Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Jacobsen Annie

Author:Jacobsen, Annie [Jacobsen, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, War, History, Crime, Espionage, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780316441407
Goodreads: 52665072
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

Billy Waugh worked best alone. To be assigned a mission and to get it done, by any means possible, was what he was best at. Accomplishing a task that others could not accomplish made him feel alive, and gave him meaning and purpose—fulfilled his boyhood dreams of feeling like he was needed in the nation’s defense. Each day he’d run an eight-mile loop around the al-Riyadh section of Khartoum, employing the old-school espionage techniques of ground surveillance. His first task was to locate a decent place to set up an observation post, or OP, in agency parlance. Bin Laden’s private residence was a pink three-story house on the old French Embassy Road. It was surrounded by high walls. Armed guards kept watch over the place, usually six or eight mujahedin dressed like they were still fighting the Afghan jihad. “Visitors to his home would drive up to the compound with drapes covering the car windows,” remembers Waugh. “He had four wives and more than a dozen children but I never saw any of them. If they were there, they stayed inside.”

At the time, the CIA did not know much about Osama bin Laden. Waugh was assigned to profile his actions so that a portrait of the man and his pattern of life could emerge. In his jogging excursions, Waugh pieced together bin Laden’s daily routine. The man prayed early in the morning, before sunrise. At 9:00 a.m. sharp he left the house, climbed into his white Mercedes sedan, license plate number 0990, and drove himself to the Arab Bank on Latif Street. For noon prayers, he would drive to another building he owned, down on South Riyadh Road, where some of his staff lived. Finally, he made a trip a few blocks to the north. It was here that bin Laden’s construction company, al-Hijira, owned a warehouse full of construction equipment.

Through the construction company, bin Laden was building a series of new roads in a country that almost entirely lacked infrastructure. This included a road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 520 miles. What machinery Osama bin Laden lacked he would import from Russia, through another of his companies, al-Qadurat. Often the government of Sudan was unable to pay bin Laden for his road work and construction projects, so he agreed to accept large plots of land as barter. In this way, Osama bin Laden acquired the Gash River Delta, a massive plot of land near the Ethiopian border, as well as a huge farm in Gedaref. At one point, he was rumored to be the largest landowner in Sudan.

In Khartoum, Waugh figured out that bin Laden owned at least four buildings. One of them stood near the Palestinian embassy, west of his private residence. The property butted up against Runway 340 at the Khartoum International Airport, giving Waugh a solid viewing perspective of goods being unloaded on the tarmac. But it was while he was observing activities at bin Laden’s building on South Riyadh Road that he got his first real break in the case.

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