The past few days on the obit front have been fairly quiet, but I do want to catch up on a couple:
Billy Waugh, legendary Special Forces and CIA operative. He was 93.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Eventually, they talked. Mr. Waugh was still quite fit, and the next day, Mr. Black agreed to send him to Afghanistan, reasoning that his experience in unconventional warfare might help a young commander there.
During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.
“I was cold, filthy and stinky,” he wrote about his final days with the team, “but I was one of roughly 150 men who can say they conducted combat on the ground in Afghanistan during the initial — and pivotal — phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
Edward Koren, “New Yorker” cartoonist.