Charlie Wilson's War (47 page)

Gust’s next move was pure Greek melodrama. He arrived at the airport for a trip with Vince to Pakistan dressed all in black. Before boarding the plane, he says he cornered Cannistraro and read him his rights: “You know you went to Central America and gave the Agency heartburn and you’re not going to get away with it on this one.”

But it was an incident on the flight from Pakistan that gave Cannistraro a real look at the side of Avrakotos no one would want to have to deal with. They were traveling on diplomatic passports and Gust managed to upgrade them to first class, where they met the interior minister from one of the Gulf States. The Arab, who was drinking heavily, ended up insulting Gust. Gust belted him and followed this up by pulling out his knife and loudly threatening to cut the man’s balls off. Cannistraro watched with horror as Gust proceeded to hurl insults at the bug-eyed minister, accusing him of sinning in the eyes of Allah by drinking.

Cannistraro remembers being quite unnerved by this excessive aggression. “I was afraid to be sitting next to him. I thought the man was going to come back at us with a knife. Gust is not a gentle person.” After describing this incident, the soft-spoken Cannistraro added that there was another moment in Pakistan that was every bit as bad: “He almost throttled the head of the motor pool at the embassy because the man didn’t give him the car he wanted.”

Gust was making a point with Vince. He made only one direct threat at the very beginning of the trip; afterward he was very courteous with his traveling companion, only demonstrating in his inimitable way how he dealt with minor aggravations. No doubt Cannistraro must have wondered what Avrakotos might be prepared to do if he determined someone was a true enemy. This was Dr. Dirty operating in his prime, but as far as Avrakotos is concerned the crowning blow came at dinner in Peshawar, when Gust followed the explicit prescription of his division chief, Bert Dunn, “to make sure to take him to a fucking restaurant where you can get him sick.”

Over the years, Avrakotos had built up a stomach immune to foreign microbes. He says, “I even ate everything in Bujumbura, Burundi, where every white man got sick. I have a cast-iron stomach.” He took Vince to a native restaurant in Peshawar, full of character, singing the praises of the food—calling it “very clean.” Gust ate everything with relish, knowing full well that the next day Vince Cannistraro would be out of the picture. “Bert was absolutely delighted,” Avrakotos recalls. “Bert just loved that Vince was sick for two days and couldn’t do shit. He was like a little country boy who just shot his first squirrel when I told him about it.”

By the time the two returned, Gust felt he needed to say nothing more. He had made his point, and he says that Cannistraro’s report evaluating the CIA program had nothing damaging in it. “It started off by saying the Agency had a well-run program, and it was so wishy-washy that it was meaningless—chicken-shit criticism about procurement and storage of perishables. Nothing about important stuff.”

Although most of this test of wills had been about personality conflicts, the Agency leadership had felt that a principle had been at stake. Never before had any outside agency attempted to investigate and critique the operation side of the CIA’s work, and Gust’s effort to back down Cannistraro was received as an important victory to prevent a dangerous precedent from being established. But that was just round one, and Avrakotos knew that Cannistraro would be back. “Vince could be greatly underestimated by his opponents, including Casey. He has certain qualities that I admire—revenge being one of them.”

Avrakotos found himself in the midst of this unprecedented covert escalation, repeatedly threatened by bizarre challenges from totally unexpected quarters. It was all so strange that he actually came to see himself as a voice of reason facing down perfectly deranged figures, who happened to have the potential to do great damage. The archconservative senators, who had always been so blindly supportive of the Agency in the past, now became the kind of friends who make it unnecessary to have enemies. In the name of trying to help, they seemed quite prepared to bring the whole program down.

Ironically, the only real impact of all of these hard-right assaults may have been to give the program the cover it absolutely needed. The scope and the disquieting details of the Muslim jihad that the CIA was then sponsoring surely warranted Congress’s attention. The Agency was not just flooding Afghanistan with weapons of every of nature; it was now unapologetically moving to equip and train cadres of high-tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower. But reporters did not choose to examine these themes in any depth. And before any congressional skeptics could investigate or seriously question whether the program might be growing too large, Humphrey, Eiva, and Free the Eagle shouted to anyone would listen (and many who didn’t want to) that the CIA was denying the Afghans the weapons the president wanted them to have.

Meanwhile, Democratic liberals and reporters, who might ordinarily have questioned the wisdom of these programs, simply couldn’t figure out how to overcome the impression left by right-wing critics that the CIA’s crime in this case was not doing too much but too little—that McMahon and the Agency were subverting the president’s clear mandate. While the CIA threw itself into arming, training, and funding the largest Muslim jihad in modern history, the only ones to register their outrage and demand change were those who seemed to believe that the CIA’s support was so meaningless as to constitute a betrayal of the Afghans.

O
ne morning in early 1985, Gust Avrakotos noticed a strange phenomenon: a number of junior officers were addressing him as “sir.” Even more peculiar was an encounter with the deputy director for finance, a stuffy functionary who Gust says “always acted like he was Saint Peter at the gate deciding whether you went to heaven or hell.” The man had never even asked Avrakotos to sit down before, but now he got up from his desk to shake Gust’s hand and offer him coffee and a doughnut. And then, one day when Gust arrived for a task force meeting where a group of officers from different departments had been invited to offer advice, a hush came over the room. Most of these officers outranked Avrakotos, but he remembers vividly that “they were quiet and smiling when I came in, and moved aside for me.” Afterward Larry Penn, Avrakotos’s old friend and “consigliere,” couldn’t help commenting that they had acted as if he—Gust Avrakotos, of all people—was “Moses parting the waters.”

What soon became clear to Avrakotos was that he suddenly had enormous power, by virtue of the fact that by 1985 his Afghan program was getting over 50 percent of the CIA’s entire Operations budget. Within a year it would explode again, becoming almost 70 percent. His bosses, Bert Dunn, the Near East division chief, and Clair George, deputy director for Operations, had, of course, far higher rank and responsibility. But he was the one with the authority to dispense hundreds of millions of dollars for killing Russians. That was power.

On the floor below, where the Central American task force operated, Gust’s counterpart Alan Fiers had literally no money for his Contras. Congress had cut the Agency off completely and forbidden them to continue any military support whatsoever. Yet Gust had a half billion to spend, and his “freedom fighters” seemed to be loved by everyone on the Hill. No one spoke ill of them, not even the press. As Gust recalled, “We were the only game in town where you could have excitement, a war, a chance to make a name for yourself. But also it was the holy cause—the one program everyone could be very proud of and identify with.”

What finally convinced Avrakotos that he had arrived was when the grand old man of the Near East Division, Alan Wolfe—who had played such a critical role in setting up Kissinger’s fabled entry to China and who was then serving as chief of station in Rome—asked Gust for dinner and an afternoon of antiquing in London. That meant something huge to Avrakotos, who says, “Wolfe is the kind of guy who only speaks to Cabots, Lodges, and God.” Wolfe was the division chief who had picked Gust to be chief of station in Helsinki—until Bill Graver had come on board and taken back the assignment. For Gust, it was like being invited to Archie Roosevelt’s. That afternoon, the incredibly short and impressive veteran officer talked Afghanistan with Avrakotos. Wolfe spoke seven languages, including Chinese. He had served in Kabul, knew the terrain, knew the culture, and he had just wanted to tell Gust that he was on the right track and “to keep at it.”

After twenty years of being an outsider, it was as if this former renegade was finally part of the establishment of the Directorate of Operations, even flying off alone with the director to the desert kingdom. Once again, the Saudis were late on their payments. It was like pulling teeth to get them to cough up their matching grant, and this time, with the CIA putting up $250 million, Avrakotos was no longer sure they could be counted on. He had urged the director to go personally to collect, and Casey had invited Gust along for the ten-thousand-mile flight in his huge C-141 Starlifter, a kind of flying hotel with a planetary-range communications center.

The Saudis treated Casey as if he were a head of state. In Riyadh, Avrakotos was given his own villa. Casey’s had eleven rooms with thirty exotic bowls, each one filled with a different kind of cashew, the director’s favorite snack. Gust had given his chief a paper with talking points, which Vickers had prepared for the meeting. “I told Casey,” he recalls, “that he should talk to the king about ‘your Muslim brothers,’ about using the money for food for the families, for clothing, weapons, for repairing the mosques. You should talk to him about being the ‘keeper of the faith.’”

“Jesus, fuck, I like that—keeper of the faith,” Casey said. “Oh fuck, I like that—keeper of the faith.”

Avrakotos found the director’s handling of King Fahd masterful. “Casey admired the Saudis. He didn’t look at them as strange fuckers, scratching their balls and wearing funny headdresses. He told them that the mujahideen were getting stronger day by day, and that his men were inspired and motivated by them.”

When the director finished his briefing, the king said, without asking for anything in return, “We will fulfill our promise.” It was a desert agreement. No papers were signed.
*

The amazing feature of the Saudi grant is that the king did not dictate terms. He was content to let the CIA use the money as it saw fit. Gust realized that because of King Fahd’s commitment, the CIA’s Afghans would now have twice the bite.

By the time Avrakotos returned to Langley, he knew he had won more than a massive increase of the Afghan war budget. He now possessed the mystique of having traveled alone on a secret mission with the director. As Avrakotos saw it, half the game in a dicey operation like Afghanistan was getting enough room to operate, and he knew that his superiors would now assume that something had happened on that long flight. The director loved risk-taking operatives. He was a notorious rule breaker himself, famous for bypassing the chain of command to deal directly with the men running his covert operations.

The seventh floor now had to adjust to the likelihood that Avrakotos and Casey had a private understanding. The director’s mumbles could be interpreted to mean almost anything, and Avrakotos, confident that no one would dare go to the old man to see if he really agreed to what Gust might claim, was fully prepared to exploit the situation to the hilt. “If I had a problem I’d say, ‘Casey called me; that’s not what he wants.’”

Meanwhile, Gust’s task force was a beehive of secret activity. The Dirty Dozen were now striking secret deals on a daily basis with intelligence services in China, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Canada, France, and Singapore. They were spending tens of millions in a shot as they began moving unbelievable shipments of weapons and ammunition to the Afghans—millions of AK-47 rounds, divisions’ worth of rifles, mortars, RPGs for hitting tanks, rockets for terrorizing Kabul, 14.5mm heavy machine guns with tracers to fend off the gunships, Dashikas, 120mm mortars—thousands of tons of deadly material.

With hindsight it can be argued that this was the critical year of the war, not just the year of the great U.S. buildup but also the year when it appeared to many at Langley and in the U.S. government that perhaps the CIA had moved with too little, too late and that it might be on the verge of creating an all-time covert disaster.

With hindsight, this was the year the Soviets might actually have succeeded in breaking the resistance. Had it not been for the huge CIA escalation, but specifically the new mix of weapons that Vickers introduced that year, the Soviet offensive might have worked.

The moment of panic—when it seemed as if the Wilson-Avrakotos escalation might backfire—came early in 1985. Ironically, the problem came not from the conventional hard-liners in the Kremlin but from the man usually thought of as the voice of reason and the architect of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev.

The first to get a look at the dark side of Gorbachev were the Pakistanis. Zia and his foreign minister, Yaqub Khan, were in Moscow in 1985 for Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral, when the newly elevated Gorbachev took them aside at the Kremlin and all but threatened to destroy their country if they did not halt support for the mujahideen. He was reportedly brutal in his delivery, declaring that Pakistan was in effect waging war on the Soviet Union and that he was not going to stand for it. Summoning all of his courage, Zia looked Gorbachev straight in the eye and insisted that his country was not involved. With that, the CIA’s key ally left Moscow for Mecca, where he prayed to Allah for courage to continue the jihad.

The CIA didn’t wake up to what Gorbachev had in mind for them until later, when the Kremlin put General Mikhail M. Zaitzev in charge of the Afghan campaign. Zaitzev was the legendary officer who had executed the brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and his appointment was viewed as virtual proof that the Soviets were now committed to prevailing no matter what the cost. Almost immediately upon Zaitzev’s arrival, the 40th Army took to the offensive everywhere.

The battlefield reports coming in that spring were deeply disturbing. Whereas the Soviet forces had previously operated only with huge shows of force, easy to detect and hide from, they were now moving in all kinds of ways and on all fronts. For the first time, the Red Army itself was howling at the doors of Pakistan, its fighter-bombers striking border towns, Soviet battalions and regiments sweeping in to cut off supply lines. There was more of everything—more bombing, more shelling, more gunships prowling the countryside looking for mule and camel caravans to blast. But most unnerving was the introduction of thousands of elite Spetsnaz troops into the fighting.

The Spetsnaz are the Russian equivalent of America’s Green Berets. The most highly trained elite soldiers in the Soviet Union, they had previously been used only for the most technically demanding and sophisticated operations. But in Afghanistan Zaitzev and his commanders were now bringing in these skilled killers by helicopter at night, inserting them behind mujahideen lines to organize ambushes and sabotage raids. For a time they seemed to be an invincible and omnipresent force, spreading terror among the usually stoic mujahideen.

Gorbachev, alarmed at the price the Soviet Union was paying for its Afghan campaign, had given Zaitzev a year to break the back of the resistance. And by the summer and fall of 1985 many Western analysts seemed to think the Soviets were on the verge of pulling it off. The escalation had taken its toll on the mujahideen, who, in spite of their warrior discipline and their astonishing faith in Allah, had become a bit war weary. At the funerals of their fathers and sons and brothers and cousins they rarely wept. They claimed to believe that they were happy for their loved ones who were now in Paradise, but it was hard not to detect a certain exhuastion setting in. They were, after all, just people. The war had been going on for five years, and instead of things getting better they were now facing an enemy that was increasing his ability to punish in ways they had never had to worry about before.

For the first time that year, Avrakotos had to consider the possibility that for once he was playing chicken with an adversary who might not blink. He says, “This was the escalation that scared us because here we were pouring in stuff that would soon double and triple their casualties and that’s what caused them to escalate in the first place—the casualties. We had to ask ourselves, What would be left for them to do after that other than to invade Pakistan or to use tactical nukes?”

The well-publicized appointment of Zaitzev had created a kind of panic among the Afghan hands in Washington, but it turns out he was not the real commander. Instead, a far more lethal and politically important figure had been placed in charge.

It seems almost incredible that a general as significant as Valentin Varennikov could have served so long in Kabul and been so little known to his American adversaries. Zaitzev was the subject of constant conversation; Varennikov none. It was as if the Kremlin had never focused in on the role that General Westmoreland had played in Vietnam.

Certainly in his own world, Varennikov was anything but invisible. To begin with he was an authentic war hero, possessor of the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, a man whose history embodied the legend and mystique of the invincibility of the Red Army. It was Varennikov who was given the honor as a young captain at the end of World War II of presenting a captured Nazi flag to Stalin.

From that moment on, the Red Army had been his life, and he had never known anything but victory as he’d risen through the ranks to become one of the three most significant officers of the Soviet General Staff. By Christmas 1979, when the Soviets marched into Afghanistan, he was the Soviet General Staff’s man in charge of drawing up the master plan for all-out war against the United States and the West. As Varennikov matter-of-factly puts it, it was his job to design the strategy for the Red Army to fight the entire world at once and win, and he had no doubt that his side would prevail.

In 1985, when the grand old strategist of Soviet power took command in Kabul, he was alarmed by developments in Eastern Europe, what he saw as a subversive anti-Communist alliance between the Reagan administration and the Polish pope of Rome. He concluded that the Soviets would have to choose a place to halt the momentum. As he set off to draw the line in Afghanistan, he was prepared to use Soviet power without compromise. During the 1980s, while Wilson and Avrakotos were still maneuvering to get into positions of power, Varennikov was in charge of Soviet military affairs in the Third World—Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen, El Salvador, and South Africa. In all those areas where the United States felt threatened, the anonymous hand of Valentin Varennikov was at work stirring the pot. In 1993, surrounded by rich Oriental rugs in the Moscow apartment building where former generals are still given gracious housing, the general agreed to speak about Afghanistan as he awaited trial for his part in the failed coup against Gorbachev.

He quickly made his American visitor understand how significant Afghanistan had been to him and to the Kremlin leadership when he laid out his dark vision of U.S. intentions during the Cold War. “It was America that started the arms race as a way of bankrupting the Soviet economy,” he explains. “America loved blackmailing the world with its nuclear might.”

The general found himself even more alarmed when he learned that Reagan had launched a missile attack against the Soviet’s Libyan ally Muammar Qaddafi. The White House and the Pentagon openly rubbed salt in this wound to Soviet pride by releasing a videotape from a tiny camera that had been placed in the nose cone of the American rocket so that the whole world could see and feel, via television, the experience of riding a U.S. Air Force bomb right into Qaddafi’s tent. “What was I to think? I knew Qaddafi very well. We were friends. I had just visited him in that tent the month before. How could we ignore these things?”