Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  His projections for ammunition, however, forced Avrakotos to recognize the inadequacy of the existing budget. If you have one gun, explained Vickers, the key question is how much ammunition will be necessary to feed it over the course of a year. Take an AK-47 assault rifle, which could easily consume 200 rounds in a firefight. Ten firefights in a month, say, would eat up 2,000 rounds. And given an annual fighting season of three or four months, one mujahid would require about 7,000 rounds a year. At a cost of fifteen cents per round that comes out to approximately $1,050 per man per year simply to keep a $165 AK-47 in ammunition. Howart Hart had already distributed more than 400,000 rifles—Enfields and AKs—to the mujahideen. It would break the budget to fully supply all of these existing weapons with ammunition, Vickers explained. Just to keep 100,000 holy warriors’ AK-47s in ammunition for a year would cost over $100 million.

  The Agency had already decided to use the added funds to buy more rifles, but these, Vickers asserted, would only leave more men with little ammunition and without the kind of weapons that could really make a difference. Everything needed to redesigned with a new weapons mix in mind.

  By the time he finished describing the range of weapons and amount of ammunition that should be supplied, he was proposing heretofore unthinkable quantities and costs of ordnance. And that was only the beginning. Once the decision was made to escalate, it would trigger huge parallel investments up and down the line to make the logistics workable: cargo planes and ships, trains and trucks, camels and mules. New warehouses would be needed, quality-control inspectors, and, always, the specialists to disguise the American hand.

  In his unassuming way, Vickers was walking Avrakotos into a completely new dimension as he talked about what the resistance should look like two, three, four years down the road. This was not about bleeding the Soviets. Vickers, a trained killer, was presenting a systematic plan for putting the Red Army through its own Vietnam.

  As Vickers sat in Avrakotos’s office, his highly specific blueprint in hand, Gust found himself almost unnerved. He had sent the junior case officer to his task feeling cocky about how much money there was to spend. What he and Wilson had done with funding was nothing short of a political miracle, and he had expected Vickers to recognize this. Instead, Vickers announced that to make a difference they should be prepared to ratchet up to a budget as high as $1.2 billion a year.

  This kid was talking about more money than the CIA was spending on all of its other covert operations put together. This was more than even Gust had bargained for. He quickly convened his team to challenge the numbers. The logistics man in particular was skeptical. But in the end the senior officers could fault little. “We ended up going with nine out of ten things he proposed,” says Avrakotos.

  Meanwhile, the paramilitary branch had gotten hold of Vickers’s paperwork and was calling the whole plan into question. At a showdown with twenty veteran warriors, Vickers reiterated that existing policy was little different from giving the mujahideen clubs instead of rifles. If they had to live with existing funding, better to stop buying any new weapons and throw the entire budget into ammunition. That way, at least the Afghans could have something to fire at the Red Army, even if they didn’t have the right weapons.

  As it now stood, the mujahideen could not fight year-round, and they couldn’t really engage the Soviets in intense combat. To infuse them with the kind of resources he was calling for, he argued, would quickly turn them into year-round warriors. All they needed was enough ammunition, food for their families, medical kits, and a supply line to keep them in the field. With his remarkably low-key presentation, this warrior-strategist was quietly seizing control of the program by sheer force of logic.

  Avrakotos knew that Chuck Cogan, with his extreme caution, would have nixed this plan before it had a chance to be considered by higher authority. But the stars were moving all the right figures into place that year; as luck would have it, Cogan’s successor was the rugged veteran case officer Bert Dunn.

  Dunn was an old military man who had served in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. He knew the terrain and the players, and he was bowled over by Vickers’s strategic plan. Equally important, he trusted Avrakotos and chose to stand back and let him run the show. That would prove to be of enormous consequence in the coming years.

  After Dunn signed off on the plan, the two men went upstairs to present it to Clair George. Once again fate played its hand. Dunn had been George’s deputy in the Africa Division and enjoyed his complete confidence. “Clair doesn’t like a lot of details or number crunching,” explains Avrakotos. “He just said, ‘Bert, if you endorse it, it’s okay with me.’” But the Agency’s top spy then suggested that the entire discussion was somewhat irrelevant because Congress would never give them the kind of money the plan called for.

  As deputy director for Operations, George was always overwhelmed with a world of problems. He had to choose where to throw his energies and where he could afford to delegate responsibility. With his old deputy Bert Dunn riding herd over Avrakotos, he didn’t feel he had much to worry about or reason to involve himself in the details of the Afghan program. Avrakotos made it easier by being uncharacteristically diplomatic with George, saying only that there was nothing to be lost by giving the plan a try; surely they would get at least some of the money. He didn’t for a moment flirt with telling Clair his little secret—about how he and Wilson were thick as thieves, plotting together to up the funding.

  Avrakotos did have one simmering problem with Wilson that he knew he had to sort out quickly. When it came to spending for the CIA’s war effort, Charlie was virtually a Johnny-one-note, insisting that the money go first toward weapons to shoot down the Hind. The nightmare was still waking Wilson up in the middle of the night, and he was constantly on the phone to Gust, wanting to know whether any Hinds had been shot down and where things stood with the Oerlikons and the other weapons he was pushing the Agency to buy.

  By the fall of 1984, when Vickers entered the picture, Wilson had been way out in front of everyone at the CIA for almost two years in trying to solve the anti-aircraft problem. He still had the Israelis working on the Charlie Horse, though Gust had told him he wouldn’t fund that program. The Muslim world considered itself at war with Israel, and he wasn’t going to risk everything by letting the Jews into the jihad.

  Now both Wilson and the Agency were urging Avrakotos to buy the British Blowpipe, a shoulder-fired missile said to have been effective in the Falklands War. Gust had looked over the weapon at a recent air show and had already spoken to the Shorts Brothers, the manufacturers. But that, too, was a sensitive matter requiring the highest-level clearances from the British government. Avrakotos was increasingly aware of how dangerous it was to stonewall on this issue, particularly since he had basically tricked Wilson with the Oerlikons. Wilson had come to think of the Swiss guns as a kind of magic weapon; he kept a little model of one on his desk and would show it to visiting Afghans, telling them that this was the weapon that would deliver them. Gust knew it would be at least a year, however, before the first Oerlikons got into the field, and then there would be so few that they would only be of marginal importance.

  It was embarrassingly clear that the Agency had not figured out how to combat Soviet control of the air. It had no plans in the works, and Gust knew it was only a matter of time before Charlie turned his guns on him.

  As with everything else, Vickers did not miss a beat when Avrakotos asked him what they should do. He said that Wilson was thinking about the solution to the problem the wrong way. Rarely, in war, is the battle won by a single weapon. It wasn’t necessary to find the perfect weapon. Once again, the answer lay in the broad concept of the weapons mix.

  After hearing Vickers out, Avrakotos decided to break protocol and bring Vickers into Wilson’s office. It’s unheard of for a new case officer, a mere GS-11, to go to a congressman’s office, much less to make a sensitive and controversial presentation. But Avrakotos was desperate. “This is going to be
the most important briefing of your life,” he told Vickers. “Go practice in front of the mirror.”

  Even years after the Soviets pulled out, Wilson would not have any idea of the role Vickers had played in the war. He never did learn—or at least could not long remember—the names of any of the briefers that the CIA sent to him through the years. To him they were all anonymous, generic figures who worked for Gust and later for Jack Devine or Frank Anderson. Everything that started to go right in the war during those early years he would always credit to the handiwork and daring of his secret partner, Gust.

  On this occasion, Wilson assumed that the young man with glasses who talked with so little charisma was a brilliant technician, but certainly not the author of a plan to give the mujahideen a chance to win. Vickers had been his normal impressive self, talking about how a new weapons mix would radically change things for the mujahideen on the ground. But it was the part about the helicopters that finally broke through for Wilson.

  Vickers explained that it was not necessary to look for a single new weapon to serve as a “silver bullet.” The way to defeat Soviet air power was by introducing a symphony of different weapons that, when put together, would change the balance in favor of the mujahideen. He then painted a verbal portrait of the mélange of weapons he was urging Gust to deploy to bring down the Hind.

  Avrakotos watched silently from the sidelines as Vickers worked his spell on Wilson. Instead of just the 12.7mm machine gun—the Dashika—with its one-thousand-meter range, the Afghans needed far more 14.5mm heavy machine guns, with twice the range and greater penetrating power. And while Oerlikons were expensive and static, their shells, which explode on impact, could fell an aircraft from thousands of meters away. The final element in this mix, Vickers suggested, should be an increase in the number of surface-to-air missiles purchased by the Agency, by twenty to thirty fold, in order to take the air war to the Soviets. The heat-seeking Soviet-designed SA-7 was able to fly five thousand meters up into the tail of a MiG while the British Blowpipe was operator-controlled and could not be thwarted by flares.

  It was like having his own intellectual hit man, and Gust could feel Charlie’s excitement as Vickers concluded by conceding that none of these weapons individually would be that effective, but the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. It was their collective impact that must be considered, because all they needed to do was convince the Soviet pilots that this mix of diverse anti-aircraft weaponry existed and was in the hands of the guerrillas. Every Soviet pilot would then know that there was no one diversionary tactic they could rely on. As it stood, the Hind could stay well out of range of the Dashikas and blast the mujahideen with impunity. And by dropping a few flares they could throw off any heat-seeking SA-7. But once the weapons mix was in place, they simply wouldn’t know what the mujahideen might have coming up at them. “The idea is to make their assholes pucker up,” Avrakotos threw in.

  More important, Vickers concluded, once this mix of anti-air was employed, it would force the pilots to fly higher; and once they did, they’d be far less effective and wouldn’t be able to terrorize the mujahideen on the ground.

  The day after Vickers’s virtuoso performance, Avrakotos returned to Wilson’s office and the two men talked money. With Wilson’s help, the Afghan program was now being funded at $500 million, half of which was from Congress and half from Saudi matching funds. Avrakotos informed Wilson that they might need more money.

  Avrakotos was now moving deeper into his embrace with this potentially dangerous congressman. The Agency still suspected that Wilson might have some financial interest in the Oerlikons, and while these suspicions were still running strong, Charlie announced that his great friend Mohammed Abu Ghazala, the defense minister of Egypt, would be willing to sell the CIA the weapons the Afghans needed to bring down the Soviet helicopter.

  Avrakotos, of course, knew that the Soviets had previously equipped the Egyptian army. The Agency was already doing some business with the Egyptians, but it was never easy to organize anything with them. Abu Ghazala’s message was that he had eight hundred SA-7s and a mule-portable Soviet anti-aircraft gun called the ZSU-23 that he was willing to sell. He had already invited Wilson to inspect them, and Charlie wanted Gust to go to Cairo with him to check them out.

  For Gust, this was a truly nerve-racking proposition, both tempting and menacing. Mohammed Abu Ghazala was widely considered to be the second most powerful man in Egypt as well as a friend of the United States. But the Justice Department was reportedly investigating a shipping company that Abu Gazalla and a former Agency case officer had set up to transport goods provided by U.S. foreign assistance to Egypt. There were allegations of corruption. It was doubly awkward because the ex-CIA man, Tom Clines, was an old friend and shady business partner of that greatest of all outlaw ex-CIA men, Ed Wilson. As chance would have it, it was Clines who had drafted the multimillion dollar plan for Ed Wilson that Charlie had presented to Somoza so many years before. This complicated tangle was hardly worth unraveling except for the stark question that sprang out in Avrakotos’s mind: was he going to get to Egypt only to discover that Charlie Wilson, the congressman he had now entered into a noble conspiracy with, was corrupt?

  CHAPTER 22

  The Arms Demonstration in Egypt

  MOHAMMED’S ARMS BAZAAR

  In the fall of 1984, Charlie Wilson defeated his Republican opponent in the general election easily. Back in official Washington, and particularly on the seventh floor of Langley, Wilson was now perceived as a permanent fact of life in the capital—an unpredictable, rule-breaking maverick who was dangerous to cross.

  His most important House ally in the Afghan struggle hadn’t been so lucky. Doc Long was defeated that year in spite of a $600,000 war chest—a major setback for Israel, which lost its most well-positioned and fanatically supportive congressional patron. For Wilson, it meant he would have to champion Zia’s aid package on the Foreign Operations subcommittee all by himself.

  It was a time of many transitions for Charlie. Joanne Herring had accepted a marriage proposal from a Houston millionaire, Lloyd Davis, a particularly suspicious Texan who didn’t approve of Wilson and insisted that his fiancée stop seeing him. Charlie wasn’t invited to the wedding Joanne organized in Lyford Cay, in the Bahamas. It was typically grand. She had everyone dress in white, and then she and her new husband left on safari for their honeymoon.

  All of a sudden, Charlie’s muse was gone. But by then he was already swept up by the momentous forces that she had set into motion. She had pulled him out of his midlife crisis, taught him once again to believe in the special destiny that awaited him, inspired him, and then selected roles for him and Zia ul-Haq to play as champions of her freedom fighters. It wasn’t easy for her to turn away from this shared crusade to rid the world of Communist tyranny. Wilson, however, faced a new set of challenges for the game, which now had to be played against the Red Army. For that battle, his newfound friend from the CIA was a far more suitable companion.

  The two men had agreed to meet in Cairo the week before Thanksgiving to buy, or at least consider buying, anti-aircraft weapons that Field Marshal Mohammed Abu Ghazala had told Wilson would be perfect against the Russian gunships. The entire American entourage was to be received as the official guests of the defense minister, who'd promised to let them review the Egyptian military’s entire arsenal.

  True to his vow never to move in a Muslim land again without a good Christian girl by his side, Wilson had invited along Trish Wilson, the pretty blond congressional secretary he’d had dinner with the night of his hit-and-run accident. The coincidence of their shared last names would be helpful when booking rooms in the stricter Muslim states. As usual, Charlie’s traveling companion was not brought along for romance alone. Her principal role was to serve as the wide-eyed innocent witnessing and appreciating the astonishing status Wilson enjoyed in the worlds he was about to take her through.

  Traveling out of the United States for the firs
t time in her life, Trish was in awe as they flew first-class, then checked into a lavish suite at the Marriott—a colonial extravaganza built for Empress Eugénie in 1869, when she came to open the Suez Canal. The hotel was close to the pyramids and, as the days unfolded, Charlie’s girl played her role perfectly—she saved every napkin, menu, bar of soap, and postcard, and even took photographs of their seats on the plane.

  Gust’s trip was a bit more mundane. Unlike Charlie, he flew tourist class and checked in at the decidedly more pedestrian Ramses Hilton across town. Accompanying him were three tough and deeply skeptical paramilitary experts: Art Alper, the demolition and sabotage man from Technical Services; Nick Pratt, a marine major on temporary duty with the PM branch; and his new military adviser, Mike Vickers. All three had warned Gust on the flight across the ocean that the gun Abu Ghazala was hawking, the ZSU-23, was even less suitable than the Oerlikon. But Gust had explained that part of their mission was diplomatic. They had to give the weapon a chance, and if it didn’t work he needed them to back him up with explanations.

  The three military pros were all a bit tense since they knew full well that it was highly unusual to have a congressman pushing specific weapons for a covert program. The general assumption among them was that Wilson had a piece of the action. The marine, Nick Pratt, who had just come back from test-firing the Oerlikons in Switzerland, was a particularly straitlaced fellow who viewed Wilson with such distaste that he used an alias when introducing himself to the congressman, steadfastly refusing to reveal his real name. Avrakotos, meanwhile, was simply hoping against hope that Charlie would not fail the ethics tests that lay ahead. But for now the congressman, because of his relationship with the defense minister, was calling the shots. So Gust checked in with the station and set off across town to find Charlie.