Charlie Wilson's War (46 page)

All of this made it possible for Wilson to play the role of the good cop, able to assure the Agency capos that he would always cover for them. At the same time, he made it clear that they should recognize that within the range of strident criticisms were some points that ought not to be ignored.

Meanwhile, Avrakotos had to deal with the fact that Gordon Humphrey, with all of his conservative credentials, was preparing to try the Agency in public. As he saw it, the CIA’s credibility and right to continue its escalating operation was in jeopardy. Early in 1985, Gust decided it was time to co-opt the senator. Mike Vickers was put in charge of organizing a dog and pony show at the Agency’s Camp Peary training ground.

Humphrey tried to bring Eiva, but Avrakotos pointed out that Humphrey, who did not sit on the Intelligence Committee, wasn’t even cleared for what he was going to be shown. Bert Dunn, the Near East division chief, came along, and he and Gust sat back as Vickers did the briefing. Gust had samples of most of the weapons the mujahideen were using flown in from all over the country. The contrast between Humphrey’s public accusation about the CIA’s failure to adequately arm the mujahideen and the range of sophisticated weaponry from the arsenal displayed before his eyes was so stark that no one mentioned it directly. As Humphrey was shown the impressive arsenal that he had claimed did not exist, three battle-hardened Agency paramilitaries told of their experiences training the mujahideen and then helped the senator fire the weapons.

This carefully choreographed performance was designed to persuade Humphrey that the Agency was not wimpish, and after exploding a particularly lethal mine for the senator, Gust said with studied forethought, “You think we’re putting chicken-shit mines in? Did you see this fucking round? It went through the son of a bitch better than Joe Louis penetrating a white woman.”

“He didn’t like that comment,” Gust remarked years later, but that was the reason why Avrakotos had chosen such an ugly and crude analogy. He was out to intimidate Humphrey into silence. At one point the senator asked if Avrakotos could account for all the money and weapons being given to the Pakistanis and the Afghans. “We can’t. Can you account for all the money going into New Hampshire from the federal government?” Avrakotos asked in return. “We use satellites as best we can. We put beacons on some packages and various crates, and overhead we study what happens to the shipments. And we do a pretty good job of it.”

The entire Camp Peary exercise had one simple objective—intimidation—and Avrakotos saved his most effective ploy for the end, when he explained in front of his fellow operatives that the Agency wasn’t able to refute the senator’s charges publicly because it didn’t want the Soviets to know what the mujahideen were getting. “You’re undermining what we’re trying to do. You’re a fifth column…. Now that you’ve seen everything we’re giving to the muj, you certainly should know that Andy Eiva is incorrect, and I assume you are satisfied.”

Unlike Wilson, Humphrey never did become a partner of the CIA and no one connected to the Afghan program seems to have anything but unflattering things to say about him. But Avrakotos maintains that by the end of that day at Camp Peary, Gordon Humphrey had been largely neutralized.

For Avrakotos, 1985 was a year of right-wing craziness. About the same time Humphrey surfaced as a menace, he was confronted with a far weirder and more threatening problem from inside the government. A band of well-placed anti-Communist enthusiasts in the administration had come up with a plan they believed would bring down the Red Army, if the CIA would only be willing to implement it.

The leading advocates of this plan included Richard Perle at the Pentagon, so intense in his Cold War convictions that he was nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness.” Oliver North also checked in briefly, but the man who set Avrakotos’s teeth on edge most was Walt Raymond, another NSC staffer who had spent twenty years with the CIA as a propagandist.

Their idea was to encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen. As Avrakotos derisively describes it, “The muj were supposed to set up loudspeakers in the mountains announcing such things as ‘Lay down your arms, there is a passage to the West and to freedom.’” Once news of this program made its way through the Red Army, it was argued, there would be a flood of defectors.

This vision was based on Vlasov’s army, a German-backed effort during World War II to persuade Communist soldiers to join an anti-Stalinist front. It had met with some success before collapsing, enough at least to excite the passionate efforts of its latter-day advocates. Andrew Eiva, not surprisingly, was deeply involved in this effort. He had gone to Pakistan in the early 1980s trying to find Russian prisoners to demonstrate how effective such a policy could be, but he had learned that the mujahideen did not have much interest in keeping prisoners alive. At a White House meeting, North and Perle told Avrakotos they wanted the Agency to spend millions on this program, expressing the belief that as many as ten thousand defectors could be expected to pour across the lines.

Avrakotos thought North and Perle were “cuckoos of the Far Right,” and he soon felt quite certain that Raymond, the man who seemed to be the intellectual ringleader, was truly detached from reality. “What Russian in his right mind would defect to those fuckers all armed to the teeth?” Avrakotos said in frustration. “To begin with, anyone defecting to the Dushman would have to be a crook, a thief, or someone who wanted to get cornholed every day, because nine out of ten prisoners were dead within twenty-four hours and they were always turned into concubines by the mujahideen. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to have them all shot.”

The meeting went very badly indeed. Gust accused North and Perle of being idiots. Larry Penn, Gust’s consigliere, actually giggled in their faces. Avrakotos said to Walt Raymond, “You know, Walt, you’re just a fucking asshole, you’re irrelevant.”

Avrakotos thought that would be the end of the Vlasov idea, but he greatly underestimated the political power and determination of this group, who went directly to Bill Casey to angrily protest Avrakotos’s insulting manner. The director complained to Clair George, who responded by forbidding Avrakotos to attend any more interagency meetings without a CIA nanny present. George gave the job to his executive assistant, Norm Gardner, who worked out a system so that whenever Gust started to feel the anger coming from his toes he would tap Gardner and let the more diplomatic officer do the talking. But Gardner, who shared Avrakotos’s frustrations with the Vlasov business, would often sit back and let his charge have at least a preliminary run at Raymond and the others.

At one point Avrakotos arrived for one of these White House sessions armed with five huge photographic blowups. Before unveiling them he explained that they would provide a useful understanding of the kind of experience a Soviet soldier could expect to have should he surrender to the mujahideen. One of them showed two Russian sergeants being used as concubines. Another had a Russian hanging from the turret of a tank with a vital part of his anatomy removed. Another showed a mujahid approaching a Soviet with a dagger in his hands. “If you were a sane fucking Russian, would you defect to these people?” he had demanded of Perle.

In spite of the angry complaints, Claire George and everyone else on the seventh floor agreed with Avrakotos’s position. He says that Director Casey even privately told him, “I think your point is quite valid. What asshole would want to defect to those animals?”

But the issue wouldn’t go away. Perle, Raymond, and the others continued to insist that the Agency find and send back to the United States the many Russian defectors they seemed to believe, despite Avrakotos’s denials, the mujahideen were harboring. They had visions of a great publicity campaign once these men reached America. As soon as their stories were known, others would defect. They refused to believe Avrakotos’s claim that there were no defectors.

Avrakotos describes what happened next with the kind of pleasure he feels only upon achieving revenge. It had been almost impossible to locate two prisoners, much less two defectors. The CIA found itself in the preposterous position of having to pony up $50,000 to bribe the Afghans to deliver two live ones. “These two guys were basket cases,” says Avrakotos. “One had been fucked so many times he didn’t know what was going on. The other was an alcoholic. We brought them back to the United States and I said to Walt Raymond, ‘Do you want me to give them your telephone number? They’re yours now.’”

Finally, Avrakotos turned the Soviets over to Ludmilla Thorne at Freedom House. “One guy had hallucinations of the KGB murdering him. The other started fucking with boys.” At that point, Avrakotos says, he went to Perle to announce the good news that the Agency had twelve more willing to come over. “I turned the tables on them and demanded they take them all. And they didn’t want to. That was the new Vlasov’s army. In all I think we brought three or four more over. One guy ended up robbing a 7-Eleven in Vienna, Virginia.”

By 1985 the CIA had become a dangerous place in which to hold a position of power. Avrakotos and Wilson had led the Agency into completely uncharted territory. No longer bound by the historic Cold War doctrine of containment, it was, for the first time—unapologetically, almost openly—in the business of killing thousands of Russian soldiers by funding a Muslim jihad.

But nothing that year, or in fact in the Agency’s history, compared to the unprecedented public attack launched from the Right on the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon. The moving force was Andy Eiva, who explains now that he was “looking around for a rock to throw” when McMahon’s name came onto the screen. Eiva says he discovered this presumed “enemy” of the Afghans on May 20, 1985, a date he remembers vividly. He had been making his usual rounds of congressional and press offices pushing for better weapons, including the American Stinger, for the mujahideen when a staffer from Senator Humphrey’s office arranged for him to meet an NSC staffer at the White House named Vince Cannistraro.

Eiva was awed just to be admitted to the Old Executive Office Building and to find that the president’s man in charge of overseeing intelligence operations seemed to take him seriously. Cannistraro, an old Agency man himself, was immediately sympathetic to Eiva’s critique of the CIA but told him that he was missing the point. “The real enemy of the freedom fighters,” Eiva remembers him saying, “is John McMahon.” It was like a biblical revelation for Eiva, as if Cannistraro was deputizing him to put a stop to John McMahon’s treachery.

Vince Cannistraro was not exactly a neutral source on the deputy director of the CIA. Until recently he had been the operations chief of the Contra war, but he had been reprimanded and moved out of Central America affairs because of the scandal over CIA-produced assassination manuals, which had enraged Congress. John McMahon had been largely responsible for his demotion and subsequent exile to the White House staff. Eiva didn’t know any of this and probably wouldn’t have cared, because he also learned that McMahon was the Agency official who had urged the Senate not to pass the Tsongas resolution. And so—on the same day that Humphrey launched his public attack on the CIA—Eiva appeared on
Nightline
and specifically accused McMahon of misleading Congress when he’d testified that the Afghans were being adequately armed. It was just the first of a vicious series of public attacks that Eiva would make against the CIA’s deputy director, all of them suggesting that McMahon’s record verged on treason.

Given what was already being done, it was a perverse twisting of reality. That fall, the mujahideen in the Pakistani training camps were not only receiving a flood of lethal weapons, they were also being trained to wage a war of urban terror, with instruction in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings, and assassination.

Just how vicious a campaign the CIA was sponsoring is suggested by the Pakistan brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, who directed the training with and distribution of CIA weapons at that time. In a matter-of-fact passage in his memoirs, he describes the range of assassination tactics and targets he was preparing the mujahideen to take on in Kabul. They ranged from your everyday “knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar” to “the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official’s office.” Educational institutions were considered fair game, he explains, since they were staffed by “Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma.”

What made Cannistraro’s whispering campaign charging cowardice and timidity in the Afghan arena so perverse was that it came at a time when Avrakotos was responsible for over a half billion dollars’ worth of weapons and training going into the funding of an exceedingly dirty war. Yet somehow Eiva, backed by conservative senators who followed his lead, insisted that the CIA was guilty of cowardice.
*

According to Avrakotos, Casey came to loathe Cannistraro, calling him that “fucking dago.” Clair George was also up in arms, according to Gust, and came to him to explain how Cannistraro could be neutralized. This was the kind of special assignment that had won Gust his old Agency nickname, Dr. Dirty, and he accepted it with relish. Gust knew that the politically ambitious Cannistraro would want to try to recruit the most powerful congressman on Afghanistan as an ally, so he arranged to have Vince meet him in Wilson’s office. “I wanted to put him totally out of place,” remembers Avrakotos. “He had no business doing what he was doing, and I figured that if he and the NSC were going to slap me around, I wanted to show him he’d have to deal with Charlie.”

Cannistraro, who later appeared regularly as an intelligence expert on ABC News and such TV shows as
60 Minutes,
remembers feeling quite out of place that day—not being able to get a word in edgewise and amazed at the intense camaraderie he and Charlie shared. “They loved each other,” Gust says. “I sat back and watched them talking about big tits and guns.”