Part 6: Surprise, Kill, Vanish...Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya...Reagan’s Preemptive Neutralization...Parachute Assassins, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden

Surprise, Kill, Vanish

by Annie Jacobson

16

Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya

For Billy Waugh, the years spent working for the U.S. Postal Service, 1972 to 1977, were misery incarnate. Then came the mysterious call, on July 20, propelling him back into the world of covert-action operations. 

“The location is overseas,” the caller said. 

“Fine by me,” said Waugh. 

If Waugh was in, the man on the phone said he’d arrange for a down payment to be wired into his bank account. 

“I’m in,” said Waugh. More details would be forthcoming, but in the meantime, Waugh needed to travel to northern Virginia and check into  a specific hotel at 3:00 p.m. on July 25, just a few days away. Waugh agreed to the meeting at the hotel. 

Forty-eight hours later, a large sum of money appeared in Waugh’s bank account. The down payment was twice as much as the post office paid in a year. The overseas job was guaranteed for six months but might continue for years, he was told. All travel and living expenses would be paid by the client, whose identity was to remain hidden for now. 

Bring clothes to last for a year in a very warm climate,” the man said. “The location is Africa.” 

Waugh considered the situation. “My instinct and intuition told me this was a CIA operation,” he recalls. “That the Agency was forming some kind of ground team for a covert operation in Africa. I figured this was how the CIA worked, now that covert-action operations had been curtailed.” 

The next day at the post office, Waugh told his supervisor that he was resigning his position. 

“You’re a good worker, and the post office is a good job,” Waugh recalls the man saying. “Why are you leaving?” 

Waugh said he wasn’t cut out for post office work. 

At home, he packed a small bag. On the assigned day, he flew to Washington, DC, and took a cab to the hotel in northern Virginia. 

At the 3:00 p.m. meeting he was not surprised to see the faces of three Green Berets from SOG, soldiers he’d worked with during the Vietnam War. Based on the skill sets of the team members, it was clear to Waugh that the job was paramilitary in nature. This four-man team included a medic, a communications man, a handheld weapons instructor, and Waugh—an expert in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and heavy weapons. During the meeting, a fifth man showed up and identified himself as “the client’s lawyer.” The team would be traveling to Libya, the lawyer said. Their job was to train soldiers who were part of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s elite special forces. In addition to being its president, Qaddafi served as the country’s commander in chief. 

The former SOG operators were escorted to the Libyan embassy and issued travel visas. “We were told our flight was leaving late the next day,” remembers Waugh. 

Back at his hotel room, Waugh considered the facts and his suppositions. “In order to ensure plausible deniability,” he guessed, “the CIA was using paramilitary contractors, and hiring them in a roundabout way.” The situation presented an excellent financial opportunity for him. Still, his intuition said, Make a few calls. 

Waugh reached out to several CIA contacts he had in Washington. Not one of the people he spoke with had any knowledge of this Libyan operation. He called the client’s lawyer and asked if the mission was a covert operation for the CIA. The lawyer said it was not. “He assured me it was all aboveboard and there was no legal risk,” Waugh says. “That we were going to be training the Libyan special forces in basic infantry tactics only.” Waugh asked to know the name of the client. The lawyer said the man’s name was Edwin P. Wilson, and that he was a former CIA officer. 

The client’s lawyer said that while en route to Africa, the team would stop in Geneva for a briefing. There, they’d meet Edwin Wilson himself, who’d pay them directly and give them the names of their contacts inside the Libyan military. It was a sensitive job, the lawyer said, which was why the money was so good. Not everyone in Libya was pro-American, so it was imperative that the operators keep their identities hidden—for example, by always wearing a balaclava, the lawyer said—whenever they were on a military base. Colonel Qaddafi’s friends included Fidel Castro and Idi Amin, the president of Uganda. Qaddafi didn’t want anyone to know he also had American friends, the lawyer explained. 

Waugh hung up and considered the situation. While he was sitting there thinking about what all this meant, the telephone rang. The caller addressed Waugh by name. Waugh did not recognize the man’s voice; nor did the caller identify himself. Instead, he told Waugh that the two of them had mutual friends, and he mentioned two names, both of whom Waugh recognized as CIA. The man asked Waugh to meet him at a restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, in an hour. It was important, the man said. Waugh should come right away. 

“The meeting is about your upcoming travel plans to Africa,” the caller said cryptically. 

At the restaurant, the man showed Billy Waugh his credentials, which identified him as working for the CIA. He said that his name was Pat. 

About the upcoming trip to Libya: “It’s not an Agency operation,” Pat said. 

Pat pulled out a briefcase and set it on the table between them. He opened up the case and removed a Pentax 35mm camera and several rolls of black-and-white film. He slid everything across the table to Billy Waugh. 

“Pat said that I could assist the Agency and myself by taking photographs of the various military facilities I’d be visiting in Libya,” Waugh recalls. Of particular interest to Pat was an area forty miles inland from the Gulf of Sidra called Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, where there was a classified Libyan military facility. Satellite images indicated that surface-to-air missile sites were set up there, Pat explained, protecting the airspace around Benghazi. The missiles were Russian. Pat said that the CIA wanted photographs of them. 

Waugh considered what he was being told. There was a loophole in the U.S. Neutrality Acts. While it was illegal to enlist in a foreign army, it was not illegal to “advise” a foreign army. That said, training a terrorist organization in explosives and munitions was treason. Libya was not yet a designated state sponsor of terrorism, but only because the State Department had not yet created its official list. However, Muammar Qaddafi was under the watchful eye of the CIA. To understand Qaddafi’s actions, the CIA relied on open source intelligence and some human intelligence, mostly from Arab locals, whose trustworthiness was anybody’s guess. The CIA wanted Billy Waugh to act as its eyes and ears on the ground, Pat told Waugh. In training Qaddafi’s commandos, he’d be part of Qaddafi’s inner circle. The risks were great, but the rewards could be huge.

Pat slid a small piece of paper across the table. On the paper was written a telephone number. This was to be Waugh’s contact, Pat said. He gave Waugh a phrase-and-reply code, tradecraft for CIA assets in the field, and said Waugh should use both elements of the code in the event a problem arose in Libya. Waugh was told not to mention this assignment to anyone. Not to his team members in Libya, and not to the man financing the operation, Edwin P. Wilson. Finally, Pat said, if the photographs were decent, Waugh would be compensated for his efforts. 

Pat asked Waugh if he understood the request, and if he accepted the assignment. Waugh said yes. Waugh was going to Libya to work for an American entrepreneur who was doing business with Qaddafi. No one outside Waugh’s Agency contacts could know that he was also working for the CIA. 

As Waugh headed to Benghazi in August of 1977, Libya inhabited a peculiar spot in the geopolitical landscape. For those living in Libya, life had already become a living hell, but on the international stage, the country was still considered a tinderbox waiting to catch fire. CIA analysts watched Qaddafi’s every move, and its Libyan desk hummed with timely reports. Soon, they would include Libyan military secrets passed on from Billy Waugh. 

Muammar Qaddafi had seized power in a military coup eight years before, in 1969, overthrowing the monarchy of King Idris. Qaddafi, then a military captain, made himself a colonel and declared his political party, the Revolutionary Command Council, to be the highest authority in Libya. He immediately imprisoned those who’d served the previous administration, many of whom would never be seen or heard from again. He tried King Idris in absentia and sentenced him to death. Much as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had promised for Latin America—unity and harmony among a group of people who live in a certain region—so Qaddafi promised a beneficent solidarity for all Arab nations. Like his idol, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, Qaddafi espoused a pan-Arab nationalism, the revolutionary brand. 

Within a year of assuming power, Qaddafi expelled from the country all American and British military advisors and shut down their military facilities, calling them “bases of imperialism.” The Italians, Libya’s former colonizers, fared worse. Twelve thousand Italians were banished, told to exhume the bones of their dead relatives and take them back to Italy. The event was televised on Libyan state TV. Qaddafi promised reform for the people, including the nationalization of state oil.

To promote a pan-Libyan identity, Qaddafi created something called the Arab Socialist Union, which fizzled. After the death of Nasser in September 1970, Qaddafi tried to assume the position of Arab unifier, but that endeavor also failed. He then worked to create an Arab federation with Egypt, Syria, and Sudan. They all received sizable financial grants, thanks to the vast wealth Libya enjoyed through its oil, and had no choice but to go along. But this, too, failed. When, in 1973, Qaddafi learned of a coup being plotted against him, his grip tightened. He created a militia “to protect the revolution” and began a systematic purge of the educated class. Death squads terrorized the population. Political parties were outlawed. Under the draconian Law 75, dissent became illegal. The state took control of the press. There were no legal codes or a legal system; justice was arbitrary. Constitutional law was suspended and replaced with sharia —Islamic law. 

For his first few years in power, Qaddafi was vocal in his disdain for the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, referring to each as “a plague.” They were together engaged in a conspiracy to harm the third world, Qaddafi said. Privately, he bought MiG fighter jets, antiaircraft guns, and heavy weapons systems from the Soviet Union. Libya’s neighbors, most notably Egypt and Sudan, grew suspicious and then alarmed. Qaddafi was no reformer; he was a megalomaniacal despot. Then, Egypt’s new president, Anwar Sadat, began making inroads toward an alliance with the United States. 

A turning point in public perception came in 1977, when Fidel Castro arrived in Libya for a ten-day visit as a guest of Qaddafi. 

“We are all revolutionaries,” Castro told the Libyan Congress. “The revolution must continue!” To a standing ovation, Castro praised Qaddafi. “Comrade al-Qaddafi has struggled for the sake of unity of the Arab world like no one else has done,” Castro said. “[His] struggle for prosperity, man’s dignity, freedom against exploitation bind us together. We highly admire what you are doing.” Castro insisted that the greedy imperialists needed to be fought to the death, by any means necessary. There was only one way. One path. He ended his speech with a call to arms against the United States: “The country of death!” It was into this incendiary climate that Billy Waugh landed in Tripoli, Pentax camera in hand, a covert-action operator for the CIA. 

At the airport in Tripoli, Waugh and the others were met by a man who went by the name Mohammad Fatah, likely an alias. The team was escorted through Libyan customs, then to a hotel on the beach. In the morning, they met with Qaddafi’s minister of intelligence, Major Abdullah Hajazzi. He spoke in Arabic, which Billy Waugh was able to understand with some help from an interpreter: back in 1956, during U.S. Army Special Forces training, he’d been sent to Monterey for a five-month course in Arabic. He was rusty now, but soon he’d be almost fluent. 

The team split up into their areas of expertise. Waugh was taken to Benghazi, roughly six hundred miles to the east, on the coast. It did not take long for Waugh to figure out that Edwin P. Wilson had several teams of former Green Berets inside Libya, doing an assortment of jobs. All were related to weapons training. Wilson, said to be a close personal friend of Qaddafi, owned a seaside villa on the north shore of Libya, near Tripoli, and ran his operations from there. 

In Benghazi, Billy Waugh was set up in a room at the Omar Khayamm Hotel under the watchful eye of Libyan handlers. Each day, a woman in a black abaya sat in the hallway outside his room, taking notes. “The only thing visible was her eyes,” remembers Waugh. “She was so hidden by a black robe, she could have been a man. Who knows.” 

For several months at a time, Waugh trained Libyan commandos in small arms, heavy weapons, and explosives. How to ambush a target, conduct hit-and run operations, sabotage. “Most of the soldiers were unqualified and lazy,” he recalls. “Many of them were Qaddafi’s friends, or people he owed a favor. Most of them ignored training or flat-out refused to be told what to do.” 

Sometimes the consequences were lethal. Qaddafi wanted his own version of the U.S. Navy SEALs and assigned Waugh to lead training. During a training exercise on the Gulf of Sidra, one of the commandos in a boat ahead of Waugh leapt out of the craft and into the water and drowned. “He didn’t know how to swim,” recalls Waugh. “He thought the scuba suit worked like a life preserver” and would keep him afloat. In a post-accident debriefing, Waugh learned only two of the twenty-two commandos knew how to swim. 

Things were heating up across the Middle East and North Africa, with Colonel Qaddafi playing the role of central provocateur. In the summer of 1977, Qaddafi’s forces carried out a tank raid on the Egyptian border town Sallum. In response, Anwar Sadat sent three Egyptian Army divisions to its border with Libya, overpowering the Libyan brigades and pushing them back. The Egyptian air force attacked Libya’s Gamal Abdul El Nasser Air Base, near the border. State Department officials feared Qaddafi wanted to provoke a war with Egypt. “LARG [Libyan Arab Republic government] anticipates military attack from Egypt, which it hopes to exploit and cause overthrow of Sadat,” Robert Carle, the U.S. embassy chargé d’affaires in Tripoli, wrote in a classified cable. The U.S. urged restraint, and the border war lasted just three days. 

But the feud between Qaddafi and Sadat would not dissipate. The CIA had intelligence indicating that Qaddafi was plotting to have Sadat assassinated. In November 1977, the Pentagon provided Sadat with an armored helicopter, a Sikorsky CH-53E. The White House sent a U.S. Secret Service team to Cairo; they taught evasive driving techniques to Sadat’s bodyguards. The CIA set up a secure communication system in the palace so that the president’s moves couldn’t be anticipated. Anwar Sadat was America’s best hope for an Arab partner in the Middle East, and he needed to stay alive. 

In November 1977, Sadat stunned the world by announcing his intention to visit Jerusalem and speak before the Knesset, Israel’s national legislature. For the first time in three decades, an Arab nation was acknowledging the nation state of Israel. Sadat’s groundbreaking three-day visit to the country was a first step in what would become the Camp David Accords, but the move infuriated Arab leaders. Qaddafi called for Sadat’s death. No one was more outraged than an Islamic extremist group inside Egypt called the Muslim Brotherhood. They, too, began plotting to assassinate President Anwar Sadat. 

It was in this extraordinarily volatile environment that Billy Waugh operated over the next two years, reporting to Qaddafi’s minister of intelligence, Major Abdullah Hajazzi, and developing a close working relationship with a Libyan special forces captain who went by the name Mohammad al Faraj bin Ageby. Taking photographs without drawing suspicion was difficult at first, but over time Waugh became a trusted presence. 

“I discovered that the commandos loved having their picture taken, and I took advantage of this,” he says. He began taking photographs of extremely sensitive military sites. Flying in a helicopter to the military facility at the Green Mountain, he photographed surface-to-air-missile sites set up in a ring around Benghazi. The CIA had long suspected that Qaddafi was getting these defense missile systems from the Soviet Union. Waugh’s photographs provided proof. 

As one of the favored trainers of Qaddafi’s special forces, Waugh was now the highest-placed CIA paramilitary asset in Libya, with direct access to Qaddafi’s most sensitive military facilities. On one occasion, he was invited to attend a small air-power demonstration with Qaddafi and a guest of honor, Idi Amin. During the event, Waugh photographed Russian airplanes that the Soviets were supplying to Libya. Every action now had a dual purpose. While training Qaddafi’s commandos how to HALO-jump out of aircraft over the desert, Waugh mapped regions previously uncharted by U.S. intelligence agencies. 

The information that Waugh provided to his CIA handler was sensitive, as well as dangerous to his own livelihood, always marked “TS/SCI [Top Secret, Secret Compartmented Information] NOFORN [no foreigners] NOCONTRACT [no contractors] ORCON [original source controlled]”—to keep Waugh, as a source, compartmentalized. What Billy Waugh did not know at the time was that in addition to gathering intelligence for the CIA on Qaddafi, he was also gathering intelligence for the CIA on Edwin P. Wilson. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the CIA were building a case against Wilson, who, the DOJ believed, was illegally selling heavy weapons and high-powered explosives to Libya. 

Every few months, Waugh would travel back to Washington, DC, file reports, turn in his film, then return to Libya with his Pentax camera and a new supply of 35mm film. In the spring of 1979, he arrived in Benghazi and received unusual news. His Libyan counterpart, Mohammad al Faraj bin Ageby, said they were going to drive six hours into the desert to meet with Ageby’s boss, Colonel Fatah. 

“In a country where the president was a colonel, being a colonel was bigtime,” remembers Waugh. “This was not an inconsequential event, and it took me by surprise.” Without further explanation, Waugh was driven to Tobruk, not far from the border with Egypt. There, he was brought to meet with Colonel Fatah. 

“We notice you are good with a camera,” Waugh recalls Colonel Fatah telling him. The comment sent a chill up his spine. Had he been discovered? Did Libyan intelligence know he was working for the CIA? 

“We’d like you to cross over into Egypt and take photographs of the Egyptian armed forces set up there,” Colonel Fatah said. From the tone of the colonel’s voice, it sounded like an offer Waugh was not supposed to refuse. His mind worked quickly, thinking through a scenario. He told the colonel that he flat-out couldn’t do that. 

“Why not?” the colonel asked. 

“If the U.S. found out about it, I’d be charged with spying for a foreign country,” Waugh said. Treason. 

Colonel Fatah told Waugh he didn’t see the logic. Waugh tried explaining, but Colonel Fatah wasn’t interested. After that, Waugh says, he felt his relationship with the Libyan command structure cool. 

For a while, he was assigned to a remote military base on the northeast coast, at Darnah; then he was sent back to the facility outside Benghazi. Across the Arab world, things were getting worse for American workers. On base Waugh mostly wore his balaclava, but a lot of the time it was off. He was tan from the intense sunshine, but everyone knew he was the American with sandy-blond hair. In November, a group of students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took more than sixty American hostages. Hostilities toward Americans escalated from there. On December 2, Waugh received a call from Mohammad al Faraj bin Ageby. Something was happening, Ageby said. Qaddafi was furious with the Americans and Waugh needed to leave the country immediately or he’d be arrested. 

In Saudi Arabia, local Sunni terrorists had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They’d taken hundreds of worshippers hostage and laid siege to Islam’s holiest site. As fierce gun battles raged inside the mosque, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini took advantage of the chaos and unleashed a black propaganda campaign against Israel and America. The real culprits behind the mosque siege, Khomeini declared, were the Zionists and the Great Satanists of the United States. The siege was in fact led by a group of Islamic fundamentalists called alIkhwan, the Brethren, but Iran’s supreme leader was pushing a fictional story, that Israeli and American commandos had parachuted into the mosque disguised as Muslims and committed the attack against Islam. Khomeini encouraged revolutionaries to go out and attack U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Africa as a response. His followers obeyed, and the U.S. embassy in Tripoli was now under siege. 

Waugh caught a taxi and headed to the airport, leaving everything behind, including the clothes in his hotel room and the money in its safe. On a television in the airport, state TV showed footage of a violent mob outside the U.S. embassy in Tripoli chanting, “Death to America!” Demonstrating solidarity with the Iranian Revolution, some two thousand Libyans had attacked the embassy and set it on fire. Twelve Americans were trapped inside, locked in a walk-in vault. Waugh caught a flight to Frankfurt. By the time he landed, the embassy siege was over and American officials were saying that everyone had “escaped without harm.” It would be thirty-two years before Waugh returned to Libya for the CIA, in October 2011, in the days immediately before Qaddafi was killed and disfigured by a violent mob.

In December 1979, U.S. dealings with Qaddafi were far from over. On the twenty-ninth, the U.S. State Department created its first official State Sponsors of Terrorism list, with four countries, including Iran and Libya. Qaddafi responded with one of the most bizarre international assassination campaigns in modern history. He publicly announced a state-sponsored targeted killing program, which he officially called Physical Liquidation of the Stray Dogs. 

Qaddafi said that his targeted killing program extended to any Libyan dissident who spoke out against his government. In a fiery speech broadcast on state radio, he called for “the physical liquidation of the enemies of the revolution abroad.” While it sounded like bluster, it was not. Over the next several months, four anti-Qaddafi Libyan émigrés were assassinated: Mohammad Mustafa Ramadan and Mahmoud Abu Salem Nafa in London, and Abdul Aref Ghalil and Mohammad Salem Rtemi in Rome. 

Come spring, the U.S. State Department ordered the expulsion of four Libyan diplomats in Washington whom President Carter described as “would-be assassins.” On May 1, 1980, the Financial Times reported that police departments in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany had been alerted by Interpol to guard against a possible wave of assassinations by Qaddafi’s hit teams. Qaddafi issued a “final warning” to anti-government Libyan exiles living abroad. “This is their last hope,” he said. “Either they return to Libya where they would be safe and sound or they will be liquidated wherever they are.” 

When a Libyan émigré living in Fort Collins, Colorado, ignored Qaddafi’s threats, Qaddafi sent one of his assassins to Colorado. The assassin was a former Green Beret named Eugene Tafoya. 

It was 7:30 on the night of October 14, 1980, and a Fort Collins police officer named Ray Martinez answered a call on his radio. There was a woman named Farida Zagallai on the other end. She was hysterical. Her husband, Faisal, had been shot in the head and was lying on the floor of their apartment in a pool of blood, she said. Officer Martinez needed to come over to 1917 South Shields Street right away. 

Officer Martinez recognized the name. Six months earlier, Faisal Zagallai, a Libyan graduate student, had applied for and received a permit to carry a concealed weapon, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Zagallai’s reason for needing the weapon was unheard-of, certainly for a city like Fort Collins: he claimed to be on a hit list of people Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya intended to assassinate as part of his Physical Liquidation of the Stray Dogs campaign. Back then, it sounded downright fictional. 

Officer Martinez hurried over to the apartment and rushed inside. There on the floor, he found Faisal Zagallai lying in a pool of blood, two bullets in his head. The first .22-caliber bullet entered the eye socket, severed the optic nerve, and lodged in Faisal Zagallai’s mouth. The second bullet sheared off part of his ear before entering his head through the cheek. The furniture in the living room was knocked over; clearly there had been a struggle. There was blood everywhere, on the carpet and the walls. There were bloody handprints on the doorframe. The assassin, it seemed, had vanished. 

Officer Martinez interviewed two witnesses from the apartment building. One helped a sketch artist draw a composite of the suspect. The second witness described a man with a pockmarked face and a clip-on necktie who was carrying a silver-and-blue handgun. Detectives drove to the Denver airport and circulated the suspect sketch. A shuttle bus driver said he recognized the man and gave the FBI a few more clues. After a few days, there was a remarkable lead. The FBI received news of an English-language broadcast from a Libyan revolutionary group that was taking credit for what it called “a physical liquidation.” This was part of “the final stage in the revolutionary conflict” between Libya and the imperialist United States, the group said. “A member of the World Revolutionary Committee [has] liquidated one Faisal Zagallai.” It looked like Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was behind this assassination attempt—that his reach had extended into the United States. 

Despite having been shot twice in the head, at close range, Zagallai was still alive. He’d been blinded in his right eye, but lived to tell the tale. Farida Zagallai had already told the FBI everything she knew and could remember. The couple had been out of work, she said, when they received an unsolicited phone call from a woman who identified herself as a recruiter for an insurance company looking for people who spoke Arabic. Farida Zagallai said the job interested her. The insurance company arranged to send someone to the house for an interview; it turned out to be the assassin. The man was strange and had alcohol on his breath, Farida Zagallai told the FBI. She went into the kitchen to make drinks, and when she came out, the assassin and her husband were engaged in hand-to hand combat. 

“He began striking me in rapid-fire karate blows,” Faisal Zagallai told the FBI from his hospital bed. Faisal remembered raising his arms up to protect himself when the assassin reached for his gun. Faisal reached for his own gun, which he said he kept hidden under the couch cushions. The assassin’s gun went off. “I felt I was shot in my head and I felt blood, but I kept struggling with him so I could take his gun,” Zagallai testified. “We struggled from one end of the apartment to the other.” 

The FBI took over, but the case went cold. Then, as circumstance would have it, months later, two local boys on bicycles happened upon a .22-caliber blue and-silver handgun lying in a ditch along a country road. The FBI traced the weapon to a retired dog warden living in a trailer park in the Florida Keys. The man, named Tully Strong, said he’d sold the gun to an old friend from Vietnam named Eugene Tafoya, a former Green Beret who’d been decorated with the Bronze Star for heroism. 

The FBI learned that Tafoya lived in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. With a bomb squad at the ready, they secured the perimeter, and in a ruse to lure Tafoya from the home without a struggle, they cut the power to his house. When Tafoya came out, they arrested him. Inside, the FBI located a trove of incriminating evidence: drawings of the Zagallais’ apartment complex, a stack of Libyan currency, and a tape recording of a phone conversation from someone offering to pay Tafoya to take care of “someone who should quit breathing… permanently.” 

The FBI arrested Eugene Tafoya. Tafoya said the man to blame was Edwin P. Wilson, an American CIA agent living in a seaside villa in Tripoli, Libya. Tafoya said his intention was to rough up Faisal Zagallai, not kill him. Tafoya told the FBI he believed he was working for the CIA. 

After a sensational jury trial, Eugene Tafoya was convicted of third-degree assault and conspiracy to commit third-degree assault but was acquitted on the more serious charges of attempted first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The jurors’ verdict indicated that they believed that Tafoya was in fact acting on someone else’s behalf, despite the fact that no evidence about the third party was introduced during the trial. 

“Obviously we felt there was another party,” the jury foreman, Gary Thornberg, told the New York Times. “But it didn’t matter for our purposes who that [third party] was.” Eugene Tafoya was sentenced to two years in prison. 

Depending on whom you ask, the FBI and the CIA had been building a case against Edwin P. Wilson for years. In 1982 Wilson was arrested, tried, and convicted of illegally selling weapons to Libya. This included 42,000 pounds of military-grade C-4 explosives, which rivaled the U.S. military’s domestic stockpile at the time. Wilson had them manufactured in Southern California. Edwin Wilson was sentenced to fifty-two years in federal prison. He served twenty-two years, much of it in solitary confinement. Then, in 2004, in a bizarre twist, a Texas judge overturned Wilson’s conviction and he was set free. 

His lawyers had gathered enough evidence to demonstrate to a judge that he’d been “informally” working for the CIA at the time of his arrest. The lawyers produced eighty instances of contact between Wilson and the CIA. In a legal briefing, Judge Lynn Hughes wrote that the U.S. government had “deliberately deceived the court” about Edwin Wilson’s continuing contacts with CIA officials, thereby “double-crossing a part-time informal government agent.” Decades later, it came to light that Wilson had initially gone to Libya on behalf of the CIA, in 1976, to locate Carlos the Jackal. He’d gone rogue, eventually working for the CIA and also for Qaddafi. This was after Libya had been placed on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. “They framed a guilty man,” said journalist David Corn. 

The Eugene Tafoya trial gave Green Berets a bad name. Reports of other Special Forces operators working as assassins for Muammar Qaddafi were published in newspapers around the country. No one else was ever charged. Billy Waugh knew that his classified work for the CIA against Muammar Qaddafi and military targets in Libya was to remain hidden. It was best for him to lay low. He was given an assignment on the other side of the world, 7,000 miles from Washington, DC, on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Kwajalein. His cover was as chief of security at the U.S. Kwajalein Missile Range. 

In the Marshall Islands, the Defense Department was testing a highly classified missile system outfitted with a ten-nuclear-warhead payload, called a MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle). The Soviets wanted one. Waugh was tasked with training and overseeing one hundred military security officers who were in charge of surveillance of the twenty-five islands and atolls near and around Kwajalein. 

The missiles were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. They were programmed to hit a target five thousand miles away, sometimes just a buoy on the ocean near Kwajalein. Ever on the prowl, Soviet submarines would quickly surface the moment the MIRV became visible on reentry, then dispatch a small Zodiac boat loaded with Russian amphibious special forces called Spetsnaz Delfin. If the Russians were to capture a piece of a missile or a MIRV it would be a counterintelligence coup d’état. Day in and day out, floating on the open sea in his own Zodiac, Billy Waugh scanned the horizon for a sign of Soviet infiltration. When he spotted one of their Zodiacs, he’d charge toward it, ready to grab a Soviet operator and bring him in for interrogation. 

“I never got a Russian, but the Russians never got a MIRV,” says Waugh.

Part 3

1981

17

Reagan’s Preemptive Neutralization

On the morning of January 28, 1981, a CIA motorcade pulled up to the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC, to collect a passenger code-named the Baron. The man’s real name was William J. Casey, and he was the new director of the CIA. Age sixty-seven, this was the Bill Casey who used to run Special Operations behind enemy lines for the OSS, the man who found a loophole that allowed General Eisenhower to sign off on a plot to kill Hitler using Nazis who’d been turned. With his signature thick-lensed glasses, jowled chin, and expensive but wrinkled suit, Bill Casey climbed into the backseat of an Oldsmobile outfitted with anti-mine plating and bulletproof windows that couldn’t be rolled down. The chase car behind Casey carried four security agents with Uzis. In the advance car, a paramilitary operator sat shotgun, a .357 Magnum on his hip and a submachine gun on his lap. 

The convoy drove to CIA headquarters in Langley, twelve miles away, breezing past security, around the boulder barriers, and through a grove of pine trees. The CIA’s campus was beautiful, its sloping terrain dotted with white and gray buildings that had an air of grandeur. After a short drive, the motorcade pulled up to the entrance of the headquarters building and Bill Casey climbed out, surrounded by his entourage. He intended to arrive this way, and to convey a message: the power of the CIA was soon to be restored. There was a new sheriff in town and he was it. 

Bill Casey made his way through the marble foyer, past the CIA memorial wall, up a short set of stairs, and into the key-operated elevator reserved for Senior Intelligence Service staff. He exited on the seventh floor and walked into the director’s conference room to meet with his team. “Casey then told these people what they needed and wanted to hear most,” explains his biographer, Joseph Persico, “that the indictment made against them during the seventies was a bum rap.” CIA officers and operators simply carry out the wishes of the American presidents they serve. 

The CIA Bill Casey took over in 1981 had been decimated by the Ford and Carter administrations, a period staff historians refer to as the Time of Troubles. Under Ford, there were the Church and Pike Committee hearings. Under Carter, director Stansfield Turner eliminated 820 clandestine positions, gutting analysis and special operations capabilities. “With the people fired, driven out, or lured into retirement, our analysis wasn’t at all sharp, forward-looking, or relevant,” recalls Robert Gates, Turner’s young executive assistant, who would become director of Central Intelligence in 1991. “Our paramilitary capability was clinically dead,” Gates said. Now, Bill Casey was about to change all that, starting with a robust rebuilding of covert operations. 

Bill Casey worked from three ideas. The world was a dangerous place; the Soviets were responsible for most of the danger; the CIA must never be weak. The director of Central Intelligence, the president, and his inner circle of advisors needed to plan and oversee foreign policy—to include covert action— as a team. “Khrushchev told us in 1961 that the communists would not win through nuclear war,” Casey told his staff. “But through national liberation wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.” To do this, the communists as well as rogue states like Libya and Iran were financing proxy armies to bring about the downfall of the United States—it was why the world was so wrought with violence. “Not exactly new in history,” said Casey, citing how the ancient Romans used men from conquered countries to fight their enemies abroad. But the biggest emerging threat the CIA needed to confront, Casey warned, was that these countries “also operate camps for training terrorists and insurgents to be sent around the world to practice and foment revolutionary violence.” In 1981, these were prescient words. 

With the intention of fighting fire with fire, Casey asked five top deputies from the clandestine service to provide him with “a clear-cut articulation of the Agency’s paramilitary role, how it relates to Delta Force [and] Green Berets, and exactly what is needed to make the Agency capable of playing that role” again. He wanted the CIA to reassert itself in hidden-hand operations around the world, starting with a “statement of clandestine paramilitary doctrine.” “It’s called for at this point,” Casey said, “because so many people [at the CIA] have forgotten where and how a clandestine paramilitary capability can be important.” 

The problem for hidden-hand operations was a Congress that wanted them curtailed. After Bill Casey finished reading the 130-page paper on Church Commission guidelines for covert operations, he threw it on the table. “This kind of crap is smothering us,” he shouted at his staff. “I’m throwing this thing out. You practically have to take a lawyer with you on a mission.” Covert action was meant to serve as the president’s hidden hand, not the town crier. Assassination as a threat to U.S. national security did not change with the Church and Pike Commissions’ investigations into the concept, Casey maintained. 

The way to reaffirm presidential authority was to create a new committee inside the executive branch to plan and oversee covert operations. Where Eisenhower had the Special Group and Johnson the 303 Committee, President Ronald Reagan’s inner circle of advisors was called the National Security Planning Group (NSPG). It met at the White House, sometimes weekly. Casey, one of its nine members, wanted closer full-time proximity than Langley to the president and the NSPG. So he arranged to keep a second office next door to the White House, in the Executive Office Building. It was here, on the morning of March 30, that he sat reading from a tall pile of papers when a call from the CIA operations center came in, upending his world. 

The worst possible coded message in the repertoire of the U.S. Secret Service had just sounded across the White House communications system. 

“AOP! AOP!” AOP is the acronym for attack on principal; principal is another word for president. Ronald Reagan had been shot by an assassin outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. Casey needed to get over to the West Wing of the White House. 

When the director of Central Intelligence finally arrived at the White House Situation Room, one question consumed everyone present: Was the assassin a terrorist with ties to the Soviet Union, Libya, or Iran? Bill Casey had no idea. 

Ronald Reagan was coming out of the Washington Hilton Hotel when an assassin fired six .22-caliber bullets in his and his security team’s direction in less than two seconds. The first bullet hit White House press secretary James Brady in the head, paralyzing him. The second bullet hit DC police officer Thomas Delahanty in the neck, near the brain stem. The third bullet, aimed directly at the president, missed its target and traveled across the street, where it hit a window. U.S. Secret Service special agent Tim McCarthy took the fourth bullet in the abdomen as he shielded the president. The fifth bullet hit the armor plated limousine. The sixth bullet ricocheted off the armored side of the vehicle and hit the president in the left underarm, entered his body, grazed his upper rib, penetrated into the lung, and stopped 2.52 centimeters from his heart. 

Secret Service agents Jerry Parr and Ray Shaddick pushed Reagan into the limousine, which sped off toward George Washington University Hospital. The president was in great pain but didn’t yet realize he’d been shot. He thought that Parr broke his rib pushing him into the limousine. As Parr checked for gunshot wounds, Reagan coughed. Out of his mouth came bright red blood, which frothed. Four minutes later, they pulled into the hospital. With no stretcher available, President Reagan insisted on walking on his own power. All the while, the military attaché carrying the nation’s nuclear football remained at his side. In the lobby, Reagan grew short of breath. His left leg buckled and he fell to one knee. 

For reasons of national security, the incident was being reported as non-life threatening, when in fact President Ronald Reagan was perilously close to death. Ingrained in the psyche of every person in the national-security apparatus is a fundamental: the center of power must never go down. An incapacitated president gives the enemy a dangerous window of opportunity to strike. How that can happen is exemplified in what occurred next. 

Once the president was inside the emergency room, the hospital staff began cutting off his suit. The FBI confiscated everything in the pockets, including his wallet, inside of which were the Gold Codes: the gamma-classified launch codes for a nuclear weapons attack, printed on a business-sized card. The FBI took these items back to headquarters. For the next forty-eight hours the FBI, not the commander in chief, had the Gold Codes. U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine rests upon the concept of mutual assured destruction, the idea that no nuclear-armed nation would be crazy enough to launch a nuclear attack against the United States because the president would launch a retaliatory attack, thereby annihilating everyone on both sides. But for forty-eight hours in March 1981, this launch-code authority was in limbo. 

The president was physically in shock. His systolic blood pressure was 60, down from the normal 140. Emergency room doctors administered intravenous fluids, oxygen, and tetanus toxoids. When his vitals finally stabilized, the president was wheeled into surgery, where he would spend the next 105 minutes undergoing a thoracotomy, a procedure to open the chest cavity to gain access to the heart and lungs and then remove the bullet. 

He had been in surgery for almost an hour when the FBI shared with hospital administrators a horrifying discovery. While searching the assassin’s hotel room, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found a box of bullets called Devastators, whose hollow-point tip was re-engineered with a flammable powder charge to explode on impact. The Devastator bullets in the assassin’s Röhm revolver failed to explode when they hit the president, but there was still a chance they could, during surgery—threatening more lives in the operating room. The doctors and nurses chose to continue and the surgery was a success. 

U.S. Secret Service special agent Lew Merletti was in New York City when the assassin struck. He’d been assigned to the field office there when he heard the news. “We were all just stunned,” he remembers. “That the shooter was able to get off six shots in [roughly] two seconds.… The Secret Service was like, whoa.” The assassin was a delusional loner named John Hinckley Jr., a stray-dog or lone-wolf killer: someone who was violent and dangerous but acted alone, without backup or support, or formal training. That a singleton like Hinckley could unleash this kind of lethality made clear what the consequences could be in the event of an orchestrated attack by a Black September–type terrorist organization. The general feeling at the Secret Service, says Merletti, was, “We need to rethink our protection philosophy.” 

Before the Reagan assassination attempt, agents assigned to the Presidential Protective Division (PPD) focused on shielding the president from an attack or a threat. While traveling, the president rode in a sedan accompanied by five or six special agents carrying submachine guns, hidden in briefcases. The American public got its first glimpse of these weapons after Reagan was shot and photographs of special agent Robert Wanko waving an Uzi submachine gun outside the Hilton were published in newspapers around the world. The reaction on the part of the Secret Service agents had been just as protocol dictated at the time. “Secret Service agents are trained to step into the line of fire. Cover and evacuate,” says Merletti. “You’re covering the president with flesh and bone and evacuating him.” In the chaos and uncertainty, the fail-safe was the sole action of special agent Tim McCarthy, who threw himself in front of the president, as Clint Hill did with Mrs. Kennedy in 1963. “Tim McCarthy really stuck himself right in the line of fire and took that bullet that would have hit Reagan,” says Merletti. The event was a cautionary tale and would transform the U.S. Secret Service. 

In the aftermath, the Secret Service began to refocus and rebuild, to shift its mind-set from defense to offense. “It became all about the asymmetric threat,” says Merletti of how the U.S. Secret Service would metamorphose. “And these were lessons learned in Vietnam.” 

A covert paramilitary unit called the Counter Assault Team (CAT) would now shadow the president twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “They have nothing to do with cover and evacuate,” Merletti says of the CAT team. “They’re not stepping into the line of fire. Their job is shooting. They are shooters.” CAT members would be unconventional-warfare experts, capable of repelling a coordinated multi-shooter attack with crippling aggression, determination, and speed. The new philosophy was not simply to defend against an assassin but to have a guerrilla warfare corps of the Secret Service always there, anticipating an attack, as if the president were forever in a hostile environment. As if they were all behind enemy lines. 

When Reagan was shot, there were roughly five part-time CAT teams already in existence, units that worked with the PPD during high-profile presidential events. “Following the assassination attempt on Reagan,” says Merletti, “the Secret Service decided periodic coverage by a Counter Assault Team was not enough.” All existing CAT members were transferred to Washington, DC, to be with the president and vice president every day, all the time. Because Lew Merletti had served as a Green Beret in combat, he’d already been selected as a member of CAT by the time Reagan was shot. Each team member was assigned a number, starting with 001, and because Merletti was the seventh member of the Counter Assault Team, his CAT number was 007. Other members joked that he was like James Bond. 

Team members were individually selected from the ranks of the Secret Service, identified for high levels of motivation, physical strength, and a paramilitary mind-set. They would go through seven weeks of training in irregular-warfare tactics: close-quarters combat, counter ambush, counterassault. “We trained with Delta Force, British SAS, Navy SEALs,” recalls Merletti. “When it came to shooting, we were right there with them all, standing shoulder to shoulder.” At their classified training facility in Beltsville, Maryland, Counter Assault Team members shot close to a thousand rounds a month just to stay sharp. 

Now transferred to Washington, DC, Lew Merletti excelled. “On [CAT], you have to think that an ambush could happen at any moment,” he says. “Because of what I experienced in Vietnam, I could bring that [concept] to protection. I always did. We used to say we were ‘on a war footing.’” Agents were hypervigilant, never allowing their minds to wander, never daydreaming about a ball game or a beer. The concept of speed, surprise, and violence of action undergirded every move. If Merletti ever experienced a particularly rough challenge, something that threatened to derail his focus, a single thought could make everything clear for him. “I’d think to myself, hey—Mike Kuropas doesn’t have this problem today.” Honoring his brothers killed in the service of the nation propelled him forward. 

For Lew Merletti, the assassination attempt against President Reagan was a transformative, life-changing event. He would go from an outer-ring member of the U.S. Secret Service assigned to a remote field office, to serving as an elite member of the Counter Assault Team. “The president’s personal detail is the inner perimeter,” Merletti explains. “On the Counter Assault Team we were like the middle perimeter. Meaning real close, but not right on top of him.” With the new philosophy firmly in place, were anyone to fire a shot in the vicinity of the president, “we would shoot out a wall of steel between the president and whoever was doing the shooting,” Merletti explains. In this protective capacity, Lew Merletti excelled. After a little over two years, he was transferred to President Reagan’s detail. He was in the inner ring now. 

That the assassin John Hinckley was mentally ill, and not an agent of a foreign government, did not mean that assassination threats from foreign governments did not exist. Bill Casey, a practicing Catholic, was particularly worried about the pope. “John Paul [is] a very controversial figure, and a fanatic could try and kill him,” he told colleagues. Moscow’s fear of the Polish pope’s power as a religious figure was of particular concern to Casey. The pope wielded great influence among Catholics in his homeland, and the Kremlin rightly worried that this sway could have a domino effect across the entire Eastern bloc—that it could lead to the collapse of communism. 

“I told [the pope] we had no hard evidence [that] he was in danger,” Casey said. Still, he asked officers with the Technical Services Division to share with the Vatican their designs for a specially fitted flak jacket that the pope could wear under his white silk cassock. But the pope opposed the idea of wearing a bulletproof vest. It went against everything his papacy stood for, he said. For this reason, the pope was not wearing a flak jacket on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, when shots rang out in St. Peter’s Square. 

It was 5:18, and the pope had just kissed a little girl and was handing her back to her mother when an assassin’s bullet struck him in his stomach, penetrating his small intestine. Blood spurted out of the bullet hole, causing his white cassock to become stained with bright red blood. As he began to collapse, a second bullet struck his right hand, and then a third bullet tore into his arm. An aid flung himself over John Paul, shielding the pope with his own body. 

“Drive!” shouted one of the papal bodyguards. 

“The pope has been shot!” wailed someone in the crowd. 

With far too many people in St. Peter’s Square, the popemobile, a Fiat, could not go any faster than two miles per hour. After several agonizing minutes, the Fiat finally arrived at an ambulance that had been positioned in advance near the Vatican basilica’s bronze doors. Once inside the vehicle, the pope began praying aloud, calling out, “Mary, my mother. Mary, my mother!” After six hours of surgery he emerged alive. 

During months of recovery, the pope became preoccupied with trying to find out who had ordered his assassination. The man who shot him, a Turkish national named Mehmet Agca, fingered a second man, Sergei Antonov, the manager of a Bulgarian airline in Rome, suggesting a conspiracy. Bulgaria’s secret services maintained close ties with the KGB. It was understood at the CIA that when Moscow needed a “wet op,” a euphemism for assassination derived from the KGB’s directorate of liquid affairs, it turned to Bulgarian or Romanian security services. In 1981, the theory being developed by analysts on the CIA’s Russia desk was that the Bulgarian intelligence service had hired Agca to assassinate the pope on behalf of the Kremlin—an attempt to subvert the pope’s influence in Warsaw and beyond. 

The rift between the Vatican and the Soviet Union widened. For the first time since the 1950s, Russian state-run news media attacked the pope publicly through its press agency, TASS. But it would be twenty-five years before an Italian parliamentary investigation, the Mitrokhin commission, concluded “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Soviet Union had ordered the assassination of John Paul II in 1981. “This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate the pope Karol Wojtyla,” it reported, using Pope John Paul’s Polish birth name. The Mitrokhin report also stated that it was Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, that had orchestrated the assassination plot, not the KGB. In 2007, Russia’s foreign intelligence service spokesman called the accusation “absurd.” 

As Muammar Qaddafi continued to dispatch assassins around the globe, the CIA compiled intelligence reports in an effort to identify these killers. In a dossier entitled “Libyan Assassination Teams, Some Patterns,” analysts noted that “a common modus operandi has been for a two-man hit squad to kill the victims,” and that these squads were made up of “professional assassins, presumably belonging to the Libyan Intelligence Services.” But there were exceptions to the rule. For example, when a former Libyan intelligence officer was strangled in Rome, and then a former officer of the Libyan Army was decapitated in Athens, Greece, the CIA surmised that “strangulation and decapitation suggests amateurs rather than professional killers.” The lack of a clear profile made Qaddafi’s assassins even more dangerous in their potential ability to strike inside the United States. 

“There were persistent threats by Qaddafi,” Lew Merletti says of this time, not only against President Reagan but also aimed at Vice President George H. W. Bush, CIA director Bill Casey, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and several members of Congress. While the Secret Service improved its precautionary measures, the CIA devised a plan to eliminate Qaddafi. Max Hugel, CIA deputy director of operations (the new name for the clandestine service), was dispatched to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence with a plan to overthrow the Libyan leader, but the committee shot the plan down and sent a strongly worded letter of protest to the president. 

The State Department was also concerned. Qaddafi’s ire was not limited to the United States. “There is evidence of Libyan-backed assassination plots against Arab leaders,” Foreign Service officers were told, and this included “President Nimeiry of the Sudan, Jordan’s King Hussein and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.” But the person at the top of Qaddafi’s hit list for the Arab world was President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. 

Sadat was a traitor to the Arab world, Qaddafi said. As a result of President Carter’s historic Camp David Accords, the president of Egypt had signed a peace deal with the prime minister of Israel. In response, Qaddafi issued a standing offer of one million dollars to anyone who would assassinate Sadat. In a news conference, Sadat called Qaddafi “a vicious criminal, one hundred percent sick and possessed of a demon.” President Nimeiry of Sudan claimed that Qaddafi had “a split personality, both of them evil.” Even Yasser Arafat called Qaddafi a “madman.” But Qaddafi’s threats were to be taken seriously. By the summer of 1981, his hit teams had assassinated more than a dozen Libyan émigrés living abroad. 

In July 1981, death threats directed against Sadat caused Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky to cancel a visit from the Egyptian president. Kreisky had already once been the subject of an international terrorism crisis, during the 1975 OPEC oil siege. He was not going to land in the crosshairs of madmen once again. The intelligence warning was provided to Kreisky from Mossad. “I was forced to ask Egyptian President Sadat at the time to postpone the trip to Salzburg because I could not guarantee his security,” Kreisky told the Associated Press. During an interview with the Libyan president, Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson asked Qaddafi about reports that he was trying to orchestrate Anwar Sadat’s murder. 

“Sadat will be eliminated by the Egyptian people,” Qaddafi replied. Which is what happened on October 6, 1981, in Cairo, during a military parade. 

President Anwar Sadat and a group of dignitaries had gathered in a 1,000-person military stand in Cairo to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Security was intense, with four layers of military guards positioned in an outer perimeter, and eight bodyguards in Sadat’s inner ring. Sadat, in full military dress, sat in the front row behind a five-foot-thick cinder block barrier. As the ceremony began, Egyptian air force Mirage jets flew overhead and a convoy of military trucks passed by the stands. Inside one of them, an Egyptian Army lieutenant named Khalid Islambouli put a gun to the driver’s head and ordered the man to stop. With three hand grenades concealed under his helmet, Islambouli leapt out of the vehicle and approached the president. Several gunmen with AK-47s hurried along behind Islambouli. 

“The president thought the killers were part of the show,” Sadat’s nephew told CNN. As the men approached the stands, Sadat stood and saluted them. Islambouli threw a grenade and the gunmen opened fire. It took Sadat’s bodyguards forty seconds to respond, suggesting a conspiracy. 

The attack lasted two full minutes. Anwar Sadat was riddled with bullets and fatally wounded. By the time he arrived at the hospital he was dead. Eleven men seated near him were killed, including the Cuban ambassador, a general from Oman, a Coptic bishop, and an Egyptian government bureaucrat. Twenty-eight people were wounded, including Egypt’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, Ireland’s minister of defense, and four U.S. military liaison officers. The assassins were carrying out a fatwa, or religious decree, issued by a radical Egyptian cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman, who went by the nom de guerre the Blind Sheik. 

The CIA watched anti-American governments and their proxy armies rejoice. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini declared Khalid Islambouli a hero and a martyr. The state issued a stamp in his honor, showing the assassin shouting behind prison bars. “I am very proud that my son killed Anwar al-Sadat,” the assassin’s mother said in an interview with the Associated Press. “Some call him a terrorist. [Sadat] sold out the country to the Jews… [My son] admired Iran.” In Beirut, Lebanon, militia groups gathered to celebrate, firing their weapons in the air and chanting “Allahu Akbar,” God is great. Across Libya, celebrations broke out in the streets. One of the last remaining diplomats in Libya described what he witnessed as “ghastly jubilation.” On the state-run radio in Tripoli, the government called for a revolt by the Egyptian masses and encouraged the military to overthrow the government. It was a terrible example of the power of assassination as a political tool. Peace in the Middle East was off the table. 

Two days later, in Washington, DC, a former CIA officer named Cord Meyer took to the airwaves to express his opinion. “If Libya had been taken care of two years ago, last year, this year, Sadat would probably be alive today,” he said. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Meyer suggested that the CIA should be “unleashed.” The statement underscored a concept that was being secretly developed as a national-security tool for the president, one that would have a ripple effect moving forward. 

At the White House, the president’s National Security Planning Group began discussing the concept of “preemptive neutralization.” Of killing a would-be assassin or member of a terrorist organization before he had the opportunity to strike. Preemptive neutralization moved covert-action counterterrorism policy from a defense position (as in waiting to be shot at) to an offensive one (as in striking first). If assassination was illegal as per the Hague resolutions, preemptive neutralization would now be a legal extension of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, the inherent right of self-defense. 

President Anwar Sadat’s funeral took place on October 11, 1981. Just hours before, the White House issued a statement explaining that President Reagan would not attend. There were reports that Qaddafi planned to assassinate Reagan at the funeral. 

It was a solemn affair, thinly attended. Former presidents Carter, Nixon, and Ford were there, with Alexander Haig standing in for the president. Also in attendance was the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, corecipient with Sadat of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The president of Sudan, the sultan of Oman, and the president of Somalia were the sole Arab leaders present. No one wanted to poke the bear that was Arab terrorism. Except Bill Casey. 

In less than sixty days, President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, reiterating the already existing ban on U.S. intelligence agencies from sponsoring or carrying out an assassination, but with new language. “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination,” the president decreed. The fine print of the new executive order spent many paragraphs clarifying specific words used in the earlier assassination bans issued by Presidents Ford and Carter. But the word “assassination” was not one of the words defined. Major Tyler J. Harder, of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Army, suggests why. “That an ambiguously broad term like ‘assassination’ would go undefined tends to support a conclusion that a definition of assassination was intentionally omitted.” The proscription against assassination was evolving into an allowance for preemptive neutralization. 

To argue his position, Bill Casey referenced one of the covert actions that had been authorized by President Carter, a large-scale operation to supply weapons to anti-Soviet holy warriors, called mujahedin, in Afghanistan. “We’re arming the Afghans, right?” Casey argued. “Every time a mujahedin rebel kills a Soviet rifleman, are we engaged in assassination? This is a rough business. If we’re afraid to hit the terrorists because somebody’s going to yell ‘assassination,’ it’ll never stop. The terrorists will own the world. They’ll know nobody is going to raise a finger against them.” 

From December 4, 1981, on out, there would be great flexibility in how targeted killing could be undertaken, and in what circumstances, so that it was not assassination. As he had done with the OSS operational plot to kill Adolf Hitler, Bill Casey had again found his legal loophole. 

In the fall of 1982 an angry, pious twenty-year-old Lebanese militant from a poor Shia family was going around Beirut looking for a large quantity of explosives. His name was Imad Mugniyah. He was known locally as “the boss of a gang of thugs enforcing Islamic laws and modest conduct on the streets of Beirut,” says journalist Ronen Bergman, who notes that around this same time, Israeli intelligence began receiving reports from local assets of “an extremist, uninhibited psychopath” who was kneecapping hookers and drug dealers around the city. In 1982, the CIA had not yet heard of him, but over the next twenty-five years, Imad Mugniyah would have more impact on U.S. presidential policy regarding assassination than any other individual in history, including Osama bin Laden. 

Four years earlier, Mugniyah had been recruited into the Palestine Liberation Organization by Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince. Mugniyah, an excellent young sniper, was assigned to Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s security detail and the elite force of the PLO’s Fatah Party. Salameh took Mugniyah under his wing, until Mossad assassinated Salameh in 1979. After Salameh and four of his bodyguards were killed by a car bomb, Mugniyah shifted his allegiance over to Iran. It is not known if Mugniyah was aware of the fact that his mentor also worked for the CIA. 

For Mugniyah and violent radicals like him, it was becoming clear that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had the best interests of Shia Muslims like Mugniyah in mind. Yasser Arafat sought gains mostly for himself and the PLO. Iran wielded far greater power; look what they’d done to the United States in Tehran in 1979. The Americans had been humiliated by the U.S. embassy takeover, the world reminded of its impotence for 444 days as Iran held Americans hostage. Recently, at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had created a proxy army, or hidden-hand army, to carry out covert operations in Lebanon and elsewhere. This proxy army would become known as Hezbollah, the Party of God, although they still used a variety of pseudonyms, including Islamic Amal and Islamic Jihad. After the death of Salameh, Mugniyah sought a rise to power within the terrorist group, which is why he was out looking for explosives in the fall of 1982. 

“He wanted some explosives and wondered whether I had some for him. I laughed and thought he was crazy. Who would want to blow themselves up?” Bilal Sharara, a well-known member of Fatah, told journalist Nicholas Blanford in 2009. 

Mugniyah knew who, exactly: teenagers following the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. In the early days of the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of these young children were sent to their deaths by the ayatollah as suicide bombers—ordered to clear land mines with their own bodies so as to make way for Iranian infantry troops and advance Iran’s front line into Iraq. Years later, New York Times reporter Terence Smith interviewed survivors of these human-wave assaults, and learned of frightened Iranian children being drugged with an opiate drink called “martyr’s syrup,” bound together in groups of twenty with machine guns at their back, ordered to keep moving forward, to walk to their deaths. Across their child-sized uniforms a message had been stenciled: “I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.” This appears to be the first reporting of modern-day suicide bombers, unwilling participants ensnared in a wicked irregular-warfare tactic designed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Hatred of the enemy was a motivator, and Imad Mugniyah told Arafat’s deputy he had a seventeen-year-old friend named Ahmed Qassir who was willing to sacrifice himself in the struggle against Israel. The delivery of explosives was arranged, and on November 11, Ahmed Qassir drove a Peugeot packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives up to the Israeli Army headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon. The teenager fingered a triggering device and detonated himself, destroying the building and killing seventy-five Israeli soldiers, policemen, and intelligence agents with the Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency. The dead teenager’s handler, Imad Mugniyah, had made his mark and would now advance to operations chief for Hezbollah. Mugniyah’s next target was the United States, a bold and unprecedented move. Hezbollah had never before directly targeted the United States with a mass casualty attack. 

It was midday on April 18, 1983, and the staff at the U.S. embassy in Beirut were going about their business when a GMC pickup truck sped into the crescent-shaped driveway, swerving to miss the U.S. ambassador’s armored limousine. In the back of the truck, hidden under a tarp, were 2,000 pounds of explosives. The driver of the truck, seen smoking a cigarette and wearing a leather jacket, stepped on the gas pedal, raced up a set of steps, crashed through a set of glass doors, and landed in the central lobby of the building that housed the embassy and the CIA station. The suicide bomber detonated, collapsing part of the building. Sixty-three people were killed, including seventeen Americans, most of them from the CIA. Lebanese pedestrians, motorists, and visa applicants were also killed. In the days that followed, body parts and pieces of skin kept washing up on the beach. 

Among the dead was CIA case officer and Near East director Bob Ames. One of his hands was found floating a mile out at sea, his wedding band still on his ring finger. Herein lay the stark reality of covert-action operations. Bob Ames had been Ali Hassan Salameh’s case officer and handler before the Red Prince was assassinated by Mossad. Now, Salameh’s terrorist protégé, Imad Mugniyah, had succeeded in killing the CIA’s Bob Ames. With the majority of its staff wiped out, the CIA dispatched a paramilitary officer named William Francis Buckley to take over as the new station chief in Beirut. 

Bill Buckley, 56, had worked for the CIA since the Korean War. Most details of his work remain classified. In Vietnam, Buckley served as deputy chief of a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU), the lethal direct-action arm of the Phoenix program. He was quintessential CIA, mild-mannered and unassuming on the surface, but brave, bold, and determined, say his friends. Buckley was comfortable in chaotic, dangerous places. After Vietnam, he ran covert operations in Zaire, Pakistan, and Egypt, where he trained Anwar Sadat’s bodyguards in close-quarters combat. Unmarried, Buckley was known to volunteer for postings in many of the most dangerous CIA stations in the world. He’d served in the Beirut station several years prior but was forced to leave after his cover was blown. Going back into a war zone like Beirut without the cover of anonymity was dangerous, but Bill Casey appealed personally to Buckley. They both knew that Iran’s proxy army, later identified as Hezbollah, had to be stopped. Bill Buckley’s assignment was to rebuild for the CIA the asset base that Imad Mugniyah’s mass-casualty attack had destroyed. But the Hezbollah terrorists had only just begun. 

Six months after the U.S. embassy and CIA station in Beirut were blown up, two suicide bombers struck again, this time with explosive-laden trucks. One crashed into the U.S. Marine Corps barracks compound at Beirut Airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen. Minutes later, a second suicide truck drove into the French paratroop barracks two miles away, killing 58. Imad Mugniyah is said to have watched the bombings through binoculars from the balcony of a high-rise down the street. Five months later, on March 16, 1984, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped Bill Buckley off the streets of Beirut. Mugniyah personally oversaw the torture that Buckley was subjected to for the next nineteen months. 

John Rizzo knew firsthand. “I had first met Bill Buckley in 1980 when he was heading the counterterrorism ‘group’ at CIA Headquarters,” Rizzo later wrote in his memoir, Company Man, “which in those days numbered only a handful of people.” A thirty-four-year career lawyer at the CIA, Rizzo spent decades writing covert-action findings for U.S. presidents. After Bill Buckley was kidnapped, he was called into a meeting with Casey. “There were just three or four of us in the room,” remembers Rizzo. “They played a tape of Buckley being tortured. I was a lawyer for the clandestine service, but I also knew him personally [and] was there to confirm identity, through his voice.” In an interview for this book, Rizzo said, “I was told by our courter-terrorism analysts sometime later that Mugniyah was doing the torturing.… It still haunts me today.” 

At the CIA, the level of anguish among Buckley’s colleagues was palpable. The quest to rescue him became Bill Casey’s personal crusade. “Casey ordered that all the stops be pulled out to locate him—wiretaps, bribes, satellite surveillance,” explains Rizzo. “I gave immediate legal approval for everything Casey wanted.” 

It was a tipping point at the CIA. As director of Central Intelligence, Casey would now aggressively upend how the CIA dealt with terrorists. Assassination, or “pre-emptive neutralization,” was about to become presidential policy. On April 3, 1984, just three weeks after Buckley’s kidnapping, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 138, authorizing the CIA to develop “capabilities for the pre-emptive neutralization of anti-American terrorist groups which plan, support, or conduct hostile terrorist acts against U.S. citizens, interests, and property overseas.” The goal, read the directive, was to “eliminate the threat of terrorism to our way of life.” The order allowed the CIA to “develop a clandestine service capability, using all lawful means, for effective response overseas.” All covert-action plans were to be submitted directly to the president’s National Security Planning Group. 

To maximize this direct-action capability, the Defense Department created something not seen since MACV-SOG: its own guerrilla warfare corps, called the Joint Special Operations Agency (JSOA), to operate out of Fort Bragg. When the New York Times learned of JSOA’s creation, it ran a page-one article, describing the group as a “secret commando unit… whose purpose was to support Central Intelligence Agency covert operations.” This “raised concern in Congress” that the CIA was back in the business of overthrowing foreign governments and plotting to kill leaders, as it had done before the Church Committee hearings. - Intelligence officials told the newspaper that no such risk existed, that “the new special operations forces constituted a resource for intelligence operations” only, and that any use of JSOA would be directed by the CIA and properly reported to Congress. 

Despite redoubling their efforts, the CIA was unable to locate Bill Buckley. No commando force was sent to rescue him. In the end, Mugniyah and his men tortured Bill Buckley to death. “He was the first CIA employee I knew who was murdered in the line of duty,” says Rizzo. 

In October 1985, after Imad Mugniyah’s Islamic Jihad Organization—a cover name for Hezbollah—announced it had killed Buckley, the CIA began developing a covert-action operation to kill or capture Mugniyah. The State Department objected. “We used to have arguments within the executive branch between those who advocated assassinations” and those who insisted it was “illegal,” recalls Ambassador Robert Oakley, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism at the time. It was Ambassador Oakley’s view that assassination was like the mythical beast, the hydra. If you cut off the head of the snake, ten more snake heads grew. 

Bill Casey disagreed, and took the issue directly to the president. “The CIA believed [Mugniyah] to be in Paris,” Oakley later wrote. Oakley argued against the CIA taking action against the terrorist. “While I was briefing the Secretary [of State], he got a call from Bud McFarlane of the NSC [National Security Council]. Bud said that the President had approved Director of Central Intelligence [Bill] Casey’s recommendation to kidnap Mugniyah off the streets of Paris.” Paramilitary operators raided the hotel room where Mugniyah was believed to be staying. “They found a fifty-year-old Spanish tourist, not a twenty-five-year-old Lebanese terrorist,” Oakley recalled. 

From the perspective of the CIA, it was time to formalize operations, to have a center at the CIA dedicated to combating terrorism. On February 2, 1986, the CIA’s first Counterterrorist Center (CTC) opened its doors (it was renamed the Counterterrorism Center in 2005). Counterterrorist Center officers would work with paramilitary operators and Special Forces soldiers from JSOA. The Center would employ scientists and engineers from the Directorate of Science and Technology and analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence. It would be a new kind of place, said its first director, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge. A “fusion center.” 

Vincent Cannistraro, a member of the National Security Council at the time and a future chief of operations at the CTC, explained the thinking in 1986. “Bill Casey saw the Counterterrorism Center as basically an all-capability center to stop terrorists. That we would go out and snatch terrorists and hit them before they could act.” Who to go after—the targets—would be determined by CTC analysts pulling data from all available sources: human, signals, imagery. “But this center would also have the capability of actually being an action element to go out there,” Cannistraro says, to go out and kill or capture enemies of the United States before they had a chance to strike. “Casey’s original conception for a counterterrorism center at the CIA was to give it a paramilitary capability, an intelligence capability, and an analytical capability—to put it all together in one package. The paramilitary capability would be used to go after known terrorists, to kidnap them and render them to U.S. justice.” Advocates of CIA kill-or-capture missions in the modern era point out how prescient Bill Casey’s thinking was in 1986. Critics say Casey helped create a monster, a multi headed hydra. That for every head it severed, ten new heads would grow. 

One of the radical ideas at the CTC in 1986, to preemptively neutralize threats, was to build and use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also called a drone. With a budget of seven million dollars, Dewey Clarridge initiated the Eagle Program, which he foresaw being used against targets in difficult to get to places, like Libya or Iran. Two months after the Counterterrorist Center opened its doors, a powerful bomb went off inside La Belle discothèque in West Berlin, a place known to be popular with American soldiers stationed at a U.S. military base down the street. Three people were killed; two were American soldiers. Two hundred twenty-nine were injured. After the National Security Agency intercepted telex messages sent from Tripoli to the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, congratulating its personnel on a “job well done,” the CIA laid blame on Muammar Qaddafi personally as well as on Libya’s governing body, the Revolutionary Command Council. 

At the Counterterrorist Center, Dewey Clarridge proposed killing Qaddafi with the CTC’s Eagle Program drone. “Pack it with explosives or engineer it to carry a rocket and fly it into Qaddafi’s tent,” he said. Clarridge’s idea was shut down. Instead, President Ronald Reagan ordered air strikes against Tripoli and Benghazi. The massive, Defense Department-led operation involved sixty-six U.S. aircraft. Qaddafi’s residential compound took a direct hit, allegedly killing his fifteen-month-old daughter, Hana. At least thirty soldiers and seventy civilians were killed. In a nationally televised speech, President Reagan defended his actions: “When our citizens are attacked or abused anywhere in the world on the direct orders of hostile regimes, we will respond so long as I’m in this office.” Anyone who dared suggest the United States had tried to assassinate Qaddafi was wrong, the president said, that America was simply exercising its right to self-defense as defined by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. 

At the CIA, Dewey Clarridge cried false virtue. It was “hypocritical,” he said, to use massive air power to take out a single dictator—killing more than one hundred people—simply because it looked better than a lethal direct-action strike targeting one man. “Why is an expensive military raid with heavy collateral damage to our allies and to innocent children okay—more morally acceptable than a bullet to the head?” 

The question was far from answered.

18

Parachute Assassins, Saddam Hussein, and  Osama bin Laden

Every day, Lew Merletti thought about how someone might try to assassinate the new president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. Merletti was always on the lookout for a chink in the armor of the U.S. Secret Service. “The assassination of the President of the United States is, quite literally, a cataclysmic event in world history,” Merletti told the Justice Department. “It is also the worst possible incident that can occur on the Secret Service’s watch. For this reason, it is the practice of the Secret Service to review and assess all assassination attempts, wherever and whenever they occur.” 

In reviewing gruesome assassination tapes, it was impossible for Merletti not to think about ambush scenarios he’d witnessed in Vietnam. His mind was always working to find places where presidential protection could improve, something ingrained in him by his highly motivated boss, John Magaw. One day, Magaw approached Merletti with an idea for a radical AOP—attack on principal —training exercise. Did Merletti have any trusted contacts with Delta Force, owing to his time in Special Forces? Magaw asked. Merletti said he did. 

John Magaw sent Lew Merletti down to Fort Bragg to meet secretly with the Delta Force commander. Delta Force, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (1st SFOD-D), is a classified unit whose existence the army will neither confirm nor deny. (During the war on terror, Delta’s name was changed to Combat Applications Group.) With counterterrorism and hostage rescue its primary missions, Delta operators are trained as a direct-action strike force and are arguably the most elite of all Tier One U.S. military operators. Merletti presented Delta Force with a challenge, direct from the Secret Service. 

They were to come up with the most devastating small-footprint ambush they could conceive of—to plan and train for an AOP targeting the White House. There were specific ground rules in place. “The Delta operators were not allowed to use their clearances to get classified information to devise the ambush,” says Merletti. “They had to use recon only, and use publicly available information. Figure out the weak point in our defense system and try and breach it. We told them, if we catch you in the [White House] tour line, it’s a point for us.” The Delta commander accepted the challenge and began devising an AOP operation. 

The chosen Delta Force unit trained for six to eight weeks. Even John Magaw and Lew Merletti remained in the dark regarding the AOP that Delta Force would attempt: to have a team of parachute assassins try and infiltrate the White House via high-altitude low-opening (HALO) infiltration. The operation has never been reported before. 

On the night of October 14, 1990, President George H. W. Bush was taken to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland. Live ammunition was collected from the Secret Service special agents on duty, an indicator that something was going on. One of the agents on duty that night, a sniper on the White House roof, recalls what happened. “All of a sudden, there were these Delta guys on the lawn. It was that fast. It was a ‘holy shit’ moment for everybody involved.” 

“The Delta operators did a low-level HALO pull,” explains Billy Waugh. “They came in free-falling [at terminal velocity], and pulled just a few hundred feet above the deck. This is very difficult to defend against, unless you’re prepared.” 

At the time of the AOP training exercise, there was a radar system installed at National Airport, five miles from the White House, designed to pick up any aircraft flying in the vicinity. There was also a direct phone line from National to the White House, hardwired into the U.S. Secret Service communications office. “It rang several times a week,” recalls Merletti, always reporting anything that was even remotely unusual. But on the night of the AOP exercise, it didn’t even ring. Delta Force outfoxed it. How the team did it remains highly classified. 

With this weakness in the White House defense system thus revealed, a microwave Doppler system was installed on the roof. Then Delta conducted a second AOP training raid. This time the Doppler radar picked up the parachute assassins. The Delta Force commander gave Lew Merletti an infrared photograph of one of the Delta operators, in a harness, as he was landing on the White House lawn. Merletti taped the photo to a wall in his office at the White House with the words “No Comment” written underneath. One hole had been plugged, but there was always another one to think about. 

The following year, in January 1991, America went to war for the first time since Vietnam. The conflict began in August 1990 when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered his military forces to invade neighboring Kuwait. The United States feared that Saudi Arabia was next—that the kingdom was at risk of an Iraqi invasion. In September 1990, a meeting took place at the Riyadh palace of Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian minister of defense. Prince Sultan was meeting with an unusual group of visitors regarding a delicate matter that needed to be handled with the utmost sensitivity. The leader of the group was a wealthy thirty-three-year-old Saudi national named Osama bin Laden. 

With bin Laden were a group of friends and colleagues, Afghan mujahedin. This group had spent the past decade fighting Russian infantry forces following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It was a classic irregular warfare scenario. A much smaller rebel force, the mujahedin, had managed to defeat one of the largest armies in the world, the Russians, using guerrilla warfare tactics. Training, weapons, and funding for the mujahedin came from the United States, Saudi Arabia, England, Pakistan, and China. In 1989 the Russians left, defeated. At the CIA, analysts called it Russia’s Vietnam. Now restless and without purpose, the mujahideen were looking for the next jihad, or holy war. It was why bin Laden was here, he told the Saudi minister of defense. 

Osama bin Laden handed Prince Sultan a five-page proposal. The document detailed how his mujahedin fighters would protect the kingdom from what looked like certain invasion by Saddam Hussein. The secular hypocrite Iraqi leader must be stopped, bin Laden warned. His presence anywhere near the two Muslim holy places Mecca and Medina was an insult to Islam. Iraq had a powerful army: 900,000 soldiers in sixty-three divisions, which made it the fourth largest army in the world. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard included some of the best-trained fighters in the Middle East. Bin Laden and the prince were both aware of the reality of the Saudi Army. In 1990, it consisted of 58,000 poorly trained soldiers, largely because the kingdom relied on technology to stop an attack. Saudi Arabia owned and maintained a $50 billion air defense system, supported by a fleet of British-made fighter-bomber aircraft. But as far as ground operations were concerned, the only thing between Saddam’s infantry soldiers and Saudi Arabia’s oil fields were a few thousand Saudi national guard soldiers who’d been sent to the front line. 

According to a witness in the room named Mohammad din Mohammad, bin Laden made a pitch for a partnership. Pulling out a map, he proposed to dig a massive ditch in the desert sands along the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. His group of fighters would use earth-moving equipment supplied by his family’s Saudi Binladin Group. The Afghan mujahedin would supplement the big ditch with lots of little ones, using shovels, he said. In this manner, they’d create all kinds of sand traps—into which Saddam Hussein’s 5,700-tank armored cavalry corps would fall. 

“I am ready to prepare one hundred thousand fighters with good combat capability within three months,” bin Laden reportedly told the prince. But the prince wasn’t interested in what bin Laden was trying to sell. He thanked him, and said he appreciated the fact that his family and bin Laden’s family had “always been loyal friends.” But he did not need Osama bin Laden’s military assistance in fighting Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden’s face turned “black with anger,” Mohammad din Mohammad recalled. 

The prince was uninterested because he already had a partner and a deal in place. Just weeks before, a billion-dollar defense contract had been signed with the Americans. President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, met personally in Jeddah with Saudi king Fahd to secure this deal. Cheney’s advisors on the trip included General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief, U.S. Central Command. General Schwarzkopf would lead all coalition forces in the forthcoming Gulf War. The Americans had state-of the-art satellite images, including ones that showed how many of Saddam Hussein’s tanks were lined up on the border. Osama bin Laden had hand-drawn maps. 

General Schwarzkopf told King Fahd, “Tanks being deployed far forward is an indication of offensive action.” It meant that Saddam Hussein appeared ready to strike. The general shared with the king the latest imagery intelligence and geospatial intelligence to make his point. The U.S. military was prepared to send fighter squadrons and U.S. troops to defend Saudi Arabia against an invasion by Iraq. All they needed was King Fahd’s okay. 

“Okay,” the king said. 

“We did a double-take,” Schwarzkopf later recalled. 

“So, you agree?” Defense Secretary Cheney asked. 

The king said, “Yes, I agree.” 

Ambassador Charles Freeman, who was also present and who spoke Arabic, confirmed that the king had indeed given his okay. 

“When do you expect the first planes to arrive?” the king asked Cheney. 

Cheney told the king, “Within twelve hours, they’ll be here.” 

Of course Osama bin Laden knew none of this. But he’d heard palace rumors that the Americans might be involved. It was why he was here in Prince Sultan’s home. 

“You don’t need Americans,” bin Laden is said to have told Prince Sultan. “You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough.” 

Prince Sultan considered what bin Laden was saying. “There are no caves in Kuwait,” he told him. “What will you do when [Saddam Hussein] lobs missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?” 

“We will fight him with faith,” bin Laden said. 

But the prince’s message was clear: he was not interested in what bin Laden was selling. If bin Laden didn’t yet know for certain that he’d lost the contract to the U.S. Department of Defense, he’d learn soon enough, when the first of nearly 500,000 American soldiers began arriving in the kingdom, along with 1,500 international journalists who would broadcast news of the American-Saudi partnership to the world. When the war began, on January 16, 1991, the Americans were already firmly planted on sacred soil. War, the president’s second option after diplomacy, had not been authorized by Congress in twentyseven years—not since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution approving U.S. military action in Vietnam. 

Bin Laden was outraged. He moved to Khartoum and began plotting jihad against the United States. Within months, the CIA sent Billy Waugh there to run reconnaissance on him. 

Khartoum was a lawless, brutish place in 1991, ruined by decades of civil war that had engulfed the country ever since Sudan gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1956. It had been seventeen years since U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, U.S. embassy chargé d’affaires Curt Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid were taken hostage and assassinated by Black September during the attack on the Saudi embassy in 1973. When Billy Waugh first arrived, in the spring of 1991, Sudan remained a hornet’s nest of terrorist activity. 

The president of Sudan was Brigadier General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a warlord who took power by military coup. But the real reins of power were held by al-Bashir’s secretary general, a Sorbonne-educated Islamist named Hassan al- Turabi. Publicly, Turabi maintained cordial relations with the United States. Privately, he was virulently anti-American. “America incarnates the devil for all Muslims in the world,” he told local commanders. 

Through NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts, the CIA learned that Turabi was in contact with numerous high-ranking leaders of Hezbollah, Abu Nidal Organization, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and with individual terrorists, criminals, and rogues wanted by Interpol and the FBI. Turabi offered them sanctuary in Khartoum in exchange for cash. Many took him up on his offer, and by 1991, the CIA understood these terrorists to be freely moving around Khartoum, out of reach of law enforcement and plotting the demise of the West. In April, Turabi hosted the Arab Islamic People’s Congress in an effort to unify Afghan mujahedin and other radical players, all of whom opposed Saudi dominance. Attendees included Yasser Arafat; Ayman al-Zawahiri, of Egyptian Islamic Jihad; Khaled Mashal, of Hamas; and Imad Mugniyah. Osama bin Laden may or may not have attended. CIA officers and counterterrorism experts differ in their opinions about when, precisely, bin Laden arrived in Sudan. 

The CIA sent Billy Waugh to Khartoum on a covert operation, to conduct surveillance on these shadowy figures, many of whom maintained multiple aliases and noms de guerre to keep their identities hidden. One notable exception was bin Laden, who went by the same name he’d been given at birth. 

“In the very early 1990s bin Laden was a nobody to us,” recalls Waugh, “but Sudan was an anything-goes cesspool of a place.” Few people had ever heard of bin Laden, who was just becoming known to Western intelligence agencies. He was on the CIA’s radar, however, because he’d recently co-founded an organization called Al-Qaeda, or the Base. 

Bin Laden’s base was made up of Afghan mujahedin and any other foreign fighters willing to wage a holy war against the West. With the Berlin wall down and the communist threat reduced nearly to nil, the CIA was gathering intelligence on potential threats. A political-religious system rooted in early Middle Ages thinking seemed conspicuously anachronistic. Bin Laden and his mujahedin called it global jihad. 

In 1989, after the Afghan war ended, the stateless mujahedin sought an alliance with the Islamist cleric Hassan al-Turabi, who’d recently helped stage a military coup in Sudan. They were like-minded individuals. In Turabi’s eyes, the failure of Arab governments was rooted in a reluctance to enforce sharia law. Turabi became the first Muslim cleric to successfully implement sharia across an entire nation. Bin Laden and his followers respected that. The CIA took note and began to monitor the jihadists in Khartoum. 

When Billy Waugh arrived in Khartoum, piles of concrete rubble lay interspersed with crumbling buildings and plywood shacks across the city. Government soldiers patrolled the streets. Armed militia manned makeshift checkpoints at the edges of town. The secret police, the Political Security Organization (PSO), arrested people at whim, mostly on grounds they’d violated sharia law. Eighty-five percent of Sudanese citizens lived without any social or civil services. Khartoum was a challenging place for an athletic sixty-three-year old white man like Billy Waugh to conduct a covert operation for the CIA. Of medium height, he stood out among the majority population, Dinka tribesmen, many of whom were over six feet tall. But he approached his work there the way he approached any Special Forces military operation, or CIA covert action, he says. “Prepare, rehearse, engage the target.” And find good cover. 

Waugh was in Sudan as an independent contractor, or IC, for the CIA, not a full-time employee on payroll—that would be a blue badger. Rather, he was a green badger, his contracts individually written and renewed. However, the black diplomatic passport he carried, provided to him by the Agency, identified him as an employee of the U.S. Department of State. In the event he was arrested by the PSO, he’d be afforded diplomatic immunity in the form of a single get-out-of jail-free card. But getting arrested would also mean the end of his CIA career. “I had a serious interest in wanting to keep my job. There was no way I was going to allow myself to get arrested. No way.” 

One of the advantages of traveling in Sudan on a diplomatic passport, not with civilian cover, was that he could use a diplomatic pouch to get camera equipment in. “The government had outlawed cameras and developing supplies,” Waugh says, fearing photographs would portray the desolate state of affairs inside the country and make obvious the failure of Turabi’s imposition of sharia law. 

“People were starving to death in the streets,” remembers Waugh. “They’d get picked up [by police] and transported to areas outside the city, left to die in a less obvious place.” Making photography illegal was the government’s solution to this problem. 

How was he going to use his camera around Khartoum without getting caught by the secret police? “I had an idea about how to circumvent the problem,” he remembers. “I suggested that I use jogging as a cover. Start running around the city with the idea I was a stubborn old American on a fitness craze.” The Khartoum chief of station said he’d think about it. He came back to Waugh with an idea that headquarters liked better. “They asked me to conduct surveillance against terrorist targets wearing a disguise that made me look like a black African.”

The Technical Services Division created a Dinka disguise, which included a rubber facemask, arms, and hands. The concept had been dreamed up and designed by Anthony Mendez, a technical operations officer who was a legend inside the Agency for having exfiltrated six American diplomats from Iran during the peak of the U.S. embassy hostage crisis. (In 2016, Mendez would become famous to the public as the lead character portrayed in the Hollywood film Argo.) A Hollywood prop house did the mask molding and building. 

The problem was, the mask didn’t really fit, says Waugh. “Its lips were too big, and in order to see through the windshield while I was driving, I had to tilt my head in such a way that my mouth was nearly touching the steering wheel.” There was legitimate concern he’d draw attention to himself driving around Khartoum like that. The problems did not end there. The mask made him sweat in Sudan’s oppressive heat; summer temperatures hovered around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The gloves that came with the mask extended from Waugh’s fingertips to his shoulders, where they tied at the back with strings. The thick rubber finger-sleeves made holding forbidden camera equipment dangerous and difficult. 

Following orders, Waugh donned the mask and drove around Khartoum in a battered Russian-made sedan given to him courtesy of the CIA. “Like just about everything in Sudan,” recalls Waugh, “my car was a wreck. It was missing a big piece of the floor, and when I drove around town, usually at seventy kilometers an hour, huge clouds of dust blew up through the open floorboards.” 

One hot day, a new deputy chief of station (name still classified) came to town. Waugh was given the assignment of showing his new superior around Khartoum. The deputy chief wanted to be shown escape routes out of town and into the desert, roads Billy Waugh had already mastered while conducting surveillance detection routes—necessary tradecraft in the event you had to ditch a tail. During the outing, the deputy chief of station also wore a Dinka mask that had been specially designed for him, complete with gloves and arms. Waugh recalls his colleagues’ deep discomfort with the lawlessness of Khartoum, heightened by the discomfort of wearing a mask. 

Waugh and the deputy chief set out driving. “It was hot as hell and I drove really fast, showing him the Saharan scenery without wasting any time. He was quiet for a while. Seemed miserable, or at least tense.” 

At one point he asked Waugh, “Do you always drive this fast?” 

Waugh recalls making a joke. “Yes, sir, I do,” he said. 

“My passenger did not think that was very funny,” remembers Waugh. 

“Where’s the floor of your car?” the deputy chief asked Waugh. 

“Some of it’s missing,” he said. “If the Agency wants to get me a new vehicle, that’ll be fine, too.” 

The deputy chief rode along in silence. At the edge of the town, where the city road meets the desert, Waugh’s old Russian car was forced to a stop by a mob of armed militia. One of the men stuck the muzzle of his AK-47 through the window. Waugh knew how to bargain with these people; he always carried cartons of cigarettes he could use for a bribe. After a bit of negotiation, the militia waved Waugh through. 

“I heard a muffled sound coming from my passenger, a kind of light gagging noise,” he recalls. Suddenly, the whole car smelled of vomit. Waugh realized that the deputy chief of station had thrown up inside his mask. 

“He was angry and embarrassed, but he couldn’t take off the mask for fear of blowing our cover,” remembers Waugh. They drove on, headed back to Khartoum. 

“It’s your fault,” the deputy chief said after a while. “The way you’re driving the car caused me to throw up.” 

The men continued in silence. Outside, Khartoum rolled by. Waugh showed the deputy chief numerous escape routes, shortcuts into the desert, and checkpoints to avoid. Finally, they arrived back at headquarters. Once inside the building, they were met by the chief of station. By now, both men had taken off their sweaty Dinka masks. The chief of station pointed at the deputy’s face and hair, which were covered in dried vomit. 

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked. 

“The deputy chief was furious,” Waugh recalls. “He fired off a litany of angry excuses, ending with, ‘I can’t put up with this shit.’” He didn’t have to for long. Just a few months later, he was transferred out of Sudan. The chief of station agreed to let Waugh jog around Khartoum now, as a means of conducting surveillance and reconnaissance on Osama bin Laden. 

Billy Waugh worked best alone. To be assigned a mission and to get it done, by any means possible, was what he was best at. Accomplishing a task that others could not accomplish made him feel alive, and gave him meaning and purpose— fulfilled his boyhood dreams of feeling like he was needed in the nation’s defense. Each day he’d run an eight-mile loop around the al-Riyadh section of Khartoum, employing the old-school espionage techniques of ground surveillance. His first task was to locate a decent place to set up an observation post, or OP, in agency parlance. Bin Laden’s private residence was a pink three story house on the old French Embassy Road. It was surrounded by high walls. Armed guards kept watch over the place, usually six or eight mujahedin dressed like they were still fighting the Afghan jihad. “Visitors to his home would drive up to the compound with drapes covering the car windows,” remembers Waugh. “He had four wives and more than a dozen children but I never saw any of them. If they were there, they stayed inside.” 

At the time, the CIA did not know much about Osama bin Laden. Waugh was assigned to profile his actions so that a portrait of the man and his pattern of life could emerge. In his jogging excursions, Waugh pieced together bin Laden’s daily routine. The man prayed early in the morning, before sunrise. At 9:00 a.m. sharp he left the house, climbed into his white Mercedes sedan, license plate number 0990, and drove himself to the Arab Bank on Latif Street. For noon prayers, he would drive to another building he owned, down on South Riyadh Road, where some of his staff lived. Finally, he made a trip a few blocks to the north. It was here that bin Laden’s construction company, al-Hijira, owned a warehouse full of construction equipment. 

Through the construction company, bin Laden was building a series of new roads in a country that almost entirely lacked infrastructure. This included a road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 520 miles. What machinery Osama bin Laden lacked he would import from Russia, through another of his companies, al-Qadurat. Often the government of Sudan was unable to pay bin Laden for his road work and construction projects, so he agreed to accept large plots of land as barter. In this way, Osama bin Laden acquired the Gash River Delta, a massive plot of land near the Ethiopian border, as well as a huge farm in Gedaref. At one point, he was rumored to be the largest landowner in Sudan. 

In Khartoum, Waugh figured out that bin Laden owned at least four buildings. One of them stood near the Palestinian embassy, west of his private residence. The property butted up against Runway 340 at the Khartoum International Airport, giving Waugh a solid viewing perspective of goods being unloaded on the tarmac. But it was while he was observing activities at bin Laden’s building on South Riyadh Road that he got his first real break in the case. Directly across the street was a safe house owned by the U.S. intelligence community. This safe house, it turned out, was being used by an ultra secret U.S. Army SIGINT unit called Intelligence Support Activity, and that went by the codename Gray Fox. Created as a Reagan-era response to the Iranian hostage rescue attempt, one of Gray Fox’s primary tasks was to collect intelligence in advance of a paramilitary operation. As Waugh understood it, Gray Fox was listening to activities going on in an Iranian safe house nearby. This Gray Fox facility presented itself as the perfect place for Waugh to set up an observation post and take the CIA’s first proprietary photographs of Osama bin Laden. 

“One of the most important elements of warfare and of spying is the ability to look down on your target,” says Waugh. In Khartoum, this general truth proved both a problem and a solution. Because it was so hot outside, many of the locals slept on the rooftops of their buildings at night. Waugh would use this activity as a cover story. He constructed a bamboo structure, designed to look like a sleeping shack, up on top of the roof of the Gray Fox building. He set up his camera equipment inside the sleep shack and waited. It was from here that he took what are considered to be the first CIA surveillance photographs of Osama bin Laden and his followers. They have never been released to the public, says Waugh. The photographs show bin Laden seated cross-legged and facing his followers. “There were twenty or twenty-five of them, and they sat there mesmerized by him, listening with their mouths open. They hung on his every word.” 

With Gray Fox as support, and while jogging around the neighborhood, Waugh was able to plant additional devices for gathering signals intelligence. But his singleton operation came with an unforeseen threat. Osama bin Laden unleashed guard dogs. “He had six or eight big white desert dogs,” recalls Waugh. “They were meaner than snakes.” They would run up to Waugh as he jogged by, threatening to sink their teeth into his bare legs. To counter the threat, Waugh began running with a lead pipe. “A couple of smacks on the snout and the dogs decided I wasn’t worth the trouble,” he recalls. 

Most of the time, Osama bin Laden’s Afghan bodyguards let Waugh jog by. Sometimes they’d tail him. “They followed me in a vehicle, staying about twenty feet behind me as I jogged. I ran like I was a boxer training for a fight. After a point, the guards would lose interest, get tired, and go home.” Finally, he was able to get photographs from close in, while jogging by the compound. 

Waugh left Sudan and returned months later. In February 1993, he observed the tail end of an assassination attempt against bin Laden at the mosque in Omdurman, on the western banks of the Nile, where the Al-Qaeda leader and his followers were known to pray. A gunman leapt out of a car, sprayed the worshippers with gunfire, and sped away. Nineteen people inside the mosque were killed, another fifteen worshippers injured. Waugh was at the Gray Fox safe house at the time. “The two would-be assassins sped across the White Nile Bridge and drove all the way to bin Laden’s house, more than twenty-five miles away,” he recalls. “They were never stopped by the police.” From Waugh’s rooftop perch on al-Riyadh Street, he “heard a flurry of gunfire from the direction of bin Laden’s residence. Two of bin Laden’s bodyguards waxed the assassins, but bin Laden escaped unharmed.” So it went in Khartoum. 

The local papers reported the arrest of an “Islamist of Libyan origin who’d fought in Afghanistan” who was tried and convicted of the crime. Was it true? Had one of bin Laden’s former fighters tried to kill him? “Hard to say,” says Waugh. Three months later, the man was executed. The assassination attempt got Waugh thinking. 

“In my capacity, I was never in [a position] to make planning decisions,” Waugh explains. “But sometimes people asked what I thought was the best thing to do. So in this particular instance, I drew up a plan to kill bin Laden,” he says. It was a transitional time for the CIA in Khartoum. The chief of station, codenamed Blackjack, had just left the post. An intruder had broken into his home through a window in his wife’s bedroom, and in self-defense he had shot and killed him. The story never made it into the local press, but Blackjack had his cover blown, and he was replaced by a forty-three-year-old longtime veteran of the clandestine service named Cofer Black. 

As a teenager at the Canterbury Preparatory School, in Connecticut, Cofer Black first became enamored with the concept of espionage. In an interview for this book, he remembers how he and his friends stayed up late one night trying to imagine the most exciting, most dangerous job in the world. “I came up with CIA officer,” recalls Black. A decade later, when he was pursuing a PhD in international relations at the University of Southern California, he decided to leave school and join the CIA. 

“As a new recruit in 1975,” says Black, “I was assigned the job of watch officer, monitoring foreign cables as they came in from overseas. I learned about the fall of Saigon in real time, sitting there in the operations center of the CIA. It had to have been my first month on the job.” 

The event had a profound effect on him, he says, as he watched so many evacuees clamoring to get out. “I will never forget the moment. It was total collapse. All our efforts, sucked away to nil. I thought to myself, This should never happen again.” Black vowed to be the most effective clandestine service officer he could be. 

He adapted well to Khartoum. “If you are a counter terrorist, Khartoum was the Super Bowl,” says Black. “Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, they were all there in the early 1990s. I’d been doing this kind of work for a long time. [Before Sudan] I administered field operations in Angola for the CIA, with mercenaries. When I arrived in Khartoum, I had operational experience.” 

When Billy Waugh presented Cofer Black with the photographs he took of Osama bin Laden, Black was impressed by the clarity and the proximity. “Billy’s never afraid of putting his personal safety in jeopardy to get the job done,” explained Black. Waugh recalls being asked his opinion regarding what might be done next with Osama bin Laden. “I said we should kill him,” remembers Waugh, “then take his body and throw it over the wall of the Iranian embassy. Set off a few flash grenades to draw a whole bunch of attention to the Iranians, make people show up and see what was going on.” Waugh sat down, wrote up his plan, and gave it to Cofer Black to submit to the director of Central Intelligence. 

There are two differing versions of what happened next, one from Cofer Black and the other from Billy Waugh. “Billy’s conversational remarks about UBL [Osama bin Laden] were never put to [sic] writing and [never] sent forward to Washington,” says Black. “This was a bad idea for so many reasons I won’t go further.” 

Waugh tells a different story. “The proposal went all the way to the desk of President Clinton. I was told he read it, thought about it, and replied in a memorandum that went to the director of the CIA. The president’s reply said, and I’m [paraphrasing], ‘We will not do this. And please do not suggest this kind of thing to me ever again.’” 

Waugh was a ground operator and an expert in irregular warfare. He played by many of the same rules of war as the enemy, the most important being there are no rules. Surprise, kill, vanish. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden lived in a den of snakes filled with rogues, assassins, and double-crossers. Waugh believes in tyrannicide, in cutting off the head of the snake. 

He left Sudan for another mission. This one involved teaching the nineteen sons of HRH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder of United Arab Emirates (UAE), how to parachute-jump. But soon Waugh would once again return to Sudan. In 1994, Turabi is said to have hosted another conference of rogues, albeit much smaller than the conference held in 1991. Egyptian double agent Ali Mohamed, who worked for bin Laden in Khartoum while also double- crossing the U.S. Army Special Forces, says he personally set up this meeting, which was attended by bin Laden and Imad Mugniyah. It is believed that during this meeting, Mugniyah shared with bin Laden techniques for how to build truck bombs to be used in mass casualty attacks against U.S. embassies. By then, the U.S. State Department had placed Sudan on its State Sponsors of Terrorism list. 

In 1995, Osama bin Laden began planning the assassination of CIA station chief Cofer Black. The plot advanced to the point where bin Laden’s fighters rehearsed the ambush on the streets of Khartoum. CIA officers determined the time and place of the assassination, on a small road near the U.S. embassy. Things escalated. One day, after being aggressively tailed, a CIA paramilitary team drew guns on a group of Osama bin Laden’s men. 

Through the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, the CIA lodged an official complaint and warned Hassan al-Turabi against carrying out the assassination. At Langley, the CIA created a unit dedicated to gathering intelligence on Osama bin Laden. It was called Alec Station. There was a long, dangerous road ahead. Bin Laden vowed to attack the United States from the land, the sea, and the air. He would succeed on every front.

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Operation Love Storm