The special-ops legend who tracked bin Laden

Billy Waugh cheated death for a living. The Green Beret and CIA operative earned mythical status in the military and intelligence communities—and eight Purple Hearts—for a career that spanned conflicts from the Korean War to the war in Afghanistan. Waugh helped train counterinsurgency units in Vietnam, where he was shot in the head and stripped naked by enemy soldiers who took him for dead. In the 1990s, he monitored the then little-known radical Osama bin Laden in Sudan, at times from close enough range that, he said, “I could have killed him with a rock.” He tracked the Venezuelan terrorist leader known as Carlos the Jackal, who was captured in 1994; later, in Afghanistan’s remote Tora Bora region, he hunted Osama bin Laden again. “For 50 years in 64 countries, I have sought and destroyed my country’s enemies,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “wherever they hide.”

Born in Bastrop, Texas, Waugh “was drawn to the military at an early age,” said Task & Purpose. At 15 he tried to hitchhike to California, believing he could enlist there and serve in World

War II. Instead, he joined the Army after high school and was sent to Korea with an airborne unit. In battle there, “for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home,” he wrote. He trained as a Green Beret before serving in Vietnam, where he worked with an elite unit “conducting some of the most dangerous and secretive missions.” In 1971 he became the first U.S. soldier to execute a HALO parachute drop, which involves jumping from a high altitude and deploying the chute at the last minute to evade detection. He left the military in 1972 and took a job working for the U.S. Postal Service, said The Washington Post. But “it wasn’t for him,” and when he was recruited by a former CIA officer to train Libyan commandos, he jumped at the chance to return to action.

Waugh “spent decades hunting terrorists across the globe,” said Stars and Stripes. After the 9/11 attacks, he “was one of the first Americans sent into Afghanistan” to seek al Qaida operatives. By then he was 71, but his taste for high-wire adventure hadn’t dimmed. “Once you get used to that, you’re not about to quit,” he said in 2011. “How could you want to do anything else?”