Charlie Wilson's War (61 page)

It was painful enough to have George take his beloved program away just when it was about to turn the corner, but the DDO now struck with a second blow designed to make sure the Aliquippan was fully neutered. He had Bert Dunn pass on his order for Gust to break off all contact with Charlie Wilson.

At this point Avrakotos understood that George was running an operation. He was tying Gust’s hands, robbing him of his ability to reach out in any way. Through Charlie Wilson, Gust had the ability to strike almost anywhere in Washington and George knew it. But he also knew that Wilson had become a professional friend of the Agency. He was now close to Tom Twetten, and he had strong ties to Bert Dunn as well as McMahon. If Avrakotos could be taken out of the equation, it was almost a sure thing that Wilson would continue to see the Agency as a friend and ally to support.
*

When Dunn relayed George’s order, Gust didn’t complain. He didn’t say much. He was being punished—banished again, really. What was surprising was that this man who’d never backed down from a fight and who’d been taught by his mother to seek revenge at almost any cost seemed to accept his fate without protest. He didn’t even accept Wilson’s offer to intervene, even though Wilson was not only on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee that doles out the Agency’s funds but was now also a member of the Intelligence Committee in charge of overseeing the CIA. Wilson had more than enough leverage to back George down.

But Avrakotos concluded that he had no choice but to take this punishment “like a man.” It had nothing to do with him personally. He was about to marry a young case officer he had been living with for the last year, and by then his son Gregory had joined the Agency. As Avrakotos analyzed his predicament, he was forced to conclude that Clair now had hostages, and his fiancée and Gregory would be the ones to suffer if he caused trouble.

So there was no breast beating, no cursing, no heart-to-heart talks asking for sympathy from anyone. Instead he took his successor, Jack Devine, a six-foot–six-inch Irishman from Pennsylvania, to meet Wilson.
*
There he told Charlie, “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. The bad news is I’m leaving the program…the good news is Jack is taking it over.”

That was it. After all they had gone through, that was the way Gust broke the news to Wilson. And despite Charlie’s efforts to find out what was going on—to see if he could be of help—Gust chose to say that this was just the way things worked in his secret world. The time had come for him to go, and the best thing Charlie could do for him and the Afghans was to make things work for Gust’s successor. The strangest part of this sad drama is that Gust was actually still living in McLean, Virginia, just a few minutes from the main gates of the CIA, though he had been ordered to tell Charlie he was in Africa. When Charlie called Gust’s old number one night, the recorded message said merely that the telephone had been taken out of service. As far as Charlie knew, Gust was somewhere in Africa, and because of the rules of his tribe they could no longer talk.

Avrakotos’s next move required discipline. It’s human nature not to want the person who takes over your position to flourish. It doesn’t make you look good. Better to see the successor sink. But the Afghan program was his pride and joy, his crowning achievement, and he managed to overcome the impulse and, instead, throw himself into the transition. He set aside a month to take Jack Devine to Egypt, Pakistan, England, China, and Saudi Arabia to meet the players, and he himself announced the changing of the guard. One of the senior officers in the program later commented that it was the best transition he had ever witnessed.

It was a horrible time for Avrakotos. The Agency had been created to contain and ultimately help defeat the Soviet empire. Of all its anti-Communist crusades, Afghanistan had clearly extracted the greatest toll on the Soviets. In time, those who followed him on the Afghan program would reap the rewards for this effort, but when he left it in the summer of 1986 the Agency’s leadership had never once recognized any of his outfit’s contributions. Time after time Avrakotos had gone into the CIA auditorium and listened to the director call off the names of those who had performed brilliantly. Dewey Clarridge and Alan Fiers, two of the officers who would later be indicted for their part in the Iran-Contra scandal, were repeatedly honored with the greatest awards.

Gust always sat in what he called the “section with the secretaries and the couriers.” He and Mike and Larry the consigliere, and Art Alper the demolitions man, and Tim the logs chief, and Hilly Billy the finance wizard—the whole Dirty Dozen would sit and listen as the director singled out the chiefs of the Contra program for their remarkable service. It was always hard for them to figure out why anyone would reward the Central American task force for its bloated staff, its micromanagement, and its complete failure to in any way threaten the Sandinista government. About the only thing it had been able to deliver was constant scandal, and yet here were Clarridge and Fiers being handed $25,000 checks in recognition of their great service.

At times it would eat away at Avrakotos. “It’s hard to work without getting any sort of recognition on the outside,” he says. You don’t expect to get your name in the papers. You’re the little gray men. But it’s different with your peer group. It matters. When we had those big ceremonies in the auditorium, Mike never got any recognition and I never did. No one on the task force ever got any. We were the fucking losers. Black sheep are used to not being recognized. We were used to getting fucked, right. But that’s what motivated us…because we were winning and they were losing.”

There was a moment that fall when Gust thought perhaps he might be taken out of purgatory. Bert Dunn called him at home to see if he would take on a special operation. For the second time in recent memory, there had been a plane disaster, this one directly involving the Central American task force chief, Alan Fiers, the man Gust had outmaneuvered to get the Afghan job.

Dunn said that there had been an incident with a plane that had gone down and they needed Gust to find out what had happened. It could not have been pleasant for a man like Alan Fiers to have Gust Avrakotos with a prosecutor’s writ moving into his secret world. For reasons that could not be explained, Fiers had dispatched a resupply plane to a destination so far away that the plane’s supply of gas would not allow it to make the return trip. Given this simple fact, it was not surprising that the plane had crash-landed inside Nicaragua. It was just pure luck that, unlike the Contra supply plane shot down with ex–CIA agent Eugene Hasenfus aboard, no one found out about it.

Avrakotos was tasked with looking into that one royal screwup, but it was really a metaphor for a disastrous six-year operation. As he flew down to Central America his mind flashed back to his first sense of the disaster brewing for the Agency over this divisive covert operation. It had been the same time in January when he had tried to get George to cut off the Iran madness. There had been a terrible snowstorm, and Gust was at home when Joe Fernandez, one of Alan Fiers’s station chiefs, called to ask if he could come over. The man said he needed to talk.

Avrakotos liked Fernandez. He was a former cop, a good Catholic with seven children—not one of your Ivy Leaguers—and he was in trouble. Oliver North had asked him to help the Contras build an airstrip in Costa Rica at a time when Congress had made it illegal for the CIA to do anything to help the Contra army.

Fernandez had been impressed when North had dropped the president’s name and perhaps overly awed when the marine lieutenant colonel had taken him for a tour of the White House and actually introduced him to the president. North had made him think that everything he asked Fernandez to do came directly from the president. But now Fernandez was being accused of breaking the law, and he was terrified that he would be fired and lose his pension, which would kick in just a few months later. Fernandez knew that Avrakotos had been close to Clair George, and he thought Gust could put in a good word for him.

Avrakotos did his best to counsel this man he identified with and in the end told him the truth as he knew it. Fernandez should not expect any kindnesses from the director of operations. And Gust was not the man to bring up his case.

As he said good-bye to Fernandez that cold winter day, Gust could almost peer into the man’s fate. It was the Halloween Day Massacre all over again. Fernandez wasn’t a blue blood; therefore, he was expendable. Sure enough, two months before his fiftieth birthday, Joe Fernandez was fired. At fifty he would have qualified for his pension, but now the Agency took the position that it had no responsibility for this man with the seven kids and the twenty-five years of service. The Agency wasn’t there for him when the grand jury handed up the criminal indictments. His boss Alan Fiers wasn’t there for him either. Gust knew that Fernandez didn’t understand what was happening to him. He didn’t yet understand that his beloved CIA could betray him. Gust did.

Eleven months later Avrakotos was stunned at Alan Fiers’s hopeless foul-up. It was a mind-bending performance from the man who had pompously declared in front of Avrakotos and Casey that the Agency’s money was being wasted in Afghanistan—that the real victory over Communism would begin in Central America and that Gust’s Afghan money should be turned over to him.

Now, with the Contra war engulfed in scandal and all but bankrupt, Avrakotos urged Bert Dunn to let him take it. He had credibility on the Hill, and even his past opposition to Iran-Contra could be put to the Agency’s advantage. Clair George, however, chose once again to banish Avrakotos from the limelight.

Six years later, it wasn’t easy for Gust to be charitable as he watched the news accounts and spoke to his old comrades about George’s ordeal. The man the press was calling America’s top spy was trapped in federal court in Washington. The CIA wasn’t picking up the bills for his five-count felony prosecution. His lawyer portrayed him as a patriot who had served his country ably and stressed his brave service in Athens under the threat of assassination. But Gust was watching the bottom line: Clair George’s own government was now trying to put him in jail. And who should come forward during the proceedings as star witness for the prosecution but Alan Fiers.

Never before had a case officer breached the code of
omertà
and snitched on another member of the Clandestine Services. What made the betrayal so vivid was that Fiers was not moved by principle but was simply attempting to trade the old spymaster for a lighter sentence.

Gust didn’t bad-mouth George during those days. He didn’t like what the government was doing, and he didn’t like what Fiers had done. But he felt a grim satisfaction in seeing his prophecy come true. When one of the defense team called to ask if he would testify for Clair, Avrakotos agreed. “But I told them if the prosecutor asked me anything about Iran-Contra, Clair would go to jail.”

It had been painful for Avrakotos when George had lost faith and turned on him. Clair’s wife, Mary, had often told Avrakotos that he had saved her husband’s life in Athens. And in truth, Gust had loved this man, at some point probably admiring him more than any other colleague. But in Gust’s eyes, all this had been overridden in the bitter spring of 1986 when Clair George let the Agency be marched into the Iran-Contra swamp, putting career and the goodwill of Colonel North over Agency and country alike. George had chosen to treat Gust as a saboteur. He hadn’t worried about what was best for the Afghan program, and he hadn’t thought about what was best for the CIA or the United States. As far as George was concerned, Gust had put him in a compromised position and now the Aliquippan could go to Africa and rot.

Gust would never again have a job at the CIA that interested him. His career was basically over—he had been done in by his old friend. It certainly didn’t have to have gone that way. He could have held on to his principles and still survived if he had been willing to take a lesson from Bert Dunn.

Dunn was the good guy in Avrakotos’s book—the officer who had joined with him in making Afghanistan possible. He was also a pro who had backed Gust’s efforts to halt the Iran disaster. But when it became perfectly clear to the veteran officer that the tide was running against him, Dunn always managed to be out of town.

There was a standing joke at the task force that everyone needed to be on guard whenever Bert was off on a hunting or fishing trip. Those were the days when compromising decisions would be made, and Dunn knew enough not to be there to have to fall on his sword or go on record in support of something absolutely mad. To men like Dunn, that was the way a professional had to act. Some would even say that by his refusal to accept the larger realities, Avrakotos was demonstrating that he just didn’t have the makings of a truly first-class officer. If he couldn’t smile and get out of the way in his own bureaucracy, how could he be trusted to con the enemy?

As Gust slipped into the obscurity of the Africa Division, sealed off from Charlie and from the growing successes of the Afghan program, he had little to carry with him by way of recognition for a job well done. Normally, in such situations, a party would be given to help cushion the blow of what was, after all, a dismissal under a cloud of sorts. Normally these affairs don’t mean much. But the one Bert Dunn organized for Gust was just right. There were no official speeches, no gold watches, and certainly no Agency medals like the many Howard Hart had left with.

But close to five hundred CIA men and women came to say good-bye. The war room and the rest of Gust’s domain had been sanitized for the occasion. Bert had unleashed the logs men to smuggle whiskey, gin, beer, and wine into the supposedly dry Agency offices. At the entrance, the big Russian solider in his frightening suit now held a Stolichnaya bottle in one hand and a Budweiser in the other. Red, white, and blue bunting was hung everywhere, framing the huge posters of the mujahideen and the large green banners with
Allahu Akbar
written in both Arabic and English.