Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  *Devine, a veteran of the Latin American Division, was most proud of his role in the intensely controversial coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. He felt that this was one of the great accomplishments of the CIA during the Cold War. Before getting Avrakotos’s job he had served as Gust’s head of the Iranian task force and had been deeply involved in all of the Agency’s Iran-Contra efforts. Later, after the Afghan war ended in victory, he was promoted to chief of the Latin American Division.

  *Avrakotos says that Wilson had complained in 1985 when he’d discovered that the Agency had managed to penetrate Pakistan’s nuclear program and was reporting on its progress toward completing the bomb. Gust explained that they had no choice; it was part of their mandate, and they could not pull their punches. However, Avrakotos also says that he pulled off one of his black-clothes performances at a private briefing for Solarz, the subcommittee chairman. “I came late, dressed in black, and told him I had been at a funeral for a member of my family,” Gust said; he knew this would be disarming. He says that Solarz had been impressed to find that the Agency was so effective in its reporting and somewhat dismayed by Avrakotos’s suggestion that Congress might find itself in a terrible position if it cut off aid and Zia changed the rules of the Afghan campaign. He might, for example, begin charging the United States for the services of the ISI and all of the logistical facilities or he might simply cut off the program. If he charged the CIA, the bill would be many billions of dollars a year. Avrakotos also suggests that Wilson may have communicated to Zia the need to back off because in the middle of this, the agents monitoring the Pakistani nuclear operation were able to report that they had been given a signal that Pakistan was halting a critical part of the program.

  *Zia also knew that Wilson was responsible for putting Pakistan and Israel together. They now apparently had a back channel of communications and areas of mutual interest that they were pursuing. This was of enormous value to Pakistan, which otherwise would have had to worry more about Israel sending planes or saboteurs to blow up its nuclear facilities, as Israel had done against Saddam Hussein several years earlier.

  *Andy Eiva and the occasional reporter continued to carp about Pakistani corruption. Some even began to question the CIA’s backing of Afghan fundamentalists. But the stories never went anywhere. The energy and attention of the moment was focused on Oliver North and Iran-Contra. Once again, the mujahideen had been given a clean license to operate without the tut-tutting overview of the coequal branches of government.

  *When Yousaf found out about it later he was furious, complaining about all the mule trips it would take just to replace the bullets wasted in that one gesture. But no one could do anything about it; it was the price the Afghans demanded for fighting.

  *These two engaged in an annual face-off on this issue, with Wilson always attending Solarz’s hearing with the explicit objective of spoiling his tea party. In February 1988 this is how he began his testimony: “Incidentally, Mr. Chairman, before we start, I would like to congratulate all of the friends of India on their acquisition of the peaceful nuclear submarine that has just arrived [from the Soviet Union].”

  *Varennikov cited the Soviets’ ambitious efforts to build a weapon to compete with the MX mobile underground missile, which the United States had announced its intention to build. He said that Yazov had a far bigger one designed at a cost that Varennikov knew the country couldn’t afford. He set out to sabotage it by having a mock-up model made that was so huge that when a man stood by one of the giant wheels he almost couldn’t be seen. The large version was scrapped, although the Defense Ministry went ahead and built the wildly expensive system to keep pace with the American peacekeepers.