Charlie Wilson's War (39 page)

The team met at 9:30
A.M.
each Monday, with Avrakotos presiding over his fourteen specialists. “There was one basic question: what do we need to win the war? Each guy would come in with his dream sheet. Some guys came up with real wild dream sheets. No one had any streak of mercy in him when it came to hurting the Russians.”

Art Alper, the grandfatherly demolitions expert, was one of the team’s more idea-filled members. Along with developing demolition kits, special fuses, and new techniques to smuggle weapons and ordnance into enemy territory, he helped develop portable amplifiers and devices to spread Broadbent’s psychological war. The inspiration for this effort came from North Korean radio broadcasts to U.S. troops: “Hey G.I., we’re fucking your sister.” The CIA’s idea was to place powerful amplifiers on hills across from Soviet garrisons. When the mujahideen turned them on, a Russian voice would boom out: “While your wives and mothers and sisters are sleeping with political commissars and you are dying on the battlefield, we mujahideen laugh at you” or “We Dushman [the Russian name for the mujahideen], we herders of goats and sheep, challenge you women to come up to this hill and fight.”

“I thought the portable broadcasts were ridiculous, but it hit my funny bone,” says Avrakotos. “And it did promote fear. If you get some fucking Dushman without shoes challenging you to fight and you go up there and get bushwhacked or sniped, you realize this guy is clever. You start fearing him.”

Alper’s amplifiers would broadcast at irregular intervals, even after the mujahideen had left their positions. When the Soviets discovered that the equipment was on automatic pilot, it spooked them further; the mujahideen were a more sophisticated foe than they had previously thought.

Some of the other psychological-war efforts weren’t quite as successful. The sinister messages that Broadbent had dreamed up for leaflets rarely made their way to the Red Army troops. Each pamphlet had a different pitch. One said, “If your commanding officer is a real Communist who wants you to fight many battles, frag him. Otherwise, eventually we’re going to get you.” But the mujahideen, who didn’t understand the concept of propaganda, tended not to be very helpful. Avrakotos says they found it far too temping to treat Broadbent’s leaflets as if they were exotic CIA-issued toilet paper.

Alper was a particularly offbeat presence in the office, with his grandfatherly face, his violent schemes, and his burgundy plaid pants. “All the secretaries saw him as a dirty old man,” says Gust. “But he was a genius with mines and at demolition. I’m sure it was the first time in his life he really felt wanted.” Gust was trying to promote just such a sense of belonging, in essence creating his own CIA tribe within the tribe.

The heart of everything the CIA was trying to do in Afghanistan, though, was arm the mujahideen. Here the man Avrakotos most strongly relied on to acquire and move staggering quantities of ordnance was longtime veteran Tim Burton. Never in the Agency’s history had there been such a challenge for the Office of Logistics. It would be up to Burton to move millions of ammunition rounds, thousands of AK-47s, night-vision goggles, medical kits, and herds of mules, all through hidden channels, from a dozen countries into one of the most inaccessible lands in the world.

“If you know who Radar is in
M*A*S*H
,” Gust says, “that was Tim. In the social pecking order of the CIA, the case officer is at the top of the totem pole and the logistics people are near the very bottom. Case officers don’t usually associate with the logistics men; they’re known as ‘logs pukes.’ People call them when the toilet breaks down. But if you really want to have a good ship, you make sure you include all your people.” Avrakotos made it a point to elevate Burton to a position of status, and when he finally left his post he passed on a piece of advice to his successor: “If you get rid of this guy, you’re losing your right tit.”

Avrakotos still stands in wonder of Burton’s mastery. “We had fifty major sources feeding information to us on a daily basis about weapons and material that we were purchasing for the mujahideen,” he said. “Tim had positioned people all over the world—in Cairo, Frankfurt, Switzerland. He could place an order, get a contract obligated, and get the weapons there in three months. It was fantastic. He could get seven C-141 planes in forty-eight hours—something that would ordinarily take a CIA task force four weeks.”

Once things got rolling, so many people started coming in to the task force with so many wild proposals for screwing up the Red Army that Avrakotos had to assign two women case officers just to screen the ideas; they put together target studies and provided the mujahideen with maps and operational intelligence for striking purposes.

Providing the mujahideen with real-time satellite intelligence had the potential to transform the Afghan soldier’s combat power. In time, Avrakotos won over another ethnic soul brother, Colonel Walter Jajko, who worked out of General Stillwell’s Pentagon office and who took it upon himself to task eighty of his people with producing target studies for the program. Jajko would make sure that satellites made extra runs over Afghanistan, and his technicians would translate the photographs into simple sketches to make them appear to have been drawn by the Afghans themselves.

Close to half of the officers in the Afghan branch, including Avrakotos, were divorced. “Everyone worked six and a half days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. After work we only went out with Agency people. We drank with them, slept with them, and if you were lucky you’d get laid three times a week, always with an Agency person. And one Sunday a month I’d head for Deale, Maryland, and eat crabs and smell salt water.”

Avrakotos has an intense love for most traditional American pastimes. He is, for example, an ardent sports fan who gambles on professional football. Under the surface, however, few Americans were as tied to the superstitions of the Old World as he was. One only had to look at his office walls to appreciate that this chief of the CIA’s South Asia Group was guided by his parents’ Greek Island mentality.

The most distinctive object in his office was a
phylacto,
an intricate dark weaving laced with silver and gold threads, that hung on his wall to protect him from evil spirits. Avrakotos’s mother, Zafira, had stitched it for Gust when, at age five, he was sick with jaundice and the doctors had given him up for dead. In desperation, his father, Oscar, brought in an herbalist from the islands. She moved into the house, fed the small boy terrible-tasting mixtures of herbs, and rubbed a hideous black paste onto his gums. The old healer cured the boy, and when Gust came to say good-bye before going overseas with the Agency on his first assignment, his mother took the
phylacto
off the wall and admonished him to always keep it with him. “You are going to all these foreign lands. I know how it feels,” she said. “Take this with you. It helped me. It will help you.”

Throughout his travels, Avrakotos brought it along. He didn’t talk about it to his colleagues, but he was every bit as superstitious as his mother. He remembered how feuds in Aliquippa would begin when someone approached a woman with a baby, saying, “May your child have a long and happy life.” The mother, fearing that the speaker was pronouncing a curse in code, would be convinced that the person meant the opposite. Gust also remembered the interminable Greek Orthodox church services of his youth, when elders would walk the aisles slapping any young boy foolish enough to cross his legs; crossing one’s legs was considered bad luck. Drinking water out of a faucet also brought bad luck, according to Gust’s mother. No matter where he was, Gust drank bottled water, just as he always closed his bedroom windows and shades at night, much to the annoyance of his wives. These were the ways of Lemnos, the island where Zafira had been born and raised.

Next to the
phylacto
on Gust’s office wall was a giant photograph of a Greek fishing boat, the
Trident.
The innocent-looking vessel was actually a high-speed armored ship used by the CIA in the 1950s to infiltrate agents into Albania. Gust had spent many a drunken evening aboard the
Trident
entertaining Greek military officers and their lady friends, and the
Trident
had also cemented the bond between him and his son Gregory during their frequent weekend boat outings together.

One of those trips had been particularly momentous. In early 1976, five weeks after CIA station chief Richard Welch had been assassinated and the 17 November terrorist group had marked all senior Athens station agents, Gust decided to take his wife and Gregory, then ten, out on the
Trident
to escape the tension. They went to a remote beach far from the capital. “It was a gorgeous morning,” he remembers. “You could see for miles. It was one of the few moments I could relax and not carry a gun. All of a sudden this gypsy woman was walking down the beach toward us. It was just weird. She was wearing twelve layers of clothes—a lot of white and purple and some red.”

“The gypsy walked up to me and asked for a cigarette. She had a tiny, shriveled, weather-beaten face and a deep, resonant voice. ‘Ah, American cigarettes. Obviously you are American,’ she said, not waiting for an answer. ‘You have a blond wife and a little boy with a bathing suit. Only Americans buy bathing suits. Also, you are Greek, but there are many Greeks who don’t like you. There is a group that wants to kill you. They have already killed one of your coworkers. You have much to be afraid of.’”

It was impossible for Gust to turn this woman away. Greeks have a great mistrust for gypsies but inevitably seek them out for protection when someone has put the evil eye out on them. “Your name is Costa,” she said. This statement surprised and frightened him—Costa was his Greek nickname. “Tell me more, old lady,” he said.

“I have to look at your hand, and I have to touch you. It’s going to cost you lots of money—one thousand drachmas,” she told him. When Avrakotos began to protest, she brushed off her request. “The money isn’t important. I like you.” Then she proceeded to tell him about his family history. “Your father died at a very old age. He died a good death. Your mother died shortly after of a horrible death.”

That unnerved Avrakotos because it was true. His father had recently died at eighty-nine of a heart attack; his mother had been killed in a gas explosion three weeks later. “This was something no one in Greece knew. I tried to find out how she did it,” he said, “but she said she didn’t know, that a flash came over her and she could see it. If she was a flimflam artist, she was damn good.” As the morning drew out, Gust shared his wine-and-cheese picnic lunch with the old woman, who offered to make him a
phylacto.
‘I know you believe, even if your wife doesn’t. As long as you carry this, you won’t have to worry that someone will hurt you or take your money. But as to health, only God can protect you.”

Gust agreed: “Two out of three isn’t so bad,” he said, whereupon she brought out grotesque things from under her clothes, including dried animal parts and bits of bats. When he asked what they were for, she replied, “You don’t want to know.” She put together the
phylacto,
then wrapped it carefully in waxed paper and said, “Put it in a safe pouch. Don’t ever throw it away because you’ll be throwing luck away.” To this day Avrakotos never moves without this black, shiny, composite of bat wing, unknown animal parts, and whatever other ingredients gypsies employ to protect their charges.

All of these superstitions help explain what led Gust to embrace Charlie Wilson in the summer of 1984, when everyone else at the CIA was trying to stiff-arm him. Avrakotos could see that something was protecting this congressman from the fate of mere mortals. Every charge in the book had been leveled against him, and yet he had shed them all and given what amounts to the evil eye to General Stillwell, Chuck Cogan, the State Department, and the entire seventh floor of Langley.

But more than his apparent power to ward off enemies, what pulled Avrakotos to Wilson was the thing that all Greeks are looking for: Wilson was the man with good luck. Greeks are gamblers at heart—they look for signs; they bet with winners. And to Gust, Charlie Wilson was the quintessential man with whom to place a bet. He was the ultimate amulet, the good-luck charm.

This, then, was the man in overall command of the largest CIA operation in history—Gust Lascaris Avrakotos, age forty-seven, a CIA “super grade” making $59,000 a year, with twenty-two years invested in his pension plan, a
phylacto
on the wall, another in his pocket, and an outlaw congressman he counted on for the ride to victory.

The only ones more irrationally optimistic than Wilson, Avrakotos, and his Dirty Dozen were the mujahideen, who were being slaughtered that year in record numbers. To them it was all so obvious: there was only one superpower, and since He was with them, they could not lose. Allah would choose the instruments of their salvation.

In the end, however, it would not be some piece of hocus-pocus or anything mystical that would give Gust and Charlie and the United States the capacity to ride the mujahideen’s guerrilla war to victory. The true transformational element arrived at Langley that fall in the form of an unassuming young man who had only been in the CIA a year and a half. He was without superstition, entirely rational, and no one looking at him could ever have imagined that within a matter of weeks, he would completely redesign and transform the nature of the CIA’s Afghan program. Looking back at it years later, Avrakotos would see the arrival of Mike Vickers into the ranks of the task force as part of the peculiar destiny that seemed to be guiding this drama.