Charlie Wilson's War (27 page)

The Israelis had gone out of their way for Joanne as well after Charlie had alerted them to her religious passions. “He knew that the first thing in my life is Jesus Christ and he arranged for the Israelis to take me everywhere Jesus had gone,” Joanne recounted with appreciation years later. Her experience visiting the Stations of the Cross managed to make her even more convinced of the sacred nature of the mission she had embarked on with Charlie. It seems hard to imagine, but on this trip she says that she succeeded repeatedly in getting the congressman to join her in intense prayer sessions. “We prayed that the dinners would go well, that Zia would be well received,” she says. “We prayed for Charlie and for him to have the strength to get through it all, and for the Lord to guide us with Doc Long.”
*

As they left Jerusalem for Pakistan, Joanne really set to work. She moved from seat to seat, telling not just the members but their wives all her stories about bringing capitalism to little Pakistani villages, and about how the wonderful General Zia was sacrificing everything to help the Afghans. She knew that Zia had a horrible reputation, and her way of dealing with it was to confront head-on the “false accusations” that Zia had in effect murdered his predecessor, Bhutto. From seat to seat she carried her curious and impassioned message: “I want to make it really clear to you that Zia did not kill Bhutto,” she said, until on her third stop she encountered a blank stare from one of the congressmen. “He said to me, ‘Who’s Bhutto?’ and I thought, These guys are going out here to visit this country and they don’t know doodle-de-twat about it.” Undeterred, Herring smiled charmingly, filled him in on the real history, and, like a pro, moved her pitch on to the next seat.

Doc Long, that magical dispenser of U.S. foreign-aid dollars, had grown accustomed to being made much of by governments. But General Zia, at the prodding of his honorary consul, made sure that the chairman got a reception he would never forget—literally, a red-carpet affair with a brass band, braided generals in full-dress uniform, lines of soldiers at attention, and small children with arms full of flowers running up to honor the suspicious old man.

Wilson and Joanne now had Doc trapped in their choreographed sequence of events. Pakistan might have been in bad odor with the chairman because it was a military dictatorship, but that also meant that when Zia ordered the military to put on a good show, the whole country performed. The golfers in the delegation were taken to the local country club and served tea at the ninth hole with linen and silver. The merchant at the antique shop in Rawalpindi offered such incredible bargains that the wives were convinced that General Zia had ordered discounts.

The centerpiece of the trip, however, was a helicopter trek to the front. It began in Peshawar at the refugee camps, with two and a half million destitute Afghans in their mud-walled compounds. Then on to the Red Cross hospital, where the delegation saw Afghan boys and young men without arms, legs, some without eyes, none complaining. Doc Long was the only member of Congress with a son who had been wounded in Vietnam, and it was impossible for him not to be impressed with the quiet courage of these men.

As always, Charlie gave a pint of his own blood for the mujahideen—the kind of act that humbles those who don’t participate. Then the delegation, wives and all, left to meet the Afghan elders, who had assembled in a tent to greet the old American chief they had been told could help them.

Long’s aide Bill Shursh remembers being awed by the sight and smell of the Afghans as he walked with Doc into the tent. One after another, the leaders stood up to address Long, in every instance telling him about the Russian gunships that were slaughtering their people and were invulnerable to the bullets from their rifles and machine guns. Shursh himself remembers thinking that these were real freedom fighters. “They made the Contras and the Cambodians look like urban cowboys,” he says.

Like every other visitor from the United States who came here in those days, Doc Long could not help but respond when the entire assembly of Afghans began roaring in unison the cry of jihad,
Allahu Akbar,
God is Great. Suddenly, he too could feel the presence of the Red Army just across the mountains. He was with men his own age who were bearing arms—men with gray beards and fierce eyes telling him about the murderous helicopters. They wanted someone from the delegation to speak to them, and Wilson shrewdly declined, offering the stage instead to his chairman.

Doc began by making a reasonably supportive but not excessive statement about the horror of the Soviet atrocities. From the tent came another great cry of
Allahu Akbar.
Wilson watched with amazement and some amusement as the seventy-two-year-old former professor of economics seemed to have an adrenaline rush. Suddenly, the old man was roaring to these Muslim warriors that he was going to get them what they needed to knock the helicopters out of the sky.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,”
they cried. Every time Doc said anything at all, the Afghans would clap, throw up their hands, and thunder back their battle cry.

It was like the most heated revival meeting in East Texas. By the time Doc Long left the tent, Wilson realized that he had just witnessed the conversion of this enemy of the CIA into an honorary mujahid. That night, back in Islamabad, Zia administered the coup de grâce.

Ordinarily, he shunned his predecessor’s luxurious palace, but Joanne and Charlie had told Zia how responsive Doc was when much was made of him. And so Zia had turned Bhutto’s palace into a vision out of the
Arabian Nights,
and Joanne even got him to relax his Islamic restrictions for this one event. She understood that he could not include women at the dinner, but she insisted that he gather everyone together at the end of the evening or else the wives would feel insulted.

As usual, Zia listened to his honorary consul and after the final course, before inviting the women in, Zia asked Doc for a word alone. Like most Americans, about the only thing Doc Long knew about Zia was bad: he was a military dictator who presided over a fundamentalist state. But Zia had a way with Americans that always caught such suspicious visitors utterly by surprise.

Twenty years before this dinner, as a young Pakistani captain, Zia had been assigned to a year of military training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. One Friday evening, shortly after arriving, the Muslim officer was sitting alone in his austere quarters feeling homesick. There was a knock at the door. A man and his wife from Louisville introduced themselves and said they were interested in making friends with foreign officers. Would he like to go to dinner with them?

Captain Zia ul-Haq had never forgotten that generosity of spirit, nor that of the many other Americans he had come to know. In later years, whenever he received Americans in Pakistan, President Zia always returned the hospitality he had found in Kentucky with a warmth that was clearly genuine. Like everyone else, Doc Long found himself entranced by this man of charm, intelligence, and seeming sincerity.

Wilson was not present at the encounter, but he quickly recognized that a communion of sorts had been established that night. The United States might have lost its nerve, but Chairman Clarence D. Long, an elder of the College of Cardinals, had personally committed himself, the entire Appropriations Committee, and the government of the United States to pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan and, specifically, to providing those marvelous Afghan warriors with the weapons they needed.

That night in the ornate Islamabad Holiday Inn, Wilson was alone in his bedroom. For all his womanizing, he was not prone to pressing himself on his paramours. The door opened, and his true love entered with just a towel wrapped around her. For Wilson, all the nightmares were over. It was a return to the fairy tale.

At the airport the next morning there was an amazing farewell: bands, flowers, carpets, gifts from Zia for everyone. As the plane headed west from Pakistan, Doc sat next to Charlie and told him, “Now my honor is at stake. I made a promise to those old men and I gave my word to the president of Pakistan that I would get them the guns.”

The plane was locked into its final flight path back to Washington when Doc, after an intimate conversation with Joanne, suddenly ordered the pilots to land in Venice for an emergency refueling. By now entranced with Joanne, he had responded to her damsel-in-distress appeal when she’d explained that an important “Save Venice” film festival was under way and that she was already a day late.

As they said their farewells on the runway, Charlie and Joanne embraced each and every member of the delegation. They had accomplished their mission with Doc Long and now had Joanne’s business to attend to. They were to be guests of the Machiavelli family, admitted into all the elegant dinner parties and homes in Venice. There are pictures of Joanne with Charlton Heston and Roger Moore, the second James Bond, who impressed Wilson with his tales of the lovely ladies who wanted to meet 007 offscreen.

As the two of them sat drinking by the Grand Canal one night, Joanne found herself overwhelmed with the realization that, as she says, “We were just so good together.” They conducted a postmortem, reviewing their triumphs. With Doc on board, Charlie told her, more money for Pakistan and the mujahideen was a sure thing. The next step was to ensure that the money was used to get them the right guns. But for the moment, it was time to bask in their glory. “We thought we were invincible,” Joanne recalls.

Then, to put the icing on the cake, paparazzi came by and began taking pictures of the glamorous couple. Soon a crowd gathered, asking for autographs. Joanne signed hers Ava Gardner and Charlie, Gary Cooper.

I
n retirement in Rome in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet’s puppet government in Kabul, Gust Avrakotos strolled across town to the Spanish steps to buy the daily newspapers. Life was good but tame these days. It was the curse of all operations officers to be put out to pasture at fifty, after almost thirty intense years of scheming on behalf of their country. Avrakotos was working on several moneymaking ventures, but nothing had come through yet and there really wasn’t much to do but see the sights and remember.

A column in that day’s
Wall Street Journal
immediately caught his eye. Entitled “The Afghan Who Won the Cold War,” it was about an old friend of sorts, the legendary Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, and the writer claimed that “as much as Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan, Mr. Massoud broke the back of Soviet imperialism.”

Avrakotos knew something about the columnist, Robert Kaplan. He was one of the more gifted writers on Afghanistan. A few months before he had somehow gotten Gust’s name and number and tried to get him to talk. But Avrakotos hates the press and hadn’t even made an effort to be nice when he said no.

Now, as he read Kaplan’s article, he found himself enthusiastically agreeing with the writer’s assertion that the Afghan war had played a decisive role in bringing on the collapse of the entire Communist empire. Not enough people understood just how devastating the CIA war had been to the Soviets. But the author was not praising the Agency. In fact, he seemed to believe that most of the credit for defeating the Red Army was due to this one guerrilla leader, so great that he belonged in the historical company of Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara. After conferring this recognition, Kaplan ended with a swipe at the CIA for having failed to recognize and adequately support this one true, independent Afghan commander.

Avrakotos smiled. He always smiled when he read these attacks. It was like receiving a medal. All the reporters had taken up this line about the CIA giving short shrift to the Lion of the Panjshir. Now that the war was over, they were all complaining about how the Agency had backed the wrong horses, giving the weapons and support to Khomeini-style Muslims instead of the noble Massoud.
*

What prompted Avrakotos to smile so broadly that day was his little secret. Massoud hadn’t just come out of nowhere. It was he, Gust Lascaris Avrakotos of Aliquippa, and the Central Intelligence Agency, who had made it possible for Ahmad Shah Massoud to realize his greatness. And what made it all such a perfect spy’s delight was that nobody knew.

The story of Avrakotos’s machinations on behalf of the great commander begins with his trip to London with John McGaffin in 1983 to meet the “cousins” at MI6. It had been a generous invitation, and Avrakotos had been grateful when McGaffin invited him to come along to meet their British counterparts. Though Gust was expected to be acting chief for only a few months, McGaffin introduced him as his replacement, which immediately conferred status upon him and gave him a license to operate independently with the British service.

MI6 members always did their best to be good hosts when their Agency friends came over on these official visits. McGaffin and Cogan loved the routine: the dinners at the venerable men’s clubs, the personal introductions to the best tailors on Savile Row, and the gushing but understated reception from the staff of the Basil Street Hotel, MI6’s choice for its favored guests. The hotel reeked of Old World charm.

But none of this worked for Avrakotos. It made him feel claustrophobic. He didn’t like the quaint wooden toilet seats in the hotel’s tiny bathrooms. McGaffin good-naturedly asked him, “Well, what do you shit on in Aliquippa, Gust?”

What Avrakotos says he found particularly distasteful about the British spies were “the fucking teas. Can you believe it, they interrupted meetings every day at three-thirty or four for tea and cookies.”
*

Gust’s escort officer was only trying to make this unpolished American feel at home. “Now that you’ll be coming here frequently,” the distinguished Englishman in the dark suit offered, “perhaps we could suggest a few things you’d like to shop for.” He mentioned a visit to his tailor, or perhaps his shoemaker. “I was patient with him until he exhausted my patience,” Gust says. “Look, fuckhead, I didn’t come here to buy shoes,” he had growled.

Part of the reason for his explosion was a certain sensitivity to his class. Long ago Avrakotos had realized that he could never look like an Ivy Leaguer, much less a British aristocrat, so he had taken to defiantly dressing in marked contrast. Since he had decided not to play the clothes game at Langley, he wasn’t about to get seduced into trying to look like one of Smiley’s people in London. “Look, if you’re trying to make me look like a Brit and it takes going to your tailor to get into your club for dinner, it’s not going to happen,” he snapped. “Besides that, I prefer pub grub!”

At this point the unflappable Englishman won Avrakotos over. “Without missing a beat he looked at me and said: ‘Pub grub, yes. Well, pub grub it shall be.’” Later, McGaffin told Gust how unfortunate it was that he couldn’t have experienced the club. Avrakotos didn’t have the heart to explain.

The MI6 spies were impressive as they moved about their old imperial capital. But Avrakotos’s eye is keenly trained to spot what’s known in the trade as “recruitable weaknesses.” Like everyone else, he had heard about MI6’s financial problems, but at their headquarters he was nevertheless struck by the extreme shabbiness of their operation. Before long he realized that this once proud service, in whose image the CIA had been formed, was virtually bankrupt. It was Avrakotos’s cunning that allowed him to sense, in this financial despair, a unique opportunity to bypass the Agency’s lawyers and play tough through a surrogate.

What initially caught the CIA man’s interest in the British was how knowledgeable they were about the war. It made sense: they’d been operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the nineteenth century, and some of their agents were sons or grandsons of operatives who had worked for the British Raj. “They have guys who have lived there for twenty years as journalists or authors or tobacco growers,” explains Avrakotos.

When the Soviets invaded, MI6 activated these old networks. In spite of their lack of resources, both the British government and MI6 wanted to continue to play a role on the world stage. From their days of empire, Afghanistan was a very familiar arena. They knew the players and the terrain, and figured they could make a mark even with very little money by focusing their efforts on Massoud, the Afghan leader who controlled the one critical area of the country. It was because of MI6’s intimate connections to Massoud that Avrakotos had come to London. The commander had stopped fighting, and the CIA wanted to know why.

By the Agency’s reckoning, there were about three hundred reasonably serious commanders in action against the Soviets at that time. But the critical factor of terrain made Massoud indispensable. His Panjshir Valley lies close to the Afghan capital and airfields where most of the Soviet’s 40th Army was based. Even more significant, the Soviets depended on the narrow Salang Pass and Highway that snaked through Massoud’s mountains from their border. With over 100,000 troops totally dependent on everything from spare parts and ammunition to medicine, vodka, and Russian food, the supplies moving down the Salang had become the lifeblood of the 40th Army. It simply couldn’t survive without keeping this line open. “Geographically, it was the key,” says Avrakotos.

Throughout the early years of the war the Red Army repeatedly invaded the Panjshir in division strength. These engagements were like scenes out of
Apocalypse Now,
with artillery barrages, helicopter assaults, and carpet bombing, followed by great sweeps with overwhelming numbers of men. Each time, the Lion of the Panjshir had followed the age-old guerrilla tactic, ordering his people to fall back to the mountains and passes beyond, to bide their time sniping and ambushing until the Russians moved out.

As Avrakotos saw it, the Soviets were being sucker-punched almost every time they tried to march into Massoud’s narrow valley: “It was like every cowboy movie where the wagon train comes in and then the Indians attack on either side.”

The French doctors from Médecins sans Frontières who had gone into the Panjshir early in the war had come out with film and stories that promoted Massoud as the ultimate freedom fighter. Ken Follett would later make him the demigod of his best-seller
Lie Down with Lions.
He was the only Afghan to capture the imagination of the world beyond the Hindu Kush.

But in 1983, when Massoud stopped fighting, Agency intelligence came to the disturbing conclusion that he had cut a deal with the Soviets. What made this particularly worrisome was that it was not the first time. In 1981 and again in 1982 the Afghan commander had also stopped fighting, in exchange for Soviet offers of food and guarantees that the Red Army would leave his villages alone.

Avrakotos, ever the prepared student, had read everything he could find in the Agency’s files about Massoud and the tribes who made up the CIA’s army of freedom fighters. What he learned made him think that perhaps Massoud was not being handled correctly.

The CIA had deeded to the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI, the right to decide which mujahideen leaders would receive the Agency’s weapons, and without question, Massoud was being shortchanged. The overwhelming bulk of CIA weaponry was being funneled to the renowned Pashtun tribesmen who had long dominated Afghan politics. No one could question the ISI’s backing of the Pashtuns, fierce warriors renowned for having repeatedly humiliated the British in the nineteenth century. They were fighting heroically against the Soviets, dying in staggering numbers, and refusing to give up. Zia’s intelligence chief, General Akhtar, himself part Pashtun, harbored the deepest suspicions about Massoud. He resented the gushing publicity about this Afghan who wouldn’t fight. He knew that MI6 agents masquerading as journalists were part of the Massoud propaganda machine. As for the French, he told Howard Hart that the only reason they were enraptured was that the so-called Lion of Panjshir was “poking the French nurses.” It was all Hart could do, drawing on his close relationship with Akhtar, to convince the ISI chief not to reduce the meager supplies set aside for Massoud.

Hart himself, however, was deeply suspicious, even angered by Massoud’s refusal to move on the Salang Highway. He passed on his doubts to Langley, along with the ISI’s crude joke about the unmanly nature of Massoud’s Tajiks: “When a Pashtun wants to make love to a woman, his first choice is always a Tajik man.”

Avrakotos came to see things differently once he discovered that there was a venerable blood feud running between the Pashtuns and Massoud’s Tajik tribe. The campaign against Massoud became even more suspect once he realized that many of the Pakistani ISI officers were themselves Pashtuns and that they maintained a formal relationship with these Afghan resistance leaders that had begun years before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Avrakotos figured that whatever the cause for Massoud’s sit-down strike, the ISI wasn’t helping matters by withholding the CIA’s weapons. As far as he was concerned, it would be a disaster to write Massoud off. Somehow, a way had to be found to get the commander back in action, and Gust knew that it was useless to look to the ISI.

The Agency, under McGaffin’s direction, had already been using the British for information about Massoud. Unlike the CIA and the U.S. government, which operated with a strict taboo against any Americans crossing into Afghanistan, British SAS commandos had been going in and out of the Panjshir since the beginning of the war. They even had a way of moving supplies to Massoud independent of the Pakistanis. In London, Avrakotos asked for a personal meeting with MI6’s Massoud expert.

He turned out to be a young, blond SAS guerrilla-warfare expert with the peculiar nickname of Awk, a name said to vaguely resemble the grunting noise he would make on maneuvers. Awk had just returned from three months inside the war zone. It was about a two-week journey in those days, walking north from the Pakistan border through Nuristan and the Hindu Kush to reach Massoud’s valley. Awk had gone in with two other SAS commandos. Their report had astonished Avrakotos.

“There was one passage in there that really got me,” remembers Avrakotos. “This guy was sleeping with a couple of his buddies and he said he awoke one night and heard horrible groans. He didn’t get up but was able to put on his night-vision goggles and saw a group of Massoud’s guys literally cornholing a Russian prisoner.”

The Afghan presiding over the rape was one of Massoud’s lieutenants. Awk described in his report how uncomfortable he and his two friends had felt, particularly because they were good-looking blond boys and Massoud’s man seemed to have developed a crush on one of them. For the last two weeks of their stay in the Panjshir, he said, they went to sleep with their weapons by their sides, always ready to fight it out if their Afghan friends approached in the dark. Then one day the three Englishmen and their Afghan escorts were lured into a Soviet ambush. The British were dressed as mujahideen, and Awk said that they absolutely would have been killed but for the lieutenant who had so terrorized their nights. Suddenly he bolted from them, running into the open field to draw the helicopter’s Gatling guns away from the men he sought to protect.

At MI6 headquarters Awk told Avrakotos that watching that man die had made him finally understand the Afghans’ ancient code: “Honor, hospitality, and revenge.” Raping an infidel invader was not the atrocity it would be in the West; it was simply revenge. Above all, Awk had come away convinced that these were men of honor. When it came to picking an ally to fight the Soviets, he told Avrakotos, there was no shortage of Tajik courage. They were every bit as good as the Pashtuns.

Now the only question for Avrakotos was how to get Massoud back in the field. Awk and his MI6 superiors took the position that Massoud would return to the fight as soon as he was adequately supplied. They made it clear that they were able to secretly funnel weapons to Massoud without the ISI’s knowledge. It was almost embarrassing, however, for the British division chief to have to explain how little they were able to provide.