Charlie Wilson's War (41 page)

Avrakotos took special precautions because he knew quite a bit about the company he was dealing with. “We were negotiating with two savvy Swiss, Herbert and Johan. Oerlikon is the company that sold weapons to both sides in World War II. They had collaborated with the Nazis. They were selling guns to Iraq and Iran and to Israel and the Saudis the same time we were talking to them. These are international scumballs, and I guess I couldn’t conceal my feelings because one of them said to me in the midst of dinner: ‘Gust, I sense you don’t like me.’”

Herbert and Johan were like any other salesmen. They stood to make a lot of money off the CIA, and they were going out of their way to be accommodating. They asked where the Americans would like to have dinner. Weber volunteered that he had always wanted to go to a restaurant where they yodeled. Avrakotos was appalled. “For the Swiss, that’s as low class as you can get. Herbert knew I was embarrassed, but they were trying to please us, so they took us to a yodeling place. I ordered a vodka. Weber ordered a Diet Coke. And then Tom, my other weapons expert, asked, ‘Do you think they have chocolate milk?’”

Herbert responded graciously, “No, but they probably have milk.”

“Don’t they have chocolate they could put in the milk?” Tom asked with a forlorn look.

Avrakotos couldn’t believe it. “Here I was, trying to buy arms to beat the fucking Russians, and one of my tough guys orders Diet Coke and the other chocolate milk. These are my fucking tough guys. Meanwhile Herbert’s ordering cognac and saying, ‘Ah yes, that chocolate milk is a good American drink.’”

The two Swiss knew that the Agency had been given $40 million in Wilson’s appropriation, and they were doing their best to persuade Gust to spend it all on Oerlikons, instead of the 50 percent that he had in mind. The rewards to the arms manufacturer would come not just from the initial sales but from the ammunition. Each Oerlikon round cost $50, and the gun fired hundreds of rounds a minute. That could quickly add up to a lot of money if the gun were ever put to use in a big way.

In Zurich, Avrakotos says, the Oerlikon officials used every conceivable argument and incentive to encourage a large sale. At the close of their visit one of the company executives, a cultivated aristocrat, hosted a fancy dinner for Gust. The suggestion was reportedly made that a three-year contract for $600,000 might be available to Gust once he left the Agency, with $500,000 of that up front.

“Shove it up your ass,” Avrakotos shot back. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear what you just said, because the last thing you want is for me to tell Congress you were trying to bribe me.” The worldly Swiss executive did not seem insulted or in any way put off, instead he responded with a question more to Gust’s liking.

“Do you like blondes?”

“Well, that’s different,” Gust replied.

Avrakotos says he reported the incident to his superiors. Whether or not he ended up with a blonde that night, it can be said with confidence that Oscar Lascaris Avrakotos’s son had not gone into the CIA to profit at the expense of his country. Beyond that, he was keenly aware that when it came to Oerlikons he was living in a glass house. It took nerves of steel and good judgment to walk the tightrope he was now on, and it was not helpful having marines by your side who were totally lacking in imagination and good sense.

This became doubly clear back in Washington, when it was time to testify before Congress about the Oerlikons. Gust was fully prepared to buy a small number of these weapons, knowing that this was the unspoken quid pro quo with Charlie—giving him something for his money to shoot down the Hind, even if it wasn’t effective. After explaining this to Weber, Avrakotos told him to testify that the Agency didn’t really need the Oerlikons but could certainly use them.

“No,” Weber replied, “the honest answer is that the Oerlikon is superfluous.”

“You’re not going to testify,” declared Avrakotos.

“Yes, I have to,” Weber protested.

“No, you’re not, you’re sick. Go home. That’s an order. Are you disobeying orders?”

The story, of course, made the rounds inside the PM branch, as did Gust’s next move, to hire Vickers. The paramilitary chief, Rudy Enders, refused to let Vickers go until Avrakotos threateded to have the director personally intervene. As he had predicted, Enders caved in.

Vickers was unaware of the bureaucratic maneuvers that Avrakotos had gone through to get him. He was told only that he was being considered for the Afghan paramilitary slot. His interview took thirty minutes, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that Avrakotos fell in love at first sight, it was close.

To begin with, Gust discovered that Vickers was an ethnic. He didn’t look or dress or talk like a new American, but his grandparents had all taken the Ellis Island route—two from Italy, two from Slovakia. The Slovak grandfather had worked in the steel mills in Chicago, had been thrilled by the money he was earning, overjoyed to be in the land of opportunity. The flag flew in front of both grandparents’ homes. Gust could spot a kindred spirit from a mile away. Like him, he had made it in life all on his own by using his brains. And he could not help but respect the fact that this nondescript-looking nerd could probably kick his ass.

It’s initially disorienting to listen to Vickers talk about guerrilla war. He makes it sound as if it were a business school course. Avrakotos himself was taken aback by the young man’s bloodlessly precise responses to questions about weapons and strategy. It was as if he were quoting from a textbook, but there is no such textbook.

Avrakotos, a math star himself, was mesmerized. This man seemed to have studied guerrilla warfare the way others study medicine. He seemed to know exactly what to prescribe and in what dose, when to be alarmed by developments, and when to stand back and let time take its course. Some deep organizing principle was at work; and Gust could sense an exuberance behind the calm exterior, particularly when this utterly self-confident young man announced that he saw no reason why the mujahideen could not win. Avrakotos hired him on the spot and turned him loose to review the entire program.

Vickers is a grind, and once he began poring through the Agency’s files and the history of the war, he didn’t look up until he had assimilated everything. What he saw both pleased and dismayed him. The good news was that the resistance was intact and growing in the face of unbelievable casualties. (Special Forces doctrine held that if a guerrilla insurgency survives and grows, then it is by definition winning.)
*

The rest of what he saw appalled him. By his way of thinking, whoever had been responsible for choosing the weapons and the broad strategy for backing the freedom fighters had verged on criminal negligence. Vickers had already been alerted that the Afghans had no meaningful anti-aircraft capacity. But he was amazed to find that they had no modern communications; no battlefield radios to coordinate attacks; few mortars; few antitank weapons; no light machine guns to speak of; no proper medical kits; no boots, which resulted in a number of cases of preventable frostbite; not enough food to keep their families from starving unless they returned from the front regularly; no mine-clearing devices; no sniper rifles; and far, far too few modern assault rifles. For some reason, the basic weapon the CIA had given the mujahideen was the bolt-action World War I Lee Enfield.

That might have worked in the early years of the century, when armies faced off against each other from fixed positions in trenches, but now? Clearly the thinking behind Howard Hart’s decision to flood the Afghans with Enfields was to give a sense of empowerment, however ill-equipped they might actually be. The Enfields were cheaper than the modern AKs, and given the small early budgets, it must have seemed the way to go. Standard guerrilla doctrine, however, called for giving the mujahideen the same rifles that their enemy used. It was the only way they could use captured ammunition. Needless to say, the Soviets didn’t use Enfields. Nevertheless, the Agency had robotically supplied the mujahideen with hundreds of thousands of these antiquated weapons—and nowhere near enough ammunition.

It became instantly clear to Vickers that there was no way for the Afghans to wage sustained combat. All of this leapt out of the CIA’s secret ledgers to offend Vickers’s sense of professionalism. By Agency protocol, Vickers was far too junior to go shooting off his mouth about his conclusions. In fact, he was so low on the totem pole that had it not been for Avrakotos, he would have had no right to take any initiative.

What makes Vickers’s story so remarkable is that the organization and support of a giant covert military campaign is a highly esoteric specialty. The U.S. government doesn’t train anyone with this particular discipline in mind. But as chance would have it, Mike Vickers had spent his entire adult life preparing for just such a commission.

Underneath his controlled exterior, Vickers is a romantic. It’s unlikely that this side of him would have surfaced had his father not left Chicago, where he ran a funeral home, to move the family to California. Vickers was still in elementary school when his father reinvented himself in Hollywood as a master carpenter, helping to build fanciful movie sets on the lots of Twentieth Century–Fox.

The senior Vickers had been a genuine war hero who had always stirred patriotic ambitions in his son. He had won the Silver Star in a bloody bomber raid over Germany, and as a boy, Vickers would look with awe and pride at his father’s citations. Later, as a teenager, he had a sense that he was born to do something big in life, but for years he thought it would be on the sports field. He couldn’t have been a more lackluster student, rarely cracking open a book and graduating from high school with a C+ average. But he would pump iron religiously in the garage, and he performed well enough as a varsity quarterback and pitcher that he hoped he would make it as a football or baseball star.

The unlikely ambition to join the CIA came to him by accident in his senior year, when he found himself in a class taught by a teacher who talked tough and straight. This professor was able to break through to him, and spoke to him about the basic realities of power and how things really work in the world of international relations. It was the height of the Vietnam protests, and the teacher gave Vickers an article to read about the CIA’s secret war in Laos. It didn’t praise the CIA; quite the contrary. But Vickers was riveted by what he read. Already intrigued with spying because of the James Bond movies, he could see himself playing such a role one day—the heroic loner, empowered by sophisticated technology, taking on fantastic odds for his country. The article on the war in Laos clinched it: one day he would join the CIA and run a secret war of his own.

At a community college the next year, still preoccupied by football, he met with disappointment: Mark Harmon, later to become the star of
St. Elsewhere
and
People
magazine’s “most handsome man in the world,” beat him out for starting quarterback. Stuck on the bench, a young man looking for action and adventure, he decided to enlist in the Green Berets. It wasn’t an impulsive move; like everything else in his life, the decision to try out for the Special Forces was highly calculated. Vickers knew that the Green Berets train men to run irregular armies, and he figured that this was the best way to acquire the preparation he needed to join the CIA. He took a military I.Q. test and for the first time learned that he was endowed with remarkable potential. He got a 160, the highest score possible.

It’s said that 85 percent of those who enlist in the Green Berets don’t make it to graduation. Vickers not only won his beret but was soon honored as the Special Forces Soldier of the Year. At twenty-one, he began his apprenticeship under true military heroes. In the 10th Special Forces Group, the other men in his unit were ten-or fifteen-year veterans of almost every irregular military adventure the United States had to offer. Most had volunteered for repeated tours in Laos and Vietnam. They were an unconventional elite who had learned the hard way what a guerrilla army filled with committed men can do to destroy the will of a much larger force.

The bulk of the U.S. Army in those years was preparing for an all-out war in Europe. But Vickers’s Green Beret unit had a special mission: training year-round to fight a guerrilla war deep behind Red Army lines—exactly what the mujahideen would be doing in real life ten years later.

Vickers threw himself into intensive study of Soviet weapons and tactics: how the Soviets organized themselves, what their counterinsurgency methods were, how to set up networks to exfiltrate downed U.S. aircrews. The target was always the Red Army and the tactics those that the Afghans would have to perfect: raids, ambushes, sniping, mines, booby traps, sabotage, even some relatively large-scale conventional operations. Vickers became an expert at using every type of Soviet weapon, from pistols to mortars to heavy machine guns to surface-to-air missiles. But he also trained with weapons from all over the world so that he could be dropped in anywhere to advise an insurgent movement on how best to use whatever armaments they happened to possess.

During his early years with the Green Berets, Vickers was driven to prove his warrior’s worth. He became an expert in the martial arts, so good that he was sent to West Point as an instructor in hand-to-hand combat. He trained with the navy SEALs in infiltration techniques and long-distance swimming. He went to England for counterterrorist training with the crack British SAS regiment, learning how to storm a room and pick out every terrorist for the kill without imperiling the hostages. He even volunteered for the ultimate assignment: in the event of an all-out war with the Soviets, Vickers was to parachute into enemy territory with a small tactical nuclear weapon strapped to his leg. His mission was to place the device in a mountain pass or some similar terrain to halt the advance of the Red Army. Theoretically, there would be time to escape the blast, but everyone knew this was a one-way mission.

When the Soviet’s 40th Army and KGB liquidation squads descended on Kabul in 1979, Vickers was driving across the country toward the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where additional training led to a job as part of a secret twenty-man unit tasked with assessing the vulnerability of U.S. embassies and responding to terrorist incidents. He moved about Central America, picking locations for snipers, gathering intelligence from embassies and other locations that might someday have to be infiltrated to rescue American diplomats. His ultimate job was to be first on the scene in the event of a terrorist incident—to pave the way for the Delta Force shooters and to serve as the ambassador’s military adviser in the event of a hostage incident, a job he performed with distinction twice in the 1980s.