Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Joanne Herring was one of the few outside Congress who truly understood Wilson’s potential. As their romance blossomed, she looked deep into his eyes and got Wilson to spell out for her what he could do with his power. She was thrilled at what she heard and began putting her considerable wiles to work persuading him to take up the cause of the mujahideen.

  Joanne was able to see things in Wilson that were invisible to others. She had cracked Charlie Wilson’s code. She understood that underneath his devil-may-care lifestyle, Wilson was deeply ambitious, consumed with Churchillian visions for himself. She considered his womanizing of no particular consequence, the kind of thing that great men with large ambitions are prone to do. She was never disapproving. Instead she just whispered like a siren into his ear, telling him he could change history: “The mujahideen need you. You can do it, Charlie. You can do anything you put your mind to.” That year, in spite of his many other flirtations, Wilson found himself beginning to fall under Joanne’s sway, swept away by her charisma and stirred by her suggestion that he had a special destiny.

  The war was not going at all well for the Afghans. While they were universally praised for their courage, their cause seemed utterly hopeless. They didn’t have any American champions of consequence, and those who did speak for them were a strange and offbeat group. A former Green Beret and Lithuanian-American put out a newsletter complaining about the antique weapons the CIA was giving to the mujahideen; reporters occasionally quoted him. A handful of enthusiastic, right-wing women in New York and Washington knocked on congressional doors, trying to appeal to the Reagan conservatives. And then there was Joanne’s friend Charles Fernley Fawcett. The passions of this bighearted, white-haired American were so touchingly pure and his efforts to dramatize the plight of the Afghans so tireless that in 1981 General Zia had awarded him Pakistan’s highest civilian decoration. Fawcett had then gone on the road in a quixotic effort to arouse the conscience of a world that didn’t seem to care. He had taken his film, Courage Is Our Weapon, not only to Baron Ricky’s living room but also to college campuses, salons in Palm Beach, and private clubs in Singapore—strange places where the rich gathered and invariably emoted generously but did nothing. The high point of Fawcett’s efforts came when the well-bred sixty-one-year-old crusader managed to get Director William Casey to host a screening of his film at CIA headquarters.

  In spite of this gesture from the director, Joanne continued to lecture Wilson about the CIA’s appalling refusal to do anything of consequence to help the freedom fighters. Now, when Wilson came for weekends to her glamorous River Oaks mansion, she had him share a room with Fawcett in a separate wing of the house, to make sure the two got to know each other. Whether it was Joanne’s wiles or those large candid eyes of Fawcett urging Wilson to do his part, the congressman finally threw in the towel that summer and told Joanne and Fawcett that he would go to Pakistan to meet Zia and their Afghans.

  What he didn’t tell her was that he intended to visit Pakistan at the tail end of a scheduled fall trip to Israel. In the political arena, Wilson was not a man to dilute his efforts. As he’d often explained to Joanne, the reason he was able to do so much was because he rarely went to the well, and then only when he knew he could win. His power in the House had come primarily as a result of his work with the Israeli lobby, and the cause that burned brighter than ever for him that year was still the survival of the Jewish state.

  In the spring of 1982, many of Israel’s strongest American supporters had been enraged when the Israeli army, led by General Ariel Sharon, had launched a blitzkrieg invasion of Lebanon under the guise of clearing out PLO strongholds. There was bitter controversy over the attack when Wilson flew into Lebanon, the first U.S. congressman to tour the battlefront. When he reemerged two days later in Jerusalem to hold a press conference, it was in the role of an unapologetic “Israeli commando,” assuring the critics that Sharon had done the right thing.

  The congressman began his remarks to the newsmen gathered at the King David Hotel by saying, “I come from a district with four hundred thousand white Baptists, one hundred thousand black Baptists, and no more than one hundred Jews.” After establishing his supposedly neutral credentials, he went completely overboard in portraying the attacking Israelis as if they were the uncontested liberators of the people of Lebanon. “They have no complaints, except their houses have been blown up,” he said. He talked about seeing an old Arab mopping the brow of a sick Israeli with a damp rag. “The biggest surprise I had was the enthusiasm, the universal enthusiasm, with which the Lebanese welcomed the Israeli army. In every instance their voices were of relief and appreciation of the Israelis. That’s just the way it is. It ain’t no other way.”

  The hard-line Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was so impressed by this unsolicited endorsement that he sent a transcript to President Reagan and asked for a personal meeting with this marvelous congressman. They met in Jerusalem in Begin’s apartment. The old Irgun commando thanked Wilson and asked if the congressman had any advice. “Well, you’re not famous for taking advice,” Wilson replied, “but if I were you I would let Sharon clean the PLO out while he has them by the throat before world pressure builds too much.”

  Begin was delighted at this suggestion, but in a matter of weeks Wilson would find himself back in Lebanon, traumatized by the sight of a massacre that caused him to regret any suggestion he might have made about egging on Ariel Sharon. Meanwhile Charlie’s gushing endorsement of the invasion triggered his first registry on the Communist screen in Moscow. The Soviet daily Izvestiya ran a mocking column demanding to know how it had come to pass that this American congressman was touring the war zone with the Israeli army: “It is clear that he is a reliable man brought there by American Zionist organizations and the Israeli embassy in Washington.”

  Wilson found out about the Izvestiya complaint from the CIA, which monitored the Soviet press and sent him a copy of the article. All of this delighted the congressman, who was reveling in his role as an indispensable protector of Israel. That year Wilson was also consumed by a grand design that he and his old friend Zvi Rafiah had been working on for months with the Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens. Arens had approached Wilson personally with a request to see if he could win a waiver from the U.S. government for foreign-aid money to be used by Israel to develop its fledgling fighter-plane industry. The fighter jet was to be called the Lavi, which means “young lion” in Hebrew.

  For the Israelis, who depend totally on their air force as a first line of defense, the Lavi was considered a matter of the highest national security. It was going to cost a half billion dollars to develop, but according to federal guidelines, U.S. military-assistance grants could be used only to purchase American-made weapons. Arens and Rafiah were asking Charlie to find a way to waive the rules.

  Wilson was honored. Congress was filled with ardent supporters of Israel, but with this commission Wilson felt himself advancing to the head of the pack. He planned to return to Tel Aviv in October to finalize his strategy for the Lavi. He had budgeted a few days for the Afghans, but only after he finished with his real friends.

  CHAPTER 6

  Gust Avrakotos in Greece

  THE CURSE OF ALIQUIPPA

  It had made absolutely no sense for Gust Avrakotos to have simply abandoned all discipline and, with the door to the European division chief’s office wide open, tell William Graver to go fuck himself for a second time. Clair George, the powerful number two man in the Directorate of Operations, had been incredulous. “Are you crazy?” he had demanded.

  Suddenly, within the ranks of the Clandestine Services, Avrakotos had become an untouchable. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations is like the mafia. You rise and fall with your friends and, with Clair George now holding the number two job, it should have been Gust’s moment to soar. “I had taken care of Clair in Greece, and he owed me everything. I figured I was a pig in shit and about to go to the very top.” Instead, Avrakotos had not only created a dangerous e
nemy in William Graver but also completely alienated the ambitious Clair George, who wasn’t about to have his old friend’s crude ways compromise his fast track. George didn’t just remove Gust’s name from the Helsinki asignment; Avrakotos says he cabled all the division chiefs to warn them about his old friend.

  Gust’s two verbal assaults on Graver had made no sense. But as he later explained, “If you’re looking for logic in the way things work, you’re not going to find it in me, the Middle East, or the Arab world, because that’s not the way things work.” And no matter how counterproductive his dealing with Graver may have been, even years later, it’s striking to hear the pride in his voice when he explains why he faced down Graver.

  “Greeks believe that we are truly God’s chosen people. And even when we go to Greek church and fourth-generation Greek-American priests are talking to third-generation Greek-American kids, they’re still preaching that we are God’s chosen people. And my mother led me to believe that among the chosen, I was one of the most chosen. That’s very positive. So when you’re thrown in with a group of brilliant Ivy Leaguers who know more about so many different things and who can humiliate you through what soup spoons to use, you just remember, ‘Gust, you’re the chosen among the chosen. You’re a superman.’ What an attitude that gives you to go through life—you’re invincible. So you fuck up; so you make mistakes; but you do what you believe is right—what your gut feeling says you should be doing. You just remember that you’re the chosen among the chosen. God will take care of you. God is on your side. It’s sort of like the mujahideen going into battle: you cannot lose. If you survive and beat the enemy, you’re the victor. If you die in battle, you go to Paradise. You can’t lose.”

  But that September 1981 he was feeling very much alone and in need of help, and with the bitter memory of his interview with William Graver fixed in his mind, Avrakotos made a pilgrimage to the town of his birth. It was a six-hour drive to Aliquippa through the mountains on old Route 40. His destination was the home of an old and trusted friend of the Avrakotos family, a woman named Nitsa. She was in the midst of intense preparations when Gust arrived—an old crone dressed in black, cooking up a strange brew and preparing chants in Greek written a thousand years before. If Walt Disney had had to cast a woman to play a classic witch, he might have chosen Nitsa. She was, in fact, the town witch of Aliquippa, but ordinarily she only practiced her art benevolently—amulets for protection, cures for the sick, and talismans to ward off the evil eye.

  Gust, however, was not only the son of her dear departed friend Zafira, he was the pride of Aliquippa, the young CIA warrior who had saved Greece from the Communists. If Gust was in need, all of her dark powers were available to him.

  And so Nitsa began: “What does he look like?”

  Gust had managed to extract a photograph of Graver from one of his security contacts in the CIA’s badge office. “It was the only place I could get a picture. I explained I wanted it for my dartboard, and they loved that.”

  A puzzled look had come over Nitsa’s face as she examined the photograph. According to Avrakotos she claims descent from an order of women in ancient Greece who were the intermediaries between the lords of the underworld and the gods of Olympus. This lineage was perhaps one of the reasons she approached her role that day with such an exacting manner. “He doesn’t look evil,” she told Gust after studying Graver’s face. “Tell me, what he has done?”

  “He’s ruining my career, and all the cake eaters will pounce on me and rip me apart.” She understood that, says Gust, “because her husband had been pulled apart by cake eaters.”

  She looked at the picture with new eyes, then nodded gravely. “You’re right, he is evil.”

  Nitsa explained that her first move would be to strike where Graver already had weaknesses. Avrakotos then gave her a total physical description of Graver, first identifying his weak physical points, starting with his knees. “He looks like a tall scarecrow when he walks. And he has a bad back.”

  “Does he like women?” she asked, explaining that she would next move to take away those things he enjoyed the most. “I think she may have made him impotent,” he later said matter-of-factly.

  Every step of the way Nitsa insisted that Gust understand the consequences of the dark forces he was asking her to unleash. “Now, Gust, you have to want it,” she warned. “You have to want evil to happen to him.”

  “Oh, I want it so bad, I can taste it.”

  “It will happen then. What are his favorite foods?”

  “I know he likes potato salad and German food,” Gust said, explaining that Graver had served many years in Germany. “The Nazis had killed Nitsa’s mother and father and some of her relatives, and I told her he was a damn Nazi. You could see that her eyes just lit up.”

  It took her about twenty minutes to complete the curse. According to Avrakotos, her incantations, all in Greek, were taken from seldom-used biblical chants written by monks a millennium ago. “In the Greek Church,” explains Avrakotos, “some of those monks were like Darth Vader, fallen angels.”

  All the while Nitsa kept rubbing Graver’s picture. It was only a small photograph, but Nitsa belongs to that tradition of people who believe that a camera captures some part of a person’s soul. “Can I keep it?” she asked.

  “You can keep it. You can burn it. You can do whatever you want with it.”

  “Are you sure? You’ll never see it again.”

  “Yes.”

  “How soon do you want the curse to take effect?”

  “Immediately.”

  “I don’t know how immediate is immediate. A professional curse will take effect before a health curse.” But, she assured him, “both will take effect.”

  “Thank you,” Gust said.

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  Certainly, had any of the teams of sleuths working out of the Offices of Security or Counterintelligence discovered what Gust Avrakotos had done with Nitsa, they would have immediately called him in for a psychiatric evaluation. And given his access to the most sensitive intelligence, they might well have considered him a serious security risk. But the session with Nitsa had been a private affair. And the act of drawing down curses and summoning forces from beyond had been miraculously therapeutic. By the time he approached the gates of the CIA, Avrakotos no longer considered William Graver a threat. Nitsa was seeing to that. Meanwhile, the whole experience had managed to revitalize his spirits and once again cause him to believe, as his mother had taught him, that he possessed some special destiny. He didn’t know when or how his moment would come, just that he had to find a way to stay in place at the CIA until that time arrived.

  On the face of it, his plan was quite simple. Instead of engaging Clair George in a head-on contest he could not possibly win, Avrakotos decided simply to vanish, to buy time until he could find a way to go back into action on his own terms.

  The problem with that strategy is that it was not supposed to be possible. In the thinly disguised military environment of the Agency, no one is supposed to be able to exist even for a moment outside of a chain of command. Without orders, case officers can’t do much of anything—they can’t get paid, can’t use the telephone, don’t even have the ability to park their cars. The system had been painstakingly designed to guarantee that the Agency could never be compromised by its enemies.

  Curiously, Avrakotos had been preparing for just this moment for years, ever since the Halloween Day Massacre firings in 1977. Back then in Athens, Clair George had stood with him when headquarters had tried to say that the firings were designed to purge the Agency of its rogue operatives. But Avrakotos knew better. To him it had been nothing short of bureaucratic ethnic cleansing and, ever since then he had believed that one day the blue bloods would come after him. So when it happened he was ready.

  Gust had one piece of good fortune going for him. At that particular moment, he happened to be beyond the reach of the Clandest
ine Services—on administrative leave, supposedly completing his Finnish-language training. Avrakotos figured he had three, perhaps four more weeks before Finance caught up with him and cut off his salary…and, unless he got new orders, all other privileges as well. But as only Avrakotos could see it, four weeks to build a route to survival was a gift from the gods.

  By then he knew certain things that could help him in his odd quest. For example, he knew that the CIA forcibly places blinders on all of its employees. As the thousands of operatives and analysts and administrators cross one another in the halls, Avrakotos knew that precious few would have any idea what anyone else was doing. Even people in the same division or on the same floor understood that it was dangerous to look too curious and so Avrakotos, the master of deception, walked through the white halls of Langley with the knowledge that no one would be trying to figure out what he was up to. In fact, they would be doing just the opposite. And for the chance encounter with old colleagues, he knew exactly what kind of shrug to give, what kind of half lie to offer, what kind of air to affect. The whole exercise was remarkably simple—the idea being to make it seem as if he was engaged in something that others either should know about, if they were in the know, or shouldn’t ask if they weren’t.