Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  After all those disastrous mishaps at Mohammed’s arms bazaar, the CIA contingent finally stumbled across a number of things they very much wanted. Thanks again to Charlie, Mohammed had offered to let the CIA men exchange information with his unconventional-warfare experts. The Egyptians had something to talk about here because they had gone through a brutal guerrilla war in Yemen just a few years before. Fighting with tribesmen in mountainous terrain similar to Afghanistan, they had learned what works and what doesn’t. They might have bombed out in the big-ticket items that Wilson had wanted the Agency to buy, but at the Egyptian Special Warfare School, the counterinsurgency experts began showing Alper, Vickers, and Pratt items that would clearly be devastating in the hands of the mujahideen.

  What got Alper and then Avrakotos particularly excited was the cornucopia of city-warfare devices that the Egyptians had stored in this facility. “It was incredible stuff that most American minds are not devious enough to think up,” remembers Avrakotos. “But if you’ve been around five thousand years like the Egyptians and survived, you come up with some great ways of killing your enemies.” He was referring to such things as bicycle bombs. “They had hundreds of ways to conceal bombs or, if you will, terrorist devices. But they had worked out bombs that were concealed in wooden carts that carry manure, or special wheelbarrows.”

  The only question, as Avrakotos saw it, was whether this deadly cornucopia could be effective against the Soviets in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan. Alper insisted it would be very useful. “Then the decision was left to me,” Gust recalled. “Do I want to order bicycle bombs to park in front of an officer’s headquarters? Yes. That’s what spreads fear.”

  Another senior CIA officer in Avrakotos’s shoes might well have chosen to pass on the offering of urban terrorist devices. That’s the kind of thing the CIA was not supposed to be doing. But Avrakotos decided they would be quite effective. Beyond that, Gust calculated that the congressman who had opened the door for him to make these purchases happened to be on one of the committees that serves as a watchdog for the Agency. Gust could hardly be accused of trying to pull a fast one on Congress.

  Thanks to Mohammed’s tour, the CIA’s military team soon discovered a whole range of low-level weapons they wanted for the jihad, like Egyptian limpet mines that Alper later modified so they could be attached magnetically to Soviet trucks heading down the Salang Highway. The Egyptians taught Alper how to delay the fuses beyond the time period he thought possible. “It was very useful for going after tunnels. We managed to block the Salang for days. The Yemenis had done it to the Egyptians, the Egyptians showed our guys how to do it, and our guys showed the mujahideen how to do it.” The Egyptians’ list also included screaming meemies, plastic mines, mines that popped out of the ground, trip mines, and wire mines.

  Gust was now sensing genuine opportunity, enchanted with his status as Charlie’s running mate as they drove in air-conditioned cars through the desert to be given red-carpet treatment at whatever facility they might choose to descend on. It was on one such visit that he stumbled across a weapon that thrilled him like no other.

  The Agency had been looking for a rocket with a range of over ten kilometers that could not be traceable to the United States or NATO, and they found it in one of Mohammed’s warehouses—the Katyusha. During World War II, at the siege of Stalingrad, this 122mm rocket had made the difference. A huge, screaming artillery round, it chilled the Wehrmacht with its terrible noise and striking power and had been immortalized in such Soviet patriotic songs as the “Stalin Organ.” “We didn’t think we could ever find the fucking thing,” says Gust. But after spotting fifty-four of them in a warehouse, he had the Egyptians test-fire one, and he still remembers his terror. “If you’ve ever heard one of these come at you, there’s no way you wouldn’t crap in your pants. I was three miles away from where it hit and I was scared. It was a frightening experience, like being in a minor earthquake. You just can’t imagine what it would be like to be within fifty feet of one of those things.”

  Gust bought every one of Mohammed’s Katyushas at tens of thousands each, and soon the mujahideen were blasting away at the airport near Kabul, creating holes the size of football fields as far away as the city’s outskirts. The French ambassador reported that although the rocket had landed seventeen blocks away, it had cracked the foundations of his Kabul embassy. The Russians were mortified. Ultimately, terrorizing the Soviets and making them leave was the name of Avrakotos’s game. The discovery of the Katyusha at that point in the war was just what the doctor ordered. Gust didn’t care that the rocket wasn’t accurate. He wanted to frighten and demoralize the 40th Army, the KGB, and all those Communist Party bastards ruling the roost in Kabul. The Agency had already started trying to “turn the lights out” in the occupied capital by having the mujahideen blow up electricity pylons. The night always belonged to the mujahideen, but particularly when there was no light. And if a screaming Katyusha could be added to the mix, well, that was just the perfect twist of the psychological dagger.

  Avrakotos first saw the rocket fired at the end of 1984. By February 1985, he had commissioned the Egyptians to open up a production line of Katyushas, ordering seven hundred of them by year’s end. They also became a part of the weapons mix against the previously invincible Soviet air force. By firing these rockets at the airfields, the Afghans could at least spread fear in the pilots’ minds and occasionally take out a target. “We had the mujahideen firing the Katyushas from ten kilometers away twice a day,” says Gust. “They sound like thirty freight trains coming in all at once.”*

  Things were falling into place on this trip, with Gust acquiring odd, diverse instruments for Mike Vickers’s symphony of armaments. “You could imagine what the Russians were starting to discover once we started pouring in all of these new weapons,” he says. “When they went into a village in 1983 or 1984 they would find a few .303 rifles. But a year later they’d have a much bigger fight on their hands, and at the end they’d find twenty-five AK-47s and all sorts of ordnance. They could sense the enormity of the volume.”

  At one point near the end of this Egyptian shopping spree, it occurred to Avrakotos that no other CIA officer had been able to play such a hand as he was in the campaign against America’s great enemy, and all because of this Texas congressman. As far as he was concerned, Charlie Wilson was a partner he could go the course with. Wilson had not only passed Gust’s ethics tests, he had demonstrated that he could be more valuable to the Agency in dealing with Egypt than anyone else in the U.S. government. “What we did in one month with Charlie would have taken us nine years to accomplish.”

  Gust would learn to operate in Egypt without Wilson’s presence. With Charlie’s blessing, Avrakotos would deal with low-level problems by telling whatever Egyptian blocker might be in his way that Congressman Wilson had already spoken to the defense minister about the matter and perhaps the officer would like to call Abu Ghazala if he insisted on overriding the field marshal’s wishes. This was Gust’s old game of bureaucratic chicken, and as long as he was moving under the mantle of the magical congressman, the keys to the Egyptian kingdom were his.

  But frequently in those early months, Avrakotos had to call on Wilson to intervene directly. Thanks to Charlie, Gust was able to build his own storage facilities at Port Suez and then send Egyptians to the United States for training as production inspectors. Once, Wilson decided that a major crisis over quality control was too big to be dealt with by phone, so he invited Mohammed for a weekend at the Hawkeye Lodge, a “good old boy” establishment in the pine woods of East Texas where legendary Texans like John Connally, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Ross Perot go for rest and recreation. It’s a place where a man can ride, shoot skeet, hunt, fish, and hang out and drink with the boys. It’s expensive, but Charlie arranged to have some of the defense contractors who sell their wares to the Egyptian military pick up the tab. And for icing on the cake, he thoughtfully summoned Carol Shannon, his personal belly dancer, whom
Mohammed so adored, to come for the weekend with her entire troop of liberated Fort Worth belly-dancing housewives.

  There is a tradition at retreats like Hawkeye that no one talks about the recreation pursued on these visits, so before the festivities began, Gust took Mohammed aside and said there would be no wiretaps, no photographs. His word of honor. This was to be a weekend of pure, free play. The two men instinctively understood each other. Mohammed, coming from a land of intrigue and omnipresent dangers, did Gust the singular compliment of taking him unreservedly at his word. So, with secret servicemen and local police patrolling the wooded perimeter, Carol danced, Charlie drank, Mohammed entertained everyone with his endless store of ethnic jokes, and Gust resolved his problems. As always, it was wonderful fun doing business Charlie’s way.

  Before his tour of duty was over, Gust would place orders for tens of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. The consignments grew so large that he bought a special ship to move them in containers to Karachi. For the next two years he was treated like a visiting monarch whenever he went to Egypt. And because of his expanding business with the Chinese, he was in the cat-bird seat when it came to organizing competitive bidding. Avrakotos was able to drive prices down to half the going black-market rate. On one occasion, Mohammed’s trusted General Yahia whined, “We’re only making a half cent a round. I’d like to make more.”

  “Well, I’d like to fuck Marilyn Monroe, but she’s dead,” Avrakotos responded. “Take the money and be happy.” After brooding for three weeks, the Egyptians folded.

  By the end of this first trip to Egypt, Gust had come to feel that he was poised to provide a steady stream of weaponry at a predictable price without fear of any sudden cutoffs. This was critical to everything that Mike Vickers was teaching Gust about the weapons policy the CIA must pursue.

  There was one lurking concern that Gust could never quite shake: the threat posed by Islamic extremists. Once, while being driven through Cairo by an Egyptian officer, he came upon an entire block that had recently been burned to the ground. Demanding that the car stop, he got out and learned that the Egyptian security forces had wiped out the entire neighborhood because it was thought to harbor radicals. Cairo’s politics were clearly unpredictable, which meant that Abu Ghazala’s hold might not last forever. But for the time being, Gust figured Mohammed was firmly in control of the armed forces, and that meant things couldn’t be better for the CIA.

  For Wilson, the Egyptian trip was a small right of passage. He had now been inducted into the CIA’s Clandestine Services. Beyond that, he had gone through a dramatic learning experience. “Up until that time I thought we just needed to buy the guns and get them into Afghanistan,” he says. But in Egypt he had been sobered, witnessing how one weapon after another that he had wanted Gust to buy sight unseen proved to be worthless. Furthermore, Charlie had learned that it didn’t help to put guns in the field if you didn’t have a proper supply of ammunition to feed them and a pipeline to get that ammunition to the fighters.

  One thing that had not changed was Wilson’s spirit, still completely untamable when it came to conniving for his freedom fighters. Gust had told Wilson that the CIA was running a Muslim jihad and he would not buy weapons from the Israelis. But Jerusalem was Charlie’s next stop on his trip with Trish, and once in the Israeli capital, he and Zvi went back to work scheming to get the Charlie Horse into the Afghan war.

  By the time Wilson arrived, the Israelis had come up with an ingenious argument as to why their anti-aircraft gun would be more effective and cheaper than anything else the Agency could acquire. It was to be fed by 2.75-inch rockets, and Zvi’s people at Israeli Military Industries were convinced that the U.S. Army had vast stocks of such ammunition left over from the Vietnam War. If Wilson could tap into this treasure trove and acquire the ammunition for free as surplus, the Israeli gun would cost the CIA precious little to operate, and IMI, for its part, could disguise it as a Soviet weapon, or anything else for that matter.

  As always, Wilson was scheming on many fronts but looking like nothing more than the ultimate boondoggling congressman. From Israel he took Trish to Marrakech, where they checked into the Churchill Suite at La Mamounia hotel. Charlie, of course, dropped in on the highest military command to justify the U.S. government picking up the tab. With the CIA on board and the Egyptian arsenal now open, Charlie could feel the tide turning.

  For Gust Avrakotos, Cairo was hopeful right up until the very last hours when, without Wilson by his side, he ran into the horror of dealing with the Egyptians as a mere mortal. A single parent, he was rushing to catch the last plane back to Washington that would get him home for Thanksgiving dinner with his son Gregory. But there was the usual bottleneck at customs.

  Almost a decade later a CIA friend would tell Gregory the story of what he saw in the airport that day. The Greek-American with the bushy mustache, wearing blue jeans and a dark blue jacket, leapt into the baggage area and started hurling suitcases about until he found his, then bolted toward the gate. Grabbed by security guards, he brandished his diplomatic passport, roaring at them to call Abu Ghazala.

  It was one of those borderline situations where a security official might go either way—either be intimidated or believe that he had just apprehended a true terrorist. Choosing the bureaucrat’s route, the Egyptians put in the call and watched with amazement as Avrakotos dressed down Mohammed’s aide, growling that the aide had exactly four minutes to get him moving toward the plane. Otherwise the field marshal should be informed that the CIA was not buying anything more from Egypt.

  When last seen, Gust was not only on the plane jetting back for his turkey dinner, but had been elevated to first class, compliments of the Egyptian Ministry of Defense.

  CHAPTER 23

  Senator Gordon Humphrey

  THE SENATOR AND HIS EVEN CRAZIER RIGHT-WING FRIENDS

  By the time Charlie Wilson returned from Cairo he had, for all practical purposes, become an integral part of Avrakotos’s Afghan operation. This recruitment (or voluntary enlistment, if you will) of an agent at the very heart of the congressional establishment came just in the nick of time, because three weeks later, on December 26, 1984, the Far Right unleashed a devastating public attack on the CIA.

  It came from New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, one of those pure conservatives from the state that has the slogan “Live Free or Die” on its license plates. Humphrey was for prayer in the schools, against abortion, against big government, and always against Communism in all of its manifestations.

  What made his assault so noteworthy was that everyone in Washington knew that Gordon Humphrey was a close ideological and political ally of the president. So when he rose before a crowd of reporters at the National Press Club with two bearded mujahideen commanders by his side, it was hard to ignore his charge that the Agency was playing a role so wimpish in its support of the Afghans that it verged on betrayal of the freedom fighters. The senator added many embellishments to his attack: mismanagement, incompetence, lack of will, failure to honor the president’s commitment. The bottom line, however, was a declaration of war against the CIA from one of the leading spokesmen of the Reagan Right.

  What Gordon Humphrey didn’t know that day was what the CIA had just done, thanks to Avrakotos and Wilson, to transform the Afghan operation. Drawing on “Charlie’s money” and following Vickers’s grand design, Avrakotos now had unbelievable amounts of ordnance moving in the pipeline toward the Afghan border. But the CIA was in no position to defend itself against Humphrey’s charge of betrayal. Covert operations are considered state secrets at Langley, not to be commented on, even in the face of ignorant or damaging claims. This attack, however, had the smell of danger to it because the senator made it clear he was not about to drop the issue.

  Humphrey, who kept to his promise to serve only two terms in Washington, has all but disappeared from public view outside of New Hampshire. During the Reagan years, however, he was a ferocious and vocal promoter of conservative cause
s. He didn’t sit on any of the committees that oversee the CIA, but out of fear of his access to the president and because of his penchant to fight to the death for his causes, the Agency chose to deal with him as if he were a full member of the Intelligence Committee.

  The senator tended to operate in those years out of a secret hide-away carved out of the curve of the Capitol dome. The intelligence officials who met him there invariably left feeling that he was a truly eccentric and somewhat disturbing figure. Avrakotos recalls a particularly creepy feeling on first encountering him there: “When I went into his inner sanctum I kept looking for pictures of little boys half mutilated on the walls. He reminded me of Himmler with those chicken-farmer eyes. I didn’t like going to see him.”

  The senator reportedly spent long hours alone in this room, communicating with his staff via computer. Avrakotos had been told that Humphrey was a former Eastern Airlines copilot and, upon being admitted to the windowless room, Avrakotos had been struck by its resemblance to the cockpit of a plane. The senator, in front of his word processor, seemed as if he were busy at the controls.

  “Is he going to fly us out of here?” Avrakotos whispered to Norm Gardner, the Agency’s congressional liaison man who had come along to keep Gust on his best behavior. “Shut up, we don’t want to piss him off,” Gardner whispered back. Wilson had already told Avrakotos to be careful with Humphrey because “he may not be all there.” Avrakotos’s Pentagon friend Walter Jajko had been blunter: “The fucker’s crazy.” Gust had repeated all this to Gardner on the way over, but the tough little CIA man had responded pragmatically, “Yeah, but Clair tells me he’s a personal friend of the president’s.”