Charlie Wilson's War (42 page)

By 1983 Vickers figured he had learned what he needed from the Green Berets. An enormous buildup was underway at the CIA and he judged it time to make his move. Typically he researched the career paths in the Agency exhaustively before choosing a specialty. His Special Forces experience would have allowed him to jump right into one of the paramilitary slots but he had larger visions of becoming Deputy Director for Operations one day and the only route to that post was to become a general case officer. This would require going through the same fifteen-month training course at Camp Peary that had prepared Hart and Avrakotos for their CIA careers.

The paramilitary course had little to teach Vickers. He was already an expert skydiver, trained to leap out of planes from high altitudes. He was even able, by steering his chute with his feet, to maneuver laterally thirty miles and to land, alongside a team of black-suited warriors, within yards of a preassigned target.

Camp Peary wasn’t all drudgery for Vickers, mainly because he shared the boot camp experience with a pretty young case officer. They parachuted together, rappelled out of helicopters, trained with all sorts of rifles and set off plastique: a touch of James Bond glamour in what might otherwise have been drudgery for this overly qualified military specialist.

It is said that all the determinants of success, luck is the most important. And as luck would have it, Vickers turned out to be the right man in the right place at the right time. But that’s not the way it looked to Vickers when he learned of his first on the job training assignment with the Caribbean Task Force. He was desolate: the Caribbean was where people went on vacation, not where great foreign policy issues were played out. But shortly after his posting, the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada became the focus of the world’s attention. For months the Reagan Administration had been complaining about the large number of Cuban advisers on the island and a suspiciously long airstrip being built with Soviet funds. When the already leftist government of this island nation was overthrown, the U.S. suddenly made the decision to invade.

The Caribbean branch chief was directed to accompany the invasion force and was told he could take one aide. As he saw it, he was going to be driving a stagecoach through the badlands and he needed a man by his side who knew how to ride shotgun. It turned out to have been a wise decision. They arrived in Grenada the day after the first troops landed and were promptly ambushed while inspecting a captured ammunition cache. Vickers comported himself with distinction in the firefight that ensued and for the next ten days impressed everyone with his organizational skills.

Back at Langley, Vickers was given a citation and another urgent assignment: to the Lebanon task force, in Beirut, to identify the bombers of the American embassy and the marine barracks. In the embassy bombing in April, the Agency’s national intelligence officer for the Near East, Bob Ames, and six other Agency men had died. The barracks attack, coming on top of the embassy bombing and all the other humiliations at the hands of the Iranians, had pushed the White House to the point of wanting revenge. Vickers’s mission was to figure out whom to target and how to get to them.

Vickers and his team quickly made their way through a list of suspects in Hezbollah and the region’s many other terrorist groups. Unhesitatingly, his team recommended that no action be taken. There was no reliable identification, no appropriate targets, and no reason to strike out blindly. It may not have been what the White House wanted to hear, but it was obviously honest.

Shortly after Vickers completed his training at Camp Peary, Avrakotos interviewed him for the military-adviser and program officer position. In Vickers’s mind, there was no question what needed to be done in Afghanistan, and drawing on his years of preparation, he quickly came up with a grand design for the war. The obvious problem, however, was that no one was about to listen to a GS-11 proclaiming that everything the Agency had undertaken was misdirected; the only person who could initiate the kind of radical change Vickers envisioned was his boss. So he gathered together his disconcerting set of proposals, and thus began the education of Gust Avrakotos.

Coordinated firepower is the key to effective combat, but rather than talk in jargon, Vickers began by offering his new boss a metaphor. The key to success, he said, rested with the mix of weapons, and having the proper “clothing” for the job. Vickers explained that the mujahideen’s needs were not all that different from those of a Green Beret team, which relies on a wide variety of weapons and skills to be effective. The guerrillas also needed to be cross-trained in communications, map reading, first aid, demolition, and small arms. But all of this was secondary to giving them the right combination of weapons—guns to kill a Russian soldier, to disable a tank, to shoot down an aircraft, to lay siege from far away.

Everything needed to be rethought with the weapons mix in mind, Vickers explained. He wanted to immediately stop all purchases of those obsolescent Enfield rifles and switch to AKs. They should think of the basic mujahideen unit as a one-hundred-man force, he said. Each one of these units needed three Dashikas but no more, and Vickers figured there were already more than enough of these heavy machine guns to satisfy that ratio. Stop the purchase of them, he suggested; instead, buy the longer-range 14.5mm heavy machine guns with rounds that can break through the skin of a Hind. He wanted long-range mortars that could hit targets from a distance and not bring down instant reprisal.

His projections for ammunition, however, forced Avrakotos to recognize the inadequacy of the existing budget. If you have one gun, explained Vickers, the key question is how much ammunition will be necessary to feed it over the course of a year. Take an AK-47 assault rifle, which could easily consume 200 rounds in a firefight. Ten firefights in a month, say, would eat up 2,000 rounds. And given an annual fighting season of three or four months, one mujahid would require about 7,000 rounds a year. At a cost of fifteen cents per round that comes out to approximately $1,050 per man per year simply to keep a $165 AK-47 in ammunition. Howart Hart had already distributed more than 400,000 rifles—Enfields and AKs—to the mujahideen. It would break the budget to fully supply all of these existing weapons with ammunition, Vickers explained. Just to keep 100,000 holy warriors’ AK-47s in ammunition for a year would cost over $100 million.

The Agency had already decided to use the added funds to buy more rifles, but these, Vickers asserted, would only leave more men with little ammunition and without the kind of weapons that could really make a difference. Everything needed to redesigned with a new weapons mix in mind.

By the time he finished describing the range of weapons and amount of ammunition that should be supplied, he was proposing heretofore unthinkable quantities and costs of ordnance. And that was only the beginning. Once the decision was made to escalate, it would trigger huge parallel investments up and down the line to make the logistics workable: cargo planes and ships, trains and trucks, camels and mules. New warehouses would be needed, quality-control inspectors, and, always, the specialists to disguise the American hand.

In his unassuming way, Vickers was walking Avrakotos into a completely new dimension as he talked about what the resistance should look like two, three, four years down the road. This was not about bleeding the Soviets. Vickers, a trained killer, was presenting a systematic plan for putting the Red Army through its own Vietnam.

As Vickers sat in Avrakotos’s office, his highly specific blueprint in hand, Gust found himself almost unnerved. He had sent the junior case officer to his task feeling cocky about how much money there was to spend. What he and Wilson had done with funding was nothing short of a political miracle, and he had expected Vickers to recognize this. Instead, Vickers announced that to make a difference they should be prepared to ratchet up to a budget as high as $1.2 billion a year.

This kid was talking about more money than the CIA was spending on all of its other covert operations put together. This was more than even Gust had bargained for. He quickly convened his team to challenge the numbers. The logistics man in particular was skeptical. But in the end the senior officers could fault little. “We ended up going with nine out of ten things he proposed,” says Avrakotos.

Meanwhile, the paramilitary branch had gotten hold of Vickers’s paperwork and was calling the whole plan into question. At a showdown with twenty veteran warriors, Vickers reiterated that existing policy was little different from giving the mujahideen clubs instead of rifles. If they had to live with existing funding, better to stop buying any new weapons and throw the entire budget into ammunition. That way, at least the Afghans could have something to fire at the Red Army, even if they didn’t have the right weapons.

As it now stood, the mujahideen could not fight year-round, and they couldn’t really engage the Soviets in intense combat. To infuse them with the kind of resources he was calling for, he argued, would quickly turn them into year-round warriors. All they needed was enough ammunition, food for their families, medical kits, and a supply line to keep them in the field. With his remarkably low-key presentation, this warrior-strategist was quietly seizing control of the program by sheer force of logic.

Avrakotos knew that Chuck Cogan, with his extreme caution, would have nixed this plan before it had a chance to be considered by higher authority. But the stars were moving all the right figures into place that year; as luck would have it, Cogan’s successor was the rugged veteran case officer Bert Dunn.

Dunn was an old military man who had served in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. He knew the terrain and the players, and he was bowled over by Vickers’s strategic plan. Equally important, he trusted Avrakotos and chose to stand back and let him run the show. That would prove to be of enormous consequence in the coming years.

After Dunn signed off on the plan, the two men went upstairs to present it to Clair George. Once again fate played its hand. Dunn had been George’s deputy in the Africa Division and enjoyed his complete confidence. “Clair doesn’t like a lot of details or number crunching,” explains Avrakotos. “He just said, ‘Bert, if you endorse it, it’s okay with me.’” But the Agency’s top spy then suggested that the entire discussion was somewhat irrelevant because Congress would never give them the kind of money the plan called for.

As deputy director for Operations, George was always overwhelmed with a world of problems. He had to choose where to throw his energies and where he could afford to delegate responsibility. With his old deputy Bert Dunn riding herd over Avrakotos, he didn’t feel he had much to worry about or reason to involve himself in the details of the Afghan program. Avrakotos made it easier by being uncharacteristically diplomatic with George, saying only that there was nothing to be lost by giving the plan a try; surely they would get at least some of the money. He didn’t for a moment flirt with telling Clair his little secret—about how he and Wilson were thick as thieves, plotting together to up the funding.

Avrakotos did have one simmering problem with Wilson that he knew he had to sort out quickly. When it came to spending for the CIA’s war effort, Charlie was virtually a Johnny-one-note, insisting that the money go first toward weapons to shoot down the Hind. The nightmare was still waking Wilson up in the middle of the night, and he was constantly on the phone to Gust, wanting to know whether any Hinds had been shot down and where things stood with the Oerlikons and the other weapons he was pushing the Agency to buy.

By the fall of 1984, when Vickers entered the picture, Wilson had been way out in front of everyone at the CIA for almost two years in trying to solve the anti-aircraft problem. He still had the Israelis working on the Charlie Horse, though Gust had told him he wouldn’t fund that program. The Muslim world considered itself at war with Israel, and he wasn’t going to risk everything by letting the Jews into the jihad.

Now both Wilson and the Agency were urging Avrakotos to buy the British Blowpipe, a shoulder-fired missile said to have been effective in the Falklands War. Gust had looked over the weapon at a recent air show and had already spoken to the Shorts Brothers, the manufacturers. But that, too, was a sensitive matter requiring the highest-level clearances from the British government. Avrakotos was increasingly aware of how dangerous it was to stonewall on this issue, particularly since he had basically tricked Wilson with the Oerlikons. Wilson had come to think of the Swiss guns as a kind of magic weapon; he kept a little model of one on his desk and would show it to visiting Afghans, telling them that this was the weapon that would deliver them. Gust knew it would be at least a year, however, before the first Oerlikons got into the field, and then there would be so few that they would only be of marginal importance.

It was embarrassingly clear that the Agency had not figured out how to combat Soviet control of the air. It had no plans in the works, and Gust knew it was only a matter of time before Charlie turned his guns on him.

As with everything else, Vickers did not miss a beat when Avrakotos asked him what they should do. He said that Wilson was thinking about the solution to the problem the wrong way. Rarely, in war, is the battle won by a single weapon. It wasn’t necessary to find the
perfect
weapon. Once again, the answer lay in the broad concept of the weapons mix.

After hearing Vickers out, Avrakotos decided to break protocol and bring Vickers into Wilson’s office. It’s unheard of for a new case officer, a mere GS-11, to go to a congressman’s office, much less to make a sensitive and controversial presentation. But Avrakotos was desperate. “This is going to be the most important briefing of your life,” he told Vickers. “Go practice in front of the mirror.”

Even years after the Soviets pulled out, Wilson would not have any idea of the role Vickers had played in the war. He never did learn—or at least could not long remember—the names of any of the briefers that the CIA sent to him through the years. To him they were all anonymous, generic figures who worked for Gust and later for Jack Devine or Frank Anderson. Everything that started to go right in the war during those early years he would always credit to the handiwork and daring of his secret partner, Gust.