Billy Waugh joined the US Army before Korea, went to Special Forces as soon as there was a Special Forces to go to, and then simply never stopped. In Vietnam he ran night raids and trained Vietnamese and Cambodian irregulars against the Ho Chi Minh Trail; in 1965, shot through the knee, foot, wrist and forehead in a single ambush, he was left for dead in a body bag until a medic saw him move.
He came back and kept going. As command sergeant major of MACV-SOG he made the first combat high-altitude low-opening parachute jump in history — a night HALO drop into Laos in 1970. He left the Army in 1972 with eight Purple Hearts and a Silver Star.
Then he delivered mail. For five years he carried a postal route in Texas, because nobody had yet invented the career that suited him. In 1977 the CIA did: he joined the Special Activities Division and spent the next quarter-century doing the same work in civilian clothes.
In Khartoum in the early 1990s he ran surveillance on two men. One was Carlos the Jackal, whose movements Waugh's team mapped until the French could take him. The other was a tall Saudi living in a villa on a quiet street who liked to play volleyball in the evenings — Osama bin Laden. Waugh jogged past the house daily and photographed him. He asked permission to kill him; the answer was no.
Ten years later, on 26 September 2001, he was seventy-one years old and one of the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan, attached to an A-team, and he fought at Tora Bora looking for the same man. He retired from the CIA in 2005, wrote a memoir called Hunting the Jackal, and died in 2023 at ninety-three. His ashes were scattered in a place the agency has not specified.
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