Charlie Wilson's War (60 page)

Ed Juchniewicz, the ADDO who had appointed Gust to his job when Clair George was out of town and who had continued to serve as an ally, was also stepping down. Something even seemed to be wrong with Bill Casey. There were rumors about his health and about investigations under way.

Vickers had the option of staying on in his current job, certainly as long as Gust remained in charge. If that didn’t appeal to him, Bert Dunn was offering to get him his choice of a foreign assignment anywhere he wanted to go if he stayed for another year. But it all seemed so incredibly small-time compared to what he had become used to.

A meeting with the CIA’s career management staff confirmed Mike Vickers’s fears. Avrakotos and Dunn might have pushed to get him promoted to GS-12 due to the nature of his work, but it would be at least five years before he could expect to make GS-13. According to the career management officer, Vickers would have to complete two overseas tours of two years each before he would be eligible for promotion to the next level.

He thought it through again and again, and every time he projected out the likely course of a CIA career without Gust and Bert and the Afghan program it always came out dull as dishwater. It might have been different if Vickers had felt that Gust really needed him. Had he honestly believed that there was that much more to do, he might have been persuaded to stay. But by now, his calculations and projections were complete. The program’s next three years were set. Any competent officer could implement it. Even the Stinger deployment had been fully prepared.

Later Gust would have to acknowledge that his young friend was right. Because so much of the money they would need to sustain their effort was already obligated for future weapons delivery, no one would be able to change the plan that Vickers had set in motion. It didn’t matter how powerful the chief of station in Islamabad might be or how differently he or someone at headquarters might want to do things. They had to go along with the weapons and ammunition deliveries or else give back the money to the Treasury. That was the nature of obligated money; it didn’t have to be spent that year, but once obligated, the contracts were set in cement. Almost anyone could now run Vickers’s program because his hand would be at the helm for the next three years, guiding each new shipment of goods to the front.

At the time, Avrakotos did not doubt Vickers’s claim that the tide was already turning and that what he and the Agency and the mujahideen had set out to do was more or less accomplished. The unmistakable signs of the chinks in the Soviet armor had surfaced. The Afghans had tasted blood, and the best weapons were just about to arrive in their hands. As far as the redesign was concerned, the program could now go on automatic pilot.

There was no great farewell. Bert spent ten minutes telling Vickers what a remarkable contribution he had made. Gust took him to dinner and offered a toast to him. And then Mike left the Agency for the Wharton business school. He had very large visions for the future and assumed that one day he would return to the realm of national security work. But for now he thought he would begin by mastering the principles of business administration.

Mike Vickers left Langley with absolutely no fanfare or recognition, but when he drove out through the main security gate at the age of thirty-two he left quite a legacy. The great Muslim army in the greatest of all modern jihads had been reconstituted because of his vision. Right now, the invincible Red Army stood confused and harassed by this angry mass of undisciplined mujahideen, who somehow seemed to be operating with a new kind of intelligence and striking power. He had told Gust that it would probably not be until 1987 that they would see the full force of their efforts surface. But the die was cast. The battle was won. It was just a matter of time.

It was now just a matter of seconds before the contest between Engineer Ghaffar and the three Soviet helicopters closing in on him was resolved. The first Stinger had given away their precise location and the gunships were now turning to finish them off. But in the words of George Patton, “Wars are fought with weapons but won by men.” Ghaffar rose to the occasion and, seizing a second grip stock, and issuing the same cry to his god, he fired the second Stinger and suddenly in the sky over Jalalabad the stake finally ripped through the heart of the beast.

The Hind was suddenly just a broken toy drifting down from the sky, and from beside Ghaffar had come a second and third cry to Allah and now it was not just one, but
three
Hinds, splintered to destruction before their eyes. God was indeed great.

It was a turning point. The Stinger worked, and the Afghans would soon demonstrate an uncanny ability to use this weapon. According to the CIA’s estimates, seven out of every ten times a mujahid fired a Stinger, a helicopter or airplane came down. Each MiG cost an average of $20 million or more, contrasted with $60,000 or $70,000 for each Stinger. That was the kind of Cold War return on an American dollar that the CIA loved. But the Stinger’s real impact went well beyond the simple number of planes and gunships it killed.

Now Soviet combat pilots had to begin worrying about when they might be coming within range of a Stinger. As a defensive measure they began constantly dropping flares from the Hinds; it was the only way to head off a heat-seeking missile that might be shooting up into the sky looking for the plumes of their exhaust. “What we wanted was to make them pucker up their asses,” Wilson had said, and that was precisely what was happening as they visibly maneuvered to keep the American warhead from flying right up into the steaming, open orifice of their once invulnerable gunship.

The mujahideen considered it a triumph just to witness the aerial acrobatics the Soviets were now putting on over Bagram each day. The pilots came in for landings high and corkscrewed down in violent maneuvers to keep the mujahideen from being able to lock in on a target. But the biggest compliment they paid the Afghans and the most useful thing for the war effort was the way the Hind pilots began flying routine missions.

The Russian journalist Alexander Prokhanov, who was intimate with the Soviet General Staff and who covered the Afghan war from the very beginning, offered this derisive sketch of the Hind pilots before and after the introduction of the Stinger: “They used to be kings of Afghan and everyone saluted them. But after the Stinger they took to flying very high to keep out of range. They had little value up there, and the ground troops began referring to the pilots as ‘cosmonauts.’”

By 1987, the mujahideen, with all of their weapons, were shooting down a Soviet or Afghan army aircraft a day. And now that the gunships were no longer sweeping in low to shoot up mule and camel caravans, much more ammunition and supplies started to make its way to the fighters.

None of this happened immediately. It took time to train operators, and even then there were only so many Stingers to cover a country the size of Texas. But the hunter-killer teams had begun moving out toward all of the major airfields, and the Soviets could never know when they might be waiting for them. Close to two hundred aircraft would be brought down by Stingers in the next year.

The main impact, as Bearden reported back to Langley, was in the morale and spunkiness of the mujahideen. They now had the psychological edge. Without the Hind, the Soviets were not ten feet tall. Mohammed with his thirty-five-pound General Dynamics Stinger was now ten feet tall. It created an entirely different balance of forces when a convoy was to be attacked. As long as they had a Stinger along, the mujahideen weren’t running from the gunships. In fact, they were taunting the gunships to come out and fight. They would not only sneak up on airstrips but sometimes attack a garrison with the explicit objective of luring a gunship out for the kill.

“It became a force multiplier, a juju amulet, a Saint Christopher medallion—you name it,” explains Bearden. “Before, all these guys were waiting around to be martyred. Now they were walking around, heading into Dodge City on purpose looking for trouble.”

At Jalalabad on September 26, after he and his fellow mujahideen had fired their Stingers, Ghaffar made sure they carefully packed each of the spent tubes onto their mules before escaping into the mountains. They had reason to make haste, but the rules of accountability for this weapon were very strict: the only way they could get another of these magical missiles was by turning in a spent one. Beyond that, there were specific plans for the one that brought down the first Hind. It was to be given to a special friend.

In Islamabad that afternoon, after Ghaffar signaled word of his triumph, Bearden held fire until the following morning, when a CIA satellite sailed over the Hindu Kush at first light and took pictures of the tangled gunships at the end of the Jalalabad runway. Minutes later a call from the Afghan task force chief went into Charlie Wilson: three Hinds have been shot down at Jalalabad. The Stinger works.

For three years, Charlie Wilson had gone to bed each night knowing that he might be woken by the gunships. The nightmare had been his confusing companion, both terrifying and energizing him. But after this call from Langley, it never returned. Once the Hinds stopped hovering over the Afghan villages and their pilots started acting like cosmonauts, the grinning Slav would never wake Charlie again.

In the coming days and weeks, as confirmation of other Hind kills came in, Wilson knew the corner had finally been turned. He had been waiting three years to bring down a Hind, and after that first call he had told his secretary that his Agency friends were on their way over to celebrate.

I
t was a bittersweet moment for Gust Avrakotos when he was informed of the Stinger hits. By September 1986 he had long since grown accustomed to immediately sharing such experiences with Charlie. But he was in deepest Africa when he read the cable, no longer a part of the Afghan program. As far as he was concerned, he had been banished to a hot Siberia and he wasn’t even allowed to call Charlie on the phone.

Wilson had no idea what had actually happened; only that Gust had suddenly come to see him, saying that he was being reassigned. He had introduced him to his successor, a tall Irishman whom Wilson got on with just fine. But it was all quite odd. There was no longer any answer on his friend’s old phone. All Charlie could get was the explanation from Norm Gardner, the CIA liaison man, that this was standard operating procedure and that Gust was off on an important new assignment.

The truth was that Avrakotos was now in purgatory, and from the moment the Stingers brought down their first kills, others at the CIA would ride to victory on the tiger he had unleashed. Others would receive the citations and the merit pay, the awards and the speeches and, especially, the promotions to the very top. He would only have his memories and his honor to console him.

No matter how many times Avrakotos went over the events that had led to his fall from grace, there was never any question in his mind that he’d done what Oscar Lascaris Avrakotos’s son had had to do. Two things were more important than anything else, his father had taught him: there was never too much that he could do for his country, and he had to feel right about himself when he looked in the mirror. He hadn’t gone into the CIA to make money, nor was he there to watch out for his career. He was just a simple second-generation ethnic patriot who had fallen in love during Camelot with the idea of doing something for his country that might make a difference. That’s what had made his father proud when Gust had come back from a tour in Greece not willing to tell him what kind of things he had been doing for the CIA. “That’s all right, Gust, I’m proud of you,” he had said. And so, in spite of the risk to his career, Gust had not had a second thought about making his move to try to stop the Agency from becoming embroiled in what everyone would come to know as Iran-Contra.

Avrakotos never told Wilson about his growing troubles with Clair George and the system. They had begun in 1985 during the great Afghan buildup and had come to a head just before he had left for Pakistan. Gust was still in charge of Iran then, so he was one of the first to be told of the White House’s idea that it was time to try to cut a deal with Khomeini’s Iran. Part of what triggered his distress was that the proposal to sell arms to Iran was being pushed by the same kind of zealots, including Oliver North, who had dreamed up the Vlasov’s army madness.

In the beginning the Agency was only indirectly involved. The Israelis were pushing the scheme. They had convinced Bud McFarlane and North that there were moderates in Iran who could be dealt with. At that point Iran was losing its war with Iraq, and the Israelis seemed to believe that if the president allowed them to sell some of their U.S.-supplied Hawk missiles, it would not only lead to the release of the hostages but to the beginning of a new strategic alliance that would prevent the Soviets from getting a foothold in Iran.

Operatives like Avrakotos always ask the question “Who profits?” when they consider such propositions. What Avrakotos instantly concluded was that Israel stood to profit the most from an arms sale to Iran, but it was very hard for him to see what possible good could come to the United States.

Avrakotos knew too much about Israel’s complicated relationship with Iran—how the Mossad had “had half of the mullahs on its payroll” before the revolution. But mainly he factored in why Israel would want to be building up Khomeini. The answer was simple: Israel’s most dangerous enemy was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and right then Iraq looked as if it might be on the verge of winning its war with Iran. What better way for Israel to do in its enemy and rebuild its alliance with Iran than to get the United States to finance it? That was enough to call into question Israel’s motives, but ultimately what enraged Avrakotos was the vision that Oliver North and the others had of a group of Iranian moderates just waiting to deal honorably with the Great Satan.

Of the many things that Avrakotos felt he brought to the Agency, one of the most valuable was an intuitive understanding of the way the Old World worked. He never permitted wishful thinking to cloud what he saw as the obvious way certain nationality groups think and act. Bosnia didn’t come as a surprise to Avrakotos; he had seen it all in the drunken passions of the Serbs and Croats back in Aliquippa when he used to deliver beer to their political halls. And what he knew about the Iranians was that they had been consistently “fucking” the United States ever since the Ayatollah had overthrown the man the CIA had put in power.

Avrakotos’s thinking was not terribly complicated. He could not figure out any reason why he or the CIA should be engaged in the efforts that Oliver North and the NSC staff were trying to push. The stated policy of the United States was not to bargain with terrorists. Specifically, it was not to arm Iran, which was responsible for backing the men holding the U.S. hostages in Beirut and which, indirectly at least, had to be held accountable for the capture and torture of the CIA station chief William Buckley.

Avrakotos hadn’t liked Buckley, but he would have risked his life to save him, and he was repelled by the idea of dealing with Iran. It wasn’t just because of the principle; there was no rational justification for believing that the scheme being pushed—bribing the Iranians with Hawk missiles to win the release of the hostages—would work.

He knew who North was relying on: the Israelis and a scumball named Manucher Ghorbanifar. Avrakotos was in charge of the Iran side of the Directorate of Operations at headquarters; the government’s most knowledgeable experts on Iran reported to him. They insisted that there were no moderates in power in Tehran, that Ghorbanifar was lying, that he was simply a huckster out to make money, and that the Israelis had their own reasons for pushing this scheme, which had nothing to do with U.S. interests.

On one of the Agency’s polygraph tests Ghorbanifar had managed to pass only two of his fourteen questions—his name and his nationality. At Avrakotos’s direction, the Agency had put out a burn notice in 1984 saying that he was a fabricator and no one should deal with him. But in 1985 Ghorbanifar came in through the CIA’s back door via the Israelis, claiming that he could win the release of Buckley and the other hostages.

Gust knew these men. They didn’t do favors for the Great Satan. They might be religious zealots, but they were smart and they knew how to bring down presidents. They knew the value of hostages to the country that was causing them such misery in their war with Saddam Hussein. The only way to deal with these people was to bomb their religious shrines, or, in the case of Ghorbanifar, stick a knife in his eyeball.

As far as Avrakotos was concerned, the people advocating this policy were part of the lunatic fringe. North had been part of the Vlasov’s army madness, and this was every bit as crazy. This hopelessly naive arms-for-hostages scheme—which would soon grow into an arms-for-hostages scheme with the profits going to fund the Contras—was nothing short of recklessness, and Gust mobilized to put a stop to it.

Avrakotos had no problem stretching the rules to the breaking point and no doubt violating many of them. But he was not about to have his department—the Iran branch—drawn into this madness. Beyond that, he wanted to protect the Agency from the disaster he saw in the works. He had had his troubles with Clair George, but he wanted to protect his old friend as well.

Finally, he decided to take a preemptory strike to protect himself, his division, and the Agency from any further involvement in this operation. He gathered together his best experts and told them to prepare a document explaining why the Agency should not be involved. He agreed to sign it himself and not include their names. He knew that Clair George was being pulled into North’s operation, and he didn’t want his subordinates to catch George’s wrath.

George may not have liked anything about North’s operation, but the Agency, which was offering no solution to the hostage problem, was hard put to say no to the White House’s plan. As Gust saw it, there was another reason why George might retaliate against the drafters of the memo. He was a contender for John McMahon’s job, and it never helps to alienate the White House.

But that was not Avrakotos’s concern. In fact, he deliberately drafted the memo with the explicit purpose of making it all but impossible for George or Casey to go forward. Among other things, the memo said that Ghorbanifar was a crook and that the operation was illegal, or at least some of the things the Agency was being asked to do were illegal, immoral, and unworkable. Then he added an explosive line predicting that if the Agency went along, it would end up with the same kind of disastrous consequences as Watergate. He sent it off just as the CIA was being asked to move into the operation in a big way. And he sent it in such a way that it would enter into the official records of the Directorate of Operations.

Clair George has a highly emotive and temperamental personality. He is capable of enormous charm as well as terrifying temper tantrums, and Avrakotos knew him better than anyone else at the Agency. He knew that George was a ballroom dancer who could maneuver with his wife, Mary, much like Fred Astaire. He was an elegant choreographer, and when he got involved in blowups it might look spontaneous to everyone else but not to Gust. In Athens he had learned to be able to predict when George was about to have a tantrum in front of a case officer or visiting dignitary; there were certain histrionics he would go through for effect. Once Clair realized that Gust had broken his code, it infuriated him. He didn’t like someone who could see through him.

Up in the DDO’s office, the CIA’s top spy appeared to be going truly nuts with anger, but Avrakotos was not intimidated. He watched his old friend as if he were at the theater, noting, however, that behind the show there was genuine fury. He knew why. The Agency had been created mainly by military men. Its predecessor, the OSS, had been part of the military. General William J. Donovan, the founder, had worn a uniform. Military tradition survives very much in force in the Clandestine Services, where people call one another by their first names and don’t salute, but they always follow orders.

What Gust had done with this unsolicited report was in effect insubordination. He had now made it part of the official record and had even gotten Bert Dunn to sign off on it. In George’s eyes there was little question that the intention of the memo was to make it damn difficult for the Agency to go along with the White House’s plans.

“Casey’s never going to see this,” Gust remembers him shouting. “Do you know what I think of this?” he said, as he crumpled the report Gust had given him. “This is what I think of it,” he shouted, as he pantomimed using the papers to wipe his ass and then threw them on the floor.

Avrakotos just stared at George for a beat. “You better pick those up and save them, because they’re going to save your ass one day,” he said before he walked out.

Shortly after this Avrakotos was taken out of the loop on the special Iran project. A new door was brought into Gust’s empire, with a cipher lock and peephole. Behind it was the Agency’s new component for North’s arms-for-hostages operation. George ordered Avrakotos removed from all cable traffic and denied him access to the weird room. But the key operatives, like George Cave, were Avrakotos’s friends and confidants. And the case officer Gust had running the Iran branch, Jack Devine, was nervous and continued to come to him for advice. Avrakotos watched with them in disbelief as North and Bud McFarlane, the recently retired national security adviser, flew off to Tehran carrying a key-shaped cake, symbolizing an opening for new relations, and a Bible—which someone in the entourage apparently thought would flatter the followers of the Ayatollah.

As far as Avrakotos was concerned, it was now only a matter of time before something blew. Gust’s three-year tour happened to come up just at that moment. Under any other circumstances he believes he would easily have been able to extend it as long as he liked. “It was the most successful program
ever
against the Russians, and I had taken a losing program and turned it into a winner.” Dunn knew that Gust wanted to stay, and so did Clair George, who sent his division chief to give Avrakotos the bad news.

“You’re not going to like this, and neither do I, but Clair wants you to go to Africa.” Gust had listened without comment as Dunn tried to make the assignment as the number three man in the African Division sound exciting. He spoke of the Savimbi war in Angola, but Avrakotos knew he was being banished and he also knew there was nothing he could do to change George’s mind. “I could have gone to Clair and pleaded my case, but I knew it would have given him sadistic pleasure to turn me down. He would have thought, Even the great Gust had to kiss my ass and let me know I was boss.” Gust had defied George, and now George was going to extract his revenge.

Avrakotos lived by his instincts. He fancied that he was a good judge of when he could bluff and when he could fight and win. And perhaps for the first time in his life he felt there was really not much of anything he could do. He knew Clair George through and through. They had been to war together—in Athens, when they’d both been hunted men. Gust had protected Clair and taught him how to navigate. They had shared confidences; Gust had given George his genuine friendship, and because he knew him so well he knew that his old friend was more than prepared to make life very miserable for him.

Later Avrakotos would have reasons other than insubordination to explain why Clair might have wanted him out of the Near East Division. The Agency was walking on the very edge of illegality in its Iran-Contra involvement. If and when the scandal hit, which now appeared likely, Avrakotos was on record as having passionately warned George and the Agency become further involved. One of Congress’s biggest problem in investigating the Agency is that it never knows whom to question or what to ask for. In this case, however, the official supervising the Iran branch would certainly be one of the first questioned, and if Gust were in the Africa Division in another job, someone else could explain the Agency’s position.