CHAPTER 1
Kill Them All
“I am here for the money.”
—AFGHAN GENERAL ZIA LODIN TO THE CIA
“The solution is to let them kill each other,” the small, energetic senior citizen in the Windbreaker tells me over a fiesta omelet with extra jalapeños at a Florida Waffle House. He points upward. “Send up a satellite and take pictures. Keep the Special Operations teams in the hills, fifty miles out of the towns. Then go in at night and do your work. Kill them. Kill like we did in Germany. Flatten the place. You have to not mind killing innocents. Even the women and children.”
These are the words of seventy-five-year-old Billy Waugh, Special Forces legend, seasoned CIA paramilitary, renowned assassin, covert operator, and the world’s longest operating “Green Badger”—or CIA contractor. Over breakfast we discuss my most recent trip to Iraq with contractors and the deadly and confused situation there. Billy is giving me his frank opinions on what needs to be done in Iraq to stop the ever-mounting toll of dead Americans. His reference to tactics in Germany and other wars is not based on a book but on events in his lifetime.
The best clue to Billy’s age comes from the vast historical and geographical area over which he can roam in the first person. Billy Waugh tried to sign up to fight during the closing year of World War II but was sent back to his home in Bastrop, Texas, because he was only fifteen at the time. He finally became an army paratrooper in 1947 at age seventeen; joined the barely two-year-old Special Forces (SF) in 1954; worked off and on with the CIA starting in 1961, fully enjoying his long career in the business of killing and espionage. Waugh is a decorated veteran of Korea, a twenty-seven-month decorated veteran of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam era, an eleven-year Special Forces veteran, and a veteran of a yet-to-be-determined number of CIA operations as either an employee (Blue Badger) or as a contractor (Green Badger). He knows many people and has been to many places—Vietnam, Bosnia, Sudan, Kosovo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries. Just as an employee and contractor for the CIA, Billy has worked and traveled in sixty-four countries since 1989.
Billy exudes obvious pride regarding his work for the Agency and has not only written a book about some of his adventures, called Hunting the Jackal, but also travels around speaking to graduation classes, SF associations, and even football teams. His three-month-old metallic-champagne Lincoln Town Car already has twenty-two thousand miles on it, mostly from driving between Florida and Washington. “I can’t fly anymore,” he admits. It’s not that he is afraid of crashing; he just carries too many weapons. When he gives his motivational speech, he says, “It’s all about being shot up and how to keep on going. How to be tough.” At his age and with his experiences, Billy Waugh should not be alive. His custom front license plate provides clues. While his rear plate advertises WOUNDED WAR VET, the front plate spells it out in simpler terms: 8 HITS, with an illustration of a Purple Heart medal.
Our waitress at the Waffle House probably assumes this short, compact man with thinning hair and thick glasses is an energetic grandfather. His black Members Only jacket, golf shirt, and nondescript pants wouldn’t spark her curiosity, unless she noticed the grinning skull patch on his jacket—a Special Operations Association logo. Billy’s culture and style is rooted in the U.S. Special Forces. He wears two large army rings, an SF pendant on a gold chain, and a gold Rolex Daymaster with diamonds around the bezel—not in a decorative fashion, but more like tribal badges common among ex–Special Forces soldiers. Billy Waugh is also a Texan, famously outspoken, and doesn’t suffer fools. Despite his age and limping gait—the result of old combat injuries—Billy has the mental and physical vigor of a twenty-one-year-old. He speaks in staccato bursts like machine-gun fire, beginning every conversation with a barrage of questions and finishing up with a few bursts of opinions.
I first met Billy over the phone, and he immediately began interspersing his spiel with questions, like an opening mortar bombardment designed to confuse or narrow in on an opponent. Even in person, Billy likes to sort out the person across the table as friend or foe. If enough names and answers click, he becomes your friend. If not, the conversation comes to an end. His only caveat to the curious is, “I ain’t gonna tell you any classified stuff” or make the Agency look bad.
Billy talks about killing like civilians might talk about their golf game. It’s what he does, what he did, and what he knows—something the U.S. government trained him and paid him to do for many years. Billy’s descriptions of death and killing are not intended to impress but to assure the listener of the difference between good and bad people. Billy must be excused for his blunt talk. He normally seeks out the company of soldiers who understand such things. The Special Operations community lauds him as a living legend, and just the way he refers to himself in the third person, speaking his own name in compressed syllables—“billywaugh”—gives him a ring of uniqueness and celebrity.
In his biography, Hunting the Jackal, Waugh describes himself as someone who simply functions in combat, someone who does not spend too much time worrying, complaining, or examining what he does. Billy has killed countless people, has had people try to kill him, been nearly dead, and has lost many friends. He has worn the smell of death, whether by retrieving maggot-infested booby-trapped bodies of comrades killed in battle, or in the private weight of burying dozens of close friends. Despite this, even at his advanced age, he would gladly go anywhere his country would send him under any conditions to kill or help others to kill America’s enemies. But his days of killing and hunting America’s enemies are over now. Even in America’s new “dead or alive” War on Terror, Billy sees a change in how contractors and paramilitaries are allowed to operate.
Billy tells me how Special Forces tactics have changed since his early career. “Closing in and doing hand-to-hand with the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] was not a very bright tactic, but it was the only tactic we knew during the sixties and early seventies. The new tactic is to use Special Forces accompanied by some of the OGA [other governmental agencies] and not allow our friendlies to close with the enemy. The new tactic is to fight a ‘standoff’ type of war in most cases. Usually a four to five kilometer standoff is the recommended distance to close with the enemy.” Today’s CIA and Special Forces method of training proxy armies is designed to create a “hands-off” relationship. He explains that the license to kill once accorded special operations has been finessed or outsourced to avoid direct liability. “We don’t pull the trigger but we sure as hell give them a gun, bullets, show them the target, and teach them how to pull that trigger. It didn’t use to be that way.” Given his long career in covert operations, Billy should know how it “used to be.”
From its founding in 1952, the mission of Special Forces was to operate behind enemy lines, train insurgent troops, and act as a force multiplier. They were recruited from the more elite airborne units and were usually aggressive, independent-minded men with high IQs and good moral character—men who would follow orders but could think for themselves under great pressure while working in hostile environments. All the early members of the Special Forces had basic foreign language skills, held at least a sergeant’s rank, and were willing to work behind enemy lines in civilian clothes. Due to the Special Forces’s covert nature and links to the CIA, most people did not know they existed until the early 1960s, when President Kennedy became a major supporter and expanded their role dramatically in the newly emerging Vietnam conflict, first as advisors and later as ground troops. Their close relationship with the CIA was kept in the background.
The CIA also had their own paramilitary teams, some of them contractors, others seconded from the military. I ask Billy what the difference was.
Billy rubs his thumb and finger together. “Money. The CIA had money, lots of it. We [Special Forces] did the legwork.”
The concept of Special Forces was not new, but America was confronting an unfamiliar style of warfare in Southeast Asia—a communist insurgency that did not stand and fight in big battalions, but rather sent agents in plainclothes to recruit, train, and equip insurgents. What the CIA and the Special Forces did in Southeast Asia was modeled on what the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) did in occupied France with the Jedburghs, whose mission was to drop in covert operators to coordinate supply efforts and provide communications and intelligence. The training and operational efforts of Special Forces were greatly expanded from the simple tactics taught by the Jedburghs in World War II.
Billy joined the Special Forces in the mid-1950s and began working occasional covert assignments for the CIA starting in 1961. At the time, Billy didn’t really think of himself as a covert operator, though in March of 1965, Waugh was asked to form an “A” team and to set up an operational base from which to run the northeast section of the Binh Dinh Province in South Vietnam. Billy’s mission was to recruit and train up an army of mercenaries—a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, or CIDG—to disrupt the NVA’s movements within enemy-controlled territory. The CIA’s Combined Studies Division would supply the funding, and the Special Forces would do the legwork.
Billy and his team built a rudimentary fort along the An Lao River and an airstrip using the labor of about a hundred mercenaries recruited from the lowlands. Once set up, his team was to coordinate efforts to harass the enemy in a twenty-kilometer circle around their base. The North Vietnamese Army had full knowledge of the base but did not try to overrun it. Unlike the Jedburghs, who would work inside cities or out on farms in occupied France, the Americans were running a covert war from fixed military bases.
On June 18, 1965, Billy, a small team of three SF, and eighty-six South Vietnamese mercenaries left their roughly hewn A-team fort and hiked along a trail that followed the An Lao River on a seventeen-kilometer recce to a small NVA camp. They planned a stealthy brutal attack in darkness to convince the Vietcong that the area was too dangerous for a base camp. Billy and his group had killed over one hundred sixty sleeping soldiers when they heard a bugle sound a call to arms for the approximately four thousand NVA troops who had just landed the day prior.
Nearly all of the Vietnamese mercenaries were gunned down as they fled across a rice paddy. As Billy ran, a bullet shattered his right knee and another destroyed his right foot. A third bullet penetrated Billy’s left wrist, knocking his watch off. Waugh lay on the ground, soaked in blood, his leg bones glistening white through his ripped uniform, left for dead. It should have been the end of Billy Waugh. He remembers counting how long the green tracers of bullets glowed as he tried to judge the distance of NVA troops, and smelling and feeling the heat of kerosene from napalm dropped by American reinforcements, until a final bullet clipped him in the head and knocked him out cold.
Thirty-five-year-old Master Sergeant Billy Waugh awoke a few hours later to find himself stripped naked by the enemy. The sun burned down on his exposed body, crusting his blood in sticky patches, as the pain from his wounds exploded in his head. Around him the fighting continued. A helicopter arrived under fire to lift him out, but the soldier who tried to carry Billy in was shot twice through the heart and lungs. Waugh crawled the final few feet and was helped onto the helo. As Billy lay there on the floor of the slick, he looked up in time to see a bullet hit the helicopter gunner’s arm, almost severing it. Billy made it to a hospital in a heap of the dead. When the battle stopped raging, the enemy had lost six hundred men, and out of Billy’s eighty-six mercenaries, only fifteen had escaped. One American from the A-team had been killed, and three, including Billy, had made it out alive.
For the next few months, Waugh lived in a hazy painkiller-numbed world. It would take over a year for his wounds to begin to heal. At the other end of this dark tunnel, he realized his ultimate calling: Waugh wanted to get back into not just what he calls the “vanilla” SF, but the “blackside” SF who worked directly with the CIA. He had already died once and so had no fear of death. His injuries meant he might never again function in normal special operations, but Billy wasn’t about to let injury end his lifelong dream of being a soldier. Most soldiers would accept that they had used up their luck, but Billy wanted back in, demonstrating a tenacious pit-bull approach that would be the hallmark of his combat career and scare off others whenever Billy asked for volunteers on missions. It is no surprise that in the future, Billy would take great pride in working alone.
Despite being barely able to walk, he talked his way into being assigned to a CIA-funded group called Military Assistance Command Vietnam–Special Observation Group (MACV-SOG), and by doing so took the journey from the overt “white” side of military operations to the “black” side of warfare—deniable TOP SECRET–level covert and clandestine operations that were never intended to be revealed to the American public. His knowledge of Special Forces and his eagerness to go into combat got him accepted with friends who put him up in an aircraft to do forward air controlling, observation, and rescue. When the pus stopped oozing out of his legs and they began to mend, he started working on the ground.
The MACV-SOG was created in 1964 as a clandestine, unconventional warfare joint-operations group working in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Although essentially a military project, the joint military and intelligence program reunited two halves of what used to be combined under the World War II–era OSS. The MACV-SOG combined CIA, Special Forces, mercenaries, counterinsurgents, independent contractors, and private front and legitimate corporations in the war against the North Vietnamese. The joint operations made use of both CIA officers and active military that both funded and directed the actions of hired indigenous paramilitaries. The use of mercenaries provided an element of deniability not allowed uniformed U.S. troops, particularly in countries not considered part of the hostilities, like Cambodia and Laos. MACV-SOG operated until April 30, 1972, and the successor agency, the Strategic Technical Directorate Assistance Team 158, ended all U.S. covert and paramilitary activities in Vietnam on March 12, 1973. At the end, MACV-SOG had comprised approximately two thousand Americans and over eight thousand indigenous troops.
Private contractors involved in MACV-SOG were typically ex-military retirees hired by the old-boy network, men who had military skills; who knew how to keep quiet; and who could carry out the necessary tasks of hiring and managing mercenary armies. The mercs typically came from indigenous groups and would be hired with CIA money and trained by “sheep dipped” Special Forces teams, meaning active military with security clearance working directly for the CIA. In the 1961 to 1975 secret war in Laos, for example, forty to fifty CIA employees worked with several hundred hired “civilian” (mostly former or serving military) contractors who flew spotter aircraft, ran ground bases, and operated radar stations in civilian clothing. The idea was to wage war using private contractors with logistics and supplies provided by CIA proprietaries—Agency-owned and funded commercial companies. It was warfare conducted by a convoluted web of intelligence officers, paramilitaries, civilian contractors, and the military, all with deniable links and calculated absence of accountability to the American taxpayer. Covert action has always been a dirty business done in faraway places that furthered the aims of American interests.
Although the CIA’s major focus was against the expansion of postwar Communism, they could not turn the tide in Vietnam. The Agency also began to be attacked on the home front, beginning with Seymour Hersh’s accusation in his December 22, 1975, article that the CIA had been spying on Americans inside the country. President Ford created the Rockefeller Commission to investigate possible spying on antiwar and civil rights activists, and Congress created the Senate’s Church and the House’s Pike committees to study CIA abuses.
A destructive rampage against the U.S. intelligence community ensued. What began as an investigation of wrongdoing ended up exposing many of the CIA’s numerous failures. The investigations also revealed that the CIA hid funds among numerous government agencies, with even the GAO (Government Accountability Office) not knowing the exact amount spent on covert activities. Pike soundly criticized the ability of the intelligence community to predict conflict and took a dim view of the success of the previous ten years of covert actions. The Church Committee’s report detailed CIA plans to assassinate the leaders of Cuba, the Congo, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. It made clear that no American finger pulled the trigger, but weapons, support, and/or training were provided with that intent in mind.
The Church-Pike investigation dealt a crippling blow to the CIA’s ability to operate aggressively and autonomously. Assassinations were specifically banned by presidential findings; the use of dirty tricks, mercenaries, contractors, and proxy agents was reined in. Suddenly, men like Billy Waugh were considered anachronisms, destabilizing and potentially dangerous. Over eight hundred clandestine service operators were fired that year, and the Special Activities Division was almost defunct. Had Billy been working contracts for the CIA at the time, he would certainly have been released or reassigned in the aftermath of Church-Pike and the gutting of the CIA it sparked.
Experiencing a decided lack of opportunity, Billy thought it a godsend when he received a mysterious phone call and request to meet in a hotel room in northern Virginia on July 25, 1977. Waugh was told to pack for a one-year deployment to the desert—the standard preamble for a covert mission. The three other team members were all Special Forces vets. The country was Libya. The mission was to train a Special Forces group that reported directly to Col. Moammar Gadhafi. The training gig had all the style and function of a black mission under deep cover with good deniability. No serious questions were asked; no official background checking occurred. The man in charge was an ex–Agency employee named Ed Wilson. It was not unusual for a former employee or soldier to be working as a freelance contractor under nonofficial cover.
The day before Billy and his team were to leave for Libya, he received another phone call, this time from a former Special Forces operator working directly for the CIA. Credentials were produced; names were dropped. Billy was confident this was a legitimate contact. The mysterious figure informed Billy that the Wilson deal was not an official Agency project, but he took the unusual step of giving Waugh a Pentax camera and told him that if he took photos of anything interesting, there would be money in it for him. His contact gave him a secret code word to use when contacting him. Needing the money, Billy, kept his mouth shut and accepted the offer.
Billy spent a year training Libyan forces on Wilson’s contract and photographing various sites for the CIA. In November of 1979, the hostage situation in Tehran began and the Arab world became increasingly hostile to Americans. The U.S. embassy in Tripoli was burned and looted. Given two hours to leave Libya, Billy made it out on a flight to Frankfurt with just the clothes he was wearing and a dozen rolls of undeveloped film.
Ed Wilson was eventually arrested and charged with illegal arms trafficking with Libya. He claimed to have been acting with CIA support, an assertion contradicted by a CIA affidavit read at his trial that stated the Agency had not had contact with Wilson since the early 1970s. Wilson was sentenced to fifty-three years in prison but was released in late 2003 when a federal judge ruled that the CIA had lied in its affidavit by not reporting eighty contacts the Agency had had with Wilson during the time in question. More disturbingly, Wilson was able to document forty jobs the CIA hired him to do after his retirement from the Agency. The line between covert and criminal is often blurry.
After Libya, Billy drifted for more than a decade, spending most of his time working at jobs he hated and drinking a lot. The eighties were lost years, as Billy approached midlife limping from wounds and burdened by a two-decade career of almost continuous combat. A life of intense action and danger had been swapped for mind-numbing boredom. “I drank a lot and they didn’t care for that. The CIA said, ‘We would bring you on tomorrow if you would stop drinking.’ I told them, ‘Well, I am not sure I am through drinking yet. I think I am going to have some more to drink.’ Then when I stopped drinking, they said, ‘Come, come, come.’”
In 1989, Billy received a phone call from a former SF friend inviting him to Washington. “The job was to become part of a hit squad designed to eliminate individuals who posed a significant threat to the United States,” he explains. Billy could not believe his luck. He thought this time he would function as an independent contractor with an official mandate to kill—something taken for granted in wartime but rarely permitted outside of combat. Billy had worked as a “Blue Badger”—a CIA employee—and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like Washington, DC. He liked doing things on the outside, on his own terms, away from the bureaucracy of Langley. Billy was a lone wolf and both the Agency and Billy liked it that way.
Despite his initial enthusiasm, Billy soon learned that the CIA of 1989 was a very different organization from his earlier days with them. His perceived opportunity as hit man for the CIA soon downgraded into an observational role—the equivalent of watching prey through a rifle scope but never being allowed to pull the trigger. He had to replace his sniper scope with a camera, his bullets with a pen. The CIA tasked Billy with finding and tracking the enemies of the United States until such time as when a decision about their fate could be made.
Billy knew that the publicity of the Church Committee had forced President Gerald Ford in February of 1976 to sign Executive Order No. 11905—the twenty-two words that removed assassination from the toolkit of U.S. foreign policy. Successive presidents reconfirmed the same finding. The presidential finding quite clearly covered contractors and mercenaries: “No person employed or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassinations.” In Billy Waugh’s new role as an independent contractor for the CIA in Africa, he could use all of his skills as a covert observer and tracker, except the most lethal. Billy’s first years back in covert operations saw him posted to the hotbed of Islamic terrorism—Khartoum, Sudan.
Billy enjoyed the Sudan. He liked Arab countries in general—his basic command of the language and ease with the culture made it enjoyable—and there was plenty to do in Khartoum, or “K-Town,” as the Agency called it. Billy soon found he had plenty of bad guys to track, photographs to take, notes to write, maps to draw, and reports to file.
Billy worked out of the embassy under diplomatic cover, giving him some degree of protection from Sudanese legal persecution. Unless the Sudanese caught him doing something illegal, they could harass him but they couldn’t arrest or kill him. Billy worked alone, often doing his work as he jogged at night. “I would do six-week to ninety-day rotations between February 1991 and July 1992. If we stayed more than a month, the Sudanese security forces would get antsy.” While he was operating in the Sudan, a rich, exiled Saudi named Osama bin Laden decided to relocate there and became just one of many miscreants Billy was tasked to babysit.
An Islamic government supported by Iranian largesse controlled Sudan. The well-educated Islamist Hassan al-Turabi served as vice president and was responsible for the country’s policy of benevolence toward militant Islamic groups, dissident religious figures, and terrorists. He shielded himself behind President Omar Hasan al-Bashir. In 1991, an odd collection of fugitives, criminals, and expats had gathered in the Sudan, including such well-known personalities as Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, and the blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Representatives and cells of most major Islamic groups also had offices in Khartoum, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and others. After bin Laden moved to Sudan following the first Gulf War, he set up ventures like a sesame-seed export business, started large construction projects like the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and began to gather around him the nucleus of what would come to be known as al-Qaeda. He also set up a training camp fifteen miles north of Khartoum in Omdurman.
Billy got to know bin Laden’s routines and habits very well. He thinks of how things could have been different if he had been allowed to kill bin Laden during the Sudan years. He holds up his fingers as if holding a bullet to make his point. “Before September eleven, lawyers owned the place. If you had to pee, you had to see a lawyer. People were running scared. George Tenet was not doing anything aggressive at all. The problem was the oversight committee. Tenet wanted to do stuff but they wouldn’t let him do it. If we wanted to KIA anyone, we had to get the permission of senators and congressmen.
“We could have killed bin Laden innumerable times. Every day I put in fifteen contingency plans for killing him. Our idea was to kill him and dump him over the Iranian embassy wall. Make ’em look bad. As lax as they were in their embassy, we could have just propped him up against their wall. We would just dump him there and call the Sudanese and say, ‘Hey, there was shooting out at the Iranian embassy. You better go take a look.’ I put that in a plan; they said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ There was one guy who loved the idea as soon as it was sent forward—Cofer Black. He was told, ‘We are not going to do that.’” Billy pauses, thinking about the lost opportunity. “Just one damn ten-cent bullet.”
This absolute ban against extrajudicial killings would remain in effect until late 1998 when, in reaction to the bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa, President Clinton signed a carefully worded series of memorandums of notification, or MONs, that would accept the use of lethal force by the CIA and its proxies in their attempts to capture and bring bin Laden to justice. It did not include a direct order to kill bin Laden but was written with the full understanding that his death as an accidental byproduct in a snatch operation was an acceptable risk. Clinton issued further MONs to include bin Laden’s associates, but all were very carefully worded to stress that the pretext of any mission would be to bring them to justice, not to simply end their lives. A direct order to kill would have required a “lethal finding,” and it wouldn’t be until after 9/11 that the legal barriers to presidentially authorized targeted assassination would be removed.
Billy never expected that bin Laden would become any more or less dangerous than the rest of the rogues’ gallery found in Khartoum in the early 1990s, and he never imagined that he would finally get his wish and be sent with orders to kill the tall Saudi in the fall of 2001. Then September 11, 2001, changed the perspective on America’s willingness to kill its enemies.
“I was in the CIA on September eleven, on the sixth floor getting ready to go to Thailand on a drug thing. Somebody watching TV said, ‘Whoa, look at that damn pilot…flew that plane right into the building.’ Then the second plane hit and the alarm went off. There were two other planes missing. They sent out the word to evacuate the building. I have never seen the CIA move so fast. You should have seen the traffic on Highway 123. All the people were doing ninety miles per hour heading out of DC, and the CIA was trying to join the traffic. People over there really hate the CIA. They don’t know anything about the CIA. They really didn’t know the manacles we had on our wrists. The CIA wasn’t killing anyone. Their people might be disappearing, but it was other governments doing that. They blame the CIA for a lot of underhanded deaths, but it wasn’t us.”
The chief of the CIA’s Special Activities Division called Billy the next day and asked him to start recruiting contractors to be inserted into Afghanistan for paramilitary actions against bin Laden and company. “Cofer Black got his orders from an all-night meeting at Camp David. He flew down there and when he came back, you could tell that things were different. They wanted people killed. They weren’t going to fire off some missile and hit some friggin’ dust pile. They wanted some dead bodies on the ground.”
“No-Good Cheatin’ Shithead”
In mid-November 2001, Billy Waugh and his team of hired contractors journeyed to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in the belly of a massive air force cargo plane. Billy believed he was beginning his last war, perhaps his final mission. At seventy-one, he was the oldest operating CIA contractor with combat experience. The group of men he traveled with intended to find and kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. They had little expectation of or interest in taking them alive.
President Bush had signed a secret presidential “finding” that authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden and his lieutenants; however, to make sure there was no ambiguity, Cofer Black asked Gary Schroen, the leader of the first CIA team into Afghanistan, to send back bin Laden’s head in a box. Billy remembers those hectic days in September. “Bush told the Agency, ‘I want dead bodies.’ Cofer told him he would have flies on their eyeballs within a week.”
The scale of the 9/11 attacks had forced a dramatic change from Clinton’s previous standing orders to allow use of lethal force in operations designed to bring bin Laden to justice. According to Billy, “Bush gave us a license to kill. Did he sign a license to kill? No, but we had the words out of his mouth, and the lawyers just had to fill out the paperwork. You will never see that document. I have a Gamma clearance, and I will never see that document as long as I live.”
George Tenet and Cofer Black had promised President Bush they could effectively hunt down bin Laden’s group and topple the Taliban by sending in teams from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and Special Forces A-teams. The problem was the CIA didn’t have enough trained people available to back up that promise, so they turned to their time-honored cohorts: contractors and the mercenary proxy army. CIA operations officer Gary Schroen was pulled out of his retirement prep program and dispatched to the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan to hire a mercenary proxy army in the form of the Northern Alliance. Billy Waugh signed on to help other CIA officers assemble more teams to join Schroen and his posse of bin Laden hunters inside Afghanistan.
In 2001, no American corporations specialized solely in the provision of trained-up ex-military operators: Blackwater Security, Triple Canopy, and similar firms sprang up only after post-9/11 military deployments—primarily Iraq—created a massive market for this type of service. So instead of being able to recruit through the equivalent of a military services temp agency, Billy had to rely on his own contacts and the old-boy network, drawing some of his team away from active duty and the rest from ex-military independent contractors he knew. “I was hired to recruit sixty-four men around the Fort Bragg area—sixty-four men,” he adds for emphasis. “I went down to Delta and got twenty, and then I got ten of the people I had known before that had been in Delta. Then I got some SEALs. I grabbed some from SEAL Team 6. There’s big difference between SEALs and SF. That’s why now a lot of them don’t want the job. They [SEALs] want short missions. They don’t want to hang out six months out of the year. My first pick is always SF. I show them a film and I ask them if they can do what they see on this film. Can they not only swim but shoot underwater? Can they do night operations, and jog for seven miles? I remind them that in Afghanistan, O2 [oxygen] is short above five grand [5,000 feet]. I look for language; the SEALs don’t have language. The SEALs just want to go in, blow a lot of people away, talk about it, write it up, and plan for the next mission. SF wants to go in and stay. That’s why we recruited SF.”
Billy is visibly proud of his accomplishment in such a short period of time. “I got ’em because I talked to Commander Jerry Boykin. I got about twenty or twenty-one. These guys come trained in HALO [high altitude–low opening parachute qualification], in good shape, and qualified. They all turned Green Badge immediately. They took a shortened version of the polygraph. I lost three out of thirty, mostly because of drugs. First, we make sure they are in shape, so they need a PT test. One of the best guys was over sixty and has worked for the Agency for forty-five years.” After three decades of being restrained, Billy was readying for his chance to go to Afghanistan and kill America’s most lethal foe.
During the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan, the CIA fielded between eighty and a hundred Green Badgers and Blue Badgers. Billy had managed to round up five dozen independent contractors and sheep-dipped military; the rest came from the Special Activities Division of the CIA. They were to carry in an initial infusion of cash to buy loyalty from warlords and influential leaders, gather intelligence about enemy positions, and search for Osama bin Laden and his associates. They would also interrogate prisoners, map out the intelligence landscape, and deal with the ever-changing alliances and allegiances of the Afghan fighters. Billy Waugh had convinced the higher-ups at the CIA that he could help coordinate between the CIA officers and the SF teams. What the CIA and Special Forces accomplished in Afghanistan began a new era of joint operations where military, intelligence, paramilitary, indigenous, mercenary, and even civilian contractors were working in unison with full lethal capabilities, something Billy hadn’t seen since his days in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
After a week in Tashkent sorting out logistics, Billy’s team flew to Bagram, the military airfield north of Kabul, and headed toward the Ariana Hotel. The Ariana had been used for the Taliban’s intelligence services, but with the Taliban gone, the CIA set up headquarters there. Billy’s tools of the trade were both high-tech and low-tech. He had brought one rucksack with cold-weather gear, an AK-47 with seven magazines, a “shitload” of grenades, and an H&K 40 mm grenade launcher. He also carried the AN/PRC 112 survival radio, digital cameras, a handheld GPS, an old compass, and a bone-handled Old Timer knife. He also had a few thousand dollars stuffed in his pockets for personal spending money.
On December 1, Billy’s seventy-second birthday, he and his small team of contractors headed south by road from the Ariana Hotel with a small group of newly hired Afghan bodyguards. The CIA team had been given money to hire a thousand or so local fighters when they got near their destination point in the southern Logar Province. They then planned to rendezvous with Special Forces Operation Detachment Alpha (ODA) 594, who would train the new hires for combat and support operations. Special Forces ODA 594 comprised a twelve-man team, plus an air force TAC-P controller to coordinate air strikes. One of Billy’s tasks was to make sure the SF team did not mix targets and hit Afghan friendlies by mistake.
Once a target was identified, there was a check for any friendlies or civilians in the area, then deconfliction with other units, and finally the okay to kill was granted. Air strikes using JDAMs, or smart bombs, were called in by using GPS coordinates, laser designator binoculars called SOFLAMs (Special Operations Forces Laser Marker), or by “talking in the pilots”—just giving a series of visual indicators that gave the pilot an accurate visual sighting. Hellfire missiles were mounted on the Predator UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), giving remote-control kill authority to operators using joysticks and firing buttons, as in a video game. It was all done over the radio, and the man actually pushing the Fire button was sitting in an air-conditioned trailer thousands of miles away.
Even though they were prepared to give effective coordination for surgical air strikes, Billy still did not feel like they had sufficient support, since the bulk of American air power was concentrated around the battle of Tora Bora at that time. “We moved from Kabul to Paktia Province. We stayed there for about twenty days, and then blasted into Gardez. The Taliban had no idea what was happening. We didn’t get the air we wanted. The air [assets] were up in Tora Bora. We couldn’t do the combat that we wanted.”
Heavy combat was thankfully not necessary, since the Taliban was quickly folding up across the country with little resistance. They had already fled Gardez when Billy and his team rolled up in a twenty-five-vehicle convoy on January 4, 2002, and began to settle into a compound east of town. Their job was to create a conveniently titled “Eastern Alliance” mercenary force, even though no such thing existed. The other function was to gather as much intelligence as quickly as possible—essentially setting up a network of intelligence assets, as well as arresting and shaking down Taliban supporters fingered by paid informants. Billy’s group set up shop in a large mud-walled compound, and he gave orders to a local strongman to have his Afghans threaten any media that came within three kilometers.
The mountain pass between Gardez and Khost crawled with Taliban, and Billy’s team began hunting down groups of fighters. They used phone intercepts, Predators with night vision, old-fashioned turncoats, and night surveillance using the latest in infrared imagery. ODA 594 spent their days training the Afghans in weapons use, as well as infantry and small unit tactics. They all spent much downtime listening to Billy tell war stories about Cambodia and Laos—the good old days when the CIA worked directly with Special Forces and when hunting down enemies and killing them with mercenary armies was standard operating procedure.
By January 15, the Afghan proxy forces were up to three hundred Afghans. General Lodin, a Pashtun commander who had worked with the CIA in the 1980s, had volunteered his son, who showed up with thirty friends. “It’s hard to get good information out of these lying-ass Afghan warlords. We worked with a bunch of lying bastards. The old man [General] Lodin was in charge and his son Zia Lodin worked as a captain for us. He was straight up about it: ‘I am here for the money. I don’t like those people in the Panjshir and I only like my people.’”
The elders in Gardez had supplied about a hundred local men, and two commanders named Kabir and Zaibdullah headed up a contingent of one hundred seventy. Billy describes Commander Zaibdullah as a “no-good cheatin’ shithead,” a well-paid ally “who was not to be trusted under any circumstances.” Almost immediately the Afghans under Kabir had begun to act suspiciously, and the team felt in jeopardy.
Billy was used to dealing with criminals and warlords, but it soon became obvious that they were not going to catch bin Laden in this murky world of shifting and dual allegiances. The CIA estimates that it handed out $70 million in cash to win the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan and considered it a bargain, even though the loyalty the money was supposed to buy did not lead to the death or capture of bin Laden or many of his minions.
The Afghans hired by the CIA and trained by Special Forces also included Zahim Khan and Pacha Khan Zadran, a thuggish-looking warlord who would later call in a U.S. air strike to target a delegation of Pashtun tribal elders on their way to congratulate Hamid Karzai in Kabul. It was the duplicity and character of America’s Afghan proxies that ensured that the bulk of the Arab, Pakistani, and Uzbek jihadis would slip away, and that bin Laden would never be found.
Billy remembers the hardships of Afghanistan, but his best memories remain of the new generation of contractors and paramilitaries he got to know. “What I have noticed is that the new lads of the paramilitary are stronger, better-trained, more able with communications, have wonderful gear, can shoot straighter, and generally outshine the old-school lads…. However, their on-the-ground decision making has become anon-occurring event. Commo is just too good, and all decisions are rendered up the chain of command.
“In my time before we had all these radios and high-tech communications, decisions were rendered by old-schoolers in the field without fear of wrath from the hierarchy. But these days, decisions are strictly arrived at by the same hierarchy,” some several hundred miles from the combat zone.
Much to his disappointment, Billy’s time in Afghanistan never did bring him face-to-face with his old nemesis, Osama bin Laden. Even the locals he worked with seemed too eager to take his money and too reticent to root out the enemy. He would have preferred the heat of the Cambodian jungle, as the cold up in the mountains made his joints ache. He smelled bad and began to think that maybe he was, as he puts it, “too old for this shit.” After two months in-country, Billy Waugh said farewell to ODA 594, heading home in mid-January. It was going to be up to somebody else to capture Billy’s nemesis.
Enter Blackwater
The use of contractors in the War on Terror started with Billy Waugh’s five dozen recruits, an ad hoc paramilitary force of firepower and expertise whose rapid deployment filled an important role in helping the American offensive adapt quickly to the unconventional terrain. As it had done in Laos and other covert conflicts, America had effectively “outsourced” aspects of the War on Terror to retired military and local indigenous mercenaries. After the decimation of the Taliban, the CIA would be working to set up an extensive intelligence network in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help hunt down Osama bin Laden and remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA’s decision to hire a corporation to bolster personal protection teams for CIA officers would catalyze one company’s first foray into the private security industry. The initial $5.4-million six-month contract began Blackwater’s transformation from a minor steel-target manufacturer and shooting-range into a massive security conglomerate.
Before 9/11, Erik Prince was working to make his business profitable. Although Prince had grown up immersed in a world of business acquisition and expansion, the original Blackwater model seemed to cater more to Erik’s personal interests than pure profit. In 1997, Erik had broken ground on his Blackwater Training Center, at that time a six-thousand-acre property with a shooting range designed to offer specialized training for military and police. Growth was slow. From 1998 until 2000, only six people worked in the training department, and Prince often had to dip into his own pocket just to make payroll. In early 2001, Prince began Blackwater Target Systems to build an innovative self-resetting steel target. He managed to turn a slight profit, but business conditions were not entirely favorable when one of his first employees, Jamie Smith, initially suggested Erik start a new division specializing in providing security.
Smith has a background in the CIA and had been working as a role player and trainer at Blackwater off and on to make some extra money for law school, but he had quit to start his career as a tax lawyer after graduating in 2001. Prince wanted to retain him as an employee, but Smith had a bigger vision. Jamie saw a market in hiring out men skilled in State Department–style personal protection skills and wanted to create a division that had potential as a growth industry. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that Prince became fully committed to the idea. He called Smith in November 2001 to offer him a position as vice president of Blackwater, and by January 2002, Smith had relocated to headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina.
Having no reason to train a force of security contractors before they had any work to do, Smith suggested they begin by trying to work all of his and Erik’s contacts to find an opportunity. Erik told Smith that a friend of his had recently joined the CIA and that he could be in a good position to help move the business plan forward. Buzzy Krongard had been appointed to the position of executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He had quite a few years of experience as advisor to the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence), but further back in his career he had been an investment banker, and it was in that capacity that he had first become acquainted with Erik and the Prince family fortune.
Erik’s timing was either fortuitous or calculated, since CIA security resources were soon spread thin. Six months after 9/11, the Global Response Staff, the CIA’s security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers’ security to private industry. After Prince called seeking opportunities for his new business venture, Blackwater obtained a $5.4-million six-month contract that specified that it was for an “urgent and compelling” necessity. “Urgent and compelling” contracts eliminate all the competitive bidding requirements, so the contract went straight to Blackwater.
The “black” contract awarded by the CIA to Blackwater required eighteen contractors plus a C1 and C2—the first and second commanders. Although the work would be dangerous, both Blackwater and the independent security contractors Prince hired would be offered enough of a financial incentive to take the calculated risk. Jamie based what to charge the CIA on what DynCorp was charging the State Department for similar work. The contractors would be paid $550 per day—just a slight bump over what Jamie was paying the instructors at Moyock—but Blackwater would bill out at a rate of $1,500 per man per day. That tripled figure not only factors in costs of training, transport, and other overhead, but also includes a fairly healthy profit margin. The individual contractors would earn about $18,500 in a month, but Blackwater would gross $30,000 per day, which would add up to $900,000 a month. Although this was a relatively small contract, it showed that the private sector could bolster capacity in time of need. Within just three years, Blackwater would grow from this tiny ad hoc job to being the second largest provider of private security services, with three quarters of a billion dollars in annual billings.
At the time he won his first contract from the CIA, though, Erik had one problem: His security empire consisted of only himself and Jamie Smith. Smith advertised in the Washington Post jobs section and both started working their contacts to put together their first team. The basic requirements were a Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance, experience working in hostile environments, and knowledge of the rigorous requirements of State Department personal security detail (PSD) training. Within weeks, Blackwater had hired, vetted, and trained enough men for the contract.
The team headed over to Afghanistan in May 2002, flying in to Bagram Airbase. Erik Prince, owner, president, and CEO, went over himself for two weeks, ostensibly to work as a contractor, though Smith described Erik’s short trip as being closer to “playing CIA paramilitary.”
The majority of the team would stay in the capital for the duration of the contract, providing security for the CIA end of Kabul Airport and the “Annex,” the CIA’s Kabul station based at the Ariana Hotel. The contractors’ job as part of the Global Response Staff—the CIA term for extra security help required to operate in a hostile environment—was to guard the compound and to ensure intel officers made it to and from meetings safely. One contractor was briefly dispatched to assist with a specific task in Herat, and the CIA requested two to be stationed at a tiny border post in Shkin to provide security for officers holding clandestine meetings with local leaders. Jamie Smith and Erik flew south from Kabul to begin the contract in Shkin. Jamie would stay for two months, but Erik would leave the mud fort after one week and return to Kabul to “schmooze” the Agency chiefs, as Jamie describes it.
The helo flight to Shkin heads due south of Kabul, ascends to ten thousand feet to clear the mountain pass made famous by Operation Anaconda, descends past an old bin Laden compound and into what some call Fort Apache, a large mud fort complex set in the town of Shkin on a bleak dust-covered landscape just three miles from the Pakistan border. The CIA considered this “Indian territory” and chose the location because it was the farthest their Pegasus Air Mi-17 could fly to and from Bagram without a refueling stop. Shkin’s other claim to fame was that it was the first U.S. firebase built since the Vietnam War. A platoon of Rangers provided the firepower and ran night patrols. A Special Forces ODA, a Ranger Force, a British SAS team, and even Delta operated from the base as the secretive joint endeavor, Task Force 11—the group charged with finding bin Laden, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mullah Omar, and other high-value targets. Since rumors persisted that bin Laden roamed freely right across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, tensions ran high at the base.
Although Fort Apache was the most remote firebase, subject to regular attacks from enemies who would strike and flee back across the border into Pakistan, much of the day was spent exercising, housekeeping, and tanning on the dirt walls. When a call came in from a local informant, the contractors would scramble to set up a safe meeting place—typically a dead-end dry creek bed where one man could watch from the ridge while the other blocked the entrance. The case officer and a translator would then drive out to make the connection and the payoff. When the informant approached, the contractor guarding the entrance would step out to stop him, search him, and then send him on to the meeting.
Most of the work would turn out to be blissfully routine, but the underlying sense of being always surrounded or watched by an unconventional, unpredictable, unseen, amorphous enemy made the job more difficult for the mental endurance it required. Erik and Jamie learned immediately that the locals were not to be trusted, nothing was to be taken for granted, and they were never to let their guard down, since events could turn in a second. Shortly before they had arrived at Shkin, a convoy of SF had been been ambushed and one communications officer killed. The group had obviously been sold out by their duplicitous Afghan guide, since the lead vehicle in the convoy—the one in which the guide was riding—escaped unscathed while the rest were peppered with AK fire.
This environment of suspicion and paranoia kept them constantly on edge and may have played tricks on their minds. As Jamie recalls, one day while out doing recon for a meeting spot, “We drove up the dustiest road on the earth. It was like talcum powder and was so thick that I had to stop at times because I simply could not see the road in front of the truck. As we drove on the older road, I spotted three Toyotas filled with armed men gaining on us and using a new road that paralleled ours. We rounded a corner covered by a building and they were nowhere to be found.” They weren’t phantoms, and they couldn’t have just disappeared, but it made no sense that they didn’t attack. Nothing in Afghanistan made sense.
Smith served out the term of the six-month contract, with two months at Shkin and the rest in Kabul. Though Erik’s stay had been brief, the experience energized him. He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirtysomething head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA’s Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.
Joining the CIA can take months, but the normally arduous and lengthy interview process must have been expedited for Prince’s benefit. By July he was asking Smith for advice on how to pass the polygraph—the last hurdle required before a CIA recruit can accept a job offer. Erik’s first test had been “inconclusive,” so he had to take it again. Smith advised him that any number of factors could have led to that result and suggested it may have just been nerves. Though Prince had already effectively worked for the CIA in a covert capacity as a contractor, he would be ultimately barred from becoming a “Blue Badger” because he lacked certain hard skills. Erik just had to refocus himself on growing the Blackwater empire.
Prince’s first contract was not renewed after the initial six months. The official reason given was that Blackwater had never managed to stay fully staffed up to the required terms of the contract, though rumors have circulated throughout the security industry that the CIA had discovered a conflict of interest relating to Buzzy Krongard. That loss didn’t seem to have any long-term impact on the business, though, since according to current president Gary Jackson, Blackwater has settled in to a pattern of doing about 15 percent “black” contracts—assumedly CIA—which these days would add up to nearly $100 million in annual revenue for the company.
That first CIA/Blackwater contract could be considered one of the early watershed events indicating where the private security business was heading, or perhaps it would be more correct to say where the War on Terror was leading the industry. The abrupt state of war that began on 9/11 had stretched the U.S. government’s resources beyond what could have been realistically anticipated on September 10, 2001, creating an opportunity for private industry to supplement the government’s security resources. In another example of how the industry is exploding, Jamie Smith has since left Blackwater to try and ride the current wave of opportunity by founding his own successful security start-up, SCG International Risk in Virginia Beach.
The two most important long-term government-related sources of employment for security contractors in Afghanistan have been in the hunt for bin Laden and the guarding of President Hamid Karzai. In my quest to traverse the world of the private security contractor, I made arrangements to visit a former Special Forces friend working on the job protecting the life of Hamid Karzai. While in Afghanistan, I also hoped to find out how the hunt for bin Laden was progressing.
Two years to the day after the beginning of the war, I journeyed to Afghanistan to see how the War on Terror had changed.