Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  “The Office of Logistics didn’t like this deal because it was embarrassing,” remembers Avrakotos, “but I never cut them off completely, because they have ways of getting back at you. So I’d throw a little their way and say, ‘Okay, we’re getting .303 rounds for seven cents, let’s see what you can do.’”

  Avrakotos now began asking his friends at stations around the world to work their military sources to find out what else was available. “It’s not what spies usually do, but I figured we have the contacts and who is better at finding what’s available.”

  It was during this time that he supervised a nerve-racking operation centered on a Polish general ready to sell Soviet SA-7 surface-to-air missiles to the Americans. This called for lifting these tightly guarded weapons from right under the nose of the Red Army, which was then more or less occupying Poland. “My hair turned white on this operation because of the risks we were taking,” remembers Avrakotos.

  If the guerrillas could acquire Soviet SA-7s, they could achieve a breakthrough in their war; the weapon might enable them to bring down the murderous Hind helicopter. The fear at Langley, however, was that the general might be part of a KGB sting. That was the year that Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” It was the height of the Cold War, and high-ranking Polish, East German, and Czech military men were all assumed to be either loyal Communists or under the control of those who were. And beyond that, the general’s demands were strange.

  He had signed off on a particularly high-risk operation. He would remove the missiles from their containers, put stones in their place, and sneak the SA-7s out of the country under false labels. In return, he wanted money, but more important, he told his CIA contact, he wanted to know if the Agency would put up a tombstone in Quebec in honor of his grandfather.

  The general’s explanation was that the old man had gone to Canada in the 1930s when he couldn’t find work in Poland. He had sent money home to take care of his family, and when he returned years later he had filled his grandson, the future general, with a sense of the wonder of Canada and a hatred for what the Communists had done to enslave Poland.

  To many this might sound a bit like those Cold War stories that used to appear in the Reader’s Digest, so corny that it’s suspect. But to Avrakotos, that was the way things worked in the real world. His own father had gone to America to find a job and had sent money to support his family back in Greece, just like the general’s grandfather. The story had a plausible ring to it, particularly after Gust had the Canadian service do a check confirming that the grandfather had once lived in Quebec.

  There were also other things that made Avrakotos buy the general’s story. He could remember, as if it were yesterday, those “captive nation” rallies he had attended as a boy and all those drunken nights at the political clubs in Aliquippa listening to the Polacks swear to liberate their motherland. It made perfect sense to Avrakotos that there could be a general in Warsaw who wanted nothing more than to stick it to the Red Army and to honor his grandfather.

  In his typical compulsion to reduce human truths to a sexual analogy, Avrakotos explains, “You just have to find out what a person has a hard-on for and give it to them.” So often money was not the determining factor. What Avrakotos knew from so many experiences was that you can never underestimate the cravings of the human spirit.

  In the small Canadian town in the Lake Superior region, it never occurred to the local stonemason that there was anything unusual about the request from the innocent American to chisel a tombstone for his Polish grandfather. A plot in a pretty cemetery was chosen, and once the tombstone was erected, the bereaved American snapped two rolls of film with his thirty-five-millimeter Nikon. By the time Gust’s special courier had rushed them to Warsaw, the deal was done. Soon the Soviet SA-7s were in the CIA’s pipeline on their way to Afghanistan.

  But Avrakotos was not content to limit his role to haggling over the cost of war material. As he saw it, now that he was acting chief, his task was to find ever more ingenious ways to kill and maim Soviets. And he knew just whom to turn to for help.

  Kutsher’s Country Club sits in the heart of the Catskill Mountains two and a half hours from New York City, in what Charlie Wilson affectionately calls “the Hebrew Himalayas.” Kutsher’s is a high-priced family hotel, and every Yom Kippur holiday throughout the nine years of the Afghan war, Art Alper made it a point to spend time there with his aging father.

  The conversation at the dinner table at Kutsher’s in the fall of 1983 was hardly scintillating. Two old ladies who had taken a shine to the CIA man’s father always seemed to find seats at the Alpers’ table. The women didn’t pay much attention to the fifty-eight-year-old “youngster” with the yarmulke and the potbelly and the ample jowls. And anyone looking at this table would have assumed that the younger Alper was about as boring a dinner companion as could be imagined.

  But Art Alper was a man who made his living surprising people, and his head was alive that fall with the deadly assignments he was beginning to work on for Avrakotos. For thirty years he had specialized in the creation of nasty and often lethal devices. His division, with its joyless bureaucratic title, the Office of Technical Services, had given Alper the best window in the business on the full range of covert operations the Agency had pursued over the years.

  When the Agency wanted a chemical to make Castro’s beard fall out or a poison pen to assassinate him, Alper’s colleagues in the Office of Technical Services got the call. Almost any time the CIA undertook a daring or dangerous operation, it invariably required some devilish input from the OTS.

  Despite Alper’s nondescript, grandfatherly appearance, he was an adventurer, a man with an eye for the ladies, a lust for travel, and a love for his work. In the 1960s, this eminently forgettable-looking man had been given the assignment to direct the covert action division of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. He spent a year in Laos helping run the secret war and three years in Vietnam with thirteen devilish tinkerers serving under him at the old Saigon embassy. There he was given carte blanche to play dirty with the Vietcong. One of his favorite tactics was to secrete both a homing device and Semtex plastique into typewriters offered for sale at shops the Vietcong were known to frequent. Alper was then able to follow the typewriter by its signal and identify the enemy nest. When ready, this American with the kindly face would detonate the Semtex charge with an electronic signal, striking a blow for the war effort.

  Alper loved this work. But then the war ended and the Church Committee investigations all but wiped out his beloved specialty. By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the CIA no longer had a stable of deadly tinkerers to call on. Not only had many of the old covert operators been fired, but the storehouse of ingenious gadgets to support special operations was simply not there anymore.

  The task to rebuild the inventory was given to Alper, who began roaming the world in search of deadly hardware, dividing his fieldwork between Central America and Afghanistan. At that point the Reagan administration was focusing its energies and hopes on the Contra war, where it believed victory was possible; Afghanistan was deemed a lost cause. So in 1983, Art Alper found himself on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border at the vast CIA Contra base camp known as Las Vegas, directing a most unusual operation.

  Alper felt it was critical to do more than just support the CIA’s Contra army. Out to win the hearts and minds of the Nicaraguan people, he sold the Agency on a plan that called for floating huge propaganda-stuffed helium balloons into Nicaragua. For years the Agency had tried to convert the Communist Chinese by bombarding Red China with such propaganda balloons launched from Taiwan. For the Nicaraguan operation, Alper added his own grandfatherly touch by including little packets of candy, soap, toilet paper, toys, and toothbrushes in the aerial bombardments.

  Every Sunday, Alper would fly from Washington to Tegucigalpa. At four A.M. Monday morning, he would be at the border with his helium pump, ready to float his propaganda offensive into the morning
air currents. Alper took particular pride in this effort. It filled him with a sense of American virtue, knowing that his little creations would soon be delivering their message of hope into the hands of honest peasants eager for a non-Communist alternative.

  But then the CIA got caught mining the harbors of Nicaragua, and when John McMahon, the Agency’s cautious deputy director, reviewed the Nicaraguan operations, he grounded Alper’s balloons. Congress had just passed the Boland Amendment, making it illegal for the CIA to do anything that might be aimed at overthrowing the Sandinista government. McMahon concluded that the balloon offensive might be construed as a violation.

  For Alper, the game was up in Central America. The only place left for the kind of vigorous anti-Communist guerrilla warfare he loved was Afghanistan, especially now that Avrakotos was taking over the program.

  Art Alper was prey to an occupational hazard common among many of the CIA’s specialists: he believed that only his specialty offered the key to success. The Agency’s mine expert, for example, had the same conceit, and by all accounts was virtually psychotic in pushing his belief that mines alone could inflict maximum pain to the occupying army. To Alper, sabotage via small, portable devices that disable, surprise, and kill was the answer.

  When he first reviewed the mujahideen’s tactics he spotted all kinds of ways to make a difference. Ambushing was the meat and potatoes of the Afghan’s strategy, but their antique approach reminded Alper of old cowboy movies he had seen as a child: an Afghan standing up in the hills with a plunger connected to an explosive. The guerrilla in his turban or Chitrali hat would wait for the tank to get to what he hoped was just the right spot before making the connection to drop and blow it up.*

  The OTS technicians proposed as an alternative a small, black device about the size of a Walkman and not much heavier. Alper still has a few of these “blasting boxes” on a shelf in his consulting-firm office just outside Washington. Their most attractive feature, he explains, is that they are very light and user-friendly. Whereas a mujahid would have to struggle to carry a bulky wood box and plunger up and down the mountains, these six-ounce devices could be hung from a belt and used ten times or more before requiring a change of batteries.

  Alper had discovered this blasting device for sale in Europe for $113. After taking it apart, he’d decided that he could have it made in the United States for about $90. It would look exactly like the European model, which was important in those days when American involvement had to be concealed. Even better from Alper’s perspective, since he is a fierce “buy American” man, it would put some Americans to work. “Remember,” he explained with genuine conviction years later, “we were just coming out of the Carter years and there was great unemployment.”

  Commissioning a U.S. company to arm the mujahideen called for breaking the prohibition on American-made weapons. But in Avrakotos Alper found a risk-taking, rule-breaking boss who figured that even if the Soviets did capture some of these little black boxes, they would never be able to point the finger at the CIA. “And what was the KGB going to do even if they found out—sue us?”

  Avrakotos says Alper was something of a bureaucratic misfit, somewhat adrift in the Agency, until he put the technical expert to work. “He’s fat, and people passed him over. He was only a GS-14. Some of his ideas were off the wall, and we’d have knock-down, drag-out fights. But two out of ten of Art’s ideas were great.” Gust also maintains that some of the work Alper ended up doing on the Afghan program advanced the tenets of modern conventional warfare.

  Bear in mind that Avrakotos was talking here about Alper’s effort to design ever more lethal ways of killing Russians. “He’d sit down with the Egyptians and design some new plastic device that the Soviet mine detectors couldn’t detect. When the Russians made plastic-mine detectors, we made screaming meemies. We’d put steel rods on the side of a hill and make the limpet mines look like stones covered with mud. It was all point-counterpoint, and Art always knew the counter to the counter and had started to build it. Here was this fifty-eight-year-old guy calling me at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Can I come over?’ You can’t get that enthusiasm out of a fourteen-year-old.”

  Like most of the CIA veterans who got caught up in this secret war, Alper loved doing to the Soviets in Afghanistan what they had done to the Americans in Vietnam. One of his most satisfying moments came right at the beginning of his work with Avrakotos. When the mujahideen captured a collection of Soviet 122mm rockets, the fuses wouldn’t work and no one knew what to do with them. But Alper knew this terror weapon well from his Vietnam days. One of the Soviet 122s that the Vietcong fired from the jungle had hit next to Alper’s office, and the concussion had been so great that it had hurled the desks and safes all over his room. He loved the idea of turning some of those Soviet rockets back where they came from.

  After a bit of tinkering, Alper declared that he could make them work just so long as he was allowed to use American fuses, which he would attach with his own specially tooled thread adapters. Again that meant breaking the prohibition on any American-made items, even components. “Art’s the type of nice little Jewish boy who always checks with his mother, and since he didn’t have his mother he always checked with me,” recalls Avrakotos, who immediately signed off without consulting the lawyers. “If I asked them they would have jerked off for three months trying to figure out why we couldn’t do it.”

  There weren’t all that many 122s, but the mujahideen reacted with childlike delight when they fired these magnificent noisemakers into Kabul. It was a morale booster for the freedom fighters to be terrorizing the infidel in his own lair.

  Avrakotos was now working to toughen the Agency’s tactics, but by later standards the war he was presiding over in 1983 was remarkably tame. Congress had appropriated only $15 million for the Afghans that year, concealed in an air force appropriation. The Saudis, convinced that the Soviets would come after them next if they were not stopped in Afghanistan, had agreed to match the U.S. commitment to the mujahideen dollar for dollar and to permit the CIA to direct the program.

  This still meant only $30 million to run a guerrilla war twelve thousand miles away, against a superpower then able to intimidate every nation in the world. Thirty million dollars is what two F-15 fighter jets cost, or six Black Hawk helicopters.

  It was not just insufficient funding, however, that Avrakotos saw as the central problem. It was bureaucratic cowardice. He talks about a “Nuremberg syndrome” loose in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, where officers like Chuck Cogan lived in terror of another congressional investigation or of being hauled up by a special prosecutor. “By the time the lawyers were finished talking to the ‘Chucks’ of the Agency,” he says, “we couldn’t do anything but play with our dicks because the lawyers worried that our weapons would be perceived as terrorist devices, or worse, as assassination devices.”*

  Later, when Avrakotos took over the Afghan program, he dealt with this problem by introducing an Orwellian change in the language he directed his staff to adopt whenever describing weapons or operations in the Afghan program. “These aren’t terrorist devices or assassination techniques,” he would inform his staff. “Henceforth these are individual defensive devices.” Sniper rifles were finally shipped out to the mujahideen, but only after Gust renamed them: “long-range, night-vision devices with scopes.” Once, when the Islamabad station sent a cable describing a lethal tactic being introduced, Avrakotos shot back a return communiqué saying that the cable had been garbled and adding, “Please do not send anything more on this subject ever again.”

  Avrakotos talks about the lawyers during these days almost as if they were predators patrolling the halls of Langley: “Even Saturday Night Live couldn’t do justice to the way the lawyers made us deal with Afghanistan.” It got so bad, he says, that when he planned to begin planting anti-Soviet stories in the European press, an assistant secretary of state objected, claiming that the propaganda migh
t bounce back and mislead Americans, in which case the Agency would be in violation of congressional laws that prohibit the CIA from operating inside the United States. Soon groups of State Department lawyers and CIA lawyers were caught up in endless meetings debating whether the possibilities of this blowback were strong enough to deny the operation.

  Avrakotos’s solution to this internal sabotage was to enlist an old CIA friend—“a New York Jew, a lawyer who had balls”—to join the Afghan task force as “my consigliere.” Larry Penn was another of those nondescript, slightly overweight middle-aged men you would never notice in an airport. Technically he was the task force operations officer. But Avrakotos says he deployed Penn regularly to design methods of countering the Agency’s other lawyers.

  Penn would constantly warn Avrakotos that he was going to end up in the slammer. But the balding, bug-eyed consigliere happily carried out the tasks Avrakotos gave him. When sensitive initiatives were being proposed and lawyers were expected at an Agency meeting, Avrakotos would send Penn to represent him. The consigliere’s instructions were to employ euphemisms and to drone on with boring double-talk so long that he would make the entire operation seem tedious.

  As Avrakotos saw it, he almost had to run a covert operation inside the Agency to get things going out in the field. But he wasn’t quite as radical as he might appear.* The main reason for his boldness with the lawyers was that he interpreted the Presidential Findings differently than they did.