by George Crile
Every author should have an agent as loyal and fiercely persistent as Andrew Wylie. He never wavered in his conviction and I appreciate his friendship as well as the efforts of Jeff Posternak and everyone at the Wylie Agency.
A book could be made out of the writing of this book. It is no ordinary experience navigating through the intelligence agencies of the United States, Pakistan, and all the other secretive worlds that came together for this campaign. It has taken a long time and more than a village—more like an international coalition—to finally nail it down.
Among those to whom I am indebted are Joe Spohn, Nicolas Beim, Tyler Clemens, Zeb Esselstyn, Reg Laing, James Morrow, Sam Osborne, Tasha Zemke, and the wise, late-night counsel of Otis Walters. Thanks to Roy Abrams for his dedicated efforts and Britta Fulla, the brilliant graphic designer who did the first-draft design for this book. Particular thanks go to John House who provided an invaluable edit of the first draft of this book as well as two close friends who were essential to the project, one at the beginning and the other at the end: Neeraj Khemlani and Justin Oppmann.
Finally, there are three more people without whom this book would simply not exist. Timothy Dickenson has served as a kind of Oxford don to this project, a role he has often played for me since our days together at Harper’s magazine. Every twist and turn of this chronicle has benefited from the endless store of historical wisdom and insight that Timothy has selflessly provided.
The best of marriages involve a sharing of the good times and bad. I am forever indebted to my wife, Susan, for her steady support and love but mostly for her unusually wise full-time assignment of her sister, Barbara Lyne, to serve as my in-house editor. No wife has ever given a husband a more valuable gift.
Barbara was by my side from the beginning. Equally as transfixed as I by the almost surreal wonder of the story that emerged from our labors, there was not a day’s work that was anything but sheer pleasure. And finally, it was only her quick and ruthless capacity to make judgments that made it possible for this book to come out in such a timely manner.
*He was often branded with the name “Timber Charlie” for the legislation he pushed through for the timber interests dominating his district; his political patron was the maverick lumber king Arthur Temple. Temple was not your usual southern robber baron; he was a model of progressive liberalism. His company, Temple Inland, never unionized because he always paid union wages. He personally integrated Diboll, his company town, in the early 1960s. He built the best library for any town its size in Texas. And at a time when federal programs to help the poor were considered anathema, he did what local governments would not—he tapped federal aid to build housing projects, an airport, recreation centers, golf courses, and facilities for the elderly. Arthur Temple helped bankroll Wilson’s political career to perpetuate this tradition as well as to help the timber industry.
*Philip Agee denies having anything to do with the exposure of Richard Welch or Gust Avrakotos.
*The author has not seen the document, but this is the language and the message that came through as described to me by those who have read it.
*In those days it was a very rare event when the rebels could stop a tank. So rare that Alper says a picture of a downed Soviet tank was received at Langley in 1983 with almost as much excitement as the later pictures of helicopters brought down by Stingers. The interview was conducted the day after the San Francisco earthquake, and Alper said the tank looked just like one of the cars stranded on the Bay Bridge. The main difference was the context, in which the mujahideen posed triumphantly with gleeful grins for the camera, which revealed a Russian dangling from the turret with his genitals removed. “It looked like a beached whale,” Alper says, “and the poor bastards had to get out of the tanks once they were trapped.”
*What this meant in a practical sense is that the lawyers ruled that the Agency couldn’t provide the Afghans with sniper rifles or, for that matter, with satellite target studies if they focused on an individual. As extreme as it might sound, they argued that it might constitute a violation of the 1977 congressional ban on any assassination plotting. It didn’t matter that the Agency was dispensing hundreds of thousand of assault rifles, machine guns, mines, rockets, mortars, and RPGs for the Afghans to use in their killing war with the Soviets—in all, some ten thousand tons of weapons and ordinance in 1983 alone, according to the Pakistan intelligence officer directing the combat activities of the mujahideen. The lawyers dug in their heels and held to their strict interpretation of the law.
*The problem was that the Agency was operating on a small budget in the beginning and the procurement office could make buys only when they had funds, thus playing into the hands of the suppliers, who sensed the growing appetite and a limited supply.
†For years Russia put the Afghan death toll at 13,000. The most recent official tally, based on previously classified files, puts the number at over 28,000.
*The District of Columbia, a federal city, is governed by the U.S. Congress, and all its funds are governed by the Appropriations Committee. This gives enormous influence to those subcommittee chairmen able to slash or augment budgets without much trouble.
*Rafiah and Shore said they were convinced that the Charlie Horse could work for the mujahideen, but the 2.75-inch ammunition it used would be expensive unless it turned out, as they believed, that there were enormous stockpiles of the ammunition left over from Vietnam. Wilson decided to put in a special appropriation to commission an inventory to find out how much ammunition could be raided from the leftover Vietnam arsenal.
*Wilson later claimed that he was not praying on his knees but was just a passive participant, holding hands with Joanne.
*In fact, this was a legitimate criticism. Even Avrakotos acknowledges that Pakistan all but forced the CIA to back its favorites, who were of the hard-line variety.
*After he became acting chief, Avrakotos actually interrupted one of these afternoon teas to declare that he did not come to London to drink tea and eat little cookies and if they wanted to do business with him, there would be no more interruptions. The ever-accommodating MI6, eager to win more CIA money for their Afghan programs, discontinued their afternoon custom.
*As always, the experiences of the CIA in Central America stood in marked contrast. While Avrakotos was in London his counterparts on the Central American task force were about to be strung up for commissioning a so-called assassination manual. Not only the Agency’s lawyers but Congress, the press, and hordes of concerned Americans moving about Nicaragua and Central America were attempting to stop the CIA’s war.
*Luttwak shared the CIA position, championed by John McMahon, that plausible deniability was critical, that it was in effect an unstated bargain with the Soviets. The Soviets would not invade Pakistan if the United States concealed its hand. And the American public did not want to take responsibility for defending Pakistan.
*The royal family was concerned not only about oil; they also had to please their own intensely fundamentalist religious establishment. The Saudi mullahs had been among the first to begin sending financial support to the Afghan jihad, and the king, as protector of the two holiest shrines of Islam, Mecca and Medina, could not afford to be indifferent toward this most passionate of Islamic causes.
*One of the most distinctive moments of the Reagan anti-Communist era came at a 1986 gathering in Washington of conservatives who rose to their feet chanting, “Get out, Gulf, get out, Gulf” as Savimbi marched down the aisle to address them.
*Fiers offered this account to David Rogers of the Wall Street Journal. It was Rogers who first broke the story of the $50 million supplemental.
*Coelho further explained, “During the eighties we had a divided government. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and the only institution controlled by Democrats was the House. We were not just the opposition party, we were the opposition government. It was a heady time for us. After the 1982 elections a political stalemate occurred and that stalemate gave Tip power and we were aggressiv
ely willing to take on Reaganism.”
*Once, however, in a particularly close and important vote on Contra aid, Wilson was confronted with an awkward choice. He had just voted with the administration when he was approached by Eddie Boland, the distinguished chairman of the Intelligence Committee, whose amendments were responsible for curtailing and then cutting off the CIA’s war. Boland was not only deeply respected in the House, he was Tip’s Washington roommate. “Charlie,” he said, “haven’t we always given you what you wanted on Afghanistan?” Wilson says he only thought for a second. He withdrew his card and voted with Boland and the Speaker.
†“The president used to say I got my ideas of what policy should be from the priests and the Maryknoll nuns,” he said. “Which was true, of course. But I say I’d rather listen to them than to these people the president called freedom fighters. I was convinced that the only thing that kept us from invading Nicaragua is what we were doing in the House to stop the president.”
*Casey’s efforts to find a legal route to funding the Contras were fast disappearing. Soon, he would begin scheming with Oliver North and a weird collection of characters inside and out of government to raise money from private citizens—from the Saudis, even the sultan of Brunei. Ultimately it would lead to the disastrous arms-for-hostages sales to Khomeini, where the profits were diverted to the Contras.
*The paramilitary branch had been radically reduced during the Carter years. Under Bill Casey it had once again expanded to staff the Agency’s burgeoning paramilitary campaigns in Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, Libya, Chad, and Afghanistan.
*Vickers was particularly struck to find that after throwing the best they had at Massoud, the Soviets had not been able to crush him. From the ledgers he could see that Massoud was only one of some three hundred significant commanders. That was a very telling indication of the fighting spirit of the mujahideen.
*Just the year before Wilson’s visit, he had been the linchpin in a secret effort with the United States to trick Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi into provoking an Egyptian retaliatory invasion. At the last minute the plan to cut the Libyan leader down to size had been scuttled, but the effort had demonstrated Abu Ghazala’s paramount significance to the United States.
*Wilson, unaware of Gust’s and the Agency’s suspicions, had attempted to put the best spin on the weapons disasters by suggesting that his friend Mohammed had been deceived by his generals. In retrospect, he acknowledges, “Abu Ghazala was probably also trying to dump his old shit from his warehouses.” What Wilson came to realize was that his friend was eager to help the CIA but also deeply interested in getting as many dollars as possible for his huge obsolescent inventories of Soviet weaponry.
On a later trip, Avrakotos would be amazed to see just how ambitious a merchant of death Charlie’s friend had become. He remembers talking to Mohammed’s aide General Yahia al Gamal, whom everyone referred to as “General Ya-Ya.” Yahia kept running in and out of a perfumed room next door to his suite of offices. There was a heavy aroma of incense, and Gust finally asked, “Who the fuck do you have in there?” Yahia answered, “The Iraqis are in one room, the Iranians in another.” Avrakotos instantly put it all together: “Mohammed was selling weapons to us to kill Russians in Afghanistan, selling weapons to Iraq to kill Iranians, and selling weapons to Iranians to kill Iraqis.”
*There is some disagreement here among experts as to the date and identity of the weapon that Avrakotos is describing in this passage. This account was used because it reflected the memory of both Avrakotos and Wilson.
*Needless to say, the kind of tactics the CIA was at least indirectly responsible for promoting would have resulted in mass firings and Watergate-size scandals had any of them been implemented in Central America. Cannistraro, for example, was reprimanded and transferred for mere words in a manual urging assassination as a tactic.
*The Saudis received Casey regally, and the director took to the role. Avrakotos was impressed with how effective his briefing was. The king signed off on the money transfers without asking any questions. The director had other business as well. As a favor to President Reagan, the Saudis were, at the time, secretly providing the Contras with a million dollars a month. Prince Bandar had flown in as translator, and when Casey began to talk about what the Saudis might do to help out in other arenas, Avrakotos quickly excused himself. Gust already knew that things were being done for the Contras and in Iran that he wanted no part of. He could almost picture himself under the bright lights of a congressional hearing having to answer questions about what he and the director had been doing with the Saudis on this visit. He was content to confine his rule-stretching to his arena alone.
*That did not apply to agents operating under technical cover from the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The station chief during this time was a short, feisty man who rode his bicycle around Kabul as a means of gauging the morale of the Soviet soldiers. Avrakotos eventually had to replace him when he appeared to be acting erratically under the strain.
*These explicit goals of the CIA campaign were never discussed in any official capacity. The Agency’s lawyers, not to mention high-ranking officials like John McMahon, were adamant about not becoming involved in anything remotely resembling assassination.
*Hinton had just come off a tour in El Salvador, and the Reagan administration was constantly under attack in Congress and by the press for its support of the Salvadoran military, which was engaged in bloody death-squad murders.
*In honor of the congressman’s role as the founding patron, he was taken to the program’s secret facility fifty miles from Washington shortly after the U.S. victory in the Gulf. He was surprised to find the facility to be little more than a huge garage, where the tinkerers were still operating, and he was deeply moved when he was ceremoniously told that he was visiting the Charles Wilson Building.
*No insurgency had ever enjoyed such a range of support: a country (Pakistan) completely dedicated to providing it with sanctuary, training, and arms, even sending its own soldiers along as advisers on military operations; a banker (Saudi Arabia) that provided hundreds of millions in funds with no strings attached; governments (Egypt and China) that served as arms suppliers; and the full backing of a superpower (the United States through the CIA). All of that plus various kinds of support from different Muslim movements and governments, as well as the intelligence services of England, France, Canada, Germany, Singapore, and other countries.
*Eiva had a particularly close relationship with one of the extreme right-wing aides of Senator Malcolm Wallop, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and his influence was definitely a factor in Wallop’s later public denunciation of McMahon. It was a truly terrifying time for the CIA’s number two man, now a senior executive at Lockheed. Although he makes a brave effort to claim that it did not bother him so much, that is not the way his colleagues on the seventh floor remember the experience.
*Vickers had thought highly of Piekney and praised him to Avrakotos. He felt the station chief had done a good job making sure the Pakistanis went along with the Agency’s radical escalations.
*The other kinds of public criticisms dealt with Pakistani corruption, occasionally with charges that the mujahideen were selling drugs, and finally that the CIA was refusing to give the freedom fighters the kind of weapons they needed. This latter charge was, of course, almost welcome because it provided cover for what the Agency was, in fact, doing.
*Operatives like Bearden explain that their main reason for hating the press is that whenever a reporter says anything about them, whether good or bad, true or false, it inevitably triggers a query from headquarters to respond in writing. That eats up time and, depending on the situation, results in bad feelings about the officer or at best leaves him no better off than before the interruption of his work. So the idea of being left alone to simply “kill Russians” was considered too good to be true.
*Gust figured he had made Mike Vickers. No other GS-12 in the Agency had ever had such a commission.
One of the reasons Avrakotos had refused Bill Casey’s request that he reorganize his group into an official task force was that he knew he would have then been compelled to fill Vickers’s position with a military specialist several grades above Mike.
*When news of this commingling of funds surfaced several months later, during the Iran-Contra scandal, Wilson was so worried that the entire program might founder that he cut short his worldwide junket with Sweetums to find out what happened and then to hold a press conference to help the Agency put out the fire. The scandal never spread because the money was kept in the account only overnight, and according to congressional investigators the Afghan funds were not affected.
*Later, the House Democratic leadership, enraged by what they learned about Iran-Contra, tried to pass a law calling for instantaneous alerts whenever a covert operation was launched. Wilson, from his Intelligence Committee slot, killed it in spite of the fact that it probably would have passed.