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The Shadow War: America's Hidden Hand in Global Conflict
In the dimly lit corridors of power, far from public scrutiny, America wages its most consequential battles. Annie Jacobsen's "Surprise, Kill, Vanish" pulls back the curtain on the CIA's paramilitary operations-the "third option" presidents turn to when diplomacy fails but full-scale war seems unthinkable. This meticulously researched expose has become required reading in intelligence circles and military academies alike, with former CIA Director Leon Panetta calling it "a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how covert operations really work." The book's revelations about presidential-authorized killings sparked heated debates in Congress about oversight of intelligence operations. What makes this work particularly compelling is how it traces America's evolution from a nation that officially banned assassination to one that normalized "targeted killing" as standard foreign policy. Have we crossed a moral Rubicon? And what happens when the tactics we perfect are eventually turned against us?
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The Birth of America's Hidden Hand
In the midst of World War II, as Nazi forces executed brutal reprisals against Czech civilians following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, President Roosevelt made a fateful decision. Just two weeks after Heydrich's death in 1942, Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)-America's first organized intelligence agency and the CIA's predecessor. Under William "Wild Bill" Donovan's leadership, the OSS recruited unconventional warriors like Aaron Bank, a 40-year-old Army officer who would train in the dark arts of guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and assassination.
These early operatives trained at classified facilities like Area B in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains (later Camp David) and Area F at the Congressional Country Club, where they learned knife fighting, silent killing, and demolitions. The Jedburgh teams-three-man units dropped behind enemy lines-operated under a telling motto that would define America's covert operations for decades to come: "Surprise, Kill, Vanish."
While the Jedburghs prepared for their missions, a young Texan named Billy Waugh, inspired by newsreels showing paratroopers floating from the sky, attempted to run away and join the war effort. Though caught and returned home, Waugh would later become one of America's most legendary covert operators, his career spanning from Vietnam to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
As the war progressed, the OSS developed increasingly bold plans, including Operation Iron Cross-a plot to assassinate Hitler using Aaron Bank and a team disguised as Wehrmacht soldiers, alongside 175 Nazi POWs who had been turned. Bank trained this special unit extensively, preparing to infiltrate Hitler's Eagle's Nest hideaway. The mission advanced to the point where Bank received bribe money and cyanide capsules, but after agonizing delays due to Alpine storms, the operation was canceled when U.S. Army infantry moved into the area.
When World War II ended, President Truman abolished the OSS, believing "gentlemen soldiers of a democracy shouldn't engage in ungentlemanly warfare." This principled stance, however, would soon collide with Cold War realities.
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The Third Option: Covert Action as Foreign Policy
In April 1946, Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith's tense meeting with Josef Stalin at the Kremlin revealed the Soviet leader's expansionist ambitions. When directly asked how far Russia would go, Stalin ominously replied, "We're not going to go much further"-a statement that chilled American officials. This ambiguous threat prompted President Truman to establish the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, declaring communism the enemy of democracy.
Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, creating both the CIA and the National Security Council. The CIA was granted special "Title 50" authority for covert operations-"direct action" capabilities that could be "plausibly denied" by the president if discovered. In June 1948, NSC directive 10/2 formalized this arrangement, creating the Office of Special Projects to conduct covert actions including "guerrilla movements, underground armies, sabotage and assassination." This established the president's third option, Tertia Optio, when diplomacy failed but military action seemed unwise.
The Korean War provided the first major testing ground for these new capabilities. When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the CIA was caught completely off guard. President Truman replaced CIA Director Hillenkoetter with the formidable General Walter Bedell Smith, who brought in OSS veterans including Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner to lead covert operations.
Under Wisner's direction, the CIA developed an assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and deployed paramilitary teams led by Jack Singlaub. Working under the cover organization JACK (Joint Advisory Commission, Korea), Singlaub developed innovative high-altitude parachute insertion techniques that would become the modern HALO (High-Altitude Low-Opening) jump. Testing over the Han River, Singlaub discovered that waiting until 1,000 feet above ground before deploying his parachute significantly reduced the chance of enemy detection.
However, a fierce battle raged between the CIA and U.S. Army over control of covert operations in Korea. While NSC Directive 10/2 granted the CIA sole responsibility for covert action during peacetime, military leaders like General Robert McClure and Colonel Russell Volckmann argued that wartime guerrilla operations belonged under military command. This institutional rivalry would continue for decades, shaping how America conducted its shadow wars.
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Green Berets: America's Unconventional Warriors
The CIA's failures in Korea prompted the Army to develop its own unconventional warfare capability. General McClure secured Joint Chiefs approval for the 10th Special Forces Group in 1952. The unit was deliberately named to deceive Soviets into thinking nine other units existed. Recruiting focused on finding ex-OSS officers with commando experience, using William Donovan's personal files containing 3,900 former OSS personnel.
Twenty-one-year-old platoon sergeant Billy Waugh, frustrated by the demoralizing war of attrition in Korea, discovered his calling through a chance encounter on a train in Germany. Meeting two sergeants wearing unusual patches, he learned about the secretive 10th Special Forces in Bad Tolz. Within a week of requesting transfer, Waugh joined this classified unit, beginning what would become seven decades of involvement in covert operations.
The 10th Special Forces was organized into twelve-man A-Teams, each comprising two officers and ten NCOs trained to infiltrate enemy territory by air, land, or sea. Team members specialized in weapons, demolition, medical care, communications, and intelligence, with each soldier trained in at least one foreign language. Their mission was to conduct unconventional warfare behind Soviet lines in Europe, modeled after OSS Jedburgh operations in France.
These units attracted extraordinary individuals like Larry Thorne (born Lauri Torni in Finland). Having fought against Soviets in Finland's army, where he commanded ski troops in hit-and-run operations so effectively the Red Army placed a bounty on his head, Thorne later trained with the Waffen-SS. After imprisonment for treason in Finland, he escaped to America, swimming ashore from a freighter near Mobile, Alabama. Through William Donovan's help, Thorne joined the U.S. Army and became a legendary Green Beret captain known for his language skills, discipline, and ability to operate alone.
Special Forces teams trained partner forces worldwide, establishing airborne schools and special warfare capabilities in countries including Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. As the force grew, they trained guerrilla fighters globally to counter Soviet expansion, sometimes fighting alongside their trainees and other times against them-a pattern that would repeat throughout the Cold War.
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Assassination as Foreign Policy Tool
In June 1954, a CIA covert operation in Guatemala catalyzed Ernesto "Che" Guevara into revolutionary action as he witnessed American-trained mercenary pilots attacking Guatemala City. The operation stemmed from U.S. concerns about Soviet influence in Latin America, particularly under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reforms threatened American corporate interests like United Fruit Company.
President Truman had created the Psychological Strategy Board to plan covert operations with plausible deniability. The PSB developed plans to overthrow Arbenz using a CIA-trained guerrilla force led by exiled military officer Carlos Castillo Armas. Their approach combined paramilitary action with psychological warfare, designed to manipulate public perception while achieving real-world consequences through force.
In 1952, CIA headquarters drafted its first assassination lists targeting Guatemalans to "eliminate immediately" under Title 50 authority. The CIA's assassination manual, "A Study of Assassination," instructed killers to use any available objects-"anything hard, heavy and handy"-and suggested methods like pushing targets off heights, staging drownings, or using morphine overdoses on alcoholics. The manual emphasized that assassination wasn't about revenge but prevention: "Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary."
For Operation Success (PBSUCCESS), President Eisenhower approved $2.7 million for CIA covert action in Guatemala. Though the CIA claimed only one death occurred, their own records showed at least 48 rebels died. The operation's perceived success became a dangerous model for future covert actions worldwide.
After the CIA-backed coup, Castillo Armas declared himself president, but his regime faced immediate resistance. His government brutally suppressed rebellions, resulting in tens of thousands-possibly 200,000-killed, tortured, or disappeared. Perhaps the most significant unintended consequence was the radicalization of Che Guevara, who witnessed the coup from Guatemala City. After joining a communist militia that was quickly disbanded, Guevara fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and joined his revolutionary movement.
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The Cold War's Shadow Battlefields
Through the 1950s, the CIA became increasingly concerned about Soviet involvement in kidnappings and assassinations across Eastern Europe. In 1954, they got concrete evidence when KGB assassin Captain Nikolai Khokhlov defected rather than kill his target, Georgiy Okolovich, an anti-Soviet emigre leader in Frankfurt.
Khokhlov revealed Moscow's sophisticated assassination apparatus, including his cigarette-pack disguised poison dart gun. During his CIA debriefing, Khokhlov exposed the KGB's 12th Department, responsible for "liquid affairs" (wet matters), with specialized labs producing poisons and assassination devices. Stalin had personally established the Kamera laboratory where death-row prisoners were used as test subjects for developing untraceable poisons.
After his high-profile defection, Khokhlov himself became a target, surviving a 1958 poisoning with radioactive thallium that caused horrific symptoms but failed to kill him. Meanwhile, the KGB successfully assassinated Ukrainian leader Lev Rebet with a hydrogen cyanide spray gun, initially ruled a heart attack until assassin Bohdan Stashinsky defected in 1961.
In the Middle East, the CIA monitored Iran's volatile situation where religious assassinations threatened stability. After the shah appointed General Ali Razmara as prime minister, Fedayeen-e Islam assassin Khalil Tahmasebi killed him at a mosque in March 1951, followed by the education minister's murder twelve days later. The CIA feared Soviet exploitation of the chaos, as assassination-triggered instability spread across the region.
In Iran, riots erupted after the assassinations, leading the shah to appoint nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. When Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, President Eisenhower authorized Operation Ajax, sending one million dollars to overthrow him. The August 1953 coup replaced him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, while the shah assumed absolute power with American backing.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1960, Billy Waugh and his elite Green Light Team trained for a Top Secret mission: carrying tactical nuclear weapons behind enemy lines. These Special Forces operators practiced with actual W54 Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM)-98-pound portable nuclear devices with 1-7 kiloton yields capable of destroying areas a mile in diameter. This shocking revelation demonstrates how far America was willing to go in its shadow war against communism.
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The Kennedy Era: Executive Action and Assassination
During Eisenhower's final year in office, a small group of presidential advisors began openly discussing plans to assassinate foreign leaders. This group, called the Special Group, was the latest iteration of covert action oversight committees. Using euphemisms like "eliminating," "neutralizing," or "disposing of" targets, they maintained plausible deniability while planning assassinations.
In 1960, they discussed poisoning Iraq's Prime Minister Qasim with a tainted handkerchief, eliminating Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and killing Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo. Their most intense focus fell on Cuba's revolutionary leaders-Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Che Guevara-who had established a Soviet foothold just 90 miles from Florida.
After witnessing the CIA bombing of Guatemala in 1954, Che Guevara had become a hardened revolutionary. By January 1959, he and Fidel Castro's rebel forces had overthrown Cuban President Batista. Castro quickly began executing perceived enemies, with Che overseeing summary executions at La Cabana prison. When questioned about lack of judicial process, Che declared that "judicial proof is unnecessary" and that revolutionaries must become "cold killing machines motivated by pure hate."
Shortly after taking office, President Kennedy's Special Group formalized assassination as a foreign policy tool under the euphemism "Executive Action Capability." According to CIA deputy director Richard Bissell's testimony, Kennedy himself authorized this capability, with orders flowing through National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow.
The program operated under the cryptonym ZR/RIFLE, with an entire infrastructure supporting assassination operations. New euphemisms emerged: "direct positive action," "neutralization operations," "an accident plot," and "the last resort." This system of "plausible denial" created "circuit breakers" that prevented the Oval Office from being directly implicated in assassination operations.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy gutted the CIA's paramilitary authority, transferring primary responsibility for large covert operations to the Defense Department. Though Kennedy opposed the CIA's handling of paramilitary operations, he actually accelerated covert actions in Vietnam under U.S. Army Special Forces leadership.
Just three weeks after South Vietnamese President Diem's CIA-backed assassination, President Kennedy himself was killed in Dallas, Texas. Years later, former CIA director Richard Helms, who had overseen Kennedy's Executive Action capability and numerous plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, made a chilling observation on national television: "If you kill someone else's leaders, why shouldn't they kill yours?"
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Vietnam: The Secret War Expands
Within eighteen months of Kennedy's death, the covert war in Vietnam escalated into an overt conflict. The United States increased military forces and began Operation Rolling Thunder, bombing Hanoi in March 1965. Russia and China responded by supplying North Vietnam with men, weapons, and guerrilla warfare expertise.
Billy Waugh led a ninety-man CIDG team on what should have been a routine ambush against an enemy camp at Bong Son. After departing their Special Forces A-Team camp at 1:30 a.m., Waugh led the team along the An Lao River through dense jungle. They encountered and killed a sleeping NVA guard, noting his modern Chinese and Russian equipment.
The raid began successfully. Waugh's team opened fire on bamboo sleeping barracks, killing an estimated 150 NVA soldiers in the initial assault. For fifteen minutes, they celebrated what seemed like a perfect ambush. Then came the sound that changed everything-a bugle call from deep in the jungle. What they hadn't realized was that the three barracks they'd attacked were merely the first of dozens housing as many as 3,000 enemy soldiers.
As the battle continued, Waugh found himself stranded in a rice paddy with no communication and no ammunition. A ricochet hit Waugh in the head, slicing off two inches of skin and bone from his forehead and knocking him unconscious. When he awoke hours later, Waugh discovered he had been stripped naked by NVA soldiers who thought he was dead.
At Walter Reed, Waugh watched fellow soldiers return from surgery missing limbs. Dr. Arthur Metz, chief of lower-extremity amputation surgery, warned that Waugh's foot might need amputation due to worsening infection. Desperate to avoid this fate and return to combat, Waugh convinced the doctor to discharge him on convalescent leave. Instead of recuperating, Waugh hitchhiked to Vietnam, eventually reaching Saigon where he reconnected with Special Forces friends who told him about a classified unit called the Studies and Observations Group (SOG).
SOG's classified operations in Laos revealed the brutal reality of their work. On SOG's first mission, three men went missing in action, foreshadowing the catastrophic losses to come. Led by Jack Singlaub, the former OSS Jedburgh, SOG operated from a Special Access facility hidden behind concertina wire and blast walls. In June 1966, Waugh led a Bright Light team to recover the bodies of RT Montana members who had been ambushed. They found Sergeant Donald Sain's body mutilated and booby-trapped, displayed in a clearing.
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The Church Committee and the Restraint of Covert Power
In 1973, Palestinian terrorists from Black September attacked the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Eight masked gunmen took hostages during a diplomatic reception, eventually executing American diplomats George "Curt" Moore and Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., along with Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid. President Nixon declared the U.S. "will not pay blackmail," a hastily created policy that would have profound consequences for decades to come.
Though not publicly known at the time, Black September was actually created by Yasser Arafat as a covert special-operations unit of al-Fatah. This information remained classified until 2006, after Arafat's death. Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman explains that Black September consisted of elite, "suicidal" fighters willing to conduct bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and assassinations.
After the Khartoum killings, the eight gunmen surrendered to Sudanese authorities. Six were tried and convicted, but President Nimeiry immediately commuted their sentences and sent them to Cairo. The CIA knew Arafat had personally approved the operation, but this information remained classified until 2006. Instead of pursuing justice, Henry Kissinger made a shocking decision: to use Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September operations chief, as a clandestine CIA asset.
Kissinger's decision coincided with the unfolding Watergate scandal. In 1973, Congress began investigating the CIA after discovering all five Watergate burglars had Agency connections. Before leaving to become Secretary of Defense, CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered all employees to reveal any illegal activities since the Agency's founding, creating the explosive 700-page "Family Jewels" document.
The Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church held sixty days of hearings with seventy-five witnesses, uncovering that the CIA had conducted over 900 "major projects" and thousands of smaller operations, most never reviewed outside the Agency. The investigation exposed assassination plots against foreign leaders and exotic assassination weapons. While Senator Church called the CIA "a rogue elephant," the parallel Pike Committee found the White House, not the CIA, was primarily responsible: "The CIA never did anything the White House didn't want."
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Reagan's Preemptive Neutralization and the War on Terror
On January 28, 1981, William J. Casey arrived at CIA headquarters with a heavily armed security detail, determined to restore CIA power. Casey operated from three core beliefs: the world was dangerous, the Soviets were behind most threats, and the CIA must never be weak. He warned that communists and rogue states like Libya and Iran were financing proxy armies to undermine America, and terrorist training camps posed a growing threat.
On March 30, Casey was working in his Executive Office Building office when he received the dreaded "AOP" (attack on principal) message-President Reagan had been shot outside the Washington Hilton. In less than two seconds, the assassin fired six .22-caliber bullets, hitting Press Secretary James Brady, Officer Thomas Delahanty, and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy before the sixth bullet ricocheted and struck Reagan, stopping just 2.52 centimeters from his heart.
The assassination attempt transformed the Secret Service from a defensive to offensive posture. The Counter Assault Team (CAT) was expanded from part-time units to a permanent force shadowing the president 24/7. CAT members, selected for motivation, physical strength and paramilitary mindset, underwent seven weeks of irregular warfare training alongside Delta Force, British SAS, and Navy SEALs.
At the White House, the president's National Security Planning Group began developing the concept of "pre-emptive neutralization"-killing would-be assassins or terrorists before they could strike. This shifted counterterrorism policy from defensive to offensive positioning, framing such actions as legal extensions of the UN Charter's right to self-defense. President Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which maintained the ban on assassination but notably left the term "assassination" undefined, creating flexibility for targeted killing that wouldn't be classified as assassination.
In 1990, Secret Service agent Lew Merletti constantly analyzed potential assassination threats against President George H.W. Bush. Working with his boss John Magaw, Merletti arranged a radical training exercise with Delta Force to test White House security vulnerabilities. On October 14, 1990, while President Bush was at Camp David, Delta Force conducted a high-altitude low-opening (HALO) parachute infiltration of the White House grounds. The operators evaded detection by the radar system at National Airport that was supposed to alert Secret Service to unusual aircraft. This stunning security breach led to the installation of a microwave Doppler system on the White House roof.
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The 9/11 Era: Targeted Killing Goes Global
On September 11, 2001, Billy Waugh was at CIA headquarters preparing for a classified mission when news broke of planes hitting the World Trade Center. CIA lawyer John Rizzo drafted the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification (MON) containing unprecedented authorities-"lethal direct action" and "capture, detain, interrogate"-phrases that would later become known as targeted killing and enhanced interrogation. President Bush signed it on September 17, declaring "I want the CIA to be first on the ground"-making the CIA, not the Department of Defense, the lead agency in the war.
Despite being 72 years old, Billy Waugh lobbied Cofer Black to join the Afghanistan mission. Meanwhile, Ric Prado, an SIS-2 officer with extensive paramilitary experience, developed plans to expand targeting beyond Al-Qaeda leadership to include mid-level facilitators-bomb makers, weapons traders, money men, and radical imams.
The Special Activities Division rapidly expanded after 9/11, with a new entity called CTC/Special Operations forming with "more than fifty rabidly dedicated officers scrambling in a disciplined frenzy of duty and revenge." Unlike the Pentagon's massive bureaucracy, the CIA's paramilitary arm operated with flexibility, minimal hierarchy, and the ability to make quick decisions in the field.
Ken Stiles quickly built the CIA's three-dimensional targeting map, incorporating multiple intelligence layers including Russian battle maps, NSA signals intelligence, satellite imagery, and human intelligence from field teams. This geographic information system, nicknamed the "Magic Box" by the White House, revolutionized battlefield visualization by enabling analysts to display hundreds of combinations of data points.
In late November, Waugh arrived at Bagram Airfield carrying an arsenal of weapons and $6 million in cash. He made his way to the CIA facility at the Ariana Hotel in Kabul-a building with a dark history as both Taliban headquarters and the site of public executions. Waugh joined Team Romeo, which would deploy to Taliban stronghold Logar Province, where they established a base in an abandoned schoolhouse alongside sixty Hazara fighters.
Instead of deploying 300,000 conventional troops, the Afghanistan campaign relied on just 115 CIA Special Activities Division personnel supported by approximately 2,000 special operations forces. These small teams spread across the country, each partnering with local warlords and fighters.
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The Moral Twilight Zone of Modern Covert Warfare
President Obama fundamentally transformed America's approach to covert warfare, revoking enhanced interrogation while dramatically accelerating targeted killing operations. Where Bush authorized 52 drone strikes outside war theaters in eight years, Obama authorized 542 strikes killing an estimated 3,797 people. Obama became the first president to publicly acknowledge these operations, with advisor John Brennan declaring they were conducted "in full accordance with the law."
Most significantly, Obama depoliticized targeted killing by making it acceptable across party lines, with the bin Laden raid representing the pinnacle of this new approach. As Obama himself boasted, "There isn't a president who's taken more terrorists off the field than me."
How did assassination become normalized and mechanized in American foreign policy? The journey began before Billy Waugh was born, when in 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war as nations sought peace after WWI's horrors. This idealism collapsed with Japan's invasion of Manchuria and Hitler's rise. After WWII, the National Security Act of 1947 created the "third option"-covert action as the president's hidden hand, with assassination as its most extreme form, always discussed in euphemisms.
For 25 years, the CIA armed rebels and engineered coups until Congressional oversight in the 1970s required Presidential Findings. Another 25 years of partisan approaches followed until 9/11, when a single paragraph in a September 17 Memorandum of Notification reopened the floodgates. Now Ground Branch operators work in 138 countries worldwide-70 percent of sovereign nations-as targeted killing accelerates beyond public awareness.
During our travels, Billy Waugh revealed his participation in perhaps the most dangerous covert operation ever designed-parachuting assassins carrying nuclear weapons. In July 1962, under Kennedy's administration, Waugh's four-man Green Light Team conducted a feasibility test at the Nevada Test Site. They were catapulted from an aircraft carrier, parachuted from low altitude with a tactical nuclear device made of three plutonium rings, assembled it in under fourteen minutes, and handed it to engineers who detonated it.
Every nation wants victory at any cost-except the cost of nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closest to this catastrophe, with Che Guevara advocating that Cubans would be "completely happy and fulfilled" even if nuclear war was unleashed in their name-rhetoric that likely contributed to Johnson authorizing the CIA to oversee his killing.
After 9/11, with fear of additional attacks looming, the CIA created a radical new unit known informally as the Stalker Team. President Bush approved this twelve-member team, which included two women (one a multilingual "femme fatale") and three targeting officers. Using reconnaissance techniques perfected over decades, they created dossiers on targets worldwide-some hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas, others in NATO-partner countries-preparing options for compromise, capture, sabotage, or "preemptive neutralization."
The Stalker Team operated under deep cover within CIA headquarters, hidden behind doors in Budget and Finance with a placard reading "Accounts Payable"-an ironic reference to their mission of pursuing terrorists who had long targeted Americans. Their success relied on plausible deniability-the hallmark of effective covert operations and the enduring legacy of America's hidden hand in global conflict.
