Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Most of Wilson’s Democratic colleagues, certainly most of the American press corps, and eventually most of the Nicaraguan people came to view Somoza as a corrupt dictator guilty of ruthless force against his own people. But Wilson saw him through his own peculiar lens as an abandoned and betrayed U.S. ally threatened by every Russian-backed leftist in the hemisphere. He was running a rearguard action from the Appropriations Committee to save Somoza, even threatening to torpedo the president’s highest priority, the Panama Canal Treaty. But the tide in America had turned against such indiscriminate anti-Communism, and Wilson thought he had used up all his options to rescue Somoza. That is, until he found himself face-to-face with the renegade ex-CIA operative Ed Wilson.

  The congressman’s encounter with this outlaw came about by chance because of one of those peculiar problems that seem to beset Charlie Wilson. He had fallen hopelessly in lust with his confidential secretary, Tina Simons. Like many of the women in the office, Tina was curvaceous, up-beat, and available, but Wilson had imposed a most unfortunate discipline on himself when it came to romance: he would not woo any of the women on his staff. The smitten congressman decided there was only one thing to do: he asked a mutual friend to get her a job. As chance would have it, she ended up as the all-purpose office manager, decorator, and social secretary for Ed Wilson.

  Memories fade, and the name Ed Wilson may no longer strike a chord, but in his day he came to represent something new and evil in the American experience. He was a former CIA agent who, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, had taken to serving the interests of dark forces. By the time the congressman met Ed Wilson, a Washington Post article had accused him of working for Muammar Qaddafi. But no formal charges had been brought, and the renegade managed to make many influential Washingtonians believe that he was, perhaps, operating under very deep cover on some convoluted mission.

  The former CIA operative would later be indicted for selling sophisticated explosives to Qaddafi, or for recruiting hit squads to dispose of the Libyan leader’s political enemies, but when Charlie Wilson met him, Ed Wilson presented himself as a multimillionaire with a sprawling horse farm in the hunt country of Virginia and a lavish town house in the capital where he held court with a daring collection of former and present CIA men and other mysterious characters.

  Charlie had never met a full-fledged CIA operative before, and Ed Wilson appealed to his sense of what a CIA agent should look like. “He was taller than me, weighed about two fifty, just a very lethal-looking person, dark, ominous, but a good sense of humor and a good guy to drink with.”

  The congressman took to meeting his former secretary at this exotic town house, where, accompanied by much alcohol, Ed Wilson began telling Charlie how things really worked in the CIA. “Ed had convinced me that he personally killed Che Guevara and I thought, Shit, if he got Che, he can sure get that little turd Ortega,” Wilson said, referring to the Sandinista guerrilla leader. This ex-CIA thug set off a lightbulb in Charlie Wilson’s head; if Jimmy Carter wouldn’t do what was necessary to save the United States, then, by God, he and Ed Wilson would come to the rescue of Tacho Somoza.

  A meeting was arranged at the Palm Bay Club in Miami Beach, Somoza’s favorite weekend retreat. The dictator brought along his hot-blooded mistress, Dinorah Sampson. Charlie Wilson brought Tina Simons and Ed Wilson. Somoza seemed more than intrigued when Ed Wilson described the one-thousand-man army of former CIA operatives he said he could mobilize to crush the Sandinistas. “We were all drinking, getting more excited, more excited, killing Ortega, killing everybody, and then Tacho asked Tina to dance.”

  Everything was going swimmingly when the dictator, now blind drunk with visions of a thousand CIA cutthroats doing in his enemies, began to fondle Tina. It all happened so fast that the two Wilsons could barely believe their eyes. Dinorah, a very fit weight lifter, began pulling apart the two dancers, screaming in Spanish at her lover, then ripped off Somoza’s glasses and stomped them on the ground.

  One can only imagine how a military dictator must feel when humiliated like this. It couldn’t have been easy for Tacho to return to the table. Perhaps it was simply a need to reassert his manhood that changed his mind about Ed Wilson’s proposal, which had so recently enchanted him. But more than likely it was the price tag. Somoza was a notorious tight-wad, and the congressman remembers to this day Somoza’s look of horror when Ed Wilson said he could save the dictator for a mere $100 million—$100,000 per man. To the congressman’s dismay, Somoza passed on the offer. He just said, “Out of the question.” Wilson later observed that the whole exercise had been “very amateurish on my part.” Putting the best possible face on this maiden effort to hijack a U.S. foreign policy, he explained, “I wanted to try to do something to hold the Ortegas of the world at bay, until Carter learned better or we got a new president.”

  Shortly afterward, Somoza lost the support even of his country’s business community. On July 17, 1979, with the rebel forces closing in, the dictator fled Nicaragua. It had not been Wilson’s finest hour, and the disasters were only beginning. Just over a year later, Charlie found himself looking at a picture of a screaming Dinorah Sampson on the front page of the Washington Post. She was running from the flaming wreckage of Tacho’s white Mercedes-Benz in Asunción, Paraguay, the only country that had been willing to offer sanctuary to Somoza. The killers had pumped eighteen bullets into Tacho’s body and face before finishing off the job with a rocket attack. Soon after, the man who had gotten Wilson into the affair, Representative Jack Murphy, was caught taking a bribe in the FBI’s ABSCAM sting operation and sent to jail. Meanwhile, Ed Wilson had become a hunted man after being indicted for his illegal dealings with Qaddafi. Captured in the Bahamas, he was tried and sentenced to fifty-two years in jail, where he languishes today.

  From his maximum-security cell in White Deer, Pennsylvania, he insists that he had always been operating under the authority of what he calls the “inner CIA.” The congressman’s girlfriend, Tina Simons, suddenly found herself fearing for her life. After testifying against Ed Wilson, she permanently disappeared into the federal witness protection program. The Sandinistas, the Communist-backed guerrillas who Wilson had tried to stop, suddenly emerged as the preoccupation of Ronald Reagan in his not-so-secret Contra war.

  Charlie Wilson escaped unscathed but unsettled. He had intervened, believing he was acting selflessly to counter a threat that the country had not yet recognized. His heart may have been in the right place, but his head certainly was not. And by the time it was over, he had managed to make himself look like a dangerous fool. It was in the aftermath of this debacle that Wilson slipped into his colorful midlife crisis—a despairing patriot, convinced that his country was headed toward disaster but no longer certain that he would have a role in its salvation. For a moment, when the courage of the Afghans temporarily inspired him, he shook off his stupor long enough to double the CIA’s Afghan budget. But it was just for a moment, and then he disappeared back into what he called “the longest midlife crisis in history.”

  In retrospect, the Somoza fiasco was a turning point for Wilson, and only later would he realize its positive impact. He had discovered that, even with a wildly unpopular cause, he had the power to intimidate the most high-level bureaucrats. And most important for what he would later do in Afghanistan, he had crossed over a line and, in effect, experimented with running his own foreign operation with a renegade operative who wasn’t afraid to break the rules.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gust Avrakotos

  A ROGUE ELEPHANT IN

  THE AGENCY WOODS

  Gust Avrakotos hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t have important relatives or fancy summer vacations. He hadn’t inherited tennis lessons, money, or classic good looks. He was the son of Greek immigrants from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and the CIA simply didn’t go to places like that to recruit its elite case officers. Aliquippa was a steel-worker’s town, and for most of its early years, the Agency seemed to think its Clandestine Service
s should be filled with men of breeding.

  That’s how the British had always picked their spies, and the founders of the CIA had taken the British as their model. British spies belonged to clubs. They dressed like gentlemen. Their top officers had gone to boarding schools, then cemented their friendships as young men at Oxford and Cambridge. This was a class that had been at the spy game for centuries; they had learned that a man’s family and schools stood for something.

  That, at least, was the legend about the British. So it was natural, when Congress created the CIA in 1947, that the American leadership would look to the same class for its service. And to a remarkable extent, the CIA did manage to fill its ranks with sons of the establishment.

  Take Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie. Brilliant at Groton and Harvard, a classical scholar with six languages and a robust appetite for healthy adventure, he was one of the first generation of Agency operatives. On the surface, he led a rather dull existence as a midlevel State Department officer. But “everyone” knew that Archie worked for the CIA, and there were few who didn’t welcome an invitation to one of his elegant Georgetown evenings.

  There was always a sense at the Roosevelts’ of being at the center of things both past and present. As Archie’s distant cousin the columnist Stewart Alsop used to joke at such gatherings, “A man should have furniture, he shouldn’t have to buy it.” In Archie’s house there were ancestral portraits on the wall and that patrician glow that comes from the mix of old wood, Oriental rugs, gleaming silver, and the kindly faces of faithful retainers.

  Archie presided effortlessly over these gatherings—actually thinking of them as “informal” because the dress called for dark suits instead of dinner jackets. There was little general conversation at the table. The ritual called for each man to speak first to the woman on his right and then, at an appropriate moment, to turn and converse with the dinner partner on his left. It was not until after the women left the men to their cigars and brandy that the talk would turn to matters of state.

  Then Archie might talk about the latest rebellion of the Kurds or what his friend the Shah of Iran was up to. But even here it was all terribly discreet. The Agency would never have to worry about a Roosevelt being polygraphed—it was part of the noblesse oblige of the man to know intuitively how to keep a secret.

  No matter how long he served or how far he rose in the CIA, Gust Avrakotos would always feel a bit like the poor street kid, nose against the glass, looking in at the party, knowing he would never be asked to attend such gatherings. And dinner at Archie’s was hardly the only thing that made Avrakotos feel like an outsider. “Almost everyone was a fucking blue blood in the CIA in 1961 when I came in,” he says. “They were just beginning to let Jews move up that year. But there still weren’t any blacks, Hispanics, or females—just some token Greeks and Polacks.”

  Some of Avrakotos’s friends actually schemed to wangle an invitation to Archie’s. They felt it could help just to be seen with this patrician. But Avrakotos hadn’t kowtowed to the plant manager’s sons in Aliquippa, and he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought about the Agency’s blue bloods. As far as he was concerned, they operated in an “old boys’ network” to keep his kind down and “the only reason half of them got anywhere is because they jerked off Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson at some prep school.”

  Avrakotos had a chip on his shoulder; there was no question about that. But he did make friends with some of the Agency’s well-born officers, and he accepted the notion that some of the real aristocrats—originals like Roosevelt—were at least authentic. Nevertheless, as he rose through the ranks he came to loathe a certain type of blue blood with a rage that bordered on class hatred.

  The CIA hadn’t started opening its ranks to gifted “new” Americans like Avrakotos until 1960, and the move had had nothing to do with social justice. There were no quotas in those days. The fact was that these first-generation types, brought up on the streets of America and speaking the languages of the Old Country, had certain strengths that the CIA had come to feel it needed.

  A kind of panic about the Communist threat had been sweeping over Washington. In every city in the 1950s air raid sirens were regularly set off. Tens of millions of children got used to scurrying into bomb shelters or crawling under their desks as part of drills to prepare for a Soviet nuclear assault. In every corner of the globe the dark hand of the Communists was seen to be at work.

  The commission by which the CIA came to live during those years was spelled out in one telling paragraph from a blue-ribbon panel explaining to President Truman why it was essential for the United States to abandon its traditional sense of fair play in this all-out struggle for the world:

  It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination…there are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, it must use more clever, more sophisticated and more effective means than those used against us.

  It was almost as if Gust Avrakotos’s early life in Aliquippa had been designed to turn him into the kind of back-alley spy that Harry Truman’s advisers were urging the CIA to nurture and unleash on the Communists. The one thing no one needed to teach this man was how to “subvert and destroy” his enemies.

  Aliquippa is one of those American company towns always described as a melting pot. Immigrants from all over the world poured in here for jobs in the huge steelworks that the Jones and Laughlin company built. But the hard people of this steel town never lost any of their ethnic pride, or their ethnic hatreds. You can still see the workingman’s anger in Avrakotos when he drives up the hill to Plan Six, where the WASP managers used to live in their five-and six-bedroom stone houses. He calls them “cake eaters” and talks about them with the same contempt he uses for the Agency’s blue bloods.

  When Jones and Laughlin moved into Aliquippa on the rolling hills just north of Pittsburgh, it didn’t specify where the workers should live. But every ethnic group insisted on living, marrying, partying, and going to church with its own. As recently as 1980, fourteen thousand steel workers earned their living there.

  Today it’s as if the bomb had struck. There’s nothing but great hulking iron forms and rusting steel. About the only sign of life are a few teams of workers dismantling one of the abandoned steel plants to sell as scrap to the Japanese. But Avrakotos remembers Aliquippa the way it was when he was growing up and delegations of Japanese used to come in buses to study this marvel of industrial America. They brought movie cameras and notebooks to record everything about the workings of the largest integrated steel mill in the world. No one felt anything but pride as the plant operated at full tilt twenty-four hours a day, spewing out great clouds of pink and black smoke that would engulf the ethnic neighborhoods of Aliquippa.

  “That’s Plan Seven, where the Dagos lived,” Avrakotos says, like a tour guide passing through the ruins of some past civilization. “Plan Twelve was all Irish. The Polacks lived in Plan Five. Plan Eleven is where the niggers were.” For all his years at the CIA, Avrakotos has never stopped using the brutal street talk of his youth. He’s as proud of it as he is of the scars that lace his body from teenage knife fights. “Each of the plans had a gang, and they fought like cats and dogs,” he explains. “Each plan fought among itself, but when the niggers came we all banded together. You had to be very fucking practical…. The guys who made it out of Aliquippa had one thing in common: you can’t fuck around all day trying to make up your mind. The niggers will overrun you.”

  This kind of talk is jarring, but it was the language of Aliquippa—and it shaped Avrakotos’s brutal instinct for the jugular. There are legends in Aliquippa about the ones who escaped and made good: Henry Mancini, who got his start at the musical and political Italian clubs; Mike Ditka, Avrakotos’s high school friend from Plan Seven, the former Chicago Bears tight end whose name is synonymous with toughness; Tony Dorsett of the Cowboys. Becoming a sports hero was one way
out.

  The mafia was another. There were three thousand Sicilians in Aliquippa. Most of Avrakotos’s friends were Sicilians, and he knew the Alamena family as “men of honor.” Gust’s father, Oscar Avrakotos, distributed Rolling Rock beer for them, and they always treated the Avrakotoses with respect. But the Sicilian mafia wasn’t an option for a Greek-American. And anyway Oscar Avrakotos had high hopes for his son.

  Like many other immigrants, Oscar’s American experience had begun at Ellis Island, as an eight-year-old boy from the Greek Island of Lemnos. He had come over with his brother in 1894 and for three decades toiled in the sweatshops of New England and the “Iron House” of Aliquippa. But then Oscar broke away from the pack with a vision of making a fortune selling his own soda pop.

  With his hard-earned savings he bought a bottling assembly line from the Smile and Cheer-up Company of St. Louis. He named his new company after the Greek sun god, Apollo. Apollo was his good-luck god, and he figured the name would win customers from the Greek Orthodox church, not to mention workers in the mills.

  As the owner of the Apollo Soda Water Company, Oscar was a man of means, at least by the standards of Lemnos. He was close to fifty when he went back to the old country and took a bride, Zafira Konstantaras, twenty-one years younger and with a big dowry. Back in Aliquippa three years later, Gust Avrakotos was born into a household that would know nothing but unrelenting hard work. His earliest memories are of his father moving about in the kitchen at 4:30 A.M., eating his breakfast of pork chops and potatoes and polishing off several beers and a couple of shots, if it was cold, before walking downstairs to begin the day’s labor.