And we came out together, we got to drinking and doing all kinds of stuff in the city at night, but a week after I left on the first weekend march, I got notified that he was killed by 17 November.

Come to find out they were tracking all of us at that time period, and he was a softest target.

So he was picked, unfortunately, but he was the one that was killed and not the rest of us, but that kind of gave me a wake up call, and I became obsessed with the study of terrorism after that, and I became obsessed with, you know, figuring out what happened.

...