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God, Honor, Country: Fenwick Alumnus Leads U.S. Intelligence Community Counterterrorism

Protecting and serving is a way of life for this Friar and decorated military son who fights international terrorism.

By Mark Vruno

Fenwick’s Friar Files blog has reported on an “intelligence community alumnus [who] prays the Rosary every morning at 5 a.m.” This Friar spoke last semester with students at Fenwick, and the U.S. government has cleared the school to share the following, somewhat random facts about this mystery person:

  • He works for the National Counterterrorism Center‘s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Washington, D.C.
  • For counterintelligence reasons, he stays off of social media. (See below).
  • He also has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as a strategic advisor and, before that, for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
  • He held a leadership position at U.S. Central Command (Department of Defense) before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2001.
  • He graduated (general engineering) from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and went on to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
  • He served his country in Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War (Iraq, 1991), where he earned a Bronze Star. (See photo.)
  • He managed crises teams during Rwanda’s civil war in the mid-1990s.
  • He followed and reported on coup attempts (in Paraguay and Suriname, South America) and refugees (from Cuba and Haiti).
  • He worked in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and briefed POTUS, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council on military matters.
The Bronze Star: awarded for heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious achievement or meritorious service in a combat zone.

Describing such a vitae as “impressive” might be considered a gross under-statement. When he visited Fenwick history and government classes in October 2019 to talk about counter-terrorism and the U.S. “intelligence” community, the former Army infantry officer challenged students to a search contest on finding information about him. “Try to find me on Google. You won’t. I’m off the grid,” he said. “There are other people with my name, but they’re not me. If you do find me online, please let me know!”

Intel expert

In military and national-security contexts, so-called “intelligence” is information that provides an organization with decision support and, possibly, a strategic advantage. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines intelligence as “information that has been analyzed and refined so that it is useful to policymakers in making decisions.” According to the FBI, intelligence is the information itself as well as the processes used to collect and analyze it.

Slogan on a CIA T-shirt that our friend brought with him to Fenwick: “In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor.”

“What they teach here at Fenwick sets the foundation for your futures.”

“Our job is to tell truth to power,” the alumnus told Fenwick students in an attempt to explain the role of the United States’ intelligence/ counterterrorism communities. The absence of truth leads to abuses of power, he warned, quickly adding that truth and integrity are moral values which align with Fenwick High School’s mission. “What they teach here at Fenwick sets the foundation for your futures,” he assured them.

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More than a Half-century Later, Fenwick Is Still Teaching Lessons to #254

How did a rough-and-tumble kid survive being a gang member on Chicago’s mean streets in the early 1960s to become a successful entrepreneur? Fenwick had something to do with it — as did his nearly lifelong love of boxing.

Introduction

Terracina’s 1964 Fenwick Yearbook photo.

There were 269 students in Roy Terracina’s 1964 graduating class at Fenwick. His academic rank among those boys was near the bottom: 254. “That’s why I wear these cuff-links,” the businessman and entrepreneur explained to three groups of current students in mid-April, standing on stage in the school’s auditorium and pointing to his wrist. “These remind me of where I was and where I started. I ran with a gang and got into trouble,” Mr. Terracina admitted. But he also stuck it out and got through Fenwick, by the grace of God.

His message to today’s Friars included anecdotes about some of his mistakes, his great love of family and his understanding of how faith has played an important role in his life. “My purpose is simple: to reach the bottom half of each class,” Terracina shared, “and to give them hope that the education they are getting is preparing them for the future; that the combination of studies and peer motivation mixes to make this a special, four-year education. I wanted a message of how special their time is here at Fenwick, even though they may not realize it today.”

After his high-school graduation, Terracina attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, where he majored in finance. In the early 1990s he borrowed $1 million from a bank and bought Sterling Foods to provide packaged food to the military during the first Gulf War in Iraq. Eleven years later, Terracina sold the food-packaging business and transitioned to his present career at US Global Investors and CEO of Sunshine Ventures, Inc. (See bio.)

Mr. T settled in on stage at Fenwick and felt right at home. “I remember this place,” he told students earlier this spring.

“I speak to youth groups and groups of young entrepreneurs about 10 to 15 times a year,” Terracina told the Friar Files. “However, no experience matches speaking at a place that means so much to me, as Fenwick truly changed my life.” Fenwick is unlike most places he talks, “where I normally have to ask the teachers to keep things orderly,” he shared. “Recently, I had to send a group to the principal’s office at a local elementary school in my home base of San Antonio. But Fenwick students indeed are different: well behaved and sponges for learning.”

Here is Roy’s story, in his own words:

“If I Had My Life to Live Over”

By Roy Terracina ’64

My teen years where filled with family stability, hard work with my father and a lot of confusion over who or what I was. I would travel by bus, elevated train and walk to get to a high school, Fenwick, that I didn’t feel a part of.  I knew going to Fenwick was the right thing to do, but I knew it because I was told it was as opposed to ‘feeling’ it was.

My freshman year was particularly puzzling because my close friends from my younger years were all going to either public schools, or a much less academic Catholic school. My evenings as a student were filled with friends who attended mostly public schools and were learning trades, while I was trying to learn Latin and physics. The childhood friends quickly saw that I was different, as did my peers at Fenwick. So the reality is that I didn’t fit into either place. I felt lost, confused, bewildered and went with the flow of the day. When my friends were out on weeknights doing what inner-city kids did, I was to be home studying, but my heart and mind were not there.

I did what I had to do to get by, and yet found myself working twice as hard as my neighborhood friends, and still not keeping up with the Fenwick standards. I was small, and in a football-first high school at the time, did not manage to engage in sports.

In the neighborhood, we were out making trouble: fighting, chasing girls and, in general, not doing the things I needed to do to build my academic career. I found out that I loved competition, especially in sports, and particularly liked to lose my temper and fight. My friends would use me as the guy who would tease others into fighting since I looked like an easy mark. When I would get into it with someone much larger, the rest of my friends would jump in and “handle the situation,” and eventually I got tired of that and learned that my speed was enough to outmaneuver most larger boys.

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