Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  There was a moment that fall when Gust thought perhaps he might be taken out of purgatory. Bert Dunn called him at home to see if he would take on a special operation. For the second time in recent memory, there had been a plane disaster, this one directly involving the Central American task force chief, Alan Fiers, the man Gust had outmaneuvered to get the Afghan job.

  Dunn said that there had been an incident with a plane that had gone down and they needed Gust to find out what had happened. It could not have been pleasant for a man like Alan Fiers to have Gust Avrakotos with a prosecutor’s writ moving into his secret world. For reasons that could not be explained, Fiers had dispatched a resupply plane to a destination so far away that the plane’s supply of gas would not allow it to make the return trip. Given this simple fact, it was not surprising that the plane had crash-landed inside Nicaragua. It was just pure luck that, unlike the Contra supply plane shot down with ex–CIA agent Eugene Hasenfus aboard, no one found out about it.

  Avrakotos was tasked with looking into that one royal screwup, but it was really a metaphor for a disastrous six-year operation. As he flew down to Central America his mind flashed back to his first sense of the disaster brewing for the Agency over this divisive covert operation. It had been the same time in January when he had tried to get George to cut off the Iran madness. There had been a terrible snowstorm, and Gust was at home when Joe Fernandez, one of Alan Fiers’s station chiefs, called to ask if he could come over. The man said he needed to talk.

  Avrakotos liked Fernandez. He was a former cop, a good Catholic with seven children—not one of your Ivy Leaguers—and he was in trouble. Oliver North had asked him to help the Contras build an airstrip in Costa Rica at a time when Congress had made it illegal for the CIA to do anything to help the Contra army.

  Fernandez had been impressed when North had dropped the president’s name and perhaps overly awed when the marine lieutenant colonel had taken him for a tour of the White House and actually introduced him to the president. North had made him think that everything he asked Fernandez to do came directly from the president. But now Fernandez was being accused of breaking the law, and he was terrified that he would be fired and lose his pension, which would kick in just a few months later. Fernandez knew that Avrakotos had been close to Clair George, and he thought Gust could put in a good word for him.

  Avrakotos did his best to counsel this man he identified with and in the end told him the truth as he knew it. Fernandez should not expect any kindnesses from the director of operations. And Gust was not the man to bring up his case.

  As he said good-bye to Fernandez that cold winter day, Gust could almost peer into the man’s fate. It was the Halloween Day Massacre all over again. Fernandez wasn’t a blue blood; therefore, he was expendable. Sure enough, two months before his fiftieth birthday, Joe Fernandez was fired. At fifty he would have qualified for his pension, but now the Agency took the position that it had no responsibility for this man with the seven kids and the twenty-five years of service. The Agency wasn’t there for him when the grand jury handed up the criminal indictments. His boss Alan Fiers wasn’t there for him either. Gust knew that Fernandez didn’t understand what was happening to him. He didn’t yet understand that his beloved CIA could betray him. Gust did.

  Eleven months later Avrakotos was stunned at Alan Fiers’s hopeless foul-up. It was a mind-bending performance from the man who had pompously declared in front of Avrakotos and Casey that the Agency’s money was being wasted in Afghanistan—that the real victory over Communism would begin in Central America and that Gust’s Afghan money should be turned over to him.

  Now, with the Contra war engulfed in scandal and all but bankrupt, Avrakotos urged Bert Dunn to let him take it. He had credibility on the Hill, and even his past opposition to Iran-Contra could be put to the Agency’s advantage. Clair George, however, chose once again to banish Avrakotos from the limelight.

  Six years later, it wasn’t easy for Gust to be charitable as he watched the news accounts and spoke to his old comrades about George’s ordeal. The man the press was calling America’s top spy was trapped in federal court in Washington. The CIA wasn’t picking up the bills for his five-count felony prosecution. His lawyer portrayed him as a patriot who had served his country ably and stressed his brave service in Athens under the threat of assassination. But Gust was watching the bottom line: Clair George’s own government was now trying to put him in jail. And who should come forward during the proceedings as star witness for the prosecution but Alan Fiers.

  Never before had a case officer breached the code of omertà and snitched on another member of the Clandestine Services. What made the betrayal so vivid was that Fiers was not moved by principle but was simply attempting to trade the old spymaster for a lighter sentence.

  Gust didn’t bad-mouth George during those days. He didn’t like what the government was doing, and he didn’t like what Fiers had done. But he felt a grim satisfaction in seeing his prophecy come true. When one of the defense team called to ask if he would testify for Clair, Avrakotos agreed. “But I told them if the prosecutor asked me anything about Iran-Contra, Clair would go to jail.”

  It had been painful for Avrakotos when George had lost faith and turned on him. Clair’s wife, Mary, had often told Avrakotos that he had saved her husband’s life in Athens. And in truth, Gust had loved this man, at some point probably admiring him more than any other colleague. But in Gust’s eyes, all this had been overridden in the bitter spring of 1986 when Clair George let the Agency be marched into the Iran-Contra swamp, putting career and the goodwill of Colonel North over Agency and country alike. George had chosen to treat Gust as a saboteur. He hadn’t worried about what was best for the Afghan program, and he hadn’t thought about what was best for the CIA or the United States. As far as George was concerned, Gust had put him in a compromised position and now the Aliquippan could go to Africa and rot.

  Gust would never again have a job at the CIA that interested him. His career was basically over—he had been done in by his old friend. It certainly didn’t have to have gone that way. He could have held on to his principles and still survived if he had been willing to take a lesson from Bert Dunn.

  Dunn was the good guy in Avrakotos’s book—the officer who had joined with him in making Afghanistan possible. He was also a pro who had backed Gust’s efforts to halt the Iran disaster. But when it became perfectly clear to the veteran officer that the tide was running against him, Dunn always managed to be out of town.

  There was a standing joke at the task force that everyone needed to be on guard whenever Bert was off on a hunting or fishing trip. Those were the days when compromising decisions would be made, and Dunn knew enough not to be there to have to fall on his sword or go on record in support of something absolutely mad. To men like Dunn, that was the way a professional had to act. Some would even say that by his refusal to accept the larger realities, Avrakotos was demonstrating that he just didn’t have the makings of a truly first-class officer. If he couldn’t smile and get out of the way in his own bureaucracy, how could he be trusted to con the enemy?

  As Gust slipped into the obscurity of the Africa Division, sealed off from Charlie and from the growing successes of the Afghan program, he had little to carry with him by way of recognition for a job well done. Normally, in such situations, a party would be given to help cushion the blow of what was, after all, a dismissal under a cloud of sorts. Normally these affairs don’t mean much. But the one Bert Dunn organized for Gust was just right. There were no official speeches, no gold watches, and certainly no Agency medals like the many Howard Hart had left with.

  But close to five hundred CIA men and women came to say good-bye. The war room and the rest of Gust’s domain had been sanitized for the occasion. Bert had unleashed the logs men to smuggle whiskey, gin, beer, and wine into the supposedly dry Agency offices. At the entrance, the big Russian solider in his frightening suit now held a Stolichnaya bottle in one hand and a Budweiser in the
other. Red, white, and blue bunting was hung everywhere, framing the huge posters of the mujahideen and the large green banners with Allahu Akbar written in both Arabic and English.

  There was much good cheer, even for Gust’s people, who knew how complicated the moment was for their boss. The Dirty Dozen had commissioned a tribute of their own—a framed photograph showing a group of heroic mujahideen firing off mortars. The photo interpreters and the people who concoct fake pictures had then superimposed a picture of a Greek efzone, a World War II warrior, leaping into the air. In the old days Greek warriors wore dresses, body stockings, and funny shoes with tassels. And that’s what this warrior, who had Gust’s face superimposed onto his body, was wearing. Nothing could have delighted the departing chief of South Asia Operations more. “Here was this wild efzone jumping up in the air in joy as the mortars were going off,” Gust says. “It was just great.”

  That was it from the traditional CIA. Nothing more. But one organization at the Agency had decided that Gust deserved their official recognition. Esther Dean, an effusive 325-pound black woman from Cleveland, was acting that day as if she were giving the party when Bill Casey came down from the eighth floor to pay his respects. He and Bert Dunn were moving about talking to members of the task force when Esther and Gust began laughing about some secret memory.

  Esther had a special feeling about Gust. Two years before, she had been his secretary when everything had fallen apart for her. In exasperation one day Gust made a racist remark: “Esther, I know you’re a fat nigger and can’t talk well, but what’s wrong with you?” She explained that she had gotten herself $34,000 in debt on credit card charges and that she was about to lose everything unless a senior-grade officer would sign off on a credit union loan. Would he?

  “On one condition,” Gust told her. With that he asked for her wallet, took out her ten credit cards, and sliced them all up. He then had her agree to a new cash regime, signed the loan, and nursed Esther back to financial health.

  “Are you going to miss Mr. Avrakotos?” Casey asked Esther, not really expecting anything but a polite response.

  “Oh, Mr. Casey, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m going to miss him. I’m going to miss him a whole bunch. I never thought I’d say this, because he used to call me ‘you black nigger’ four or five times a day, but he’s good, he’s a good boss.” With that, big Esther Dean gave Gust Avrakotos a great hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  Casey had no way of knowing what to make of this strange spectacle. The director, who was preoccupied with the unraveling Iran-Contra affair, and who was about to be diagnosed with a brain tumor, didn’t mention the Afghan program. But Gust appreciated his stopping by. “See you around” was all Casey said as he left.

  That was when Linda, another big, spirited black woman, tapped Gust on the shoulder and told him that she and some of the other blacks would like him to come downstairs. They wanted to recognize him.

  Downstairs, the blacks of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations were waiting for him in the records room. He knew most of them surprisingly well. In fact, he had become something of a legend with these people who manned the underbelly of the Agency. They were part of Gust’s intelligence network, part of what had made it possible for him to wander the halls for almost seven months and face down Clair George in that first test of wills.

  Gust also viewed them differently from all of his colleagues. Who knows what’s going on in the director’s office? The secretary knows. And what do you do if there is a message too sensitive to send over the wires? You give it to the couriers? They’re the GS-1s and 2s and 3s and most of them were all staring at Gust right there in the records room.

  “I had gone to bat for many of them,” Gust recalls. The word among them was if you’re having trouble and being picked on, go see Gust. He had given many of them practical counsel, just as he had with Esther Dean. When they were getting a raw deal, if he knew their supervisor he would put in a word for them. He ate lunch with them, he talked dirty to them, and mainly he gave them a fair shake.

  Thea was the spokesperson for the gathering. The CIA’s blacks had an award they gave each year to one of their own who had distinguished him-or herself. It was called the Brown Bomber Award, and it had never gone to a white guy.

  A good-looking black woman with a beautiful smile, Thea was radiant as she offered Gust the highest possible praise: “We want to give this award to the blackest motherfucker of us all.”

  That is the only formal citation from the CIA that Gust Lascaris Avrakotos ever got. It sits by his desk with the picture of the mad Greek efzone leaping with joy into the air. There is also a picture of Charlie Wilson on a white horse. But for the professional underdog from Aliquippa, for the conqueror of the Evil Empire, the Brown Bomber Award has a special place of honor.

  CHAPTER 31

  Charlie

  “IT’S MY WAR, GODDAMN IT”

  Nothing illustrates the power that Charlie Wilson was able to wield on behalf of the Afghans better than the story of a humiliating incident he was subjected to on one of his trips to Pakistan with Sweetums.

  The incident took place in 1986 at the end of a particularly satisfying tour in which he had been received as a conquering hero everywhere he went. As usual, he had flown into the Northwest Frontier Province to give blood at the IRC hospital in Peshawar and then meet with the mujahideen commanders who had gathered specially to see him. As usual, the Defense Intelligence Agency plane attached to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, was assigned to fly him and his party to their various stops in Pakistan. At the end of the day the plane was scheduled to fly him and Sweetums to Lahore for an official dinner being held in his honor.

  Moments before boarding the plane, everything collapsed. It turns out that the embassy’s military attaché, an air force colonel, had taken it upon himself to scrutinize the rules, and discovered that civilians other than wives or relatives of congressmen were not cleared to fly on his military spy plane.

  The colonel had done his duty as he saw fit and, without hesitation, ordered the pilots not to let Sweetums come aboard. It didn’t matter to him that on previous trips Wilson’s friends—Snowflake, Joanne, and even his belly dancer—had all flown on that very same plane. Nor did it concern the colonel that the congressman and his companion were scheduled to be the guests of honor in Lahore that evening, nor was it of interest to him that no commercial flights were available until the following day.

  The colonel, it appears, had no idea that he might be picking a dangerous fight. He seemed to believe that Wilson was little more than a braggart without any leverage. The Texan was, after all, an elected official, and the colonel had caught him red-handed, trying to appropriate one of the nation’s precious spy planes to ferry a beauty queen about the North-West Frontier province. It was, as the attaché saw it, a clear abuse of power and hardly an issue Wilson would like to risk surfacing in public.

  One of Wilson’s escorts had tried to warn the colonel that he was making a mistake. “If I were you, I’d interpret those regulations loosely or else you guys are going to lose your airplane.” But now it was too late. The colonel had phrased his cable to Washington in such a way that the Pentagon had no choice but to deny permission for Sweetums.

  It must be remembered that Charlie Wilson was a senior member of the subcommittee responsible for the Pentagon’s annual budget. He had been around for over two decades and knew well how quickly the Pentagon was prepared to bend the rules to accommodate their congressional patrons. This colonel was trying to say that his precious $200,000 plane was too good for Sweetums and that she would have to wait a day in Peshawar until the next scheduled flight left. Wilson says that for the first time in twenty years, he lost his temper: “This was first time I actually swore and shouted. I just went bug-fuck.”

  At one point Wilson found himself screaming at the tough old U.S. ambassador, who was clearly trapped in a no-win situation. In exasperation, the congressman finally ordered the colonel to get the p
resident of Pakistan on the phone.

  Wilson had never asked Zia for a personal favor before, and the Muslim dictator immediately understood the gravity of the situation. Without hesitating, he told his friend Charlie that his personal plane was on its way to rescue Sweetums. That afternoon, as Wilson prepared to board Pakistan’s equivalent of Air Force One, he told the offending officer: “This is not the end of this story, Colonel.”

  Just to make sure the colonel understood whom he had a picked a fight with, Wilson issued a humiliating order that the colonel was not in a position to refuse. The DIA plane was not to return to Islamabad, where the colonel and the pilots had been counting on attending an office picnic. Instead the plane was to fly parallel to Zia’s plane, with Charlie’s personal baggage and poor Colonel Rooney (Wilson’s military aide) along as the official cargo. Stepping aboard the plane an awkward Rooney had told the furious pilots: “I’m just a little pissant on the crossroads of life. I had nothing to do with it.” That didn’t calm them down a bit. Enraged, they proceeded to warn Rooney that the Defense Department was going to get Wilson for this and that perhaps they wouldn’t allow Sweetums’s bag to be put on the plane. Rooney replied, “Don’t even touch that one. It’s absolutely foolish.”

  Zia had congratulated Charlie on his chivalry but Wilson was now hell-bent on revenge. Back in Washington he addressed his Defense Appropriations colleagues in the room under the great dome: “Gentlemen, the honor of the coequal branch of government has been challenged. They have insulted the committee on Appropriations, they have insulted me, and they have insulted my true love, Sweetums. I want you to give me revenge.”