Charlie Wilson's War (37 page)

This maneuver elevated Avrakotos in the eyes of McMahon and Casey. They now viewed him as a kind of political lion tamer, able to contain the Agency’s most dangerous and persistent congressional critic. Up until this point Avrakotos could argue that he had not exceeded his authority since he was quite prepared to claim a clear go-ahead based on his interpretation of the director’s mumbles. But two weeks later, when he returned to the congressman’s office, he was guilty of such a flagrant violation of the CIA’s rigid rules that no excuse could have protected him if exposed.

This time he didn’t set out to physically intimidate Wilson. Instead, he opened by making it clear the enormous personal risk he was about to take. No one knew what he was doing and if Wilson accepted his proposition he must never let on where the idea came from. Then he dropped his bombshell. He wanted another $50 million.

It was an outrageous request. Agency officers are not permitted to lobby congress for money. They’re not even permitted to talk to members of congress without an authorization and then only when accompanied by a minder.

In this case, Gust Avrakotos was not only asking for money that no one on the seventh floor knew anything about; it was money that no one at Langley was remotely interested in asking congress to give them. Indeed, some were still balking at the $40 million Wilson had just rammed down the Agency’s throat. The congressman was seen as a wild man to be restrained rather than egged on. More important, any request for new funding in the middle of a congressional session could only be introduced if the director was willing to take his case to the president. The $50 million that Avrakotos was now asking Wilson to push through was more than the CIA’s entire Afghan budget that year.

No matter how you look at it, this series of moves amounted to a direct recruitment effort. No CIA recruitment comes without an element of danger. In extreme instances abroad a case officer might get shot or beaten or jailed when a recruitment effort goes bad. There is always the risk of being exposed to hostile authorities—in Avrakotos’s case the hostile authorities would have been the CIA itself. But as if the ice was not thin enough already, Avrakotos made it sound as if Wilson’s manhood was at stake if he didn’t deliver. “You do a lot of talking about killing Russians. Now for someone as tough as you, you ought to be able to get $50 million bucks, and I’d rather not have to wait until Christmas for it.”

O
stensibly Gust Avrakotos was the moving force in this recruitment drama. And certainly had he not made the first move nothing further would have happened. But the fact was, he had just walked into a trap that Charlie Wilson had set long before. Wilson, too, was relying on his political instincts. He knew that somewhere in the CIA there had to be people who thought as he did. He had tried to woo the Agency with offers of money. When that failed he had stood on the outside and threatened to lay siege to their fortress if they didn’t accept his offer. Avrakotos was the one who took the bait. The result was a mutual recruitment and the birth of a secret partnership that would soon transform the Afghan war.

The way Charlie recalls that first encounter, Avrakotos actually asked for only $40 million whereupon Wilson responded by upping the amount to $50 million. “That day, we recognized that we could be good for each other,” says Avrakotos. “I think Charlie realized that I’m loyal and brutally honest and I knew I could call on him. He would protect me.”

Initially Avrakotos took the lead as he began to introduce Wilson to the intricacies of political life inside the CIA. They both understood that the first battle they must fight would be against the CIA’s cautious leaders. Together they worked out a ritual dance that they would refine and put to use with great effect time and again in the coming months. Following Gust’s instructions, Wilson telephoned Casey and said he was prepared to give the Agency $50 million more for Afghanistan. Could the director use it? Charlie added that he had already taken it upon himself to put this question to Avrakotos.

That left Casey with little choice but to check with the actual orchestrator of this charade, Gust Avrakotos—who confirmed that Wilson had called him and that, in response to the congressman’s demanding questions, he had admitted that the program could use more cash. The director had little choice but to sign off on the offer. With that in place, Wilson set out to work his magic on the Appropriations Committee.

“By this time I had everyone in Congress convinced that the mujahideen were a cause only slightly below Christianity,” Wilson remembers. “Everyone on the subcommittee was enthusiastic. I gave them the sense they could lead the way on a just cause. I told the conservatives it was time we fucked the Russians. Told the liberals it would prove that they were against Communism even if they didn’t support the Contras.”

The CIA was in very bad odor in the House that summer. There was some grumbling from the liberals who had just defeated the administration’s $19 million request for the Contras. Wilson realized he couldn’t just rely on political clout. He would have to sell this one. “So I defended the $50 million in front of the whole committee. We ordered the staff to leave. It was the only time I ever had to do this.”

Above all, Wilson is a masterful storyteller, and he began by describing the events of Christmas Day, 1979, when the great unconquerable Red Army began airlifting troops into Afghanistan. “But the Russians picked on the wrong guys,” he told his colleagues. “Even as we speak, illiterate shepherds and tribesmen are confounding the Soviets. They are making them pay and pay and pay. The money we’re talking about represents one-tenth of one percent of our appropriations bill, and this one-tenth of one percent is the part that could change history. And even if it doesn’t,” he concluded, looking about the room with unquestioned sincerity, “it is our sacred duty to make valuable the lives that these people are laying down.”

Wilson directed a final point to the instinctive mistrust of his liberal colleagues for CIA interventions. “The U.S. had nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s decision to fight. The Afghans made this decision on Christmas and they’re going to fight to the last, even if they have to fight with stones. But we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones.”

Whatever opposition had existed before vanished by the time of the full committee vote. “I don’t remember one nay,” says Wilson, who would use variations on this speech at other critical junctures over the coming years when the outcome of a vote was uncertain.

When Charlie called Avrakotos the next day, it was to announce that he would soon have the entire $50 million. “We were just gleeful,” remembers Wilson. “That $50 million was a direct Avrakotos-Wilson conspiracy. We had made our first move together.” The figure grew to $100 million when the Saudis’ matching funds came through a few months later, a fact made all the more astonishing because Congress was simultaneously moving to completely close down the Contra war.

Bill Casey had no choice now but to take notice. He had just been raked over the coals by Barry Goldwater, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, who was furious about the CIA’s operation to mine the Nicaraguan harbors. The House, meanwhile, under Tip O’Neill’s leadership, had succeeded in banning all military assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels. Casey was perceived by many congressional Democrats to be running an outlaw Agency, and when it came to the Contra war he was prepared to do almost anything to keep it going.

Alan Fiers, who took over the Central American task force after losing out to Avrakotos for the Afghan job, recalled to the
Wall Street Journal
the enormous significance Casey attached to the Contra war. Casey told him, “Alan, you know the Soviet Union is tremendously overextended and they’re vulnerable. If America challenges the Soviets at every turn and ultimately defeats them in one place, that will shatter the mythology…and it will all start to unravel. Nicaragua,” Casey said, “is that place.”
*

The CIA director and Oliver North at the White House were just then starting to plot alternative routes to fund the Contras and bypass congressional restrictions. One can only imagine the director’s confusion at Wilson’s ability to tap huge sums for the Afghans while neither his nor President Reagan’s direct appeal for Contra support had yielded anything.

By most accounts Casey was repelled by Wilson’s carnal lifestyle. Ed Juchniewicz, who shares an intense Catholic background with the director, explained that “Casey was a prude when it came to lifestyle issues. He was educated by Jesuits and nuns, and the stories about Wilson—the belly dancers, the drugs, the drinking, the constant womanizing—offended him.” Avrakotos also noted the director’s initial disapproval of Wilson’s overt hedonism: “This whole thing about cocaine really bothered him. The perception about perverted sex, about drug use, and about being Mr. Five Percent. Casey just didn’t want that black cloud to land on the Agency’s image.”

But the director’s pet, the Contra war, was now in jeopardy, and Casey was the ultimate pragmatist. In spite of his concerns about Wilson, he decided to try to enlist the congressman to help with the Contras. By that time, Casey had discovered Wilson’s role as the great defender of Tacho Somoza and had deduced that Charlie would want to do his part to punish Somoza’s enemies, the Soviet-backed Sandinistas. Adding to the argument was the fact that much of the leadership of the CIA’s Contra army came directly from Somoza’s U.S.-trained National Guard.

Wilson felt almost triumphant returning to Casey’s office, assuming that he would be recognized as the mighty CIA patron he had become. The director, whom he so revered, congratulated him on his extraordinary ability to put through so much money for the Afghans. “You know the entire administration is going through unmitigated hell trying to get a few million for the Contras—who are next door to us—and you’ve just increased the Afghan program by $90 million. I don’t understand this.”

Wilson was elated by the director’s praise until he realized the real reason Casey had summoned him: Could Wilson see a way of sharing just 10 percent of the Afghan appropriation with the Contras? The director insisted it would make all the difference. “We could win the war in six months.”

It was no small request. The president desperately wanted to keep the Nicaraguan “resistance” alive, and the director was asking the patriotic Texas congressman to do his part. “I’d like nothing more than to do that, but Tip wouldn’t like it,” Wilson told the director, referring to Speaker Tip O’Neill. He added that he would only destroy his ability to work for the Afghans if he set out to champion the Contras.

When Casey asked if he wouldn’t at least try, Wilson quite bluntly explained that the Contra war was a lost cause. Clearly the director didn’t understand what Nicaragua had come to mean to liberals in America. Influential leaders in every city in the country were agitated about the Agency’s operations. Hundreds of Americans were actually working for the Sandinista government. Every Friday afternoon, they would gather in front of the U.S. embassy to protest the war, often joined by many more Americans visiting Nicaragua. O’Neill’s niece was in Managua, and housewives and ministers from Witness for Peace were going up to the border to symbolically interpose themselves between the Contra army and the Sandinistas. Reporters were flying in and out of the country filing dispatches about the Agency’s hopelessly public covert operation.

All that was tame, Wilson told Casey, compared to the white passion that he was seeing close up from his Democratic colleagues. Even his close friend level-headed majority leader Jim Wright acted as if getting the CIA out of Nicaragua was his life’s crusade. The most powerful and intractable foe, however, was still the Speaker, and nothing anyone said was going to change his mind.

What Wilson didn’t tell the director that day, because it would have enraged Casey, was that he had already cut a deal with O’Neill—an implicit quid pro quo arrangement in which he'd agreed, in effect, to sell out the Contras in exchange for leading the House when it came to funding the Afghan war.

“I can tell you that we would not have been involved in Afghanistan had it not been for Charlie,” says Tony Coelho, the Democratic whip at the House. “Most members didn’t know where Afghanistan was, and the majority didn’t care.” Coelho, one of the true scholars of power in the House, explained why the arrangement was necessary.
*
“Nicaragua was a bitter, bitter, vicious fight with State, CIA, the military, and the White House against us. If Charlie had gotten caught up in any of those battles he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”

It was not the first time Wilson cut a private deal with the Speaker. O’Neill had tapped him during the Abscam scandals on behalf of his great friend Representative John Murtha. “He would do things like this for O’Neill,” explains Coelho, “and the leadership learned that it could count on him.”

Wilson’s conservative anti-Communist colleagues had repeatedly tried to get him to join their Contra crusade. But he'd always stayed out. O’Neill didn’t expect him to vote with the Democratic majority, but the understanding was that he would not use his influence or energies to work against them.
*
Deep into the Scotch one night, Wilson recalled the bargain with genuine remorse: “Even though I knew they were a lost cause, I’ll always have to live with the fact that I sold out the Contras.” But for the Afghans, the rewards that came from this Contra betrayal were extraordinary.

In retirement, the former Speaker was surprisingly candid in describing his machinations with Wilson: “I knew that Charlie was doing undercover work with the Defense Department and the CIA and everyone else, but we blinked while he was doing it. I figured Charlie was on the right side and I knew that no American soldiers were going to be involved. I used to tell him: ‘I don’t want to know this Charlie; you just go ahead.’”
†

The one place where O’Neill drew the line was over Wilson’s fierce efforts to win an assignment on the Intelligence Committee. As Coelho explains, “That committee was supposed to be controlling the CIA. If we had let Charlie on, it would have been like giving up one of the spots to them.” But that was just about the only thing the Speaker denied Wilson when it came to Afghanistan.

Ever since Reprentative Leo J. Ryan had been murdered in Guyana during the Jim Jones Kool-Aid mass suicide, congressmen had been prohibited from traveling alone on congressional business; but Tip waived the rule for Wilson. Congressmen aren’t supposed to become embroiled in the mechanics and decision making of a covert killing war; rather, they are expected to act as a watchdog over such things. Again, Tip chose to give Wilson license to operate as a virtual member of the CIA. “We had our differences,” recalled the Speaker warmly, “but I always admired and respected Charlie for what he did down there in Afghanistan. I’ve never known a congressman to take a role like that before. If you asked, ‘Did Charlie do it with my approval?’ No. But he did it with my consent.”

Coelho adds one other intriguing observation about Wilson’s success in bringing about radical increases in the CIA’s Afghan funding. “The only reason the political institutional atmosphere would permit something like this to develop was because of the cover of Nicaragua. We were so concentrated on Nicaragua that Afghanistan was not on the radarscope. No one paid any attention to it, and they would have had it not been for Nicaragua.”

There was another thing Wilson did that would have enraged the director. He never missed an opportunity to tell his liberal friends that they were safe voting against the Contras only if they covered their tracks by voting with him on Afghanistan. That way they couldn’t be accused of being soft on Communism in the midst of the Reagan revolution.

Bill Casey had no idea that this was the game Wilson and the Democratic leadership were playing, and he emerged from his Contra fund-raising effort empty-handed. He had asked Avrakotos to join him in the effort to recruit Wilson for Nicaragua, but Gust had diplomatically bowed out of the meeting.
*
He didn’t want anything to compromise his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Flush with Charlie’s money, he was able to operate effectively in the international arms bazaar for the first time. Under his direction, the Agency commissioned the Egyptian Defense Ministry to set up a production line for ammunition to feed all those Enfield rifles. He was sick of being shaken down by black marketeers, and with this government-to-government contract he could count on a guaranteed supply at a fixed price.