by George Crile
Just how zany and out of touch with modern times the senator was is conveyed by his hard-and-fast rule that none of his staff were permitted to speak to Communists, no matter what the circumstances. Any in-fractions were cause for immediate dismissal. This created a considerable dilemma for Humphrey when he discovered that the aide he had come to rely on most, Mike Pillsbury, was an old China hand who had spoken to untold numbers of Reds for years. Pillsbury had the unfortunate task of having to explain the confusing news to the senator that the Communist Chinese were key allies of the CIA in backing the anti-Communist mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union.
This came as something of a shock; Pillsbury reports that it took the senator some time to assimilate the information. But that December 26 at his press conference, Humphrey was anything but muddle-headed; he was the picture of clarity and passion as he laced into the CIA. For the next six years, Afghanistan would become his all-consuming passion. Within weeks of his debut he would create a congressional “Afghan task force” and, anointing himself chairman, would then preside over unofficial hearings on the state of the CIA’s war. Almost immediately he would become better known than Charlie Wilson as the American champion of the Afghan cause. His method of support, however, would be so exceedingly bizarre that the Pakistan ambassador, Jamsheed Marker, would observe privately that Gordon Humphrey “was a most embarrassing friend.”
The senator became so obsessed with the cause that he went so far as to commit over 60 percent of the efforts of his Senate staff to Afghanistan. Most of those efforts consisted of harassing the bureaucracies involved in the war effort. His aides were expected to grind out a constant flow of accusatory letters to the CIA, State, AID, the Pentagon, and the White House, demanding more action and immediate explanations for failures to properly support the mujahideen. His letters resembled interrogatories sent to a hostile side in litigation.
The sudden appearance of this vocal negative force was no small problem for Avrakotos and the CIA. To begin with, it forced Gust’s officers to spend hours or even days a week just answering the senator’s questions. Unlike Wilson, Humphrey’s approach was not to work with the CIA from the inside but to push them through bureaucratic terror tactics. The threat most worrisome to Langley came from the senator’s ability to create a forum where all sorts of critics of the CIA, including some very zany ones, could have their voices heard.
As with so many of the public assaults on the Agency’s Afghan program in those early years, Humphrey’s could be traced back to a maniacally energetic Lithuanian-American, Andrew Eiva, the same former Green Beret who had convinced Senator Paul Tsongas to push through his congressional resolution calling for total support of the mujahideen. While Charlie and Gust were in Egypt, Eiva had managed to insinuate himself into Humphrey’s mind. The senator, who acknowledges that he hadn’t thought much about Afghanistan before launching his CIA attack, had been searching about for a good conservative cause to champion, when Eiva came into his life.
The night of the press conference the team divided its labors: Eiva to Nightline to accuse the CIA of selling out the freedom fighters, Humphrey to MacNeil/Lehrer for a twenty-minute tirade. The papers, notably the Los Angeles Times and Washington Times, as well as a number of newspapers overseas, gave his accusations front-page billing.
The reason reporters were drawn to the right-wing senator and his Green Beret adviser had little to do with a shared conviction that the CIA should be involved in Afghanistan. They paid attention only because a senator was bad-mouthing the Agency on the record. (He and Eiva were specifically accusing the CIA of double-dealing by providing the freedom fighters with antique and joke weaponry and permitting the Pakistanis to steal them blind.) Perhaps it was hard for the press to avoid giving full attention to these kinds of harsh accusations, but it is remarkable that Eiva was able to get his campaign off the ground.
Eiva was a very shabby-looking fellow, with disheveled hair and a long scraggly beard. Quite overweight, he always had a haunted look, like a character out of a Russian novel from the days of Rasputin. In what seemed to be his only suit, he resembled almost anything but a former clean-cut American Green Beret.
The CIA came to loathe Andrew Eiva, and it appears that officers suggested more than once to congressmen and staffers that Eiva might be a Bulgarian or East German agent. But it seems more likely that he was just another of those passionate believers, like Charles Fawcett and, to a certain extent, Charlie Wilson, who got caught up in this cause. The idea that he was a Communist spy would become quite ludicrous years later, in 1990, when he was found behind the barricades in front of the Lithuanian Parliament, where he had joined his countrymen for the final assault on Communism.
The penniless Eiva had been working out of a phone booth in 1984 when a particularly extreme, right-wing Mormon operation, Free the Eagle, decided to put him on their payroll as an Afghan lobbyist. The group’s leader, Neil Blair, believed that Eiva could rally conservatives who felt that the CIA, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, was dominated by people of suspect patriotism.
With Free the Eagle’s Xeroxing and mailing resources, Eiva began bombarding reporters and congressmen with the Agency’s long record of betrayals and its current failures in Afghanistan. Many of his points were hard to deny, and a breakthrough for the crusader came when he convinced Leslie Gelb of the New York Times that the CIA’s effort was insignificant when compared to the estimated $700 million a year’s worth of weapons that the Soviets had furnished the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. A favorable Times profile gave Eiva all the legitimacy he needed.
It might seem that Gust Avrakotos would have found Eiva’s public criticisms useful. The two were, after all, saying much the same thing, and certainly they were pursuing the same objective. But Avrakotos had many reasons for fearing the public attacks once Gordon Humphrey got into the mix. For one thing, the civilian Pentagon officials involved in security affairs were starting to maneuver to take over the Afghan operation, claiming that the CIA did not know how to run a military campaign. Furthermore, Humphrey and Eiva were enlisting other conservative senators, and the idea of Congress gearing up for a sustained public attack threatened to erode confidence in the program just when Gust and Charlie had finally managed to get the resources the Agency needed to show what could be done.
Here Wilson orchestrated another cunningly effective campaign to soften these challenges to Avrakotos’s Afghan program. Early on he decided that most of the activists involved in lobbying for the Afghans were highly peculiar and excessive in their criticism, not only of the CIA and the U.S. government but of the other groups that were involved in the same cause. Indeed, he would soon come to view them as very much like their Afghan clients—ostensibly sharing the same broad cause but caught up in internecine warfare.
Many were even more extreme in their zealousness than Eiva and Free the Eagle. There was the Washington-based Committee for a Free Afghanistan, originally led by an intimidating former army officer, Karen McKay, who had once undergone limited jump-school training and would sometimes appear at conservative gatherings in uniform, wearing a green beret. Two other equally formidable women worked out of a respected New York foundation, Freedom House: Rosanne Klass and Ludmilla Thorne. Wilson’s political antenna told him right away that it would be highly dangerous to cross any of these zealots. For one thing, they all seemed to hate each other. The Committee for a Free Afghanistan, for example, refused to let Eiva into any of its meetings, and Eiva reciprocated by accusing the committee of being a CIA front.
Wilson made it a point to see them all whenever they called, to offer encouragement but diplomatically avoid signing on publicly with any of them. He played his role masterfully here. By now he was for all practical purposes a critical player in the very center of the CIA’s Afghan operation, though he managed to make the entire range of ardent critics believe he was with them in their bitter attacks on the Agency. In the councils of his Appropriations
subcommittees and in conferences with the Senate, however, he had already assumed the role of Langley’s advocate, able to make the case for the way the Afghan operation was being run. It may be that Wilson was better informed at that time than anyone in the Agency except a few members of Avrakotos’s inner circle.
He could tell his colleagues that he had been to Cairo, had seen the weapons being bought, had been to Pakistan and the mujahideen camps, and could state from firsthand experience how effective the program was becoming. He was already playing the part that the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon, would later call that of the Agency’s “case officer on the Hill.”
There was an element of duplicity in Wilson’s dealings here. In truth, it suited him just fine to have these crazies moving menacingly around the fringes hurling virtual bombs and attacking bureaucrats. For example, Charlie would always defend John McMahon in public, but he recognized that the deputy director was in fact a conservative force at the Agency and that other CIA officials were even more dubious about escalating. It didn’t hurt to have the bureaucrats feel the pressure. On occasion, when he sensed resistance at State or the Agency, he would deliberately stir Eiva up.
Perhaps Wilson’s most masterful maneuver on behalf of the CIA effort came in his dealings with Senator Humphrey. Here Charlie chose to have his role inside the Agency remain invisible and to allow Humphrey to assume the public spotlight as the Afghans’ key congressional champion. Humphrey was so extreme when it came to Afghanistan that he would camp outside a fellow senator’s office, if necessary, to corner him for a commitment on a vote. He didn’t sit on Appropriations or Intelligence. He couldn’t initiate funding increases the way Wilson could. But as an enforcer of senatorial discipline on behalf of the mujahideen, he managed to make his fellow senators feel that they would have a political enemy for life if they stood in his way, and few cared enough about the issue to choose to alienate such a man.
All of this made it possible for Wilson to play the role of the good cop, able to assure the Agency capos that he would always cover for them. At the same time, he made it clear that they should recognize that within the range of strident criticisms were some points that ought not to be ignored.
Meanwhile, Avrakotos had to deal with the fact that Gordon Humphrey, with all of his conservative credentials, was preparing to try the Agency in public. As he saw it, the CIA’s credibility and right to continue its escalating operation was in jeopardy. Early in 1985, Gust decided it was time to co-opt the senator. Mike Vickers was put in charge of organizing a dog and pony show at the Agency’s Camp Peary training ground.
Humphrey tried to bring Eiva, but Avrakotos pointed out that Humphrey, who did not sit on the Intelligence Committee, wasn’t even cleared for what he was going to be shown. Bert Dunn, the Near East division chief, came along, and he and Gust sat back as Vickers did the briefing. Gust had samples of most of the weapons the mujahideen were using flown in from all over the country. The contrast between Humphrey’s public accusation about the CIA’s failure to adequately arm the mujahideen and the range of sophisticated weaponry from the arsenal displayed before his eyes was so stark that no one mentioned it directly. As Humphrey was shown the impressive arsenal that he had claimed did not exist, three battle-hardened Agency paramilitaries told of their experiences training the mujahideen and then helped the senator fire the weapons.
This carefully choreographed performance was designed to persuade Humphrey that the Agency was not wimpish, and after exploding a particularly lethal mine for the senator, Gust said with studied forethought, “You think we’re putting chicken-shit mines in? Did you see this fucking round? It went through the son of a bitch better than Joe Louis penetrating a white woman.”
“He didn’t like that comment,” Gust remarked years later, but that was the reason why Avrakotos had chosen such an ugly and crude analogy. He was out to intimidate Humphrey into silence. At one point the senator asked if Avrakotos could account for all the money and weapons being given to the Pakistanis and the Afghans. “We can’t. Can you account for all the money going into New Hampshire from the federal government?” Avrakotos asked in return. “We use satellites as best we can. We put beacons on some packages and various crates, and overhead we study what happens to the shipments. And we do a pretty good job of it.”
The entire Camp Peary exercise had one simple objective—intimidation—and Avrakotos saved his most effective ploy for the end, when he explained in front of his fellow operatives that the Agency wasn’t able to refute the senator’s charges publicly because it didn’t want the Soviets to know what the mujahideen were getting. “You’re undermining what we’re trying to do. You’re a fifth column…. Now that you’ve seen everything we’re giving to the muj, you certainly should know that Andy Eiva is incorrect, and I assume you are satisfied.”
Unlike Wilson, Humphrey never did become a partner of the CIA and no one connected to the Afghan program seems to have anything but unflattering things to say about him. But Avrakotos maintains that by the end of that day at Camp Peary, Gordon Humphrey had been largely neutralized.
For Avrakotos, 1985 was a year of right-wing craziness. About the same time Humphrey surfaced as a menace, he was confronted with a far weirder and more threatening problem from inside the government. A band of well-placed anti-Communist enthusiasts in the administration had come up with a plan they believed would bring down the Red Army, if the CIA would only be willing to implement it.
The leading advocates of this plan included Richard Perle at the Pentagon, so intense in his Cold War convictions that he was nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness.” Oliver North also checked in briefly, but the man who set Avrakotos’s teeth on edge most was Walt Raymond, another NSC staffer who had spent twenty years with the CIA as a propagandist.
Their idea was to encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen. As Avrakotos derisively describes it, “The muj were supposed to set up loudspeakers in the mountains announcing such things as ‘Lay down your arms, there is a passage to the West and to freedom.’” Once news of this program made its way through the Red Army, it was argued, there would be a flood of defectors.
This vision was based on Vlasov’s army, a German-backed effort during World War II to persuade Communist soldiers to join an anti-Stalinist front. It had met with some success before collapsing, enough at least to excite the passionate efforts of its latter-day advocates. Andrew Eiva, not surprisingly, was deeply involved in this effort. He had gone to Pakistan in the early 1980s trying to find Russian prisoners to demonstrate how effective such a policy could be, but he had learned that the mujahideen did not have much interest in keeping prisoners alive. At a White House meeting, North and Perle told Avrakotos they wanted the Agency to spend millions on this program, expressing the belief that as many as ten thousand defectors could be expected to pour across the lines.
Avrakotos thought North and Perle were “cuckoos of the Far Right,” and he soon felt quite certain that Raymond, the man who seemed to be the intellectual ringleader, was truly detached from reality. “What Russian in his right mind would defect to those fuckers all armed to the teeth?” Avrakotos said in frustration. “To begin with, anyone defecting to the Dushman would have to be a crook, a thief, or someone who wanted to get cornholed every day, because nine out of ten prisoners were dead within twenty-four hours and they were always turned into concubines by the mujahideen. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to have them all shot.”
The meeting went very badly indeed. Gust accused North and Perle of being idiots. Larry Penn, Gust’s consigliere, actually giggled in their faces. Avrakotos said to Walt Raymond, “You know, Walt, you’re just a fucking asshole, you’re irrelevant.”
Avrakotos thought that would be the end of the Vlasov idea, but he greatly underestimated the political power and determination of this group, who went directly to Bill Casey to angrily protest Avrakotos’s insulting manner. The director complained to Clair George, who responded by forbid
ding Avrakotos to attend any more interagency meetings without a CIA nanny present. George gave the job to his executive assistant, Norm Gardner, who worked out a system so that whenever Gust started to feel the anger coming from his toes he would tap Gardner and let the more diplomatic officer do the talking. But Gardner, who shared Avrakotos’s frustrations with the Vlasov business, would often sit back and let his charge have at least a preliminary run at Raymond and the others.
At one point Avrakotos arrived for one of these White House sessions armed with five huge photographic blowups. Before unveiling them he explained that they would provide a useful understanding of the kind of experience a Soviet soldier could expect to have should he surrender to the mujahideen. One of them showed two Russian sergeants being used as concubines. Another had a Russian hanging from the turret of a tank with a vital part of his anatomy removed. Another showed a mujahid approaching a Soviet with a dagger in his hands. “If you were a sane fucking Russian, would you defect to these people?” he had demanded of Perle.
In spite of the angry complaints, Claire George and everyone else on the seventh floor agreed with Avrakotos’s position. He says that Director Casey even privately told him, “I think your point is quite valid. What asshole would want to defect to those animals?”
But the issue wouldn’t go away. Perle, Raymond, and the others continued to insist that the Agency find and send back to the United States the many Russian defectors they seemed to believe, despite Avrakotos’s denials, the mujahideen were harboring. They had visions of a great publicity campaign once these men reached America. As soon as their stories were known, others would defect. They refused to believe Avrakotos’s claim that there were no defectors.
