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antsy.” While he was operating in the Sudan, a rich, exiled Saudi named Osama bin Laden decided to relocate there and became just one of many miscreants Billy was tasked to babysit.
    An Islamic government supported by Iranian largesse controlled Sudan. The well-educated Islamist Hassan al-Turabi served as vice president and was responsible for the country’s policy of benevolence toward militant Islamic groups, dissident religious figures, and terrorists. He shielded himself behind President Omar Hasan al-Bashir. In 1991, an odd collection of fugitives, criminals, and expats had gathered in the Sudan, including such well-known personalities as Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, and the blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Representatives and cells of most major Islamic groups also had offices in Khartoum, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and others. After bin Laden moved to Sudan following the first Gulf War, he set up ventures like a sesame-seed export business, started large construction projects like the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, and began to gather around him the nucleus of what would come to be known as al-Qaeda. He also set up a training camp fifteen miles north of Khartoum in Omdurman.
    Billy got to know bin Laden’s routines and habits very well. He thinks of how things could have been different if he had been allowed to kill bin Laden during the Sudan years. He holds up his fingers as if holding a bullet to make his point. “Before September eleven, lawyers owned the place. If you had to pee, you had to see a lawyer. People were running scared. George Tenet was not doing anything aggressive at all. The problem was the oversight committee. Tenet wanted to do stuff but they wouldn’t let him do it. If we wanted to KIA anyone, we had to get the permission of senators and congressmen.
    â€œWe could have killed bin Laden innumerable times. Every day I put in fifteen contingency plans for killing him. Our idea was to kill him and dump him over the Iranian embassy wall. Make ’em look bad. As lax as they were in their embassy, we could have just propped him up against their wall. We would just dump him there and call the Sudanese and say, ‘Hey, there was shooting out at the Iranian embassy. You better go take a look.’ I put that in a plan; they said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ There was one guy who loved the idea as soon as it was sent forward—Cofer Black. He was told, ‘We are not going to do that.’” Billy pauses, thinking about the lost opportunity. “Just one damn ten-cent bullet.”
    This absolute ban against extrajudicial killings would remain in effect until late 1998 when, in reaction to the bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa, President Clinton signed a carefully worded series of memorandums of notification, or MONs, that would accept the use of lethal force by the CIA and its proxies in their attempts to capture and bring bin Laden to justice. It did not include a direct order to kill bin Laden but was written with the full understanding that his death as an accidental byproduct in a snatch operation was an acceptable risk. Clinton issued further MONs to include bin Laden’s associates, but all were very carefully worded to stress that the pretext of any mission would be to bring them to justice, not to simply end their lives. A direct order to kill would have required a “lethal finding,” and it wouldn’t be until after 9/11 that the legal barriers to presidentially authorized targeted assassination would be removed.
    Billy never expected that bin Laden would become any more or less dangerous than the rest of the rogues’ gallery found in Khartoum in the early 1990s, and he never imagined that he would finally get his wish and be sent with orders to kill the tall Saudi in the fall of 2001. Then September 11, 2001, changed the perspective on America’s willingness to kill its enemies.
    â€œI was in the CIA