Billy Waugh, “godfather of the Green Berets,” is dead at 93

Billy Waugh, a near-legendary covert operative who honed his skills in unconventional warfare during the Vietnam War, helped the CIA hunt down terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden, and, in his 70s, fought in Afghanistan, died April 4. He was 93.

His death was confirmed in a statement on Twitter by the Army’s 1st Special Forces Command, which lauded him as having “inspired a generation of special operations.” It did not say where he died.

The website Military. com, using the colloquial name for Special Forces made famous during the Vietnam War, called Waugh “the unparalleled godfather of the Green Berets” for his long years of service and numerous missions with them.

The New York Times once described him as a “former CIA paramilitary officer who seems to have cut quite a swashbuckling path through the ‘ back alleys,’ as they say, of half the world.”

“He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire, as far as he could get, living large and defending his country,” Cofer Black, a former CIA counterterrorism chief who supervised Waugh, said in a phone interview.

Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War, as part of a U.S. 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, freefalling 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.

“There was no rest at SOG, only war recon, rescue, sleep,” Waugh told Annie Jacobsen in her 2019 book, “Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins.”

In June 1965, Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnamcoast. 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 “Hunting the Jackal,” his 2005 autobiography. “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 armand a leg, Davis helped Waugh crawl to a helicopter.

Those actions by Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Joe Biden in 2021. Waugh received the Silver Star.

In a summary of the battle that he wrote in 2016, Waugh recalled Davis’ heroism, saying, “I only have to close my eyes to vividly recall the gallantry.”

William Dawson Waugh was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Bastrop, Texas, a small city southeast of Austin, to John and Lillian Waugh.

His father was a railroad brakeman who died when Billy was about 10; his mother was a substitute teacher.

Meeting two local soldiers who had been wounded in World War II inspired Billy, at 15, to hitchhike to Los Angeles to enlist in the Marines; he had heard that he could join them at that age. But he got only as far as Las Cruces, N.M., where, penniless and without identification, he was arrested. He called his mother, who wired him bus fare home.

“When I got there,” he wrote in “Hunting the Jackal,” “my mother gave me a lengthy lecture and a firm belt whipping. Also, a clear set of orders: Get back in school, or else.”

He enlisted in the Army in 1948 but did not taste combat until he joined the fighting in the Korean War three years later. He rose from private first class to infantry platoon sergeant.

“I learned what made men tick, and what combat was all about,” he wrote. “For the first time in my military life, I felt completely at home.”

After his Korean service, he was transferred to Germany, stationed in the Bavarian town of Bad Tolz, where he lobbied successfully to join the elite Special Forces.

He retired fromthe Army in 1972 with the rank of sergeant major, and worked for two years for the Postal Service sorting mail, which bored him.

Then a call came in 1977 to return to action in a murky assignment — training Moammar Khadafy’s Libyan commandos in infantry tactics — and he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t a CIA job but one organized by a former agency officer, Edwin Wilson, who would serve nearly 22 years in prison for selling explosives to Libya before his sentence was overturned.

After the Libyan mission, Waugh became an independent contractor for the CIA. In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who, long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was on the agency’s radar as the founder of al-qaeda. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.

“At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially highlevel 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 himwith a rock,” he said.

He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.