Charlie Wilson's War (48 page)

From the standpoint of the Kremlin, the early returns on Varennikov’s series of offensives must have looked very promising indeed. By the summer of 1985, new floods of Afghans were pouring over the border seeking refuge in Pakistan, telling horror stories of saturation bombing, a new scorched-earth policy, and the dreaded night-fighting Spetsnaz troops.

What Gorbachev and Varennikov had no way of knowing that spring, however, is that they were moving with too little, too late. Back in Langley, Avrakotos had his own personal General Varennikov in place, thirty-two-year-old Mike Vickers, and Vickers was going to turn out to be the better general.

On one level it was preposterous for Vickers to be playing such a role. He was so junior in grade that he couldn’t even sign his own cables. But he was now speaking and acting in Avrakotos’s name, with a half-billion-dollar war chest to use to wreck General Varennikov’s campaign. And never for a moment did Vickers have any doubts about exactly what needed to be done.

What Vickers, operating even more invisibly than Varennikov, came up with was a radical departure from Hart’s concept of a massive mountain army. The brash young officer conceded that Howard Hart had accomplished much by arming a baseline force of more than 400,000. But because of the way the Afghans were armed and because of their lack of training and sophistication, he was convinced that the law of diminishing returns had long ago set in. In fact, he concluded that even if the Agency were to arm an extra 300,000 mujahideen, it would not improve their capacity to fight one bit.

Vickers’s first bold act was to cut off hundreds of thousands of mujahideen from the Agency’s main support program. Instead of giving the same arms and ammunition to 400,000 or more conventional guerrillas, Vickers decided to create an elite force of 150,000. Basically, he was betting everything on this new army within an army. The “holy warriors” who didn’t make the cut would continue to be supported but would be treated essentially as a militia.

To an outsider, it might have appeared to be a scaling back, but 150,000 was still a huge number. The Contra army in Nicaragua, for example, was said to be no more than 20,000. More important than the size, however, was what Vickers had in mind for this core group of Muslim warriors. He intended to give them the most sophisticated weaponry and turn them into a force of late-twentieth-century “technoguerrillas.”

Drawing on Gust’s authority, Vickers was already channeling a torrent of new and varied weapons to the mujahideen, but that was only half the battle. He had been appalled when he’d discovered that the Agency was offering the mujahideen only four or five training courses in weapons and tactics, none any longer than a week. Now, under the supervision of marine Colonel Nick Pratt, the straitlaced officer who had been so repelled by Charlie Wilson on the Egyptian trip, the Agency began giving twenty different courses covering a range of irregular warfare disciplines, some lasting a month or more.

It seemed to Gust that the mujahideen had some genetic gift for learning how to use weapons and instruments of destruction. His PM operatives, dressed in
shalwar kameezes
with beards and Chitrali hats, set out to train the Afghans in their Pakistani border camps. They were taught not only how to fire their new weapons but how to work together in combat and how to mount a range of different kinds of operations, from urban sabotage to huge, combined-arms ambushes.

By the end of the year, the Agency began sending in frequency-hopping radios and burst transmitters. Now, instead of waiting days for messengers on horseback, a commander like Ismail Khan in Herat, near the Iranian border, could communicate with the ISI in Pakistan instantly. With basic combat walkie-talkies, these biblical warriors were finally able to talk to one another in combat and coordinate attacks.

That year Art Alper’s Technical Services people even came up with a small device that the mujahideen could carry with them to give an early alert when a gunship was approaching. It would be many long months before Vickers could introduce his “symphony of weapons” to combat the Hind, but this exotic noise sensor, not much bigger than a quarter, was a godsend. It didn’t just predict the approach of a helicopter but identified the direction it was coming from, thus giving the Afghans time at least to hide. On every front, the CIA was turning its guerrillas into a far smarter and more lethal fighting force.

Throughout the entire buildup, only a handful of people understood the role Vickers, hiding behind his lowly GS-11 rating, was playing. He would be in England negotiating to buy Blowpipes one day and back the next; in Pakistan for four and back for two; in China for seventy-two hours, placing orders for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, and back to the sixth floor, operating as if he had never been away. As Avrakotos explained, “He was our brain. I couldn’t afford to have him away for more than four days at a time.”

When things went badly and the reports made it sound as if all was lost, Vickers would be there to reassure Gust. It was only logical, he explained, that the Soviets would finally make their move. As for the Spetsnaz, Vickers suggested that there might be something hopeful about their introduction.

No rational army, he explained in his role as Gust’s tutor, uses its most valuable soldiers for semiconventional battle. Spetsnaz soldiers are the army’s equivalent of jet fighter pilots. You don’t treat such thoroughbreds as if they were ordinary grunts. “You wouldn’t send me to lead a raid on the Kabul garrison,” he went on. “It’s a waste. There’s something desperate about it.”

It was always reassuring for Avrakotos to talk to this cool strategist. Vickers, with his white shirt and tie, looking out calmly through his owl glasses, invariably responded to such crises as if he were being asked to solve a simple arithmetic problem. Avrakotos had been genuinely alarmed about the Spetsnaz and told him they needed a counterstrategy fast.

Vickers was soon presiding over a meeting of three knuckle draggers from the Ground Branch of the P.M. division and two of the Pentagon’s leading irregular-warfare experts. Within days, three Agency types turned up in Pakistan, armed with a very specific set of countertactics to pass on to the freedom fighters. One tactic, for example, called for the mujahideen to lure the Spetsnaz into restricted areas, which would have been mined in advance and would be covered by machine-gun fire. Soon the Afghans were actually hunting the Spetsnaz: never easily or without a price but now at least able to hold their own. Before the year was out, the cost to the Soviet special forces would be enormous.

Gust’s war room during this time was electric, infused with patriotic purpose. The PM types would always stop by to see him before going off on their missions. As Avrakotos saw it, “Sending one of these people to Afghanistan was sort of like giving Itzhak Perlman a Stradivarius. Give him an AK-47 and he’s home. He suddenly lurches from being an asshole at Tyson’s Corner into being an honorable killer.” Gust would always leave these warriors with a few words of encouragement. “I told them to just teach the mujahideen how to kill: pipe bombs, car bombs. But don’t ever tell me how you’re doing it in writing. Just do it.”

One of the secretaries remembers the sense then in the war room of being “surrounded by heroes.” The case officers were all framed by huge blown-up pictures of mujahideen warriors. After hours they would tell the wide-eyed young women about the nobility of the Afghans. “I got the feeling that the Russians had come in and taken their land, their homes,” recalls one of the secretaries. “People were being massacred, children were dying, and the mujahideen were fighting impossible odds. When you found out what was happening you couldn’t be involved and not care.”

For this woman, watching Vickers grow a beard before leaving on a trip or listening to Gust say good-bye to the paramilitaries as they set off for Pakistan was like watching a World War II movie with RAF pilots heading off to fight the Luftwaffe. In reality, however, these PM officers did not actually go into combat. Throughout the war, the CIA was rigidly prohibited from having any American agents operating inside Afghanistan.
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In fact, for most of the war, they were only permitted to train the Pakistanis, who in turn trained the Afghans.

Some of the hard-right enthusiasts complained about this, arguing that Americans would be more effective, but Avrakotos and Vickers knew that direct involvement would be a prescription for disaster. Besides, they saw General Akhtar’s ISI as first-rate military men, many of them highly experienced and well trained (some out of the American Special Forces schools at Fort Bragg).

Beyond that, they knew it would be absurd for non-Muslim Americans to accompany the Afghan holy warriors in combat. The Pakistanis, many of whom were of Pashtun origins, spoke the same language, shared the same geography and religion. They were now constantly going with the mujahideen as advisers on combat runs into Afghanistan, a fact that Gust knew could cause him no end of trouble because of the explicit prohibition on any direct CIA involvement. “I got around that by asking if the Pakistani advisers had any Pathan blood,” explains Avrakotos. “‘Yes,’ was the response. ‘Okay then, they are not Pakistani. They are Pathans or Uzbeks.’”

To the CIA men who had operated on the ground in Pakistan, it was clear that American spies would have made a mess of things trying to deal directly with these Afghans from another time and place. “Akhtar’s troops did something for us we couldn’t,” explains Avrakotos. “It would have cost us millions to try to do what they did—all the movement of weapons, the training of the mujahideen, the coordination of everything.”

There was another plus. Because most of the ISI trainers were virtual blood brothers to the Afghans, they were more than eager to do things that would have been political suicide for Americans. For example, they had no hesitation when it came to training for sabotage and assassination. And unlike their American counterparts, they could even offer bounties to hit the targets deemed most valuable.

Without so much as a second thought, the ISI officers promoted the value of selective killing. This was war, and as they saw it the idea was to convince the mujahideen that some of the enemy were more important to kill than others. They went to some lengths to teach their Afghan charges how to identify a Soviet general or commanding officer by describing where he would normally stand in a group of soldiers and what position he would take when walking about a base. An Afghan soldier could more easily decide whom to shoot first once he not only knew who the general was but also understood that the higher the rank of the Soviet soldier killed, the bigger the bounty he could collect back in Peshawar.
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Avrakotos was careful never to associate the Agency with such activities—that would be a political time bomb. Killing Russians, however, was what this operation was about, and he was determined to put every kill to his advantage. He agreed to the idea of using Soviet soldiers’ belt buckles as a way of measuring the body count. And he loved the rewards the Pakistanis offered for these trophies: cash, more guns, sometimes even alcohol—whatever a given commander or warrior most wanted. Avrakotos made sure every one of these kills was tabulated and the totals distributed in highly classified reports to the policy makers he needed on board.

In many respects, the war on the actual battlefront was the least of Gust Avrakotos’s concerns in 1985. He left the operational decisions to Vickers. His combat took place in very different and varied arenas. That year he had a particularly ticklish problem to cope with from the all-important Pakistan intelligence service, through which the CIA had to conduct all of its operations.

The ISI brigadier responsible for arming the Afghans with the CIA’s weapons was Mohammad Yousaf, a big, bug-eyed, former infantry officer who maintained a very complicated relationship with the Americans. After the war he wrote a book in which he complained sharply about the CIA’s inefficiency and its timidity in introducing the kinds of weapons, like the Stinger, that the mujahideen needed.

But if you listen to Avrakotos and the other CIA Afghan hands, it was Yousaf who wouldn’t let them escalate. A fundamentalist Muslim, Yousaf bore considerable suspicion and even bitter resentment against the American spy agency, which he believed was forever machinating behind the scenes to manipulate the Pakistan government and to undermine his religion.

President Zia was the ultimate authority in Pakistan; he always told his American friends that he was the one who decided how much to let the pot boil in Afghanistan. He assured Charlie Wilson and others several times that he had given his okay to the escalation that year. But Yousaf felt it was his obligation to decide how much to permit the Americans to force down Pakistan’s throat, and he emerged in those months as a genuine block to the massive increases Vickers had in mind. His official explanation was that he did not want to do anything that would precipitate a Soviet invasion of his country.

Part of the problem, however, was no doubt personal. On a CIA-sponsored trip to Washington that year, the proud ISI brigadier was deeply insulted when he was led, virtually blindfolded, to the Agency’s “sabotage school” in North Carolina. Vickers escorted the burly Pakistan general in a plane whose windows were blacked, then in a car with its shades drawn. Yousaf, who suffers the chip on the shoulder of many proud Third World types, was deeply offended at this slight. He reasoned that if he was trusted enough to be permitted to run the CIA’s operation in Pakistan, why was the Agency treating him as if he were about to reveal the location of the sabotage school?

At dinner back in Washington, things deteriorated even further when Vickers and Avrakotos took Yousaf and one of his colleagues out for a fancy dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel. Yousaf, perhaps because he still felt the sting of the sabotage-school humiliation, complained when Avrakotos ordered a second bourbon and water. Being a pure Muslim, the Pakistan general reacted to this rather natural Western custom almost the way an American might respond if Yousaf had taken out a syringe and begun shooting up with heroin just as the appetizers were arriving.