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but was released in late 2003 when a federal judge ruled that the CIA had lied in its affidavit by not reporting eighty contacts the Agency had had with Wilson during the time in question. More disturbingly, Wilson was able to document forty jobs the CIA hired him to do after his retirement from the Agency. The line between covert and criminal is often blurry.
    After Libya, Billy drifted for more than a decade, spending most of his time working at jobs he hated and drinking a lot. The eighties were lost years, as Billy approached midlife limping from wounds and burdened by a two-decade career of almost continuous combat. A life of intense action and danger had been swapped for mind-numbing boredom. “I drank a lot and they didn’t care for that. The CIA said, ‘We would bring you on tomorrow if you would stop drinking.’ I told them, ‘Well, I am not sure I am through drinking yet. I think I am going to have some more to drink.’ Then when I stopped drinking, they said, ‘Come, come, come.’”
    In 1989, Billy received a phone call from a former SF friend inviting him to Washington. “The job was to become part of a hit squad designed to eliminate individuals who posed a significant threat to the United States,” he explains. Billy could not believe his luck. He thought this time he would function as an independent contractor with an official mandate to kill—something taken for granted in wartime but rarely permitted outside of combat. Billy had worked as a “Blue Badger”—a CIA employee—and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like Washington, DC. He liked doing things on the outside, on his own terms, away from the bureaucracy of Langley. Billy was a lone wolf and both the Agency and Billy liked it that way.
    Despite his initial enthusiasm, Billy soon learned that the CIA of 1989 was a very different organization from his earlier days with them. His perceived opportunity as hit man for the CIA soon downgraded into an observational role—the equivalent of watching prey through a rifle scope but never being allowed to pull the trigger. He had to replace his sniper scope with a camera, his bullets with a pen. The CIA tasked Billy with finding and tracking the enemies of the United States until such time as when a decision about their fate could be made.
    Billy knew that the publicity of the Church Committee had forced President Gerald Ford in February of 1976 to sign Executive Order No. 11905—the twenty-two words that removed assassination from the toolkit of U.S. foreign policy. Successive presidents reconfirmed the same finding. The presidential finding quite clearly covered contractors and mercenaries: “No person employed or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassinations.” In Billy Waugh’s new role as an independent contractor for the CIA in Africa, he could use all of his skills as a covert observer and tracker, except the most lethal. Billy’s first years back in covert operations saw him posted to the hotbed of Islamic terrorism—Khartoum, Sudan.
    Billy enjoyed the Sudan. He liked Arab countries in general—his basic command of the language and ease with the culture made it enjoyable—and there was plenty to do in Khartoum, or “K-Town,” as the Agency called it. Billy soon found he had plenty of bad guys to track, photographs to take, notes to write, maps to draw, and reports to file.
    Billy worked out of the embassy under diplomatic cover, giving him some degree of protection from Sudanese legal persecution. Unless the Sudanese caught him doing something illegal, they could harass him but they couldn’t arrest or kill him. Billy worked alone, often doing his work as he jogged at night. “I would do six-week to ninety-day rotations between February 1991 and July 1992. If we stayed more than a month, the Sudanese security forces would get