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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