Licensed to Kill (3 page)

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”