Charlie Wilson's War (38 page)

Nothing is ever simple in the clandestine world, and Gust was soon beset with complaints from the Pakistanis that they should have been given the contract. No doubt some general wanted to skim profits, but Avrakotos didn’t care who stuck his hand in the till just so long as the price the Agency paid was less than he could get anywhere else. It was important to keep the Pakistanis happy, so he gave them a contract as well.

All of this was insignificant, however, compared to what happened when Avrakotos moved to play the China card. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese army had once been equipped and trained by the Soviet Union, and the military alliance between these two powers had terrified the West. But by the time of the Afghan invasion they had become bitter foes. Thirty Soviet divisions were massed on the Chinese border, and China had good reason to believe that an attack (perhaps nuclear) might be launched at any time. They never missed a chance to urge Western countries to take a hard line toward the mounting Soviet threat.

Still, no one thought the Chinese government would risk Soviet wrath by becoming the major arms merchant for the Afghan rebels. This came about through the efforts of a brilliant young station chief in Beijing, Joe DiTrani. Fluent in Mandarin and married to a Chinese woman, he presented headquarters with the novel suggestion that the Chinese might be willing to manufacture Soviet-designed weapons for the jihad. DiTrani reminded Avrakotos of a young Frank Sinatra; “Broadway Joe,” Gust called him. “The thing we had to do in China,” explains Gust, “was to convince the Chinese that we not only wanted to fuck the Russians…[but] we were going to win. Joe did that.”

DiTrani had asked his Chinese counterparts, “Do you think we’d have people in Kabul and Pakistan who are not like me? Look at me. I speak your language. I married one of your people. We have people like me everywhere. We can’t lose.”

“He did a marvelous con job,” says Avrakotos admiringly. The Chinese connection was one of the most tightly held secrets of its day. Only two or three of Avrakotos’s colleagues from the task force knew about it. Perhaps no more than ten people in the whole Agency were read in. The Chinese still do not acknowledge that they provided such arms.

To Avrakotos it was delicious revenge: “Just the thought of using Chinese Communist guns to kill Russians—just the irony of it. Getting two guys on the same side fucking each other makes it easier for you to fuck both of them, and aside from just the general idea of fucking each other, their equipment was good—top-notch—and it was cheap.”

The first order was for millions of dollars' worth of basic weapons: AK-47 assault rifles, Dashika 12.7mm machine guns, antitank RPGs, and lots of ammunition. To explain the significance of this new source of high-quality, low-price weaponry for the mujahideen, Avrakotos offered another sexual analogy: “Operating in the black market is like trying to get laid in a city you don’t know. In a strange city, if you have enough money, you’re bound to find something, but there might be a disease contracted, you might get rolled or arrested, and there’s no telling how much it will cost. With your wife, it’s predictable and in a steady quantity.”

By mid-1984 Avrakotos was using Charlie’s money to take the CIA out of the world’s black-market whorehouses and into contractual relationships with governments that could provide the Agency with sound, reliable killing devices at a fixed price. He was amazed at how eager the Chinese were to get into this game. To his delight, he discovered that they were prepared to sell at close to cost. That increased his purchasing power dramatically.

“It was like the old days, when the Italians would produce shoes for forty dollars and the Chinese would come in at two dollars for the same thing,” says Avrakotos. “For example, AK-47s on the black market were going for $299. Once I got the Egyptians to start up a production line, the price went down to $139. With the Chinese in it, I was able to get them for less than $100.” Mines offered an even more dramatic savings. “On the black market some were going for as much as $500 apiece. With the Egyptians it dropped to $275. But with the Chinese in the game, it went down to $75, and then the Egyptians had to match it.”

Of Wilson’s $50 million, $38 million went to the Chinese. The pipeline to the mujahideen suddenly filled up with a quantity of goods unimaginable just a year before. By late fall 1984, cargo ships filled with Soviet-designed weapons began moving from Shanghai, disguised as junks for the 5,200-nautical-mile run to Karachi.

At about this time Avrakotos received a small gift from the gods. As well as things were going, the Agency was still deeply reluctant to undertake the kind of sustained escalation he had in mind. The concern was not just fear of Soviet moves on Pakistan but the trickier charge that the Agency was pursuing a cynical policy of fighting to the last Afghan.

A compelling answer to this accusation came right out of the sky, from the National Security Agency, whose job it is to eavesdrop on enemies and friends abroad. No one knows exactly how many intercepts the NSA’s sensitive ears picked up listening to the Soviet’s 40th Army in Afghanistan. Day after day, week after week, teams of aging Russian émigrés sat about secret Agency facilities, translating every sort of Soviet communication. By chance one of these was a tape of a Soviet operation in the spring of 1985 against a 12.7mm Dashika heavy-machine-gun warrior.

This was the gun that Howard Hart so admired and upon which he had rested the entire anti-aircraft capability of the mujahideen. The Dashika had profound shortcomings, most notably its inability to break through the armor of the helicopter. But when fired down on a helicopter from a mountaintop it could be lethal, and on this occasion the radio intercepts revealed an amazing drama.

The tape began as one helicopter went down—$10 million worth of Soviet hardware felled by a lone man in a mountain perch with a single 12.7mm burst. Enraged, another chopper came in to finish the mujahid off, and it went down too. The pilot had wired through to Kabul for reinforcements, so in came a Spetsnaz platoon—the Soviet’s Green Berets—in a troop transport helicopter. The gunner shot this down too, killing some twenty more soldiers.

This was Audie Murphy in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the radio intercepts vividly captured the Soviets sense of utter impotence as they talked back and forth about the terrible losses this Afghan warrior was inflicting on their troops. It is not clear whether the Soviets ever did finish off the mujahid. It’s possible that he was assisted by another Afghan handling the ammunition, but what emerged with great clarity was that one man with one $6,000 machine gun had managed to wipe out dozens of the Soviet’ most elite soldiers and perhaps $20 million worth of equipment. The story of this one man’s heroics energized everyone on Gust’s team. If one mujahid could pull off such a stunt, imagine what might happen to the Soviets over the course of several years.

This tape of “Mohammed the Conqueror” became a powerful piece of mood music. Avrakotos gave a copy of it to Casey, who ended up playing it in his limousine coming from and going to Congress. There were few stories of mujahideen triumphs, and this one bought Avrakotos some much needed running room with Wilson, who was fanatically pushing Gust to buy the Oerlikons.

The two were now meeting at least once a week in Wilson’s office. Avrakotos played his role to the hilt, leaving a slight question mark in the congressman’s mind as he jokingly threatened to rub Wilson out if he ever blew Gust’s cover, and delighting Charlie with demeaning stories about Chuck Cogan. These two bureaucratic outlaws seemed to have found a common bond in ridiculing the polo-playing Harvard elitist. The jokes would also extend to Cogan’s deputy, the milquetoast Tom Twetten, who, both decided, bore a striking resemblance to the children’s television host Mr. Rogers. A few years later, to Gust’s intense dismay, that “wimp” would replace Clair George as the director of Operations. But back then Avrakotos and Wilson saw themselves as mounting a rear-guard action to revitalize a CIA that had become paralyzed by cowardice. They were determined once and for all to move their country to stand up for freedom and to punish tyranny. On that score, they might as well have had as their mantra an old Barry Goldwater slogan: “Moderation in the pursuit of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the pursuit of justice is no vice.” Since the conspiratorial part of their partnership was hidden, none of the Agency’s leaders on the seventh floor was ever prepared for the precision attacks that Wilson was now able to deliver in order to open the doors for Avrakotos to put his own bureaucratic black arts to work. What this meant was that for the next two years, while Chuck Cogan was, happily, out of Wilson’s line of fire in Paris and Tom Twetten was skillfully avoiding any confrontation with the excitable congressman, Charlie and Gust opened the secret-war throttle to levels never before deemed possible.

A
vrakotos was not a morning person. By the time he left his row house in McLean, Virginia, and placed his plastic coffee cup on the special holder next to the driver’s seat, most of the Agency’s senior officers were already at their desks. It was just a four-or five-minute drive to Langley, and everyone would immediately recognize the Greek by his car. It was a 1976 emerald Coupe de Ville, the last of the truly big Cadillacs, with tufted green damask upholstery and a CB radio antenna jutting up from the back. Avrakotos had bought it in Philadelphia from “a Mafia teamster guy in a bar.” It was a strange sight, this would-be wrecker of the Soviet empire maneuvering into the line of spaces reserved for Chuck Cogan and the other understated senior officers running operations around the world.

Bill Casey would arrive in a chauffeur-driven car. Most of the other cars in the line where Avrakotos was authorized to park were BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, or Saabs. There were a Jaguar and a few Porsches, even a Ferrari. As far as Avrakotos could make out, there wasn’t an American car in the whole row.

The Greek took a perverse delight in pulling into his parking spot and greeting his fellow officers with excessive good cheer. The preposterous hubcaps on the Cadillac were priced at $200 each. He knew it embarrassed his well-bred colleagues to see a fellow officer in the kind of car, as he says, “that only gangsters and niggers drive.”

After work, Avrakotos would sometimes stop in front of the building to offer his secretaries a ride home. Susan, the beautiful black woman who always passed on information to him and who'd had a shouting incident with Alan Fiers, used to complain each time she got into the gaudy machine. “I hate it. Everybody’s looking at me. They think I’m some kind of whore. Why can’t you buy a white man’s BMW or something?” she’d ask him.

But the Cadillac was his badge of honor as well as a kind of shield. His mother had taught him about the evil eye, that ancient belief that certain people have the power to do all kinds of harm just by wishing ill on an enemy with a stare. Gust had more than his share of enemies, and the Cadillac was a kind of amulet, a message to all those who might have bad intentions that they shouldn’t screw with this street fighter.

He was now forty-seven. His entire adult life had been spent in the CIA; it was home. But once he left the car, Avrakotos only occasionally entered through the Agency’s front door, where lines of nameless stars—each commemorating an officer killed in the line of service—are chiseled into the white marble walls. He figured he had known almost half of the case officers on the wall—eight alone lost in the bombing of the Beirut embassy more than a year earlier, in April 1983. Gust had particularly mourned Deputy Station Chief Ken Haas, one of those brilliant, exuberant tough guys who’d reminded Avrakotos why he loved the CIA. The two had gotten drunk together in Frankfurt. Gust had known he could count on Haas if there ever was a crisis, but some Iranian scum had wasted him.

Avrakotos was not the type to stop and stare, but the symbolism, designed to inculcate a sense of mission and sacrifice in the minds of the agents of the Clandestine Services, was not lost on him. The reason he chose not to pass this way was because of a new scanning device that tended to reject his plastic ID card. Throughout the day he treated his card like a string of worry beads, picking away at its edges, bending it back and forth and thus altering the electronic signature. It was embarrassing to be turned back from the front door, so he usually took the side entrance, where an old scanner never denied him entry.

His office was on the sixth floor, but it didn’t really matter what floor you were assigned to at headquarters. All of them looked the same. Occasionally, Gust would think how weird it was to be back in this white-walled sterile atmosphere where everyone wore coats and ties and pretended to fit into a mold. He knew it was a lie.

He understood the thinking behind the minimalist architectural style. Its Spartan design was supposed to promote discipline and purpose, but it was a fraud: overseas, a case officer was an individual, swimming in the inky sea of the culture he was part of. He led a life without any real rules. “You can do almost anything except screw naked little girls. But then you’re supposed to come back to Langley and be Mr. Goody Two-Shoes. No one likes it.”

At times Avrakotos would wander the halls, just to see the way everyone lived and worked. It wasn’t really done in this compartmentalized world, but Gust knew he would find a certain amount of jazz once he opened one of the white office doors lining the corridors of Langley. Acording to Avrakotos, the Agency at that time allowed its officers to paint the inside of their doors whatever color they wanted. So there were blues, yellows, and greens. It was a way of establishing one’s independence. Farther inside there were the trophies from days abroad: menacing masks from Indonesia, shrunken heads, Buddhas, icons, and always posters from the exotic places where these case officers had once roamed. Avrakotos understood that this was what kept everyone sane, kept them from feeling humiliated by the sterile bureaucratic sameness that made it seem as if they were all lab technicians, instead of espionage agents for the greatest country in the world.

The South Asia Operations Group, the formal name given to the agents assigned to the cluster of countries through which Gust exercised so much clandestine power, was located on the sixth floor, one down from the director’s floor in what is called the “vaulted area.” These case officers were responsible not only for the Afghan war but for India and Iran as well. The entire suite that made up the South Asia Operations Group was nothing less than a giant strong room with a heavy metal door and combination lock. They didn’t even have to put their classified documents into safes when they went home at night: the office was the safe.

It was easy to know which suite belonged to the Iran branch. Persian rugs covered the floor, maps and Iranian flags hung on the wall, along with a huge picture of the young Shah, entitled “The Hope of Democracy of Iran.” His father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, had been installed by the CIA in 1953. Now, five years into Khomeini’s virulently anti-American regime, Gust’s Iranian agents had pulled off what they considered a master technical strike. They had blocked the TV signals on all Iranian channels and broadcast a speech from the young Shah. There had been a caviar-and-Russian-vodka party in the Iran section that day to celebrate this stunt.

There was little the Agency could do directly against Khomeini. But indirectly it was doing tremendous damage by providing covert assistance to Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis for their bloody war with Iran. As explained by Ed Juchniewicz—Avrakotos’s patron and the number two man in the Operations Division at that time—they were just leveling the playing field: “We didn’t want either side to have the advantage. We just wanted them to kick the shit out of each other.”

Gust’s Iranian officers would look at satellite photographs that showed “the human waves” surging into battle. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian teenagers—all carrying plastic keys that the Ayatollah insisted would grant them entry into Paradise if they died in battle—had already perished in this mindless Muslim war. Gust, too, looked at the satellite images and felt no remorse.

Bleeding the Ayatollah was what the Iran branch was all about. In Gust’s mind, there was nothing wrong with a bit of realpolitik; he approved of it wholeheartedly and knew he had good men in place in the Iranian section. There was little more that could be done, and he only spent perhaps 15 percent of his time supervising them. His real passions lay in the neighboring suite of offices.

The Pakistan-Afghanistan branch was located in the vault, in an area totally lacking in character: government-gray walls partitioned to create semiprivate work spaces. Although every desk had a telephone and typewriter, there were few computers. It could have been mistaken for an old-fashioned newsroom, save for the huge map of Afghanistan and the romantic, poster-size pictures of mujahideen on horseback. A doctored photograph showed a Russian tank with the hammer-and-sickle insignia looming in front of the Houses of Parliament. The inscription read, “This year Afghanistan, next year London.” Gust’s propaganda team had the same tank in front of the Arc de Triomphe—“This year Kabul, next year Paris”—as well as ones for Germany, Holland, and Italy.

On the surface, officers working in the Pakistan-Afghanistan branch looked like everyone else in the operations directorate. They were respectably dressed and well turned out. But there was a difference. For all practical purposes, Gust might as well have placed a sign on the outer door that read, “No Wasps Need Apply.”

The entire staff of the Afghan branch numbered only fourteen men and women—rounding off, Gust referred to them as “the Dirty Dozen.” It would remain an article of pride with Gust that the core group stayed small, even as the program grew to almost $1 billion a year. The numbers were deceptive because the fourteen were able to draw upon hundreds of Agency people, both at headquarters and around the world. “If we wanted a pamphlet in German, one guy could go get sixty people to work on getting those pamphlets out. Each person could network and draw on anyone he wanted.”

Nevertheless, when it came to the core group, this was as large as Gust would permit it to grow. After all, it was good cover: how could so few people be directing something so big? Avrakotos took particular pride in comparing his lean staff to the Central America task force, with its ninety agents bumping into one another as they micromanaged the disastrous Contra war.

“I took people no one wanted,” he says. “I took the outcasts. It was my way of demonstrating that you don’t have to go to Amherst to succeed. Hardly any of us were Ivy Leaguers. I had the worst band of derelicts ever assembled: “There was Dwayne, the intelligence analyst, all twisted up from childhood bouts with polio. He could barely walk. It would take him ten minutes to go take a piss. But he had a passionate, underdog streak. He was my walking encyclopedia about the Russians and everything to do with the mujahideen. And I would use him to grind out bureaucratic memos defending the program from its attackers.”

Avrakotos was convinced that the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate, where the analysts came from, was professionally invested in the mujahideen’s defeat; that’s what they had been predicting all along and were still predicting in their papers. He tapped Dwayne to counter them. “I could tell him. ‘Okay, we need three memos this morning: one to answer the Pentagon, one to answer some stupid article in the press, and one to counter our own analysts.’”

Soon Gust had Dwayne publishing a weekly Afghan update that he distributed as a top-secret document to forty of the main policy makers at the State Department, White House, Pentagon, and inside the CIA. It showed that the mujahideen were hurting the Russians and that they were unwilling to quit. Gust knew that if he gave these reports a high enough classification, they’d be sure to leak—which was his intention.

Then there was Larry Penn, “the New York Jew.” A Latin America specialist, he spoke Spanish and Portuguese. He and Gust had gone through the Agency’s Camp Peary boot camp together. And they had both seen themselves as outsiders. “Larry was the only Jew ever sent to Saudi Arabia from the Afghan program,” Gust recalled. “He has the map of Tel Aviv on his face, but on his visa he put down ‘Unitarian’ on the line that asks about religion.” Under Avrakotos, the balding, bug-eyed Penn was in direct charge of the Afghan war effort. He was also a lawyer, and that turned out to be immensely valuable to Gust, who was convinced that if he listened to the Agency’s in-house lawyers, nothing would be possible. Gust insisted that Penn double as his “consigliere.”

Time and again Penn who would warn Avrakotos, “You’ll go to the slammer for this.” But then he would set about finding ways to bypass the lawyers’ most recent prohibitions. “These aren’t terrorist devices or assassination techniques,” he would conclude. And this lovely euphemism would become the official description of a particularly lethal weapon for the mujahideen.

Penn’s legal rulings were of enormous importance, since he interpreted how Avrakotos could delegate the dollar-for-dollar matching grants that the Saudis had contributed to the secret war. According to Penn, those funds were not subject to the same restrictions that guided congressional appropriations. So Gust committed $44 million of those liberated CIA-controlled funds to acquire $44 million worth of British Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles, non-Soviet weapons that otherwise would have required special authorization for the CIA to pass on to the Afghans.

Moving money into the black market and through all of the secret channels of the world of espionage was the special preserve of a man whom everyone called “Hilly Billy.” Avrakotos describes him proudly as a man with a “huge chip on his shoulder.” Gust knew well how easy it was to get stymied moving millions of dollars of unacknowledged funds. “Have you ever tried to open an unnumbered Swiss bank account for the U.S. government? It takes six months because of all the red tape. The Agency can do it in four to six weeks because they’re good. But this guy, Hilly Billy, could do it in twelve hours.” By late 1985, Hilly Billy would be moving $1 billion a year through those secret channels. A sign over his desk read, “War Is Not Cheap.”

The man tapped to run psychological warfare was Paul Broadbent, a second-generation American who had grown up in a Russian neighborhood of Cleveland. “He was the ‘hearts and minds’ expert,” Gust says, “the kind of guy who pulls the wings off of flies, dangerous if you don’t channel him properly. I told him, ‘The first time I see you treating any of my people mean, I’ll fire you. Take it out on the Russian cocksuckers.’ Paul knew the Russian mind. He kept trying to get me to give him twenty portable radio stations that he could program with demoralizing psychological broadcasts. He finally got two portable man packs to beam stuff into the Russian troops. The problem is that none of the mujahideen wanted to do it. They didn’t think it was manly. Who would want to carry a radio transmitter when you can fire a missile?”