Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Avrakotos describes what happened next with the kind of pleasure he feels only upon achieving revenge. It had been almost impossible to locate two prisoners, much less two defectors. The CIA found itself in the preposterous position of having to pony up $50,000 to bribe the Afghans to deliver two live ones. “These two guys were basket cases,” says Avrakotos. “One had been fucked so many times he didn’t know what was going on. The other was an alcoholic. We brought them back to the United States and I said to Walt Raymond, ‘Do you want me to give them your telephone number? They’re yours now.’”

  Finally, Avrakotos turned the Soviets over to Ludmilla Thorne at Freedom House. “One guy had hallucinations of the KGB murdering him. The other started fucking with boys.” At that point, Avrakotos says, he went to Perle to announce the good news that the Agency had twelve more willing to come over. “I turned the tables on them and demanded they take them all. And they didn’t want to. That was the new Vlasov’s army. In all I think we brought three or four more over. One guy ended up robbing a 7-Eleven in Vienna, Virginia.”

  By 1985 the CIA had become a dangerous place in which to hold a position of power. Avrakotos and Wilson had led the Agency into completely uncharted territory. No longer bound by the historic Cold War doctrine of containment, it was, for the first time—unapologetically, almost openly—in the business of killing thousands of Russian soldiers by funding a Muslim jihad.

  But nothing that year, or in fact in the Agency’s history, compared to the unprecedented public attack launched from the Right on the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon. The moving force was Andy Eiva, who explains now that he was “looking around for a rock to throw” when McMahon’s name came onto the screen. Eiva says he discovered this presumed “enemy” of the Afghans on May 20, 1985, a date he remembers vividly. He had been making his usual rounds of congressional and press offices pushing for better weapons, including the American Stinger, for the mujahideen when a staffer from Senator Humphrey’s office arranged for him to meet an NSC staffer at the White House named Vince Cannistraro.

  Eiva was awed just to be admitted to the Old Executive Office Building and to find that the president’s man in charge of overseeing intelligence operations seemed to take him seriously. Cannistraro, an old Agency man himself, was immediately sympathetic to Eiva’s critique of the CIA but told him that he was missing the point. “The real enemy of the freedom fighters,” Eiva remembers him saying, “is John McMahon.” It was like a biblical revelation for Eiva, as if Cannistraro was deputizing him to put a stop to John McMahon’s treachery.

  Vince Cannistraro was not exactly a neutral source on the deputy director of the CIA. Until recently he had been the operations chief of the Contra war, but he had been reprimanded and moved out of Central America affairs because of the scandal over CIA-produced assassination manuals, which had enraged Congress. John McMahon had been largely responsible for his demotion and subsequent exile to the White House staff. Eiva didn’t know any of this and probably wouldn’t have cared, because he also learned that McMahon was the Agency official who had urged the Senate not to pass the Tsongas resolution. And so—on the same day that Humphrey launched his public attack on the CIA—Eiva appeared on Nightline and specifically accused McMahon of misleading Congress when he’d testified that the Afghans were being adequately armed. It was just the first of a vicious series of public attacks that Eiva would make against the CIA’s deputy director, all of them suggesting that McMahon’s record verged on treason.

  Given what was already being done, it was a perverse twisting of reality. That fall, the mujahideen in the Pakistani training camps were not only receiving a flood of lethal weapons, they were also being trained to wage a war of urban terror, with instruction in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings, and assassination.

  Just how vicious a campaign the CIA was sponsoring is suggested by the Pakistan brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, who directed the training with and distribution of CIA weapons at that time. In a matter-of-fact passage in his memoirs, he describes the range of assassination tactics and targets he was preparing the mujahideen to take on in Kabul. They ranged from your everyday “knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar” to “the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official’s office.” Educational institutions were considered fair game, he explains, since they were staffed by “Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma.”

  What made Cannistraro’s whispering campaign charging cowardice and timidity in the Afghan arena so perverse was that it came at a time when Avrakotos was responsible for over a half billion dollars’ worth of weapons and training going into the funding of an exceedingly dirty war. Yet somehow Eiva, backed by conservative senators who followed his lead, insisted that the CIA was guilty of cowardice.*

  According to Avrakotos, Casey came to loathe Cannistraro, calling him that “fucking dago.” Clair George was also up in arms, according to Gust, and came to him to explain how Cannistraro could be neutralized. This was the kind of special assignment that had won Gust his old Agency nickname, Dr. Dirty, and he accepted it with relish. Gust knew that the politically ambitious Cannistraro would want to try to recruit the most powerful congressman on Afghanistan as an ally, so he arranged to have Vince meet him in Wilson’s office. “I wanted to put him totally out of place,” remembers Avrakotos. “He had no business doing what he was doing, and I figured that if he and the NSC were going to slap me around, I wanted to show him he’d have to deal with Charlie.”

  Cannistraro, who later appeared regularly as an intelligence expert on ABC News and such TV shows as 60 Minutes, remembers feeling quite out of place that day—not being able to get a word in edgewise and amazed at the intense camaraderie he and Charlie shared. “They loved each other,” Gust says. “I sat back and watched them talking about big tits and guns.”

  Gust’s next move was pure Greek melodrama. He arrived at the airport for a trip with Vince to Pakistan dressed all in black. Before boarding the plane, he says he cornered Cannistraro and read him his rights: “You know you went to Central America and gave the Agency heartburn and you’re not going to get away with it on this one.”

  But it was an incident on the flight from Pakistan that gave Cannistraro a real look at the side of Avrakotos no one would want to have to deal with. They were traveling on diplomatic passports and Gust managed to upgrade them to first class, where they met the interior minister from one of the Gulf States. The Arab, who was drinking heavily, ended up insulting Gust. Gust belted him and followed this up by pulling out his knife and loudly threatening to cut the man’s balls off. Cannistraro watched with horror as Gust proceeded to hurl insults at the bug-eyed minister, accusing him of sinning in the eyes of Allah by drinking.

  Cannistraro remembers being quite unnerved by this excessive aggression. “I was afraid to be sitting next to him. I thought the man was going to come back at us with a knife. Gust is not a gentle person.” After describing this incident, the soft-spoken Cannistraro added that there was another moment in Pakistan that was every bit as bad: “He almost throttled the head of the motor pool at the embassy because the man didn’t give him the car he wanted.”

  Gust was making a point with Vince. He made only one direct threat at the very beginning of the trip; afterward he was very courteous with his traveling companion, only demonstrating in his inimitable way how he dealt with minor aggravations. No doubt Cannistraro must have wondered what Avrakotos might be prepared to do if he determined someone was a true enemy. This was Dr. Dirty operating in his prime, but as far as Avrakotos is concerned the crowning blow came at dinner in Peshawar, when Gust followed the explicit prescription of his division chief, Bert Dunn, “to make sure to take him to a fucking restaurant where you can get him sick.”

  Over the years, Avrakotos had built up a stomach immune to foreign microbes. He says, “I even ate everything in Bujumbura, Burundi, where every white man got sick. I have a cast-iron stomach.” He took Vinc
e to a native restaurant in Peshawar, full of character, singing the praises of the food—calling it “very clean.” Gust ate everything with relish, knowing full well that the next day Vince Cannistraro would be out of the picture. “Bert was absolutely delighted,” Avrakotos recalls. “Bert just loved that Vince was sick for two days and couldn’t do shit. He was like a little country boy who just shot his first squirrel when I told him about it.”

  By the time the two returned, Gust felt he needed to say nothing more. He had made his point, and he says that Cannistraro’s report evaluating the CIA program had nothing damaging in it. “It started off by saying the Agency had a well-run program, and it was so wishy-washy that it was meaningless—chicken-shit criticism about procurement and storage of perishables. Nothing about important stuff.”

  Although most of this test of wills had been about personality conflicts, the Agency leadership had felt that a principle had been at stake. Never before had any outside agency attempted to investigate and critique the operation side of the CIA’s work, and Gust’s effort to back down Cannistraro was received as an important victory to prevent a dangerous precedent from being established. But that was just round one, and Avrakotos knew that Cannistraro would be back. “Vince could be greatly underestimated by his opponents, including Casey. He has certain qualities that I admire—revenge being one of them.”

  Avrakotos found himself in the midst of this unprecedented covert escalation, repeatedly threatened by bizarre challenges from totally unexpected quarters. It was all so strange that he actually came to see himself as a voice of reason facing down perfectly deranged figures, who happened to have the potential to do great damage. The archconservative senators, who had always been so blindly supportive of the Agency in the past, now became the kind of friends who make it unnecessary to have enemies. In the name of trying to help, they seemed quite prepared to bring the whole program down.

  Ironically, the only real impact of all of these hard-right assaults may have been to give the program the cover it absolutely needed. The scope and the disquieting details of the Muslim jihad that the CIA was then sponsoring surely warranted Congress’s attention. The Agency was not just flooding Afghanistan with weapons of every of nature; it was now unapologetically moving to equip and train cadres of high-tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower. But reporters did not choose to examine these themes in any depth. And before any congressional skeptics could investigate or seriously question whether the program might be growing too large, Humphrey, Eiva, and Free the Eagle shouted to anyone would listen (and many who didn’t want to) that the CIA was denying the Afghans the weapons the president wanted them to have.

  Meanwhile, Democratic liberals and reporters, who might ordinarily have questioned the wisdom of these programs, simply couldn’t figure out how to overcome the impression left by right-wing critics that the CIA’s crime in this case was not doing too much but too little—that McMahon and the Agency were subverting the president’s clear mandate. While the CIA threw itself into arming, training, and funding the largest Muslim jihad in modern history, the only ones to register their outrage and demand change were those who seemed to believe that the CIA’s support was so meaningless as to constitute a betrayal of the Afghans.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Freedom Fighters

  TECHNO HOLY WARRIORS

  One morning in early 1985, Gust Avrakotos noticed a strange phenomenon: a number of junior officers were addressing him as “sir.” Even more peculiar was an encounter with the deputy director for finance, a stuffy functionary who Gust says “always acted like he was Saint Peter at the gate deciding whether you went to heaven or hell.” The man had never even asked Avrakotos to sit down before, but now he got up from his desk to shake Gust’s hand and offer him coffee and a doughnut. And then, one day when Gust arrived for a task force meeting where a group of officers from different departments had been invited to offer advice, a hush came over the room. Most of these officers outranked Avrakotos, but he remembers vividly that “they were quiet and smiling when I came in, and moved aside for me.” Afterward Larry Penn, Avrakotos’s old friend and “consigliere,” couldn’t help commenting that they had acted as if he—Gust Avrakotos, of all people—was “Moses parting the waters.”

  What soon became clear to Avrakotos was that he suddenly had enormous power, by virtue of the fact that by 1985 his Afghan program was getting over 50 percent of the CIA’s entire Operations budget. Within a year it would explode again, becoming almost 70 percent. His bosses, Bert Dunn, the Near East division chief, and Clair George, deputy director for Operations, had, of course, far higher rank and responsibility. But he was the one with the authority to dispense hundreds of millions of dollars for killing Russians. That was power.

  On the floor below, where the Central American task force operated, Gust’s counterpart Alan Fiers had literally no money for his Contras. Congress had cut the Agency off completely and forbidden them to continue any military support whatsoever. Yet Gust had a half billion to spend, and his “freedom fighters” seemed to be loved by everyone on the Hill. No one spoke ill of them, not even the press. As Gust recalled, “We were the only game in town where you could have excitement, a war, a chance to make a name for yourself. But also it was the holy cause—the one program everyone could be very proud of and identify with.”

  What finally convinced Avrakotos that he had arrived was when the grand old man of the Near East Division, Alan Wolfe—who had played such a critical role in setting up Kissinger’s fabled entry to China and who was then serving as chief of station in Rome—asked Gust for dinner and an afternoon of antiquing in London. That meant something huge to Avrakotos, who says, “Wolfe is the kind of guy who only speaks to Cabots, Lodges, and God.” Wolfe was the division chief who had picked Gust to be chief of station in Helsinki—until Bill Graver had come on board and taken back the assignment. For Gust, it was like being invited to Archie Roosevelt’s. That afternoon, the incredibly short and impressive veteran officer talked Afghanistan with Avrakotos. Wolfe spoke seven languages, including Chinese. He had served in Kabul, knew the terrain, knew the culture, and he had just wanted to tell Gust that he was on the right track and “to keep at it.”

  After twenty years of being an outsider, it was as if this former renegade was finally part of the establishment of the Directorate of Operations, even flying off alone with the director to the desert kingdom. Once again, the Saudis were late on their payments. It was like pulling teeth to get them to cough up their matching grant, and this time, with the CIA putting up $250 million, Avrakotos was no longer sure they could be counted on. He had urged the director to go personally to collect, and Casey had invited Gust along for the ten-thousand-mile flight in his huge C-141 Starlifter, a kind of flying hotel with a planetary-range communications center.

  The Saudis treated Casey as if he were a head of state. In Riyadh, Avrakotos was given his own villa. Casey’s had eleven rooms with thirty exotic bowls, each one filled with a different kind of cashew, the director’s favorite snack. Gust had given his chief a paper with talking points, which Vickers had prepared for the meeting. “I told Casey,” he recalls, “that he should talk to the king about ‘your Muslim brothers,’ about using the money for food for the families, for clothing, weapons, for repairing the mosques. You should talk to him about being the ‘keeper of the faith.’”

  “Jesus, fuck, I like that—keeper of the faith,” Casey said. “Oh fuck, I like that—keeper of the faith.”

  Avrakotos found the director’s handling of King Fahd masterful. “Casey admired the Saudis. He didn’t look at them as strange fuckers, scratching their balls and wearing funny headdresses. He told them that the mujahideen were getting stronger day by day, and that his men were inspired and motivated by them.”

  When the director finished his briefing, the king said, without asking for anything in return, “We will fulfill our promise.” It was a desert agreement. No pap
ers were signed.*

  The amazing feature of the Saudi grant is that the king did not dictate terms. He was content to let the CIA use the money as it saw fit. Gust realized that because of King Fahd’s commitment, the CIA’s Afghans would now have twice the bite.

  By the time Avrakotos returned to Langley, he knew he had won more than a massive increase of the Afghan war budget. He now possessed the mystique of having traveled alone on a secret mission with the director. As Avrakotos saw it, half the game in a dicey operation like Afghanistan was getting enough room to operate, and he knew that his superiors would now assume that something had happened on that long flight. The director loved risk-taking operatives. He was a notorious rule breaker himself, famous for bypassing the chain of command to deal directly with the men running his covert operations.

  The seventh floor now had to adjust to the likelihood that Avrakotos and Casey had a private understanding. The director’s mumbles could be interpreted to mean almost anything, and Avrakotos, confident that no one would dare go to the old man to see if he really agreed to what Gust might claim, was fully prepared to exploit the situation to the hilt. “If I had a problem I’d say, ‘Casey called me; that’s not what he wants.’”

  Meanwhile, Gust’s task force was a beehive of secret activity. The Dirty Dozen were now striking secret deals on a daily basis with intelligence services in China, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Canada, France, and Singapore. They were spending tens of millions in a shot as they began moving unbelievable shipments of weapons and ammunition to the Afghans—millions of AK-47 rounds, divisions’ worth of rifles, mortars, RPGs for hitting tanks, rockets for terrorizing Kabul, 14.5mm heavy machine guns with tracers to fend off the gunships, Dashikas, 120mm mortars—thousands of tons of deadly material.