by George Crile
In Zurich, Avrakotos says, the Oerlikon officials used every conceivable argument and incentive to encourage a large sale. At the close of their visit one of the company executives, a cultivated aristocrat, hosted a fancy dinner for Gust. The suggestion was reportedly made that a three-year contract for $600,000 might be available to Gust once he left the Agency, with $500,000 of that up front.
“Shove it up your ass,” Avrakotos shot back. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear what you just said, because the last thing you want is for me to tell Congress you were trying to bribe me.” The worldly Swiss executive did not seem insulted or in any way put off, instead he responded with a question more to Gust’s liking.
“Do you like blondes?”
“Well, that’s different,” Gust replied.
Avrakotos says he reported the incident to his superiors. Whether or not he ended up with a blonde that night, it can be said with confidence that Oscar Lascaris Avrakotos’s son had not gone into the CIA to profit at the expense of his country. Beyond that, he was keenly aware that when it came to Oerlikons he was living in a glass house. It took nerves of steel and good judgment to walk the tightrope he was now on, and it was not helpful having marines by your side who were totally lacking in imagination and good sense.
This became doubly clear back in Washington, when it was time to testify before Congress about the Oerlikons. Gust was fully prepared to buy a small number of these weapons, knowing that this was the unspoken quid pro quo with Charlie—giving him something for his money to shoot down the Hind, even if it wasn’t effective. After explaining this to Weber, Avrakotos told him to testify that the Agency didn’t really need the Oerlikons but could certainly use them.
“No,” Weber replied, “the honest answer is that the Oerlikon is superfluous.”
“You’re not going to testify,” declared Avrakotos.
“Yes, I have to,” Weber protested.
“No, you’re not, you’re sick. Go home. That’s an order. Are you disobeying orders?”
The story, of course, made the rounds inside the PM branch, as did Gust’s next move, to hire Vickers. The paramilitary chief, Rudy Enders, refused to let Vickers go until Avrakotos threateded to have the director personally intervene. As he had predicted, Enders caved in.
Vickers was unaware of the bureaucratic maneuvers that Avrakotos had gone through to get him. He was told only that he was being considered for the Afghan paramilitary slot. His interview took thirty minutes, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that Avrakotos fell in love at first sight, it was close.
To begin with, Gust discovered that Vickers was an ethnic. He didn’t look or dress or talk like a new American, but his grandparents had all taken the Ellis Island route—two from Italy, two from Slovakia. The Slovak grandfather had worked in the steel mills in Chicago, had been thrilled by the money he was earning, overjoyed to be in the land of opportunity. The flag flew in front of both grandparents’ homes. Gust could spot a kindred spirit from a mile away. Like him, he had made it in life all on his own by using his brains. And he could not help but respect the fact that this nondescript-looking nerd could probably kick his ass.
It’s initially disorienting to listen to Vickers talk about guerrilla war. He makes it sound as if it were a business school course. Avrakotos himself was taken aback by the young man’s bloodlessly precise responses to questions about weapons and strategy. It was as if he were quoting from a textbook, but there is no such textbook.
Avrakotos, a math star himself, was mesmerized. This man seemed to have studied guerrilla warfare the way others study medicine. He seemed to know exactly what to prescribe and in what dose, when to be alarmed by developments, and when to stand back and let time take its course. Some deep organizing principle was at work; and Gust could sense an exuberance behind the calm exterior, particularly when this utterly self-confident young man announced that he saw no reason why the mujahideen could not win. Avrakotos hired him on the spot and turned him loose to review the entire program.
Vickers is a grind, and once he began poring through the Agency’s files and the history of the war, he didn’t look up until he had assimilated everything. What he saw both pleased and dismayed him. The good news was that the resistance was intact and growing in the face of unbelievable casualties. (Special Forces doctrine held that if a guerrilla insurgency survives and grows, then it is by definition winning.)*
The rest of what he saw appalled him. By his way of thinking, whoever had been responsible for choosing the weapons and the broad strategy for backing the freedom fighters had verged on criminal negligence. Vickers had already been alerted that the Afghans had no meaningful anti-aircraft capacity. But he was amazed to find that they had no modern communications; no battlefield radios to coordinate attacks; few mortars; few antitank weapons; no light machine guns to speak of; no proper medical kits; no boots, which resulted in a number of cases of preventable frostbite; not enough food to keep their families from starving unless they returned from the front regularly; no mine-clearing devices; no sniper rifles; and far, far too few modern assault rifles. For some reason, the basic weapon the CIA had given the mujahideen was the bolt-action World War I Lee Enfield.
That might have worked in the early years of the century, when armies faced off against each other from fixed positions in trenches, but now? Clearly the thinking behind Howard Hart’s decision to flood the Afghans with Enfields was to give a sense of empowerment, however ill-equipped they might actually be. The Enfields were cheaper than the modern AKs, and given the small early budgets, it must have seemed the way to go. Standard guerrilla doctrine, however, called for giving the mujahideen the same rifles that their enemy used. It was the only way they could use captured ammunition. Needless to say, the Soviets didn’t use Enfields. Nevertheless, the Agency had robotically supplied the mujahideen with hundreds of thousands of these antiquated weapons—and nowhere near enough ammunition.
It became instantly clear to Vickers that there was no way for the Afghans to wage sustained combat. All of this leapt out of the CIA’s secret ledgers to offend Vickers’s sense of professionalism. By Agency protocol, Vickers was far too junior to go shooting off his mouth about his conclusions. In fact, he was so low on the totem pole that had it not been for Avrakotos, he would have had no right to take any initiative.
What makes Vickers’s story so remarkable is that the organization and support of a giant covert military campaign is a highly esoteric specialty. The U.S. government doesn’t train anyone with this particular discipline in mind. But as chance would have it, Mike Vickers had spent his entire adult life preparing for just such a commission.
Underneath his controlled exterior, Vickers is a romantic. It’s unlikely that this side of him would have surfaced had his father not left Chicago, where he ran a funeral home, to move the family to California. Vickers was still in elementary school when his father reinvented himself in Hollywood as a master carpenter, helping to build fanciful movie sets on the lots of Twentieth Century–Fox.
The senior Vickers had been a genuine war hero who had always stirred patriotic ambitions in his son. He had won the Silver Star in a bloody bomber raid over Germany, and as a boy, Vickers would look with awe and pride at his father’s citations. Later, as a teenager, he had a sense that he was born to do something big in life, but for years he thought it would be on the sports field. He couldn’t have been a more lackluster student, rarely cracking open a book and graduating from high school with a C+ average. But he would pump iron religiously in the garage, and he performed well enough as a varsity quarterback and pitcher that he hoped he would make it as a football or baseball star.
The unlikely ambition to join the CIA came to him by accident in his senior year, when he found himself in a class taught by a teacher who talked tough and straight. This professor was able to break through to him, and spoke to him about the basic realities of power and how things really work in the world of international relations. It was the height of
the Vietnam protests, and the teacher gave Vickers an article to read about the CIA’s secret war in Laos. It didn’t praise the CIA; quite the contrary. But Vickers was riveted by what he read. Already intrigued with spying because of the James Bond movies, he could see himself playing such a role one day—the heroic loner, empowered by sophisticated technology, taking on fantastic odds for his country. The article on the war in Laos clinched it: one day he would join the CIA and run a secret war of his own.
At a community college the next year, still preoccupied by football, he met with disappointment: Mark Harmon, later to become the star of St. Elsewhere and People magazine’s “most handsome man in the world,” beat him out for starting quarterback. Stuck on the bench, a young man looking for action and adventure, he decided to enlist in the Green Berets. It wasn’t an impulsive move; like everything else in his life, the decision to try out for the Special Forces was highly calculated. Vickers knew that the Green Berets train men to run irregular armies, and he figured that this was the best way to acquire the preparation he needed to join the CIA. He took a military I.Q. test and for the first time learned that he was endowed with remarkable potential. He got a 160, the highest score possible.
It’s said that 85 percent of those who enlist in the Green Berets don’t make it to graduation. Vickers not only won his beret but was soon honored as the Special Forces Soldier of the Year. At twenty-one, he began his apprenticeship under true military heroes. In the 10th Special Forces Group, the other men in his unit were ten-or fifteen-year veterans of almost every irregular military adventure the United States had to offer. Most had volunteered for repeated tours in Laos and Vietnam. They were an unconventional elite who had learned the hard way what a guerrilla army filled with committed men can do to destroy the will of a much larger force.
The bulk of the U.S. Army in those years was preparing for an all-out war in Europe. But Vickers’s Green Beret unit had a special mission: training year-round to fight a guerrilla war deep behind Red Army lines—exactly what the mujahideen would be doing in real life ten years later.
Vickers threw himself into intensive study of Soviet weapons and tactics: how the Soviets organized themselves, what their counterinsurgency methods were, how to set up networks to exfiltrate downed U.S. aircrews. The target was always the Red Army and the tactics those that the Afghans would have to perfect: raids, ambushes, sniping, mines, booby traps, sabotage, even some relatively large-scale conventional operations. Vickers became an expert at using every type of Soviet weapon, from pistols to mortars to heavy machine guns to surface-to-air missiles. But he also trained with weapons from all over the world so that he could be dropped in anywhere to advise an insurgent movement on how best to use whatever armaments they happened to possess.
During his early years with the Green Berets, Vickers was driven to prove his warrior’s worth. He became an expert in the martial arts, so good that he was sent to West Point as an instructor in hand-to-hand combat. He trained with the navy SEALs in infiltration techniques and long-distance swimming. He went to England for counterterrorist training with the crack British SAS regiment, learning how to storm a room and pick out every terrorist for the kill without imperiling the hostages. He even volunteered for the ultimate assignment: in the event of an all-out war with the Soviets, Vickers was to parachute into enemy territory with a small tactical nuclear weapon strapped to his leg. His mission was to place the device in a mountain pass or some similar terrain to halt the advance of the Red Army. Theoretically, there would be time to escape the blast, but everyone knew this was a one-way mission.
When the Soviet’s 40th Army and KGB liquidation squads descended on Kabul in 1979, Vickers was driving across the country toward the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where additional training led to a job as part of a secret twenty-man unit tasked with assessing the vulnerability of U.S. embassies and responding to terrorist incidents. He moved about Central America, picking locations for snipers, gathering intelligence from embassies and other locations that might someday have to be infiltrated to rescue American diplomats. His ultimate job was to be first on the scene in the event of a terrorist incident—to pave the way for the Delta Force shooters and to serve as the ambassador’s military adviser in the event of a hostage incident, a job he performed with distinction twice in the 1980s.
By 1983 Vickers figured he had learned what he needed from the Green Berets. An enormous buildup was underway at the CIA and he judged it time to make his move. Typically he researched the career paths in the Agency exhaustively before choosing a specialty. His Special Forces experience would have allowed him to jump right into one of the paramilitary slots but he had larger visions of becoming Deputy Director for Operations one day and the only route to that post was to become a general case officer. This would require going through the same fifteen-month training course at Camp Peary that had prepared Hart and Avrakotos for their CIA careers.
The paramilitary course had little to teach Vickers. He was already an expert skydiver, trained to leap out of planes from high altitudes. He was even able, by steering his chute with his feet, to maneuver laterally thirty miles and to land, alongside a team of black-suited warriors, within yards of a preassigned target.
Camp Peary wasn’t all drudgery for Vickers, mainly because he shared the boot camp experience with a pretty young case officer. They parachuted together, rappelled out of helicopters, trained with all sorts of rifles and set off plastique: a touch of James Bond glamour in what might otherwise have been drudgery for this overly qualified military specialist.
It is said that all the determinants of success, luck is the most important. And as luck would have it, Vickers turned out to be the right man in the right place at the right time. But that’s not the way it looked to Vickers when he learned of his first on the job training assignment with the Caribbean Task Force. He was desolate: the Caribbean was where people went on vacation, not where great foreign policy issues were played out. But shortly after his posting, the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada became the focus of the world’s attention. For months the Reagan Administration had been complaining about the large number of Cuban advisers on the island and a suspiciously long airstrip being built with Soviet funds. When the already leftist government of this island nation was overthrown, the U.S. suddenly made the decision to invade.
The Caribbean branch chief was directed to accompany the invasion force and was told he could take one aide. As he saw it, he was going to be driving a stagecoach through the badlands and he needed a man by his side who knew how to ride shotgun. It turned out to have been a wise decision. They arrived in Grenada the day after the first troops landed and were promptly ambushed while inspecting a captured ammunition cache. Vickers comported himself with distinction in the firefight that ensued and for the next ten days impressed everyone with his organizational skills.
Back at Langley, Vickers was given a citation and another urgent assignment: to the Lebanon task force, in Beirut, to identify the bombers of the American embassy and the marine barracks. In the embassy bombing in April, the Agency’s national intelligence officer for the Near East, Bob Ames, and six other Agency men had died. The barracks attack, coming on top of the embassy bombing and all the other humiliations at the hands of the Iranians, had pushed the White House to the point of wanting revenge. Vickers’s mission was to figure out whom to target and how to get to them.
Vickers and his team quickly made their way through a list of suspects in Hezbollah and the region’s many other terrorist groups. Unhesitatingly, his team recommended that no action be taken. There was no reliable identification, no appropriate targets, and no reason to strike out blindly. It may not have been what the White House wanted to hear, but it was obviously honest.
Shortly after Vickers completed his training at Camp Peary, Avrakotos interviewed him for the military-adviser and program officer position. In Vickers’s mind, there was no question what needed to be done in Afghanistan, and drawing
on his years of preparation, he quickly came up with a grand design for the war. The obvious problem, however, was that no one was about to listen to a GS-11 proclaiming that everything the Agency had undertaken was misdirected; the only person who could initiate the kind of radical change Vickers envisioned was his boss. So he gathered together his disconcerting set of proposals, and thus began the education of Gust Avrakotos.
Coordinated firepower is the key to effective combat, but rather than talk in jargon, Vickers began by offering his new boss a metaphor. The key to success, he said, rested with the mix of weapons, and having the proper “clothing” for the job. Vickers explained that the mujahideen’s needs were not all that different from those of a Green Beret team, which relies on a wide variety of weapons and skills to be effective. The guerrillas also needed to be cross-trained in communications, map reading, first aid, demolition, and small arms. But all of this was secondary to giving them the right combination of weapons—guns to kill a Russian soldier, to disable a tank, to shoot down an aircraft, to lay siege from far away.
Everything needed to be rethought with the weapons mix in mind, Vickers explained. He wanted to immediately stop all purchases of those obsolescent Enfield rifles and switch to AKs. They should think of the basic mujahideen unit as a one-hundred-man force, he said. Each one of these units needed three Dashikas but no more, and Vickers figured there were already more than enough of these heavy machine guns to satisfy that ratio. Stop the purchase of them, he suggested; instead, buy the longer-range 14.5mm heavy machine guns with rounds that can break through the skin of a Hind. He wanted long-range mortars that could hit targets from a distance and not bring down instant reprisal.
