Charlie Wilson's War (36 page)

Juchniewicz didn’t like the idea of a wasting action in Afghanistan. No doubt because of his own family history, he responded personally to the plight of people enslaved by Communism. He had been to the mujahideen training camps near the Afghan border, had sat with the elders, and watched shoeless young boys preparing to go fight the Red Army. His response was understandably moralistic, from a man whose father’s homeland was behind the Iron Curtain: “How in Christ’s name could you send these guys into battle and say, You don’t have much of a chance, but do your best. That is despicable.”

Juchniewicz had watched Avrakotos take command of the Afghan account with growing admiration and then cheerleading. Gust was only the acting chief, but he was playing as if he were there for the long haul.

While Wilson had appeared to be going down and out in East Texas, the Soviets had gone on the attack. There were scenes that spring in Afghanistan of military striking power not witnessed in the world since Vietnam. Great clouds of dust rose as the 40th Army marched twenty thousand troops into the Panjshir Valley to finish off Massoud once and for all.

Unlike earlier campaigns, these Soviet troops were highly trained and motivated. They rode into battle in tanks and armored personnel carriers, with MiGs and helicopter gunships overhead providing close air support. Any previous distinction that the Soviet command might have made between the mujahideen and the civilian population that provided assistance of any kind suddenly disappeared as silver-bodied Tu-16s operating from bases in the Soviet Union began carpet bombing even primitive mud-walled villages where the mujahideen might have received support.

At Langley, Avrakotos was not surprised. He had been waiting for the escalation, knowing that the Agency had been egging it on. As he saw it, the Soviets had no choice. Given their mentality, they couldn’t let a bunch of ragheads openly defy them. The 40th Army was now moving to crush the resistance, and Avrakotos took the position they might just succeed if the Agency didn’t start playing tough.

It was precisely because of Avrakotos’s killer approach to the job that Juchniewicz became his advocate. He had become angry at the way the war was being run. “The Paks were in charge of everything, running the whole show, and I said, ‘That’s bullshit. We want to help plan battles, want to look at the kind of training they’re getting.’” So Juchniewicz went to the director and said that Afghanistan was going nowhere and that the Agency had to get tougher. According to him the director said, “Go ahead, make your call, you’re in charge.”

That simple statement of Casey’s is the kind of murky opening that men like Juchniewicz and Avrakotos are wont to take advantage of. One day when Clair George was out of the country and Juchniewicz was the acting chief, Avrakotos burst into the ADDO’s office with a challenge: “It’s been almost a year that I’ve been helping McGaffin as acting chief, and the rule is that if you have the job for three months and you want it, you get it. I want it. Unless you want another fucker in here who just follows orders.”

Juchniewicz was not the kind of man who was ruffled by such a presentation. “You’re right,” he responded. “I’m going to do it. I shouldn’t, but Clair’s gone.” Chuck Cogan was reportedly appalled and tried to challenge the appointment. According to Avrakotos, Juchniewicz silenced Cogan with a communiqué of unusual clarity: “Higher authority wants a mean fucker in the job.”

Juchniewicz had the technical authority to make this appointment, but given Avrakotos’s intensely complicated history with Clair George, it had required some guts. Now, unless George was prepared to overrule his deputy, it was a fait accompli. Recalling that moment, Juchniewicz observed that his boss was furious but somehow compromised in his ability to challenge the appointment. “Clair had a secret admiration for Gust from their time together in Athens. People didn’t understand the depth of their relationship. But it was one of those love-hate relationships.” He says the two had had a falling out over something that no one fully understood. “In my own heart I always felt Gust had something on Clair, something he knew about Clair himself or about the family. Clair didn’t like that. Gust would never betray a trust or confidence, but Clair couldn’t stand it.”

According to one account, George spent the better part of fifteen minutes shouting at Juchniewicz until the deputy said that he had already spoken to Casey and McMahon about Gust and they thought his appointment was a good idea. Perhaps George should check with them, he said, knowing that was about the last thing George would want to do.

In the end, the DDO chose not to overturn the decision and instead congratulated Gust, saying that he was happy to have been able to do it for him. Avrakotos, who knew exactly what George had been doing, played along. Why not? He now had the job.

Part of the pleasure of that circumstance involved watching his rival, Alan Fiers, slowly self-destructing. Denied Afghanistan, Fiers would end up in charge of the Contra war, which would soon be outlawed by Congress. He would play a role on the fringes of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme. Finally, it would be his fate to become the Clandestine Service’s first Judas. Faced with near-certain imprisonment for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, Fiers would take the special prosecutor’s offer of immunity if he told all. In a courtroom filled with former brothers of the Clandestine Service, a weeping Alan Fiers would give the testimony that would doom his old chief, Clair George.

Juchniewicz would later look back on his act of bureaucratic daring and say that pushing Fiers aside and gambling on Avrakotos might well have been his most prescient decision in a long CIA career.

By the time Avrakotos had maneuvered himself into his new post, Charlie Wilson and the CIA were in a virtual state of war. What would soon become clear to Avrakotos is that Wilson had the will and the ability to win. That first came into focus at Langley when Wilson drew on his real strength, the power to punish. He called Jim Van Wagenen, the Defense Appropriations staffer responsible for black programs and asked, “What are the CIA’s crown jewels?” Recognizing the veiled threat in the question, Van Wagenen sprang into action, informing John McMahon that Wilson was going to go after the Agency’s pet programs if they didn’t back off. The staffer made it clear that Wilson enjoyed the support of the full subcommittee on this one and that the Agency was now on the verge of alienating those very legislators on whom they relied for money.

Wilson even managed to make the CIA believe he would go after crown jewel number one, the Contra war in Nicaragua. “I’m sure I implied that I might go over to the other side on the Contras,” admits Wilson somewhat sheepishly, because it would have been a bold defection from the anti-Communist camp. “But at that point I was willing to do anything I could to embarrass them. I probably threatened them well beyond what I could have done, but I always try to make people think I’m a little crazy.”

This, of course, is the madman theory of how power is best exercised, the notion that a reputation for unpredictability and excessive use of force makes threats more effective. It’s worth noting that Wilson was making these rumblings at a time when the Democratic majority in the House had already mobilized against the CIA because of Nicaragua. Had the hawkish Wilson taken his conservative following and made common cause with the opposition, it might well have been a rout for the Agency.

In retrospect, Wilson acknowledges that this debate over the Oerlikon, a weapon that ultimately proved to be of marginal value, was really not about the weapon itself. It was about his personal march, under the aegis of the U.S. Congress, onto the seventh floor of Langley to force the Agency into a bigger war than it wanted to fight. As he sees it now, this bureaucratic battle in 1984 was the defining moment of the Afghan war. Every other tactical decision to escalate, including the introduction of the American Stingers two years later, followed from it.

“They were offended to the point of despair and they weren’t going to let it happen,” remembers Wilson. “But I knew there was no point to this war if you couldn’t shoot down the helicopters. They wanted to fight to the last Afghan and not expose the United States to any risk at all. But I didn’t have any interest in killing a million Afghans to cause the Russians some mild embarrassment, and it still absolutely enrages me to think of it.”

Wilson and the Agency’s seventh floor were now locked in a dangerous confrontation that Avrakotos likened to a bureaucratic “Showdown at the O.K. Corral.” And he knew that the first thing to suffer would be his Afghan budget. Director Casey was also beginning to sense danger—so much so that he asked Avrakotos to explain what Cogan had been saying to Wilson and what might be done to defuse the situation.

Avrakotos was typically blunt: “If you didn’t know better you’d say Cogan was working for the Soviets,” he told the director. This was mutually understood hyperbole, and he then explained that he couldn’t understand why the Agency wanted to pick a fight with Wilson. “Buy the Oerlikon, see if the gun works,” he urged Casey. “We’re pissing all over our friends. “

The director was famous for the way he would often mumble in such moments, so that it was hard to know what he was saying. Avrakotos interpreted the mutter as a go-ahead to take independent action. “In that game on the seventh floor, if the director hints at something, that’s a green light,” he explained. “No one was going to question me.”

Avrakotos was never one to wait for written instructions. He was a patriot, but he drew his operational inspiration from the Janissaries, the elite warriors of the old Ottoman emperors. “You’re a Janissary when you play your own game—when no one knows what the rules are,” he explains. “And once you get a band of adventurers working for you, it’s a bit much to expect they won’t have some adventures of their own.” So with that mumble from Casey the modern Janissary moved into action.

As a boy in Aliquippa, Gust’s favorite game was playing chicken in the dead of night on the long empty roadways next to the steel mills. All the high school girls and their boyfriends would come out and stand by the side of the road to watch these feats of daring. Two cars would face each other in the same lane a quarter of a mile apart, then accelerate from a dead start to maximum speed. The first to blink, to veer off into the other lane, would be the chicken.

Early on, Gust developed a reputation for never blinking. He would throw his souped-up four-door Dodge into first, and by the time it was ready for second he would have the look of the early Avrakotoses, the ones who would rip off their clothes before battle and charge the enemy screaming. What manner of man would want to fight such a foe? In that car in the dark of night, with pretty girls on the sidelines, the Greek would barrel for glory, and the lesser gladiators of Aliquippa would yield. “Never blink” was the rule that Avrakotos had drawn from these early nights of combat.

Thirty years later he took an Agency car and left the driver out in front of the Rayburn building. He should have called Norm Gardner, the congressional liaison, to accompany him. A CIA nanny was always supposed to be present for meetings with politicians. But Gust was on an operation, and it had to be done one-on-one. By the time he reached Charlie’s office he had gained a momentum not visible in the speed of his walk. He was cordial with the Angels, perfectly controlled, but once inside the office he strode directly to Wilson’s desk.

The congressman was caught completely by surprise. Until then, he had dismissed Avrakotos as “a bumpkin from the coal fields” and “Chuck’s pacifier,” another of those timid souls from the CIA. But the frightening-looking Greek standing just inches from him was saying quite disturbing things. “It seemed to me that he made some aggressive, physical move,” remembers Wilson. “He said, ‘Let’s get it straight right now. You don’t want to kill those fuckers any more than I do. So let’s just figure out a way to do it together.’”

It took a moment for Wilson to compose himself and to realize that this finally was the CIA he had read about in the novels. Whoever Gust Avrakotos was, he was not to be trifled with: “It stunned me. He took my bluster away,” admits Charlie.

At the heart of every CIA case officer’s existence is the business of recruitment. It’s a dirty game—buying people for one’s country. To excel at it, the case officer must be empathetic and supple. He must have the capacity to charm and to make friends. But in the last analysis he has to be a con man. What he’s looking for are “recruitable weaknesses.” And once he spots them he has to know how to put in the hook and land the fish.

Avrakotos had spent three years as Station Chief in Boston doing nothing but recruiting agents—nuclear scientists, American businessmen, Iranians to take part in the rescue mission. Each was a major accomplishment and Avrakotos’ office was credited with fifteen, a remarkable record indicating an almost disturbing ability to use the tools of idealism, sex, money, and blackmail for America.

There was no question in Avrakotos’ mind about what he was doing in Charlie Wilson’s office that April of 1984: he was there to recruit the congressman. But it was by no means an official CIA operation. No one at the Agency even knew that Gust had gone to Wilson’s office. The Agency’s leadership never would discover the plots that these two men later hatched.

But almost immediately, the seventh floor at Langley understood that something had transformed Wilson from a highly dangerous adversary to a peculiarly supportive advocate. Everyone knew that Avrakotos had performed this small miracle and Gust played it for all it was worth—letting it be known that he had tamed the congressman’s fury over the Oerlikon issue with a ruse. “There are a lot of ways to kill a program,” he explained. “One is to fight it to the bitter end but we realized we couldn’t do that with Charlie. So we came up with an internal ‘pilot program’ to buy a limited number of Oerlikons to test and evaluate. We knew we could create delays for at least a year and then see what happened.”