Billy Waugh
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Billy Waugh was a long-serving paramilitary contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency and a U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green Beret") veteran of three wars, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He held approximately seventeen Purple Hearts (acknowledging that "some sorry-ass son of a bitch from North Carolina got 18") and drove a vehicle with the personalized license plate 17 HITS. He worked for the CIA as a contractor for approximately forty years. Kiriakou describes meeting him before 9/11, working with him in the Middle East, and being told directly about the North Carolina license plate, "17 hits," with a Purple Heart symbol next to it. He has also cited Wall's 17 Purple Hearts as one short of the U.S. record.

Joint operation with Kiriakou

John Kiriakou worked with Wall on a joint operation in the United Arab Emirates that combined training delivery with a sensitive electronic-collection component. The substance of the operation remains undisclosed. Kiriakou's characterization of him: "Billy was a bonafide American hero. Truly a real hero." In a separate telling, Kiriakou describes this as an operation in the Middle East that ran for months and says it is simply how the two men met.

Later life and death

Wall's wife predeceased him of cancer; he had no children and continued operational work because "what else is there to live for? He's got no kids." He bought a house in Niceville, Florida. His niece, who lived in Las Vegas, ghost-wrote his autobiography. He died in his nineties.

The apocryphal story

Wall's late-life storytelling, per Kiriakou, included one anecdote that turned out to be a scene from the film Apocalypse Now. In his final telling, to Kiriakou, Wall described being shot down behind North Korean lines, encountering a cow in a pasture, slitting the cow's artery, and drinking its blood for nourishment. Kiriakou: "That was in Apocalypse Now. That wasn't you. That was from Apocalypse Now." Wall: "Ah, it still makes for a good story."

In a separate retelling, Kiriakou places the same embellished story in Vietnam rather than Korea, attached to Wall's Silver Star: Wall said he was shot down behind enemy lines, his pilot killed, his own leg shredded by bullets, and that he trekked roughly 25 miles toward friendly lines. By the third or fourth retelling the story had grown to include cutting an ox's or cow's artery in a rice paddy to drink its blood for nourishment, the detail Kiriakou recognized as lifted from Apocalypse Now.

Identifying Carlos the Jackal in Khartoum

Per John Kiriakou's retelling, confirmed to him by Cofer Black, then CIA station chief in Khartoum: on Wall's day off in the mid-1990s he was browsing the Khartoum vegetable market and recognized Carlos the Jackal, "the most wanted terrorist of the 1970s", among the cabbages. Wall told a fellow contractor "that's Carlos the Jackal," who didn't believe him.

Wall went back to Black's office: "Cofer's on an elliptical machine. He says, 'What's up, Billy?' Billy says, 'Cofer, I know you're not going to believe me, but I saw Carlos the Jackal.'" Black: "If it was Carlos the Jackal, then we're going to have to find him."

Wall returned to the vegetable market every single day for a month. When Carlos reappeared, Wall photographed him repeatedly and followed him home. Headquarters confirmed the identification, and "they came up with an absolutely brilliant idea that would never have occurred to me, they lured him to a doctor's office on false pretenses where he was sedated, and when he woke up he was on a French military flight back to Paris to face murder charges."

In a separate telling, Kiriakou adds that Wall got the crucial photograph by having two locals stage a fistfight, so that Carlos would crane his neck to watch the commotion and Wall could photograph his face clearly.

Post-9/11: Afghanistan, and "I've been killing people"

Per Kiriakou, Wall disappeared from CIA headquarters on September 11, 2001 and showed up again roughly six weeks later. Kiriakou ran into him in the hallway and asked where he'd been. Wall: "Been in Afghanistan." What had he been doing? "I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?"

Kiriakou has repeated this same encounter across many other tellings, with minor variations in the elapsed time (he variously recalls three months and six weeks) and in his own account of why he had not himself been sent to Afghanistan. He says he volunteered three times to deploy after 9/11 and was ignored each time, until he confronted the deputy director of counterterrorism, an old friend, and threatened to quit for Exxon if he wasn't sent; even then, he says, he was never sent, and it was Wall's revelation that made him realize the CIA's post-9/11 teams in Afghanistan were focused on killing, not on capturing or interrogating.

In a separate telling, Kiriakou dates the two men's return from their joint Middle East operation to September 9, 2001, two days before the attacks, after which he lost track of Wall for weeks before running into him in the hallway at the end of October. Kiriakou says he had been one of only two Arabic speakers assigned to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center at the time and repeatedly volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan himself, but was never sent; he concluded it was because operators like Wall were there to kill, not to translate: "They weren't translating anything. They were just killing everybody."

Elsewhere Kiriakou says the same revelation explained why the agency kept refusing to send him: they needed shooters, not the "good cop" translator.

Wall died at age 98. Kiriakou says that late in life, after a war wound had gotten him declared disabled, Wall hitchhiked across the country and tried to convince the CIA he was fit to redeploy. Wall told Kiriakou he had no interest in writing his own memoir but that his niece would write his biography instead; Kiriakou says it was published shortly before Wall's death.

The answer in the corridor

Kiriakou credits Waugh with telling him, without meaning to, why his repeated volunteering after 9/11 was being ignored. Waugh, a contractor who by then had "something like 13 or 14 Purple Hearts over the course of three wars", had simply disappeared for about six weeks. Kiriakou ran into him in a hallway.

> "'Hey, Billy, where you been?' And he whispers, 'I've been in Afghanistan.' I said, 'Yeah, what are you doing in Afghanistan?' And he looks at me like I'm crazy. And he says, 'I've been killing people. What do you think I've been doing?'"

The inference was immediate, and it explains the whole sequence that followed: "it dawned on me that that's why they haven't sent me to Afghanistan. They don't need linguists. They're not debriefing anybody. They're just killing them." It was straight after this that he made the threat about Exxon and was offered Pakistan the next day.

See also

- Special Activities Division
- Ground Branch
- John Kiriakou
