Charlie Wilson's War (22 page)

Khan’s theory helps explain why Wilson had such a huge impact on the Pakistani military establishment. They were entranced by his conviction that the mujahideen could win this war. Even more seductive was Wilson’s message that they could play this greatest of all games on their terms. As he presented it, they didn’t need to be guided by the CIA’s caution. If they simply did what they yearned to do anyway and backed the Afghans to the hilt, they could count on the U.S. Congress giving them hundreds of millions to reconstruct their army. Wilson said he could personally guarantee that.

None of this reflected the current thinking of the U.S. government. But most Pakistani military officers had grown up on Hollywood films, and dealing with a larger-than-life Texan like Wilson was a far more familiar experience to them than the gray figures from the CIA and the State Department, who always behaved so properly. The Pakistanis tended to suspect that bold characters like the ones they had gotten to know in the movies were the real powers in America.

The only thing that troubled President Zia ul-Haq stemmed from the rumors about the congressman’s peculiar lifestyle and his needlessly provocative traveling companion, the woman he lamely called his “secretary.” Realizing that he needed a reality check before going any further with this congressman, Zia put in a call to the American he relied on for advice.

There is a thirteen-hour time difference between Pakistan and River Oaks, and the courteous dictator was careful to wait until his honorary consul, Joanne Herring, was awake. “Why has the congressman brought a belly dancer with him to Pakistan?” he asked. Basically, the dictator needed someone to tell him that he was not dealing with a crazy man.

“Well,” she recalled, “I said, ‘I just don’t know what to say about the belly dancer. I haven’t met her, but you can depend on Charlie.’” That was enough for Zia. Joanne had saved the day. Shortly thereafter, the president’s private secretary called Wilson to set up a dinner at Government House in Rawalpindi. At the president’s request, the congressman would come alone at 7:30
P.M.
It was to be an all-male affair in Mr. Wilson’s honor. Dinner would begin at eight, but President Zia would like to have a few words with the congressman before the others arrived.

The conversation in the president’s study that evening dealt with a range of military and political issues. It would have astonished Howard Hart that the military dictator would even discuss such matters with any American official. A very different Charlie Wilson surfaced—sober, impressive, with a bold strategy that caught Zia’s attention and enthusiasm.

The congressman began by showing Zia the design for the Charlie Horse and describing the Israelis’ T-55 proposal. After establishing what Zia wanted him to convey back to the Israelis, Wilson came right to the point: they both wanted the same thing—to expand the Afghan war—and Charlie had a plan to make it possible. Then, just as he had with Zvi Rafiah and Abu Ghazala, Wilson set about giving Zia the keys to understanding what he could do for Pakistan by explaining how things really worked in the U.S. government.

Zia’s problem was that he did not dare permit a radical escalation unless he could be guaranteed huge amounts of U.S. aid, both to build up his army and to demonstrate to the Soviets that the Americans stood ready to protect Pakistan. That could be done, Wilson said, but not by relying on the State Department and the CIA to deliver. The key to opening the foreign-aid spigots and keeping the money flowing, Wilson explained, was one man—someone Zia had never heard of.

“His name is Doc Long,” Wilson told the president. “Forget the big-name senators or even the secretary of state; this is the man you have to win over. He’s a very strange, if not bizarre, character, but he’s the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that doles out foreign aid. He’s so powerful that he can sabotage any program he doesn’t like, or he can be a Daddy Warbucks.”

Wilson said he was prepared to bring Doc Long to Islamabad during the next congressional recess. “He’s hostile to military dictators, but he’s an unpredictable man and he can be won over if the case is made correctly.” He explained that Joanne had already agreed to come along to help make the case, but he would not even approach Long unless Zia was prepared to roll out the reddest of carpets.

When Wilson missed his scheduled flight out of Islamabad the next day, Zia arranged to have his presidential plane take the congressman and his companion to Karachi to catch the Pan Am flight home. As would become his custom for all of Charlie’s subsequent guests, he included a gift for Carol—a green onyx jewelry case with his personal card inside.

On the plane ride home, Wilson proceeded to get himself very drunk. For Carol Shannon, it was nearing midnight in this fairy tale. The next day she would be back in Fort Worth to resume her difficult life as an exotic belly dancer in a city that doesn’t pay a living wage to practitioners of the art. For her Prince Charming, the adjustment was going to be even harder. The congressman might be received as a hero in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Islamabad, but when Wilson landed in the capital, there would be no brass band waiting for him, only a federal posse closing in to destroy him.

G
ust Avrakotos had taken to the Afghan program like a duck to water. There was nothing like killing Communists to give him a sense of well-being. He had begun helping his old friend John McGaffin on the Afghan task force the same month in late 1982 that Charlie Wilson first discovered the mujahideen in Peshawar. Just like Wilson, Avrakotos had felt something stir inside himself the moment he met the Afghans. They were killers, and he understood these people. They wanted revenge. Avrakotos wanted revenge. And he liked their food. Lamb. That’s what Greeks eat. He even liked the Pakistani military men who were running the mujahideen for the CIA.

It didn’t take Avrakotos long to throw himself into this operation that was actually drawing Soviet blood, and he soon made himself indispensable to McGaffin. By the middle of 1983, when he learned that his friend was about to be promoted to another job, Avrakotos, who had made something of a cult out of pretending he didn’t care about anything, realized that he desperately wanted McGaffin’s job.

By this time, however, he had made a mess of things, and somewhere deep down he knew that at least part of the reason was because he just wouldn’t compromise. There was nothing to gain from telling a powerful division chief to go fuck himself—twice. And there was everything to gain from being a bit more diplomatic in the way he dealt with his colleagues. But Avrakotos had no stomach for this game and, in a curious way, felt he shouldn’t have to play it.

He had been recruited to be a street fighter for America, and he was proud to offer his brilliant mind and his ruthless skills to the country that his father had taught him to honor above all else. As he saw it, he was providing something through his work at the CIA that America desperately needed. One night, in a moment of introspection, Avrakotos came up with a historical analogy to explain the role he has played over the years in defense of America. “Have you ever heard of the Janissaries?” he began. “The Turks, when they conquered the Greeks and ruled much of the known world, had an elite group known as the Janissaries. Most were Christians, taken from the best families and made into fanatic Muslims. They were the sultan’s SS. They were his CIA. Every totalitarian regime, every government, every democracy has its equivalent of the Janissaries, people used for missions that no one else wants to touch.”

This was definitely not the sort of analogy a Yalie at the CIA would have offered to explain why he had joined the CIA, but it was typical of Avrakotos to put forth such a grim analogy. It may not be pretty, but to his way of thinking there could be nothing more honorable or important than to serve as an elite guardian of American democracy.

Even before the run-in with Graver, Avrakotos had come to wonder if the CIA had lost its way, and if there was still a place for a modern Janissary. But when he went to the border in Pakistan that first time and saw the Afghans loading camels and mules with Agency munitions, everything leapt back into focus. This was the CIA he had joined back in 1962. The Afghan operation was still small, but as he realized what was already under way and what these tribesmen were prepared to do if given more support, Avrakotos lusted to take over the program.

The CIA is a surprisingly large organization. Although the number of people who work there is classified, it can be said with some authority that there are over twenty thousand employees. When it comes time to fill a major operational post like McGaffin’s, however, the CIA suddenly becomes a very small and unforgiving place. The only real contenders come from the Agency’s true inner circle, the Clandestine Services, that tiny tribe of handpicked, hard-trained, general case officers to which Avrakotos had been admitted in 1962 in spite of his shabby social credentials. These men and precious few women are the ones who organized the overthrows of governments in Iran and Guatemala for Eisenhower; who tried to assassinate Lumumba and Castro during the Kennedy years; who ran the secret wars in Laos for Johnson; who helped overthrow Allende in Chile for Nixon; and who created the Contra army for Ronald Reagan. They were the ones who even Jimmy Carter had turned to when he’d decided he had to do something about the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The number of these elite case officers at any given time is about 2,500, but even this gives a grossly inflated impression. As one veteran explains, “Out of that twenty-five hundred a certain number are simply burned out or their wives have cancer or they are the walking dead. Maybe five percent are super, twenty percent good, and five percent should be shot. By the time you get to choosing an officer for a major post there may only be two or three serious candidates available.”

Technically, Gust Avrakotos was in the running. He now had more experience with the Afghan program than anyone at headquarters. But this crude and defiantly uncompromising spirit was simply not a contender and not only because he had made so many enemies. He just wasn’t presentable in the way that Chuck Cogan or Howard Hart or John McGaffin were. And the CIA had powerful reason to be extremely cautious when it came to filling its most visible posts.

In the interest of national security, the CIA is given a responsibility that calls for routinely violating the law in the countries where it operates. In any democracy there is a natural, built-in tension over the mere existence of any such organization; it’s one of the reasons the American spy service conceals itself and acts as if it doesn’t really exist. No government likes to acknowledge what its spies are doing—particularly when it’s dirty business. For that reason, there is an understandable impulse to hire men for this line of work who, when seen in public, present a sober, upright image.

The idea of Gust Avrakotos, the beer salesman from Aliquippa, interacting with a Saudi prince or even a British MI6 chief was scary enough. But even more frightening was the prospect of such a loose cannon representing the Agency in meetings with other branches of the U.S. government—particularly now that the CIA was once again under bitter attack from Congress for its secret war in Nicaragua.

The man chosen instead of Avrakotos to take over John McGaffin’s post was Alan Fiers, the politically astute chief of station in Saudi Arabia who years later would burst into the limelight when indicted by the independent counsel for his Iran-Contra dealings. He would become infamous in the CIA as the first Judas to turn in another officer in order to save his own skin.

But back in the early 1980s, he had caught the eye of Ronald Reagan’s exuberant CIA director, William Casey, as one of the Agency’s leading covert operators. Fiers was known as an outspoken, anti-Communist zealot, a former marine and college football player under Woody Hayes at Ohio State. Casey was looking for bold, risk-taking officers, and Fiers not only passed the enthusiasm test but he had long since adapted perfectly to the Agency’s culture. He had a Brooks Brothers appearance and was diplomatic in any setting. All in all, he seemed to be the perfect man for the job.

Since Fiers’s Saudi tour was not scheduled to end for several months, an acting chief had to be found, and no one on the Agency’s fast track wanted this lame duck slot. The comers all knew that headquarters wouldn’t even want a temporary chief to set up liaison relationships with foreign services for fear it would compromise the efforts of the permanent director soon to take over.

John McGaffin, either out of respect for Avrakotos or perhaps in a less than helpful gesture to Alan Fiers, his bureaucratic competitor, urged Gust to take the post. “Who knows, you’re good enough that you may be able to keep the job,” he said. With that Avrakotos began plotting to push Fiers aside, keenly aware of the unwritten rule in the Directorate of Operations: if you hold a major post for three months as acting chief, it’s yours.

Avrakotos’s job title was acting chief of the South Asia Operations Group. It was a big job with responsibility for, in addition to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Sri Lanka. Though he was little more than a caretaker, Avrakotos marched in with none of the caution of a lame duck. He figured that however many months he had in this job, he was going to use it to make a difference in the mujahideen’s war.

No one was asking for heroics from the temporary chief. McGaffin had told Avrakotos that the Agency’s job was not to think about winning but to make the Soviets bleed. “It wasn’t a defeatist attitude,” says Avrakotos. “It was positive—making the enemy hemorrhage. But I don’t play ball that way. It’s either black or white, win or lose. I don’t go for a tie.”

In Islamabad, Howard Hart viewed Avrakotos’s promotion with almost as much disgust as he had Charlie Wilson’s entry into the war. “I had known Gust for years and never liked him. He’s just a horrible man….Had I stayed on much longer I would have gone to Chuck Cogan and said, It’s either him or me.”

Talking to Hart about Avrakotos is like hearing an old Yale alumnus bewail the entry of women into the hallowed halls. “Most of us were fourth-generation Dartmouth types,” he explained. Hart did, however, acknowledge one area where Avrakotos excelled: whether it was the black market or negotiating with a corrupt Communist official, no one could cut a better deal. And from day one, without asking for a penny more from Congress, he began to dramatically increase the purchasing power of the Agency’s weapons budget—just by introducing a bit of competitive shopping.

This is something of a euphemism given the way Avrakotos operates when he goes to buy almost anything. Years later, when he joined Wilson on a congressional fact-finding mission to Baghdad, he hovered all afternoon in the main bazaar, haggling over a prayer rug. Wilson, whose personal style calls for big tipping and a generous manner, was always appalled by his friend’s ferocity over the cost of trinkets. On this afternoon in Saddam Hussein’s capital, Avrakotos waited until the bazaar had emptied out and then, with an evil stare, presented the merchant with a virtual threat. “This is a fair offer. You either take it or you won’t have a single sale tomorrow.”

The merchant succumbed, and Avrakotos gloatingly explained to the unhappy congressman that Muslim merchants are superstitious and feel it critical to begin and end the day with a successful sale: “If you know when to move, you can make them feel it’s not only bad luck for their business but bad luck for their family as well.”

When Avrakotos had started working with McGaffin in 1983, this compulsive bargainer had made the rounds of seven CIA stations, explicitly looking for ways to make an end run around the Agency’s procurement specialists. From his point of view, the 450-man Covert Action Procurement and Logistics Division always found the least risky and therefore the most expensive way of buying weapons on the black market. There was an art to getting a good deal with these merchants of death, and it did not include paying whatever price they attached to a weapon or a supply of ammunition.

By the time Avrakotos came into the picture, the procurement operatives were buying just about any Lee-Enfield .303 ammunition available on the world market. The Agency had already slipped more than 100,000 of these World War I–vintage rifles to the Afghans. It takes an enormous amount of ammunition to feed that many rifles, and the procurement people weren’t able to get as much as the mujahideen needed.

The bigger problem was the cost. Once the arms merchants caught on to the Agency’s appetite for this obsolescent ammunition, the price soared. And to Avrakotos’s disgust, his procurement colleagues simply paid it. He looked into the records and found that the Agency’s first buys were for three cents a round. “But then it doubled to six, and when they discovered we were coming back every three months it went to twelve cents. When it hit eighteen cents I said, We’re being taken.”

Through one of his old Greek military buddies, Avrakotos learned of forty million rounds stored in a Yugoslav mushroom cave, which represented almost half of what Howard Hart needed to fill his annual budget for the mujahideen that year. It was a perfect setup. The Yugoslav army wanted money and didn’t like Russians; the farmers wanted their caves back so they could grow mushrooms; and all the Agency had to do was provide phony end-user certificates so that it would look as if the ammo was going to someone other than the Americans. Instead of eighteen cents a round, Gust was able to buy the stash for seven cents a round. It was a mini coup.

“The Office of Logistics didn’t like this deal because it was embarrassing,” remembers Avrakotos, “but I never cut them off completely, because they have ways of getting back at you. So I’d throw a little their way and say, ‘Okay, we’re getting .303 rounds for seven cents, let’s see what you can do.’”

Avrakotos now began asking his friends at stations around the world to work their military sources to find out what else was available. “It’s not what spies usually do, but I figured we have the contacts and who is better at finding what’s available.”

It was during this time that he supervised a nerve-racking operation centered on a Polish general ready to sell Soviet SA-7 surface-to-air missiles to the Americans. This called for lifting these tightly guarded weapons from right under the nose of the Red Army, which was then more or less occupying Poland. “My hair turned white on this operation because of the risks we were taking,” remembers Avrakotos.

If the guerrillas could acquire Soviet SA-7s, they could achieve a breakthrough in their war; the weapon might enable them to bring down the murderous Hind helicopter. The fear at Langley, however, was that the general might be part of a KGB sting. That was the year that Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” It was the height of the Cold War, and high-ranking Polish, East German, and Czech military men were all assumed to be either loyal Communists or under the control of those who were. And beyond that, the general’s demands were strange.

He had signed off on a particularly high-risk operation. He would remove the missiles from their containers, put stones in their place, and sneak the SA-7s out of the country under false labels. In return, he wanted money, but more important, he told his CIA contact, he wanted to know if the Agency would put up a tombstone in Quebec in honor of his grandfather.