Charlie Wilson's War (73 page)
*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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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].”
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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.