Annie jacobsen surprise kill vanish5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() When the Saudis decided to allow infidels in the form of a vast American army to do the job, bin Laden “began plotting jihad against the United States.” Waugh saw what he needed to see and developed a plan to eliminate his target that might have kept 9/11 from happening-but it never happened, nixed somewhere between his handlers and the president’s desk. ![]() So it was that, as Jacobsen writes, a weathered and fearless contractor named Billy Waugh entered Khartoum to track a well-protected Osama bin Laden, who was enraged after having been rebuffed by the Saudi royals to lead a war against Saddam Hussein. As Jacobsen ( The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency, 2015, etc.) notes, this so-called “third option” is used “when the first option, diplomacy, is inadequate and the second, war, is a terrible idea.” The underlying idea is that getting up close and killing a single opponent or small batch of them is preferable to bombing an entire city or region to achieve the same goal. ![]() It’s no secret that intelligence agents operate covertly around the world. A behind-the-scenes look at the most shadowy corners of the American intelligence community. ![]()
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