Hunting the Jackal

by Waugh, Billy; Keown, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780060564094
• ISBN10: 0060564091
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-26
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Billy Waugh is a Special Forces and CIA legend, and in Hunting the Jackal he allows unprecedented access to the shadowy but vital world he has inhabited for more than fifty years. From deep inside the suffocating jungles of Southeast Asia to the fetid streets of Khartoum to the freezing high desert of Afghanistan, Waugh chronicles U.S. Special Operations through the extraordinary experiences of his singular life. He has worked in more than sixty countries, hiding in the darkest shadows and most desolate corners to fight those who plot America's demise. Waugh made his mark in places few want to consider and fewer still would choose to inhabit. In remarkable detail he recounts his participation in some of the most important events in American Special Operations history, including his own pivotal role in the previously untold story of the CIA's involvement in the capture of the infamous Carlos the Jackal. Waugh's work in helping the CIA bring down Carlos the Jackal provides a riveting and suspenseful account of the loneliness and adrenaline common to real-life espionage. He provides a point-by-point breakdown of the indefatigable work necessary to detain the world's first celebrity terrorist. No synopsis can adequately describe Waugh's experiences. He spent seven and a half years in Vietnam, many of them behind enemy lines as part of SOG, a top secret group of elite commandos. He was tailed by Usama bin Laden's unfriendly bodyguards while jogging through the streets of Khartoum, Sudan, at 3 A.M. And, at the age of seventy-two, he marched through the frozen high plains of Afghanistan as one of a select number of CIA operatives who hit the ground as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Waugh came face-to-face with bin Laden in Khartoum in 1991 and again in 1992 as one of the first CIA operatives assigned to watch the al Qaeda leader. Waugh describes his daily surveillance routine with clear-eyed precision. Without fanfare, fear, or chance of detection, he could have killed the 9/11 mastermind on the dirty streets of Khartoum had he been given the authority to do so. No man is more qualified to chronicle America's fight against its enemies -- from communism to terrorism -- over the past half-century. In Hunting the Jackal, Billy Waugh has emerged from the shadows and folds of history to write a memoir of an extraordinary life for extraordinary times.

Author Biography

Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN the Magazine.

Excerpts

Hunting the Jackal
A Special Forces and CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies

Chapter One

As I waited to die in a rice paddy inBong Son, South Vietnam, on June 18, 1965, with green North VietnameseArmy (NVA) tracers searing past my naked, immobile body,my mind was not occupied by fear or regret. No, I drifted in andout of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds,leeches feasting on every open wound, with one thought jabbing atmy semilucid brain: Damn, my military career is finished. I'll never seecombat again.

Through eleven years in Special Forces and twenty-sevenmonths in Southeast Asia, I had never been bashful when it came tocombat. I lived for it, studied it, and understood it. I knew the risksand did not fear death. Still, I had never come close to being in aspot like this -- flat on my back, shot to hell, lying behind a meagerbamboo stand that provided pathetic protection. I was out of ammunitionand gear. I had taken bullets to my knees, an arm, an ankle,a foot, and my forehead. The bones of my right foot and anklesat there fully exposed, doing me absolutely no good while causinga breathtaking amount of pain. The force of one of the bullets haddriven the sole of my right jungle boot through my foot and ankleand into my tibia. I could not crawl, let alone walk. The enemy hadalready gotten to me, stripping me and leaving me for dead. In thisstate, I apparently was not deemed worthy of the extra bullet thatwould have clinched my death. I was all alone, not a friendly insight. There was no assurance that I would ever leave this bloodyfield or see the world from an upright position again.

And still the NVA kept firing. We had pissed the bastards offsomething fierce, and they weren't going to stop until every lastone of us was as dead as I appeared to be. Their infernal greentracers were whizzing over my head, mocking my defenselessness,popping like cannon fire around my head as they broke the soundbarrier. The kerosene smell and blast-furnace heat of the napalmblanketed that rice paddy, brought there by the Air Force F-4CPhantom and Navy F-8 jets screaming above.

When I took stock of my own dire predicament, peeringthrough the now-crusted blood from the wound that had torn openmy forehead, comprehending my utter nakedness, wondering howand why I continued to live, I began to ask myself a different question:When all this is over, how in the hell am I ever going to con myway back to the battlefield?

Getting into the battlefield was all that ever mattered to me. Fromthe moment I joined the U.S. Army as an eighteen-year-old, I havenever been content to sit back and hear of others' exploits. My desireto be among the troops at the point of attack struck me first inearly 1951, when we were at war in Korea and I was stuck in the82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I had hadmore than enough of the 82nd Abn. Div. and was tired of statesideduty, so in April 1951 I reenlisted for combat in Korea, whichmeans I signed on for another three years of service just to get myass out of the United States and into the war zone.

I didn't like the Army at all until I got a taste of combat in Korea.I advanced from a private first class to an infantry platoonsergeant while in Korea. More important, I learned what mademen tick, and what combat was all about. For the first time in mymilitary life, I felt completely at home. I could have asked for amore forgiving landscape than Korea, which was like no otherplace. We'd climb a hill, with great expectations of meeting the enemy,only to arrive at the top to see another, slightly larger hilllooming. All the trees were stripped for firewood, and cold penetratedmy bones. I was only twenty-one years old, so I handled thecold much better than later in life, but we Texans and Floridians inKorea were continuously cold. As far as wars go, Vietnam, with itsinsufferable humidity and constant heat, was much more to myliking.

Upon returning from Korea in December 1952, I entered Officers' Candidate School in Fort Benning. During the twelfth or thirteenthweek, I contracted malaria and spent a week in the hospital.To return to OCS, I would have had to revert back to the eighth week, since my class was too far advanced for me to catch up with it.I refused this move and was sent to Germany as a sergeant first classand assigned to the 5th Infantry Division as a platoon sergeant. Itwas during my stay in Germany, sometime in 1953, that I read aboutSpecial Forces moving a unit to Bad Tolz, Germany. I began politickingfor a transfer to SF, and I made a trip to Bad Tolz to see formyself. Once I learned what these fine men -- the fittest and mostcommitted group I had ever seen -- were to become, I knew it wasthe only place for me. I immediately cranked an intertheater transferand had it granted, to the 10th Special Forces in Bad Tolz. Fromthe moment I joined those fine and fit men, I knew I was there tostay. It was, by far, the best move I ever made in my life. I mightleave Special Forces, but Special Forces would never leave me.

So as I lay on the ground in the Bong Son rice paddy, I was forcedto imagine my life without the Special Forces, without combat, withoutan enemy to fight. I didn't like the thoughts that raced throughmy head, so I shoved them out of my mind and went to work thinkingabout what it would take to get my body back together and backwhere it belonged, on the field of combat ...

Hunting the Jackal
A Special Forces and CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies. Copyright © by Billy Waugh. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Hunting the Jackal: A Special Forces and CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies by Billy Waugh, Tim Keown
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