Charlie Wilson's War (14 page)

For the Israelis, who depend totally on their air force as a first line of defense, the Lavi was considered a matter of the highest national security. It was going to cost a half billion dollars to develop, but according to federal guidelines, U.S. military-assistance grants could be used only to purchase American-made weapons. Arens and Rafiah were asking Charlie to find a way to waive the rules.

Wilson was honored. Congress was filled with ardent supporters of Israel, but with this commission Wilson felt himself advancing to the head of the pack. He planned to return to Tel Aviv in October to finalize his strategy for the Lavi. He had budgeted a few days for the Afghans, but only after he finished with his real friends.

I
t had made absolutely no sense for Gust Avrakotos to have simply abandoned all discipline and, with the door to the European division chief’s office wide open, tell William Graver to go fuck himself for a second time. Clair George, the powerful number two man in the Directorate of Operations, had been incredulous. “Are you crazy?” he had demanded.

Suddenly, within the ranks of the Clandestine Services, Avrakotos had become an untouchable. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations is like the mafia. You rise and fall with your friends and, with Clair George now holding the number two job, it should have been Gust’s moment to soar. “I had taken care of Clair in Greece, and he owed me everything. I figured I was a pig in shit and about to go to the very top.” Instead, Avrakotos had not only created a dangerous enemy in William Graver but also completely alienated the ambitious Clair George, who wasn’t about to have his old friend’s crude ways compromise his fast track. George didn’t just remove Gust’s name from the Helsinki asignment; Avrakotos says he cabled all the division chiefs to warn them about his old friend.

Gust’s two verbal assaults on Graver had made no sense. But as he later explained, “If you’re looking for logic in the way things work, you’re not going to find it in me, the Middle East, or the Arab world, because that’s not the way things work.” And no matter how counterproductive his dealing with Graver may have been, even years later, it’s striking to hear the pride in his voice when he explains why he faced down Graver.

“Greeks believe that we are truly God’s chosen people. And even when we go to Greek church and fourth-generation Greek-American priests are talking to third-generation Greek-American kids, they’re still preaching that we are God’s chosen people. And my mother led me to believe that among the chosen, I was one of the most chosen. That’s very positive. So when you’re thrown in with a group of brilliant Ivy Leaguers who know more about so many different things and who can humiliate you through what soup spoons to use, you just remember, ‘Gust, you’re the chosen among the chosen. You’re a superman.’ What an attitude that gives you to go through life—you’re invincible. So you fuck up; so you make mistakes; but you do what you believe is right—what your gut feeling says you should be doing. You just remember that you’re the chosen among the chosen. God will take care of you. God is on your side. It’s sort of like the mujahideen going into battle: you cannot lose. If you survive and beat the enemy, you’re the victor. If you die in battle, you go to Paradise. You can’t lose.”

But that September 1981 he was feeling very much alone and in need of help, and with the bitter memory of his interview with William Graver fixed in his mind, Avrakotos made a pilgrimage to the town of his birth. It was a six-hour drive to Aliquippa through the mountains on old Route 40. His destination was the home of an old and trusted friend of the Avrakotos family, a woman named Nitsa. She was in the midst of intense preparations when Gust arrived—an old crone dressed in black, cooking up a strange brew and preparing chants in Greek written a thousand years before. If Walt Disney had had to cast a woman to play a classic witch, he might have chosen Nitsa. She was, in fact, the town witch of Aliquippa, but ordinarily she only practiced her art benevolently—amulets for protection, cures for the sick, and talismans to ward off the evil eye.

Gust, however, was not only the son of her dear departed friend Zafira, he was the pride of Aliquippa, the young CIA warrior who had saved Greece from the Communists. If Gust was in need, all of her dark powers were available to him.

And so Nitsa began: “What does he look like?”

Gust had managed to extract a photograph of Graver from one of his security contacts in the CIA’s badge office. “It was the only place I could get a picture. I explained I wanted it for my dartboard, and they loved that.”

A puzzled look had come over Nitsa’s face as she examined the photograph. According to Avrakotos she claims descent from an order of women in ancient Greece who were the intermediaries between the lords of the underworld and the gods of Olympus. This lineage was perhaps one of the reasons she approached her role that day with such an exacting manner. “He doesn’t look evil,” she told Gust after studying Graver’s face. “Tell me, what he has done?”

“He’s ruining my career, and all the cake eaters will pounce on me and rip me apart.” She understood that, says Gust, “because her husband had been pulled apart by cake eaters.”

She looked at the picture with new eyes, then nodded gravely. “You’re right, he is evil.”

Nitsa explained that her first move would be to strike where Graver already had weaknesses. Avrakotos then gave her a total physical description of Graver, first identifying his weak physical points, starting with his knees. “He looks like a tall scarecrow when he walks. And he has a bad back.”

“Does he like women?” she asked, explaining that she would next move to take away those things he enjoyed the most. “I think she may have made him impotent,” he later said matter-of-factly.

Every step of the way Nitsa insisted that Gust understand the consequences of the dark forces he was asking her to unleash. “Now, Gust, you have to want it,” she warned. “You have to want evil to happen to him.”

“Oh, I want it so bad, I can taste it.”

“It will happen then. What are his favorite foods?”

“I know he likes potato salad and German food,” Gust said, explaining that Graver had served many years in Germany. “The Nazis had killed Nitsa’s mother and father and some of her relatives, and I told her he was a damn Nazi. You could see that her eyes just lit up.”

It took her about twenty minutes to complete the curse. According to Avrakotos, her incantations, all in Greek, were taken from seldom-used biblical chants written by monks a millennium ago. “In the Greek Church,” explains Avrakotos, “some of those monks were like Darth Vader, fallen angels.”

All the while Nitsa kept rubbing Graver’s picture. It was only a small photograph, but Nitsa belongs to that tradition of people who believe that a camera captures some part of a person’s soul. “Can I keep it?” she asked.

“You can keep it. You can burn it. You can do whatever you want with it.”

“Are you sure? You’ll never see it again.”

“Yes.”

“How soon do you want the curse to take effect?”

“Immediately.”

“I don’t know how immediate is immediate. A professional curse will take effect before a health curse.” But, she assured him, “both will take effect.”

“Thank you,” Gust said.

“Is there anything else you need?”

“No, that’s it.”

Certainly, had any of the teams of sleuths working out of the Offices of Security or Counterintelligence discovered what Gust Avrakotos had done with Nitsa, they would have immediately called him in for a psychiatric evaluation. And given his access to the most sensitive intelligence, they might well have considered him a serious security risk. But the session with Nitsa had been a private affair. And the act of drawing down curses and summoning forces from beyond had been miraculously therapeutic. By the time he approached the gates of the CIA, Avrakotos no longer considered William Graver a threat. Nitsa was seeing to that. Meanwhile, the whole experience had managed to revitalize his spirits and once again cause him to believe, as his mother had taught him, that he possessed some special destiny. He didn’t know when or how his moment would come, just that he had to find a way to stay in place at the CIA until that time arrived.

On the face of it, his plan was quite simple. Instead of engaging Clair George in a head-on contest he could not possibly win, Avrakotos decided simply to vanish, to buy time until he could find a way to go back into action on his own terms.

The problem with that strategy is that it was not supposed to be possible. In the thinly disguised military environment of the Agency, no one is supposed to be able to exist even for a moment outside of a chain of command. Without orders, case officers can’t do much of anything—they can’t get paid, can’t use the telephone, don’t even have the ability to park their cars. The system had been painstakingly designed to guarantee that the Agency could never be compromised by its enemies.

Curiously, Avrakotos had been preparing for just this moment for years, ever since the Halloween Day Massacre firings in 1977. Back then in Athens, Clair George had stood with him when headquarters had tried to say that the firings were designed to purge the Agency of its rogue operatives. But Avrakotos knew better. To him it had been nothing short of bureaucratic ethnic cleansing and, ever since then he had believed that one day the blue bloods would come after him. So when it happened he was ready.

Gust had one piece of good fortune going for him. At that particular moment, he happened to be beyond the reach of the Clandestine Services—on administrative leave, supposedly completing his Finnish-language training. Avrakotos figured he had three, perhaps four more weeks before Finance caught up with him and cut off his salary…and, unless he got new orders, all other privileges as well. But as only Avrakotos could see it, four weeks to build a route to survival was a gift from the gods.

By then he knew certain things that could help him in his odd quest. For example, he knew that the CIA forcibly places blinders on all of its employees. As the thousands of operatives and analysts and administrators cross one another in the halls, Avrakotos knew that precious few would have any idea what anyone else was doing. Even people in the same division or on the same floor understood that it was dangerous to look too curious and so Avrakotos, the master of deception, walked through the white halls of Langley with the knowledge that no one would be trying to figure out what he was up to. In fact, they would be doing just the opposite. And for the chance encounter with old colleagues, he knew exactly what kind of shrug to give, what kind of half lie to offer, what kind of air to affect. The whole exercise was remarkably simple—the idea being to make it seem as if he was engaged in something that others either should know about, if they were in the know, or shouldn’t ask if they weren’t.

The one thing Avrakotos could not afford was to physically run into Graver or Clair George. That would precipitate a formal review of his misconduct, and nothing good could come of that. The clock was ticking now and the challenge, as he moved through the white corridors of Langley, was to find someone in the Agency bold enough to give him a pay station before his administrative leave ended and the paychecks stopped coming in.

The first friend he went to—a man running a branch in the Latin American Division—didn’t blink when Gust described the favor he needed, not even when Avrakotos explained that it might be illegal and, at the very least, there was the risk of Clair George’s fury. Had his rank been one grade higher, George’s office would have been automatically notified when Avrakotos took up his new post. As it was, Gust acquired this safe haven without registering on George’s radar screen. Now, instead of having to formally seek a new assignment and trigger a reckoning, time was now on his side. “Without that pay station I couldn’t have survived,” he later recalled “That was my ante.”

Avrakotos had bought himself time. But to survive the next series of challenges, he relied on a most unusual—and all but invisible—asset. Everyone knew that Avrakotos had a gift for making enemies within his own organization and this would always threaten to sabotage his capacity to rise to where his talents might have otherwise taken him. But even more distinctive was the unlikely network of allies he had acquired at the CIA over the years who were prepared to do the kinds of things to help him that almost no one could have imagined possible.

Avrakotos was hardly the first CIA case officer to recognize the value of lower-level members of an intelligence organization. Abroad, every CIA spy recognizes that perhaps the most promising targets for recruitment in an enemy intelligence service are low-level figures: the code clerks, the secretaries, the couriers. But it was rare indeed to find a case officer who made an effort to befriend such lowly figures within their own organization. In vivid contrast, Avrakotos had always found himself more at home with these fellow untouchables than with the well-born, high-ranking officers of the clandestine services, and from the time he first joined the CIA he had befriended them.

He made it a point to intervene when he could on their behalf. He became their champion whenever one of them would be unfairly treated. And he always shared the truth about the way he felt about the blue bloods.

The network’s most distinctive feature was its racial composition: most of its members were African-American and no one could ever understand how they could be so devoted to a man who routinely called them “niggers” to their face. To Avrakotos it was simple. He identified with the Agency’s African-American employees because they were just like him: “If you’re from Aliquippa in the CIA, you may not be black but you’re still a nigger.” To Clair George’s deputy, Norm Gardner, who witnessed the loyalty of this network: “It was just mystifying what Gust could get the blacks at the Agency to do for him,” he recalls, “just mystifying!”

Throughout his seven-month disappearance into the Agency’s underground, it was the CIA’s African-American employees who, in small ways and large, protected Avrakotos by constantly passing intelligence on to him. “Don’t go near the sixth floor today, Clair’s going to be there; stay out of the cafeteria this afternoon.” They even arranged for him to be able to park in one of the VIP lots. It may not sound like much but the only way to gauge the importance of anyone at the CIA is by the parking spot they are given. The agents who run the big programs are closest to headquarters and, most important for Gust, his VIP spot was next to a side door that let him avoid the main elevators. “They got the pass through security by saying I was a medical doctor on consultation,” says Avrakotos. When asked if his black network had also monitored Clair George’s and Bill Graver’s traffic for him, Avrakotos replied: “I’ll take the fifth on that one.”