by George Crile
Avrakotos never told Wilson about his growing troubles with Clair George and the system. They had begun in 1985 during the great Afghan buildup and had come to a head just before he had left for Pakistan. Gust was still in charge of Iran then, so he was one of the first to be told of the White House’s idea that it was time to try to cut a deal with Khomeini’s Iran. Part of what triggered his distress was that the proposal to sell arms to Iran was being pushed by the same kind of zealots, including Oliver North, who had dreamed up the Vlasov’s army madness.
In the beginning the Agency was only indirectly involved. The Israelis were pushing the scheme. They had convinced Bud McFarlane and North that there were moderates in Iran who could be dealt with. At that point Iran was losing its war with Iraq, and the Israelis seemed to believe that if the president allowed them to sell some of their U.S.-supplied Hawk missiles, it would not only lead to the release of the hostages but to the beginning of a new strategic alliance that would prevent the Soviets from getting a foothold in Iran.
Operatives like Avrakotos always ask the question “Who profits?” when they consider such propositions. What Avrakotos instantly concluded was that Israel stood to profit the most from an arms sale to Iran, but it was very hard for him to see what possible good could come to the United States.
Avrakotos knew too much about Israel’s complicated relationship with Iran—how the Mossad had “had half of the mullahs on its payroll” before the revolution. But mainly he factored in why Israel would want to be building up Khomeini. The answer was simple: Israel’s most dangerous enemy was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and right then Iraq looked as if it might be on the verge of winning its war with Iran. What better way for Israel to do in its enemy and rebuild its alliance with Iran than to get the United States to finance it? That was enough to call into question Israel’s motives, but ultimately what enraged Avrakotos was the vision that Oliver North and the others had of a group of Iranian moderates just waiting to deal honorably with the Great Satan.
Of the many things that Avrakotos felt he brought to the Agency, one of the most valuable was an intuitive understanding of the way the Old World worked. He never permitted wishful thinking to cloud what he saw as the obvious way certain nationality groups think and act. Bosnia didn’t come as a surprise to Avrakotos; he had seen it all in the drunken passions of the Serbs and Croats back in Aliquippa when he used to deliver beer to their political halls. And what he knew about the Iranians was that they had been consistently “fucking” the United States ever since the Ayatollah had overthrown the man the CIA had put in power.
Avrakotos’s thinking was not terribly complicated. He could not figure out any reason why he or the CIA should be engaged in the efforts that Oliver North and the NSC staff were trying to push. The stated policy of the United States was not to bargain with terrorists. Specifically, it was not to arm Iran, which was responsible for backing the men holding the U.S. hostages in Beirut and which, indirectly at least, had to be held accountable for the capture and torture of the CIA station chief William Buckley.
Avrakotos hadn’t liked Buckley, but he would have risked his life to save him, and he was repelled by the idea of dealing with Iran. It wasn’t just because of the principle; there was no rational justification for believing that the scheme being pushed—bribing the Iranians with Hawk missiles to win the release of the hostages—would work.
He knew who North was relying on: the Israelis and a scumball named Manucher Ghorbanifar. Avrakotos was in charge of the Iran side of the Directorate of Operations at headquarters; the government’s most knowledgeable experts on Iran reported to him. They insisted that there were no moderates in power in Tehran, that Ghorbanifar was lying, that he was simply a huckster out to make money, and that the Israelis had their own reasons for pushing this scheme, which had nothing to do with U.S. interests.
On one of the Agency’s polygraph tests Ghorbanifar had managed to pass only two of his fourteen questions—his name and his nationality. At Avrakotos’s direction, the Agency had put out a burn notice in 1984 saying that he was a fabricator and no one should deal with him. But in 1985 Ghorbanifar came in through the CIA’s back door via the Israelis, claiming that he could win the release of Buckley and the other hostages.
Gust knew these men. They didn’t do favors for the Great Satan. They might be religious zealots, but they were smart and they knew how to bring down presidents. They knew the value of hostages to the country that was causing them such misery in their war with Saddam Hussein. The only way to deal with these people was to bomb their religious shrines, or, in the case of Ghorbanifar, stick a knife in his eyeball.
As far as Avrakotos was concerned, the people advocating this policy were part of the lunatic fringe. North had been part of the Vlasov’s army madness, and this was every bit as crazy. This hopelessly naive arms-for-hostages scheme—which would soon grow into an arms-for-hostages scheme with the profits going to fund the Contras—was nothing short of recklessness, and Gust mobilized to put a stop to it.
Avrakotos had no problem stretching the rules to the breaking point and no doubt violating many of them. But he was not about to have his department—the Iran branch—drawn into this madness. Beyond that, he wanted to protect the Agency from the disaster he saw in the works. He had had his troubles with Clair George, but he wanted to protect his old friend as well.
Finally, he decided to take a preemptory strike to protect himself, his division, and the Agency from any further involvement in this operation. He gathered together his best experts and told them to prepare a document explaining why the Agency should not be involved. He agreed to sign it himself and not include their names. He knew that Clair George was being pulled into North’s operation, and he didn’t want his subordinates to catch George’s wrath.
George may not have liked anything about North’s operation, but the Agency, which was offering no solution to the hostage problem, was hard put to say no to the White House’s plan. As Gust saw it, there was another reason why George might retaliate against the drafters of the memo. He was a contender for John McMahon’s job, and it never helps to alienate the White House.
But that was not Avrakotos’s concern. In fact, he deliberately drafted the memo with the explicit purpose of making it all but impossible for George or Casey to go forward. Among other things, the memo said that Ghorbanifar was a crook and that the operation was illegal, or at least some of the things the Agency was being asked to do were illegal, immoral, and unworkable. Then he added an explosive line predicting that if the Agency went along, it would end up with the same kind of disastrous consequences as Watergate. He sent it off just as the CIA was being asked to move into the operation in a big way. And he sent it in such a way that it would enter into the official records of the Directorate of Operations.
Clair George has a highly emotive and temperamental personality. He is capable of enormous charm as well as terrifying temper tantrums, and Avrakotos knew him better than anyone else at the Agency. He knew that George was a ballroom dancer who could maneuver with his wife, Mary, much like Fred Astaire. He was an elegant choreographer, and when he got involved in blowups it might look spontaneous to everyone else but not to Gust. In Athens he had learned to be able to predict when George was about to have a tantrum in front of a case officer or visiting dignitary; there were certain histrionics he would go through for effect. Once Clair realized that Gust had broken his code, it infuriated him. He didn’t like someone who could see through him.
Up in the DDO’s office, the CIA’s top spy appeared to be going truly nuts with anger, but Avrakotos was not intimidated. He watched his old friend as if he were at the theater, noting, however, that behind the show there was genuine fury. He knew why. The Agency had been created mainly by military men. Its predecessor, the OSS, had been part of the military. General William J. Donovan, the founder, had worn a uniform. Military tradition survives very much in force in the Clandestine Services, where people call one another by their fir
st names and don’t salute, but they always follow orders.
What Gust had done with this unsolicited report was in effect insubordination. He had now made it part of the official record and had even gotten Bert Dunn to sign off on it. In George’s eyes there was little question that the intention of the memo was to make it damn difficult for the Agency to go along with the White House’s plans.
“Casey’s never going to see this,” Gust remembers him shouting. “Do you know what I think of this?” he said, as he crumpled the report Gust had given him. “This is what I think of it,” he shouted, as he pantomimed using the papers to wipe his ass and then threw them on the floor.
Avrakotos just stared at George for a beat. “You better pick those up and save them, because they’re going to save your ass one day,” he said before he walked out.
Shortly after this Avrakotos was taken out of the loop on the special Iran project. A new door was brought into Gust’s empire, with a cipher lock and peephole. Behind it was the Agency’s new component for North’s arms-for-hostages operation. George ordered Avrakotos removed from all cable traffic and denied him access to the weird room. But the key operatives, like George Cave, were Avrakotos’s friends and confidants. And the case officer Gust had running the Iran branch, Jack Devine, was nervous and continued to come to him for advice. Avrakotos watched with them in disbelief as North and Bud McFarlane, the recently retired national security adviser, flew off to Tehran carrying a key-shaped cake, symbolizing an opening for new relations, and a Bible—which someone in the entourage apparently thought would flatter the followers of the Ayatollah.
As far as Avrakotos was concerned, it was now only a matter of time before something blew. Gust’s three-year tour happened to come up just at that moment. Under any other circumstances he believes he would easily have been able to extend it as long as he liked. “It was the most successful program ever against the Russians, and I had taken a losing program and turned it into a winner.” Dunn knew that Gust wanted to stay, and so did Clair George, who sent his division chief to give Avrakotos the bad news.
“You’re not going to like this, and neither do I, but Clair wants you to go to Africa.” Gust had listened without comment as Dunn tried to make the assignment as the number three man in the African Division sound exciting. He spoke of the Savimbi war in Angola, but Avrakotos knew he was being banished and he also knew there was nothing he could do to change George’s mind. “I could have gone to Clair and pleaded my case, but I knew it would have given him sadistic pleasure to turn me down. He would have thought, Even the great Gust had to kiss my ass and let me know I was boss.” Gust had defied George, and now George was going to extract his revenge.
Avrakotos lived by his instincts. He fancied that he was a good judge of when he could bluff and when he could fight and win. And perhaps for the first time in his life he felt there was really not much of anything he could do. He knew Clair George through and through. They had been to war together—in Athens, when they’d both been hunted men. Gust had protected Clair and taught him how to navigate. They had shared confidences; Gust had given George his genuine friendship, and because he knew him so well he knew that his old friend was more than prepared to make life very miserable for him.
Later Avrakotos would have reasons other than insubordination to explain why Clair might have wanted him out of the Near East Division. The Agency was walking on the very edge of illegality in its Iran-Contra involvement. If and when the scandal hit, which now appeared likely, Avrakotos was on record as having passionately warned George and the Agency become further involved. One of Congress’s biggest problem in investigating the Agency is that it never knows whom to question or what to ask for. In this case, however, the official supervising the Iran branch would certainly be one of the first questioned, and if Gust were in the Africa Division in another job, someone else could explain the Agency’s position.
It was painful enough to have George take his beloved program away just when it was about to turn the corner, but the DDO now struck with a second blow designed to make sure the Aliquippan was fully neutered. He had Bert Dunn pass on his order for Gust to break off all contact with Charlie Wilson.
At this point Avrakotos understood that George was running an operation. He was tying Gust’s hands, robbing him of his ability to reach out in any way. Through Charlie Wilson, Gust had the ability to strike almost anywhere in Washington and George knew it. But he also knew that Wilson had become a professional friend of the Agency. He was now close to Tom Twetten, and he had strong ties to Bert Dunn as well as McMahon. If Avrakotos could be taken out of the equation, it was almost a sure thing that Wilson would continue to see the Agency as a friend and ally to support.*
When Dunn relayed George’s order, Gust didn’t complain. He didn’t say much. He was being punished—banished again, really. What was surprising was that this man who’d never backed down from a fight and who’d been taught by his mother to seek revenge at almost any cost seemed to accept his fate without protest. He didn’t even accept Wilson’s offer to intervene, even though Wilson was not only on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee that doles out the Agency’s funds but was now also a member of the Intelligence Committee in charge of overseeing the CIA. Wilson had more than enough leverage to back George down.
But Avrakotos concluded that he had no choice but to take this punishment “like a man.” It had nothing to do with him personally. He was about to marry a young case officer he had been living with for the last year, and by then his son Gregory had joined the Agency. As Avrakotos analyzed his predicament, he was forced to conclude that Clair now had hostages, and his fiancée and Gregory would be the ones to suffer if he caused trouble.
So there was no breast beating, no cursing, no heart-to-heart talks asking for sympathy from anyone. Instead he took his successor, Jack Devine, a six-foot–six-inch Irishman from Pennsylvania, to meet Wilson.* There he told Charlie, “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. The bad news is I’m leaving the program…the good news is Jack is taking it over.”
That was it. After all they had gone through, that was the way Gust broke the news to Wilson. And despite Charlie’s efforts to find out what was going on—to see if he could be of help—Gust chose to say that this was just the way things worked in his secret world. The time had come for him to go, and the best thing Charlie could do for him and the Afghans was to make things work for Gust’s successor. The strangest part of this sad drama is that Gust was actually still living in McLean, Virginia, just a few minutes from the main gates of the CIA, though he had been ordered to tell Charlie he was in Africa. When Charlie called Gust’s old number one night, the recorded message said merely that the telephone had been taken out of service. As far as Charlie knew, Gust was somewhere in Africa, and because of the rules of his tribe they could no longer talk.
Avrakotos’s next move required discipline. It’s human nature not to want the person who takes over your position to flourish. It doesn’t make you look good. Better to see the successor sink. But the Afghan program was his pride and joy, his crowning achievement, and he managed to overcome the impulse and, instead, throw himself into the transition. He set aside a month to take Jack Devine to Egypt, Pakistan, England, China, and Saudi Arabia to meet the players, and he himself announced the changing of the guard. One of the senior officers in the program later commented that it was the best transition he had ever witnessed.
It was a horrible time for Avrakotos. The Agency had been created to contain and ultimately help defeat the Soviet empire. Of all its anti-Communist crusades, Afghanistan had clearly extracted the greatest toll on the Soviets. In time, those who followed him on the Afghan program would reap the rewards for this effort, but when he left it in the summer of 1986 the Agency’s leadership had never once recognized any of his outfit’s contributions. Time after time Avrakotos had gone into the CIA auditorium and listened to the director call off the names of those who had performed brilliantly. Dewey
Clarridge and Alan Fiers, two of the officers who would later be indicted for their part in the Iran-Contra scandal, were repeatedly honored with the greatest awards.
Gust always sat in what he called the “section with the secretaries and the couriers.” He and Mike and Larry the consigliere, and Art Alper the demolitions man, and Tim the logs chief, and Hilly Billy the finance wizard—the whole Dirty Dozen would sit and listen as the director singled out the chiefs of the Contra program for their remarkable service. It was always hard for them to figure out why anyone would reward the Central American task force for its bloated staff, its micromanagement, and its complete failure to in any way threaten the Sandinista government. About the only thing it had been able to deliver was constant scandal, and yet here were Clarridge and Fiers being handed $25,000 checks in recognition of their great service.
At times it would eat away at Avrakotos. “It’s hard to work without getting any sort of recognition on the outside,” he says. You don’t expect to get your name in the papers. You’re the little gray men. But it’s different with your peer group. It matters. When we had those big ceremonies in the auditorium, Mike never got any recognition and I never did. No one on the task force ever got any. We were the fucking losers. Black sheep are used to not being recognized. We were used to getting fucked, right. But that’s what motivated us…because we were winning and they were losing.”