Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  After the colonels arrested Papandreou, who had lived in the United States for years, the embassy sent Avrakotos to deliver a message to them. The United States had taken the unusual step of issuing the Greek leader an American passport, and the embassy wanted the junta to permit him to leave the country. “That’s the official position. You should let him go,” the young CIA man told the colonels. “But unofficially, as your friend, my advice is to shoot the motherfucker because he’s going to come back to haunt you.”

  This was vintage Aliquippa wisdom and just the kind of statement made at just the right moment to cement a true conspirators’ friendship. One can only imagine the trouble Avrakotos might have gotten into if the ambassador had learned about his private remarks—but he didn’t, and now, at twenty-nine, Avrakotos had suddenly leapt to the front of the pack and transformed himself into the CIA’s all-important agent at the very heart of the new power center of Greece.

  For the next seven years, the colonels insisted on dealing with Avrakotos as their principal American contact. Ostensibly he worked for the Department of the Army as a civilian liaison to the Greek military. He moved freely in and out of their offices. He took them out on his boat at night and for picnics and outings on weekends. He was, for all practical purposes, an invisible member of the ruling junta.

  Avrakotos tells of driving up to the Athens Hilton, where he lunched every day. The doorman saluted the CIA man and took his keys just as one of the colonels came up to meet him for lunch. “How come they let you park your car here?” the colonel demanded. “They won’t even let me do that.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you do, but I run the country,” Avrakotos growled, and his buddy laughed with delight.

  Accounts of Avrakotos at this high point evoke a Costa-Gavras character—a shadowy American in dark glasses, whispering to his fascist colonels. It was a time of coups and countercoups. Greece and Turkey came to the edge of war over Cyprus. Both countries were members of NATO, and Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco shuttled in and out, trying to keep the alliance from tearing apart. In spite of the significance of the diplomacy, the only American always welcome to the changing military strongmen was Gust Avrakotos. It’s hard not to feel a certain unease about such a figure.

  But those were days of Cold War, and the kinds of things he did were deemed crucial to the secret struggle. Just how dangerous a game Avrakotos was playing did not become fully evident until two days before Christmas 1975, when Richard Welch, the chief of the Athens station, was cut down on his front doorstep by three masked gunmen. Welch, one of those gentleman spies who spoke four languages and studied the classics, had supposedly been a mere first secretary at the embassy until that November, when an Athenian English-language magazine had identified him as CIA and published his name, photograph, and address.

  It was a frightening moment for American operatives abroad. A CIA renegade, Philip Agee, had exposed over two hundred of his former colleagues in his sensational book, Inside the Company. And a Washington journal, Counterspy, had launched a campaign to expose agents wherever they could be found.

  A Greek terrorist group, the 17 November, instantly claimed responsibility for the assassination. Within months Avrakotos’s cover was blown by another Greek leftist magazine. From that time on, Gust was vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country’s many ills—preposterous stories that would have been amusing had they not carried with them the threat of death.

  The articles described him as “the Head of the Dark Forces of Anomaly,” the “Butcher of Cyprus,” “the Fascist CIA Overlord of the Colonels,” “the Brutal Killer of Cypriot Women and Children,” even the “CIA collaborator with the Turks.” The Communist Morning Daily was the most colorful. “Under every big rock, when lifted, live vermin, evil vipers and spiders. And under every questionable activity in our land is found the head CIA vermin and viper, Avrakotos.”

  Several of Avrakotos’s friends from the junta were murdered, two with the same .45 that had killed Welch. Avrakotos became an even more intensely disciplined professional, systematically changing routes, cars, and meeting places, sometimes spending three hours of evasion getting to a five-minute contact. “Typically terrorists will have three targets,” he says, “and they almost always pick the easiest to go after. I became a very hard target. That’s how I stayed alive.”

  The terrorists and the ever pervasive KGB were not the only ones targeting Avrakotos and the CIA at that time. Back home, agents were being dragged before congressional committees to account for decades-old efforts to assassinate foreign leaders or overthrow governments. And for the first time, reporters were attempting to expose current CIA activities.

  Every operative with an ordinary instinct for self-preservation was keeping a low profile. But for Gust Avrakotos there was unfinished business. His station chief, Dick Welch, had been murdered and, as he saw it, his job was to find and murder the murderers. It was the code of his family. It was the way of Aliquippa. “I wanted to go out and hit thirty-five or forty of the 17 November people,” he recalls. “We had a list, and I didn’t care if we hit some of the wrong ones. So what?” Furthermore, his friends in the Greek Central Intelligence Service (CIS) and the Athens police force would take care of the dirty work. All they needed was the signal.

  “But I was ordered down,” Avrakotos remembers philosophically years later. “‘We don’t do assassinations,’ they said. I was just working at the wrong time.” And so the tough steel-town kid backed off. But it was a different story when it came to Philip Agee. Like most of his colleagues, Avrakotos was enraged by Agee’s campaign to expose agents and he wanted to make him suffer.*

  In the U.S. media, however, Agee was receiving a surprising amount of sympathetic treatment. A number of journalists portrayed Agee as an American innocent, radicalized by the Vietnam War and the evil he had discovered. Esquire magazine published Agee’s own apologia, in which he explained with righteous indignation why he considered it an act of conscience to try to destroy the organization in which he had served.

  This was all much too much for Avrakotos, who began scheming with friendly intelligence services throughout Europe to label Agee a Cuban agent, thus getting him banned from their countries. It was at this moment, says Avrakotos, that the CIA’s deputy director for operations flew to Athens to order him to cease and desist: “He said I couldn’t use the same tactics that Agee was using against us and that my efforts were violating Agee’s civil rights. He said I would go to jail if I continued.”

  The CIA’s operations chief is like the commanding general of a secret army. His word is supposed to be law to case officers in the field. The man was clearly under tremendous pressure, but Avrakotos saw him as siding with a man who was trying to expose CIA agents. He flew into a rage. “‘I understand you testified before the Pike Committee and used my name. Well, you just violated my civil rights, and if you come after me, then I’ll come after you, you bastard!’ I lectured him on what he should be doing. And you know what? That story went all over the world. Everyone was saying at all the stations: Do you know what Gust just did in Athens? He actually called the DDO a cocksucker.”

  Few case officers could have gotten away with that, but Avrakotos was one of those killer operatives that every spy agency comes to depend on. He had been indispensable in Greece, and he was only trying to defend the agency. Beyond that, in spite of all his tough talk and his hatred of the blue bloods, no one who had worked with Avrakotos doubted that he loved and honored the CIA as if it were his own family. “I was never in a fraternity. The CIA is my fraternity,” he said in retirement. “I still have people who know me in over three-quarters of the stations overseas, and even today if I call any of them and say I want something, it will be done, no questions asked.”

  The fact was that by 1977, Gust Avrakotos was head over heels in love with the Agency. When he returned to Aliquippa his father treated him as a man of honor: “
You’re the one who is educated, you’ve seen the world. Tell us, what’s happening?” Oscar asked his son. “What are you doing about the Communists?”

  “I told him that the Agency won’t let us talk about our work and he said, ‘Good, I’m proud…. Whatever you can do for your country, it’s not enough.’”

  There were moments in Athens, such as when a coup would hit and Henry Kissinger and the rest of the U.S. government would look to Avrakotos, that he would dream of climbing to the Agency’s very top. Then Gust could visualize perfectly the moment when he, Gust Lascaris Avrakotos, from the long line of Greek defenders of the emperors, would be sworn in as director of Central Intelligence.

  But those were Avrakotos’s dreams before the intelligence scandals following Watergate rocked the CIA. Before Admiral Stansfield Turner took over the Agency for Jimmy Carter and sent out his cold form letters on October 31, 1977. That purge of the CIA’s Operations Directorate, still known inside the Agency as the Halloween Day Massacre, changed forever the way Avrakotos felt about the CIA.

  Until then Avrakotos had never complained about the death threats or the attacks by Congress or the press, because he and every other member of the Clandestine Services believed that “mother CIA would always take care of her own.” It was similar to the confidence that U.S. fighter pilots feel when they are shot down in combat, knowing that everything possible will be done to rescue them, even to the point of risking more lives to save theirs.

  That is why he was so stunned in 1978 when four of his agents opened envelopes from the new CIA director containing termination notices. The targets of the purge had all been first-or second-generation Americans, like him. They were the Greek speakers, the ones who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, the ones Avrakotos believed were the most valuable. When he checked elsewhere he discovered that other new Americans were also being let go: four Japanese from the Tokyo station, three Italians from the Rome station, three Chinese. The criteria seemed to be designed to terminate the men who knew the language and the culture and who had served the longest in one spot, agents just like him.

  At first Avrakotos thought perhaps it was a mistake. He convinced two of the four to appeal. Langley’s return cable to one of the men who had requested an explanation stung Gust like nothing he had experienced in his adult life. “We understand you have appealed,” it read. “But you are a native Greek operating on native turf in a native language. You really are not an American.”*

  “When they said that about him not being an American, I knew they could say that about me,” recalls Avrakotos. “That’s when I lost my loyalty to the bureaucrats. That’s when I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck about my career or about trying to become the director. I’m going to fight these fuckers to change it and, if I can’t, I’ll leave.’”

  The return cable that Avrakotos wrote, signing his friend’s name, read: “I was born in the United States. I’m a second-generation American of Greek heritage. I served in World War II with honor. For you to call me anything else is a disgrace. I would like to send your comments to my senator in New York, Jacob Javits.”

  “Well, they shat in their pants. That’s when they gave my friend his stay of execution. And do you know what he did when they reinstated him? He gave them thirty days’ notice and resigned. Isn’t that beautiful?”

  Greece was now different for Avrakotos, murky and ambiguous. By 1978 he had been at this game for twelve years. He had been through eleven coups and four attempted coups; he had gone through the murder of his station chief and a thousand different dramas. He was bitter about the firing of his friends, and he had just broken up with his wife. He was burned out, and he didn’t want to subject his son to any of these battles anymore. He put in for a transfer.

  When he went to say good-bye to his counterpart, the chief of the Greek Central Intelligence Service, the man told him he was relieved Avrakotos was finally leaving: “You’re good, but they would have gotten you if you’d stayed. It would only have been a matter of time.”

  And so the back-alley spy was finally brought home to America—to a post in Boston, where he was given command of a little-known operation to recruit foreign businessmen. He was good at this specialty.

  For him it was like a sport. He would study his prey so that by the time he got to the liaison, he would know the man’s family history, what he enjoyed eating and drinking, whether he liked boys or girls, what his material aims and psychological needs were. Years selling in the ethnic enclaves of western Pennsylvania had taught him how to hook a customer and close a deal. In the weeks before the hostage-rescue mission, he managed to convince two Iranians to go into Tehran to provide the Delta Force rescue team with real-time intelligence of any last-minute changes in security around the embassy.

  His favorite deputy in Boston was John Terjelian, a physically menacing Armenian-American who “had one of those faces like Jack Palance’s that scare the shit out of you.” Avrakotos loved this man. There was something about him that was pure Aliquippa. His favorite story was about how the Turks had buried his four Armenian uncles alive up to their necks, poured honey on their faces, and watched as the insects ate their heads. “But you know they never talked,” he told Avrakotos proudly. “And do you know what? I have the same attitude.”

  It was because of Terjelian that Avrakotos first began to consider the possibility that Afghanistan might be turned into Russia’s Vietnam. On Christmas Day 1979, when the news came over the radio that the Russians were invading, Avrakotos went into the office to check the cable traffic. He opened the door to find Terjelian already there, eagerly reading the cables and laughing.

  The huge Armenian was shouting out his favorite word: muti, which means something like “jerk” in old Armenian slang. “Those fucking mutis. The Russians are mutis; they’re fucking mutis.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, John?”

  Terjelian explained that he had spent three years in Kabul and that “no one fucks with the Afghans and gets away with it.”

  Avrakotos says, “John’s the kind of guy who likes to do the things men do: skydiving, flying planes, ten whores at once, throwing spears, riding camels. He’d done all of that in Afghanistan. He’d even walked through remote parts of the country, and he was telling me that these were the only people who had ever frightened him.”

  This last admission made a large impression on Avrakotos because Terjelian was one of the only people who had ever made him feel physically menaced. Back in 1979 at this curious hidden CIA office in Boston, the idea of the Afghan tribesmen torturing and killing Russian soldiers gave these two lonely bachelors something to laugh about, and Avrakotos decided that Terjelian should write up a report for the DDO.

  No one appears to have paid any attention at headquarters, but Terjelian’s report had a huge impact on Avrakotos once he took over the Afghan war, particularly the warning he offered about these ferocious tribesmen: “Don’t put white men in charge. Don’t give [the Afghanis] a lot of money. Don’t trust them. It would be like throwing money into a cesspool. All they need,” he wrote, “is a little help and the Russians will be sorry they ever went into that country.”

  The idea that there was a nation of warriors waiting in the mountains to kill Russians took seed in Avrakotos’s mind. But in 1979 he never imagined that he—or, for that matter, the CIA—would ever even consider the remote possibility of giving these people hundreds of thousands of weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition to take on the Red Army. Back then the CIA was rapidly pulling back from the world. It had gone a long way toward getting rid of the old street fighters like Avrakotos, and the talk was all about drawing down and avoiding the kind of high-risk covert operations that only created trouble for the Agency. A new and gentler CIA was being born, and it was not the kind of environment that seemed likely to permit such a rude figure as Gust Avrakotos to win a spot in the Agency’s ruling elite.

  After Avrakotos’s three-year tour in Boston, the CIA brought him back to head
quarters and started to use him for particularly difficult and sensitive missions. “My nickname was ‘Dr. Dirty,’” he explains almost bitterly. He was still considered a valuable asset but too freewheeling to entrust with serious responsibility. So Avrakotos was thrilled when he learned that Alan Wolfe, head of the European Division, had handpicked him to become station chief in Helsinki. Wolfe was the legendary officer who had moved in advance of Henry Kissinger to set up the secretary of state’s fabled opening to China. And the Helsinki assignment was one of the Agency’s most important frontline posts targeted on the Soviets. For Avrakotos, it had an even greater significance. Until then he had been somewhat typecast as a back-alley operator, identified almost exclusively with Greek operations. The fact that Wolfe, whose judgment everyone respected, had picked him for a post that demanded worldly, diplomatic skills meant that, for the first time, Avrakotos would be moving out of his ethnic box and truly into the heart of the Clandestine Services. Once again, he could dream of rising to the highest levels.

  Helsinki was a done deal and Avrakotos had already enrolled in Finnish-language school when Wolfe’s tour as European Division chief ended and a new man, William Graver, took over. Graver happened to be another of the Agency’s walking legends. At six feet seven inches he was an imposing figure who had been with the CIA ever since its founding. He held a rank equivalent to that of a four-star general and seemed to believe that the Clandestine Services should be staffed by the kind of gentleman spies that he had known when he’d served in the OSS, during World War II. On that score, Gust Avrakotos was all wrong, and rather quickly Graver decided he would not honor Alan Wolfe’s appointment.

  The morning after Labor Day 1981, Graver summoned Avrakotos to his large corner office on the fifth floor of headquarters. Avrakotos remembers a creepy feeling overwhelming him the moment he set foot in the room. Graver had spent much of his career in Germany, and as far as Avrakotos was concerned he might have walked into SS headquarters: “The most striking thing about Graver is that he was Teutonic. By Teutonic I don’t mean the blond, handsome, Aryan type. By Teutonic, I mean stiff, wooden, no sense of humor.” The only decorations Graver seemed to have were certificates and diplomas on the wall, mostly in German. Even Graver’s aides looked like Teutons to Avrakotos, “the kind that carry briefcases and almost click their heels. It was like going in to see the führer.”