An army general who led the Pentagon's effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden and once likened the war on terror to a Christian struggle against Satan is retiring, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.
Lieutenant General William Boykin's departure ends a legendary 36 year career, most of it as a special operations warrior and member of the army's elite Delta Force counter-terrorism unit.
Boykin is retiring in August, said Major Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.
He is to be replaced as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence by Major General Richard Zahner, director of signals intelligence at the National Security Agency, the Pentagon said. Zahner has been nominated for promotion to lieutenant general.
Boykin oversaw the Pentagon's counter-terrorism operations and the so far unsuccessful search for bin Laden.
A devout evangelical Christian, he gained notoriety for a series of videotaped appearances at churches across the United States in 2003 in which he vividly portrayed the war on terrorism as a fight with Satan.
In a speech to a group in Oregon in June 2003, Boykin said radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."
In another speech describing a battle with a Somali warlord, he said, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
His comments ran counter to administration assertions that it was not at war with Islam and set off a storm of criticism.
The Pentagon's inspector general faulted him for not getting his speeches cleared ahead of time, and for not clearly stating that his views did not necessarily represent those of the Defense Department.
Details of Boykin's career are shrouded in secrecy but he has been reported to have played a role in some of most dramatic US military engagements of the past three decades.
He is said to have been part of the Delta Force team that made an aborted attempt to rescue US hostages in Tehran in 1980.
He was seriously wounded in Grenada in 1983, was part of the invasion force sent to capture Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega in 1989, and led the Delta Force during the "Black Hawk Down" battle in Somalia in 1993.
