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created the Rockefeller Commission to investigate possible spying on antiwar and civil rights activists, and Congress created the Senate’s Church and the House’s Pike committees to study CIA abuses.
    A destructive rampage against the U.S. intelligence community ensued. What began as an investigation of wrongdoing ended up exposing many of the CIA’s numerous failures. The investigations also revealed that the CIA hid funds among numerous government agencies, with even the GAO (Government Accountability Office) not knowing the exact amount spent on covert activities. Pike soundly criticized the ability of the intelligence community to predict conflict and took a dim view of the success of the previous ten years of covert actions. The Church Committee’s report detailed CIA plans to assassinate the leaders of Cuba, the Congo, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. It made clear that no American finger pulled the trigger, but weapons, support, and/or training were provided with that intent in mind.
    The Church-Pike investigation dealt a crippling blow to the CIA’s ability to operate aggressively and autonomously. Assassinations were specifically banned by presidential findings; the use of dirty tricks, mercenaries, contractors, and proxy agents was reined in. Suddenly, men like Billy Waugh were considered anachronisms, destabilizing and potentially dangerous. Over eight hundred clandestine service operators were fired that year, and the Special Activities Division was almost defunct. Had Billy been working contracts for the CIA at the time, he would certainly have been released or reassigned in the aftermath of Church-Pike and the gutting of the CIA it sparked.
    Experiencing a decided lack of opportunity, Billy thought it a godsend when he received a mysterious phone call and request to meet in a hotel room in northern Virginia on July 25, 1977. Waugh was told to pack for a one-year deployment to the desert—the standard preamble for a covert mission. The three other team members were all Special Forces vets. The country was Libya. The mission was to train a Special Forces group that reported directly to Col. Moammar Gadhafi. The training gig had all the style and function of a black mission under deep cover with good deniability. No serious questions were asked; no official background checking occurred. The man in charge was an ex–Agency employee named Ed Wilson. It was not unusual for a former employee or soldier to be working as a freelance contractor under nonofficial cover.
    The day before Billy and his team were to leave for Libya, he received another phone call, this time from a former Special Forces operator working directly for the CIA. Credentials were produced; names were dropped. Billy was confident this was a legitimate contact. The mysterious figure informed Billy that the Wilson deal was not an official Agency project, but he took the unusual step of giving Waugh a Pentax camera and told him that if he took photos of anything interesting, there would be money in it for him. His contact gave him a secret code word to use when contacting him. Needing the money, Billy, kept his mouth shut and accepted the offer.
    Billy spent a year training Libyan forces on Wilson’s contract and photographing various sites for the CIA. In November of 1979, the hostage situation in Tehran began and the Arab world became increasingly hostile to Americans. The U.S. embassy in Tripoli was burned and looted. Given two hours to leave Libya, Billy made it out on a flight to Frankfurt with just the clothes he was wearing and a dozen rolls of undeveloped film.
    Ed Wilson was eventually arrested and charged with illegal arms trafficking with Libya. He claimed to have been acting with CIA support, an assertion contradicted by a CIA affidavit read at his trial that stated the Agency had not had contact with Wilson since the early 1970s. Wilson was sentenced to fifty-three years in prison