by George Crile
Bleeding the Ayatollah was what the Iran branch was all about. In Gust’s mind, there was nothing wrong with a bit of realpolitik; he approved of it wholeheartedly and knew he had good men in place in the Iranian section. There was little more that could be done, and he only spent perhaps 15 percent of his time supervising them. His real passions lay in the neighboring suite of offices.
The Pakistan-Afghanistan branch was located in the vault, in an area totally lacking in character: government-gray walls partitioned to create semiprivate work spaces. Although every desk had a telephone and typewriter, there were few computers. It could have been mistaken for an old-fashioned newsroom, save for the huge map of Afghanistan and the romantic, poster-size pictures of mujahideen on horseback. A doctored photograph showed a Russian tank with the hammer-and-sickle insignia looming in front of the Houses of Parliament. The inscription read, “This year Afghanistan, next year London.” Gust’s propaganda team had the same tank in front of the Arc de Triomphe—“This year Kabul, next year Paris”—as well as ones for Germany, Holland, and Italy.
On the surface, officers working in the Pakistan-Afghanistan branch looked like everyone else in the operations directorate. They were respectably dressed and well turned out. But there was a difference. For all practical purposes, Gust might as well have placed a sign on the outer door that read, “No Wasps Need Apply.”
The entire staff of the Afghan branch numbered only fourteen men and women—rounding off, Gust referred to them as “the Dirty Dozen.” It would remain an article of pride with Gust that the core group stayed small, even as the program grew to almost $1 billion a year. The numbers were deceptive because the fourteen were able to draw upon hundreds of Agency people, both at headquarters and around the world. “If we wanted a pamphlet in German, one guy could go get sixty people to work on getting those pamphlets out. Each person could network and draw on anyone he wanted.”
Nevertheless, when it came to the core group, this was as large as Gust would permit it to grow. After all, it was good cover: how could so few people be directing something so big? Avrakotos took particular pride in comparing his lean staff to the Central America task force, with its ninety agents bumping into one another as they micromanaged the disastrous Contra war.
“I took people no one wanted,” he says. “I took the outcasts. It was my way of demonstrating that you don’t have to go to Amherst to succeed. Hardly any of us were Ivy Leaguers. I had the worst band of derelicts ever assembled: “There was Dwayne, the intelligence analyst, all twisted up from childhood bouts with polio. He could barely walk. It would take him ten minutes to go take a piss. But he had a passionate, underdog streak. He was my walking encyclopedia about the Russians and everything to do with the mujahideen. And I would use him to grind out bureaucratic memos defending the program from its attackers.”
Avrakotos was convinced that the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate, where the analysts came from, was professionally invested in the mujahideen’s defeat; that’s what they had been predicting all along and were still predicting in their papers. He tapped Dwayne to counter them. “I could tell him. ‘Okay, we need three memos this morning: one to answer the Pentagon, one to answer some stupid article in the press, and one to counter our own analysts.’”
Soon Gust had Dwayne publishing a weekly Afghan update that he distributed as a top-secret document to forty of the main policy makers at the State Department, White House, Pentagon, and inside the CIA. It showed that the mujahideen were hurting the Russians and that they were unwilling to quit. Gust knew that if he gave these reports a high enough classification, they’d be sure to leak—which was his intention.
Then there was Larry Penn, “the New York Jew.” A Latin America specialist, he spoke Spanish and Portuguese. He and Gust had gone through the Agency’s Camp Peary boot camp together. And they had both seen themselves as outsiders. “Larry was the only Jew ever sent to Saudi Arabia from the Afghan program,” Gust recalled. “He has the map of Tel Aviv on his face, but on his visa he put down ‘Unitarian’ on the line that asks about religion.” Under Avrakotos, the balding, bug-eyed Penn was in direct charge of the Afghan war effort. He was also a lawyer, and that turned out to be immensely valuable to Gust, who was convinced that if he listened to the Agency’s in-house lawyers, nothing would be possible. Gust insisted that Penn double as his “consigliere.”
Time and again Penn who would warn Avrakotos, “You’ll go to the slammer for this.” But then he would set about finding ways to bypass the lawyers’ most recent prohibitions. “These aren’t terrorist devices or assassination techniques,” he would conclude. And this lovely euphemism would become the official description of a particularly lethal weapon for the mujahideen.
Penn’s legal rulings were of enormous importance, since he interpreted how Avrakotos could delegate the dollar-for-dollar matching grants that the Saudis had contributed to the secret war. According to Penn, those funds were not subject to the same restrictions that guided congressional appropriations. So Gust committed $44 million of those liberated CIA-controlled funds to acquire $44 million worth of British Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles, non-Soviet weapons that otherwise would have required special authorization for the CIA to pass on to the Afghans.
Moving money into the black market and through all of the secret channels of the world of espionage was the special preserve of a man whom everyone called “Hilly Billy.” Avrakotos describes him proudly as a man with a “huge chip on his shoulder.” Gust knew well how easy it was to get stymied moving millions of dollars of unacknowledged funds. “Have you ever tried to open an unnumbered Swiss bank account for the U.S. government? It takes six months because of all the red tape. The Agency can do it in four to six weeks because they’re good. But this guy, Hilly Billy, could do it in twelve hours.” By late 1985, Hilly Billy would be moving $1 billion a year through those secret channels. A sign over his desk read, “War Is Not Cheap.”
The man tapped to run psychological warfare was Paul Broadbent, a second-generation American who had grown up in a Russian neighborhood of Cleveland. “He was the ‘hearts and minds’ expert,” Gust says, “the kind of guy who pulls the wings off of flies, dangerous if you don’t channel him properly. I told him, ‘The first time I see you treating any of my people mean, I’ll fire you. Take it out on the Russian cocksuckers.’ Paul knew the Russian mind. He kept trying to get me to give him twenty portable radio stations that he could program with demoralizing psychological broadcasts. He finally got two portable man packs to beam stuff into the Russian troops. The problem is that none of the mujahideen wanted to do it. They didn’t think it was manly. Who would want to carry a radio transmitter when you can fire a missile?”
The team met at 9:30 A.M. each Monday, with Avrakotos presiding over his fourteen specialists. “There was one basic question: what do we need to win the war? Each guy would come in with his dream sheet. Some guys came up with real wild dream sheets. No one had any streak of mercy in him when it came to hurting the Russians.”
Art Alper, the grandfatherly demolitions expert, was one of the team’s more idea-filled members. Along with developing demolition kits, special fuses, and new techniques to smuggle weapons and ordnance into enemy territory, he helped develop portable amplifiers and devices to spread Broadbent’s psychological war. The inspiration for this effort came from North Korean radio broadcasts to U.S. troops: “Hey G.I., we’re fucking your sister.” The CIA’s idea was to place powerful amplifiers on hills across from Soviet garrisons. When the mujahideen turned them on, a Russian voice would boom out: “While your wives and mothers and sisters are sleeping with political commissars and you are dying on the battlefield, we mujahideen laugh at you” or “We Dushman [the Russian name for the mujahideen], we herders of goats and sheep, challenge you women to come up to this hill and fight.”
“I thought the portable broadcasts were ridiculous, but it hit my funny bone,” says Avrakotos. “And it did promote fear. If you get some fucking Dushman
without shoes challenging you to fight and you go up there and get bushwhacked or sniped, you realize this guy is clever. You start fearing him.”
Alper’s amplifiers would broadcast at irregular intervals, even after the mujahideen had left their positions. When the Soviets discovered that the equipment was on automatic pilot, it spooked them further; the mujahideen were a more sophisticated foe than they had previously thought.
Some of the other psychological-war efforts weren’t quite as successful. The sinister messages that Broadbent had dreamed up for leaflets rarely made their way to the Red Army troops. Each pamphlet had a different pitch. One said, “If your commanding officer is a real Communist who wants you to fight many battles, frag him. Otherwise, eventually we’re going to get you.” But the mujahideen, who didn’t understand the concept of propaganda, tended not to be very helpful. Avrakotos says they found it far too temping to treat Broadbent’s leaflets as if they were exotic CIA-issued toilet paper.
Alper was a particularly offbeat presence in the office, with his grandfatherly face, his violent schemes, and his burgundy plaid pants. “All the secretaries saw him as a dirty old man,” says Gust. “But he was a genius with mines and at demolition. I’m sure it was the first time in his life he really felt wanted.” Gust was trying to promote just such a sense of belonging, in essence creating his own CIA tribe within the tribe.
The heart of everything the CIA was trying to do in Afghanistan, though, was arm the mujahideen. Here the man Avrakotos most strongly relied on to acquire and move staggering quantities of ordnance was longtime veteran Tim Burton. Never in the Agency’s history had there been such a challenge for the Office of Logistics. It would be up to Burton to move millions of ammunition rounds, thousands of AK-47s, night-vision goggles, medical kits, and herds of mules, all through hidden channels, from a dozen countries into one of the most inaccessible lands in the world.
“If you know who Radar is in M*A*S*H,” Gust says, “that was Tim. In the social pecking order of the CIA, the case officer is at the top of the totem pole and the logistics people are near the very bottom. Case officers don’t usually associate with the logistics men; they’re known as ‘logs pukes.’ People call them when the toilet breaks down. But if you really want to have a good ship, you make sure you include all your people.” Avrakotos made it a point to elevate Burton to a position of status, and when he finally left his post he passed on a piece of advice to his successor: “If you get rid of this guy, you’re losing your right tit.”
Avrakotos still stands in wonder of Burton’s mastery. “We had fifty major sources feeding information to us on a daily basis about weapons and material that we were purchasing for the mujahideen,” he said. “Tim had positioned people all over the world—in Cairo, Frankfurt, Switzerland. He could place an order, get a contract obligated, and get the weapons there in three months. It was fantastic. He could get seven C-141 planes in forty-eight hours—something that would ordinarily take a CIA task force four weeks.”
Once things got rolling, so many people started coming in to the task force with so many wild proposals for screwing up the Red Army that Avrakotos had to assign two women case officers just to screen the ideas; they put together target studies and provided the mujahideen with maps and operational intelligence for striking purposes.
Providing the mujahideen with real-time satellite intelligence had the potential to transform the Afghan soldier’s combat power. In time, Avrakotos won over another ethnic soul brother, Colonel Walter Jajko, who worked out of General Stillwell’s Pentagon office and who took it upon himself to task eighty of his people with producing target studies for the program. Jajko would make sure that satellites made extra runs over Afghanistan, and his technicians would translate the photographs into simple sketches to make them appear to have been drawn by the Afghans themselves.
Close to half of the officers in the Afghan branch, including Avrakotos, were divorced. “Everyone worked six and a half days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. After work we only went out with Agency people. We drank with them, slept with them, and if you were lucky you’d get laid three times a week, always with an Agency person. And one Sunday a month I’d head for Deale, Maryland, and eat crabs and smell salt water.”
Avrakotos has an intense love for most traditional American pastimes. He is, for example, an ardent sports fan who gambles on professional football. Under the surface, however, few Americans were as tied to the superstitions of the Old World as he was. One only had to look at his office walls to appreciate that this chief of the CIA’s South Asia Group was guided by his parents’ Greek Island mentality.
The most distinctive object in his office was a phylacto, an intricate dark weaving laced with silver and gold threads, that hung on his wall to protect him from evil spirits. Avrakotos’s mother, Zafira, had stitched it for Gust when, at age five, he was sick with jaundice and the doctors had given him up for dead. In desperation, his father, Oscar, brought in an herbalist from the islands. She moved into the house, fed the small boy terrible-tasting mixtures of herbs, and rubbed a hideous black paste onto his gums. The old healer cured the boy, and when Gust came to say good-bye before going overseas with the Agency on his first assignment, his mother took the phylacto off the wall and admonished him to always keep it with him. “You are going to all these foreign lands. I know how it feels,” she said. “Take this with you. It helped me. It will help you.”
Throughout his travels, Avrakotos brought it along. He didn’t talk about it to his colleagues, but he was every bit as superstitious as his mother. He remembered how feuds in Aliquippa would begin when someone approached a woman with a baby, saying, “May your child have a long and happy life.” The mother, fearing that the speaker was pronouncing a curse in code, would be convinced that the person meant the opposite. Gust also remembered the interminable Greek Orthodox church services of his youth, when elders would walk the aisles slapping any young boy foolish enough to cross his legs; crossing one’s legs was considered bad luck. Drinking water out of a faucet also brought bad luck, according to Gust’s mother. No matter where he was, Gust drank bottled water, just as he always closed his bedroom windows and shades at night, much to the annoyance of his wives. These were the ways of Lemnos, the island where Zafira had been born and raised.
Next to the phylacto on Gust’s office wall was a giant photograph of a Greek fishing boat, the Trident. The innocent-looking vessel was actually a high-speed armored ship used by the CIA in the 1950s to infiltrate agents into Albania. Gust had spent many a drunken evening aboard the Trident entertaining Greek military officers and their lady friends, and the Trident had also cemented the bond between him and his son Gregory during their frequent weekend boat outings together.
One of those trips had been particularly momentous. In early 1976, five weeks after CIA station chief Richard Welch had been assassinated and the 17 November terrorist group had marked all senior Athens station agents, Gust decided to take his wife and Gregory, then ten, out on the Trident to escape the tension. They went to a remote beach far from the capital. “It was a gorgeous morning,” he remembers. “You could see for miles. It was one of the few moments I could relax and not carry a gun. All of a sudden this gypsy woman was walking down the beach toward us. It was just weird. She was wearing twelve layers of clothes—a lot of white and purple and some red.”
“The gypsy walked up to me and asked for a cigarette. She had a tiny, shriveled, weather-beaten face and a deep, resonant voice. ‘Ah, American cigarettes. Obviously you are American,’ she said, not waiting for an answer. ‘You have a blond wife and a little boy with a bathing suit. Only Americans buy bathing suits. Also, you are Greek, but there are many Greeks who don’t like you. There is a group that wants to kill you. They have already killed one of your coworkers. You have much to be afraid of.’”
It was impossible for Gust to turn this woman away. Greeks have a great mistrust for gypsies but inevitably seek them out for protection when someone has pu
t the evil eye out on them. “Your name is Costa,” she said. This statement surprised and frightened him—Costa was his Greek nickname. “Tell me more, old lady,” he said.
“I have to look at your hand, and I have to touch you. It’s going to cost you lots of money—one thousand drachmas,” she told him. When Avrakotos began to protest, she brushed off her request. “The money isn’t important. I like you.” Then she proceeded to tell him about his family history. “Your father died at a very old age. He died a good death. Your mother died shortly after of a horrible death.”
That unnerved Avrakotos because it was true. His father had recently died at eighty-nine of a heart attack; his mother had been killed in a gas explosion three weeks later. “This was something no one in Greece knew. I tried to find out how she did it,” he said, “but she said she didn’t know, that a flash came over her and she could see it. If she was a flimflam artist, she was damn good.” As the morning drew out, Gust shared his wine-and-cheese picnic lunch with the old woman, who offered to make him a phylacto. ‘I know you believe, even if your wife doesn’t. As long as you carry this, you won’t have to worry that someone will hurt you or take your money. But as to health, only God can protect you.”
Gust agreed: “Two out of three isn’t so bad,” he said, whereupon she brought out grotesque things from under her clothes, including dried animal parts and bits of bats. When he asked what they were for, she replied, “You don’t want to know.” She put together the phylacto, then wrapped it carefully in waxed paper and said, “Put it in a safe pouch. Don’t ever throw it away because you’ll be throwing luck away.” To this day Avrakotos never moves without this black, shiny, composite of bat wing, unknown animal parts, and whatever other ingredients gypsies employ to protect their charges.