Part 7 : Surprise Kill ,Vanish....Operation Love Storm...Carlos the Jackal....The Engineer

Surprise Kill ,Vanish

by Anne Jacobson

19

Operation Love Storm

George H. W. Bush had been out of the White House for less than three months when, in April 1993, he traveled to Kuwait on an official visit. He was there to receive the Mubarak the Great medal, the nation’s highest civilian award, for having pushed the Persian Gulf War Resolution of 1991 through Congress, authorizing the use of U.S. military force against Iraq, then occupying Kuwait. The result had been Operation Desert Storm. 

It was a lavish celebration resplendent with swordsmen, drummers, and hundreds of cheering children waving flags. The Kuwaiti press called the three day affair Operation Love Storm. The emir of Kuwait, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, thanked the former president for the 541,000 U.S. military personnel who’d helped free Kuwait the year before. “This award [is] in gratitude and appreciation for your enormous efforts in liberating Kuwait and your services toward world peace,” said the emir. George H. W. Bush responded in kind. “Mere words cannot express how proud I feel to be here with you on the hallowed ground of Kuwait,” he said. The emir then knighted the former president and presented him with the Mubarak the Great medal, named for Kuwait’s founder, who famously assassinated two of his half-brothers—political rivals—to ascend the throne. 

All went well during the festivities. The emir neglected to mention to any U.S. official that a team of sixteen assassins had tried to assassinate former president Bush with a powerful car bomb. Not for another two weeks would the Clinton White House learn about the alleged plot. Richard Clarke, special assistant to the president, later wrote that he was the first person to hear about it. “I was reading headlines from an Arab-language newspaper,” says Clarke, when “I saw a subject line that grabbed my eye.” Ash Sharq Al Awsat was reporting that a band of Iraqi assassins had tried to kill Bush when he was in Kuwait. “There had been no such report from the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, or the embassy,” Clarke insists. Alarmed by this news, Clarke telephoned the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait, Ryan Crocker. 

Did Crocker know anything about an attempted assassination of former president Bush, Clarke asked? Had he seen the article in Ash Sharq Al Awsat? The ambassador said no, that this near attack was news to him. Clarke then called Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national-security advisor. 

“Saddam tried to kill Bush,” he said. 

The next morning there was a sealed envelope on my desk,” remembers Clarke, “a message so sensitive that it could not be sent to me electronically from the Situation Room.” Clarke learned that seventeen men accused of being the assassins were presently being held in a Kuwaiti prison. The more the White House staff learned about the plot, the crazier it seemed to get. Two of the prisoners, both Iraqi nationals, had implicated the Iraqi intelligence service, suggesting a conspiracy. Clarke advised Anthony Lake to have the State Department put pressure on Kuwait to find out what, exactly, was going on. Why had the Kuwaitis told a newspaper about the conspiracy before they’d shared information with their friends in the United States? 

“They have to come clean with us,” Clarke recalls Lake telling him. The fact that the Clinton White House was just now learning about this assassination attempt made the new president look weak. 

Ambassador Crocker telephoned Kuwait’s minister of defense. “Details of the plot were not supplied at the time because President Bush was on his way home and the plot had been thwarted,” the defense minister said. He told Crocker that the government of Kuwait was moving forward with a trial. 

The White House demanded immediate access to all the prisoners. Because the attack was against a former U.S. president, the CIA and FBI had to be allowed to conduct their own independent criminal investigations, the White House said. On April 29, 1993, CIA officers from the Counterterrorist Center and FBI agents arrived in Kuwait City to interview suspects and examine evidence. From there, a narrative emerged. 

The group of assassins and accomplices included four Iraqis, one Kuwait born Iraqi national, and twelve stateless Bedouins. The information the CIA found most credible came from the group’s ringleader, a former military officer turned nurse, Wali al-Ghazali. The CIA accessed his records and learned he’d been trained to use explosives as a member of Iraq’s national guard. In 1993, he was working at Al-Najaf Hospital outside Basra, he said, when military intelligence service agents, the Mukhabarat, informed him he was being sent on a mission he could not refuse: “to assassinate the former president [Bush as] revenge for the devastation caused by Coalition forces during Operation Desert Storm.” The Mukhabarat, also known as the Department of General Intelligence, was the most heavy-handed instrument of Iraq’s state security system. With its multiple divisions, or directorates, the organization was fundamental to Saddam Hussein’s preservation of autocratic rule. Like most Iraqi citizens, al-Ghazali knew better than to challenge a request. Fearing retribution against his family, he agreed to take part in the Mukhabarat’s assassination operation. 

Taking advantage of the porous Kuwait-Iraq border, he was told to pose as a whiskey smuggler and infiltrate Kuwait with a car bomb: he was to park the vehicle on a busy Kuwait City street and then detonate the bomb remotely, as President Bush’s motorcade drove by. The Mukhabarat provided al-Ghazali with a Land Cruiser prefitted with explosive devices that had been soldered into the side panels. He was given two Browning pistols with suppressors, two land mines, two hand grenades, an AK-47, a passport from the UAE, a case of contraband whiskey, $1,100 in cash, and a suicide belt. If the car bomb failed to detonate, al-Ghazali was to walk to Kuwait University, get as close to President Bush as possible, and detonate the explosives belt as a fedayeen, or suicide bomber. Directions understood, Wali Al-Ghazali set off into the night, accompanied by the stateless Bedouins. 

The assassins crossed the border into Kuwait and drove the Land Cruiser to a predesignated rendezvous point in a town called Al-Jahra. There, they hid in a goat barn belonging to an uncle of one of the Bedouins. The men drank some of the whiskey they were given and fell asleep. When they awoke, the goat barn was surrounded by Kuwaiti police. Al-Ghazali said that he and two others escaped, stole a vehicle, and sped toward Iraq. But their car broke down and they were forced to abandon it on the side of the road. As they walked into the desert, they were spotted by local bird hunters and reported and arrested by a Kuwaiti police patrol. 

It’s impossible to know if the testimony was fabricated through coercion, or a genuine account of an actual assassination plot. The declassified findings by the FBI forensics team were equally vague. “The car bomb found in Kuwait closely resembles the corresponding components of Iraqi-made bombs that were recovered in February 1991 during Operation Desert Storm,” the report indicates, with details redacted. FBI agents warranted that the bomb’s fusing system, face plates, and radio-controlled receiving devices, as well as the type of circuit boards used, gave agents what they felt was “a recognizable signature” to a known Iraqi bomb maker affiliated with the Mukhabarat. “The wires ran under the on-off switch and were soldered to the circuit board in a uniquely expert way, proving that the same person was responsible.” After pages rife with redactions, the FBI forensics team reached a conclusion: “Examination of other components used in the explosive devices recovered in Kuwait, together with a comparison of the techniques used to assemble them, once again provided ample proof of direct Iraqi responsibility.” Ample proof is hardly the same as beyond a reasonable doubt, but the trial was being held in Kuwait, not the United States. 

CIA officers with the CTC included Saddam Hussein’s long history of assassinations and summary executions in its report for President Clinton. Since assuming power in the late 1970s, Saddam Hussein had ordered the killings of political rivals and people he felt had betrayed him. Religious clerics, Kurdish Peshmerga leaders, and scientists who attempted to defect had been shot, strangled, and blown up by the Mukhabarat. After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein became more emboldened with his plots, CTC officers wrote, exemplified in an assassination attempt against Danielle Mitterrand, the wife of the French president, nine months before. On July 6, 1992, Mrs. Mitterrand was traveling in a diplomatic convoy through the town of Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq, when a parked Toyota Land Cruiser exploded into a sixty-foot-high fireball. She escaped injury, but four members of her security detail were killed and nineteen others wounded—mostly people who’d gathered to wave as she passed by. This brazen attack, wrote the CIA, “demonstrated [Saddam Hussein’s] willingness to disregard international opinion and possible military retaliation.” 

There were other warning signs, wrote CTC analysts, including Ba’ath Party threats against President Bush. Shortly before the plot unfolded, Iraqi government officials hinted at a forthcoming attack. “Bush will be killed based on a universal judicial system,” Saddam’s press secretary told a reporter for AlThawrah, one “that goes beyond the law of the jungle.” Another Ba’ath Party official promised, “This [President] will be cursed, along with his ancestors, until the day of judgment”—that “he and others would be hunted down and punished… held personally responsible for each drop of blood spilled on Iraqi soil.” 

What to do? President Clinton called his advisors to the Oval Office.Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, “A plot to kill a former president is an attack against our nation.” President Clinton agreed. He ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA to develop a target list. The targets would include the headquarters building of the Mukhabarat. The strike should occur at night, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, to minimize casualties. Colin Powell suggested cruise missiles launched from a destroyer in the Red Sea. 

On June 26, 1993, twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at Baghdad, leveling much of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters and killing a night watchman. Three of the missiles missed their targets and exploded in a nearby residential neighborhood, killing eight civilians. Among the dead were the director of the Saddam Hussein Center for the Arts, a painter named Leila alAttar, her husband, and their housekeeper. The couple’s son and daughter were both seriously injured. Al-Attar was reportedly a close friend of Saddam’s; her home had been hit by a missile in the Persian Gulf War, and she had suffered a serious wound to her leg. Now she was dead. 

In a nationally televised speech, President Clinton called the assassination plot against former president Bush “particularly loathsome and cowardly” and “revenge by a tyrant.” But the U.S. response was not an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, he said, rather a means to prevent future attacks. It was two days later that the twenty-three cruise missiles were fired. Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, citing Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, said that America was exercising its legal right to self-defense. 

In Baghdad, anti-American crowds held demonstrations in the streets. “Revenge to America!” they chanted. “Shame on America! Glory to the martyrs of Iraq.” They issued a warning to America’s new president: “Clinton, pay attention; we are the people who toppled Bush!” 

It was the fall of 1993, and Lew Merletti sat at his desk inside the Treasury building, surrounded by piles of paperwork. He was no longer on the Presidential Protective Division and on rare occasions would stop to wonder how on earth he’d wound up in a place doing exactly the opposite of what he excelled at. For more than a decade he had been in the president’s inner circle; now he was being asked to serve as a bureaucrat. “It was the job I was assigned to do, and I accepted that. But it was really depressing,” Merletti recalls. He felt like Billy Waugh did when he was working at the post office after Vietnam. 

Everything had been going so well back in 1992. As the assistant to the special agent in charge of the president during the Gulf War, Merletti had been entrusted with tremendous responsibility. When President Bush and General Schwarzkopf traveled to the Middle East during Operation Desert Storm, Merletti was in charge of their security. Because of his combat experiences as a Green Beret in Vietnam, he felt entirely confident in the role. His missions had all been a success. And now, twenty months later, here he was sitting at a desk, loaded down by paperwork. 

Prior to the presidential election of 1992, Merletti was selected by the Secret Service to assume the top position in the Presidential Protective Division—were George H. W. Bush to be reelected. When Bill Clinton won the election instead, Merletti was assigned to the Treasury Department, the organization that governed the U.S. Secret Service. 

At Treasury, he had been asked to lead the team investigating what went wrong in Waco, Texas, when federal agents raided the compound of a religious cult suspected of stockpiling illegal weapons, and seventy-six people died. The fiasco would become known as the Waco siege. Merletti’s official title summed up the labyrinthine world into which he’d been pulled. He was the deputy director of the review team for the Report of the Department of the Treasury on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell, also known as David Koresh. 

The work was laborious and painstaking. It was not pleasant investigating where fellow civil servants went wrong. Because the investigation was such a high-profile event, as the top law enforcement officer on the team, Merletti was unwittingly shoved into the limelight. When it came time to report the findings to Congress, his situation went from bad to worse. “The Treasury Department’s top law enforcement officer has told federal firearms administrators that a probe into their Feb. 28 raid uncovered ‘serious errors in agents’ judgment,’ and that some officials had knowingly made misleading statements about the raid to their superiors and to the media,” reported the Washington Post. “People lost their jobs,” Merletti explains. Then a very strange thing happened. 

“At the congressional hearing, under oath, a congressman said to me, ‘I’d like to meet the individual who was in charge of this report,’” Merletti recalls. The initial tone of the congressman, a fellow Republican, at first led Merletti to believe that he was expressing appreciation for the truth. Most Republicans seemed to want blame laid at the feet of President Clinton, which the Treasury Report had determined should not happen. 

“I wrote the report,” Merletti told the congressman. “He looked at me,” recalls Merletti, “and his tone switched. He said, ‘I just had to meet the person who wrote this pack of lies.’” 

Merletti was stunned. “So you’re a Clinton guy,” the congressman said, smirking. In that moment, Merletti understood “it was all politics.” 

As a Secret Service agent, Lew Merletti was trained to leave politics out of the job. “The office of the president is what matters,” he explains. “There is an institution to uphold. We used to have a sign on the wall in the White House [field] office that said, ‘You elect ’em, we’ll protect ’em.’ We all worked with that concept in mind.” 

That Merletti was no longer on the Presidential Protective Division had nothing to do with politics, he told himself; it had to do with circumstance. He reported the Waco failings he’d discovered because it was the truth, not because he was a Democrat—which he wasn’t. 

Several days later, he received word that President Clinton wanted to see him in the Oval Office. 

“I went into his office,” Merletti recalls. “I was told to bring a copy of the report. The president gave me a compliment regarding the work. He pointed to the report and asked to autograph it for me.” There was a long pause, Merletti recalled. Then the president spoke candidly. “He said something to the effect of, ‘You did a good job up there,’ meaning on Capitol Hill. He said that he [and his staff] knew the investigation was going to be politicized and they were [aware] that I [probably] had no idea my testimony was going to be about that.” The president was thanking Lew Merletti for being apolitical. The meeting was over, and Merletti went home to his family. 

Perhaps President Clinton said something to the director of the Secret Service, or to the special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, or maybe what happened next was circumstantial. Either way, Merletti’s life was about to change. 

On September 12, 1994, seventy miles north of the White House, near Aberdeen, Maryland, an unemployed truck driver named Frank Eugene Corder spent the evening with his brother, drinking alcohol and smoking crack cocaine. Around midnight, Corder asked his brother to drop him off near a small airport in Churchville. Once there, Corder somehow managed to scale the fence, drop down onto the tarmac, and steal a Cessna aircraft. High on drugs, he taxied down the runway and took off into the night sky. 

Corder was not a licensed pilot but had taken a few Cessna lessons the summer before, apparently learning enough to allow him to fly the stolen craft over Pennsylvania and Maryland for roughly forty minutes. At 1:06 a.m., FAA radar systems at Baltimore/Washington International Airport detected the aircraft and noted that it was 6.5 miles north of the White House, flying at an altitude of 2,700 feet. The plane dropped to 1,000 feet, turned around, and headed south. At 1:48, it entered the prohibited airspace of the White House complex and began descending rapidly. With its wing flaps up and its throttle position in full forward, Corder crashed the Cessna onto the lawn, skidded across the grass, struck a magnolia tree, and slammed into the first floor of the White House, killing himself. President Clinton and his family were across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House for the night. 

It was a calamitous security breach, made worse by an interview the Secret Service gave to Newsweek magazine. “National [airport] shuts down at 11:00 p.m. and controllers in the tower were absorbed in other duties,” an official spokesman said. When the reporter asked how that was even possible, why the FAA hadn’t detected the security breach, the official said, “The FAA isn’t really in the business of protecting the president from flying suicides.” To which the Newsweek reporter responded, “That leaves the real question: who is?” 

The entire event was a disaster. To Lew Merletti’s eye, presidential protection was contingent on three fundamentals that never changed. The world is a dangerous place; it doesn’t matter who’s to blame, only that you defend against it; the U.S. Secret Service must never appear weak. An attack could come from anywhere, including a lone wolf, a terrorist organization, or a foreign government. 

Because Merletti had foreseen this kind of attack from above—the Presidential Protective Division had trained for it during the Delta Force HALO assassin AOP exercise—he was called to the White House. Secret Service director Eljay B. Bowron asked him how security could be tightened. These details, like all Secret Service protocols, are classified. Bowron also asked Merletti to come to the Secret Service team room in the White House, to talk to the PPD agents about what it meant to protect the president. The speech is classified, but Lew Merletti says he wrote it with his old friend Mike Kuropas in mind. Bowron transferred Merletti back to the White House PPD. He would now serve as deputy special agent in charge, which meant he was the number two in charge of the safety and security of the president of the United States. 

In the middle of October, President Clinton called Lew Merletti into his office to tell him to prepare for travel to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel. This was one of the most difficult and dangerous parts of the world in which to protect the president of the United States against assassination attempts. 

Lew Merletti was ready for the job.

20

Carlos the Jackal

It was Christmas time when Billy Waugh was summoned to his CIA reporting site in northern Virginia. He was being sent on a Top Secret gamma-classified mission as the senior operator on a four-person reconnaissance and surveillance team. During the classified briefing, Waugh learned that the target was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, nom de guerre Carlos the Jackal, the mastermind behind the spectacular 1975 OPEC siege. Unseen for years and believed by many to be dead, he was now hiding out in Khartoum. CIA chief of station Cofer Black was determined to get him. 

The CIA didn’t want to kill Carlos the Jackal—they wanted to capture him. For eighteen years he’d been in hiding, able to function out of reach of Interpol, the CIA, the FBI, Mossad, and France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE). Each had placed a significant bounty on information leading to his arrest. The Jackal moved around the globe as the guest of one state sponsor of terror (official and unofficial) after the next: Libya, Syria, Cuba, Iraq, Hungary, Romania. For the CIA, learning what his quid pro quo was with these countries would help the Counterterrorist Center better understand how the global terrorist network worked—how assassins operated and who pulled the strings. 

“Carlos the Jackal was a dangerous killer who’d machine-gunned down people who were after him,” Cofer Black explained in 2017. “Billy Waugh was the perfect person” to conduct a hidden-hand operation to capture him. 

On December 13, 1993, Waugh flew from Dulles Airport to Frankfurt to Khartoum. His diplomatic passport said he worked for the U.S. Department of State. Looking down over Khartoum as he flew in, he observed the White River and the Blue Nile. The dirt streets. The ramshackle houses made of mud and tin, all barely visible through a thick brown haze that hung like fog. “Being in Sudan was like being behind enemy lines,” Waugh recalls. “It’s a non-permissive environment. Every step must be taken with great care.” 

At the airport, he showed his credentials. A Dinka woman examined his passport and marked his travel bags with white chalk, indicating he was a diplomat and could not be searched. Inside the bags were chemicals necessary to develop film. 

By the time Waugh got to his embassy-owned villa, it was past curfew. He’d been stopped by soldiers, called Jundis, on the way in and had given them a carton of cigarettes as a bribe. The U.S. sanctions against Sudan had made money even tighter, and everyone was looking for a bribe. At the safe house, Waugh’s teammates were waiting up for him. They all had last-name aliases and would use their regular first names: Billy, Greg, Don, Santos. The team talked for hours. First thing in the morning, Waugh acclimated himself to the city by heading out for a jog, the quickest way to reestablish area familiarization. 

Back to the villa, the team climbed into their Land Cruiser and headed to the U.S. embassy complex on Abdel Latif Avenue. The pace of the Sudanese intelligence services had picked up since the bin Laden job, Waugh noted. The vehicle they were driving in was almost immediately tailed. A white Toyota pickup truck filled with soldiers carrying AK-47s followed along a few cars back in a signature show of force. 

The Land Cruiser crossed the railroad bridge and headed into Khartoum City and over to the U.S. embassy compound. In the parking lot there, the guards, Dinka tribesmen and marine corps commanders, kept diligent watch. The team passed through heavy security and traveled up to the third floor, where the CIA station was then located, next to the Regional Security Office, the State Department’s law enforcement agency responsible for all in-country personnel. They made their way through an entry lock, past the passcode panel, and through several more doors before they were finally inside. 

Cofer Black led the meeting. Everybody wanted Carlos the Jackal, he said. Mossad wanted him. France wanted him. The FBI wanted him. The CIA was going to get him. But the first part of the equation had been the most difficult to date: identifying who Carlos the Jackal actually was. No one could say for sure, since there had not been a photograph taken of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in roughly eight years. In 1985, the Hungarian security services had secretly made a video of him meeting with their chief of security. Looking fat, slovenly, and unshaven, Carlos the Jackal pleaded that he not be forced to leave Hungary. The image was all the team had to go on for now. The Jackal was a heavy drinker and smoker, a partier in declining health. But how to find a single, debauched-looking white man—who happened to be a most wanted person—in a chaotic, lawless city of over a million people? This was the first critical part of the job: photograph the Jackal to establish proof of life. 

It was the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Jordan’s equivalent of the CIA, that had provided the initial intelligence that indicated the Jackal had moved to Khartoum. Under the pretense of being a Muslim, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez had married a second time, a twenty-six-year-old Jordanian named Lana Abdel Salem Jarrar. GID tracked the two of them to Khartoum. Jordanian intelligence provided the CIA with a photograph of Jarrar. In Khartoum, the Jackal started making mistakes. 

“It was his lack of discipline that would lead to his downfall,” recalls Waugh. His first mistake was getting drunk and starting a fight. “He got into an argument with a shopkeeper and pulled a gun on the man, which landed him in jail. Local police do not take kindly to foreigners. He had to call Turabi, President al-Bashir’s secretary general, to come get him out.” That was only the first mistake, says Waugh. “He decided it was time to get himself a foreign bodyguard. That was the fatal move.” 

Carlos the Jackal made an international call to one of his old associates from the days of the Black September terrorist attacks. The Israeli Intelligence Corps picked up the signals intelligence. The man, believed to be an Iraqi national, went by the alias Tarek. Mossad provided the CIA with this first real break in the case. They had photographs of Tarek, which were sent to the CIA’s Khartoum station via secure fax. 

“We all studied the photographs carefully,” remembers Waugh. “What was unusual about Tarek was that he looked Caucasian, with white wavy hair. He was around forty years old and fit. He had big muscles, like a bodybuilder on steroids.” 

Waugh was assigned the job of photographing Tarek when he arrived at Khartoum International Airport. But Carlos the Jackal had friends in high places. A state-sponsored handler met Tarek before he entered the public area and covertly escorted him away, through an airport side door.

On January 20, 1994, Waugh and Greg went to the Meridian Hotel on a reconnaissance mission. Carlos the Jackal frequented international hotels— alcohol was served—and it made sense he’d send his new bodyguard to case these places in advance. Disguised as businessmen eating dinner, Waugh and Greg spotted Tarek sitting on a couch in the lobby, doing a crossword puzzle. Hotel clerks were known to be on the payroll of the secret police, the Political Security Organization. Hanging out doing surveillance was not an option, so Waugh and Greg finished their dinner, went outside, and sat in their parked vehicle. With a solid view of the front exit, they waited. 

After some time, Tarek sauntered out. He walked up to a white 1990 Toyota Cressida, license plate 1049, and climbed inside. This was a tremendous lead. Now it was time to follow him. Tarek pulled out of the lot and drove toward the Blue Nile River. He made an immediate U-turn, tradecraft for how to lose a tail. Waugh and Greg followed him for a few blocks, but after a few more U-turns it was time to drop the surveillance. Back at the CIA station, Waugh and Greg shared their findings with Cofer Black. “The search was narrowing in focus, which meant it was gaining momentum,” says Waugh. 

Over the next few weeks the team divided up, each man spending sixteen hours a day searching for the white Cressida, license plate 1049. Each member of the team had a portable radio that was linked back to a comm system at the CIA station. This enabled them to track one another’s whereabouts at all times and to communicate with the Khartoum station in real time. Transmissions were encrypted. “Anyone trying to listen in to what we were doing would hear nothing but loud noise, like howling wind,” recalls Waugh. 

Each man had a specific talent, just as in Special Forces operations. Team member Don, a former police officer, was a rare genius in vehicle searches, says Waugh. He had a remarkable ability to recognize vehicles and identify plates from great distances, almost a sixth sense. With a list of the places Carlos the Jackal was most likely to visit, they waited and watched. The Meridian Hotel, the Hilton Hotel, and the Diplomatic Club were the three top spots. Every Thursday night, the Diplomatic Club threw a huge party, complete with disco dancing and a full bar. It was located fifteen miles outside the city center. On the first Thursday in February, the Cressida was spotted in the parking lot. 

Waugh picked up the car as it left the disco and headed north. Traffic was crazy out here in the suburbs, with cars, trucks, and donkey carts all fighting for a space on the dirt road. There were no lights and lots of tall people meandering across the road. He lost the car in no time and headed back to the Khartoum station. The excitement of locating the Cressida wore off, followed by a long period of surveillance. They were back to ground zero, the hunt for the vehicle. After days of searching, excitement gave way to monotony. They searched the city in vain, eighteen hours a day. Most of the apartment complexes in Khartoum were surrounded by ten-foot-tall mud walls. Trying to find Tarek felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. 

When he wasn’t out conducting surveillance, Waugh practiced his photo developing skills in the CIA photographic laboratory located in the U.S. embassy compound, on the sixth floor. Developing film in Khartoum was challenging. The water came out of the pipes somewhere around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. To get a proper water bath cooled down to between the requisite 68 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit involved the skillful use of ice cubes. Waugh and Greg were inside the film lab when the encrypted radio sprang to life. Don had spotted the Cressida in Khartoum’s New Addition neighborhood. It had just pulled up to Ibn Khaldoun Hospital, on Nineteenth Street. Waugh told Don to take up a surveillance position. If the car moved, he said, follow it. 

Waugh and Greg hurried out of the lab, down the embassy’s private elevator, and out into the parking lot. The two PSO intelligence officers assigned to tail them had fallen asleep in their pickup truck. Waugh and Greg climbed into their Land Cruiser and began driving fast, headed toward the hospital. Waugh told Greg to open the lockbox that was welded to the floor, take out the camera, a 35mm Canon F-80 with a 300mm lens, and assemble it. 

Five minutes later, they were at the hospital. Waugh spotted Don’s car, drove past it, and pulled his vehicle into a spot twenty meters away from the Cressida. From his back window, he now had a clear shot of Tarek’s car. “Less than ten minutes before, we’d been in the lab at the embassy, mixing chemicals.” 

Two white men sitting in a car would surely get the attention of the everpresent PSO. Waugh told Greg the plan. On the dirt shoulder of the road, there was a vendor selling wares. Greg should go over there and consider buying something. Hang out. Wait until Carlos the Jackal exited the hospital. Then make some kind of commotion to get attention. 

Waugh got out of the Land Cruiser and opened the hood. Feigning engine trouble, he fiddled around inside. Then, leaving the hood open, he climbed back inside and set up the camera, using the space between the front seat and its headrest as a platform for the long lens. He focused the lens on the hospital exit doors. “As I was adjusting the lens, the face of a pretty woman came into focus,” he recalls. “It was Lana, Carlos’s second wife.” He quickly snapped four or five pictures he believed were properly focused and framed. As Lana Jarrar walked toward the Cressida, there was a sudden outburst near where the vendor was selling his wares, on the dirt shoulder of the road. 

“You’ve cheated me!” Greg shouted at the vendor. Agitated, like he was willing to fight. Waugh watched as the man stood up. “He was about seven feet tall,” recalls Waugh. He towered over Greg. 

Greg continued to play the role of the customer who’d been cheated. Waugh kept his lens trained on the hospital door. A man emerged. “Caucasian, in his forties. Well groomed, with reddish hair, combed back. A mustache. Fat: forty or fifty pounds overweight,” recalls Waugh. He carried a small weapons bag over one shoulder. “I spotted a leg holster near his right ankle. He wore a shooter’s vest. Sleeveless and with pockets in the front. Behind him, a black African man was carrying a large manila envelope in one hand.” Following the Jackal to his car. 

Greg continued arguing with the tall Dinka vendor. “The situation had escalated to such a degree,” recalls Waugh, that it had the attention of “the fat man who’d emerged from the hospital.” 

Click. Click. Click. Waugh took photographs of Carlos the Jackal. One photograph after the next, until he’d used the entire roll of film. Lana Jarrar climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car. Carlos climbed into the passenger seat as the hospital technician set the large manila envelope inside the car, on the backseat. X-rays, thought Waugh. There was a quick exchange between Waugh and Greg. Time to close down the operation, Waugh said. Greg pulled a large bill from his wallet and paid the unwitting Dinka vendor for his troubles. It was time to get out of there, fast. The Cressida pulled out of its parking spot. Ahead, Waugh watched Don pull out of his spot and follow along. Waugh and Greg headed back to the embassy. 

“We tried getting Cofer Black on the encrypted radio, but he was nowhere to be found.” At the embassy, they rushed into the photo lab. “It was the most important roll of film I’d handled to date,” recalls Waugh. 

Under the glow of the red light bulb, Waugh worked patiently to get the water bath to the precise temperature. A few degrees off and he could ruin the film. It was quiet in the lab. The smell of the German photographic chemicals filled his senses. When he was confident the elements were correct, he developed the film. Was this Carlos the Jackal? The pictures were sharp. Clear. “The target jumps out at you,” remembers Waugh. “And for a minute, it’s like you’ve already captured him.” 

Right after the film was developed, Don called. He’d tailed the Cressida to an apartment complex in a residential area, where the car was now parked behind a gate. He’d observed the man and the woman walk up a flight of stairs and head inside. It was very likely that this was where Carlos the Jackal lived. Waugh continued developing the film. Waugh and Greg couldn’t wait to tell Cofer Black. More than two hours had passed and they still hadn’t heard from him.

“Screw it,” thought Waugh. “I decided to break protocol and drive to Cofer’s house myself.” 

Waugh and Greg drove out of the embassy, down along the Blue Nile River, past the Chinese embassy, past Turabi’s home, past where the aspiring terrorist Osama bin Laden lived. They drove over to the eastern side of the al-Riyadh neighborhood where Cofer Black resided. “We said hello to the guard, who rang the bell.” Cofer Black emerged in running attire. 

I’d been exercising in my home,” Black recalls. “I asked them what in hell they wanted. What was so important it couldn’t wait.” 

Billy Waugh handed Cofer Black an envelope containing the photographs. 

“Jesus Christ, Billy,” Black recalls telling Waugh. “This is Carlos’s goddamn wife.” 

“Keep looking,” Billy said. 

They moved inside the house, where Black spread the photographs out across his dining room table. “Who the hell took these?” he asked. 

Greg said Waugh did. Two hours before, outside Ibn Khaldoun Hospital. Time to get the photos to CIA headquarters in DC, Cofer Black said. At 2:00 a.m., a lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Department of State diplomatic staff boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, continuing on to Dulles Airport in Virginia. Two CIA officers met the lieutenant colonel at the plane. 

“Cofer sometimes said I took actions without bothering to think of the possible repercussions, which was sometimes true,” Waugh recalled in 2017. “That’s what it means to be an independent contractor. A singleton. You can do the job. Get it done, without having the CIA monitor your every move. It involves risk. You can’t make a mistake or your bacon gets kicked out. When it pays off, it pays off big-time.” 

The photographs went to the seventh floor at CIA headquarters at Langley. There, two division chiefs gave their opinions. Next, an agency operative flew the pictures back the other way to Amman, where Jordanian intelligence confirmed that this was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. The CIA wanted to capture him. The paramilitary operation needed to move fast, but not too fast. There were spies everywhere. If the Jackal got wind of the fact that the Agency had located him and would now create a plan to capture him, he’d get out of Khartoum fast. 

Shortly after the Jordanians confirmed the Jackal’s identity, a local asset told his handler that Carlos was moving to Cyprus, transiting through Cairo. Waugh and a team were sent to the Africa terminal of Cairo International Airport to conduct surveillance. For six days, they watched the terminal. Carlos never showed up. “Covert action is not all action. Sometimes you sit around bored out of your mind. A lot of your time is spent running down a bad tip,” says Waugh. In March, Cofer Black authorized a team to watch the house that Don had identified. They located a dilapidated six-story apartment building across the street. The apartment on the top floor had a direct line of sight to Carlos’s building. It was perfect. 

“It was a hellhole,” recalls Waugh. “Filthy beyond what you can imagine. Ceilings crumbling down. Holes in the wall. No running water, no toilet. But it had a direct view of the entrance and exit. And the Toyota Cressida parked right out front.” 

Waugh and Santos told the building manager that they were surveyors working for the U.S. government. “Sensing money, he asked for seven hundred dollars a month,” recalls Waugh, an exorbitant amount in Sudan, where the average income was about three hundred dollars a year. “He also asked for three months up front. In a place like Sudan, you can’t hide the fact that you’re American. Some of the money is keep-your-mouth-shut money. He didn’t report us to the PSO because he wanted the fourth month’s rent.” 

The next challenge was getting the surveillance equipment into the apartment. To avoid drawing attention to themselves, Waugh and Santos worked at night. The camera equipment included several camera bodies and an assortment of lenses and tripods that together weighed several hundred pounds. The lens that was hardest to conceal was a 4,000mm Questar, 24 inches in diameter and 140 pounds. It was secreted into Khartoum via diplomatic pouch, in a case the size of a footlocker. 

Inside the observation post (OP), they had two folding cots, blackout curtains, and a Bunsen burner for boiling water and cooking rice. Creating a fast way out of the OP in the event of a raid by the security police was key to success as well as peace of mind. “If we were caught in the OP, we were told we would almost certainly be shot on sight,” says Waugh. “So we devised an escape route using rappelling ropes. We located the sturdiest pipes, then rigged up a system with ropes. We left a pair of rappelling gloves in an air vent on the roof.” With the OP set up, they began surveillance. For this, Waugh fashioned a large chart on the wall, onto which he would document who came and who went, and when. 

Waugh was intrigued by how reckless, pathetic, and debauched Carlos was, and yet how predictable was his routine. “He was a drunken partier. He went out, drank, came home, slept, went out again. His security detail were all Arabs. Their style appeared to be modeled after the U.S. Secret Service,” says Waugh. They kept perimeter guard around the house. “Before a visitor arrived, they’d open the gate, look around for an ambush, then go back and get Carlos or Lana, then get them into the car.” It was the same every day, Waugh says. “But one thing they forgot to do was ever look up. They never saw our OP. That was their big mistake.” Plans for a capture mission were being drawn up. 

One day at the embassy, Cofer Black told Billy Waugh that he wanted a shot of the Jackal that was really, really close. Billy used the Questar lens and took a photograph of Carlos’s teeth. 

“He happened to have a toothpick in his mouth,” recalls Waugh. 

“What the hell is this?” Cofer Black asked when Waugh showed him a photograph that, at first glance, looked more like postmodern art than a surveillance photograph. 

“It’s a toothpick balanced between Carlos the Jackal’s teeth,” said Waugh. 

Black chuckled and got back to work. 

Waugh photographed everyone who visited the Jackal’s apartment. “It was a parade of bad guys,” Waugh says. For the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, this was an intelligence gold mine. 

One week, the CIA chief of station in Paris, Richard Holm, visited. Dick Holm was a legend at the CIA. He’d served as a covert-action operator in Laos, as had Waugh, although the two men had not worked together. Later, stationed in Congo, Holm had been surveilling military targets from a two-seater T-28 when his plane crashed into rebel-held territory. He survived but suffered third-degree burns over 35 percent of his body. He lived only because he was rescued and taken care of by local Azande tribesmen who dug bugs out of his wounds using a knife and covered him in a homeopathic blue-black paste, made of snake oil and tree bark, to keep his burns from becoming infected. Another CIA pilot also on the mission that day, a man named Tunon, was captured by a different group of tribesmen, the Simbas, who killed and ate him, according to reports by local missionaries. “The Simbas believed that if you eat the flesh and vital organs of your enemy you gain strength,” Holm explained in an oral history. The world of covert action was perilous; it made no sense who lived and who died. 

Dick Holm had been tracking Carlos the Jackal since the early 1980s. He would now act as the liaison between DGSE and the CIA. The man in the lead on the French side was Philippe Rondot, a special services investigator who’d been tracking the Jackal even longer, back to when the terrorist had killed two French intelligence officers before the OPEC siege. Waugh briefed both men on what he’d seen from the observation post. The two senior officers chose not to share with Waugh details about the snatch-and-grab capture mission they were planning. 

On August 12, 1994, Waugh watched Carlos the Jackal and Lana Jarrar leave the house at the usual time. He photographed them exiting, as he always did. Then something unusual happened. They didn’t return after the disco closed, as was customary. All night Waugh waited and watched. Then, into the following day. He was surprised. Had Carlos the Jackal gotten away? 

“I got a call from Cofer Black over the encrypted commo. ‘Come on in, Billy,’” was all he said. 

Anxious to learn what was happening, Waugh drove fast over to the U.S. embassy. Pulling into the driveway, he was surprised to see the U.S. ambassador, Donald Peterson, standing out front. Waugh parked his vehicle and climbed out. Peterson walked toward him, his hand extended. “The ambassador said, ‘Great work, Billy,’ and as he shook my hand, he said, ‘Carlos the Jackal has been captured.’” 

Inside the CIA station, the staff celebrated with champagne. It was a big day. In the snack bar, on the overhead television set, Waugh watched the Air France network present a news broadcast. The French had captured Carlos the Jackal in Khartoum, an announcer said. The terrorist was on his way to Paris, where he would face justice for a myriad of attacks and crimes. The role of the CIA in this mission remained entirely hidden. 

For several days, news crews gathered around the apartment complex formerly inhabited by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. By the third day, they were gone. At 3:00 a.m., Waugh went out for a last jog. He passed by the old OP one last time. Running down Riyadh Road toward Airport Road, he spotted traffic in front of Carlos the Jackal’s apartment building. What the hell is going on? he wondered. It was the middle of the night, hours before dawn. 

“There were a number of vehicles. A few station wagons and a large truck with the engine running. There were twenty or so policemen. They’d created a perimeter around the building.” Waugh recognized a man from photographs he’d viewed during Agency intelligence briefings. 

“He was large and had very black skin,” recalls Waugh. “He wore a crisp white turban and a crisp, clean white robe.” There was a large security presence around the man. “I realized it was Sudan’s number two, Hassan al-Turabi. In the flesh.” Waugh stopped jogging and took cover. He called Santos on the portable radio he kept tied to his body at all times, in case of emergency. 

“I woke him up. I told him to get up and look out the window of the OP.” 

Santos did as instructed. “Use the night lens and get some photographs,” Waugh said. “Use high-speed night film.” If Santos could get photographs of Turabi, the CIA would have evidence linking Carlos the Jackal to his state sponsor, Sudan. From where Waugh hid in the bushes, he watched Lana Jarrar exit the building. “She was carrying a suitcase and crying,” he recalls. “Hassan al-Turabi comforted her like they were old friends.” Lana climbed into the backseat of a police vehicle and was driven away. 

In the morning, Waugh called Cofer Black to tell him about the new photos. 

“What in hell were you doing outside at 3:00 a.m.?” Cofer asked. 

“Staying fit, boss,” Waugh said. 

At the embassy, Waugh learned what had happened to the Jackal after he was captured. “They jabbed him with sodium pentothal,” says Waugh. “They put a bag over his head and said, ‘Start answering questions’—or he’d be turned over to Mossad. No one wants to be turned over to Mossad. Carlos the Jackal sang like a bird.” According to Billy Waugh, the CIA got the intelligence it hoped for, and more. The CIA files on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez remain classified. He was taken to France, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced by an antiterrorism court to serve multiple life terms in a French prison. There he remains.

21

The Engineer

As deputy special agent in charge of security for President Clinton, Lew Merletti prepared for travel—to Israel, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It was October 19, 1994. The focus of the trip was peace in the Middle East, but all Merletti could think about were assassination attempts and potential mass casualty attacks against his protectees. 

No fan of CIA covert operations, President Clinton was pursuing diplomacy instead—always the first option for a commander in chief. The centerpiece of this trip was the historic signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, set to take place on October 26 in a tiny border town between the two warring nations. If successful, the signing ceremony would be a step toward peace in the Middle East—progress not seen since the Camp David Accords of 1978. Then, in advance of the visit, the Shin Bet updated the Secret Service with escalated threat information. It involved a Hamas bomb maker who went by the nom de guerre the Engineer. 

The Palestinian terror organization Hamas had recently declared war against Israel, setting off a wave of guerrilla warfare tactics including hit-and-run killings, assassinations, and now suicide bombings. Since its official establishment in 1987, Hamas maintained a hit squad, called Majmouath Jihad u-Dawa, a strike force trained to kill Palestinians suspected of cooperating with Israel. Hamas called these traitors “moral deviants” and made their deaths public, to serve as a warning to others. “Israel, as the Jewish state, must disappear from the map,” declared Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the nearly blind, quadriplegic founder of Hamas—wheelchair-bound since a wrestling accident at the age of twelve. Palestine was and would always be Islamic land, Sheikh Yassin said, “consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” 

After the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and with rumblings that Yasser Arafat was considering making peace with Israel, Hamas vowed to take power from the PLO. The Hamas assassination squad was folded into the group’s military wing, the Ezzedeen al-Qassam Brigades. Without a standing army, the organization relied on guerrilla warfare tactics. Suicide bombings became the new focus for Hamas, the work of a shy electrical engineer from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank named Yahya Ayyash, also known as the Engineer. To date, he’d built four suicide bombs that killed fifteen people and injured thirty-nine. 

The lethality of a suicide bomb attack is contingent upon the size of the bomb. In 1994, the master bomb makers in the Middle East were with Hezbollah, Shia Muslims. Hamas was an organization made up of Sunni Muslims. Because militants from these two branches of Islam were engaged in their own sectarian wars, terrorists from Hezbollah and Hamas did not generally mix. When Sudan hosted a terror conference, the Arab Islamic People’s Congress, in April 1991, the CIA feared this calculus might change. Hamas leader Khaled Mashal attended, and so had Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah operations chief. Now the Shin Bet had information suggesting that a pernicious new partnership between these two organizations might be under way. 

Yahya Ayyash had been on the run. He and other Hamas members were said to be living in a refugee camp in Lebanon, just over the border from Israel. The place was built into a hillside and difficult to get to, with Lebanese media reporting that convoys of donkeys and mules were bringing supplies in to the Hamas fighters living here, including weatherproof tents, food, clothes, and supplies. “Then came the military and terrorism instructors” from Hezbollah, says Ronen Bergman. “[Imad] Mugniyah himself came to the camp to talk with Ayyash and some of his comrades.” Were Hamas and Hezbollah working together? With Imad Mugniyah’s training, the power of the Engineer’s bombs could grow exponentially more lethal. 

In Washington, Lew Merletti, bags packed, was preparing to leave for the Middle East when the deadliest suicide bombing in Israel’s history rocked the center of Tel Aviv, just a few blocks from where President Clinton’s motorcade was scheduled to travel. The bomb had been built by the Engineer. 

It was morning rush hour, and the No. 5 passenger bus was heading down Rothschild Boulevard toward Dizengoff Street, the Champs-Élysées of Tel Aviv. Approaching the heart of the café district, a tall, thin twenty-seven-year-old Arab man from the West Bank boarded the bus, sat down in an aisle seat, and placed a small brown bag at his feet. A thin wire ran out of the bag through a hole in the man’s trousers, up his leg, and into his pocket. There, it connected to an electrical switch, which connected to an improvised explosive device (IED) containing 20 kilograms of military-grade TNT and wrapped in nails and screws. 

At 8:56, the suicide bomber in the aisle seat flipped the electrical switch in his pocket. The heat and blast produced a fireball so intense, it separated the vehicle’s cabin from its chassis, melted the fiberglass frame, crushed a nearby car, and shattered windows all down the street. In a flash, twenty-two people were ripped apart, their limbs hurled across the street, where they landed on café floors and up in the branches of the chinaberry trees. Dazed and in shock, a young hairdresser who’d been riding the bus to work miraculously survived. “I saw fire,” she told a journalist. “I saw a woman without a face.” Orthodox men in long black cloaks appeared on the scene, carrying plastic bags and tweezers, which they used to pick up fingers, toes, and pieces of skin. Even the most hardened Israeli counterterrorism officers found the carnage too much to bear. A uniformed soldier vomited in the street. “How much more can we take?” screamed a young girl, her face and hands covered in blood. Twenty-two people were dead, fifty injured. 

Reporters took to the streets, seeking opinions on whether or not the peace treaty could survive. “If peace comes only from one side, ours, it isn’t peace,” store owner Moshe Bar told a journalist with a camera, emphasizing the word ours. Susana Halperin, a passenger on the bus who had been hospitalized for burns, shared a different opinion. “I want the peace process to continue,” she said. “I want my children to live in peace.” But as the hours wore on, the ancient, archetypal desire for revenge reemerged. “Death to the Arabs!” shouted the growing crowd, as Kevlar-clad security forces worked to quell riots. In Gaza and the West Bank, vendors took to the streets, selling T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the Engineer. To many Palestinians, Yahya Ayyash was the new face of the revolution. For the Shin Bet, he was the most wanted man in Israel. 

Lew Merletti traveled to Andrews Air Force Base, accompanied by a military aide and several staffers. They boarded a ten-person aircraft and flew to the Middle East, with Merletti now leading the advance trip for President Clinton’s security. “Typically the DSAIC [deputy special agent in charge] and the SAIC [special agent in charge] travel with the president, but the threat associated with this trip” was unprecedented, Merletti explains. “I would [now] visit each of the country’s top security officials for six or eight hours. We would go over security” and then fly to the next country. “It was my job to make sure [each of] the host nations understood without any hesitation what was required of them by us,” Merletti says. The first stop was Tel Aviv. 

“I was focused on the threat,” he remembers. “We were aware of the Engineer.” To protect the president inside the United States has its challenges, Merletti explains, but the Secret Service is a highly efficient security machine. Counter snipers with shoot-to-kill orders are positioned atop buildings, prepared to neutralize anyone who takes aim at the president. Counter Assault Teams are ready to repel an attack with overwhelming force. “Protection of the president overseas is an entirely different ball game,” says Merletti. “We just don’t take that lightly.” While the team was airborne, President Clinton issued a statement on the Hamas bombing, calling it “an outrage against the conscience of the world,” and vowed it would have no impact on his diplomatic efforts “toward a real and lasting peace in the Middle East.” 

After landing in Tel Aviv, Merletti and his team traveled to the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, and checked in. Merletti had with him an eighteen-point security plan, which he intended to share with his Shin Bet counterpart, Benny Lahav. “All eighteen requirements had to be met,” Merletti would insist. “We couldn’t settle for anything less.” Not in this environment. 

Israel was a particularly dangerous place at this moment in time. Hamas’s mass casualty attack against the No. 5 passenger bus the day before had likely emboldened them. With their expressly stated goal of stopping the peace process, Hamas saw President Clinton as a high-value target (HVT). While in Israel, Clinton’s security detail would be jointly run by the U.S. Secret Service and the Shin Bet. On two separate occasions the president would be out in the open, says Merletti, the most challenging environment to defend against. 

After a partial night’s sleep, Merletti traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with Benny Lahav, who served as assistant director for the Shin Bet protective division responsible for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s personal security detail. Merletti recalls feeling unsettled during the meeting. “We did not see eye to eye on the eighteen points.” A contentious discussion ensued. “Their attitude, as I recall, was to solve problems through use of force. 

“I was flabbergasted and frustrated,” Merletti says, “but after two hours Lahav conceded seventeen of the eighteen criteria the Secret Service demanded for the visit. The point I didn’t get was CAT [Counter Assault Team] coming to Israel. Most foreign countries were very sensitive about allowing CAT in because most foreign countries viewed CAT as a ‘military type’ unit.” 

With the meeting over, Merletti headed off on a fast-paced trip, meeting with the heads of security for the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It was a tough few days and he felt the greatest pressure when President Clinton was in Israel. At one point, when “we were out in the open with the president, it was clear to me that a Shin Bet agent named S [redacted] was not paying attention” to the degree the U.S. Secret Service requires. “[Agent S ] was not watching his area. Without saying too much about security, I can tell you that arrivals and departures are critical times. In these areas, there can never be lapses or holes.” Concerned for the president’s safety, Merletti spoke directly to Agent S about this issue. “He said something to me along the lines of, ‘if any threat [approaches], we’re going to spray bullets. Ask questions later.’ I was appalled.” For U.S. Secret Service agents, “Protecting the president is like going on a mission in the jungle, behind enemy lines. A sniper, a hit-and run grenade attack, a firefight, an ambush… anything is possible, at any time. You have to accept and prepare for this. That’s how we are trained.” 

On October 25, 1994, with high hopes for peace and security in the Middle East, President Clinton began a six-nation tour, with Lew Merletti always within arm’s reach. In Damascus, Clinton met with Hafez al-Assad, the first American president to meet with a president of Syria in more than twenty years. During the visit, Assad lauded Syria’s capital as one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, a region that played a role in the dawn of human civilizations. “Syria [is] committed to the peace process,” Assad promised. “We aspire to transform the region from a state of war to a state of peace.” In 1994, Syria had been on the U.S. State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list longer than any other nation, a record it still holds in 2019. 

In Cairo, President Clinton met with President Mubarak and Yasser Arafat. Two weeks prior, Arafat had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres. In King Khalid Military City, Saudi Arabia, Clinton met with King Fahd, who praised “the relentless efforts of President Clinton and his government to move ahead the peace process.” In Kuwait City, he met with the emir of Kuwait. It had been only a year since Clinton’s predecessor, former president George H. W. Bush, had been the target of an Iraqi assassination plot. In a region wrought by centuries of conflict and bloodshed, could these neighbor nations really put aside their blood feuds and live in peace? President Clinton was the first American president since Carter to pursue peace, not covert action, in the Middle East. 

At a border crossing between Jordan and Israel, Lew Merletti stood behind the president in the bright sun while the first-ever peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan, ending forty-six years of enmity. “This vast bleak desert hides great signs of life,” said President Clinton. “Peace between Jordan and Israel is no longer a mirage. It is real.” Jordan was now the second Arab nation to enter into a peace agreement with Israel. Egypt had been the first, sixteen years earlier, in September 1978. Three years later, Anwar Sadat was assassinated. Was it an auspicious time, or a time of ominous foreboding? No one could predict. 

When it came time to leave Israel, Merletti felt compelled to speak out to Benny Lahav of the Shin Bet. “I was standing at the bottom of the steps of Air Force One, about to board. Someone made a remark kind of suggesting I was overzealous. Lahav pointed out that everything had worked out fine. He asked if I had anything else to say about Shin Bet security.” 

Merletti thought about his experiences in Vietnam and specifically of Mike Kuropas, his friend and fellow soldier who died just after turning twenty-two, before he ever had a chance to really shine. Merletti decided he was unwilling to stay silent. “So I said, ‘You’re weak on arrivals and departures. And Agent S doesn’t understand protection. Someone is going to get hurt.’ Then I climbed the stairs and boarded Air Force One.” 

Merletti took his seat, located just a few feet from the door to the private cabin for the president of the United States. For the first time in days, he was able to really sleep. 

From a security standpoint the trip was a success, and this was also true from a diplomatic perspective. But not everyone felt triumphant. During the signing of the peace accord, as celebratory balloons were released into the hot desert air, Hezbollah, headquartered in nearby Lebanon and financed by Iran, fired rockets into Israeli villages in northern Galilee. As the details of the treaty emerged, Yasser Arafat became enraged. Anyone dumb enough to abide by it could “drink Gaza seawater,” Arafat fumed. At the urging of Hamas and the PLO, more than one million Palestinians went on strike, declaring a “day of mourning” in protest. 

But no one could have predicted that the greatest direct threat to the safety and security of Israel’s prime minister was not necessarily from Hamas or Hezbollah. Peril was brewing at home, within a group of radical nationalistic right-wing Orthodox Jews. They saw Rabin as a traitor to their hard-line views and took to the streets to burn effigies of him. “Death to Rabin!” they shouted from parades and from podiums where they gathered. One of their members, a twenty-five-year-old Jewish law student named Yigal Amir, had begun experimenting with homemade bullets inside his garage. 

During the first week of May 1995, Prime Minister Rabin traveled to Washington, DC, where he met with President Clinton at the White House. The Shin Bet agent Benny Lahav led the detail. “We recognized one another immediately,” Merletti recalls. “Benny Lahav said to me, ‘I’d like you to come have lunch with me over at the hotel we’re staying at,’” Lahav had something important to tell Merletti, he said. Over lunch, he asked Merletti if he remembered the argument the two of them had had in Israel over the eighteen points of security the Secret Service strongly requested from the Shin Bet. 

Merletti told Lahav that of course he did. The way Merletti recalls the conversation, Lahav then shared with him some thoughts about the American’s hypervigilance. “Benny Lahav told me [a man] always has to fight for what [he] believes is right.” Lahav said, “‘Let me tell you, if Rabin were ever hurt, it would be my head. And if Clinton was ever hurt? It would be your head.’” Merletti knew Lahav’s words were the truth. 

Four months later, on September 3, 1995, Lew Merletti was promoted to special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division. With the exception of director, this was the highest position a Secret Service agent could hold. When Merletti moved into his new office, he brought with him items that reminded him of what was at stake: gravestone rubbings of his friends who died fighting in Vietnam. 

Two months later, on Saturday, November 4, 1995, Lew Merletti was at his son’s football game when his pager went off. The message indicated that the situation was urgent. Merletti ran to his car and used his Secret Service–issued cellular telephone. “They said there had been an assassination of a world leader,” he remembers. On the drive to the White House, a breaking news story came over the radio. Yitzhak Rabin had been killed in Tel Aviv. 

As Merletti sat there stunned, the telephone in his car rang. It was President Clinton calling. “He said to me something along the lines of, ‘You heard what happened. I have to go to the funeral. I need to talk to you. I need you to be on board with this.’” Because the funeral was in two days, travel would have to happen in a matter of hours, Merletti remembers. “I said to him, ‘If you want to go, we’ll go. But we need you to do everything we tell you to do. We’re going to go [to Israel] and we’ll do what we plan on doing. There can be no side events. And if we determine there’s something we can’t do, we’re not doing it.’” 

Merletti went home, changed his clothes, and drove to the White House. “The situation was frenetic. People racing around trying to prepare staff for the trip.” There were difficult logistics to sort out. “This was not a normal group of people traveling to the funeral for Yitzhak Rabin,” he recalls. There would be three living presidents traveling to Israel on Air Force One: President Clinton, former president Jimmy Carter, and former president George H. W. Bush. Also in the delegation were White House chief of staff Leon Panetta; House minority leader Newt Gingrich; Speaker of the House and Senate majority leader Bob Dole; Senate minority leader Tom Daschle; and others. “Besides the vice president, who stayed in Washington, nearly the entire line of [presidential] succession was on the plane.” 

On the flight over, Merletti gave a security briefing and took questions. What everyone wanted to know was, “How was Rabin assassinated?” But Merletti had no idea. 

The delegation arrived in Tel Aviv, drove up the mountain into Jerusalem, and checked into the King David Hotel. 

“A guy came up to me and introduced himself from the Shin Bet,” Merletti recalls. “He said, ‘The director [Carmi Gillon] wants to meet with you right now.’ The first thing that went through my mind was, Ahhh, there’s been another assassination attempt.” It was almost midnight. The funeral was the following day. Whatever it was had to be important enough that it couldn’t wait. Merletti told his deputy he’d be right back. The Shin Bet agents whisked him into a car and drove away. It was dark outside and the streets were narrow. The car moved quickly through what felt like Jerusalem’s back alleyways and up to a darkened restaurant that looked closed. The agents got out of the car and motioned for Merletti to follow. One of them tapped on a door. The window blinds separated and a man peeked out. The door opened. 

Inside the restaurant the chairs were all up on the tables. The place was definitely closed. Merletti was taken through the front room and into a much smaller room at the back. 

“There was a big table in there, with all these men sitting there in a row, under very bright lights.” Merletti remembers thinking to himself, What on earth is going on? 

Carmi Gillon introduced himself. “He said, ‘I’m the director of the Shin Bet. Are you Lew Merletti?’” Merletti said he was. Gillon said, “‘I was told—so I’m asking you—is this true that last year when you were here, you said the Shin Bet was weak on arrivals and departures and that Agent S didn’t know what he was doing?’” 

Merletti told Gillon yes, that’s what he said. 

Gillon asked Merletti if he knew how the prime minister was killed. If he was aware of “the details of the assassination of Rabin.” 

Merletti said no. “It was on a departure, just as you predicted,” Gillon said, and told Merletti that the advance agent was Agent S . “That Agent S was standing next to Rabin when he was shot.” Merletti felt sick. 

“And do you know who was standing next to Agent S ” Gillon asked. 

“No,” Merletti said. 

“Benny Lahav,” Gillon said. 

There was a coda to the tragedy. Gillon asked Merletti if the U.S. Secret Service would be willing to train Shin Bet agents on arrivals and departures, as well as other security protocols that remain classified. Merletti said he would introduce Gillon to the appropriate people. The men shook hands and the Shin Bet agents took Merletti back to the King David Hotel. 

When Israel’s Shamgar Commission released its report on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Shin Bet agent Benny Lahav was singled out and fired. Agent S resigned. Carmi Gillon assumed full responsibility for the security failures and resigned. 

The state funeral, at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl Cemetery, was a solemn affair. President Clinton read a eulogy that remained focused on peace, which he referenced nine times. After the service ended, the delegation drove back down the mountain, boarded Air Force One, and flew home. 

There was a second coda, which, like the first, has never been reported. Rabin’s assassination was for many Israeli Jews a time of great suffering and soul-searching. Hamas took advantage of the national despair, upping its irregular-warfare campaign with lethality unmatched in its prior terror campaigns. Over a one-month period in February and March, more than sixty Israelis were killed in a wave of suicide bomb attacks. The explosive devices were built by Yahya Ayyash. 

The hunt for the Engineer accelerated, and the Shin Bet asked the U.S. Secret Service for assistance. The exact role of the partnership remains classified, but it involved surveillance equipment used by Gray Fox, the army’s classified intelligence unit and CIA partner. This technology was lent to the Shin Bet in its hunt for the Engineer. 

Meanwhile, in the United States, a technology development in the private sector was giving the U.S. Secret Service grave concerns. Mobile phones had recently become popular. As special agent in charge of the PPD, Lew Merletti was having great difficulty making the affable president understand the danger in holding someone else’s phone. 

On one occasion, recalls Merletti, “an individual in a crowd held out her cell phone and asked the president to say hello to her mom.” President Clinton obliged. Merletti suggested to the president that he should not receive any object, including a cell phone, that wasn’t approved by the Secret Service first. The president noted the request and seemed to agree. But a few weeks later, a similar situation came to pass. Then it happened a third time. 

“I spoke to him in the car,” recalls Lew Merletti. “I said, ‘Mr. President, you must understand how serious the threat is. You can’t take a cell phone from anyone. Not unless it has been approved by us first.’” 

Merletti was privy to information about the Engineer that had not yet been made public. Shin Bet operators learned that the Hamas bomb maker would sometimes spend the night in the Gaza City home of a childhood friend named Osama Hamad. In order to speak with Hamas leaders clandestinely, the Engineer would sometimes borrow Osama Hamad’s cell phone. The Shin Bet had previously used an uncle of Osama Hamad’s, a man named Kamil Hamad, as a paid informant. In the fall of 1995, the Shin Bet blackmailed the uncle into working for them, threatening to tell Hamas of his treachery if he didn’t honor a simple request. The Shin Bet gave the uncle a cell phone and told him it needed to be put into the hands of the Engineer. The Shin Bet said it wanted to listen to the Engineer’s conversations with Hamas. The uncle was not made privy to the fact that the cell phone was an engineered explosive device, outfitted with fifteen grams of RDX explosives. 

On January 5, 1996, while visiting with his childhood friend, the Engineer received a call from his father on Osama Hamad’s cell phone. Overhead, an Israeli SIGINT aircraft, equipped with technology provided by the U.S. Secret Service, listened in on the call. When voice recognition software confirmed the caller ID, the Shin Bet remotely detonated the cell phone bomb, instantly killing the Engineer. 

With the Hamas bomb maker assassinated, Lew Merletti requested from his Shin Bet counterparts two postmortem photographs of the Engineer. The Shin Bet obliged. 

“I went to see the president,” Merletti says. “I set down the photographs on his desk and asked him to take a look. The first was a photograph of the bomber’s head, the side opposite from where the cell phone had been.” The man was clearly dead, but the gruesome results of the cell phone explosion were not evident. Clinton took note, then moved on to the second photograph. “The second photograph had been taken from the side where the Engineer had been holding the cell phone containing the explosive charge. This side of the Engineer’s head was almost entirely destroyed.” 

Merletti’s recollection is that President Clinton never again accepted another cell phone that had not been handed to him by a Secret Service agent. 

In the summer of 1996, in Khartoum, Hassan al-Turabi banished Osama bin Laden and his followers from the country. The Al-Qaeda leader and his entourage moved to Afghanistan, where they were given sanctuary by the Taliban, the militant Islamist group who’d recently seized the capital city of Kabul. In a financial arrangement with Taliban leader Mullah Omar, bin Laden began to expand his Al-Qaeda organization by setting up terrorist training camps in Afghanistan where fighters prepared for jihad against the United States. Osama bin Laden’s first target, not widely known, was President Clinton. 

It was November 24, 1996, and Lew Merletti accompanied President Clinton to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Philippines. Security was intense, with an estimated 26,000 police and soldiers assigned to protect visiting dignitaries. The U.S. State Department warned its citizens to be on alert for a possible terrorist attack. In Manila, President Clinton was scheduled to visit a local politician. The route chosen would take him across a bridge in central Manila. 

“As the presidential motorcade began to move,” recalled Merletti, he received a “crackly message in one earpiece.” Intelligence agents had picked up a message using the words “bridge” and “wedding,” which Merletti “interpreted to be terrorist code words for assassination.” Merletti ordered the motorcade to change course, something only he had the authority to do. “The motorcade agent Nelson Garabito did a great job rerouting the president under those difficult circumstances,” he says, and that agents “discovered a bomb on the bridge.” The assassination attempt was not made public. The Secret Service keeps all assassination attempts against a U.S. president classified Top Secret so as not to encourage copycat attacks. The details of the Manila bomb were made known to only a handful of members of the U.S. intelligence community. 

The following year, on June 6, 1997, Lew Merletti was sworn in as the nineteenth director of the U.S. Secret Service, the first former Counter Assault Team member to hold the position, and the only director to have served in the U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam. Six months into the job, in January 1998, Merletti was driving to the White House one morning when he heard NPR reporters Mara Liasson and Robert Siegel interviewing President Clinton. 

“Is there any truth to the allegation of an affair between you and the young woman?” one of the reporters asked. The president was being accused of having conducted an affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, and of having asked the Secret Service to help keep it a secret. Merletti was stunned. He was the special agent in charge of the president’s security detail at the time this affair was allegedly taking place. He’d never heard a word about it from any of his agents. He hurried back to the White House. “Our chief counsel, John Kelleher, informed me that we would be getting subpoenas from the [Office of the] Independent Counsel for agents on the President’s Protective Detail to testify” in open court. Merletti remembers thinking, “What is this guy Ken Starr thinking? Does he know what this means?” If Secret Service agents were forced to testify against a president, it would rock the foundation of trust and confidence, Merletti believed. 

Merletti was summoned to Starr’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue to speak with the independent counsel and his deputy, Robert J. Bittman. Merletti told Ken Starr that Secret Service agent Clint Hill was living proof that proximity to the president is critical to the success of the Secret Service. As we learned earlier, on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas there were no Secret Service agents riding on the running boards of the president’s limousine. This protocol change, authorized by President Kennedy just a few days earlier, put several yards’ distance between the president and his protective detail. “Proximity is the difference between life and death to our protectees,” Merletti told Starr. “If our protectees cannot trust us, if they believe that they will be called to testify before a grand jury to reveal confidences, the president will not allow us that critical proximity.” 

Ken Starr seemed unconcerned. “It’s like it didn’t register,” Merletti recalls. “Instead he asked questions about lipstick, hair… other things.” Merletti was furious. His job was about protection, not politics. A showdown ensued. In May 1998, a judge scheduled a hearing on Merletti’s claim that Secret Service agents should be granted a “protective function” privilege and kept from testifying in open court. Accompanying Merletti was former Secret Service agent Clint Hill. Lawyers for the Secret Service showed the judge rare historical photographs of agents, including Clint Hill jumping off the rear bumper of the presidential limousine to ride in the vehicle behind, on President Kennedy’s orders, just minutes before heading toward Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963. The case headed to trial. Immunity deals were negotiated. Secret Service agents were forced to testify in court, revealing under oath that they had not known about the Lewinsky affair and had never helped the president keep it secret. In late July, President Clinton volunteered to testify regarding allegations that he’d committed perjury by covering up the affair. 

In the middle of this unfolding drama, on August 7, 1998, suicide bombers drove truck bombs into the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Among the 224 people killed, in nearly simultaneous explosions, were 12 Americans. Another 4,000 people were wounded. The truck bombs were reminiscent of the ones Hezbollah had driven into the U.S. embassy and marine corps barracks and the French paratroop barracks in Beirut fifteen years before. But the East Africa embassy bombings proved to be the work of Al-Qaeda. 

Three months before the embassy attacks, in February 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa against the United States, calling for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” In May, CIA lawyer John Rizzo drafted a Memorandum of Notification for a snatch-and-grab operation against bin Laden, an updated version of a Reagan-era finding against Hezbollah. “I had drafted the Reagan finding,” says Rizzo, “I wrote it in another era, to deal with terrorists in another era,” and Clinton had a “very different threshold” of tolerance for covert action than Reagan had, Rizzo says. His guess was that in the course of trying to capture bin Laden, there’d be a firefight, and the Al-Qaeda chief—and maybe some of the women and children around him— would be killed. Rizzo wrote the Memorandum of Notification for the president to sign, but Clinton would not sign it and it was shelved. After the embassy bombings in East Africa, the CIA wanted to kill bin Laden outright—using lethal direct action by a covert-action paramilitary team. President Clinton ordered missile strikes instead. 

On August 20, four U.S. Navy ships and a submarine stationed in the Arabian Sea fired between sixty and seventy-five Tomahawk cruise missiles at terrorist training camps in Khost, Afghanistan, and the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum. Billy Waugh was in Sudan on a classified mission at the time. “A colleague and I went by the factory to look at the damage inflicted by the Tomahawks,” he says. “It was a big pile of rubble. An unnecessary move, if you ask me. Osama bin Laden was thousands of miles away. Still alive as could be.” American officials later acknowledged their intelligence on Al-Shifa was thin.

Officers at the CIA’s Counter-terrorist Center began thinking about how to actually kill Osama bin Laden. John Rizzo drafted another covert-action Memorandum of Notification for President Clinton to sign, one that would allow a team of Afghan assets led by CIA paramilitary operators to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan. But the MON came back “with Clinton’s handwritten notes,” Rizzo recalls, “not something I’d ever seen a president do before.” Before lethal direct action could be taken, Clinton noted, a certain set of conditions had to be met, including the right to self-defense. “There were so many caveats and conditions, it muddied the waters” and became prohibitive, according to Rizzo. CIA director George Tenet took a new draft of Rizzo’s MON to attorney general Janet Reno. “The Attorney General informed [Tenet] that she would consider as ‘illegal’ any CIA operation intended solely to kill bin Laden.” There were additional plans in the works aimed at killing Osama bin Laden. 

Back in 1986, Dewey Clarridge, one of the CTC’s co-founders, had envisioned using a drone in a targeted killing operation. It was his idea to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle loaded with explosives and ball bearings into Muammar Qaddafi’s tent. In the wake of the embassy bombings in East Africa, Cofer Black, now chief of the CTC, and his deputy Henry “Hank” Crumpton, had a similar idea. 

Black allocated a $5 million budget to the CIA’s Special Activities Division, authorizing the development of a UAV called the Predator. Originally conceived as a surveillance drone, the 27-foot-long Predator, with its 55-foot wingspan, had a maximum altitude of 25,000 feet and a maximum speed of 138 mph. More importantly, it could hover above a single target for up to 40 hours at a time, take video, and send it back to the CTC. 

In the summer of 2000, the CIA sent a Predator drone over bin Laden’s training base in Afghanistan, Tarnak Farms, outside Kandahar. The Predator gathered video data, identified vehicles, and established a pattern of life. One day, with the Predator watching, bin Laden appeared in the driveway—tall, robed, and surrounded by followers. The CIA was certain it was him. The Clinton White House was notified. The CTC was told it would take six hours for the president to sign off on a missile strike against Tarnak Farms. 

“Unbelievable,” recalls Cofer Black. 

Cofer Black and Hank Crumpton again proposed sending a paramilitary team to Tarnak Farms to kill Osama bin Laden. John Rizzo wrote up another MON. 

“We were driven by an immediate imperative: find bin Laden. Engage in lethal force,” Crumpton explained, in an interview for this book. “To our frustration, the president’s covert-action finding included many caveats [stating] we could seek to kill Osama bin Laden only if it was part of a capture mission.” The situation struck Crumpton as hypocritical. “There was no apparent problem killing him with a cruise missile.” 

Cofer Black later gave Crumpton his assessment. “Imagine the pre-9/11 headlines,” Black said. “CIA Assassinates Saudi Militant.” Assassination was un-American. 

“No one had the foresight to understand the consequences” down the road, Crumpton laments. Herein lies the enigma of preemptive neutralization. 

In 2000, Cofer Black and Hank Crumpton remained determined to kill bin Laden, but unable to act without a MON, or Presidential Finding, from the Clinton White House authorizing lethal direct action. “They all but wanted us to take a lawyer from the Justice Department into Afghanistan on a mission,” says Black. “Read bin Laden his rights before arresting him.” “Clinton issued no new findings or MONs on counterterrorism from mid-’99 through the end of his administration, not even in the wake of the Al-Qaeda bombings of the USS Cole in October 2000,” says Rizzo. 

Hank Crumpton foresaw a solution. “I realized that arming the Predator was perhaps our only chance of achieving our lethal mission,” he says. An armed UAV was more likely to get approval from President Clinton than a covert-action strike involving a bullet to the head or chest. Is it the desire for public approval that makes a president loath to kill a man in close-quarters combat? To instead defend as legitimate a missile strike costing $75 million to $100 million that kills civilians and destroys buildings in its path? And how would Hank Crumpton’s armed Predator drone fit into this calculus? It involved a missile, but it was also a lethal direct-action strike, intended to kill a single man. With help from White House National Security Council advisor Richard Clarke, the CIA’s Cofer Black, Charlie Allen, and others, Crumpton explains, the development, testing, and deployment of the armed Predator drone would begin. 

The pretense of virtue attached to killing someone from a distance is curious. Perhaps dangerous as well. The current laws of war prohibit treacherous killing, and that includes assassination. It is also considered treacherous to shoot the enemy while he is taking a bath. But covert action occurs in the in-between, governed by Title 50 of the national-security code. It is undertaken at the behest of the president and is to remain hidden from the public eye. Do the laws of war need to be updated for guerrilla warfare, seeing as it is the only kind of war America has engaged in since World War II? Can terrorism be defeated by gentleman’s rules? 

War is wicked, violent, and treacherous. A horror of chaos, anarchy, and revenge. Just ask the covert-action operators who run lethal direct-action missions for the CIA’s Special Activities Division, including its Ground Branch, all of which remain classified. I spoke to scores of its operators, some on the condition of anonymity. 

“Where the laws of war end,” one Ground Branch operator told me, “Ground Branch begins.

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