28
The Hidden Hand
President Obama’s decision to revoke enhanced interrogation and accelerate targeted killing would have a profound effect on the age-old concept of assassination as a foreign policy tool. Whereas the Bush White House authorized 52 drone strikes outside the war theater in an eight-year period, the Obama White House authorized more than ten times that number, some 542 drone strikes that killed 3,797 people—supposedly from the kill-or-capture list—at least three of whom were U.S. citizens. Reportedly 324 civilians were also killed. But these numbers are just estimates.
President Obama not only embraced and accelerated the use of drones to kill terrorist leaders and their lieutenants; he became the first president in U.S. history to acknowledge that the hidden hand could be used this way. “Yes,” Obama advisor John Brennan said on April 30, 2012, “in full accordance with the law, and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives, the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al-Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.”
But the truth was far more ruthless and complex than John Brennan made it out to be. The Wall Street Journal had already reported that President Obama’s drone program in Pakistan had also been killing fighting-age males without knowing exactly who they were. Officially called “signature strikes,” these drone strikes were directed against groups of individuals who had been observed keeping company with known terrorists. In the press, signature strikes quickly became known as “crowd kills.” “The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp,” reported the New York Times, citing a senior official.
The following year, in a carefully worded speech given at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, in Washington, DC, President Obama further owned his administration’s targeted killing program. “America’s actions are legal,” he said. He’d canceled the signature strike program inherited from the Bush administration, he said, and was working “vigorously to establish a framework that governs our use of force against terrorists—insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.” By bringing targeted killing out of the shadows and into the light, President Obama intended to silence his critics—to make American citizens accept that killing leaders and prominent people in certain circumstances was not only legal but moral and therefore just. “So this is a just war,” President Obama insisted of the war against terrorists. “Doing nothing is not an option.”
There was one person whose targeted killing few Americans objected to. Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May 2011, not by a drone strike but by a CIA-led paramilitary team. While this lethal direct-action mission is famously credited to the Defense Department’s Navy SEALs, the team was acting under CIA authority, as the president’s guerrilla warfare corps. Outside a war zone, only the CIA can conduct lethal direct action; its Title 50 authority makes it legal. The operators on the bin Laden raid wore clothing with no markings or identifications—as had the OSS Jedburghs in World War II and the MACV-SOG operators in Vietnam, and as do Ground Branch operators all around the world today. Plausible deniability is built-in, should things go wrong.
After President Obama announced Osama bin Laden’s death on national TV, a crowd of people gathered outside the White House. From Lafayette Square to Pennsylvania Avenue and beyond, thousands of Americans chanted in unison: “Obama, Obama! We fucking killed Osama!” Just war theory tells us not to rejoice in the battlefield deaths of others; that there is no place for vengeance or bloodlust. But what is man, if not flawed?
As significant as was President Obama’s normalization of targeted killing, so was the reality that he depoliticized it. Here was a liberal Democrat not only embracing and expanding a foreign policy tool previously associated with conservative Republicans but expressing pride in it as well. “There isn’t a president who’s taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven and a half years,” President Obama told Fox News in his last spring as commander in chief.
“Obama succeeded in making Americans comfortable with drone strikes,” says former administration official and drone scholar Micah Zenko, “as they are generally supported by the American public and wildly popular in Congress.” There is subtext here: if Congress can’t fight a battle on political lines, it acts as if it is not a battle worth fighting for.
How did we end up here, with assassination—but not called assassination— normalized, mechanized, and industrialized? Let’s back up to the year before Billy Waugh was born.
One day in the summer of 1928, war became outlawed. Representatives of fifteen nations led by the United States and France gathered inside the French Foreign Ministry in Paris and signed a pact declaring war illegal. The General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, came a decade after World War I, considered the war to end all wars. Between the staggering losses—eight million dead, thirty million maimed or wounded—and the appalling barbarity of the weapons used, what glory that had previously existed had been sucked out of war. War had become too mechanized, people said, with horses replaced by tanks, and bombs being dropped from the skies. With the use of chlorine and mustard gas on the front lines, world leaders had betrayed the moral rules of warfare. By the time Kellogg-Briand was ratified in 1929, sixty-four nations including Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, China, Cuba, and Afghanistan agreed to solve their differences through peaceful means. The treaty soared through the U.S. Congress with a vote of eighty-five to one. To wage war was now a crime.
A few months later, at a White House tea ceremony honoring the antiwar pact, President Herbert Hoover expressed high hopes for a new era. “I dare predict that the influence of the Treaty for the Renunciation of War will be felt in a large proportion of all future international acts,” he said. But the peace was short-lived. Just two years later, in the fall of 1931, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria, an occupation that would last until the end of World War II. In 1935, Adolf Hitler began military conscription of fighting-age males, the first in a series of aggressive acts that laid the groundwork for World War II.
In 1938, on the tenth anniversary of its signing, the editors of the New York Times declared, “the Kellogg pact is dead.” The treaty, the editors wrote, “has not abolished war.… It has abolished declarations of war.” What was being said and what was being done were in fundamental conflict. The facade lasted another year. On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had officially begun.
It was after World War II that the idea of a third option came to be. War and peace were no longer the American president’s only two foreign policy tools, the National Security Act of 1947 made clear. Covert action would now function as the president’s hidden hand. In the words of former CIA inspector general L. Britt Snider, “Covert actions… that the CIA might undertake in other countries could accomplish a U.S. foreign policy objective without the hand of the U.S. government becoming known or apparent to the outside world.” The most extreme of all covert-action operations, it was decided secretly, would be assassination. The president’s advisors spoke “in riddles” to achieve their plausibly deniable goals, Congress later found. Or, in the words of CIA officer William King Harvey, assassination was to be “the last resort beyond last resort… but never mention the word.”
For the next twenty-five years, from roughly 1950 to 1975, this is how it worked. The CIA’s paramilitary force, with assistance from their special operations partners, armed foreign rebel groups, taught them to sabotage and subvert, how to engineer coups d’état, and if necessary to assassinate. Then came the revelation of these assassinations—including of Generalissimo Trujillo and President Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu—followed by the Church and Pike Committee hearings and the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Assassination was “incompatible with American principles, international order and morality,” said Congress. Now there would be rules.
But Congress didn’t create a law against assassination; rather, it left things up to the president and his national-security advisors to decide. Covert-action operations now required a Presidential Finding to be shared with the appropriate intelligence committee “as soon as possible” after issuance, Congress decreed.
And so, for the next twenty-five years, from roughly 1976 to 2001, this is how it worked. The attitudes and actions of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush with respect to lethal direct action tended to be hawkish, while those of Democratic presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton leaned toward dovish. Congress oversaw the Presidential Findings/MONs and the actions of the CIA paramilitary operators who were dispatched to the field to carry out the wishes of the president and his closest advisors.
Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It was the September 17 Memorandum of Notification that allowed for the return of killing leaders or prominent people in foreign lands—which if not for legalese would be called assassination—as a foreign policy tool. “It’s remarkable when you consider what came out of one short paragraph in that [MON],” former CIA general counsel John Rizzo explained for this book. It was Rizzo who drafted this Memorandum of Notification. “Three words authorized the [terrorist] capture and detention program, another few [words] authorized taking lethal direct action against terrorists.” When the MON was delivered to the congressional intelligence committees on September 18, “Republicans and Democrats alike had the same reaction,” he says, which was: “Is this enough?”
The floodgates reopened. With the Bush administration, an army of drones called Predators and Reapers took to the skies, and an army of paramilitary operators from the Special Activities Division, and its Ground Branch, moved into action in hostile territory and behind enemy lines. The Obama administration embraced and accelerated targeted killing. The Trump administration further broadened these programs, but with the nation consumed by political battles, the targeted killing programs have become easier to hide. Ground Branch operators and their special operations forces partners presently operate in 138 countries around the world. Not just in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya but inside (and in the airspace above) 70 percent of the world’s sovereign nations, from Colombia to Mongolia, Albania to Uzbekistan, Nepal to the Gaza Strip. Ground Branch operators interviewed for this book have been helicoptered into Bogotá, Colombia, HALOed onto islands in the Philippines, and HALOed into remote terrain in Iran. All on the orders of the president of the United States.
Covert action in general and targeted killing in particular are accelerating at a rate that far outpaces public awareness or understanding. The CIA has opened a global center called the Special Activities Center—the Special Activities Division has thus expanded from a paramilitary division to an interdisciplinary center.
Still, the goal of covert action remains what it was in 1947: to prevent or avert a nuclear World War III. To report this book,
I interviewed Billy Waugh for several hundred hours and exchanged more than 1,300 emails with him. A majority of the missions Waugh participated in were born classified—designed to accomplish U.S. foreign policy goals without their ever becoming known to the public. Even when discussing declassified operations he was involved in, Waugh tends to play it close to the vest, speaking in phrases that take time to discern. Once, he answered a written question with a series of dashes and dots, which took me a while to decipher as Morse code.
The more illuminating information often came forth when we were traveling together internationally, including to Vietnam and Cuba. Billy Waugh is a veteran soldier, paramilitary operator, and spy. He is a master of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—ISR, in covert-action parlance. He has spent his life at the tip of the tip of the spear. Having operated in some sixty-four countries around the world, Waugh, I learned, is most at home on the move: riding in airplanes, waiting in airports, driving in cars, and sitting in international hotel lobbies watching people come and go.
It was inside an airplane, traveling at 36,000 feet over the Russian peninsula near the Sea of Okhotsk, that I learned of the most dangerous lethal covert-action operation perhaps ever designed by the CIA and its military counterparts—an operation Waugh led. Dangerous—by way of unintended consequences that threaten the security and stability not just of the United States but of the entire world. The tactic: parachute assassins carrying a nuclear bomb.
It was the middle of the night, and the aircraft we were traveling in was roughly three-quarters of the way from Los Angeles, California, to Seoul, Korea. I couldn’t sleep. The Korean Air A380 had a lounge on the upper deck, and it was there that I found Billy Waugh, seated on a couch drinking a glass of pineapple juice and reading The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Churchill’s Mavericks Plotting Hitler’s Defeat. I sat down. We began discussing black entry parachute operations. As part of Operation Grouse, during World War II, the British Special Operations Executive parachuted commandos into remote terrain near the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway, where the Germans were secretly working to build a nuclear bomb.
“The nuclear weapon is the ultimate weapon,” said Waugh. After he’d trained to parachute-jump a live nuclear weapon in behind enemy lines on Okinawa in the early 1960s, Waugh said, he and his Green Light Team moved to a classified facility in the United States at the Nevada Test Site, where roughly one hundred nuclear weapons had already been detonated in the desert—mushroom cloud and all. There the team conducted a feasibility test to see if a tactical nuclear weapon could be detonated after being parachuted in from above and armed on the ground.
It was the second week in July 1962, and John F. Kennedy was president. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in talks to ban atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. As part of Operation Sunbeam, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department were now jointly testing four tactical nuclear weapons in and around Area 18 of the Nevada Test Site, located seventy five miles north of Las Vegas. These were the last four known atmospheric nuclear explosions in U.S. history.
“We started out on an aircraft carrier parked on the Pacific near Catalina Island,” recalls Waugh. “Our four-man team was sequestered under the deck. No one said a word to any of us, and we didn’t say boo. The nuclear device was made of three plutonium rings. Each one weighed thirty-three pounds. We had forty pounds of commo and a hand-cranked generator, which had its own portable seat.”
The Green Light Team loaded their gear and the tactical nuclear weapon— capable of destroying a small city—into a TF-1. “The seats were removed,” remembers Waugh.
“We were catapulted off this carrier, flew across California into Nevada, and prepared to jump.” The goal was to jump, land, assemble the team, and assemble the nuclear weapon in less than fourteen minutes. “We jumped from down low,” recalls Waugh. “Around a thousand feet above the deck [terrain]. When you jump that low, enemy radar can’t see jumpers, but it sees the airplane.” 349S
For this reason, as many as fifteen aircraft are used in these kinds of parachute-insertion operations. The use of multiple aircraft confuses enemy spotters on the ground. In this operation, the Green Light Team landed, located all four members, assembled the device, and used the commo to send an encrypted message to the commanding officer.
“Instead of firing the device ourselves,” says Waugh, “we handed it off to a group of nuclear weapons engineers.”
The engineers armed the device and set the timer. The Green Light Team was driven to a bunker roughly five kilometers away, recalls Waugh. Each man was given a pair of welder’s goggles, and a seat from which to watch the nuclear weapon explode.
“It’s a thirty-thousand-degree-centigrade burst,” says Waugh. “You watch it and you say to yourself, ‘Holy goddamn.’” Good and evil. Sacred and profane.
“What’s good about a nuclear bomb?” I asked.
“It scares people,” said Waugh. “It should. Have you read Hiroshima?” The 1946 book by John Hersey follows survivors of the U.S. bombing. “It should be required reading. In a nuclear blast, people incinerate. They melt and disappear.”
The feasibility test at the Nevada Test Site was a success. A nuclear device could be parachuted in by a commando team, armed, and fired in a matter of minutes. “The Central Intelligence Agency tries to prevent things from happening,” says Waugh. “The military prepares for things that might.” I thought of Lew Merletti’s Delta Force assassins, who had succeeded in covertly parachuting down onto the White House lawn.
Flying over the Russian peninsula, Waugh recalled how, roughly two hours after the tactical nuclear weapon was detonated, a lieutenant colonel arrived at the bunker in the desert for a debrief. “They told us everything we did right and everything we did wrong.” Then on to Nellis Air Force Base, fifty miles east, to spend the night.
“We didn’t talk much,” remembered Waugh. “You don’t sit around and congratulate yourself on a job well done. That’s not how you’re trained.” Waugh still recalls what he ate for dinner that night: “ham and lima beans,” U.S. Army– style.
Ten days later, Attorney General Robert Kennedy flew to the Nevada Test Site to observe a tactical nuclear weapon explode. Archival footage shows him sitting on a wooden bench, dressed in casual clothing and wearing welder’s goggles as he watches a weapon, fired from a recoilless gun, explode in the distance, 2.17 miles away.
Seated inside the upper deck lounge on our Korean Air flight, Waugh pointed out the window and noted the height, 36,000 feet—roughly the same altitude for a military HALO jump. “I never jumped any part of an atomic weapon by free fall, but I do know this has been accomplished,” he said.
The concept of parachute-jumping a nuclear weapon must have remained on Waugh’s mind because he brought it up again, two days later, during a meeting in Hanoi. We were at the former home of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the indomitable leader of the North Vietnamese Army during the war—the war Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the MACV-SOG mission to kill General Giap at Oscar Eight, in June 1967, a classified operation for which Waugh led forward observation control. The mission failed and Giap lived to be 102; he died in 2013.
Our host was General Giap’s son Vo Dien Bien, the keeper of Giap’s legacy. Dien Bien was born in 1954, during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which his father commanded and for which he is named. We were invited to General Giap’s former home, located across the street from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in downtown Hanoi. Inside, large framed portraits of General Giap hung on the walls, with dozens of medals and awards neatly displayed in glass cases. Incense burned. We walked through the garden, where General Giap and his commanders sat long ago, plotting the demise of the United States. We were shown tunnels beneath the home where Ho Chi Minh and his inner circle took shelter during the Nixon administration’s bombing of Hanoi.
Joining us was General Giap’s former aide-de-camp, Colonel Bon Giong, age ninety-two. During the war, Colonel Giong commanded Brigade 48 of the 320th Division of the North Vietnamese Army. He led operations against U.S. marines at Khe Sanh and orchestrated hit-and-run strikes against MACV-SOG operators during Top Secret cross-border missions into Laos. Colonel Giong’s fighters killed Sergeant Delmer Lee Laws and Sergeant Donald Sain; his men boobytrapped Sain and mutilated his body. Giong’s fighters killed scores of Waugh’s fellow SOG operators, just as Waugh and his colleagues killed scores of Giong’s men. The goal of war is to kill in order to win.
“If you told me fifty years ago I’d be in Hanoi one day, I’d never believe you,” said Waugh. He certainly never believed he’d be in Hanoi under these unusual circumstances. Here were former sworn enemies speaking without enmity. But to an outside observer, something unspoken hung in the air.
For a while, through a translator, Waugh and Giong discussed the other side’s guerrilla warfare tactics—ambush, commo, and infiltration. Constructs they remained curious about, after all these decades had passed. Roughly an hour into the discussion, Waugh brought up his tactical nuclear weapons training.
“I was on a Green Light team that trained in Okinawa,” he said, followed by a brief explanation of how the team trained to parachute a nuclear weapon in behind enemy lines, which would most likely be somewhere in eastern Europe in the event of war with the Russians.
“We were considering parachuting a SADM nuclear device into Vietnam,” Waugh told our hosts.
The statement took a while to translate accurately, requiring repetition and clarification. Dien Bien and Colonel Giong were stunned by what Waugh was saying. “I want to make sure I understand you,” Dien Bien said.
Waugh repeated his assertion.
Dien Bien disagreed. “We knew nuclear use was not possible for the Americans,” he said, then clarified: “The Americans would never use nuclear weapons against” Vietnam.
“Not true,” said Waugh. “I was on the team. We were going to drop it on the Mu Gia Pass. I wrote up the recommendation,” Waugh said. The mission fell to MACV-SOG. The Mu Gia Pass was a steep mountain roadway that connected Vietnam to Laos. Countless communist fighters, weapons, and supplies moved through this pass each month; it was a choke point along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
There was a long pause. Dien Bien turned to me. “Did he really just say the Americans were considering dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam?”
Documents kept classified until 2003 reveal this truth. In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered a scientific advisory group, the Jason scientists, “to evaluate the military consequences of a U.S. decision to use tactical nuclear weapons [TNW] in Southeast Asia.”
Jason scientist Seymour Deitchman explained. “We were asked whether it made sense to think about using nuclear weapons to close off the supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.… The idea had been discussed at the Pentagon.”
To augment the evaluation, the CIA performed a landscape analysis of the Mu Gia Pass and determined that it was “the most vulnerable section” of the trail.
But having a SOG team parachute in a tactical nuclear weapon for use in Vietnam was a very bad idea, the Jason scientists concluded. “A very serious long-range problem would arise,” they warned. “Insurgent groups everywhere in the world would take note and would try by all means available to acquire TNW for themselves.” Such use presaged a dystopian future in which terrorists could use nuclear weapons in a game of existential extortion, the Jasons warned the secretary of defense.
“A small minority of dissidents with a supply of TNW could blackmail and ultimately destroy any but the most resolute government,” the scientists wrote. “If this were to happen, the U.S. would probably be faced with a choice between two evils, either to allow nuclear blackmail to succeed, or to intervene with military force under very unfavorable circumstances.” Not only would the use of tactical nuclear weapons open the floodgates, it would open Pandora’s box—the mythological source of uncontrollable chaos. Prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield was the ultimate red line in the sand, a barrier that a U.S. president simply could not cross, even if it meant losing a war.
But Waugh told our hosts in Hanoi that he felt differently.
“I wish we’d done that,” he said. “It would have ended the war.”
There was a long silence. When Dien Bien finally spoke, it was to express shock and disgust.
“This is my homeland you’re talking about,” he said.
“Fifty-eight thousand of my people died,” Waugh said. “Half a million of your people died. A lot of them would still be here.”
More silence. Then Colonel Giong said, “Yes, but we might not have won the war.”
Every nation wants to win at any cost. Except the cost and consequences of nuclear war.
The closest the world ever came to nuclear war was during the Cuban missile crisis. It was Che Guevara, more so than Fidel Castro, who advocated for nuclear war. “If the people of Cuba should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names,” Che told the First Latin American Youth Congress in 1960, “they will feel completely happy and fulfilled.” This rhetoric likely contributed to President Johnson’s granting the CIA the authority to oversee Che’s killing.
In June of 2017, I traveled with Billy Waugh to Cuba, where he was to make a HALO jump with a group of Cuban ex-military parajumpers. Our host was Ernesto Guevara. Ernesto was just a baby when his father famously wrote a letter to be read to his children in the event of his death. “Grow up to be good revolutionaries,” Che Guevara implored. “Remember that the Revolution is what is important and that each one of us, on our own, is worthless.” Following Che’s assassination in Bolivia in 1967, Ernesto was taken in by Fidel Castro and educated in Spain and Russia, he says. During my trip, I learned that Ernesto was not a revolutionary like his father. A lawyer by training, he was now partowner of a Harley-Davidson-themed motorcycle bar in Old Havana called Chacón 162.
Cuba is a great enigma, the original Cold War menace after the Soviet Union. This book begins with Stalin and the very real threat that communism once posed to the free world, and here I was now, visiting one of the last communist dictatorships on the planet. The island is America’s closest non-border neighbor, located just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Since the revolution in 1959, Cuba has caused every sitting U.S. president foreign policy dilemmas, great and small. And while the threat of communism has now been reduced to nil, Cuba’s role in America’s national-security interests remains complex. Traveling to Cuba with Billy Waugh, I wondered if something else might lie behind the recreational HALO jump. If perhaps the hidden hand was in some way involved.
During the Obama administration, relations with Cuba had softened, but under President Trump new restrictions had been put in place. Finally, in June 2017, the U.S. State Department cleared our group for travel.
Our group was unique. Our team leader was a former Green Beret, from a legendary family of Green Berets. I knew from my research that our team leader’s father had once taught Jordan’s King Hussein how to parachute-jump; that he’d served in MACV-SOG, and later in the CIA’s Special Activities Division, as part of Ground Branch, alongside Billy Waugh. Also on the trip were a commercial airline pilot (whose last name happens to be a registered trademark) and a beautiful, buxom woman who’d twice been crowned Miss [state withheld]. She had a background in U.S. Army intelligence and now ran a company that tracked criminals across state lines and turned them over to law enforcement. There was me, the journalist; a businessman who would serve as our interpreter; and Billy Waugh, the former Green Beret who was also one of the longest-serving CIA operators in the Agency’s history. Waugh’s last CIA mission, he said, had been in the fall of 2011, when he was eighty-two—sent to Libya during the revolution that overthrew Qaddafi to make contact with Qaddafi’s former generals. Or maybe that wasn’t his last mission. Maybe this was.
On the drive from Havana to Varadero Beach, the number of billboards and other forms of propaganda featuring Che Guevara was remarkable to me. He’d been dead for fifty years and yet his image was everywhere. For every one poster, sign, or billboard featuring Fidel Castro, who ruled Cuba for roughly fifty years and who had died only seven months before, there were eight or ten billboards of Che Guevara promoting La Revolución, some of them the size of apartment buildings.
For the parachute jump over Varadero Beach, on Cuba’s north shore, our team would be flying in an old Russian aircraft, an Antonov An-2 biplane from the late 1950s. “The writing on the gauges was in Cyrillic,” our group’s pilot told me. He paid careful attention to the instrument dials. “Over the years, there [have] been six hundred twenty-two Antonov An-2 accidents, claiming seven hundred seventy-four lives,” he said. “At least that’s what’s officially reported.” As the person in the group chronicling the event, I had a choice: watch the jumpers from inside the old Antonov aircraft or from the deck of an amphibious rescue craft. Maybe I’d seen too many spy movies like The Good Shepherd, where the unwitting person gets thrown out the aircraft into the ocean. I chose the rescue craft.
Down on the white-sand beach, six shirtless Cuban former paratroop commandos ferried me out onto the azure sea. Through binoculars, I scoured the skies. After about an hour, Waugh and the others came hurtling down from above in a free fall. They looked like ants falling from the sky, tiny dots moving at terminal velocity. Finally, their individual parachutes blossomed and each came floating down to earth. Waugh, 87½, plunged into the ocean, where he was met by fast-swimming Cuban commandos, who made sure his lanyards were swiftly unclipped. Billy Waugh earned his paratrooper wings in 1948, when he was nineteen years old. He’d been jumping into war zones and training grounds and who knows where else, ever since. This was his last parachute jump. I could see the emotion on his expressive face.
At dinner, I asked Ernesto Guevara how he and our team leader, the former Green Beret, first met. The meeting took place at Chacón 162 a few years before, he said. The details came out later while we were driving around with the interpreter.
“A few years back,” the interpreter said, “when Fidel was still alive, the team leader came into the bar. We knew he was an American. We thought, okay, he’s either here to kill Fidel or he’s an MMA [mixed martial arts] fighter.”
Everyone laughed. The interpreter continued.
“We had the Cuban intelligence services ask [the team leader] a few questions.”
More laughter.
“We’ve all been friends ever since.” One person in the group handed me a business card. It read: Dirección de Inteligencia. Cuban intelligence services. The name of an agent, should I need to call.
In Havana, Ernesto Guevara took us to La Casa del Habano, the legendary cigar manufacturer and smoking club where his father and Castro and their inner circle of advisors would meet to smoke cigars and plot the downfall of the United States. The room’s wood-paneled walls were covered with museum quality photographs, iconic images—including the time when the world came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war—and was filled with European-style antique furniture, velvet chairs, bronze and marble statues. Rare luxuries in a country where I’d seen people riding horses for transportation, bareback and with ropes, not bridles.
The whiskey began to flow, and in the haze of cigar smoke, a rowdy discussion ensued. Everyone was enjoying themselves. Then the conversation turned to politics. Ernesto Guevara began speaking of the ills of capitalism, and he said that the benefits of socialism were worth fighting for. Waugh, never short on earnest opinions, cried bullshit.
“I fought for the revolution in Angola,” Guevara said proudly.
“I spent my entire life in the military and the CIA,” Waugh retorted.
Silence. You could hear a pin drop. Fair is fair: Ernesto Guevara has good reason to harbor ill will toward the CIA. The CIA trained the commandos that killed his father.
On the way back to the house where we were staying, our team leader asked Waugh, “What the fuck, Billy? Why’d you have to say that?”
“I’m too goddamn old to hide the obvious,” Waugh said. “Besides, he can read all about me on the internet. Google ‘William D. Waugh.’”
“They don’t have internet in Cuba,” said our team leader, shaking his head.
Driving through Havana, I noticed dozens of people gathered in a park, seated on benches around a banyan tree. It was around 1:00 a.m. “What are they doing?” I asked our driver.
“Wi-Fi hotspot,” the driver said, explaining that the Cuban government offers internet access for a brief amount of time, on a certain day of the week, late at night. People who want a censored glimpse of the outside world must really work for it in a communist police state.
Our team was staying at a private home billed as an Airbnb, seemingly implausible in a country where citizens haven’t owned private property since 1959. The place was surrounded by concertina wire and made me think of a CIA safe house. A guard sat out front, watching our every move. I asked him what he was protecting.
“Lots of valuable things inside,” he said.
Epilogue
In the spring of 2017, I traveled to Billy Waugh’s house in Florida for lunch. Lew Merletti, the former director of the U.S. Secret Service, drove up from down south to join us. Waugh and Merletti are old friends, going back to the days of Special Forces, when Merletti was just twenty-one years old and Waugh was already a veteran MACV-SOG warrior whose reputation for ruthless bravery preceded him.
The backbone of the conversation was Special Forces. Each man believes his best qualities are a by-product of training and fighting for the U.S. Army Green Berets. After leaving the military, Lew Merletti spent the rest of his career protecting presidents of the United States from assassination—national-security defense. Billy Waugh spent the rest of his life conducting covert-action operations for presidents of the United States—national-security offense. The two work hand in glove.
On the walls of Billy Waugh’s Florida home there are so many medals, framed commendations, awards, and honors that the eye doesn’t know where to land. Numerous of these medals and citations are from the CIA, and as my eyes locked in on one of them, I thought about something the former director of the CIA’s Counter terrorist Center, Cofer Black, said to me during an interview in Virginia in 2016.
“Good that you’re writing about Billy [Waugh],” he said. Then he chuckled.
“What’s funny?” I asked. We were eating dinner in an Irish pub just a few miles from CIA headquarters. The feeling I had was that there were spies everywhere.
“You’ll only ever know a hundredth of the things Billy accomplished for us,” said Black cryptically.
I told him I’d learned more than he might think. In addition to interviewing dozens of Waugh’s colleagues and friends, I’d examined thousands of pages of declassified documents at the National Archives and obtained hundreds more through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Cofer Black chuckled again, sphinxlike.
“Most of what Billy Waugh did was never written down,” he said. “Almost everything was on verbal [orders] from someone like me, to someone like him.”
Things stay hidden this way, Black was saying.
On the walls of Waugh’s home, one framed award—perhaps more so than the others—spoke to this truth. I’d seen it before, during an interview I conducted with Waugh at his home in May 2015. It was from the CIA and included the Agency’s Seal Medallion, a Citation of Excellence, and an eleven-inch Persian style knife. It read: “The Assassin: In Thanks for Your Friendship, Professionalism and Protection.”
I asked Billy Waugh to tell me more about the award.
“You know I can’t do that,” he said again.
Waugh can’t. Others did. In the fall of 2001—in the chaotic wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and with fear of another attack looming—after reviewing the Memorandum of Notification that gave the CIA unprecedented new direct-action authorities, Congress asked the question: Is this enough? Senior Intelligence Service officers at the CIA made a radical decision at this critical moment in U.S. history. It was time for the CIA to pull from its Office of Strategic Services roots, to develop a team that could scour the globe: to surprise, kill, and vanish as necessary. According to participants, the team regularly discussed the need to be “ruthless, relentless, and remorseless” in facing a Nazi-like enemy.
This idea for this radical unit was drafted into a Memorandum of Notification. Known only to a select few, the unit was informally called the Stalker Team. “The idea was taken to President Bush and he signed off on it,” says an individual directly involved. The man chosen to lead the Stalker Team was a veteran of the Special Activities Division, Ground Branch, someone who’d risen up through the ranks at the CIA to a Senior Intelligence Service position of great prestige. He vacated his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley so quickly that many coworkers erroneously believed he had resigned.
The Stalker Team had roughly twelve members. Two were women; one of them spoke five languages fluently and became known among the group as the femme fatale. Two CIA targeting officers were assigned to the team and a third targeter was brought over from the National Security Agency to assist. All members used code names.
Orders were concise: “make book” on a set of individual targets around the world, some of whom were hiding out in mud structures inside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in northwestern Pakistan; others were hiding in plain sight, in apartment buildings located inside first-world, NATO-partner countries. Using reconnaissance and surveillance techniques developed and perfected by the CIA over decades, the Stalker Team created dossiers on viable targets: names, pseudonyms, locations, workplaces, routines, habits, and more. The unit then constructed alternative options for when a “go” order was given: compromise (blackmail), snatch-and-grab, sabotage, or preemptive neutralization.
“Our mission was to locate targets and stalk them,” a team member told me in 2018. “If called upon, to disrupt their operation by going after them personally. Duct-tape them and carry them off. Capture, detain, question. If necessary, neutralize.” Most on the Stalker Team were long-serving members of the Special Activities Division. “In the old days, SAD were knuckle draggers and snake eaters. Second-class citizens as operations officers. Not anymore. The [current] DDO [deputy director of operations] is a former knuckle dragger. So are a lot of guys on the seventh floor—SAD-born and -raised. Came up through the ranks. You know, the Agency used to be gun-phobic. Not anymore. The days of Europe and cocktail parties in Argentina are over. It’s a different world now. Terrorism was the catalyst for changing the playing field.”
Starting in 2002, the work of the Stalker Team was so secret and compartmented it needed its own cover story inside the CIA, and so an office was constructed behind a series of doors inside Budget and Finance. One day, CIA director George Tenet stopped by to discuss the Stalker Team’s hidden-hand operations. He noticed a placard fastened to an exterior door. Enigmatic if not ironic, it read ACCOUNTS PAYABLE.
A discussion ensued. Many of the targets being pursued by the Stalker Team were prominent individuals and leaders in their communities—foreign nationals who’d been planning and orchestrating terror acts against Americans, some since the early 1980s. As far as the unit was concerned, these accounts were now overdue.
The details of the program remain highly classified, and the only known target that the Stalker Team was looking at who is now confirmed dead is Hezbollah’s former chief of operations, Imad Mugniyah. The identity and fate of the other targets remain obscured, as intended, because the most successful covert-action operations are designed and orchestrated to be plausibly denied.....
source with many pics at back of file
http://lander.odessa.ua/doc/Surprise,%20Kill,%20Vanish%20by%20Annie%20Jacobsen.pdf
