Charlie Wilson's War (59 page)

Early on Avrakotos decided that Vickers was a military and tactical genius and that he would let him call the military shots. As he backed his strategist’s brash plan to build the largest operation the CIA had ever run, Avrakotos came to rely on an almost unreal aspect of Vickers’s performance: he didn’t seem to make mistakes.

In early 1985, when the program had hit a half billion a year and a nervous John McMahon had called in the Pentagon to review the strategy, the Joint Chiefs could find nothing to criticize. When the White House had become alarmed about corruption charges and had ordered a full policy review, Vickers had managed to turn the exercise on its head. He’d not only put down the corruption concerns, he’d also successfully argued that the president should abandon the old “bleeding policy” and sign off on a new U.S. policy to drive the Red Army out “by all means available.”

In February 1986, as Avrakotos sat contemplating life without his strategist, he realized that he had bet the store on Vickers and he had never once been disappointed. He now realized that he loved this young man—this bright, hardworking, patriotic ethnic kid who reminded him of what he had been like when he’d first joined the Agency in the early 1960s. Vickers wasn’t burdened with quite the same rough edges that Gust had brought with him from Aliquippa, but still he was an ethnic and Gust had found it rewarding to see how the kid flourished when given the right kind of assignment by the right kind of boss. It was as if he had been proving what Gust might have been able to do for the Agency and for his country had he been given the same chance that Archie Roosevelt’s prep school roommate would have had.

For Avrakotos, the idea of running the Afghan program without Vickers was like being told he had to have an arm amputated. He felt almost betrayed—or perhaps abandoned.
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At a time when the press was still predicting defeat and ruin, and before Vickers’s new mix of weapons and training and theories had been given a chance to kick in, their guide and all-important strategist was just walking out.

Bert Dunn got into the act, offering to make sure that after the Afghan program, Mike would get an assignment to whatever overseas post he wanted. But by then Vickers had analyzed his situation and reached several surprising conclusions simultaneously, all of which told him it was time to leave.

His first conclusion was typical of this wildly confident intellect. Vickers told Gust that his work was basically done. It would be another year or two before the full impact of what they had set in motion would surface on the battlefield, but the weapons decisions had all been taken, the contracts let, the training programs developed, the logistical system and delivery schedules established. He had put it all into the task force plans, and for all practical purposes the rest of the CIA’s efforts could go on automatic pilot.

It was hard for Avrakotos to accept this until Vickers began to break it down for him. While Gust had been in Pakistan, Vickers explained, he had put into place the last major element of the weapons program—the Stinger training and deployment strategy.

He was confident that the Stinger would add a lethal new dimension to the anti-aircraft mix that was already beginning to pay off. He had gone to great lengths to make sure the Afghans would be properly trained. In the past, U.S. trainers had taught the Pakistanis how to use new weapons, and the Pakistanis had then instructed the mujahideen. This time Vickers proposed that the American specialists go into the camps dressed like mujahideen to personally supervise the training.

He was also hopeful about the hunter-killer strategy he and Nick Pratt, the marine colonel in charge of training, were implementing with the Stingers. Instead of using them just to counter planes or helicopters that might attack Afghan positions, the mujahideen would be trained to take them to where they knew or suspected Soviet aircraft would be taking off or landing. The idea was to turn the tables and let the mujahideen hunt the gunships for a change. It had worked with the SA-7s and Blowpipes, but the Stinger made the strategy all the more effective.

Now that the anti-aircraft strategy was in place, Vickers insisted that his master plan, spelling out precisely how the CIA should support the Afghans for the next three years was complete. Had it been anyone else making this claim, Avrakotos might have doubted that such a thing was possible. But he knew better than to question Vickers. At times Gust felt that his young military adviser was almost inhuman. “He could be frightening when he started talking numbers,” Gust says.

Avrakotos remembered his amazement when he’d first watched the way Vickers had gone about making his decisions about the number of rounds the mujahideen would need to keep their AK-47s fed, factoring in not only combat engagements but also joy shots, hoarding, and black marketeering. Including such details had become an integral part of the effortless art of Mike Vickers, allowing for life as it is on the battlefield but applying science, discipline, and accountability whenever possible. Logistics, supply lines, medical care—such things are fundamental to war but are particularly challenging in covert warfare. Every aspect of trying to support the Afghan holy warriors had its own special logistical challenge. And so all of Vickers’s calculations had to take into account maneuvers with Swiss bank accounts, shadowy purchasing agents, safe houses, phony corporations, contracts, lawyers, disguised boats, fleets of trucks, trains, camels, donkeys, mules, warehouses, disguised satellite-targeting studies, and secret payments to the families of the fighters.

Almost all of this work was done from a rather dull, colorless set of offices tucked away in the peaceful woods of Langley, Virginia. That wasn’t at all the kind of work Mike Vickers had envisioned doing when he’d signed on with the CIA; he’d had visions then of becoming a modern T. E. Lawrence. But Vickers was, above all, a man of modern times and new technologies and he quickly came to feel that had Lawrence spent his time with the mujahideen, he might not have made much of a difference at all.

The Agency’s paramilitary cowboys were always coming upstairs, urging him and Gust to let them mount special operations in Afghanistan. In his own daydream, Vickers would head off into the Panjshir Valley to advise Massoud, the Afghan he most admired. The two men were born the same year, and he would have loved nothing more than to disappear into the mountains with the Lion of the Panjshir to trap and hunt and harass the common foe. But Vickers knew it was of no value for a few Americans to run operations in Afghanistan. The mujahideen (and, when needed, the Pakistan ISI) were doing that kind of work for themselves. The creative thing in this war was for the CIA to transform these men into technoguerrillas.

It required a certain kind of imagination to visualize from paper the army Vickers was sculpting. Vickers had read long and deep into the history of unconventional warfare. He knew he had a historic commission. He was designing a new prototype, and to him it was a work of military art. Vickers is one of those rare men who basically mark their own report cards, and in February 1986 he was able to peer into the future, see the creature he had been bringing to life, and pronounce it a full-blown success.

Upon seeing those satellite photos of the carnage on the Gardez-to-Kabul Highway, Vickers had felt great satisfaction. From then on he had little doubt that the CIA’s strategy would succeed, and he told Gust this when he said he had reached his decision to leave the Agency. But in all fairness, it’s highly unlikely that Mike Vickers, after almost three years in the CIA, would have suddenly decided to leave simply because he believed that the important creative contribution he had to offer was largely complete.

What happened was that Vickers had focused his analytic powers not just on the strengths and weaknesses of the mujahideen and the Red Army but on the way things worked in his own spy agency, and he hadn’t liked what he’d discovered.

By the beginning of 1986 Vickers realized he was calling the shots on 57 percent of the Directorate of Operations’ total budget. He had by then grown accustomed to running the biggest CIA paramilitary campaign in history. But an experience the previous month had jolted him into the realization that on paper he was not running anything. Twenty thousand people worked at CIA. It was a bureaucracy. It had its rules and its routes to power and responsibility, and as far as the official record was concerned, he was one of the lowest case officers involved. Gust might be using him to do the equivalent work of an army field commander at war, but in the official records, he was the equivalent of a captain or major. And army captains and majors don’t get to do the job of a General Schwarzkopf.

The previous fall Gust and Bert Dunn had sought a promotion for Vickers. The promotion board had gone along only after Dunn had threatened to have Clair George overrule them if they refused. But the officer in charge had given Vickers the sobering news that he would have been far better off doing what ordinary junior case officers do than performing a function that could not really be recognized since he wasn’t supposed to be doing it. A senior CIA official had told him earlier that it would be another ten or fifteen years, if he was lucky, before he could count on getting such responsibility again. The official told Vickers that the Afghan operation was the highlight of his own twenty-year career.

Vickers was now coming to recognize just what a strange aberration this Afghan operation had been. Nothing he had been able to do would have been possible without Gust, but Avrakotos’s license to operate came from Bert Dunn, who was about to leave to become Clair George’s assistant deputy director of operations. That should have strengthened Gust’s position, but there was a catch. The front-runner to inherit Dunn’s job was Tom Twetten, and if that happened, Vickers’s all-important patron, Gust Avrakotos, was going to be seriously out of luck.

Technically, Tom Twetten, as Near East Division deputy chief, had been Avrakotos’s boss for over two years. But Gust had carved out a strange and independent role, dealing with Wilson at times, with Casey at other times, and always with a direct line to Dunn. And for his own perverse reasons, Gust had chosen simply to ignore Twetten whenever possible and sometimes to taunt him for no good reason at all.

Part of it was just a personality thing. Gust used to refer to Twetten as Mr. Rogers when talking with the Dirty Dozen, and the nickname had caught on. The one thing professional spies do well is build information networks, and Twetten was a pro who’d quickly learned his nickname.

One of the ways Avrakotos and Wilson had initially developed a rapport was by telling crude jokes at Tom Twetten’s expense. And for some reason Gust used to refuse to answer Twetten’s calls until he had kept him waiting for at least a minute. His secretary would find it excruciating to keep Twetten on hold while Gust would read his mail until he felt he had made his point, then pick up the phone and gruffly say hello as if he had far more important and pressing business to tend to than taking a call from Tom Twetten.

All that might have mattered little had it not been for the ugly incident the month before. Oliver North had stormed out to the Agency demanding access to a Swiss bank account to deposit the proceeds from one of the Iranian arms-for-hostages sales. He wanted it immediately, and Twetten wanted to satisfy this important White House emissary. Gust said no.

This time Avrakotos was not acting out of some adolescent need to tweak the deputy division chief. He thought the request was asinine and dangerous, and to him it was a matter of principle to resist. So far no one had bothered the Agency about its Afghan operation. No one was demanding the same kind of conformity to the rules as they were in Central America, and Gust knew the program couldn’t stand examination. All they needed was to have one scandal break and the floodgates would open.

The deputy division chief was asking him to mingle Iranian arms-for-hostages funds with the Saudi account—an account that to Gust was sacred. The Saudis were giving a fortune to the CIA with no strings attached. And that money had an added value because it didn’t have to be accounted for the way congressionally appropriated moneys did.

Gust had bent over backward to make sure nothing jeopardized this Saudi connection. When the king had sent his son to Langley for a month, Avrakotos had made sure the young prince was treated like a prince of old. He’d even consulted the Agency’s great expert on Saudi Arabia and Iran, George Cave, who’d advised that because of Muslim prohibitions on usury, the Agency probably should not put the money in an interest-bearing account. Gust had put the choice to the Saudis, who thanked the Agency for its sensitivity to their religion and opted for the no-interest alternative.

As far as Gust was concerned, Twetten was so eager to please Oliver North and the White House that he was prepared to jeopardize this Saudi connection. Avrakotos wasn’t going to let him do it. Twetten called on a secure line to ask for the account number.

“What for? You don’t have a need to know,” Avrakotos answered.

“I certainly do. Call Clair.”

“Fuck you—have Clair call me.”

Soon after that conversation, Hilly Billy, Gust’s finance man, said he was being pressured to cough up the number. “Refer the calls to me,” Gust said. When Twetten called back citing the orders of the National Security Council, Avrakotos ended the exchange by saying, “Have Casey order me.” Gust says he also told Twetten, “You’re going to go to jail.”

Twetten finally managed to get the head of finance to give him the account number.
*

Even more disquieting, however, were the other things going on with Iran-Contra. For starters, Clair George had sealed off the special Iran room and denied Avrakotos access. What was known was that at least part of the Iranian account had been taken from Avrakotos. Gust’s political fortunes within the Directorate of Operations were once again coming under a cloud.

It didn’t help Gust one little bit that John McMahon had already resigned that February. Andy Eiva and Free the Eagle tried to claim that they were responsible and that they had saved the day for the Afghans by getting rid of their one true enemy inside the Agency. But McMahon had been one of Gust’s most important patrons. His had always been a voice of caution in Bill Casey’s CIA. He had insisted on old-fashioned efforts to conceal the American hand, but John McMahon had also been a key friend of the program who’d ultimately backed every major escalation. Every single person in the Directorate of Operations, including Avrakotos, had stood in line to shake hands and say good-bye to the thirty-year veteran.