Charlie Wilson's War (8 page)

In retrospect, the Somoza fiasco was a turning point for Wilson, and only later would he realize its positive impact. He had discovered that, even with a wildly unpopular cause, he had the power to intimidate the most high-level bureaucrats. And most important for what he would later do in Afghanistan, he had crossed over a line and, in effect, experimented with running his own foreign operation with a renegade operative who wasn’t afraid to break the rules.

G
ust Avrakotos hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t have important relatives or fancy summer vacations. He hadn’t inherited tennis lessons, money, or classic good looks. He was the son of Greek immigrants from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and the CIA simply didn’t go to places like that to recruit its elite case officers. Aliquippa was a steel-worker’s town, and for most of its early years, the Agency seemed to think its Clandestine Services should be filled with men of breeding.

That’s how the British had always picked their spies, and the founders of the CIA had taken the British as their model. British spies belonged to clubs. They dressed like gentlemen. Their top officers had gone to boarding schools, then cemented their friendships as young men at Oxford and Cambridge. This was a class that had been at the spy game for centuries; they had learned that a man’s family and schools stood for something.

That, at least, was the legend about the British. So it was natural, when Congress created the CIA in 1947, that the American leadership would look to the same class for its service. And to a remarkable extent, the CIA did manage to fill its ranks with sons of the establishment.

Take Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie. Brilliant at Groton and Harvard, a classical scholar with six languages and a robust appetite for healthy adventure, he was one of the first generation of Agency operatives. On the surface, he led a rather dull existence as a midlevel State Department officer. But “everyone” knew that Archie worked for the CIA, and there were few who didn’t welcome an invitation to one of his elegant Georgetown evenings.

There was always a sense at the Roosevelts’ of being at the center of things both past and present. As Archie’s distant cousin the columnist Stewart Alsop used to joke at such gatherings, “A man should
have
furniture, he shouldn’t have to buy it.” In Archie’s house there were ancestral portraits on the wall and that patrician glow that comes from the mix of old wood, Oriental rugs, gleaming silver, and the kindly faces of faithful retainers.

Archie presided effortlessly over these gatherings—actually thinking of them as “informal” because the dress called for dark suits instead of dinner jackets. There was little general conversation at the table. The ritual called for each man to speak first to the woman on his right and then, at an appropriate moment, to turn and converse with the dinner partner on his left. It was not until after the women left the men to their cigars and brandy that the talk would turn to matters of state.

Then Archie might talk about the latest rebellion of the Kurds or what his friend the Shah of Iran was up to. But even here it was all terribly discreet. The Agency would never have to worry about a Roosevelt being polygraphed—it was part of the noblesse oblige of the man to know intuitively how to keep a secret.

No matter how long he served or how far he rose in the CIA, Gust Avrakotos would always feel a bit like the poor street kid, nose against the glass, looking in at the party, knowing he would never be asked to attend such gatherings. And dinner at Archie’s was hardly the only thing that made Avrakotos feel like an outsider. “Almost everyone was a fucking blue blood in the CIA in 1961 when I came in,” he says. “They were just beginning to let Jews move up that year. But there still weren’t any blacks, Hispanics, or females—just some token Greeks and Polacks.”

Some of Avrakotos’s friends actually schemed to wangle an invitation to Archie’s. They felt it could help just to be seen with this patrician. But Avrakotos hadn’t kowtowed to the plant manager’s sons in Aliquippa, and he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought about the Agency’s blue bloods. As far as he was concerned, they operated in an “old boys’ network” to keep his kind down and “the only reason half of them got anywhere is because they jerked off Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson at some prep school.”

Avrakotos had a chip on his shoulder; there was no question about that. But he did make friends with some of the Agency’s well-born officers, and he accepted the notion that some of the real aristocrats—originals like Roosevelt—were at least authentic. Nevertheless, as he rose through the ranks he came to loathe a certain type of blue blood with a rage that bordered on class hatred.

The CIA hadn’t started opening its ranks to gifted “new” Americans like Avrakotos until 1960, and the move had had nothing to do with social justice. There were no quotas in those days. The fact was that these first-generation types, brought up on the streets of America and speaking the languages of the Old Country, had certain strengths that the CIA had come to feel it needed.

A kind of panic about the Communist threat had been sweeping over Washington. In every city in the 1950s air raid sirens were regularly set off. Tens of millions of children got used to scurrying into bomb shelters or crawling under their desks as part of drills to prepare for a Soviet nuclear assault. In every corner of the globe the dark hand of the Communists was seen to be at work.

The commission by which the CIA came to live during those years was spelled out in one telling paragraph from a blue-ribbon panel explaining to President Truman why it was essential for the United States to abandon its traditional sense of fair play in this all-out struggle for the world:

 

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination…there are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, it must use more clever, more sophisticated and more effective means than those used against us.

 

It was almost as if Gust Avrakotos’s early life in Aliquippa had been designed to turn him into the kind of back-alley spy that Harry Truman’s advisers were urging the CIA to nurture and unleash on the Communists. The one thing no one needed to teach this man was how to “subvert and destroy” his enemies.

Aliquippa is one of those American company towns always described as a melting pot. Immigrants from all over the world poured in here for jobs in the huge steelworks that the Jones and Laughlin company built. But the hard people of this steel town never lost any of their ethnic pride, or their ethnic hatreds. You can still see the workingman’s anger in Avrakotos when he drives up the hill to Plan Six, where the WASP managers used to live in their five-and six-bedroom stone houses. He calls them “cake eaters” and talks about them with the same contempt he uses for the Agency’s blue bloods.

When Jones and Laughlin moved into Aliquippa on the rolling hills just north of Pittsburgh, it didn’t specify where the workers should live. But every ethnic group insisted on living, marrying, partying, and going to church with its own. As recently as 1980, fourteen thousand steel workers earned their living there.

Today it’s as if the bomb had struck. There’s nothing but great hulking iron forms and rusting steel. About the only sign of life are a few teams of workers dismantling one of the abandoned steel plants to sell as scrap to the Japanese. But Avrakotos remembers Aliquippa the way it was when he was growing up and delegations of Japanese used to come in buses to study this marvel of industrial America. They brought movie cameras and notebooks to record everything about the workings of the largest integrated steel mill in the world. No one felt anything but pride as the plant operated at full tilt twenty-four hours a day, spewing out great clouds of pink and black smoke that would engulf the ethnic neighborhoods of Aliquippa.

“That’s Plan Seven, where the Dagos lived,” Avrakotos says, like a tour guide passing through the ruins of some past civilization. “Plan Twelve was all Irish. The Polacks lived in Plan Five. Plan Eleven is where the niggers were.” For all his years at the CIA, Avrakotos has never stopped using the brutal street talk of his youth. He’s as proud of it as he is of the scars that lace his body from teenage knife fights. “Each of the plans had a gang, and they fought like cats and dogs,” he explains. “Each plan fought among itself, but when the niggers came we all banded together. You had to be very fucking practical…. The guys who made it out of Aliquippa had one thing in common: you can’t fuck around all day trying to make up your mind. The niggers will overrun you.”

This kind of talk is jarring, but it was the language of Aliquippa—and it shaped Avrakotos’s brutal instinct for the jugular. There are legends in Aliquippa about the ones who escaped and made good: Henry Mancini, who got his start at the musical and political Italian clubs; Mike Ditka, Avrakotos’s high school friend from Plan Seven, the former Chicago Bears tight end whose name is synonymous with toughness; Tony Dorsett of the Cowboys. Becoming a sports hero was one way out.

The mafia was another. There were three thousand Sicilians in Aliquippa. Most of Avrakotos’s friends were Sicilians, and he knew the Alamena family as “men of honor.” Gust’s father, Oscar Avrakotos, distributed Rolling Rock beer for them, and they always treated the Avrakotoses with respect. But the Sicilian mafia wasn’t an option for a Greek-American. And anyway Oscar Avrakotos had high hopes for his son.

Like many other immigrants, Oscar’s American experience had begun at Ellis Island, as an eight-year-old boy from the Greek Island of Lemnos. He had come over with his brother in 1894 and for three decades toiled in the sweatshops of New England and the “Iron House” of Aliquippa. But then Oscar broke away from the pack with a vision of making a fortune selling his own soda pop.

With his hard-earned savings he bought a bottling assembly line from the Smile and Cheer-up Company of St. Louis. He named his new company after the Greek sun god, Apollo. Apollo was his good-luck god, and he figured the name would win customers from the Greek Orthodox church, not to mention workers in the mills.

As the owner of the Apollo Soda Water Company, Oscar was a man of means, at least by the standards of Lemnos. He was close to fifty when he went back to the old country and took a bride, Zafira Konstantaras, twenty-one years younger and with a big dowry. Back in Aliquippa three years later, Gust Avrakotos was born into a household that would know nothing but unrelenting hard work. His earliest memories are of his father moving about in the kitchen at 4:30
A.M.
, eating his breakfast of pork chops and potatoes and polishing off several beers and a couple of shots, if it was cold, before walking downstairs to begin the day’s labor.

By five
A.M.
he would have the bottling machine cranked up and moving. On one side was Louisa, a large black woman, who placed the dirty bottles on the beginning of the thirty-five-foot line. Miraculously, the chain apparatus would turn the bottles upside down as soap and water poured in and out, to prepare them for an infusion of Oscar’s secret cherry and cola formulas. There were always incidents. The bottles would sometimes explode from the pressure like hand grenades, sending glass shrapnel all over the room. One such piece sliced into Gust’s face and cost him a full day’s work.

At first it was a thrill for the boy to be included. But by sixteen, he had accumulated forty quarters of Social Security and the novelty had worn off. This was the kind of punishing physical labor that quickly makes a man out of a boy.

It was at the Apollo Soda Water Company that Avrakotos developed his frightening convictions about revenge. His first mentor had been Wasil Rosinko, a Ukrainian who worked at the end of the bottle line, heaving cases into the trucks. Rosinko had found his wife in bed with another man and had murdered them both. After Rosinko spent fifteen years in prison, Oscar gave him his job back, and Wasil took it upon himself to help educate Oscar’s boy. He warned young Gust never to trust a Ukrainian woman and taught him that revenge is sweet.

But Avrakotos’s most powerful memory was of his mother at the kitchen table demanding to know what Oscar intended to do about an insult: “You’re not going to let this pass, are you? You are going to get even, aren’t you?”

In the Avrakotos household, revenge was a matter of family honor. As a boy of twelve, Gust would go with his father to the bars to collect unpaid bills. He learned not to show fear when Oscar would face down bartenders and begin hurling bottles, threatening to take the bar apart if the money due him was not paid immediately. The Avrakotos family did not tolerate freeloaders.

There was no TV in the house, and on Saturday nights Gust would be allowed to sit at the table in the kitchen to listen to his father and uncles talk politics and trade family stories. The men were particularly proud of the family name in spite of its ambiguous meaning in Greek: “without pants” or “those without pants.” Whenever she became frustrated with Oscar, Zafira would suggest that some ancestor had been caught in a compromising sexual relationship.

The Avrakotos men insisted that the name referred back to men who functioned as a kind of praetorian guard in ancient times. These Avrakotoses were a fierce warrior class, so the family legend went, who would throw off all their clothes when going into battle and charge the enemy. The sight of screaming, naked warriors was enough to cause most opponents to break and run.

Whether or not the legend is true, these stories shaped the young boy’s sense of his identity and destiny. And they help explain why his father made such extreme demands on his son. He forced Gust to take private lessons in Greek and Latin. “Each new language gives you a new set of eyes and ears, a new window on the world,” he repeatedly told his complaining child. Even free time on Sunday was given over to torturous work at the Greek Orthodox Church, where, amid chanting priests and incense, Gust would spend four hours serving as an altar boy. But the main thing Oscar and Zafira did for their son was to fill him with the sense that he must get out of the steel town. And the path of liberation that Oscar chose gleamed like a vision directly across the street from their home.

Like Andrew Carnegie, the founders of Aliquippa had built a library. It was not a simple, utilitarian building but a shining citadel of limestone and bronze in the form of a Greek temple. On the cornices in great letters were carved the words
HISTORY, SCIENCE, FICTION, PHILOSOPHY, BIOLOGY
, and
ASTRONOMY
. Every evening after dinner, after hours of humping beer kegs and a full day at school, Gust Avrakotos would walk the two hundred feet across Franklin Avenue, pass through the great bronze doors of the Benjamin Franklin Jones Memorial Library, and take the seat at a mahogany desk reserved for him. There he would switch on the individual bronze reading lamp with its Tiffany-style glass shade and begin the serious work of the day. It was what his father expected and demanded.