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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