by George Crile
What happened was that Vickers had focused his analytic powers not just on the strengths and weaknesses of the mujahideen and the Red Army but on the way things worked in his own spy agency, and he hadn’t liked what he’d discovered.
By the beginning of 1986 Vickers realized he was calling the shots on 57 percent of the Directorate of Operations’ total budget. He had by then grown accustomed to running the biggest CIA paramilitary campaign in history. But an experience the previous month had jolted him into the realization that on paper he was not running anything. Twenty thousand people worked at CIA. It was a bureaucracy. It had its rules and its routes to power and responsibility, and as far as the official record was concerned, he was one of the lowest case officers involved. Gust might be using him to do the equivalent work of an army field commander at war, but in the official records, he was the equivalent of a captain or major. And army captains and majors don’t get to do the job of a General Schwarzkopf.
The previous fall Gust and Bert Dunn had sought a promotion for Vickers. The promotion board had gone along only after Dunn had threatened to have Clair George overrule them if they refused. But the officer in charge had given Vickers the sobering news that he would have been far better off doing what ordinary junior case officers do than performing a function that could not really be recognized since he wasn’t supposed to be doing it. A senior CIA official had told him earlier that it would be another ten or fifteen years, if he was lucky, before he could count on getting such responsibility again. The official told Vickers that the Afghan operation was the highlight of his own twenty-year career.
Vickers was now coming to recognize just what a strange aberration this Afghan operation had been. Nothing he had been able to do would have been possible without Gust, but Avrakotos’s license to operate came from Bert Dunn, who was about to leave to become Clair George’s assistant deputy director of operations. That should have strengthened Gust’s position, but there was a catch. The front-runner to inherit Dunn’s job was Tom Twetten, and if that happened, Vickers’s all-important patron, Gust Avrakotos, was going to be seriously out of luck.
Technically, Tom Twetten, as Near East Division deputy chief, had been Avrakotos’s boss for over two years. But Gust had carved out a strange and independent role, dealing with Wilson at times, with Casey at other times, and always with a direct line to Dunn. And for his own perverse reasons, Gust had chosen simply to ignore Twetten whenever possible and sometimes to taunt him for no good reason at all.
Part of it was just a personality thing. Gust used to refer to Twetten as Mr. Rogers when talking with the Dirty Dozen, and the nickname had caught on. The one thing professional spies do well is build information networks, and Twetten was a pro who’d quickly learned his nickname.
One of the ways Avrakotos and Wilson had initially developed a rapport was by telling crude jokes at Tom Twetten’s expense. And for some reason Gust used to refuse to answer Twetten’s calls until he had kept him waiting for at least a minute. His secretary would find it excruciating to keep Twetten on hold while Gust would read his mail until he felt he had made his point, then pick up the phone and gruffly say hello as if he had far more important and pressing business to tend to than taking a call from Tom Twetten.
All that might have mattered little had it not been for the ugly incident the month before. Oliver North had stormed out to the Agency demanding access to a Swiss bank account to deposit the proceeds from one of the Iranian arms-for-hostages sales. He wanted it immediately, and Twetten wanted to satisfy this important White House emissary. Gust said no.
This time Avrakotos was not acting out of some adolescent need to tweak the deputy division chief. He thought the request was asinine and dangerous, and to him it was a matter of principle to resist. So far no one had bothered the Agency about its Afghan operation. No one was demanding the same kind of conformity to the rules as they were in Central America, and Gust knew the program couldn’t stand examination. All they needed was to have one scandal break and the floodgates would open.
The deputy division chief was asking him to mingle Iranian arms-for-hostages funds with the Saudi account—an account that to Gust was sacred. The Saudis were giving a fortune to the CIA with no strings attached. And that money had an added value because it didn’t have to be accounted for the way congressionally appropriated moneys did.
Gust had bent over backward to make sure nothing jeopardized this Saudi connection. When the king had sent his son to Langley for a month, Avrakotos had made sure the young prince was treated like a prince of old. He’d even consulted the Agency’s great expert on Saudi Arabia and Iran, George Cave, who’d advised that because of Muslim prohibitions on usury, the Agency probably should not put the money in an interest-bearing account. Gust had put the choice to the Saudis, who thanked the Agency for its sensitivity to their religion and opted for the no-interest alternative.
As far as Gust was concerned, Twetten was so eager to please Oliver North and the White House that he was prepared to jeopardize this Saudi connection. Avrakotos wasn’t going to let him do it. Twetten called on a secure line to ask for the account number.
“What for? You don’t have a need to know,” Avrakotos answered.
“I certainly do. Call Clair.”
“Fuck you—have Clair call me.”
Soon after that conversation, Hilly Billy, Gust’s finance man, said he was being pressured to cough up the number. “Refer the calls to me,” Gust said. When Twetten called back citing the orders of the National Security Council, Avrakotos ended the exchange by saying, “Have Casey order me.” Gust says he also told Twetten, “You’re going to go to jail.”
Twetten finally managed to get the head of finance to give him the account number.*
Even more disquieting, however, were the other things going on with Iran-Contra. For starters, Clair George had sealed off the special Iran room and denied Avrakotos access. What was known was that at least part of the Iranian account had been taken from Avrakotos. Gust’s political fortunes within the Directorate of Operations were once again coming under a cloud.
It didn’t help Gust one little bit that John McMahon had already resigned that February. Andy Eiva and Free the Eagle tried to claim that they were responsible and that they had saved the day for the Afghans by getting rid of their one true enemy inside the Agency. But McMahon had been one of Gust’s most important patrons. His had always been a voice of caution in Bill Casey’s CIA. He had insisted on old-fashioned efforts to conceal the American hand, but John McMahon had also been a key friend of the program who’d ultimately backed every major escalation. Every single person in the Directorate of Operations, including Avrakotos, had stood in line to shake hands and say good-bye to the thirty-year veteran.
Ed Juchniewicz, the ADDO who had appointed Gust to his job when Clair George was out of town and who had continued to serve as an ally, was also stepping down. Something even seemed to be wrong with Bill Casey. There were rumors about his health and about investigations under way.
Vickers had the option of staying on in his current job, certainly as long as Gust remained in charge. If that didn’t appeal to him, Bert Dunn was offering to get him his choice of a foreign assignment anywhere he wanted to go if he stayed for another year. But it all seemed so incredibly small-time compared to what he had become used to.
A meeting with the CIA’s career management staff confirmed Mike Vickers’s fears. Avrakotos and Dunn might have pushed to get him promoted to GS-12 due to the nature of his work, but it would be at least five years before he could expect to make GS-13. According to the career management officer, Vickers would have to complete two overseas tours of two years each before he would be eligible for promotion to the next level.
He thought it through again and again, and every time he projected out the likely course of a CIA career without Gust and Bert and the Afghan program it always came out dull as dishwater. It might have been different if Vickers had felt that Gust really needed h
im. Had he honestly believed that there was that much more to do, he might have been persuaded to stay. But by now, his calculations and projections were complete. The program’s next three years were set. Any competent officer could implement it. Even the Stinger deployment had been fully prepared.
Later Gust would have to acknowledge that his young friend was right. Because so much of the money they would need to sustain their effort was already obligated for future weapons delivery, no one would be able to change the plan that Vickers had set in motion. It didn’t matter how powerful the chief of station in Islamabad might be or how differently he or someone at headquarters might want to do things. They had to go along with the weapons and ammunition deliveries or else give back the money to the Treasury. That was the nature of obligated money; it didn’t have to be spent that year, but once obligated, the contracts were set in cement. Almost anyone could now run Vickers’s program because his hand would be at the helm for the next three years, guiding each new shipment of goods to the front.
At the time, Avrakotos did not doubt Vickers’s claim that the tide was already turning and that what he and the Agency and the mujahideen had set out to do was more or less accomplished. The unmistakable signs of the chinks in the Soviet armor had surfaced. The Afghans had tasted blood, and the best weapons were just about to arrive in their hands. As far as the redesign was concerned, the program could now go on automatic pilot.
There was no great farewell. Bert spent ten minutes telling Vickers what a remarkable contribution he had made. Gust took him to dinner and offered a toast to him. And then Mike left the Agency for the Wharton business school. He had very large visions for the future and assumed that one day he would return to the realm of national security work. But for now he thought he would begin by mastering the principles of business administration.
Mike Vickers left Langley with absolutely no fanfare or recognition, but when he drove out through the main security gate at the age of thirty-two he left quite a legacy. The great Muslim army in the greatest of all modern jihads had been reconstituted because of his vision. Right now, the invincible Red Army stood confused and harassed by this angry mass of undisciplined mujahideen, who somehow seemed to be operating with a new kind of intelligence and striking power. He had told Gust that it would probably not be until 1987 that they would see the full force of their efforts surface. But the die was cast. The battle was won. It was just a matter of time.
It was now just a matter of seconds before the contest between Engineer Ghaffar and the three Soviet helicopters closing in on him was resolved. The first Stinger had given away their precise location and the gunships were now turning to finish them off. But in the words of George Patton, “Wars are fought with weapons but won by men.” Ghaffar rose to the occasion and, seizing a second grip stock, and issuing the same cry to his god, he fired the second Stinger and suddenly in the sky over Jalalabad the stake finally ripped through the heart of the beast.
The Hind was suddenly just a broken toy drifting down from the sky, and from beside Ghaffar had come a second and third cry to Allah and now it was not just one, but three Hinds, splintered to destruction before their eyes. God was indeed great.
It was a turning point. The Stinger worked, and the Afghans would soon demonstrate an uncanny ability to use this weapon. According to the CIA’s estimates, seven out of every ten times a mujahid fired a Stinger, a helicopter or airplane came down. Each MiG cost an average of $20 million or more, contrasted with $60,000 or $70,000 for each Stinger. That was the kind of Cold War return on an American dollar that the CIA loved. But the Stinger’s real impact went well beyond the simple number of planes and gunships it killed.
Now Soviet combat pilots had to begin worrying about when they might be coming within range of a Stinger. As a defensive measure they began constantly dropping flares from the Hinds; it was the only way to head off a heat-seeking missile that might be shooting up into the sky looking for the plumes of their exhaust. “What we wanted was to make them pucker up their asses,” Wilson had said, and that was precisely what was happening as they visibly maneuvered to keep the American warhead from flying right up into the steaming, open orifice of their once invulnerable gunship.
The mujahideen considered it a triumph just to witness the aerial acrobatics the Soviets were now putting on over Bagram each day. The pilots came in for landings high and corkscrewed down in violent maneuvers to keep the mujahideen from being able to lock in on a target. But the biggest compliment they paid the Afghans and the most useful thing for the war effort was the way the Hind pilots began flying routine missions.
The Russian journalist Alexander Prokhanov, who was intimate with the Soviet General Staff and who covered the Afghan war from the very beginning, offered this derisive sketch of the Hind pilots before and after the introduction of the Stinger: “They used to be kings of Afghan and everyone saluted them. But after the Stinger they took to flying very high to keep out of range. They had little value up there, and the ground troops began referring to the pilots as ‘cosmonauts.’”
By 1987, the mujahideen, with all of their weapons, were shooting down a Soviet or Afghan army aircraft a day. And now that the gunships were no longer sweeping in low to shoot up mule and camel caravans, much more ammunition and supplies started to make its way to the fighters.
None of this happened immediately. It took time to train operators, and even then there were only so many Stingers to cover a country the size of Texas. But the hunter-killer teams had begun moving out toward all of the major airfields, and the Soviets could never know when they might be waiting for them. Close to two hundred aircraft would be brought down by Stingers in the next year.
The main impact, as Bearden reported back to Langley, was in the morale and spunkiness of the mujahideen. They now had the psychological edge. Without the Hind, the Soviets were not ten feet tall. Mohammed with his thirty-five-pound General Dynamics Stinger was now ten feet tall. It created an entirely different balance of forces when a convoy was to be attacked. As long as they had a Stinger along, the mujahideen weren’t running from the gunships. In fact, they were taunting the gunships to come out and fight. They would not only sneak up on airstrips but sometimes attack a garrison with the explicit objective of luring a gunship out for the kill.
“It became a force multiplier, a juju amulet, a Saint Christopher medallion—you name it,” explains Bearden. “Before, all these guys were waiting around to be martyred. Now they were walking around, heading into Dodge City on purpose looking for trouble.”
At Jalalabad on September 26, after he and his fellow mujahideen had fired their Stingers, Ghaffar made sure they carefully packed each of the spent tubes onto their mules before escaping into the mountains. They had reason to make haste, but the rules of accountability for this weapon were very strict: the only way they could get another of these magical missiles was by turning in a spent one. Beyond that, there were specific plans for the one that brought down the first Hind. It was to be given to a special friend.
In Islamabad that afternoon, after Ghaffar signaled word of his triumph, Bearden held fire until the following morning, when a CIA satellite sailed over the Hindu Kush at first light and took pictures of the tangled gunships at the end of the Jalalabad runway. Minutes later a call from the Afghan task force chief went into Charlie Wilson: three Hinds have been shot down at Jalalabad. The Stinger works.
For three years, Charlie Wilson had gone to bed each night knowing that he might be woken by the gunships. The nightmare had been his confusing companion, both terrifying and energizing him. But after this call from Langley, it never returned. Once the Hinds stopped hovering over the Afghan villages and their pilots started acting like cosmonauts, the grinning Slav would never wake Charlie again.
In the coming days and weeks, as confirmation of other Hind kills came in, Wilson knew the corner had finally been turned. He had been waiting three years to bring down a Hind, and after that first call he had told his secretary that
his Agency friends were on their way over to celebrate.
CHAPTER 30
Gust
THE BROWN BOMBER
It was a bittersweet moment for Gust Avrakotos when he was informed of the Stinger hits. By September 1986 he had long since grown accustomed to immediately sharing such experiences with Charlie. But he was in deepest Africa when he read the cable, no longer a part of the Afghan program. As far as he was concerned, he had been banished to a hot Siberia and he wasn’t even allowed to call Charlie on the phone.
Wilson had no idea what had actually happened; only that Gust had suddenly come to see him, saying that he was being reassigned. He had introduced him to his successor, a tall Irishman whom Wilson got on with just fine. But it was all quite odd. There was no longer any answer on his friend’s old phone. All Charlie could get was the explanation from Norm Gardner, the CIA liaison man, that this was standard operating procedure and that Gust was off on an important new assignment.
The truth was that Avrakotos was now in purgatory, and from the moment the Stingers brought down their first kills, others at the CIA would ride to victory on the tiger he had unleashed. Others would receive the citations and the merit pay, the awards and the speeches and, especially, the promotions to the very top. He would only have his memories and his honor to console him.
No matter how many times Avrakotos went over the events that had led to his fall from grace, there was never any question in his mind that he’d done what Oscar Lascaris Avrakotos’s son had had to do. Two things were more important than anything else, his father had taught him: there was never too much that he could do for his country, and he had to feel right about himself when he looked in the mirror. He hadn’t gone into the CIA to make money, nor was he there to watch out for his career. He was just a simple second-generation ethnic patriot who had fallen in love during Camelot with the idea of doing something for his country that might make a difference. That’s what had made his father proud when Gust had come back from a tour in Greece not willing to tell him what kind of things he had been doing for the CIA. “That’s all right, Gust, I’m proud of you,” he had said. And so, in spite of the risk to his career, Gust had not had a second thought about making his move to try to stop the Agency from becoming embroiled in what everyone would come to know as Iran-Contra.