Charlie Wilson's War (58 page)

I
t does not remotely detract from Milt Bearden to call him the luckiest station chief in the CIA’s history. By most accounts he was so devilishly effective during his three years running the Afghan program that he earned the good fortune with which he began his tour. Bearden was like a man who had inherited great wealth and, instead of screwing it up, managed to build an even greater fortune.

Avrakotos had personally recruited Bearden in early 1986 to take over the Islamabad station. Ever since Howard Hart had left, the station had been run by a competent but weak personality named Bill Piekney. Gust had taken advantage of his weakness. Using Charlie’s money as leverage, he had trampled on the tradition of the chief of station as king and had managed to call the shots from Langley. But by February 1986 Vickers’s redesign was over and Piekney was in trouble. He had been falsely accused, but the miniscandal confused the political scene and Avrakotos seized the opportunity to push for his early departure.
*
As Gust saw it, you either have strength in Washington or strength in the field, and with Vickers’s work completed, he figured the program needed a classic field marshal.

Milt Bearden was not the kind of man that Avrakotos was going to be able to push around, and Gust wanted it that way. Bearden was a Texan, a great storyteller, a natural salesman, and a very tough customer. At the time Avrakotos approached him, he wasn’t yet a legend, but he was the veteran of twenty-five years of operations who had roamed the Third World managing dictators like the Sudan’s Numiery. He had won Gust’s admiration when Gust had been running the station in Boston, and the two had successfully teamed up to recruit a spy. Later Avrakotos had spent an evening drinking with him in Texas. They liked each other, and when Gust found out that Bearden was languishing as deputy division chief for the Far East—an impressive enough title but filled with bureaucracy and no way back into the field for at least two years—he hit him with an offer: “I’ve got a job that will knock your socks off.”

“If it’s so great, why aren’t you taking it?”

“I would if I could, but Clair won’t let me have it.”

“Tell me more,” Milt said.

Gust amazed him with the description of the size of the program and his conviction that it was working, no matter what the press and the analysts might be saying. And then he described the role of “the crazy congressman from Texas who is behind the program. I told him he would love Charlie and Charlie him. And in fact Charlie did fall in love with Milt. They’re both from Texas.”

Of the many wonders Bearden discovered about the program upon arriving in Islamabad, the one he found most appealing was that the American press corps was not really asking any questions.

It remains one of the great mysteries of this entire history that virtually no one in the press—or Congress, for that matter—seemed to care that the CIA was running the biggest operation in its history: that it was supporting efforts to kill thousands of Soviets, that it was fighting a very dirty war, that it was arming tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists. Bearden couldn’t quite figure out why no one was concerned about these facts, but he loved it. The only thing the reporters seemed to want to do was get an Afghan to take them into the war zone for an adventure tale of being with the mujahideen in the Hindu Kush.
*

Bearden recognized another stroke of good fortune: the
New York Times
man in Pakistan, Arthur Bonner, announced just as Bearden arrived that the war was, in effect, over. The headline read, “Guerrillas Are Divided and at Risk of Being Conquered.” Since the
Times
is a kind of American bible insofar as political judgments are concerned, Bearden realized that there was no place for his operation to go but up. Indeed, even the following year, Dan Rather would host a CBS special report concluding that all was lost, and henceforth no reporter would be able to go in.

In fact, as Gust had told him, the tide was already turning. No doubt one of the reasons why American reporters and politicians and, indeed, the public they represented didn’t pay any attention to the occasional references to how much this war was costing was because they had all learned to disregard money as being helpful in solving problems. Government wasted money. The poverty program didn’t solve poverty; it might have made it worse. The billions spent in Vietnam had backfired.
Washington Post
cartoonist Herb Block loved to draw Caspar Weinberger walking around with a thousand-dollar toilet seat around his neck. And everyone knew that the CIA screwed up everything it did.

Perhaps reporters felt some sympathy toward the poor Afghans. At that time the mujahideen cause was almost universally embraced throughout the world. Journalists seemed to find it difficult to undermine the CIA’s effort, which appeared to be inadequate in the first place. Whatever the underlying reason, Bearden thought it totally charming that no one was hunting him down, eager to humiliate and expose him and the giant operation he had just taken over.
*

All of this was just the beginning for the station chief, compared to the great good fortune that began to erupt that summer. On August 26, the skies of Kabul burst into flames, and Milt, the Afghans, and even the CIA bathed in the glory. The unmistakable conclusion was that the biggest Soviet arms depot in Afghanistan had just been blown up as a result of a very skilled CIA-backed guerrilla maneuver.

Bearden, who does not shy from taking credit for his triumphs, offers a disarmingly humble explanation of the Agency’s role. “This was one that Allah really did do all by himself,” he says. But to properly enjoy Bearden’s explanation of how this killer blow against the 40th Army was delivered, you have to imagine yourself in the presence of a master storyteller using a Texas accent and knowing that his listener is likely to think that he was personally responsible for placing the C-4 explosives in just the right spot.

“Think of an old muj,” he begins. “Lucky Mohammed, I call him. He’s carrying a thirty-seven-pound rocket that costs ninety-two dollars. Now, Mohammed’s mule has died and he’s tired. He stops at a teahouse in the mountains on the outskirts of Kabul. And when he goes to lay the rocket down, it falls into a tandoori oven and it explodes. The rocket strikes a dove over the teahouse as it takes off. This changes its trajectory. As a result the rocket goes straight down the smokestack and blows up the whole dump.”

At this point Bearden’s audience understands that the much-ballyhooed incident in which a 107mm rocket knocked off fifty thousand tons of ammunition was not the product of the CIA’s ingenious planners. “A free-flight rocket is a free-flight rocket,” explains the station chief.

Bearden now reverts back to a straight briefing, explaining that news of this hit—complete with dramatic still photographs and video—was immediately picked up and shown all around the world. Meanwhile, the press corps’ favorite Afghan commander, Abdul Haq, immediately claimed credit for the hit. He began to include pictures of the explosions in his party’s brochures. Bearden thought this was just fine, since he wanted to give the impression to the Soviets that everything the mujahideen did was the result of precision planning. “So what if it happened by utter chance—you turn it into a precision operation and let Abdul Haq’s story stick. And shit, everyone needs a hero, so let Abdul Haq be a hero and write ballads about being the man who knocked off the 40th Army.”

Actually, it wasn’t all quite the piece of abstract luck that Bearden describes. By the time Lucky Mohammed launched his mortar round, the mujahideen had taken to launching rocket attacks on Kabul almost daily. These attacks were not very accurate because the Soviets had built up a defensive ring perimeter eleven miles out. On top of that, the mujahideen didn’t want to risk being caught by the gunships, so they tended to fire only at night, knowing they would have time to escape before first light, when the Hinds could lift off seeking revenge.

Even so, the fact was that the mujahideen were shelling Kabul virtually every day by the time Bearden arrived on the scene. If you fire enough rockets for long enough at the same general target, one day one of them is bound to strike. And this one didn’t just explode a lot of enemy ammunition; it made everyone suddenly think that the mujahideen were finally learning how to really hurt the enemy.

That, in fact, was exactly what was happening in the sealed-off indoor-training area just outside the Pakistan capital the month Bearden arrived to take up his job. There a select group of mujahideen had been tapped to learn how to fire the Stinger.

Engineer Ghaffar was one of the Afghans’ most successful gunners, a member of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s archfundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami party. Like his leader, Ghaffar is not the kind of Muslim who smiles on America. So one might wonder how the good engineer felt when he was first handed the dull green seven-foot tube. And how he felt when the red-faced Texan, the American named Milt, went with him to the border to wish him well as he walked off with his band of men.

As Ghaffar crossed the Pakistan border, moved into the tribal zone, and then began traveling across the dry and wasted landscape of southern Afghanistan, he and his men looked little different from their great-grandfathers, who had twice shattered British invasions in the nineteenth century. The green tubes they carried with them hardly seemed menacing, and if the truth were known, no one at the CIA or the ISI knew whether they would be effective. The Stinger had never yet been deployed in actual combat.

The eyes of the CIA, in the form of satellites specially detailed for the operation, were very much upon the holy warriors as they continued on their way. Only the green tubes offered an evidentiary link to their American suppliers. They carried with them a map of the target area, drawn so artfully as to resemble a quick mujahid scroll but actually derived from the subtlest of American satellite photographs. The sketch depicted the best approach and escape routes from the airfield at the Soviet garrison in Jalalabad.

This was approximately the same spot where, 144 years earlier, Dr. Brydon had struggled alone along the Kabul road, bringing the appalling news that he was the lone survivor of the British expeditionary force that had ridden into Afghanistan ten months earlier to take control of Kabul. The grisly story of Dr. Brydon and the fate of the nineteenth-century British invaders was told over and over again with great pleasure by U.S. ambassadors and CIA men once the Afghans started to look as if they might actually defeat the Soviets.

Brydon had been part of the proud British Indian army that had marched into Kabul with their fine uniforms and lethal weapons to install their own king. After more than a year of being hacked away by snipers and attackers, the British realized they had no choice but to withdraw. They thought they had negotiated an agreement of safe passage for their troops and dependents. But from the first day of retreat, the mountain men began to take their revenge, cutting off sections of the column, destroying the infidels one by one, as often as possible in the most horrible manner. Dr. Brydon’s good fortune is assumed to be the consequence of an old tactic of Muslim warfare: to leave behind one man to tell the tale. And so the doctor carried the message that would echo down through the centuries—of the fate that awaits any future enemy of the faith.

Ghaffar stood proudly in the tradition of his Afghan ancestors. It was about 3
P.M.
on September 26, 1986, when he and his men approached the Jalalabad airfield. They moved in closer to the landing zone than their ISI trainers, running off the CIA target studies, had specified.

Until this moment the three-man crews that flew the Hinds had never really known fear. Never in the six years of the war. They could kill at will, and no one could kill back. But now, preparing to pierce that invulnerability, Engineer Ghaffar sighted his shouldered weapon and he and his fellow soldiers looked out near dusk at four Hinds flying into Jalalabad.

To explain the functioning of a Stinger is demanding—just as it takes far more time to explain how a clock works than it does to teach a person that the clock’s purpose is to tell time. Engineer Ghaffar may not have known what electrical forces cause the Stinger’s warhead to launch out of its tube or what makes it turn and twist in the air in pursuit of its target. That sort of detail was between the weapons designer and Allah. But he did know that the Stinger was what the Americans call a fire-and-forget weapon. Somehow, with its infrared sensors it could chase through the skies seeking heat from the exhaust of the Hind’s engines. For Ghaffar the task was to lock the beast in the Stinger’s sights and then pull the trigger.

There was one thing more—something the instructors had not taught the Afghans but that none ever forgot. As the missile rocketed past Ghaffar’s eyes at twelve hundred miles per hour, he uttered the cry of the faithful:
“Allahu Akbar,”
God is Great.

But now the engineer’s faith was put to the test, because the Stinger had misfired and three of the Hinds were closing in.

At CIA headquarters that day, Mike Vickers was nowhere to be found. He had, by then, left the CIA. For Gust Avrakotos, returning from the front a few months earlier, the news that his irreplaceable strategist had decided to quit had been traumatic.

Avrakotos was not one to become dependent on anyone, but over the course of just a year and a half, Vickers had become Gust’s right hand: his tutor, his troubleshooter, his counselor on all aspects of the war. Vickers had taught Avrakotos to look at the big picture and not get caught up in the details or panic at temporary setbacks. He had created an entirely new vision of how to arm and train this mass of primitive individualists. And already they were transforming themselves into a force that could torment and defy the invincible Red Army.

It was Vickers who had taught Avrakotos that his own instincts had been right: the Afghan war was winnable. But it was also Vickers who had given Avrakotos the shock of his life by showing him that the monetary price for getting into the winning game was far, far higher than he or anyone else at the CIA could have imagined.