Charlie Wilson's War (62 page)

There was much good cheer, even for Gust’s people, who knew how complicated the moment was for their boss. The Dirty Dozen had commissioned a tribute of their own—a framed photograph showing a group of heroic mujahideen firing off mortars. The photo interpreters and the people who concoct fake pictures had then superimposed a picture of a Greek
efzone,
a World War II warrior, leaping into the air. In the old days Greek warriors wore dresses, body stockings, and funny shoes with tassels. And that’s what this warrior, who had Gust’s face superimposed onto his body, was wearing. Nothing could have delighted the departing chief of South Asia Operations more. “Here was this wild
efzone
jumping up in the air in joy as the mortars were going off,” Gust says. “It was just great.”

That was it from the traditional CIA. Nothing more. But one organization at the Agency had decided that Gust deserved their official recognition. Esther Dean, an effusive 325-pound black woman from Cleveland, was acting that day as if she were giving the party when Bill Casey came down from the eighth floor to pay his respects. He and Bert Dunn were moving about talking to members of the task force when Esther and Gust began laughing about some secret memory.

Esther had a special feeling about Gust. Two years before, she had been his secretary when everything had fallen apart for her. In exasperation one day Gust made a racist remark: “Esther, I know you’re a fat nigger and can’t talk well, but what’s wrong with you?” She explained that she had gotten herself $34,000 in debt on credit card charges and that she was about to lose everything unless a senior-grade officer would sign off on a credit union loan. Would he?

“On one condition,” Gust told her. With that he asked for her wallet, took out her ten credit cards, and sliced them all up. He then had her agree to a new cash regime, signed the loan, and nursed Esther back to financial health.

“Are you going to miss Mr. Avrakotos?” Casey asked Esther, not really expecting anything but a polite response.

“Oh, Mr. Casey, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m going to miss him. I’m going to miss him a whole bunch. I never thought I’d say this, because he used to call me ‘you black nigger’ four or five times a day, but he’s good, he’s a good boss.” With that, big Esther Dean gave Gust Avrakotos a great hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Casey had no way of knowing what to make of this strange spectacle. The director, who was preoccupied with the unraveling Iran-Contra affair, and who was about to be diagnosed with a brain tumor, didn’t mention the Afghan program. But Gust appreciated his stopping by. “See you around” was all Casey said as he left.

That was when Linda, another big, spirited black woman, tapped Gust on the shoulder and told him that she and some of the other blacks would like him to come downstairs. They wanted to recognize him.

Downstairs, the blacks of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations were waiting for him in the records room. He knew most of them surprisingly well. In fact, he had become something of a legend with these people who manned the underbelly of the Agency. They were part of Gust’s intelligence network, part of what had made it possible for him to wander the halls for almost seven months and face down Clair George in that first test of wills.

Gust also viewed them differently from all of his colleagues. Who knows what’s going on in the director’s office? The secretary knows. And what do you do if there is a message too sensitive to send over the wires? You give it to the couriers? They’re the GS-1s and 2s and 3s and most of them were all staring at Gust right there in the records room.

“I had gone to bat for many of them,” Gust recalls. The word among them was if you’re having trouble and being picked on, go see Gust. He had given many of them practical counsel, just as he had with Esther Dean. When they were getting a raw deal, if he knew their supervisor he would put in a word for them. He ate lunch with them, he talked dirty to them, and mainly he gave them a fair shake.

Thea was the spokesperson for the gathering. The CIA’s blacks had an award they gave each year to one of their own who had distinguished him-or herself. It was called the Brown Bomber Award, and it had never gone to a white guy.

A good-looking black woman with a beautiful smile, Thea was radiant as she offered Gust the highest possible praise: “We want to give this award to the blackest motherfucker of us all.”

That is the only formal citation from the CIA that Gust Lascaris Avrakotos ever got. It sits by his desk with the picture of the mad Greek
efzone
leaping with joy into the air. There is also a picture of Charlie Wilson on a white horse. But for the professional underdog from Aliquippa, for the conqueror of the Evil Empire, the Brown Bomber Award has a special place of honor.

N
othing illustrates the power that Charlie Wilson was able to wield on behalf of the Afghans better than the story of a humiliating incident he was subjected to on one of his trips to Pakistan with Sweetums.

The incident took place in 1986 at the end of a particularly satisfying tour in which he had been received as a conquering hero everywhere he went. As usual, he had flown into the Northwest Frontier Province to give blood at the IRC hospital in Peshawar and then meet with the mujahideen commanders who had gathered specially to see him. As usual, the Defense Intelligence Agency plane attached to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, was assigned to fly him and his party to their various stops in Pakistan. At the end of the day the plane was scheduled to fly him and Sweetums to Lahore for an official dinner being held in his honor.

Moments before boarding the plane, everything collapsed. It turns out that the embassy’s military attaché, an air force colonel, had taken it upon himself to scrutinize the rules, and discovered that civilians other than wives or relatives of congressmen were not cleared to fly on his military spy plane.

The colonel had done his duty as he saw fit and, without hesitation, ordered the pilots not to let Sweetums come aboard. It didn’t matter to him that on previous trips Wilson’s friends—Snowflake, Joanne, and even his belly dancer—had all flown on that very same plane. Nor did it concern the colonel that the congressman and his companion were scheduled to be the guests of honor in Lahore that evening, nor was it of interest to him that no commercial flights were available until the following day.

The colonel, it appears, had no idea that he might be picking a dangerous fight. He seemed to believe that Wilson was little more than a braggart without any leverage. The Texan was, after all, an elected official, and the colonel had caught him red-handed, trying to appropriate one of the nation’s precious spy planes to ferry a beauty queen about the North-West Frontier province. It was, as the attaché saw it, a clear abuse of power and hardly an issue Wilson would like to risk surfacing in public.

One of Wilson’s escorts had tried to warn the colonel that he was making a mistake. “If I were you, I’d interpret those regulations loosely or else you guys are going to lose your airplane.” But now it was too late. The colonel had phrased his cable to Washington in such a way that the Pentagon had no choice but to deny permission for Sweetums.

It must be remembered that Charlie Wilson was a senior member of the subcommittee responsible for the Pentagon’s annual budget. He had been around for over two decades and knew well how quickly the Pentagon was prepared to bend the rules to accommodate their congressional patrons. This colonel was trying to say that his precious $200,000 plane was too good for Sweetums and that she would have to wait a day in Peshawar until the next scheduled flight left. Wilson says that for the first time in twenty years, he lost his temper: “This was first time I actually swore and shouted. I just went bug-fuck.”

At one point Wilson found himself screaming at the tough old U.S. ambassador, who was clearly trapped in a no-win situation. In exasperation, the congressman finally ordered the colonel to get the president of Pakistan on the phone.

Wilson had never asked Zia for a personal favor before, and the Muslim dictator immediately understood the gravity of the situation. Without hesitating, he told his friend Charlie that his personal plane was on its way to rescue Sweetums. That afternoon, as Wilson prepared to board Pakistan’s equivalent of Air Force One, he told the offending officer: “This is not the end of this story, Colonel.”

Just to make sure the colonel understood whom he had a picked a fight with, Wilson issued a humiliating order that the colonel was not in a position to refuse. The DIA plane was not to return to Islamabad, where the colonel and the pilots had been counting on attending an office picnic. Instead the plane was to fly parallel to Zia’s plane, with Charlie’s personal baggage and poor Colonel Rooney (Wilson’s military aide) along as the official cargo. Stepping aboard the plane an awkward Rooney had told the furious pilots: “I’m just a little pissant on the crossroads of life. I had nothing to do with it.” That didn’t calm them down a bit. Enraged, they proceeded to warn Rooney that the Defense Department was going to get Wilson for this and that perhaps they wouldn’t allow Sweetums’s bag to be put on the plane. Rooney replied, “Don’t even touch that one. It’s absolutely foolish.”

Zia had congratulated Charlie on his chivalry but Wilson was now hell-bent on revenge. Back in Washington he addressed his Defense Appropriations colleagues in the room under the great dome: “Gentlemen, the honor of the coequal branch of government has been challenged. They have insulted the committee on Appropriations, they have insulted me, and they have insulted my true love, Sweetums. I want you to give me revenge.”

Everyone on Appropriations understood that this was a petty, if not reckless, act of revenge that Wilson was calling for. But they also knew that it was something they had to do for their colleague. It was a professional courtesy, in effect. And lurking behind their vote to support their colleague was the recognition that it was not healthy to allow a lowly colonel to insult a member of Defense Appropriations.

For all these reasons the subcommittee moved to remind the Pentagon once and for all how to regard a member of Defense Appropriations: “Them that has the gold makes the rules.” Ultimately, the whole sorry story surfaced in a front-page exposé in the
New York Times.
It turns out that by order of Congress, the offending DIA plane, along with one more for good measure, was permanently removed from the military spy agency’s fleet. And, just to make sure the Pentagon got the message loud and clear, the two planes were reassigned to duty with the Texas Air National Guard.

Typically, Wilson seemed not in the least concerned about the resulting scandal and controversy. For a time, it seemed to overshadow all of the positive things Wilson had achieved in the region. In spite of that he wore the attention almost proudly. For over three years Wilson had been the real magic bullet of the Afghan War, all but invisibly hurtling through the entrails of the U.S. government. For the first time he had publicly demonstrated his willingness to bite, and he knew the story would only add to the legend that it was suicidal for any American bureaucrat to get in the way of Congressman Charlie Wilson and his Afghan obsession. For Pakistan’s President Zia it had been a pleasure to be able to help his friend and the great patron of the jihad. But on Wilson’s next trip to Pakistan, when once again he became troublesome to another military man, Zia found himself in a very different frame of mind, determined to do everything in his power to prevent his all-important ally from getting his way.

Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf went to bed on the night of November 15, 1986, with the certain belief that his work would earn him a place in Paradise. The big, barrel-chested, bug-eyed fundamentalist was then in his second year directing the ISI’s supersecret Afghan cell. The excitement that swept over the CIA’s Afghan task force once the tide began to turn that year was nothing compared to how this Muslim warrior felt. He was in operational command of the biggest and greatest of all modern jihads, and for the first time, he was convinced the mujahideen were going to win.

Brigadier Yousaf distributed the weapons, ruled on special operations, coordinated training, controlled the C-4 explosives and the Stingers, and passed on the satellite targeting studies. His officers were in radio contact with mujahideen commanders throughout the war zone. He even had teams of ISI soldiers, dressed as Afghans, operating alongside the mujahideen or conducting their own special operations.

Yousaf was at the very heart of everything, and more often than not he had been a royal pain in the ass for the Americans. The brigadier had not forgotten the insult of being taken blindfolded to the Agency sabotage school. He had responded with his own petty revenge: only occasionally allowing the CIA to visit the training camps. It was a great concession when he let in the Near East Division deputy chief, Tom Twetten—but only at night and in the clothes of the mujahideen. Yousaf even found it a badge of honor that after twenty-two requests he still had not given his home phone number to the two station chiefs who had asked for it. The CIA was a necessary evil, but he was quite determined to keep it at arm’s length.

Yousaf was certain that the Americans had recruited spies in his own intelligence service. Many of his men trained in the United States, and he wondered what kind of bribes they’d been offered. His sense of the CIA’s power was no doubt so exaggerated as to be detached from reality, but it was a perception shared by many of his countrymen. He was quite convinced that the Americans hated and feared his religion and that the Agency was helping Pakistan only because of its Cold War with the Communists. He was sure that the same CIA spies helping him with the mujahideen were at the same time trying to halt his country’s efforts to build an Islamic bomb. He knew that they feared such Afghan fundamentalists as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, his favorite commander, whom the ISI had had on its payroll for more than a decade. The fundamentalist mujahideen were the ones he and his intelligence chief had always favored, and he was offended when the U.S. embassy and the press corps called on the ISI to cut off these true warriors of Allah and turn the jihad over to the washed-out Muslims. This he refused to do.

It was an awesome responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders, and in the 1407th year of the Islamic calendar, Brigadier Yousaf considered it a unique privilege as a Pakistan army officer to stand astride this greatest of all modern jihads. So he went to sleep on November 15 filled with pride, a man who bowed only to Allah. In truth, his loyalties ran almost as deeply to his imperial ISI chief, General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, who woke him up in the middle of that night with an urgent directive from the president himself, General Zia ul-Haq.

An American official with a woman is trying to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan, Akhtar said. The brigadier must locate this man and stop him; it was of the utmost importance. Akhtar sternly added a proviso: Yousaf must not reveal that the ISI or the Pakistani government was involved.

The American official headed to Afghanistan, was of course, Charlie Wilson, but Zia had it wrong about the woman’s destination. Sweetums had no intention of going into the war zone. It was not her idea of a good time. In fact, she was quite put out about having to sit around Peshawar while her man went off on his rite of passage. But Wilson had sweet-talked her into another one of those junkets that she would never forget, and Annelise had somehow allowed her hopes to rise again.

Though the incident with the DIA plane was still fresh in his mind, Wilson was truly pushing the envelope with this latest junket. He envisioned the trip as the ultimate romantic vacation: the Amalfi Coast; the baby elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka; the shopping wonders of Hong Kong; the exotic, teeming streets of Shanghai; and the Great Wall of China—all of this leading up to Sweetums’s lifelong fantasy, a week in Tahiti. The monthlong trip began in Rome, where Bertie van Storer, the Oerlikon representative, would entertain them; there was a stopover in London; and then on to Pakistan for a closer look at the war. He had arranged for his favorite Pentagon traveling aide, Colonel Rooney, to come along to handle logistics, including him even in the nonbusiness-related legs of the trip that Wilson was paying for out of his own pocket. It was not only pleasant having the personable colonel along to share the sights; it was necessary in order to justify having the main portions of the junket picked up by Defense Appropriations. When they reached Pakistan, Sweetums was perplexed to learn that Charlie intended to leave her alone in the hotel while he disappeared into Afghanistan. He explained that he had developed a deep need to experience combat with the mujahideen.

Given Charlie’s relationship to the program, you might think he would have tried to keep this CIA covert operation a secret. But he was now becoming just a bit flaky, and he had brought along a Texas reporter to chronicle his trip into the war zone.

He was offering the young man the experience of his life. But the morning before they were scheduled to go in, they went to the Khyber Pass, where the journalist looked down with horror at the sight of a Red Army tank brigade in ferocious action.

Wilson experienced some butterflies himself, but the reporter had a wife and two children at home; he didn’t want to be a war correspondent. Ever the gentleman, Charlie gracefully let him bow out. Actually, it only made him feel all the more heroic when he embraced Sweetums in his Afghan robes and strode out onto the street to meet the mujahideen who had come to take him off to fight the Russians. She said she would be waiting for him at the American consulate when he returned.

In a four-wheel-drive, surrounded by bearded Afghans carrying AK-47s, with an extra one set aside for him, Charlie felt that he had now crossed the Rubicon. He had, however, made one major mistake. Over dinner the night before in Islamabad, he had told Zia of his plans. The Pakistani president, famous for his perpetual smile, had kept his poker face. He had even told Charlie that he envied him.
Inshallah,
God willing, they would meet soon to discuss Wilson’s great adventure. But even as Wilson was passing through the gate of Zia’s residence, the president, who ruled his country by martial law, had ordered his intelligence chief, General Akhtar, to stop Wilson. They couldn’t afford to lose this man. He was too important to Pakistan.

This was not the kind of mission Brigadier Yousaf relished, but he set off for Peshawar at 4:30 in the morning, and by 6:30 he had mobilized all of the ISI assets throughout the frontier city. Yousaf had spies everywhere in Peshawar. The ISI had bugged Dean’s Hotel, where Crandall had held his Cross Border meetings; they had waiters, hotel managers, and telephone operators throughout the city. Most important, the ISI had eyes and ears everywhere in the vast Afghan population—particularly in the headquarters and in compounds where the commanders and leaders of the different political parties lived with their armed followers.