Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  Casey reveled in running the CIA. When I served as station chief in Argentina in the early 1980s, I learned at one point that he wanted to come for a visit after the country’s disastrous war against the British over the Falkland Islands, a war that led to the toppling of Argentina’s military junta. The Argentines weren’t happy about the director’s planned visit, but I told them he was determined to come, and they reluctantly acquiesced—on the condition that he fly into a clandestine airport, keep a low profile, and use a false passport. I sent a cable back to Washington telling headquarters as much. In response, I was told by one of the director’s aides, “Casey is going to fly in on a C-130 with his wife, doctor, and a team of advisers, as well as his dog and kids. He’s not flying into a half-assed airport. He’s flying into the main airport in Buenos Aires, and he wants a band playing”—an exaggeration for effect, I’m sure.

  I went back to the Argentines and told them, in less vivid language, of Casey’s plans, and they flatly turned him down. They were fearful of the potential damaging publicity that might jeopardize their position in the delicate transfer of power to civilian rule. Before I could get a cable back to Washington telling the director of central intelligence (DCI) the Argentines’ response, the trip was canceled. Another Latin American country chief of station had beaten us to the punch with a similar rejection of Casey’s proposed visit. I was relieved on several levels.

  Around the same time, I attended a CIA conference with Casey in Panama. It was a logistical nightmare for CIA officials, who had to coordinate not only the director’s visit but also the visits of other Agency officials from around the hemisphere. I was impressed by their organization, but they were thrown off course when Casey asked if everyone could stay an extra night for a breakfast meeting the next morning. He added, “We will keep it simple. Coffee and donuts.” They hustled about to make the necessary travel arrangements, but procuring U.S.-style donuts was impossible in Panama in those days. Every five minutes during the breakfast, Casey would bellow in obvious annoyance, “Where are the donuts?” Of course, they never appeared, and in a thank-you cable to the chiefs following the conference, Casey signed off with “NEXT TIME, YOU WILL GET DONUTS.”

  I was spared having to host Casey in any of my foreign postings. He never ended up coming to visit me, and I could not help but think that the Argentine officials had had a point in their refusal to meet Casey’s demands: the director of the CIA should come into a country with a very low profile and without an entourage. Before Casey, directors did not travel often, for security reasons. Today, the director travels with the fanfare of most cabinet-level dignitaries, as Casey had demanded. I have always been opposed to this type of director travel. But I should give Casey his due: in all his grandiosity, he reenergized the Agency after the Carter doldrums, and he was a covert operator at heart, going all the way back to his OSS days. He also had excellent access to President Reagan while at the same time genuinely valuing the role of the Agency. He didn’t tamper with its culture, which involved calling things as we saw them and not as the president might have wanted them to be.

  That said, I had reservations about Casey. Perhaps I caught him too late in his tenure as DCI, when he might have been beyond his prime. It certainly made me uncomfortable that he, an avowed archconservative, wasn’t averse to using the CIA to advance a political agenda—for example, supporting the Contras in Central America and, by extension, the Iran-Contra affair.

  Still, my personal relationship with Casey was friendly if formal. I wasn’t in awe of him. Rather, I was guarded, both because he could be hard to read and, as I’ve said, difficult to understand.

  There’s one moment when I understood his words—but failed to understand the wisdom in them. It was unwise of me. I was meeting with him about Afghanistan, and I finished by saying I thought I needed a staff of about six dozen for the Afghan Task Force. He looked at me quizzically.

  “Jack, are you sure this is right? Are you sure you’ve got enough?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  He was right to question my manpower estimate. In retrospect, I should have told him flat out that I needed more than one hundred people. (We eventually went to well over 120.) But this was the biggest responsibility I had been given at the Agency up to that point, and I was trying to calibrate how much staff I could suck out of the far reaches of the CIA structure while keeping everybody supportive of what we were doing.

  Once the Afghan Task Force got rolling, there was no micromanaging from Casey. He didn’t get involved, and neither did anybody else on the seventh floor. I felt they all understood that this was the only way it would work. You had to trust the person in charge, and if things weren’t working, you needed to remove that person immediately. There’s no way I could have briefed Casey or anyone else often enough about the fast-moving situation and still have done my job.

  With authorization to use “any means necessary” to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Reagan administration had to decide if this would include the U.S.-made Stinger, a lethal shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile with an infrared seeker that can lock onto the heat emitted by an aircraft’s engine at a range of up to fifteen thousand feet. Despite all the pain the mujahideen had inflicted on the Soviets, the Soviets had managed to stop our supply lines through the mountain passes. All the matériel we had been shipping through for years had made the war so deadly for Moscow that the Politburo had responded by deploying fierce Mi-24D Hind helicopter gunships and the USSR’s special forces, Spetsnaz, to close the mountain passes. Now our guns weren’t flowing. Convoys of pickup trucks and mules laden with guns and crates of ammunition were no match for the Hinds, which flew in low and rained down barrages of missile and machine-gun fire. And the mujahideen lacked an effective antiaircraft weapon that could turn them back or shoot them down.

  What if we armed the mujahideen with Stingers and trained them to line up the gunships in their sights and fire? There was some concern about the Stinger’s effectiveness. In fact, the manufacturer, General Dynamics, estimated only a 25 percent success rate. The Soviet analysts, who historically tended to overrate the Russian capability, also argued that the Stinger could be jammed by high-tech Russian equipment, but we tested the Russian jammer and established that it was totally ineffective against the Stinger. Still, a much bigger strategic issue had to be resolved before the Stingers would find their way to eastern Afghanistan. My predecessor, Gust Avrakotos, had always adhered to classic CIA doctrine, which called for arming insurgents with the same weapons as the army they were fighting, so that the insurgents would already be trained to use any arms they captured from the other side. He also shared the belief, expressed most forcefully in this case by John McMahon, the CIA’s former deputy director—he retired just as I assumed my position—that introducing weapons that were easily traceable to the United States, as the Stinger was, could provoke the Soviets and lead to a larger conflict. (Interestingly, McMahon was a lightning rod for conservative critics, who thought he personified an overly cautious CIA.) The two men had a point, but I put the higher priority on pushing the Russians out of Afghanistan. I was less concerned about the likelihood of an expansion of the conflict, which seemed very remote to me. There were limits, but we were in a covert war that could be recalibrated if need be. A similar debate raged within the CIA’s analytic ranks, with Soviet specialists—who tended to see the Soviets as larger-than-life—arguing that the Russians were winning. Even our officers in the region seemed to support this view, based on the great difficulty they were having moving arms and supplies into Afghanistan. Analysts from the Near East Division countered that the Soviets were vulnerable and that the mujahideen were doing better than most people thought, even with their fire-and-run approach—that is, firing from a long distance.

  Not long after my meeting with Casey, I represented the Agency at a meeting in the White House Situation Room, located in the basement of the West Wing, where we debated the Stinger issue one final time. A
dozen of us from across the executive branch settled into the thick leather armchairs and listened to a Pentagon staffer explain this missile’s particular lethality. A brief testing range video shown at the meeting resolved any lingering doubts I had when the missile literally made a right-hand turn in midair and scored a direct hit on the test aircraft. “Okay. It’s clear we need to use it,” I said to those around the table. Everyone else had the same reaction. Our consensus was passed to the president. Almost immediately, Reagan signed an order authorizing the Stinger’s use in the covert war.

  Up until then we had been playing a covert chess game with the Russians. They invaded, and we sent some weapons in. They brought in more troops, and we countered with more sophisticated weapons. They deployed the Hind helicopter gunships and the Spetsnaz special forces, and now it was our move. We hoped the Stinger would open up the mountain passes. Time would tell.

  Several days later, I went over to the Pentagon to meet with an army three-star general to find out when the Department of Defense could make the delivery.

  “The White House has approved it, and we need the Stingers as soon as possible,” I said.

  “Jack, I understand,” the lieutenant general said, “but this is the latest system, it’s coming off the assembly line, and it’s going to the front-line troops.”

  “General,” I said, “we’ve got the only fighting war in town, I really have to have them.”

  “I understand your position,” he said. “I just can’t do it. It was nice meeting you. Godspeed.”

  He was gracious and, frankly, he took the position I would have taken had I been in his shoes. He wanted to give the Stinger to U.S. troops first.

  I went back and brought the bad news to the White House. “The DOD refuses to part with the Stingers,” I said.

  My contact on the National Security Council staff promised to call me back, which he did a short time later. A call had been made to the lieutenant general, and a second meeting was set up for the next day. By then, he had a better understanding of who was behind my request. Now it was practically a pro forma discussion.

  “How many do you need?” he asked.

  When I told him, he barely concealed his displeasure. “You’re taking nearly my entire inventory,” he said.

  “That’s what’s needed.”

  Compared to my meetings with the lieutenant general, my first meeting with Charlie Wilson went off without a hitch—thanks to Gust Avrakotos. Among the many problems with the movie Charlie Wilson’s War is its depiction of my predecessor, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. There is no arguing that Avrakotos, the son of Greek immigrants from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, could be difficult to deal with at times—even Wilson told me that Avrakotos was “the most difficult man [he’d] ever met”—but he was nowhere near the maverick the movie made him out to be. When Avrakotos told Wilson that I was replacing him, he said I was a “good guy.” That seemed to be enough of a recommendation. Wilson was important to the program, the key congressman on Capitol Hill, someone deeply committed and paying careful enough attention to Afghanistan. He alone was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of needed funding. When Avrakotos exited the program, he left quietly. He did not try to pull an end run around me. And he unplugged his phone with Charlie Wilson; he didn’t take any more calls from him. He was told not to deal with Wilson again, and he didn’t. That’s a disciplined officer, not a rogue on the loose, as depicted in the movie.

  The task force’s expanded offices were on the fourth floor, by a set of red elevators, in the same space where Avrakotos had had his. We had a suite of vaulted cubicles and open desks, not executive offices with doors. There was a large, formal wooden desk in my office when I arrived, but I had it immediately replaced with an oval conference table as a sign that we were going to do this more collegially by opening up the discussion. It took months, given the almost military chain of command that existed inside the Agency, before I was able to bring people around to where they could challenge my views without hesitation. I wanted to encourage people to come in and say, “You’ve got it wrong and this is what you ought to do.” I recognized that I had a lot of learning to do, and I had to rely heavily on good people to fill in the gaps in my understanding of weaponry and the battlefield. I spent weeks adding staff, arranging space, building capability, developing strategy.

  I was also responsible for overseeing the field operations conducted by the new chief in Islamabad, Milt Bearden. Bearden could have been a stand-up comic; he was that funny. He was also a very talented operations officer, having recently led a covert operation in which he rescued five hundred Ethiopian Jews from the Sudanese desert. For the Afghanistan program, he and his officers were managing the mujahideen’s needs through Pakistani intelligence. I had to manage relations with Congress, as well, and brief the intelligence committees, the other agencies, and the White House—all while keeping Charlie Wilson in the loop. The more we kept everyone informed, the less they got in our hair.

  Since the task force resided within the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations, the operations officers detailed to me tended to be first-rate, thanks in part to my close relationship to Tom Twetten. The analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) were sometimes a problem, however. Their uneven quality complicated my life, but analytic support from the DI was critically important. Papers and briefing books had to be written for Congress, the White House, and the policy people on the CIA’s seventh floor. Cables were constantly going back and forth between headquarters and the field.

  Michael Barry, a Middle East analyst who led the analytical charge on mujahideen operations, got it right. He understood just how much damage the mujahideen were inflicting on the Russians and what they were capable of if armed with the latest weapons. The analysts from the DI’s Office of Soviet Analysis were less optimistic, tending to see the Soviet army as invincible. SOVA, as that office was known, apparently reserved its top people for other tasks, such as analyzing Soviet missile silos, wheat harvests, and industrial production. I couldn’t help thinking, “Okay, we’re kicking the hell out of them and you don’t want to be a key part of it?” I, therefore, increasingly relied on analysts from the DI’s Office of Analysis for Near East and South Asian Studies. My successor on the task force, Frank Anderson, encountered the same analytical rifts. The SOVA analysts “missed the indicators that the Russians were being defeated,” Anderson said. “It was very shortly after I joined the task force that I was persuaded that the Russians were losing badly … It is true that the analytical community, all of academia, and most of the ‘experts’ were just unable to get their heads around the idea that the Red Army could be defeated.”3 But we felt strongly that our best analysts on the task force were right. Our Soviet military analyst Bob Williams was particularly strong. He once helped us parse an intercepted Soviet field communication, called a morning report, that showed a shocking number of Soviet troops were unable to fight because of illness. Williams, a retired infantry officer and Russia specialist with combat experience in Vietnam and Korea, often disagreed with the SOVA analysts because he relied on his own tactical information. He understood from personal experience what the Russian troops were actually going through on the ground. “You needed to know what it was like to hold back forces in a gully…” he said. “It made a big difference to have had personal combat experience to understand what the Soviet soldier was experiencing. Something that the SOVA analysts seemingly did not have.”4

  I didn’t feel overwhelmed running the program, but I probably should have. There weren’t many people in the Agency who knew much about weaponry other than specialists in the Special Activities Division, the paramilitary unit in the Directorate of Operations. Avrakotos was fortunate enough to have found Michael Vickers, a very smart former Green Beret who had been detailed to the Agency, and who now serves in the Obama administration as under secretary of defense for intelligence. In addition to Williams, we were fortunate to have an A-plus weapo
ns expert, a former Marine captain named Clifton Dempsey.5 Dempsey looked more like a young professor than a five-year veteran of the Marines. An expert in mortar fire, shortly after my arrival on the Afghan account, he started modeling the next year’s weapons requirements for a mujahideen army of 120,000 fighters. Before I could go out later in August 1986 and negotiate with the Egyptian and Chinese suppliers, Dempsey and I, along with Tim Burton, our highly skilled logistics chief, needed to figure out what kind of weapons the mujahideen would require beyond the Stingers, how much ammunition they were likely to expend, and what other kinds of matériel they would need to fight through the winter.

  Vickers had worked up a smart, detailed formula for determining the military supplies necessary for the mujahideen, one based on an old World War II formula. Burton took Vickers’s calculations and did his best to fit them into the current political reality. At this time, we had already shifted away from the .303 Lee-Enfield rifles to the greater firepower of the AK-47, the Russian-designed assault rifle. (At that point, the formal decision to deploy the lethal Stinger had not yet been made.)

  Dempsey and others on the task force worked hard to find an effective antiaircraft missile that would neutralize the devastating helicopter attacks. The British-designed Blowpipe had been tested and rejected because it was too complicated for the mujahideen to handle. The Brits also wanted to sell us the Javelin, an upgraded version of the Blowpipe, but for the same reason we said no. Dempsey recalls that we needed a “fire and forget” missile equipped with an internal guidance system that could lock on to an aircraft, and that nothing else would be viable. The SA-7 antiaircraft missile was ubiquitous worldwide, and it would have been easy to flood the field with it, but our research showed that it was not very effective and had been a failure in trying to knock down U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War. The Swedish had the RB-70, which was exceptionally effective, but we doubted we would get Swedish approval to deploy it in combat. So in the end we turned to the lethal Stinger.