From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Billy Waugh, 93, ‘Godfather of the Green Berets,’ Is Dead   
   By Richard Sandomir, April 14, 2023, NY Times   
      
   The New York Times once described him as a “former C.I.A. paramilitary   
   officer who seems to have cut quite a swashbuckling path through the ‘back   
   alleys,’ as they say, of half the world.”   
      
   “He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire,   
   as far as he could get, living large and defending his country,” Cofer   
   Black, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, who supervised Mr. Waugh, said   
   in a phone interview.   
      
   Mr. Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence   
   community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he first arrived in Laos   
   in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War, as part of a United States   
   military advisory mission    
   called White Star.   
      
   Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency   
   forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho   
   Chi Minh Trail, which required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000   
   feet or more, he said,    
   free-falling in the nighttime to the lowest possible height before popping the   
   chute, to avoid enemy detection.   
      
   And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the   
   Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran   
   reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and   
   Cambodia.   
      
   “There was no rest at SOG, only war recon, rescue, sleep,” Mr. Waugh told   
   Annie Jacobsen in her 2019 book, “Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History   
   of C.I.A. Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins.”   
      
   In June 1965, Mr. Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his   
   team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along   
   the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in   
   a rice paddy. Thinking    
   he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.   
      
   “I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot   
   wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my   
   semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Hunting the   
   Jackal.” “Damn, my military    
   career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.”   
      
   He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis.   
   Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Captain Davis helped Mr.   
   Waugh crawl to a helicopter.   
      
   Those actions by Captain Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was   
   belatedly presented to him by President Biden this year. Mr. Waugh received   
   the Silver Star.   
      
   In a summary of the battle that he wrote in 2016, Mr. Waugh recalled Captain   
   Davis’s heroism, saying, “I only have to close my eyes to vividly recall   
   the gallantry.”   
      
   William Dawson Waugh was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Bastrop, Texas, a small city   
   southeast of Austin, to John and Lillian Waugh. His father was a railroad   
   brakeman who died when Billy was about 10; his mother was a substitute teacher.   
      
   Meeting two local soldiers who had been wounded in World War II inspired   
   Billy, at 15, to hitchhike to Los Angeles to enlist in the Marines; he had   
   heard that he could join them at that age. But he got only as far as Las   
   Cruces, N.M., where, penniless    
   and without identification, he was arrested. He called his mother, who wired   
   him bus fare home.   
      
   “When I got there,” he wrote in “Hunting the Jackal,” “my mother   
   gave me a lengthy lecture and a firm belt whipping. Also, a clear set of   
   orders: Get back in school, or else.”   
      
   He enlisted in the Army in 1948 but did not taste combat until he joined the   
   fighting in the Korean War three years later. He rose from private first class   
   to infantry platoon sergeant. “I learned what made men tick, and what combat   
   was all about,”    
   he wrote. “For the first time in my military life, I felt completely at   
   home.”   
      
   After his Korean service, he was transferred to Germany, stationed in the   
   Bavarian town of Bad Tolz, where he lobbied successfully to join the elite   
   Special Forces.   
      
   He retired from the Army in 1972, with the rank of sergeant major, and worked   
   for two years for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail, which bored   
   him.   
      
   Then a call came in 1977 to return to action in a murky assignment —   
   training Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libyan commandos in infantry tactics —   
   and he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t a C.I.A. job, but one organized by a   
   former agency officer,    
   Edwin Wilson, who would later serve nearly 22 years in prison for selling   
   explosives to Libya before his sentence was overturned.   
      
   After the Libyan mission, Mr. Waugh became an independent contractor for the   
   C.I.A. In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who,   
   long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was already on the agency’s   
   radar as the founder    
   of Al Qaeda. Mr. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.   
      
   “At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially   
   high-level assignment, and Khartoum was so completely saturated with   
   miscreants and no-good bastards that my hunting wasn’t limited to this one   
   tall Saudi exile.”   
      
   Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within   
   30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.   
      
   He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as   
   Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before   
   French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.   
      
   Mr. Waugh boasted that he could have killed Carlos as well. Mr. Black, who was   
   the C.I.A. station chief in Khartoum, didn’t think he was serious.   
      
   “Billy was larger than life,” Mr. Black said in the phone interview. “I   
   remember him stating that. ‘Yes, fine, Billy, that’s not your job.’   
   Sometimes he went off the reservation. He could be a force multiplier, but he   
   could also be a force    
   pain in the ass.”   
      
   After 9/11, Mr. Waugh, who was then 71, lobbied to be sent to Afghanistan.   
      
   “Billy got a folding chair and set it up opposite the entrance to my office   
   and told my office manager, ‘I’m going to sit here until Cofer talks to   
   me,’” said Mr. Black, who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist   
   Center at the time.   
      
      
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