Charlie Wilson's War (11 page)

This last admission made a large impression on Avrakotos because Terjelian was one of the only people who had ever made him feel physically menaced. Back in 1979 at this curious hidden CIA office in Boston, the idea of the Afghan tribesmen torturing and killing Russian soldiers gave these two lonely bachelors something to laugh about, and Avrakotos decided that Terjelian should write up a report for the DDO.

No one appears to have paid any attention at headquarters, but Terjelian’s report had a huge impact on Avrakotos once he took over the Afghan war, particularly the warning he offered about these ferocious tribesmen: “Don’t put white men in charge. Don’t give [the Afghanis] a lot of money. Don’t trust them. It would be like throwing money into a cesspool. All they need,” he wrote, “is a little help and the Russians will be sorry they ever went into that country.”

The idea that there was a nation of warriors waiting in the mountains to kill Russians took seed in Avrakotos’s mind. But in 1979 he never imagined that he—or, for that matter, the CIA—would ever even consider the remote possibility of giving these people hundreds of thousands of weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition to take on the Red Army. Back then the CIA was rapidly pulling back from the world. It had gone a long way toward getting rid of the old street fighters like Avrakotos, and the talk was all about drawing down and avoiding the kind of high-risk covert operations that only created trouble for the Agency. A new and gentler CIA was being born, and it was not the kind of environment that seemed likely to permit such a rude figure as Gust Avrakotos to win a spot in the Agency’s ruling elite.

After Avrakotos’s three-year tour in Boston, the CIA brought him back to headquarters and started to use him for particularly difficult and sensitive missions. “My nickname was ‘Dr. Dirty,’” he explains almost bitterly. He was still considered a valuable asset but too freewheeling to entrust with serious responsibility. So Avrakotos was thrilled when he learned that Alan Wolfe, head of the European Division, had handpicked him to become station chief in Helsinki. Wolfe was the legendary officer who had moved in advance of Henry Kissinger to set up the secretary of state’s fabled opening to China. And the Helsinki assignment was one of the Agency’s most important frontline posts targeted on the Soviets. For Avrakotos, it had an even greater significance. Until then he had been somewhat typecast as a back-alley operator, identified almost exclusively with Greek operations. The fact that Wolfe, whose judgment everyone respected, had picked him for a post that demanded worldly, diplomatic skills meant that, for the first time, Avrakotos would be moving out of his ethnic box and truly into the heart of the Clandestine Services. Once again, he could dream of rising to the highest levels.

Helsinki was a done deal and Avrakotos had already enrolled in Finnish-language school when Wolfe’s tour as European Division chief ended and a new man, William Graver, took over. Graver happened to be another of the Agency’s walking legends. At six feet seven inches he was an imposing figure who had been with the CIA ever since its founding. He held a rank equivalent to that of a four-star general and seemed to believe that the Clandestine Services should be staffed by the kind of gentleman spies that he had known when he’d served in the OSS, during World War II. On that score, Gust Avrakotos was all wrong, and rather quickly Graver decided he would not honor Alan Wolfe’s appointment.

The morning after Labor Day 1981, Graver summoned Avrakotos to his large corner office on the fifth floor of headquarters. Avrakotos remembers a creepy feeling overwhelming him the moment he set foot in the room. Graver had spent much of his career in Germany, and as far as Avrakotos was concerned he might have walked into SS headquarters: “The most striking thing about Graver is that he was Teutonic. By Teutonic I don’t mean the blond, handsome, Aryan type. By Teutonic, I mean stiff, wooden, no sense of humor.” The only decorations Graver seemed to have were certificates and diplomas on the wall, mostly in German. Even Graver’s aides looked like Teutons to Avrakotos, “the kind that carry briefcases and almost click their heels. It was like going in to see the führer.”

Graver remained seated, leaving Avrakotos standing like an uncomfortable schoolboy. The division chief said that the coveted Helsinki station chief job was no longer his. The assignment was on the books, but Graver was taking it away. The conversation had barely begun when, contrary to all protocol, Avrakotos ended it. Not merely that, but he ended it by telling Graver to go fuck himself.

As Avrakotos turned and burst past the secretaries and case officers in Graver’s outer office, he knew he’d transgressed in a world that is not generous to those who break the internal code of conduct. The CIA, and particularly its elite Clandestine Services, maintains a pretense of informality. Its officers dress in civilian clothes and call each other by their first names. But underneath, it is organized just like the military, and majors (Avrakotos’s equivalent rank) don’t get away with telling off four-star generals. Bill Graver was now in a position to effectively put an end to Gust’s career.

Graver no doubt assumed that he had caught Avrakotos by surprise and that the poor fellow had simply lost control. But Graver had no idea who he was dealing with and what a dangerous enemy he had just made for himself. Whatever qualities as a gentleman Avrakotos may have lacked in Graver’s eyes, when it came to espionage no one could outdo him. As was his practice, Avrakotos had cultivated a spy in the division who had tipped him off to Graver’s plans weeks earlier. The source had even alerted Gust that another officer had already been picked for a post Graver now had said he would consider giving to him. At that point Avrakotos concluded that Graver was not just taking away his promotion, he was out to destroy and humiliate him.

Perhaps if Graver had simply said he didn’t want anything to do with Gust, it would have ended there. But a rage verging on violence had swept over Avrakotos when he was faced with Graver’s calculated lie. The man didn’t have the balls to say it straight; to the wounded Greek, it was simply the Halloween Day Massacre all over again. The Teutonic bastard seemed to think he could get away with this latest ethnic cleansing and expect Gust Avrakotos to just say “thank you very much” and disappear.

Something dark and dangerous detonated inside Avrakotos that previously he had unleashed only on America’s enemies. He had an attitude about the blue bloods—the “cake eaters”—who ruled the CIA; there’s no question about that. But the truth is, he revered the Agency and gave it and his country every ounce of his quite remarkable talents and energies. Graver had hurt him in ways that went beyond the crippling of Avrakotos’s career. It was almost as if he had taken away all of Gust’s previous accomplishments and declared him unfit to serve anywhere in his division. Now, after the outburst, this man who didn’t even know him was in a position to make sure that Avrakotos would have no further prospects for advancement.

But life can sometimes be like a Dickens novel, with characters who meet early on destined to cross paths later, as if for a purpose. That was certainly the case with the friendship that Avrakotos had forged in Greece with Clair George, recently risen to become the second man in the Clandestine Services and heir apparent to take over the Directorate of Operations.

If there was any one person who owed Gust, it was Clair George, and Avrakotos fully expected that this old friend would come to his rescue. The two had forged their friendship over three years in Athens at the height of the 17 November terrorist campaign. George had volunteered to take over the Athens station just after Richard Welch was assassinated, and he had looked to Avrakotos to guide him through the treacherous landscape of Greece in the 1970s. For all practical purposes, he had shared with Avrakotos the responsibility for running the CIA’s huge Athens station. Gust handled the underground side of the station—the network of safe houses, the security teams, and the liaisons with the military and the local police. In the wake of Welch’s assassination, when everything important entailed dirty work, Gust was king, and Clair George depended on him. They spent their days and often their nights together, always the principal targets of 17 November and always plotting how to strike first. They drank together, they reveled together and, like a ferocious guardian angel, Avrakotos watched over George’s safety, even passing on to him his longtime personal driver and bodyguard.

By curious coincidence, George and Avrakotos came from little towns just ten miles apart in Pennsylvania. George, a postman’s son, found it easy and rewarding to adopt the manner, clothing, and attitude of the CIA’s ruling elite. Gust would kid him mercilessly about being a Beaver Falls pussy, the kind of sissy Aliquippans used to love to beat up. But in truth, Avrakotos loved the man. He even approved of George’s chameleon-like ability to assimilate and move onto the Agency’s fast track. What Avrakotos valued most, however, was the way George had stood by him and the ethnic officers targeted during the Halloween Day Massacre. George hadn’t signed his own name to any of the cables back then, but he had given his silent support, which was enough to make Gust feel confident that George would back him now. When Graver demanded that Avrakotos be punished, George had his old friend come up to the seventh floor for a heart-to-heart talk.

“Costa, Costa,” George began, using Avrakotos’s old Greek nickname. George didn’t say anything explicit about what Gust must do. He was trying to be helpful—to make Gust recognize that he had a first-class problem that needed to be dealt with. He appealed to Gust not to offend Graver again. “He can hurt you badly.”

“You know who I am,” Avrakotos said. “I’m not going to kiss his ass; he didn’t want me anywhere in his division.”

“Yes, but you can’t tell him to go fuck himself—he’s very powerful.”

When Graver’s secretary called a few days later to schedule another meeting, Avrakotos assumed that George had smoothed things over. Nevertheless, he had his guard up as he walked back into the large fifth-floor office. The last time, Graver had asked him to close the door. He asked again this time, but Avrakotos decided to leave it open. “I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I wanted witnesses,” he explained. Once again, Graver remained seated.

“Well,” Graver finally said, after a long pause.

“Well, what?”

“The ADDO [assistant deputy director for operations] said you were going to apologize.”

It may be that Avrakotos had some kind of death wish. Perhaps he had allowed himself to expect good news from Graver. He may have been disappointed to find that Clair George had not delivered for him. But it didn’t really matter, because he was now left with no good choices. Not all that much was being asked of him: a gesture, even some small effort to make peace. But it was suddenly too late for that. Once again Avrakotos was overcome with a feeling of class rage and anger that verged on violence. Once again he looked straight in Graver’s eyes, and once again he crossed the line.

“You can go fuck yourself.”

Y
ears later, as he tried to explain how it all happened, how the CIA ended up with a billion dollars a year to kill Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, Avrakotos would offer a curious explanation. “It began with a Texas woman, one of Wilson’s contributors. She’s the one who got him interested.”

Joanne Herring was a glamorous and exotic figure out of the oil-rich world of Texas in the 1970s and ’80s. At the time nobody imagined that, in addition to her role as a social lioness and hostess to the powerful, she was simultaneously responsible for setting in motion a process that would profoundly impact the outcome of the Afghan war. When almost everyone had written off the Afghans as a lost cause, she saw potential for greatness in the most unlikely characters. In the pivotal first years of the jihad, she became both matchmaker and muse to Pakistan’s Muslim fundamentalist military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, as well as to the scandal-prone Charlie Wilson.

Most of the women Charlie was seeing in those days—and there were many—were half Herring’s age. But Joanne Herring was a woman of extraordinary resources who knew how to mesmerize a man on many levels—not the least of which was her ability to sweep this congressman from the Bible Belt into her dazzling world of black-tie dinners, movie stars, countesses, Saudi princes, and big-time Republican oil magnates. Invariably, when reporters wrote features about Joanne Herring, they invoked Scarlett O’Hara. The comparisons are found in clips from the
Washington Post, People
magazine, and
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Few modern women can trigger such a comparison. But to appreciate her full impact, it helps to add Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dolly Parton, and even a bit of Arianna Huffington.

Something about Texas and its oil heritage seems to permit its citizens to reinvent their histories and to carry out their lives as if they were part of an ongoing theatrical experience. As Herring tells it, she was born on the Fourth of July, a direct descendant of George Washington’s sister; her great-uncle had died at the Alamo; and there were suggestions of old family money and an ancestral home modeled after Mount Vernon. Hers was a family whose history embodied all the virtues of the American experience, Texan style. “You see, I’m descended from Washington, and all my life I’ve been told that by my family. It’s kind of nice to know who you are down through the years, and I feel I know all my people who came before me.”

But Joanne’s story was nothing compared to that of so many other high-rolling Texans, like her best friend from high school, Sandra Hovas, who would become another link in Wilson’s introduction to Afghanistan.

As a buxom teenager, Hovas was known affectionately as “Buckets.” But as a young woman in the 1960s, she began to reinvent herself, and her friends soon went along with calling her Sandy, then Sandra, and then Saundra. When she met and fell under the influence of Baron Ricky di Portanova, a dashing young Italian who had moved to Houston to claim his share of the Cullen oil fortune, Saundra became Allisandra. When she married the baron, Buckets was reborn as Baroness di Portanova.

To the uninitiated, Joanne and the baroness appeared to be typical social butterflies, but they actually shared a conspiratorial past. As young debutantes, both had been inducted into the Minutewomen, an offshoot of the ultraright, paramilitary Minutemen. While other debutantes across the country were tittering and talking about boys, Joanne and Buckets were sitting at high tea listening to “patriotic women who cared about their country. They opened my eyes to the conspiracy that threatened our way of life,” remembers Joanne. By the time the two girls were eighteen they had become part of a semisecret national organization of right-wing patriots so convinced of the possibility of a Communist takeover that they were organizing for guerrilla warfare. And like all good Texas girls, Joanne and Buckets had learned to ride and shoot from the earliest age.

“It is difficult talking about this now,” says Herring. “You can easily be thought of as a nut or a nutty hawk.” Nevertheless, she remains deeply proud of her involvement in the arch-conservative organization. That’s where she acquired a “sense of obligation to act like a lady,” which included a commitment to fight Communism. “I decided back then that I would dedicate my life to making the free-enterprise society survive for my children.”

One would never have imagined such ambitions by reading about Joanne in the Houston society columns of the 1960s and ’70s. Her Roman Toga party was so lavish and theatrical that
Life
magazine covered it, and everyone in Houston who counted was invited. Slave girls were auctioned off. Christians were burned to the accompaniment of fireworks. And to lend authenticity, ten-year-old black Boy Scouts, playing the role of Nubian slaves, moved about the gathering of Roman-clad socialites, filling their crystal goblets with wine.

By the 1970s, she was entertaining all of Houston daily with her own immensely popular television talk show. When she married a rich oilman, Bob Herring, who ran the largest natural gas company in the country, she began traveling with him through Arab lands. They met and befriended kings, sheikhs, and chiefs of intelligence. Arab oilmen have a special connection with Texas. Texans have drilled their oil and sold them machinery, and they have invariably visited Texas and watched cowboy movies. And when they met Joanne Herring, they all tended to turn to Jell-O.

Houston was a boomtown back then, and when kings and foreign leaders asked to visit, the State Department found it helpful to enlist the ever enthusiastic Herring to entertain. Her parties were always magnificently overdone. For the king of Sweden, there was a sheikh’s-tent discotheque, complete with zebra rugs, stuffed tigers, and belly dancers. She so charmed Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos that when she and her husband visited the Philippines, the Marcoses reciprocated by meeting them with a brass band and an honor guard. Herring soon added Anwar Sadat, King Hussein, Princess Grace, the Shah of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi to her list of intimate new friends, all of whom were extravagantly entertained at the Herrings’ twenty-two-room River Oaks mansion.

In the midst of this heady swirl, Joanne departed for Paris to produce and narrate a “documentary” on the life of the Marquis de Lafayette, entitled
A Thirst for Glory, a Struggle for Freedom.
During 1976 she kept herself busy at Versailles directing thirty French aristocrats in the roles of eighteenth-century French nobles. She was a novelty, and the Parisian café society loved this Texas bombshell who talked of nothing but politics and the origins of freedom. There were even whispers of a romance between her and the elegant chief of the French intelligence service, the count de Marenches.

Until then, Herring had thought she was fully sensitized to the Communist threat. But the count opened her eyes to a new dimension when he took out maps and carefully described the “master plan” being carried out against the West: “‘In every government and agency—even in the airports—there was infiltration,’” she recalls him saying. De Marenches explained that he had played a critical role in stopping the student riots in Paris in 1968. He was a center post in what Herring now describes as “a worldwide network of people ready to sacrifice everything: their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, just like the Founding Fathers.”

It can be said that Ms. Herring’s future fixation on fighting the Russians in Afghanistan originated in Paris when de Marenches arranged for her and her husband to meet one of the key players in his network, the brilliant Pakistani ambassador to Washington and eventual foreign minister Sahabzada Yaqub Khan. At the end of the 1970s, Pakistan was a poor country and out of favor in Washington. Trying to build friendships, Yaqub Khan proposed that Bob Herring become Pakistan’s honorary consul in Houston. Herring declined but suggested his wife instead. Thus began Joanne’s love affair with Pakistan and certainly one of most bizarre diplomatic appointments ever made by a fundamentalist Muslim country.

Ordinarily, an honorary consul is not expected to do much more than get drunken sailors out of jail, ship dead citizens home, and generally show the flag. But Joanne Herring acted as if she had been made a full-fledged ambassador or minister of trade. She was suddenly organizing benefits, even one in which all of her designer friends—Pierre Cardin, Oscar de la Renta, Emilio Pucci—were shanghaied into coming up with designs for Pakistani craftsmen to use as patterns. She plunged into Pakistani villages on fact-finding missions, giving the poverty-stricken Muslims inspirational talks on capitalism and inspiring hope with her idea that each village could get rich selling beautifully made dresses and rugs designed by her famous friends.

There was no precedent for an American woman playing such a role on behalf of the Pakistani government, so Pakistan honored Herring with the official status of “honorary man”; she was addressed as “sir.” Back in the United States, she managed to put the out-of-favor Pakistan diplomats in the limelight, including them at elegant black-tie dinners with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller.

It was all going very well until the military seized power and hung President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, perhaps best known today as the father of Benazir Bhutto. President Jimmy Carter led the charge in condemning the new dictator, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, accusing him of killing democracy in Pakistan as well as of building an Islamic atomic bomb. Carter cut off all military and economic assistance, declaring Pakistan unworthy of further U.S. aid.

When “Pakistan” became a dirty word in Washington, another honorary consul might have lost heart. Herring, however, reacted differently. The count de Marenches had recently confided in her that there were only seven men standing between the free world and Communism. Zia, he said, was one of them. So that year she set off for Pakistan, prepared to find virtue in the maligned dictator Zia ul-Haq. In Islamabad, Zia quickly won her heart. He invited her to dinner at his simple military headquarters, explaining that he would never move into Bhutto’s palace as long as his people were starving. The unexpected surprise of this visit was the astonishing impact Herring had on Zia. He was a fundamentalist Muslim and she a born-again Christian. Yet by all accounts, their bond grew so strong that, for a time, she is said to have been Zia’s most trusted American adviser, a development that Foreign Minister Yaqub Khan found alarming. “She absolutely had his ear, it was terrible,” he said.

It was all the more unusual given that Zia was in the process of reimposing fundamentalist restrictions on women. But he was so spellbound by Herring, and took her so seriously, that to the utter dismay of his entire foreign office, he made her Pakistan’s roving ambassador to the world and even awarded her his country’s highest civilian honor, the title of
Quaid-e-Azam,
or “Great Leader.” Charlie Wilson says that Zia would leave cabinet meetings just to take Joanne’s calls. “There was no affair with Zia,” Wilson recalls, “but it’s impossible to deal with Joanne and not deal with her on a sexual basis. No matter who you are, you take those phone calls.”

When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Zia’s relationship with the United States could not have been worse; nor could he have been closer to his honorary consul, who took the novel position with the dictator that the invasion was a great blessing in disguise. “At last there were Russians crossing the border,” she told him. “Before, they were just using nicknames like FMLN or FSMLN. But now they were Russians, and I knew there was a possibility to do something.”

That kind of bravado was typical of Joanne Herring, who, at age forty-eight, was accustomed to seizing and holding center stage and refusing to let anything get her down. She had married two men, raised two boys, and worked five days a week for twelve hours a day on her television talk show. She was one of the social dragons of Houston and a tireless promoter of Pakistan. But the year after the invasion, for the first time in her life, she felt defeated. She found that no one seemed to want to hear about Zia or Pakistan, much less about Afghanistan. It seemed that life was passing her by, and she felt alone. After a long struggle, her husband had died of cancer, and Joanne turned to her church in Houston, where she remembers sobbing at the altar, in a state of complete despair. “I never thought I would laugh again,” she says. “I thought my life was over.”

Joanne Herring remembers those dark days with a shudder, but mainly she remembers how Charlie Wilson arrived to save her life. They had met two years before at one of her River Oaks parties, after he had passed an important piece of oil and gas legislation that her husband had thought impossible. Joanne collected powerful men, and as she told him about the virtues of Pakistan, she locked eyes with the handsome congressman. Wilson left with the distinct impression that Joanne Herring had been flirting with him. So he was delighted when she called him one day out of the blue, in the midst of her depression.

It is said that hypochondriacs make the best nurses, and if Charlie Wilson was responsible for lifting Joanne Herring from her depression back in 1981, then it was because he knew where she was coming from. Very few were aware of the depths of Charlie Wilson’s frequent depressions—the insomnia, the alcoholism, the asthma, the trips to the doctor, the constant loneliness. He disguised it well. No matter what his inner mood, whenever the public door opened, the darkness disappeared, replaced by the bigger-than-life, can-do Texan.

For Joanne Herring, that overflowing energy was like a miracle cure. “Charlie taught me to laugh again and made my life really wonderful,” she said. A curious romance began, with much talk of Christ, anti-Communism, and Zia ul-Haq. As the weeks passed, she found her spirits returning. “Everyone else’s eyes would glaze over when I would talk about the Afghans, but Charlie was interested in these things.”

As the romance bloomed, Herring found herself reborn as a ferocious champion of Zia and the Afghans, and she became convinced that Wilson was the one who could save the day. “I really gave Zia a story on Charlie,” she recalls, “because I was scared someone could do an investigation of Charlie and write him off. I told Zia, ‘This is the man who can really do it for you.’ You see, they were very frightened of America.” Joanne also began to use all of her wiles to pull Wilson into the Afghan war. “I knew that if he was serious about something, he went all out. I’d say to Charlie, ‘You are powerful, you are wonderful, just think what you can do.’ It had to be a sort of brainwashing,” she explained. “But it was very easy, because Charlie thought in those terms too. You can raise that spirit in a Texan. It’s there.”