Charlie Wilson's War (40 page)

W
hen Mike Vickers arrived at the door of the South Asia Operations Group for his first interview, he was a GS-11, the civil service equivalent of a captain in the army. At thirty-one, with just a year and a half in the Agency, he was so low in the pecking order that had he joined the ninety-man Contra task force, he would have been one of its most junior officers.

It wasn’t exactly easy to find Avrakotos on the sixth floor. Every other office in the Near East Division, the mother hen of the South Asian enterprise, had a sign next to its door:
N.E. SUPPORT, N.E. FINANCE
. Vickers had only a number to go by, 6C18, so he searched for a white door in a white hallway with no markings—just numbers in very small print next to the entrance.

The idea behind this studied anonymity was to discourage those without a need to know from dropping by. Anyone could enter, however, and once inside, the unsuspecting visitor was confronted by a huge Soviet soldier in the combat uniform of a chemical-warfare specialist. The uniform was the real thing, stripped off a Red Army trooper killed in Afghanistan. There was a bullet hole in the chest alongside the hammer-and-sickle insignia, and with its rubber gloves and gas mask, the looming figure had a Darth Vader quality about it.

Such was the Dirty Dozen’s innovative approach to security. They didn’t like the rigmarole of locking and unlocking the door each time they came and went, so they deployed this Soviet scarecrow as their first line of defense. The threat was not some Soviet mole but the Office of Security, which was sure to send an agent incognito one day to try to penetrate the vault to prove the branch wasn’t protecting its secrets. Gust had prepared for such an incursion by installing a secretary next to the Russian soldier with instructions to deny entry to suspected security sleuths.

The secretary was expecting Vickers, however, and escorted him past the burn bags into Avrakotos’s suite. It, too, was part of the vaulted area, but the Office of Security had insisted on sealing it off with special doors equipped with cipher locks and peepholes.

Avrakotos hadn’t protested. One of his ironclad rules was never to cross the security people. He got around them by just keeping the doors open. Other officers loved to wrap their daily routine in the spookery of “need to know.” The ritual of closing their doors made everyone believe that important clandestine business was being transacted.

But Avrakotos hated that game. Anyone who made the mistake of closing the door to his office would find themselves staring at what was probably the only pitch-black door in the Agency. Avrakotos had a thing about black. He always wore it when he went on challenging operations, particularly when he wanted to intimidate someone. That was the idea behind the door, and he took a perverse enjoyment out of watching the reactions. To those few who dared ask, he would explain that he hated to be closed in and wanted people who did that to him to know that there better be a good cause. But Vickers was not the sort to needlessly close a door; nor was he intimidated by anyone.

The face of the CIA is often disappointingly bland, and with his glasses and quiet demeanor, Vickers was a particularly bland-looking fellow. He had the manner of an eager but young stockbroker who had perhaps attended a good college. He just didn’t look like a candidate to take over the design of the largest CIA operation in history.

Avrakotos, however, had never gone about staffing his units conventionally. For starters, he didn’t trust the Agency to pick candidates for him. He began his recruiting drives by tapping into his informal network: the secretaries of the Clandestine Services. As far as he was concerned, they were the only ones who could be counted on to tell him who was good and who was a loser. “They overhear their bosses’ conversations,” explains Avrakotos. “They know about jealousies. They know if a guy gets thirty-five calls a day from his wife.” More than anyone in the Agency, the secretaries in Operations were the ones privy to the real dirt.

Over his twenty years roaming the world and checking in at the Agency’s stations wherever he went, Avrakotos had built up a virtual network of these women. By 1984, he figured, he knew 90 percent of the secretaries in the Operations Directorate, certainly all of the twenty-five or thirty in Near East. He cultivated them almost as an agent network, treating them as equals and taking them to lunch even after he'd ascended to McGaffin’s job.

He knew how hard it was for them to come back to headquarters, trying to live on $18,000 or $19,000 a year. Overseas, in Dacca or Tegucigalpa, they had housing allowances, and when the dollar was strong they could live lavishly. At Langley, they were so poor they had to cluster together in tiny houses or apartments to make ends meet. Gust always made sure they got as much overtime and as many cash bonuses as he could justify, and more than once he proved that he was willing to fight for them.

One time, when his personal secretary was slated for an overseas assignment, the area chief responsible for the country where she was to be posted blackballed her, declaring that she was a “jezebel.” Her crime was having been caught in an affair with a married case officer—who, of course, suffered no consequences.

Avrakotos immediately rallied to the defense of his humiliated secretary, a pretty blond divorcee. When Gust confronted the branch chief, demanding an explanation, the man made the mistake of telling him that his secretary was a “fornicator” who might disrupt the station if he gave her the assignment.

“Well, if that’s the case, then you’re going to have to fire your own secretary and one of your agents as well.”

“Why?”

“Because I fucked them both. They’re both fornicators.”

Back in his office, Gust summoned his secretary and the case officer with whom she was consorting. “It’s all cleared up—you can have the job if you want it,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d probably tell them to go to hell.” He added, “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to call off the affair.”

Such stories make the rounds, and the secretaries knew they had a friend in Gust Avrakotos. Had it not been for them, Gust wouldn’t even have considered hiring the man who would quickly become indispensable to him. The secretaries said he was special—the best writer in the branch, a near genius, and the target of jealousy in the paramilitary branch, which hadn’t even passed his name on as a candidate for the job.

The CIA’s paramilitary unit, officially known as the Special Operations Group, was still in the process of rebuilding after years of firings and retrenchment. It had once been a major component of the CIA, a full division with land, air, and sea branches. When the Agency took on Castro, at the Bay of Pigs, it was two cowboy PM officers who had led the Cubans ashore and fired the first shots. PM officers had been at the heart of the successful overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Close to a hundred of them had run a massive air-support operation in Laos in the late 1960s. They had always been a critical component of every major covert operation involving force because the general case officers rarely had such expertise.
*

Avrakotos instinctively liked these men, most of whom had begun their government service in the military. “Most of them never would have survived in the regular military,” he explains with admiration. “They’re the kind who like to tell generals to go fuck themselves. They don’t like to shine their shoes. Some were pilots for Air America and were crazy, but that’s what you want on your side. They talk straight and tell you what they believe. They hate bureaucracy. They get in trouble, drink too much—probably beat up a lieutenant colonel in a bar—so then they decide to get out of the army and go to where the action is, and that’s the CIA.”

These men and Gust were kindred spirits. But there was a reason these PM specialists were known inside the Agency as “knuckle draggers”—so many of them had limited vision. Now that he was in charge of the Afghan program, Avrakotos felt that he needed a different kind of paramilitary specialist, and left to its own devices, he didn’t think the PM branch would find him the right man.

The Afghan operation was unique, not just because of its size but because the Pakistani intelligence service, General Akhtar’s ISI men were responsible for the hands-on supervision of the mujahideen. In time, Avrakotos would send teams of American PM officers on temporary training missions to the Pakistani camps. But for his personal military adviser he didn’t need a knuckle dragger to perform heroics behind enemy lines. He needed a weapons expert who was above all a strategic thinker.

As Avrakotos had sat in his office paging through the résumés of the ten PM officers he was considering for the job, Vickers’s file had stood out: ten years a Green Beret, the first five on the NATO frontline studying the Soviets and preparing for guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. A series of internal citations: Special Forces Soldier of the Year. Fluent in Czech and Spanish. Officers Candidate School, second in class. Training in demolition, light and heavy weapons, raids and ambushes, high-altitude free-fall parachuting, advanced mountain climbing. Three years running counterterrorism missions out of Southern Command, Panama. Then a career change: at thirty he entered the CIA’s elite career-training program. What caught Avrakotos’s eye were two entries indicating missions to Grenada and Beirut in the midst of what should have been a routine desk job. For one of them, Vickers had gotten a citation for bravery under fire. That was enough to make one want to pursue this man’s background more thoroughly.

Gust had begun by wandering through the PM branch to eyeball Vickers. He wasn’t impressed. “He was the only nerdy-looking guy in the whole group; most of those guys are Neanderthals, and he looked like a bookworm.” Avrakotos decided that he needed to know what this man was all about. What tipped the balance was a piece of intelligence from one of the secretaries in his network: as far as the women were concerned, Vickers was no nerd, and he was dating the prettiest girl in the case officer program.

To Gust’s great annoyance, Rudy Enders, the Special Operations chief, declared that Vickers was too junior and couldn’t interview for the position. This wasn’t Avrakotos’s first run-in with the PM branch, and he wasn’t about to roll over. Earlier that year he had locked horns with the previous PM chief over another officer he had wanted to borrow. A vicious turf battle had broken out over the phone. “You better apologize,” Avrakotos had shouted, “because if you don’t I’m going to come down and shove the telephone up your ass.” By time he had stormed down to the PM branch, to the knuckle draggers’ lair, the chief had vanished. Later Avrakotos discovered that the officer had left only because he had a history of brawling and it would have jeopardized his career had he stayed to slug it out.

That man was William Buckley, who shortly afterward was sent to Beirut as chief of station. By the time Gust was scheming to enlist Vickers, Buckley had already been taken captive by Iranian-backed terrorists, who'd proceeded to torture him. They had sent a videotape of their captive’s agony, leering into the camera as they broke every bone in his body. As best the Agency specialists could judge, his ordeal had lasted many days.

Avrakotos never had any doubts about what he would have done to the Iranians had he been in charge. He would have ordered the bombing of their most holy shrine at Qom or taken his anger out on Khomeini’s family. As he saw it, the tape was a classic sucker punch, designed to make the Agency strike out impotently. He told Casey that unless they were prepared to do something truly awful, it was better to do nothing at all. But he argued that the tape should be released to at least inform the world who these people were.

Buckley may have been his foe internally, but once the enemy had him, the case officer became very much a part of Gust’s family. He would later give him the ultimate accolade: “Whoever kidnapped him got the wrong guy. He would have given them no satisfaction. He was a stubborn goat.”

Buckley’s replacement in the paramilitary division was no less prickly a personality. Rudy Enders wasn’t about to let Avrakotos fill one of the Agency’s plum PM jobs with the most junior case officer in his branch. But Gust was painfully aware of his own inadequacy in the area of weapons and strategy. With Charlie’s money pouring in and so many critical decisions to be made, he was ready to do whatever was necessary to get Vickers.

The last officer PM had sent him, Dwight Weber, a full marine colonel, had driven him crazy. “He was a by-the-book, straight-missionary-position kind of guy with absolutely no initiative,” says Avrakotos. The colonel didn’t think beyond the next fiscal year. “If the funding level were to double he would have been inclined just to double the existing order, keeping the same ratio of weapons to ammunition that Howard Hart had long ago established. There was no thought of changing the kind of weapons—just more of the same year after year.”

To make matters worse, Colonel Weber had crossed a line by asking Larry Penn, Gust’s consigliere, whether the entire program made sense. He seemed concerned about the mounting casualties, given the tremendous odds against a successful resolution of the war. A livid Avrakotos dressed him down. “What kind of military man are you?”

Everyone else in the program was there to kick ass, and Avrakotos considered this kind of self-doubt unforgivable. The grandfatherly Art Alper wasn’t rent with doubts when he designed his lethal sabotage tactics; he felt virtuous about it. “Here’s a guy who could go to the synagogue, pray, and have a good night’s sleep. That’s the kind of killer I wanted on my team. We had right and God on our side.”

Weber had actually driven Avrakotos to the breaking point once before, when he and another PM officer had accompanied him to Switzerland to explore the purchase of the controversial Oerlikons. They were told they were there to examine the guns, but the real reason Gust had brought them was to protect his backside. “I didn’t want anyone to suspect that I had made a private deal with Charlie or to suggest that he was somehow getting a commission.”