Charlie Wilson's War (44 page)

Avrakotos then turned to Wilson and said, “Charlie, I can’t buy it.” Without missing a beat Wilson responded, “You’re right.” In Gust’s mind, Charlie had just passed the first ethics test. He wasn’t trying to pressure the Agency into buying a weapon that wouldn’t work for the Afghans. There would soon be a second test for Charlie.

The entourage was then ferried back across the desert to eyeball Mohammed’s next offering: a warehouse filled with eight hundred Soviet SA-7s left over from the Yom Kippur War. These were the same type of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons the Agency had gotten so excited about when they were able to buy a small supply of them from the Polish general who’d wanted a tombstone in honor of his grandfather erected in Quebec. But the station had tipped off Gust that the Egyptians tended not to maintain their old weapons well. Avrakotos, still worried that Wilson might try to put the fix in, had said, “Charlie, if the SAMs are operational, I’ll buy them. But if they’re not, I don’t want to hear another fucking word about them.”

Abu Ghazala had assured Charlie that every SAM was in mint condition. But when they walked into the warehouse, all three of Gust’s experts rolled their eyes. SA-7s, like all sophisticated electronic weapons, are supposed to be stored in temperature-controlled, sanitary conditions. This desert warehouse was filled with dust, and the SA-7s were actually sitting on dirt floors. Art Alper whispered to Gust, “They aren’t worth the metal put into them.” The wires were burned out, and the connections were no good.

Gust explained to Wilson that Vickers and Alper, the two men he trusted, said the SAMs were useless, but another expert from the station had suggested that Gust take samples back to headquarters for testing. What did Wilson want to do? Gust asked. “Forget the SAMs,” Charlie said. “We can’t give something to the Afghans that won’t work.”

Before leaving for Egypt, the CIA’s deputy director, John McMahon, had called Avrakotos into his office and issued a warning: “I want you to know that you are dealing with dynamite with Wilson. If he ever does anything that looks to you as if he is using the Agency to personally profit, you let me know immediately.” Wilson had now passed Avrakotos’s final ethics test. “It proved to me that he wasn’t out for the commissions,” Gust says. It made me one hundred percent certain he was not Mr. Five Percent. And having watched him now for all these years, I can honestly say, in my opinion, there is no question that Charlie never made a dime on any of this. His motive was just to get even with the Russians. If his friends made money he didn’t give a shit, just so long as the weapons killed Russians.”
*

After the disastrous day in the desert, Gust was not very hopeful about doing much business with Mohammed. Charlie, in his typically charming manner, called the field marshal to tell him the bad news. “Mohammed, I’m afraid some of your mules fainted this morning,” he said, adding that the defense minister would be furious to discover that his officers had not properly stored the SA-7s and that the CIA couldn’t consider buying them either. “Someone is going to die,” Abu Ghazala told Charlie, who says, “I’m sure a few heads rolled that day.”

Although a bit embarrassed, Mohammed did not seem overly concerned. He quickly assured Wilson that he had many other weapons to offer and that the following day he would even arrange for a visit to Egypt’s most sensitive new-weapons development center. That night, he insisted, the entire delegation must join him for dinner and an evening at the leading belly-dancing casbah of Cairo, where Fifi Abdul was performing.

The scene in the casbah was right out of
Casablanca
—swarthy Egyptians drinking and watching the middle-aged belly dancers, Mohammed at the best table surrounded by equal numbers of Egyptian generals and Agency operatives, and Charlie and Gust as the guests of honor. As always, flanking the table were Mohammed’s bodyguards, understandable in a country where religious zealots had recently gunned down the president.

As head of the purchasing commission, Gust was seated next to the defense minister. The Agency’s analytic division had prepared him for this encounter by providing a psychological profile of Ghazala, which Avrakotos had studied on the way over. It reported that Mohammed smoked, drank, had a roving eye, and, most fascinating of all to Gust, loved ethnic jokes. Wanting to build a bridge to this powerful potential ally, Avrakotos decided to ingratiate himself by telling Mohammed a politically incorrect joke that made fun of a certain Greek stereotype. “Did you hear the one about the little Greek boy?” he asked. “He went with the Greek girl for three months until he finally got into her little brother.”

“It’s not that funny when you get down to it,” acknowledges Avrakotos, “but Mohammed fucking loved it. He said, ‘You’re Greek, aren’t you?’” The delighted defense minister then proceeded to spin out a series of Greek, Armenian, and Israeli jokes and ended up by saying, “Well, I have to give equal treatment to the Arabs. I can’t let you think I’m anti-Semitic.” With that, Mohammed let loose several hilarious jokes mocking his own countrymen.

As Gust and Mohammed began to bond, Gust discovered how valuable a relationship with Abu Ghazala could be. The quality of the weapons and ammunition the Egyptians had been producing for the Afghan operation was so mixed that the Cairo station had been requesting the right to inspect the factory, but after four months they had been unable to get anyone to even give them an answer. At dinner, Abu Ghazala just waved his hand and told Gust that everything was possible for Charlie’s friends; they could visit the factory in the morning.

The rest of the trip was a dizzying roller coaster. The previously inaccessible .303 factories sprang open just as promised. The CIA contingent found it hard to believe their eyes as they watched the Egyptian men loitering about, smoking next to the explosive stores of gunpowder, while women, their hands moving like machines, filled cartridges with thimbles full of the black substance. To Gust it was like stepping back in time. The factories looked just like the descriptions he had once read of conditions in nineteenth-century New England textile mills.

“Mind you, we were in a Muslim nation where women are not supposed to participate but all the quality control stations were run by women,” he says. When Avrakotos queried General Yahia about all the women supervisors, he replied, “Apparently you’ve never been married to an Egyptian woman—they’re real sons of bitches.”

“Okay,” Gust responded, “I’m going to keep buying from the Egyptians.”

Most of the Egyptians’ initial efforts to sell weapons to the Agency resembled a Keystone Kops movie. The most preposterous moment came during a test firing of Mohammed’s new briefcase-size tank destroyer. Once more a general delivered a rousing briefing and a stalwart Egyptian fired at the target, but this time the round, acting like a boomerang, turned back on the watchers. “Oh shit!” Charlie yelled as they all hurled themselves flat. “We decided not to buy any of those,” Wilson remembers.

There had been much wringing of Egyptian hands before the demonstration, ostensibly over the disclosure of such valuable state secrets to such known friends of Israel. Art Alper had gone to some lengths to conceal his religious affiliations. After scrambling up from the ground, Gust had quipped to the embarrassed General Yahia, “I don’t think the Jews have to worry about this one.”

As compensation for these little setbacks and to the confusion and dismay of his security officials, Mohammed offered to let the Agency delegation go into the army’s most sensitive research-and-development facility, where his weapons people were finishing production of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile that he said was not only more effective than a SA-7 but would prove superior to the American Stinger.

No one at this plant was ever prepared for visitors, but unlike everything else the Americans had seen in Egypt, this facility was operated like a sophisticated high-tech laboratory in the United States. “It was the cleanest place in Cairo,” remembers Avrakotos. “The men and women wore white coats like doctors and seemed to have been educated at technical schools in the U.S. like Carnegie Mellon.”

At first Charlie figured he had led the CIA to the silver bullet that would at last bring down the Hind, and once inside, Gust could not restrain his impulse to snoop. On a later trip with Paul, the psychological-warfare expert whom Gust complimentarily describes as “a sneaky son of a bitch,” the visitors dispersed to explore as much of the facility as possible. The Egyptians always looked quite terrified when the American spies, taking advantage of Mohammed’s license, entered areas ordinarily forbidden.

In one sealed-off room Paul and Gust came across three scientists who didn’t look Egyptian and Gust said, “
As Salaam Alaikum
,” Arabic for “hello.” Two of them responded with
“Bonjour.”
Gust now knew that French were working with the Egyptians. It was not long ago that Egypt and Israel had been at war, and the fear was that the Americans would run off and warn Jerusalem. But once again Gust, with Charlie as a guarantor, gave his word that all of the Agency’s dealings with Mohammed would remain a secret. In keeping with all of Mohammed’s other anti-aircraft solutions, this weapon never lived up to the field marshal’s promises and wasn’t even ready to be tested when the CIA was prepared to buy it.

After all those disastrous mishaps at Mohammed’s arms bazaar, the CIA contingent finally stumbled across a number of things they very much wanted. Thanks again to Charlie, Mohammed had offered to let the CIA men exchange information with his unconventional-warfare experts. The Egyptians had something to talk about here because they had gone through a brutal guerrilla war in Yemen just a few years before. Fighting with tribesmen in mountainous terrain similar to Afghanistan, they had learned what works and what doesn’t. They might have bombed out in the big-ticket items that Wilson had wanted the Agency to buy, but at the Egyptian Special Warfare School, the counterinsurgency experts began showing Alper, Vickers, and Pratt items that would clearly be devastating in the hands of the mujahideen.

What got Alper and then Avrakotos particularly excited was the cornucopia of city-warfare devices that the Egyptians had stored in this facility. “It was incredible stuff that most American minds are not devious enough to think up,” remembers Avrakotos. “But if you’ve been around five thousand years like the Egyptians and survived, you come up with some great ways of killing your enemies.” He was referring to such things as bicycle bombs. “They had hundreds of ways to conceal bombs or, if you will, terrorist devices. But they had worked out bombs that were concealed in wooden carts that carry manure, or special wheelbarrows.”

The only question, as Avrakotos saw it, was whether this deadly cornucopia could be effective against the Soviets in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan. Alper insisted it would be very useful. “Then the decision was left to me,” Gust recalled. “Do I want to order bicycle bombs to park in front of an officer’s headquarters? Yes. That’s what spreads fear.”

Another senior CIA officer in Avrakotos’s shoes might well have chosen to pass on the offering of urban terrorist devices. That’s the kind of thing the CIA was not supposed to be doing. But Avrakotos decided they would be quite effective. Beyond that, Gust calculated that the congressman who had opened the door for him to make these purchases happened to be on one of the committees that serves as a watchdog for the Agency. Gust could hardly be accused of trying to pull a fast one on Congress.

Thanks to Mohammed’s tour, the CIA’s military team soon discovered a whole range of low-level weapons they wanted for the jihad, like Egyptian limpet mines that Alper later modified so they could be attached magnetically to Soviet trucks heading down the Salang Highway. The Egyptians taught Alper how to delay the fuses beyond the time period he thought possible. “It was very useful for going after tunnels. We managed to block the Salang for days. The Yemenis had done it to the Egyptians, the Egyptians showed our guys how to do it, and our guys showed the mujahideen how to do it.” The Egyptians’ list also included screaming meemies, plastic mines, mines that popped out of the ground, trip mines, and wire mines.

Gust was now sensing genuine opportunity, enchanted with his status as Charlie’s running mate as they drove in air-conditioned cars through the desert to be given red-carpet treatment at whatever facility they might choose to descend on. It was on one such visit that he stumbled across a weapon that thrilled him like no other.

The Agency had been looking for a rocket with a range of over ten kilometers that could not be traceable to the United States or NATO, and they found it in one of Mohammed’s warehouses—the Katyusha. During World War II, at the siege of Stalingrad, this 122mm rocket had made the difference. A huge, screaming artillery round, it chilled the Wehrmacht with its terrible noise and striking power and had been immortalized in such Soviet patriotic songs as the “Stalin Organ.” “We didn’t think we could ever find the fucking thing,” says Gust. But after spotting fifty-four of them in a warehouse, he had the Egyptians test-fire one, and he still remembers his terror. “If you’ve ever heard one of these come at you, there’s no way you wouldn’t crap in your pants. I was three miles away from where it hit and I was scared. It was a frightening experience, like being in a minor earthquake. You just can’t imagine what it would be like to be within fifty feet of one of those things.”

Gust bought every one of Mohammed’s Katyushas at tens of thousands each, and soon the mujahideen were blasting away at the airport near Kabul, creating holes the size of football fields as far away as the city’s outskirts. The French ambassador reported that although the rocket had landed seventeen blocks away, it had cracked the foundations of his Kabul embassy. The Russians were mortified. Ultimately, terrorizing the Soviets and making them leave was the name of Avrakotos’s game. The discovery of the Katyusha at that point in the war was just what the doctor ordered. Gust didn’t care that the rocket wasn’t accurate. He wanted to frighten and demoralize the 40th Army, the KGB, and all those Communist Party bastards ruling the roost in Kabul. The Agency had already started trying to “turn the lights out” in the occupied capital by having the mujahideen blow up electricity pylons. The night always belonged to the mujahideen, but particularly when there was no light. And if a screaming Katyusha could be added to the mix, well, that was just the perfect twist of the psychological dagger.