Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  At the same time, we were also looking for a higher-caliber round that could penetrate the armor of the Hind helicopter. Dempsey recalls finding a Chinese antiarmor tungsten round that was not as good as the higher-velocity SLAP (saboted light-armor penetrator) round, but it was cheaper at just a dollar a round rather than $15 to $20. This was a significant difference when we needed to supply approximately 120,000 fighters. So we married the tungsten round to the 12.7-millimeter machine gun, which is very similar to the U.S.-manufactured .50-caliber. It worked well but not great. Still, it got the job done and helped knock out Soviet aircraft.

  The procurement of weapons came through a somewhat complicated budgeting device known as end-of-year supplemental funding—that is, whatever the Department of Defense hadn’t managed to spend by the last day of the fiscal year, September 30. Covert action is often paid for with end-of-year funds. Weeks ahead of time we would get a report that read, “The Department of Defense is going to have this amount, and it looks like we’ll get this much.” That meant we had to have cables with all our field stations and suppliers around the world ready to go, with someone on the other end agreeing to the order. If you were a day late, the money would be gone. There were some discretionary funds that didn’t have to be committed in this way, but they amounted to peanuts when compared to the end-of-year Pentagon funds. And we never knew exactly how much we were going to get. Congress did not want a line item.

  Every year that I was there, DOD always had a large surplus. For the Pentagon, $1 billion is a relatively small number, but there were other high-cost technical programs, such as satellites, that had to be funded. The Stingers were different—a direct purchase from the Pentagon. They weren’t too expensive—at around $60,000 each—so a few million dollars got you a lot of these lethal weapons. Still, it remained to be seen whether the mujahideen could be trained to fire them effectively at the Hinds, and whether the Stinger’s guidance system was superior to the Soviet’s antimissile technology, despite our field testing.

  The entire time I was running the task force, the only calls I ever received from the White House were requests for a surge prompted by a news story—“Can you ramp up operations in the field as fast as possible?” But given our funding system, a surge was impossible, since virtually all major purchases were made on the last day of the fiscal year, and there was nothing left to surge with after that: the piggy bank was empty. Likewise, the weapon assembly lines around the world took months to crank up; there were no shelf items to draw upon. This was not an ideal way to run a war, but somehow it worked.

  In the summer of 1986 we knew we would be getting a huge amount of money in addition to the end-of-year surplus, thanks largely to items Charlie Wilson was inserting into appropriations legislation. Instead of getting $200 million, we received $350 million, not counting matching funds from the Saudis.

  When Tim Burton and I traveled abroad that August to make sure we had everything in place for the end of the fiscal year, our first stop was Egypt. There was an arms factory there built with U.S. tax dollars that was two blocks long. For the Egyptians, our orders represented a huge infusion of cash, which helped them build up their arms industry. Wilson had particularly close relations with the Egyptians. Consequently, we were buying about 60 percent of our weapons from Egypt and 40 percent from China. One of the most important things we did was to change the equation to 60 percent Chinese and 40 percent Egyptian. This was critically important—both in terms of cost savings and quality. The Chinese-made weapons were cheaper and more reliable. Why use both the Chinese and the Egyptian? If an incident such as that which occurred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square had happened in either country during our Afghanistan tenure, we would not have wanted to be solely reliant on one country. So we had to have at least two suppliers, and sometimes you paid a higher price in order to keep two suppliers going.

  I enjoyed negotiating these deals. Sometimes on these trips, I would wonder if I had missed my true calling. Still, negotiating with the Egyptians over arms pricing wasn’t easy, and sometimes the bartering lasted several days. On one trip to Cairo, we ran into stiff opposition over the price to be paid for an AK-47, which practically every Afghan fighter carried into the battlefield. As I recall, the Egyptians were demanding $165 per weapon, and we were holding firm at $145. Fortunately, when the negotiation reached an impasse, we enjoyed an extended interruption in the bartering, because our guests had programmed a visit for us to Mount Sinai and Saint Catherine’s fourth-century active monastery. It was a fascinating trip by helicopter. We flew fast and low across the Sinai Desert. At that time, this historic site had few roads to it and was virtually devoid of tourists.

  The chief Egyptian negotiator came along for the trip. When we arrived at Mount Sinai, he personally walked me to the biblical “burning bush,” through which, in Exodus 3:2–8, God is said to have told Moses to save the Hebrews. After a few minutes of reflection, he reverently asked me what I thought about visiting this sacred site. Without hesitation, I remarked that it was an amazing experience, adding in a hushed and grave tone that the burning bush had spoken to me. I paused for effect, then added: “It said, ‘The price is one forty-five.’” Apparently, our host had a good sense of humor, and everyone found time for a deep laugh of relief. We settled at $145 without any further negotiation. The Egyptians were careful, however, not to bring me back to the bush on future trips when we were negotiating arms prices.

  I drove the same kind of tough bargain with a Greek shipowner we met with after leaving Egypt. I spent two days negotiating a lease for his ship and whittled him down to the last dollar. The ship would take the weapons from Cairo to Karachi, in Pakistan. Then they would be shipped by train up to the Afghan border, where they would be loaded on trucks. (We were probably one of the largest owners of Toyota pickup trucks in the world at that time, because those were the trucks best suited for use on the border.) Once the trucks had gone as far as they could, the weapons would be loaded onto mules for the final leg of the trip, through Afghanistan’s treacherous mountain passes.

  One year, we bought nine thousand mules from the Chinese, and the Chinese supplier drove them, as in an old-fashioned Western cattle drive, across China and into Pakistan. At one point, someone suggested we go to Nigeria to buy inexpensive mules, which we did. What did I know about mules? I grew up in Philadelphia. But I quickly learned that we needed special mules, ones acclimated to high altitude. We couldn’t take a Nigerian or Tennessee mule to Afghanistan. “Using a Tennessee mule that hasn’t ever been above a thousand feet in the mountains of Afghanistan wouldn’t work,” Burton said.6 Bert Dunn, then the associate deputy director of operations, made the same point, drawing upon his West Virginia roots. Needless to say, the Nigerian mules didn’t work out, and the Afghans probably used them for field food rations instead. Burton remembers procuring mules from China, then herding and trucking them to the Afghan border to turn them over to the mujahideen. He recalls that it was “an extraordinarily successful operation,” particularly considering the parties involved. I would agree that it was, indeed, one of the most complicated parts of the whole operation.

  There was an art to dealing with the Chinese, for mules and, far more important, for weapons. Socializing was important for building rapport and trust, and our meetings were all very structured. The first half hour would be devoted to testimonials. I would begin, “We trust you. Friendship is important. We’re here not because we’re looking for weapons but because it’s our mutual destiny.” This would be translated. Then we’d take a break. They would come back and give me the same speech. Later in the day, we would go out to dinner. Then, the next day, we would finally get down to business.

  “Okay, this is what I’m looking for,” I’d say. “What are the best prices you can give us? Because we are friends, good friends. And we are in this together, and we have a common enemy, the Russians.”

  I was, of course, negotiating with representatives of the People’s Liberation Army. They would g
o away to consider what we had offered, and then they would come back with their prices. I’d look at my price sheet, prepared by Burton and Dempsey, and because we’d decided ahead of time what we were prepared to pay, we would start the haggling. The Chinese knew exactly where the weapons were going, and one of the reasons I got a good price with a minimum of haggling was they wanted to be helpful in the fight against the Russians.

  The only inappropriate weapon that almost got into the Afghan inventory was the Swiss-made twenty-millimeter Oerlikon cannon, which fired large and very expensive cartridges. It wasn’t called a cannon by accident. It was way too large and cumbersome for an insurgency force and would have required tremendous logistical support to position it in the field. Also, the cost of feeding this cannon an ample supply of shells at three hundred rounds per minute would have been extremely high and would have cut into the purchase of other, more valuable weapon systems.

  My assumption is that prior to my forming the task force, Wilson and Avrakotos had settled on the Oerlikon out of desperation, because up until then all other efforts to deter the menacing Russian Mi-24 helicopter had failed. The Redeye, SAM7, and Blowpipe had all come up short. Still, until we neutralized the Soviet helicopters, our arms supply train would be badly debilitated. Wilson tried to force-feed the Oerlikon to the task force, and in the end Avrakotos apparently acquiesced and bought a few of them, partly to keep Wilson happy and supporting funding for the program, but as I recall, they never made it into combat. The chief of the Near East Division, Tom Twetten, remembers Wilson’s insistence on using the Swiss weapons as well.7

  When I took over as chief of the task force, I was briefed about the Oerlikon with great skepticism by the staff, especially Dempsey and Burton. Fortunately, before we got too far down the road with the Swiss arms company on a new and major contract, the Stinger emerged as a more viable option, and I canceled any further acquisitions of the Oerlikon gun and replacement ammunition.

  While we factored in the inevitable slippage of weapons we shipped into Afghanistan, we worked hard to make sure only a small percentage “fell off the back of the truck,” as it were. The Stingers were different; we carefully controlled all of them. Each one had a serial number. A mujahideen commander would not get a new one, via our go-betweens in Pakistani intelligence, until he had given back the expended tube after an attack, and the Stingers went only to the mujahideen leaders considered most reliable. Those who got them were specially trained and monitored, and when I visited the facilities to look at where the weapons were being kept and logged in, I was always impressed with the thoroughness of the mujahideen’s efforts. There was a great deal of management oversight. One of the things our case officers did in Pakistan was regularly go through the gun markets in the North West Frontier and elsewhere to determine how many of our weapons found their way into the market, and I was consistently surprised that almost nothing, and certainly no Stingers, showed up there.

  In 1986, great anticipation greeted the arrival of the Stingers in theater. Even though we had seen the tests and knew how deadly these missiles were, firing them required certain skill and precision. A PhD wasn’t necessary, but a certain facility with technology was helpful. Could this ragtag group of mujahideen fighters be trained to handle a sophisticated weapon? I never had any doubt that they could.

  THREE

  “Your Friend Called from the Airport”

  Chile, 1971–74

  As I look back on it now, Santiago was an indescribably exotic first foreign assignment. It was September 1973, and rumors of a military coup against President Salvador Allende had been swirling for months. There had already been one attempt. Street protests by Allende opponents made Santiago chaotic. Strikes and economic disarray made basic necessities difficult to find. Occasional bomb explosions rocked the capital. The whole country seemed exhausted, waiting.

  I was at Da Carla, a noisy Italian restaurant in downtown Santiago, for lunch on September 9, when a colleague joined my table and whispered in my ear: “Call home immediately; it’s urgent.” I ducked out as discreetly as I could, to get back to the station to call from a secure line. I thought I knew what my wife would tell me. Amid all the chaos, Pat, who had never been outside the United States and Bermuda before we came to Chile, was raising five young children. She could have been calling me about any number of urgent matters. But my instincts were right. “Your friend called from the airport,” she told me. “He’s leaving the country. He told me to tell you, ‘The military has decided to move. It’s going to happen on September eleventh. The navy will lead it off.’”

  It was the first indication received by any member of the CIA station in Santiago that the coup had been set in motion. A second source later called the station; we agreed to meet at his house just after dark. He confirmed the earlier report and added one key detail, the time the coup would begin: 7:00 a.m. With two sources, I sent CIA headquarters in Langley a top secret cable—a CRITIC, which overrides all other traffic worldwide and goes to the highest levels of government. Markings on the document, declassified in redacted form in 2000, indicate that it was distributed to President Nixon and other top U.S. policy makers the following day.1 The source’s name has been blacked out—and I am not at liberty to divulge it now—but his message bears an unadorned sense of urgency: “A COUP ATTEMPT WILL BE INITIATED ON 11 SEPTEMBER. ALL THREE BRANCHES OF THE ARMED FORCES AND THE CARABINEROS ARE INVOLVED IN THIS ACTION. A DECLARATION WILL BE READ ON RADIO AGRICULTURA AT 7 A.M. ON SEPT. 11 … THE CARABINEROS HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR SEIZING PRESIDENT SALVADOR ALLENDE.”2

  This is how the U.S. government learned of the coup. That may be hard for many Americans to believe, given a central conclusion reached in 1975 by the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Frank Church: “There is no doubt that the U.S. government sought a military coup in Chile” in 1970.3 But I can say with conviction, flat out: the CIA did not plot with the military to overthrow Allende in 1973. It’s important to get this straight for the sake of history: the CIA should not be blamed for things it did not do.

  As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Agency has been involved in misguided covert actions, driven by presidential authorization, most of which are well-known by now. But the 1973 overthrow of Allende wasn’t one of them.

  “We helped to keep the opposition in Chile alive, but we did not promote the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973,” said Ed Boring, a longtime Latin America hand and colleague who was in Chile with me at the time.

  A highly respected former State Department official and later an ambassador, Jeffrey Davidow, who was a junior political officer with the State Department in Chile in 1973, noted that the work the U.S. government did was designed to bolster the opposition against Allende so the opposition could hang on until the next elections, but those efforts also, to some degree, had “the effect of roiling the waters” and contributed to the military stepping in. This is a far cry from orchestrating a military coup.

  Even the Church Committee reported, “There is no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the coup, despite frequent allegations of such aid.”4

  Nevertheless, the impression persists that the CIA sponsored the coup that toppled Allende. The confusion arises, I believe, because of one of those misguided covert actions I spoke of. In September 1970, after Allende finished first in a three-way presidential election, President Nixon summoned CIA director Richard Helms to the White House and told him in no uncertain terms to foment a coup.5 Despite the Agency’s assessment that it could not be done, especially with such a short time line, Nixon believed it was essential to U.S. interests in all of Central and South America to keep Allende from taking office. This coup attempt, which Nixon ordered the CIA to conceal from the U.S. ambassador and other American officials in Chile, came to be known as the highly secretive Track II—a secret complement to Track I, the political and propaganda efforts that had been mounted to keep Allende from being elected in the first place.

  Track
II meets my definition of “bad covert action,” for a number of reasons. Conditions were simply not ripe for military action. The Chilean military was standing behind the constitution and wanted no part of a coup after the election. Likewise, the Chilean people were not supportive of blocking Allende. He had been democratically elected, even if his margin of victory was small. Later, his government’s mishandling of the economy would galvanize the people and the military, but as Allende had not yet taken office, there was not even a pretext for action. Not only were the conditions not conducive to lethal action, the cost of military intervention—as Augusto Pinochet’s actions demonstrated years later—was excessive in terms of loss of life and the violation of human rights and democratic freedom. From a policy perspective, and with the advantage of hindsight, I see that the Nixon administration should have heeded the CIA’s advice and limited its efforts to supporting the political opposition and letting the democratic process play out until it was clearer that Allende was in fact pulling Chile into the Soviet orbit.

  Before being assigned to Chile, I had worked the night shift for the Chile Task Force at Langley, synthesizing cables from Santiago into a morning intelligence report for the bosses. It was my first assignment after covert training at the Farm. The station chief in Santiago did not hide his doubts about a coup: “PARAMETER OF ACTION IS EXCEEDINGLY NARROW AND AVAILABLE OPTIONS ARE QUITE LIMITED,” read one cable. “[DO] NOT CONVEY IMPRESSION THAT STATION HAS SUREFIRE METHOD FOR HALTING, LET ALONE TRIGGERING COUP ATTEMPTS,” read another.6 His concerns proved to be well-founded. However, the chief of Latin American covert action at the time recalls that there was a great deal of pressure on him to push hard for a coup. In fact, the headquarter’s covert action chief was sent by DCI Richard Helms to Santiago to explicitly tell the station chief that if he wasn’t prepared to press for a coup, he could return to Washington that day and the covert action chief would take command of the station. The station chief said he would do the best he could, but he remained pessimistic about the likelihood of success.