Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Gust knew he would be skating perilously close to the edge. But with MI6 he was in the presence of old pros, and he figured that as long as he never specifically discussed what they would be doing with the money he planned to provide them, he would, technically, not be breaking any U.S. laws. So at the end of their talks Gust committed to a major increase in the CIA’s subsidy to the Brits with just one condition: they must not tell him or any other Agency official about any lethal operations. “If I’m ever brought up before a committee,” he explained, “I’ll have to say what I know. Please, don’t tell me for your own good and mine.”

  Later, when Charlie’s money began to roll in, Avrakotos says, “The Brits were eventually able to buy things that we couldn’t because it infringed on murder, assassination, and indiscriminate bombings. They could issue guns with silencers. We couldn’t do that because a silencer immediately implied assassination—and heaven forbid car bombs! No way I could even suggest it, but I could say to the Brits, ‘Fadlallah in Beirut was really effective last week. They had a car bomb that killed three hundred people.’ I gave MI6 stuff in good faith. What they did with it was always their business.”

  But Avrakotos wasn’t about to pay the British to completely take over such an invaluable asset as Ahmad Shah Massoud. Immediately after expanding the MI6 account, he set about to create an independent U.S. channel to Massoud as well. Not that he didn’t appreciate MI6’s efforts; it’s just that interests inevitably diverge, and he wanted America to have its own piece of Massoud’s war.

  During this time Gust showed up in Peshawar in disguise—a fake limp, different hair color, elaborate security—to meet Massoud’s brother. Avrakotos was now beginning to assert his independence, even from the ISI, which until then had enjoyed total control over the Agency’s Afghan efforts.

  In their secret meeting in Peshawar behind Dean’s Hotel, Avrakotos made one of those offers to the Lion’s brother that cannot be refused. By late 1984, Agency money would immediately begin to flow into Massoud’s Swiss bank account, and with Art Alper’s input, all kinds of exotic hardware for killing Russians started to move on the backs of camels and mules toward the Panjshir. It would prove to be important aid during this moment of intense Soviet escalation in 1984 and 1985. All Gust asked for in return that day was that Massoud keep killing Soviets and remember who his friends were.

  Avrakotos is quite matter-of-fact about the reason for sidestepping his British pals: “You can’t allow even a friend to have a monopoly on the most effective fighter. The ante to get into the game was money, and by giving it directly we had a voice at the table.” One of the main reasons for fixing an independent American channel was to make sure the Agency was in the game if, for example, Massoud captured a KGB communications van. The last thing he wanted was for the Brits to walk away with such a prize.

  It didn’t take Avrakotos long, once he started funding such programs, to discover that there wasn’t nearly enough money to do the things he knew would be effective. He began stretching the rules to the breaking point. Years before, an Agency finance officer had taught him a trick for surviving when an operational budget runs dry. By law any money not spent by the end of a fiscal year is automatically returned to the U.S. Treasury and lost to the Agency. It’s one of the ways Congress keeps Central Intelligence accountable—by preventing the buildup of a discretionary war chest. A neat way to undercut this safeguard is to get other division chiefs to divert their extra moneys to your project. “We all know the routine. What you do is get someone in, say, the Tokyo station to pick up the tab. This is where a good finance officer is invaluable,” explains the master at walking the bureaucratic tightrope. “On the q. t. they can find out who has surpluses. No one likes to have surpluses. It looks like you can’t spend it, right? So I would go to a guy with a surplus and say, ‘Will you help? When I’m fat one day I’ll help you.’ John, my predecessor, lived off the fat of others with promises, and when I got in and got some money I paid them all back.”

  Avrakotos acknowledges that what he had in mind went far beyond anything the division chief, Chuck Cogan, would have tolerated. But then Cogan hadn’t grown up in Aliquippa.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Oerlikon

  THE OPENING SALVO

  When Doc Long returned from his junket, he moved quickly to fulfill his promise to President Zia and the freedom fighters. This time when the mercurial chairman asked the CIA to send someone to see him, the Deputy Director, John McMahon, was determined to avoid triggering the kind of explosion that had followed Chuck Cogan’s encounter with Long the previous spring. This time, when he tapped Norm Gardner for the job, McMahon spelled out the mission: at all costs the case officer must pacify Long.

  Gardner is one of those CIA men who’ve actually participated in secret warfare. A former Green Beret, he had signed on with the Agency in the 1960s for its campaigns in Vietnam and Laos. But he was also smart and later would run operations in Africa and eventually become the right hand of Clair George, the Agency’s director of dirty tricks. It was on the way to this most sensitive of jobs in the Clandestine Service that Gardner was handed the Long assignment.

  That year, 1983, the CIA was already in serious trouble with Congress. It had been caught building a Contra army to overthrow the Sandinistas, and the Democratic majority in the House was in full revolt. That’s when headquarters selected Gardner to serve as its liaison officer to this troublesome body.

  At five foot four, Gardner tends to give off a little-boy appearance when he puts on his blue suit and Brooks Brothers wing tips. He’s incapable of looking mean or dangerous or in any way out of the ordinary. But Gardner is easily underestimated.

  The first thing he did after receiving his assignment was to take his lunch, in a brown paper bag, and sit outside the Capitol. He treated the House of Representatives as if it were an intelligence target and he wanted to know how it worked. For three days he prowled the halls—watching, talking, reading—and quickly reached the conclusion that precious few of the 435 representatives mattered.

  He figured there were only two committees to worry about: the Intelligence Committee, which was supposed to serve as the Agency’s watchdog, and the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, which meted out its money. Probably no more than forty representatives and staffers were cleared for Agency briefings, and Clarence D. Long was not one of them. But when Long summoned Gardner to his office in September, the CIA’s diminutive liaison officer promptly appeared, and did his best not to look surprised at the spectacle that began unfolding in front of his eyes.

  The chairman was expectorating into his spittoon and shouting for his shoes. A nervous aide explained apologetically that the chairman had just sent them off to be repaired.

  “Oh, all right, goddamn it. What’s the name of that missile?”

  No one could remember.

  “Well, goddamn it, then bring me my briefcase.”

  With that the aide scurried off, only to return a minute later to report that the chairman had left the briefcase in his car and the car was also at the repair shop. As Doc Long proceeded to curse his staff, the poker-faced CIA man waited patiently, wondering where this was all heading.

  Finally a breathless aide arrived with the briefcase and Gardner watched with much amazement as Long began pulling out glossy brochures and shouting that this was what he wanted the CIA to buy for the mujahideen. They were pictures of British Blowpipe and Javelin anti-aircraft missiles, and the excited old representative seemed to assume that Gardner would immediately take the brochures out to Langley and put the missiles into the pipeline for the mujahideen.

  Gardner was careful to be respectful in discussing the missiles’ merits, and before leaving, he assured the chairman that immediate consideration would be given to his most helpful suggestions. He had read about the eccentricities of Congress, but a trip to Doc Long’s office was disorienting, like visiting a loony bin.

  Wilson, however, was thrilled by the chairman’s zeal. “Doc wa
s now more ferocious than I was,” he says. “It was no longer a question of me going to him for his help. He was telling me to do whatever I had to do to get the guns.”

  Even with Doc Long’s support, what Charlie wanted to do should have been technically impossible. To begin with, funding for a covert program had always been the exclusive preserve of the president, and neither he nor the CIA had requested the weapons. In addition, the critical first phase of the legislative session had ended. And while the Appropriations Committee is the ultimate arbiter of funding, it cannot dole out money for any program without a legislative committee having first authorized it.

  But “Them that has the gold makes the rules” said the sign over Doc Long’s desk. And since Long was one of the barons of the committee, and Wilson a veteran insider with chits aplenty, they decided to reverse the process and back-end the money through.

  Wilson had worked his magic with his own subcommittee, and everything seemed on track for him to make his legislative strike when Doc Long stumbled across an article recounting the plight of a young, blind, orphaned Pakistani girl who had been raped. To the chairman’s disgust, the article explained that by Islamic law, rape can be proved only if there are four witnesses. Since here there was only one, and since the girl admitted that intercourse had taken place, the Pakistani authorities promptly tried her and threw her in jail for fornication.

  All bets were now off. Hair swirling, eyes bugging out in fury, the chairman was suddenly calling his newfound friend General Zia a barbaric dictator. “Zia is not going to get a dollar of foreign military aid. Period,” screeched Long. “I want him to know that I control the bucks.” Long dispatched his aide Jeff Nelson to inform the Pakistani ambassador that if the girl was not immediately pardoned, put in a home, and cared for, Pakistan would be cut off.

  For a moment, the plight of this unfortunate teenage girl became the most sensitive issue in U.S.-Pakistan relations. In Wilson’s view, Long was just powerful and crazy enough to sabotage the entire Afghan war effort if Zia did not yield.

  The next day Zia’s ambassador General Ajaz Azim appeared in the chairman’s office and announced, “His Excellency the president has asked me to communicate to you that the matter about which you communicated with him has been resolved in the exact terms which you requested.”

  Doc stared at the ambassador, shouting back at his aide, “What the hell does that mean?”

  Very quickly, General Azim assured Long that the girl would be taken care of in a private home for life. The president, he said, wanted the chairman to know that he personally guaranteed this. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Nelson, “the blind girl was the key to everything.”

  With Doc back in the fold, Wilson felt dramatically bolder. But before choosing the dollar amount to put into his Appropriations request, he summoned Chuck Cogan for a final review of the situation. The Near East division chief, still smarting from his encounter with Doc Long, was not about to talk to another congressman without a witness. Unfortunately, the man he wanted to accompany him was off at language school, so he was forced to tap the acting chief of the Afghan task force, Gust Avrakotos.

  There may have been another reason why Gust was chosen to go along with Cogan. John McMahon had not liked having to repair the damage from Cogan’s last briefing of a congressman. “So the mission from McMahon,” says Avrakotos, “was to prove to Wilson that we weren’t sissies, that we were tough guys.”

  Before setting off for the fifteen-minute drive down to the Hill, Avrakotos was familiarized with the sins of Congressman Wilson: a boodling, boozing, indiscriminate skirt chaser who was giving the Agency no end of trouble. Unlike Cogan, however, Avrakotos was interested in having a look at this Hunter Thompson of the Hill. And unlike his division chief, who numbered kings among his personal friends, Avrakotos prided himself on being tough to intimidate.

  Avrakotos knew he was going to enjoy himself the moment he passed the threshold of the congressman’s office and took note of Charlie’s Angels. He liked the Truman and FDR pictures on the walls, the statue of Churchill, the giant painting of George Washington at Valley Forge, the blowups of the mujahideen, the map of the world covering an entire wall. But the congressman struck gold with Avrakotos the moment he began talking to Cogan. “Rays were coming out of him,” Gust recalls, “and I could sense that he had an immediate dislike of Chuck. He was the only congressman I ever met who used the word ‘fuck’ in the first forty-five seconds.”

  Wilson began by asking Cogan what the Agency had done to come up with a weapon to shoot down the Hind. It was one of those questions designed to put the CIA official on the defensive. The only realistic answer was “Nothing effective,” but to Avrakotos’s annoyance it took Cogan some time to concede this simple point.

  “All right, then what about the Charlie Horse?” Wilson demanded impatiently. Cogan explained that the mujahideen would never accept an Israeli weapon, and it would jeopardize relations with the Saudis, who were putting up half the money. “Well, if that’s your only problem, I can have my Israeli friends put swastikas on the guns,” Wilson said.

  “Cogan looked as if I had farted,” Wilson remembers. “He always acted as if people farted right next to him whenever you challenged him.” Part of the problem no doubt is that Wilson insisted on calling Cogan “Mr. Coburn,” despite at least one correction. Avrakotos loved watching his division chief squirm.

  Now Wilson was on a roll, hurling questions at the now-defensive “Mr. Coburn,” who didn’t know how to respond to the congressman’s accusations that the CIA was sitting on its hands. The congressman said that he and Doc Long were not going to wait any longer. In fact, he was thinking of a special appropriation to buy Oerlikons. What did the Agency think about these mule-portable Swiss anti-aircraft guns?

  Wilson directed this question to Avrakotos, who had been introduced as Cogan’s expert on anti-aircraft weapons. “I don’t know what the fuck an Oerlikon is,” Avrakotos responded. Wilson was not impressed. “I thought they had hauled him in to be a big dumb target, to take my abuse,” Charlie says. “I didn’t take him seriously at all.” There was also the question of Avrakotos’s appearance. “He had a peasant’s physique and those fucking tinted glasses that looked like they came off a shelf at Woolworth’s. And very thick shoes. He was a real low-rent-looking guy.”

  Across the desk, Avrakotos was anything but disapproving of Wilson. He was delighted by the way the Texan was sticking it to Cogan with a shower of references to his intimate friendships with Zia and Akhtar; his Texas benefactress who had Zia’s ear; his high-level Pentagon contacts who were advising him about how the CIA should be running the war; even informing Cogan that he had convinced his great friend the Egyptian defense minister to sell 894 SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles for use in the war. Reading between the lines, Wilson was saying that since the Agency wasn’t doing anything to counter the Hind, he damn well would. And what was Chuck Cogan going to do about that?

  Cogan managed to push Wilson to the breaking point when he offered a long-winded explanation about why the Agency could not possibly introduce the Oerlikon into Afghanistan. It had to do with concealing the American hand, “plausible deniability,” the CIA’s time-honored rule permitting only weapons of Russian origin in a secret war with the Soviets.

  “Why?” Wilson asked defiantly, pointing out that President Reagan was publicly acknowledging U.S. assistance to the Afghans.

  As the exchange started to break down, Avrakotos felt a certain institutional loyalty and jumped in to save the day. “We’ll be happy to look into your suggestion,” he said with uncharacteristic diplomacy. “Mr. Cogan is absolutely correct that it is not what we have been doing, but I’ll have my experts look into it.”

  The ride back to Langley was exquisite for Avrakotos. As he says, “I mean, what boss wants to get reamed in front of his subordinates?” Cogan didn’t talk much except to say he really didn’t want to see that man again. Avrakotos, on the other hand, figured he had spotted a
kindred spirit, a congressman with power who talked dirty and who wasn’t afraid to say he wanted to kill Russians and get even for Vietnam.

  On the Hill, Wilson was now in the middle of the annual Appropriations feeding frenzy. Secretaries and undersecretaries of the navy, army, and air force and the long chain of defense contractors from General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas, GE, Lockheed, and LTV all lined up, waiting their turn to plead their cases with the always receptive big spender on defense. Denis Neill and the main foreign-aid recipients were also putting in appearances: Zvi Rafiah from Israel and Mohammed Abu Ghazala from Egypt.

  Wilson would take care of them all, but his mind and energies were now focused on getting more help for Pakistan and the mujahideen. By his side was Joanne Herring, a full-fledged conspirator in their secret campaign. They began using code language on the phone, talking about “eagles” and how many hawks had landed that week. Wilson also had her sit in on one of his CIA briefings and encouraged her to explain why they needed to do more. One can only imagine what the officials reported back to their bosses at Langley.

  The two Texans went to visit Wilson’s old adviser on Israeli strategic concerns, Edward Luttwak, described on the dust jackets of his many books as “the most brilliant and controversial defense analyst and military historian writing today.” Luttwak would later burst into the national consciousness during the Gulf War with his numerous network appearances warning that the U.S. Army would take horrendous casualties if General Norman Schwarzkopf launched a ground war against Saddam Hussein. He was dramatically wrong but, as always, impressive and full of authority.

  When Joanne and Charlie descended on him in 1983, he had just completed an assignment for the Pentagon to design the mix of weapons that a light infantry division could use to battle the Soviets in mountainous terrain. Because of this he had become unquestionably the most knowledgeable figure in Washington about light, portable anti-aircraft weapons.