Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  By five A.M. he would have the bottling machine cranked up and moving. On one side was Louisa, a large black woman, who placed the dirty bottles on the beginning of the thirty-five-foot line. Miraculously, the chain apparatus would turn the bottles upside down as soap and water poured in and out, to prepare them for an infusion of Oscar’s secret cherry and cola formulas. There were always incidents. The bottles would sometimes explode from the pressure like hand grenades, sending glass shrapnel all over the room. One such piece sliced into Gust’s face and cost him a full day’s work.

  At first it was a thrill for the boy to be included. But by sixteen, he had accumulated forty quarters of Social Security and the novelty had worn off. This was the kind of punishing physical labor that quickly makes a man out of a boy.

  It was at the Apollo Soda Water Company that Avrakotos developed his frightening convictions about revenge. His first mentor had been Wasil Rosinko, a Ukrainian who worked at the end of the bottle line, heaving cases into the trucks. Rosinko had found his wife in bed with another man and had murdered them both. After Rosinko spent fifteen years in prison, Oscar gave him his job back, and Wasil took it upon himself to help educate Oscar’s boy. He warned young Gust never to trust a Ukrainian woman and taught him that revenge is sweet.

  But Avrakotos’s most powerful memory was of his mother at the kitchen table demanding to know what Oscar intended to do about an insult: “You’re not going to let this pass, are you? You are going to get even, aren’t you?”

  In the Avrakotos household, revenge was a matter of family honor. As a boy of twelve, Gust would go with his father to the bars to collect unpaid bills. He learned not to show fear when Oscar would face down bartenders and begin hurling bottles, threatening to take the bar apart if the money due him was not paid immediately. The Avrakotos family did not tolerate freeloaders.

  There was no TV in the house, and on Saturday nights Gust would be allowed to sit at the table in the kitchen to listen to his father and uncles talk politics and trade family stories. The men were particularly proud of the family name in spite of its ambiguous meaning in Greek: “without pants” or “those without pants.” Whenever she became frustrated with Oscar, Zafira would suggest that some ancestor had been caught in a compromising sexual relationship.

  The Avrakotos men insisted that the name referred back to men who functioned as a kind of praetorian guard in ancient times. These Avrakotoses were a fierce warrior class, so the family legend went, who would throw off all their clothes when going into battle and charge the enemy. The sight of screaming, naked warriors was enough to cause most opponents to break and run.

  Whether or not the legend is true, these stories shaped the young boy’s sense of his identity and destiny. And they help explain why his father made such extreme demands on his son. He forced Gust to take private lessons in Greek and Latin. “Each new language gives you a new set of eyes and ears, a new window on the world,” he repeatedly told his complaining child. Even free time on Sunday was given over to torturous work at the Greek Orthodox Church, where, amid chanting priests and incense, Gust would spend four hours serving as an altar boy. But the main thing Oscar and Zafira did for their son was to fill him with the sense that he must get out of the steel town. And the path of liberation that Oscar chose gleamed like a vision directly across the street from their home.

  Like Andrew Carnegie, the founders of Aliquippa had built a library. It was not a simple, utilitarian building but a shining citadel of limestone and bronze in the form of a Greek temple. On the cornices in great letters were carved the words HISTORY, SCIENCE, FICTION, PHILOSOPHY, BIOLOGY, and ASTRONOMY. Every evening after dinner, after hours of humping beer kegs and a full day at school, Gust Avrakotos would walk the two hundred feet across Franklin Avenue, pass through the great bronze doors of the Benjamin Franklin Jones Memorial Library, and take the seat at a mahogany desk reserved for him. There he would switch on the individual bronze reading lamp with its Tiffany-style glass shade and begin the serious work of the day. It was what his father expected and demanded.

  The library was like a window into the world of the possible beyond the bars, the union halls, and a life of servitude in the Iron House. In the winter, it might be snowing when he entered the library, but the white accumulation would have already turned black with soot by the time he finished his evening studies. Inside the classics were all there; fine oil paintings hung on the wall; the beamed ceilings were high, the windows huge. At the doorway towered a bronze statue of the founder, Benjamin Franklin Jones, passing on his unspoken message to all who entered that here in this temple of learning was a way out for those willing to apply themselves.

  Each night all the ethnic achievers of Aliquippa would be there—studying, wandering through the stacks, improving their minds. And none of the deserving working-class kids of Aliquippa worked so hard or did so well as Gust Lascaris Avrakotos, who graduated as valedictorian of Aliquippa High. Then followed two years working his way through Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, until disaster struck and Oscar had to close down his beloved Apollo Soda Water Company. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had moved into Aliquippa, cutting prices. According to the family’s Old World code, Gust had to leave school to pay off his father’s debts.

  For the first time, Gust went to work in the mill. Then he began traveling up and down the Allegheny Valley for the Greek-American Cigarette Vending Machine Company, selling cigarette machines to bars. He had never left Pennsylvania, but by the time he was twenty-one, he knew how people from numerous different countries talked and thought and drank and sang and argued. He knew the world the way few American boys his age do, because every one of those political clubs where he delivered beer and sold cigarettes was a virtual enclave of foreigners. There was the Syrian Club, the Cedars of Lebanon Club, the Pan-Slovak Club, the Russian-American Club, the Croatian Club, the Ukrainian Club—one for virtually every country of the Old World, and Avrakotos had discovered that he could increase his sales if he knew what each of these groups cared about.

  “I started reading to find out what the fuck to say when I was trying to sell cigarettes in the different bars. To sell, you needed to talk to the Serbs and the Croatians and you needed to know what they cared about. And the one thing that was common was that not many of them were saying anything nice about the Communists. Not the Ukrainians, not the Serbians, not the Croatians, the Polacks, the Czechs, the Slovaks…. They all fucking hated the Russians. All of them were out of their countries because of the Russians. The Syrians of course hated the Jews. Maybe the only group not anti-Communist were the blacks. They were more practically biased. The others blamed the Russians for everything. For why we were working sixteen hours a day in the mill and paying taxes.”

  Avrakotos became a master at endearing himself to all of these prickly tribes. He can still say in perfect Slovak, “Take your balls and stuff them up your ass.” This always pleased the Slovaks, who laughed appreciatively and offered the crazy Greek a boilermaker.

  These forays into the ethnic enclaves of western Pennsylvania and the special skills required to maneuver there were not designed to serve any particular purpose beyond moving beer and cigarettes. Unbeknownst to Gust, they also constituted a remarkable introduction into the worlds he would later pass through for the CIA.

  Curiously, it was not the Agency but IBM that first wanted to enlist Avrakotos. After paying off his father’s debts in 1959, he had gone back to school at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in mathematics. The IBM recruiter was so impressed that he offered Gust $15,500. “I was twenty-four years old and that was a lot of money in those days [roughly equivalent to $60,000 today]. All I had to do was get my master’s and they’d pay my tuition.” But then the recruiter started to tell him about IBM’s corporate image and how they would expect him to adapt to some of their ways of doing things—a dress code, for one. And then there was the issue of his car.

  It was a 1947 Dodge four-door, and
it was the pride of Avrakotos’s life. “We called it the fuckmobile,” he recalls fondly today. “It had over three hundred thousand miles on it and was all souped up to look like a Lincoln Zephyr—like a gangster car. So I said, ‘What’s wrong with the car?’”

  “It’s old.”

  “It’s an antique,” Gust said.

  “Around here we drive Pontiacs,” the IBM man explained.

  Avrakotos was on his way to his fourth interview with IBM when his favorite professor, Dr. Richard Cottam, suggested that he might like to speak to a man connected with American intelligence. Cottam, an expert on the Middle East whom Jimmy Carter would later tap for secret missions to Iran, was one of those men the CIA looked to in the country’s universities to spot potential. Avrakotos still remembers the university room where he was told to report for the interview: 7 E21.

  There was nothing physically interesting about the CIA man, but he knew how to talk Avrakotos’s language. He registered pleasure that Gust had graduated summa cum laude. He said it was useful that Gust spoke Greek and that he was so good with figures. “But it was clear right away what really interested him,” Gust recalls. “He recognized my real talent—that I was a fucking street guy.”

  “How do you feel about playing in dark alleys?” he asked.

  “I love it,” replied Avrakotos.

  “You’re just what I’m looking for.”

  When Avrakotos told him how much IBM was offering, the visitor said he was embarrassed and could offer only a third of that—$5,355 a year. “But I can give you one thing IBM can’t,” he said. “I can have you trained and overseas doing something for your country in one and a half years.”

  Avrakotos was hooked by the idea of becoming a spy for America. Instead, for the next three months the CIA spied on him. The office of security sent its sleuths to Aliquippa to ferret out any Communist influences in his family. They flew him to Washington (his first trip on an airplane) for a series of lie detector tests to see if he was homosexual or if he had anything to hide. Finally, the CIA told him they were going to induct him into their elite case officer–training program—not the office of security, not logistics or science and technology. They were going to take Oscar Avrakotos’s son into their ultimate inner sanctum, into the Directorate of Operations, Archie Roosevelt’s club.

  When Avrakotos tried to read up on the CIA, he discovered there were no books or magazine articles explaining what the Agency did or what kind of people worked there. No one wrote about the CIA then; it was considered unpatriotic. The Agency was just moving into its $250 million headquarters hidden in the woods of Langley, Virginia, eight miles up the Potomac from the White House. Its design gave it the look of a modern campus or, perhaps, a corporate headquarters and some fifteen thousand employees worked there, but no sign acknowledged its existence from the road except a false one that read BUREAU OF PUBLIC WORKS. Any citizens who went looking for this nonexistent bureaucracy would find themselves facing a police barricade and a polite order to turn around.

  It was into this mysterious world that Avrakotos descended on August 1, 1962. The majority of the fifty recruits in his class were from the Ivy Leagues—predominantly Harvard, Yale, and Brown. The others came from places like the Universities of Pittsburgh, Nebraska, or Kansas, or technological schools such as Carnegie Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The way Avrakotos computed it, “There were thirty-eight Ivy Leaguers and twelve of us.” But he quickly developed a begrudging respect for all his classmates. He was impressed to find that the Agency had compiled a list of the country’s valedictorians and had managed to enlist many of them. “When you grow up realizing the only way to get out of the shithole is by using your brain, you respect brains. And all these people were using their fucking brains, all of them.”

  Half had master’s degrees; many spoke several languages. Avrakotos remembers one Harvard man who could recite Chaucer as if he were carrying on a simple conversation. For the next year and a half these fifty chosen ones stayed together, learning the tradecraft of the spy.

  At Camp Peary, Virginia, the Agency’s boot camp near Jamestown, Virginia, where the first Americans made their settlement, the new spies learned how to use firearms and detonate explosives. They went through a demanding survival course and parachuted out of planes. They traveled to different cities to practice shadowing and shaking surveillance. They learned how to sketch and diagram, how to make surreptitious entries, how to work with bugging experts and polygraph operators, how to pass messages secretly, how to infiltrate agents, how to compromise or recruit their adversaries.

  There was a sense, in those days, of readying for war. The two superpowers were spending the bulk of their national budgets preparing to deliver an all-out nuclear attack within a matter of minutes. Over fifteen thousand nuclear warheads were aimed at each other’s cities and military targets. On the border of Western Europe stood ninety Soviet divisions. The United States and its NATO allies conducted constant exercises in anticipation of an all-out conventional war. But no one doubted that it would inevitably go nuclear if so much as a division crossed the frontier. The superpowers had turned themselves into helpless giants, neither side willing to use its true might. With no other real outlet, the entire globe became the battleground of the spies. There was hardly a country where the KGB and CIA were not facing off in one way or another.

  Avrakotos and his classmates assumed they’d be going into battle the moment they got their first assignment overseas. It was a time when places no one thought much about kept leaping onto the front pages as critical battlegrounds of the Cold War: the CIA’s Cubans fighting the Soviets’ Cubans; the American-backed Vietnamese against the Communist Vietnamese.

  CIA agents came to view themselves as global cancer surgeons trying to identify and remove—or at least contain—even the most minor malignancies, lest they grow into full-scale threats that might later precipitate a nuclear confrontation. It was dirty business but deemed as necessary as the cut of a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon. A Castro in Cuba could spread his revolution not just to Central America but throughout Latin America. As the colonial powers began pulling out, all of Africa was up for grabs; a black Castro could infect the entire continent. There was no middle ground in this struggle. And everywhere the invisible generals in the only true battles allowed to be fought were the spies.

  This was the world Gust Avrakotos moved into in 1963, when, after completing his training, he was given his first overseas post. It would be hard to underestimate the sense of destiny he felt when he learned he would be posted to the country of his parents’ birth. Now he was going back, not just to defend Greece’s freedom but, as President Kennedy put it, to be “a watchman on the walls of freedom.”

  Greece was not just the cradle of democracy; it was where the Cold War had begun. The Truman Doctrine had been created to counter the threat of armed Communist infiltration in Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan had poured in hundreds of millions to rescue the economy, and the CIA was determined to keep the Greeks, who were NATO allies, from voting for leftists.

  By the time Avrakotos arrived, the Agency was intervening in every aspect of Greek life. It had created and funded the Greek Central Intelligence Service, whose operatives worked with it hand in glove. CIA men busied themselves planting stories, funding candidates, monitoring the Communists, neutralizing their champions, showering their own clients with gifts and services. It was a massive undertaking, but Avrakotos was surprised to discover that 142 agents were already in place. The station chief didn’t even bother to introduce himself for two months.

  This was a strange, insular world for a new CIA operative to get used to. There was a virtual taboo against befriending Americans in Greece, and most of the real diplomats at the embassy treated their spy colleagues as if they were untouchables. “They called us ‘spooks,’” Avrakotos recalls. “It’s different in a small embassy like in Dakar or Calcutta, where there may only be five people posted and you’re the only Americans
in town. But in the big embassies in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, London, spooks are separate. It’s a real caste system. You can tell the way they spit it out when they ask for your opinion. ‘Well, what do the spooks think?’”

  The “spooks” themselves considered case officers green for their first two tours. Some of the veterans insist that you really can’t be a true pro until you have twenty years of espionage behind you. But Avrakotos was an irrepressible self-starter. He spoke Greek like a native and knew how to build on opportunities. On April 21, 1967, he got one of those breaks that can make a career, when a military junta seized power in Athens and suspended democratic and constitutional government. Liberals in the United States and around the world were outraged, but overnight “the colonels’ coup” turned Avrakotos into one of the CIA’s indispensable, frontline players.

  Well before this, he had made it his business to get to know the colonels. They had all started off life as peasants before joining the army, and they felt a kinship with this charismatic, working-class American whose parents had come from Lemnos. They could speak Greek with him. He drank and whored with them, and they knew from the heart that he shared their ferocious anti-Communism.

  Avrakotos understood that the colonels had expected the United States to thank them, however discreetly, for preventing the anti-American candidate, Andreas Papandreou, from taking power. The polls had indicated that Papandreou would win the election, and the colonels suspected that the CIA itself was trying to sabotage Papandreou’s campaign. But world reaction was so bitter and the move so brutally antidemocratic that the Johnson administration took to verbally attacking the junta and threatening to cut off U.S. assistance.