Charlie Wilson's War (45 page)

Avrakotos first saw the rocket fired at the end of 1984. By February 1985, he had commissioned the Egyptians to open up a production line of Katyushas, ordering seven hundred of them by year’s end. They also became a part of the weapons mix against the previously invincible Soviet air force. By firing these rockets at the airfields, the Afghans could at least spread fear in the pilots’ minds and occasionally take out a target. “We had the mujahideen firing the Katyushas from ten kilometers away twice a day,” says Gust. “They sound like thirty freight trains coming in all at once.”
*

Things were falling into place on this trip, with Gust acquiring odd, diverse instruments for Mike Vickers’s symphony of armaments. “You could imagine what the Russians were starting to discover once we started pouring in all of these new weapons,” he says. “When they went into a village in 1983 or 1984 they would find a few .303 rifles. But a year later they’d have a much bigger fight on their hands, and at the end they’d find twenty-five AK-47s and all sorts of ordnance. They could sense the enormity of the volume.”

At one point near the end of this Egyptian shopping spree, it occurred to Avrakotos that no other CIA officer had been able to play such a hand as he was in the campaign against America’s great enemy, and all because of this Texas congressman. As far as he was concerned, Charlie Wilson was a partner he could go the course with. Wilson had not only passed Gust’s ethics tests, he had demonstrated that he could be more valuable to the Agency in dealing with Egypt than anyone else in the U.S. government. “What we did in one month with Charlie would have taken us nine years to accomplish.”

Gust would learn to operate in Egypt without Wilson’s presence. With Charlie’s blessing, Avrakotos would deal with low-level problems by telling whatever Egyptian blocker might be in his way that Congressman Wilson had already spoken to the defense minister about the matter and perhaps the officer would like to call Abu Ghazala if he insisted on overriding the field marshal’s wishes. This was Gust’s old game of bureaucratic chicken, and as long as he was moving under the mantle of the magical congressman, the keys to the Egyptian kingdom were his.

But frequently in those early months, Avrakotos had to call on Wilson to intervene directly. Thanks to Charlie, Gust was able to build his own storage facilities at Port Suez and then send Egyptians to the United States for training as production inspectors. Once, Wilson decided that a major crisis over quality control was too big to be dealt with by phone, so he invited Mohammed for a weekend at the Hawkeye Lodge, a “good old boy” establishment in the pine woods of East Texas where legendary Texans like John Connally, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Ross Perot go for rest and recreation. It’s a place where a man can ride, shoot skeet, hunt, fish, and hang out and drink with the boys. It’s expensive, but Charlie arranged to have some of the defense contractors who sell their wares to the Egyptian military pick up the tab. And for icing on the cake, he thoughtfully summoned Carol Shannon, his personal belly dancer, whom Mohammed so adored, to come for the weekend with her entire troop of liberated Fort Worth belly-dancing housewives.

There is a tradition at retreats like Hawkeye that no one talks about the recreation pursued on these visits, so before the festivities began, Gust took Mohammed aside and said there would be no wiretaps, no photographs. His word of honor. This was to be a weekend of pure, free play. The two men instinctively understood each other. Mohammed, coming from a land of intrigue and omnipresent dangers, did Gust the singular compliment of taking him unreservedly at his word. So, with secret servicemen and local police patrolling the wooded perimeter, Carol danced, Charlie drank, Mohammed entertained everyone with his endless store of ethnic jokes, and Gust resolved his problems. As always, it was wonderful fun doing business Charlie’s way.

Before his tour of duty was over, Gust would place orders for tens of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. The consignments grew so large that he bought a special ship to move them in containers to Karachi. For the next two years he was treated like a visiting monarch whenever he went to Egypt. And because of his expanding business with the Chinese, he was in the cat-bird seat when it came to organizing competitive bidding. Avrakotos was able to drive prices down to half the going black-market rate. On one occasion, Mohammed’s trusted General Yahia whined, “We’re only making a half cent a round. I’d like to make more.”

“Well, I’d like to fuck Marilyn Monroe, but she’s dead,” Avrakotos responded. “Take the money and be happy.” After brooding for three weeks, the Egyptians folded.

By the end of this first trip to Egypt, Gust had come to feel that he was poised to provide a steady stream of weaponry at a predictable price without fear of any sudden cutoffs. This was critical to everything that Mike Vickers was teaching Gust about the weapons policy the CIA must pursue.

There was one lurking concern that Gust could never quite shake: the threat posed by Islamic extremists. Once, while being driven through Cairo by an Egyptian officer, he came upon an entire block that had recently been burned to the ground. Demanding that the car stop, he got out and learned that the Egyptian security forces had wiped out the entire neighborhood because it was thought to harbor radicals. Cairo’s politics were clearly unpredictable, which meant that Abu Ghazala’s hold might not last forever. But for the time being, Gust figured Mohammed was firmly in control of the armed forces, and that meant things couldn’t be better for the CIA.

For Wilson, the Egyptian trip was a small right of passage. He had now been inducted into the CIA’s Clandestine Services. Beyond that, he had gone through a dramatic learning experience. “Up until that time I thought we just needed to buy the guns and get them into Afghanistan,” he says. But in Egypt he had been sobered, witnessing how one weapon after another that he had wanted Gust to buy sight unseen proved to be worthless. Furthermore, Charlie had learned that it didn’t help to put guns in the field if you didn’t have a proper supply of ammunition to feed them and a pipeline to get that ammunition to the fighters.

One thing that had not changed was Wilson’s spirit, still completely untamable when it came to conniving for his freedom fighters. Gust had told Wilson that the CIA was running a Muslim jihad and he would not buy weapons from the Israelis. But Jerusalem was Charlie’s next stop on his trip with Trish, and once in the Israeli capital, he and Zvi went back to work scheming to get the Charlie Horse into the Afghan war.

By the time Wilson arrived, the Israelis had come up with an ingenious argument as to why their anti-aircraft gun would be more effective and cheaper than anything else the Agency could acquire. It was to be fed by 2.75-inch rockets, and Zvi’s people at Israeli Military Industries were convinced that the U.S. Army had vast stocks of such ammunition left over from the Vietnam War. If Wilson could tap into this treasure trove and acquire the ammunition for free as surplus, the Israeli gun would cost the CIA precious little to operate, and IMI, for its part, could disguise it as a Soviet weapon, or anything else for that matter.

As always, Wilson was scheming on many fronts but looking like nothing more than the ultimate boondoggling congressman. From Israel he took Trish to Marrakech, where they checked into the Churchill Suite at La Mamounia hotel. Charlie, of course, dropped in on the highest military command to justify the U.S. government picking up the tab. With the CIA on board and the Egyptian arsenal now open, Charlie could feel the tide turning.

For Gust Avrakotos, Cairo was hopeful right up until the very last hours when, without Wilson by his side, he ran into the horror of dealing with the Egyptians as a mere mortal. A single parent, he was rushing to catch the last plane back to Washington that would get him home for Thanksgiving dinner with his son Gregory. But there was the usual bottleneck at customs.

Almost a decade later a CIA friend would tell Gregory the story of what he saw in the airport that day. The Greek-American with the bushy mustache, wearing blue jeans and a dark blue jacket, leapt into the baggage area and started hurling suitcases about until he found his, then bolted toward the gate. Grabbed by security guards, he brandished his diplomatic passport, roaring at them to call Abu Ghazala.

It was one of those borderline situations where a security official might go either way—either be intimidated or believe that he had just apprehended a true terrorist. Choosing the bureaucrat’s route, the Egyptians put in the call and watched with amazement as Avrakotos dressed down Mohammed’s aide, growling that the aide had exactly four minutes to get him moving toward the plane. Otherwise the field marshal should be informed that the CIA was not buying anything more from Egypt.

When last seen, Gust was not only on the plane jetting back for his turkey dinner, but had been elevated to first class, compliments of the Egyptian Ministry of Defense.

B
y the time Charlie Wilson returned from Cairo he had, for all practical purposes, become an integral part of Avrakotos’s Afghan operation. This recruitment (or voluntary enlistment, if you will) of an agent at the very heart of the congressional establishment came just in the nick of time, because three weeks later, on December 26, 1984, the Far Right unleashed a devastating public attack on the CIA.

It came from New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, one of those pure conservatives from the state that has the slogan “Live Free or Die” on its license plates. Humphrey was for prayer in the schools, against abortion, against big government, and always against Communism in all of its manifestations.

What made his assault so noteworthy was that everyone in Washington knew that Gordon Humphrey was a close ideological and political ally of the president. So when he rose before a crowd of reporters at the National Press Club with two bearded mujahideen commanders by his side, it was hard to ignore his charge that the Agency was playing a role so wimpish in its support of the Afghans that it verged on betrayal of the freedom fighters. The senator added many embellishments to his attack: mismanagement, incompetence, lack of will, failure to honor the president’s commitment. The bottom line, however, was a declaration of war against the CIA from one of the leading spokesmen of the Reagan Right.

What Gordon Humphrey didn’t know that day was what the CIA had just done, thanks to Avrakotos and Wilson, to transform the Afghan operation. Drawing on “Charlie’s money” and following Vickers’s grand design, Avrakotos now had unbelievable amounts of ordnance moving in the pipeline toward the Afghan border. But the CIA was in no position to defend itself against Humphrey’s charge of betrayal. Covert operations are considered state secrets at Langley, not to be commented on, even in the face of ignorant or damaging claims. This attack, however, had the smell of danger to it because the senator made it clear he was not about to drop the issue.

Humphrey, who kept to his promise to serve only two terms in Washington, has all but disappeared from public view outside of New Hampshire. During the Reagan years, however, he was a ferocious and vocal promoter of conservative causes. He didn’t sit on any of the committees that oversee the CIA, but out of fear of his access to the president and because of his penchant to fight to the death for his causes, the Agency chose to deal with him as if he were a full member of the Intelligence Committee.

The senator tended to operate in those years out of a secret hide-away carved out of the curve of the Capitol dome. The intelligence officials who met him there invariably left feeling that he was a truly eccentric and somewhat disturbing figure. Avrakotos recalls a particularly creepy feeling on first encountering him there: “When I went into his inner sanctum I kept looking for pictures of little boys half mutilated on the walls. He reminded me of Himmler with those chicken-farmer eyes. I didn’t like going to see him.”

The senator reportedly spent long hours alone in this room, communicating with his staff via computer. Avrakotos had been told that Humphrey was a former Eastern Airlines copilot and, upon being admitted to the windowless room, Avrakotos had been struck by its resemblance to the cockpit of a plane. The senator, in front of his word processor, seemed as if he were busy at the controls.

“Is he going to fly us out of here?” Avrakotos whispered to Norm Gardner, the Agency’s congressional liaison man who had come along to keep Gust on his best behavior. “Shut up, we don’t want to piss him off,” Gardner whispered back. Wilson had already told Avrakotos to be careful with Humphrey because “he may not be all there.” Avrakotos’s Pentagon friend Walter Jajko had been blunter: “The fucker’s crazy.” Gust had repeated all this to Gardner on the way over, but the tough little CIA man had responded pragmatically, “Yeah, but Clair tells me he’s a personal friend of the president’s.”

Just how zany and out of touch with modern times the senator was is conveyed by his hard-and-fast rule that none of his staff were permitted to speak to Communists, no matter what the circumstances. Any in-fractions were cause for immediate dismissal. This created a considerable dilemma for Humphrey when he discovered that the aide he had come to rely on most, Mike Pillsbury, was an old China hand who had spoken to untold numbers of Reds for years. Pillsbury had the unfortunate task of having to explain the confusing news to the senator that the Communist Chinese were key allies of the CIA in backing the anti-Communist mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union.

This came as something of a shock; Pillsbury reports that it took the senator some time to assimilate the information. But that December 26 at his press conference, Humphrey was anything but muddle-headed; he was the picture of clarity and passion as he laced into the CIA. For the next six years, Afghanistan would become his all-consuming passion. Within weeks of his debut he would create a congressional “Afghan task force” and, anointing himself chairman, would then preside over unofficial hearings on the state of the CIA’s war. Almost immediately he would become better known than Charlie Wilson as the American champion of the Afghan cause. His method of support, however, would be so exceedingly bizarre that the Pakistan ambassador, Jamsheed Marker, would observe privately that Gordon Humphrey “was a most embarrassing friend.”

The senator became so obsessed with the cause that he went so far as to commit over 60 percent of the efforts of his Senate staff to Afghanistan. Most of those efforts consisted of harassing the bureaucracies involved in the war effort. His aides were expected to grind out a constant flow of accusatory letters to the CIA, State, AID, the Pentagon, and the White House, demanding more action and immediate explanations for failures to properly support the mujahideen. His letters resembled interrogatories sent to a hostile side in litigation.

The sudden appearance of this vocal negative force was no small problem for Avrakotos and the CIA. To begin with, it forced Gust’s officers to spend hours or even days a week just answering the senator’s questions. Unlike Wilson, Humphrey’s approach was not to work with the CIA from the inside but to push them through bureaucratic terror tactics. The threat most worrisome to Langley came from the senator’s ability to create a forum where all sorts of critics of the CIA, including some very zany ones, could have their voices heard.

As with so many of the public assaults on the Agency’s Afghan program in those early years, Humphrey’s could be traced back to a maniacally energetic Lithuanian-American, Andrew Eiva, the same former Green Beret who had convinced Senator Paul Tsongas to push through his congressional resolution calling for total support of the mujahideen. While Charlie and Gust were in Egypt, Eiva had managed to insinuate himself into Humphrey’s mind. The senator, who acknowledges that he hadn’t thought much about Afghanistan before launching his CIA attack, had been searching about for a good conservative cause to champion, when Eiva came into his life.

The night of the press conference the team divided its labors: Eiva to
Nightline
to accuse the CIA of selling out the freedom fighters, Humphrey to
MacNeil/Lehrer
for a twenty-minute tirade. The papers, notably the
Los Angeles Times
and
Washington Times,
as well as a number of newspapers overseas, gave his accusations front-page billing.

The reason reporters were drawn to the right-wing senator and his Green Beret adviser had little to do with a shared conviction that the CIA should be involved in Afghanistan. They paid attention only because a senator was bad-mouthing the Agency on the record. (He and Eiva were specifically accusing the CIA of double-dealing by providing the freedom fighters with antique and joke weaponry and permitting the Pakistanis to steal them blind.) Perhaps it was hard for the press to avoid giving full attention to these kinds of harsh accusations, but it is remarkable that Eiva was able to get his campaign off the ground.

Eiva was a very shabby-looking fellow, with disheveled hair and a long scraggly beard. Quite overweight, he always had a haunted look, like a character out of a Russian novel from the days of Rasputin. In what seemed to be his only suit, he resembled almost anything but a former clean-cut American Green Beret.

The CIA came to loathe Andrew Eiva, and it appears that officers suggested more than once to congressmen and staffers that Eiva might be a Bulgarian or East German agent. But it seems more likely that he was just another of those passionate believers, like Charles Fawcett and, to a certain extent, Charlie Wilson, who got caught up in this cause. The idea that he was a Communist spy would become quite ludicrous years later, in 1990, when he was found behind the barricades in front of the Lithuanian Parliament, where he had joined his countrymen for the final assault on Communism.

The penniless Eiva had been working out of a phone booth in 1984 when a particularly extreme, right-wing Mormon operation, Free the Eagle, decided to put him on their payroll as an Afghan lobbyist. The group’s leader, Neil Blair, believed that Eiva could rally conservatives who felt that the CIA, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, was dominated by people of suspect patriotism.

With Free the Eagle’s Xeroxing and mailing resources, Eiva began bombarding reporters and congressmen with the Agency’s long record of betrayals and its current failures in Afghanistan. Many of his points were hard to deny, and a breakthrough for the crusader came when he convinced Leslie Gelb of the
New York Times
that the CIA’s effort was insignificant when compared to the estimated $700 million a year’s worth of weapons that the Soviets had furnished the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. A favorable
Times
profile gave Eiva all the legitimacy he needed.

It might seem that Gust Avrakotos would have found Eiva’s public criticisms useful. The two were, after all, saying much the same thing, and certainly they were pursuing the same objective. But Avrakotos had many reasons for fearing the public attacks once Gordon Humphrey got into the mix. For one thing, the civilian Pentagon officials involved in security affairs were starting to maneuver to take over the Afghan operation, claiming that the CIA did not know how to run a military campaign. Furthermore, Humphrey and Eiva were enlisting other conservative senators, and the idea of Congress gearing up for a sustained public attack threatened to erode confidence in the program just when Gust and Charlie had finally managed to get the resources the Agency needed to show what could be done.

Here Wilson orchestrated another cunningly effective campaign to soften these challenges to Avrakotos’s Afghan program. Early on he decided that most of the activists involved in lobbying for the Afghans were highly peculiar and excessive in their criticism, not only of the CIA and the U.S. government but of the other groups that were involved in the same cause. Indeed, he would soon come to view them as very much like their Afghan clients—ostensibly sharing the same broad cause but caught up in internecine warfare.

Many were even more extreme in their zealousness than Eiva and Free the Eagle. There was the Washington-based Committee for a Free Afghanistan, originally led by an intimidating former army officer, Karen McKay, who had once undergone limited jump-school training and would sometimes appear at conservative gatherings in uniform, wearing a green beret. Two other equally formidable women worked out of a respected New York foundation, Freedom House: Rosanne Klass and Ludmilla Thorne. Wilson’s political antenna told him right away that it would be highly dangerous to cross any of these zealots. For one thing, they all seemed to hate each other. The Committee for a Free Afghanistan, for example, refused to let Eiva into any of its meetings, and Eiva reciprocated by accusing the committee of being a CIA front.

Wilson made it a point to see them all whenever they called, to offer encouragement but diplomatically avoid signing on publicly with any of them. He played his role masterfully here. By now he was for all practical purposes a critical player in the very center of the CIA’s Afghan operation, though he managed to make the entire range of ardent critics believe he was with them in their bitter attacks on the Agency. In the councils of his Appropriations subcommittees and in conferences with the Senate, however, he had already assumed the role of Langley’s advocate, able to make the case for the way the Afghan operation was being run. It may be that Wilson was better informed at that time than anyone in the Agency except a few members of Avrakotos’s inner circle.

He could tell his colleagues that he had been to Cairo, had seen the weapons being bought, had been to Pakistan and the mujahideen camps, and could state from firsthand experience how effective the program was becoming. He was already playing the part that the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon, would later call that of the Agency’s “case officer on the Hill.”

There was an element of duplicity in Wilson’s dealings here. In truth, it suited him just fine to have these crazies moving menacingly around the fringes hurling virtual bombs and attacking bureaucrats. For example, Charlie would always defend John McMahon in public, but he recognized that the deputy director was in fact a conservative force at the Agency and that other CIA officials were even more dubious about escalating. It didn’t hurt to have the bureaucrats feel the pressure. On occasion, when he sensed resistance at State or the Agency, he would deliberately stir Eiva up.

Perhaps Wilson’s most masterful maneuver on behalf of the CIA effort came in his dealings with Senator Humphrey. Here Charlie chose to have his role inside the Agency remain invisible and to allow Humphrey to assume the public spotlight as the Afghans’ key congressional champion. Humphrey was so extreme when it came to Afghanistan that he would camp outside a fellow senator’s office, if necessary, to corner him for a commitment on a vote. He didn’t sit on Appropriations or Intelligence. He couldn’t initiate funding increases the way Wilson could. But as an enforcer of senatorial discipline on behalf of the mujahideen, he managed to make his fellow senators feel that they would have a political enemy for life if they stood in his way, and few cared enough about the issue to choose to alienate such a man.