Licensed to Kill (4 page)

In mid-November 2001, Billy Waugh and his team of hired contractors journeyed to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in the belly of a massive air force cargo plane. Billy believed he was beginning his last war, perhaps his final mission. At seventy-one, he was the oldest operating CIA contractor with combat experience. The group of men he traveled with intended to find and kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. They had little expectation of or interest in taking them alive.

President Bush had signed a secret presidential “finding” that authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden and his lieutenants; however, to make sure there was no ambiguity, Cofer Black asked Gary Schroen, the leader of the first CIA team into Afghanistan, to send back bin Laden's head in a box. Billy remembers those hectic days in September. “Bush told the Agency, ‘I want dead bodies.' Cofer told him he would have flies on their eyeballs within a week.”

The scale of the 9/11 attacks had forced a dramatic change from Clinton's previous standing orders to allow use of lethal force in operations designed to bring bin Laden to justice. According to Billy, “Bush gave us a license to kill. Did he sign a license to kill? No, but we had the words out of his mouth, and the lawyers just had to fill out the paperwork. You will never see that document. I have a Gamma clearance, and I will never see that document as long as I live.”

George Tenet and Cofer Black had promised President Bush they could effectively hunt down bin Laden's group and topple the Taliban by sending in teams from the CIA's Special Activities Division and Special Forces A-teams. The problem was the CIA didn't have enough trained people available to back up that promise, so they turned to their time-honored cohorts: contractors and the mercenary proxy army. CIA operations officer Gary Schroen was pulled out of his retirement prep program and dispatched to the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan to hire a mercenary proxy army in the form of the Northern Alliance. Billy Waugh signed on to help other CIA officers assemble more teams to join Schroen and his posse of bin Laden hunters inside Afghanistan.

In 2001, no American corporations specialized solely in the provision of trained-up ex-military operators: Blackwater Security, Triple Canopy, and similar firms sprang up only after post-9/11 military deployments—primarily Iraq—created a massive market for this type of service. So instead of being able to recruit through the equivalent of a military services temp agency, Billy had to rely on his own contacts and the old-boy network, drawing some of his team away from active duty and the rest from ex-military independent contractors he knew. “I was hired to recruit sixty-four men around the Fort Bragg area—sixty-four men,” he adds for emphasis. “I went down to Delta and got twenty, and then I got ten of the people I had known before that had been in Delta. Then I got some SEALs. I grabbed some from SEAL Team 6. There's big difference between SEALs and SF. That's why now a lot of them don't want the job. They [SEALs] want short missions. They don't want to hang out six months out of the year. My first pick is always SF. I show them a film and I ask them if they can do what they see on this film. Can they not only swim but shoot underwater? Can they do night operations, and jog for seven miles? I remind them that in Afghanistan, O
₂
[oxygen] is short above five grand [5,000 feet]. I look for language; the SEALs don't have language. The SEALs just want to go in, blow a lot of people away, talk about it, write it up, and plan for the next mission. SF wants to go in and stay. That's why we recruited SF.”

Billy is visibly proud of his accomplishment in such a short period of time. “I got 'em because I talked to Commander Jerry Boykin. I got about twenty or twenty-one. These guys come trained in HALO [high altitude–low opening parachute qualification], in good shape, and qualified. They all turned Green Badge immediately. They took a shortened version of the polygraph. I lost three out of thirty, mostly because of drugs. First, we make sure they are in shape, so they need a PT test. One of the best guys was over sixty and has worked for the Agency for forty-five years.” After three decades of being restrained, Billy was readying for his chance to go to Afghanistan and kill America's most lethal foe.

During the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan, the CIA fielded between eighty and a hundred Green Badgers and Blue Badgers. Billy had managed to round up five dozen independent contractors and sheep-dipped military; the rest came from the Special Activities Division of the CIA. They were to carry in an initial infusion of cash to buy loyalty from warlords and influential leaders, gather intelligence about enemy positions, and search for Osama bin Laden and his associates. They would also interrogate prisoners, map out the intelligence landscape, and deal with the ever-changing alliances and allegiances of the Afghan fighters. Billy Waugh had convinced the higher-ups at the CIA that he could help coordinate between the CIA officers and the SF teams. What the CIA and Special Forces accomplished in Afghanistan began a new era of joint operations where military, intelligence, paramilitary, indigenous, mercenary, and even civilian contractors were working in unison with full lethal capabilities, something Billy hadn't seen since his days in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

After a week in Tashkent sorting out logistics, Billy's team flew to Bagram, the military airfield north of Kabul, and headed toward the Ariana Hotel. The Ariana had been used for the Taliban's intelligence services, but with the Taliban gone, the CIA set up headquarters there. Billy's tools of the trade were both high-tech and low-tech. He had brought one rucksack with cold-weather gear, an AK-47 with seven magazines, a “shitload” of grenades, and an H&K 40 mm grenade launcher. He also carried the AN/PRC 112 survival radio, digital cameras, a handheld GPS, an old compass, and a bone-handled Old Timer knife. He also had a few thousand dollars stuffed in his pockets for personal spending money.

On December 1, Billy's seventy-second birthday, he and his small team of contractors headed south by road from the Ariana Hotel with a small group of newly hired Afghan bodyguards. The CIA team had been given money to hire a thousand or so local fighters when they got near their destination point in the southern Logar Province. They then planned to rendezvous with Special Forces Operation Detachment Alpha (ODA) 594, who would train the new hires for combat and support operations. Special Forces ODA 594 comprised a twelve-man team, plus an air force TAC-P controller to coordinate air strikes. One of Billy's tasks was to make sure the SF team did not mix targets and hit Afghan friendlies by mistake.

Once a target was identified, there was a check for any friendlies or civilians in the area, then deconfliction with other units, and finally the okay to kill was granted. Air strikes using JDAMs, or smart bombs, were called in by using GPS coordinates, laser designator binoculars called SOFLAMs (Special Operations Forces Laser Marker), or by “talking in the pilots”—just giving a series of visual indicators that gave the pilot an accurate visual sighting. Hellfire missiles were mounted on the Predator UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), giving remote-control kill authority to operators using joysticks and firing buttons, as in a video game. It was all done over the radio, and the man actually pushing the Fire button was sitting in an air-conditioned trailer thousands of miles away.

Even though they were prepared to give effective coordination for surgical air strikes, Billy still did not feel like they had sufficient support, since the bulk of American air power was concentrated around the battle of Tora Bora at that time. “We moved from Kabul to Paktia Province. We stayed there for about twenty days, and then blasted into Gardez. The Taliban had no idea what was happening. We didn't get the air we wanted. The air [assets] were up in Tora Bora. We couldn't do the combat that we wanted.”

Heavy combat was thankfully not necessary, since the Taliban was quickly folding up across the country with little resistance. They had already fled Gardez when Billy and his team rolled up in a twenty-five-vehicle convoy on January 4, 2002, and began to settle into a compound east of town. Their job was to create a conveniently titled “Eastern Alliance” mercenary force, even though no such thing existed. The other function was to gather as much intelligence as quickly as possible—essentially setting up a network of intelligence assets, as well as arresting and shaking down Taliban supporters fingered by paid informants. Billy's group set up shop in a large mud-walled compound, and he gave orders to a local strongman to have his Afghans threaten any media that came within three kilometers.

The mountain pass between Gardez and Khost crawled with Taliban, and Billy's team began hunting down groups of fighters. They used phone intercepts, Predators with night vision, old-fashioned turncoats, and night surveillance using the latest in infrared imagery. ODA 594 spent their days training the Afghans in weapons use, as well as infantry and small unit tactics. They all spent much downtime listening to Billy tell war stories about Cambodia and Laos—the good old days when the CIA worked directly with Special Forces and when hunting down enemies and killing them with mercenary armies was standard operating procedure.

By January 15, the Afghan proxy forces were up to three hundred Afghans. General Lodin, a Pashtun commander who had worked with the CIA in the 1980s, had volunteered his son, who showed up with thirty friends. “It's hard to get good information out of these lying-ass Afghan warlords. We worked with a bunch of lying bastards. The old man [General] Lodin was in charge and his son Zia Lodin worked as a captain for us. He was straight up about it: ‘I am here for the money. I don't like those people in the Panjshir and I only like my people.'”

The elders in Gardez had supplied about a hundred local men, and two commanders named Kabir and Zaibdullah headed up a contingent of one hundred seventy. Billy describes Commander Zaibdullah as a “no-good cheatin' shithead,” a well-paid ally “who was not to be trusted under any circumstances.” Almost immediately the Afghans under Kabir had begun to act suspiciously, and the team felt in jeopardy.

Billy was used to dealing with criminals and warlords, but it soon became obvious that they were not going to catch bin Laden in this murky world of shifting and dual allegiances. The CIA estimates that it handed out $70 million in cash to win the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan and considered it a bargain, even though the loyalty the money was supposed to buy did not lead to the death or capture of bin Laden or many of his minions.

The Afghans hired by the CIA and trained by Special Forces also included Zahim Khan and Pacha Khan Zadran, a thuggish-looking warlord who would later call in a U.S. air strike to target a delegation of Pashtun tribal elders on their way to congratulate Hamid Karzai in Kabul. It was the duplicity and character of America's Afghan proxies that ensured that the bulk of the Arab, Pakistani, and Uzbek jihadis would slip away, and that bin Laden would never be found.

Billy remembers the hardships of Afghanistan, but his best memories remain of the new generation of contractors and paramilitaries he got to know. “What I have noticed is that the new lads of the paramilitary are stronger, better-trained, more able with communications, have wonderful gear, can shoot straighter, and generally outshine the old-school lads…. However, their on-the-ground decision making has become anon-occurring event. Commo is just too good, and all decisions are rendered up the chain of command.

“In my time before we had all these radios and high-tech communications, decisions were rendered by old-schoolers in the field without fear of wrath from the hierarchy. But these days, decisions are strictly arrived at by the same hierarchy,” some several hundred miles from the combat zone.

Much to his disappointment, Billy's time in Afghanistan never did bring him face-to-face with his old nemesis, Osama bin Laden. Even the locals he worked with seemed too eager to take his money and too reticent to root out the enemy. He would have preferred the heat of the Cambodian jungle, as the cold up in the mountains made his joints ache. He smelled bad and began to think that maybe he was, as he puts it, “too old for this shit.” After two months in-country, Billy Waugh said farewell to ODA 594, heading home in mid-January. It was going to be up to somebody else to capture Billy's nemesis.

Enter Blackwater

The use of contractors in the War on Terror started with Billy Waugh's five dozen recruits, an ad hoc paramilitary force of firepower and expertise whose rapid deployment filled an important role in helping the American offensive adapt quickly to the unconventional terrain. As it had done in Laos and other covert conflicts, America had effectively “outsourced” aspects of the War on Terror to retired military and local indigenous mercenaries. After the decimation of the Taliban, the CIA would be working to set up an extensive intelligence network in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help hunt down Osama bin Laden and remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA's decision to hire a corporation to bolster personal protection teams for CIA officers would catalyze one company's first foray into the private security industry. The initial $5.4-million six-month contract began Blackwater's transformation from a minor steel-target manufacturer and shooting-range into a massive security conglomerate.

Before 9/11, Erik Prince was working to make his business profitable. Although Prince had grown up immersed in a world of business acquisition and expansion, the original Blackwater model seemed to cater more to Erik's personal interests than pure profit. In 1997, Erik had broken ground on his Blackwater Training Center, at that time a six-thousand-acre property with a shooting range designed to offer specialized training for military and police. Growth was slow. From 1998 until 2000, only six people worked in the training department, and Prince often had to dip into his own pocket just to make payroll. In early 2001, Prince began Blackwater Target Systems to build an innovative self-resetting steel target. He managed to turn a slight profit, but business conditions were not entirely favorable when one of his first employees, Jamie Smith, initially suggested Erik start a new division specializing in providing security.