Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Avrakotos was careful never to associate the Agency with such activities—that would be a political time bomb. Killing Russians, however, was what this operation was about, and he was determined to put every kill to his advantage. He agreed to the idea of using Soviet soldiers’ belt buckles as a way of measuring the body count. And he loved the rewards the Pakistanis offered for these trophies: cash, more guns, sometimes even alcohol—whatever a given commander or warrior most wanted. Avrakotos made sure every one of these kills was tabulated and the totals distributed in highly classified reports to the policy makers he needed on board.

  In many respects, the war on the actual battlefront was the least of Gust Avrakotos’s concerns in 1985. He left the operational decisions to Vickers. His combat took place in very different and varied arenas. That year he had a particularly ticklish problem to cope with from the all-important Pakistan intelligence service, through which the CIA had to conduct all of its operations.

  The ISI brigadier responsible for arming the Afghans with the CIA’s weapons was Mohammad Yousaf, a big, bug-eyed, former infantry officer who maintained a very complicated relationship with the Americans. After the war he wrote a book in which he complained sharply about the CIA’s inefficiency and its timidity in introducing the kinds of weapons, like the Stinger, that the mujahideen needed.

  But if you listen to Avrakotos and the other CIA Afghan hands, it was Yousaf who wouldn’t let them escalate. A fundamentalist Muslim, Yousaf bore considerable suspicion and even bitter resentment against the American spy agency, which he believed was forever machinating behind the scenes to manipulate the Pakistan government and to undermine his religion.

  President Zia was the ultimate authority in Pakistan; he always told his American friends that he was the one who decided how much to let the pot boil in Afghanistan. He assured Charlie Wilson and others several times that he had given his okay to the escalation that year. But Yousaf felt it was his obligation to decide how much to permit the Americans to force down Pakistan’s throat, and he emerged in those months as a genuine block to the massive increases Vickers had in mind. His official explanation was that he did not want to do anything that would precipitate a Soviet invasion of his country.

  Part of the problem, however, was no doubt personal. On a CIA-sponsored trip to Washington that year, the proud ISI brigadier was deeply insulted when he was led, virtually blindfolded, to the Agency’s “sabotage school” in North Carolina. Vickers escorted the burly Pakistan general in a plane whose windows were blacked, then in a car with its shades drawn. Yousaf, who suffers the chip on the shoulder of many proud Third World types, was deeply offended at this slight. He reasoned that if he was trusted enough to be permitted to run the CIA’s operation in Pakistan, why was the Agency treating him as if he were about to reveal the location of the sabotage school?

  At dinner back in Washington, things deteriorated even further when Vickers and Avrakotos took Yousaf and one of his colleagues out for a fancy dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel. Yousaf, perhaps because he still felt the sting of the sabotage-school humiliation, complained when Avrakotos ordered a second bourbon and water. Being a pure Muslim, the Pakistan general reacted to this rather natural Western custom almost the way an American might respond if Yousaf had taken out a syringe and begun shooting up with heroin just as the appetizers were arriving.

  Avrakotos lost his cool. It was one thing to suffer this kind of repression in Pakistan, but Yousaf was playing on Avrakotos’s home turf. Beyond that, Avrakotos was paying for the guns and the ammunition and making it possible for the Pakistanis to organize this jihad. He was even paying for dinner, and he didn’t like this chain-smoking, tight-assed Muslim trying to tell him what not to drink in his own hometown. “I’ll stop drinking,” Avrakotos barked, “when you stop smoking. My doctor says it’s like suicide to smoke, and Allah does not permit suicide.”

  The Agency was not doing a good job on this trip of winning the heart of the man they needed on board to make the Afghan program work. There was also another slight, one that seems almost incredible, given the effort the Agency was making to strengthen its relationship with Yousaf.

  For reasons that were quite inexplicable to Vickers, the CIA protocol team in charge of organizing the brigadier’s schedule had decided that Yousaf would enjoy going to the theater. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf is a fundamentalist Muslim who turns to Mecca five times a day in prayer and who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; by nature he is suspicious of Christians. The play the CIA selected for him to attend with Vickers and Avrakotos at Ford’s Theater was Godspell.

  It was, needless to say, a very grim-faced Pakistan general who sat between Vickers and Avrakotos that evening. His arms folded over his barrel chest, he scowled at the musical, whose author clearly had not understood that Muhammad was the greatest of all the prophets.

  All was not lost, however. The Agency’s relationship was saved in part by Yousaf’s enormous respect for Avrakotos’s boss, Bert Dunn, the Near East Division chief. Dunn had served in Afghanistan and had been responsible during the Kennedy years for helping Pakistan establish its own special forces unit. He spoke Dari and Pashto and was much loved by the Pakistan military, which had known and trusted him for years.

  Yousaf was pleased to receive Dunn’s praise for all he was doing for the jihad. But things broke down with Yousaf again over the most basic question of how to arm an insurgent movement. Yousaf didn’t want to let the CIA ship the huge amount of ammunition that Vickers felt was absolutely necessary to keep the fighters in steady combat. When Yousaf cited insufficient infrastructure to transport the ammunition, Vickers countered by getting Gust to offer to build warehouses, upgrade train tracks, buy thousands of new trucks, even ship in mules and camels.

  More complicated was Yousaf’s adamant insistence that the CIA equip all of the mujahideen with AK-47s. Vickers had been the biggest critic of the bolt-action Enfield in favor of the AK, but his objective now was to create a lean, tough, well-armed guerrilla army. The last thing he wanted was to buy hundreds of thousands of AKs and then not be able to give anyone enough ammunition for sustained combat.

  The Agency was not about to make this point directly, and Vickers, the rough equivalent of an army captain in Brigadier Yousaf’s eyes, was not inclined even to suggest such a thing. So something of an impasse was reached in which Vickers could not say either that he was worried about corruption or that he felt Yousaf was an imbecile when it came to military strategy and tactics. The net result was a logjam, which appeared to be unmovable until Avrakotos intervened with a bit of baksheesh distributed skillfully at just the right moment.

  At one of those dreary official receptions in Islamabad where the Muslim government serves only fruit juice, Avrakotos ran into Brigadier Raza, the Pakistan ISI general who had held Yousaf’s job during Howard Hart’s tour. Unlike Yousaf, Raza was no fundamentalist. He liked Americans and they liked him, and Raza was not offended when Avrakotos showed him the flask he had concealed in his suit and offered to spike the general’s fruit juice.

  After accepting his fourth ration of Russian vodka, Raza volunteered a suggestion. Perhaps the CIA would have more luck with the ISI if Avrakotos would consider giving a contract for ammunition to a certain Pakistani arms manufacturer.

  Avrakotos had a half billion dollars to spend on arms that year, so he quickly gave $8 million of that to the Pakistanis to make .303 ammunition for the mujahideen. “It was chicken feed,” he said. “We paid a penny or two more per round, but we didn’t have to pay for transportation. I had Charlie come out and go through the factories with me, and we complimented the Pakistanis on their quality control.” In such a manner, apparently, was the barrier to the historic CIA escalation removed. Avrakotos does not assert any direct quid pro quo or claim that Yousaf’s troublesome positions were anything but the product of his wrong-minded professional judgment. But for whatever reasons, the Agency officials most knowledgeable about these negotiations do say that after the placement
of this relatively small arms contract, the Pakistani resistance disappeared.

  For Avrakotos, dealing with crises became routine, but at one point in 1985 he found himself having to cope with a screaming problem that seemed to belong to another century: mules. The challenge of secretly moving tons of weapons into position for the Afghans was always a logistical nightmare. The CIA had literally hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition constantly traveling by sea and air to Pakistan. Once in Pakistan, the lethal goods were transported by train and truck to the border. At that point, however, everything had to move the old-fashioned way: if not on a man’s back, then by mule or camel.

  The Russians therefore placed the highest priority on hunting down and slaughtering the mujahideen’s long mule caravans. So many of these beasts were wiped out by gunships that in 1985, an urgent call suddenly came into the task force headquarters warning of a crisis that had placed everything at risk. “Where the fuck do you go to buy donkeys?” Avrakotos remembers asking Vickers. Later an incredulous CIA director called Avrakotos: “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re buying mules?”

  In fact, Avrakotos soon had agents all over the world looking for the best deal on mules. When the Egyptians landed one of the first major contracts, the Pakistanis got insanely jealous and began complaining about health hazards because a number of mules had died shortly after arrival. They insisted on health certificates for the next batch, presuming this would force the Agency to buy locally.

  But Mohammed Abu Ghazala’s resourceful arms salesman General Yahia al Gamal wanted the next contract for 2,500 mules at $1,300 each, cash on delivery, so he engineered a great Egyptian put-down. “You have to realize that donkeys and mules are the lowest form of life in Egypt,” explains Avrakotos. “Even a camel has greater status. But the Egyptians provided each donkey and mule with an ID card and vaccination certificate.” As if that wasn’t enough to make fun of the Pakistanis, General Yahia outfitted every donkey with a piece of plastic sporting an Arabic name. “Yahia thought it was hysterical. He even gave them passports.”

  According to Avrakotos, the Pakistanis only reluctantly accepted this zanily credentialed herd, but they were sufficiently insulted that they refused to permit any more Egyptian mules into Pakistan. The experiences of the CIA buying and shipping mules to Afghanistan over the next few years became the subject of legendary stories in the halls of Langley. At one point, the Pakistanis became so ornery that they wouldn’t permit the CIA’s transporter to leave the mule manure in Pakistan. They made the planes carry the smelly droppings back to Europe.

  It would take months to establish the mule-supply lines. One early shipment of sorry creatures purchased in Brazil arrived in Pakistan with all the animals dead. Eventually the mujahideen were moving their supplies on the backs of Tennessee mules, and the halls of Langley were soon filled with rumors (later confirmed by the Agency’s spies) that the freedom fighters were copulating with these animals.

  In an attempt to paint a bright face on this curious practice, Avrakotos explained that in Greece and other Near Eastern cultures there is no scorn placed on buggery as long as the person in question assumes the right position. “The key question is whether you are the fucker or the fuckee,” he said. The mujahideen were taking the dominant male role here; thus, by their code of honor, Gust explained, there was no cause for shame. The Office of Logistics, however, was not as understanding as Avrakotos. They were quite appalled by the stories, particularly when they learned that the mujahideen had also eaten a number of their prized Tennessee mules.

  No sooner had Avrakotos’s operatives dealt with the mule crisis than he was faced with a new and truly threatening challenge. The White House had taken Andy Eiva and Gordon Humphrey’s accusations of corruption in the CIA pipeline to heart and had demanded a major policy review. Now that hundreds of millions of dollars were at play with an uncertain outcome on the battlefield, Avrakotos understood that it would be devastating if the conclusion were drawn that the Pakistanis were stealing the CIA blind.

  It isn’t easy to control graft in a massive covert arms operation like the Afghan war, and certainly some level of corruption is part of doing business in the Third World. Gust found it perfectly acceptable to dole out an $8 million contract now and then if it bought him cooperation. At the same time, he understood that crude corruption could bring them all down.

  For that reason, the task force had adopted all kinds of extraordinary measures to keep their allies honest. Here Art Alper’s boys made all the difference by placing tiny sensors in random shipments of weapons, which were then followed by satellite, to see where they ultimately went. Spies were recruited among the mujahideen themselves, as well as from the ranks of the Pakistani military. Finally, the Agency also ran a network of fifteen “third-country agents,” neither Pakistani nor Afghans but Europeans operating inside the war zone under the cover of being foreign journalists, doctors, or documentary filmmakers. They reported how the mujahideen were doing militarily, as well as whether the money, food, and arms shipments were getting through. Beyond that, satellites were now regularly being used to verify Afghan claims of downed planes and tanks.

  The task of responding to the White House fell on Vickers’s shoulders, and instead of looking at it as a defensive exercise aimed simply at keeping the bureaucrats from closing the operation down, he saw it as an opportunity to win their support. He quickly spelled out the full range of measures that had already been put in place to prevent the kind of corruption that Eiva and Humphrey alleged. He had no doubt that his detailed explanation would lay the corruption matter to rest. One of the questions from the White House asked for an explanation of the program’s overall objective; clearly the volume of weapons and support flowing into Pakistan now dwarfed the intent of the original Presidential Findings, so Vickers went on the offensive.

  Rather than pretend that Afghanistan was still a bleeding campaign, Vickers urged Avrakotos and Bert Dunn, the division chief, to come clean and to acknowledge that the Agency now believed that the policy should unapologetically be to win the war. Avrakotos and Dunn signed off, and Vickers reduced the answer to a simple and momentous line for the president to endorse, which he did in National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166. The object of the CIA’s campaign, he wrote, was now to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan “by all means available.”

  CHAPTER 25

  A Tennessee Mule Carrying Supplies to the Mujahideen

  “THE NOBLEST SMUGGLING OPERATION IN HISTORY”

  In the first week of 1985 Wilson hired a new administrative assistant, a fifty-five-year-old Texan named Charlie Schnabel. Technically, Schnabel was supposed to spend his days in the small office next to the congressman, watching over the staff and making sure legislation was being tended to and constituents’ problems were being solved. Strictly speaking, Schnabel, who had never been out of the country except for a brief visit to Mexico and who had never given a serious thought to the workings of U.S. foreign policy, was expected to stay in the capital and certainly not to have anything to do with a CIA war in Afghanistan. But years later, Wilson’s former assistant, Charles Simpson, would remark that the twin impact of his departure and Schnabel’s arrival removed the one restraining influence that had previously kept Wilson somewhat straight. It may be hard to believe that anyone could outdo Charlie Wilson when it came to the art of rule breaking, but Charlie Schnabel turned out to be every bit his boss’s equal and then some.

  Schnabel is a slow-moving man who wears cowboy boots, speaks with a southern drawl, and subscribes to Soldier of Fortune magazine. You see his type often on the dusty back roads of East Texas: driving a pickup truck, a rifle hanging on a rack in the back window, a hound by his side, heading off into the woods for a weekend of hunting. But he’s also reminiscent of that breed of cunning southern lawyers who open trials by saying, “I’m just a country boy.”

  Schnabel was nobody’s fool. For twenty-two years he had been secretary of state of the Texas Senate, resp
onsible for running the institution that Wilson’s famous drinking friend Larry King immortalized in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. This experience taught him just about everything there was to know about the way things work in American politics. Over the years he had broken in or done serious business with just about every major Democratic political figure ever to come out of Texas.

  He had watched over all the newcomers in their turn. On more than one occasion, the ever understanding secretary of state had carried Wilson home drunk in his arms. He’d gotten Wilson out of the jail and had sometimes even managed to get his DWI charges dropped or modified. So prepared was Schnabel for the inevitable foibles of his many wild Texas charges in those days that he had the wife of the county prosecutor and the wife of the county clerk on his payroll.

  All of which is to say that Schnabel had not kept his post in the Texas senate because he was a timid or cautious bureaucrat. As his wife, Nadine, commented one day when a visitor to their capital apartment noted how curious it was that her husband had a Soviet RPG grenade launcher, an AK-47 with a large supply of live ammunition, and other captured weapons from the Afghan war, “Oh, Charlie’s rule in life is: ‘Don’t pay attention to the rules.’”

  Schnabel was in fact something of a Texas legend—and in spite of his penchant for stretching the rules, the senators who had known him over the years never felt he had ever done anything bad. They figured that the Schnabels of the world are the ones who make the system work in spite of itself. There had been one embarrassing incident, a prosecution centering on a political favor he had done for a college sports program. He was indicted but plea-bargained his way out with a misdemeanor conviction. His old senatorial friends stood by him, and in a Wilsonesque statement, Schnabel remarked to the press, “I always like to do what I can for American sports.”