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on September eleven, on the sixth floor getting ready to go to Thailand on a drug thing. Somebody watching TV said, ‘Whoa, look at that damn pilot…flew that plane right into the building.’ Then the second plane hit and the alarm went off. There were two other planes missing. They sent out the word to evacuate the building. I have never seen the CIA move so fast. You should have seen the traffic on Highway 123. All the people were doing ninety miles per hour heading out of DC, and the CIA was trying to join the traffic. People over there really hate the CIA. They don’t know anything about the CIA. They really didn’t know the manacles we had on our wrists. The CIA wasn’t killing anyone. Their people might be disappearing, but it was other governments doing that. They blame the CIA for a lot of underhanded deaths, but it wasn’t us.”
    The chief of the CIA’s Special Activities Division called Billy the next day and asked him to start recruiting contractors to be inserted into Afghanistan for paramilitary actions against bin Laden and company. “Cofer Black got his orders from an all-night meeting at Camp David. He flew down there and when he came back, you could tell that things were different. They wanted people killed. They weren’t going to fire off some missile and hit some friggin’ dust pile. They wanted some dead bodies on the ground.”
    â€œNo-Good Cheatin’ Shithead”
    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