Posted on 16-6-2003
Largest
Covert Operation In CIA History
By Chalmers Johnson, The History News Network, 09 June 2003
The US's Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished
record of screwing up every "secret" armed intervention
it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government
in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate
Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of
Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the "secret war"
in Laos, aid to the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967,
the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan's
Iran-contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance
in which the agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing
to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this
primarily because its budget and operations have always been
secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its constitutional
functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale
of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.
According to the author of the newly released Charlie
Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming
between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan moujahedeen ("freedom
fighters"). The agency flooded Afghanistan with an astonishing
array of extremely dangerous weapons and "unapologetically
mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors
in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern
superpower," in this case, the USSR.
The author of this glowing account, George Crile, is
a veteran producer for the CBS television news show "60
Minutes" and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for
the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S. clandestine involvement
in Afghanistan was "the largest and most successful CIA
operation in history" and "the one morally unambiguous
crusade of our time." He adds that "there was nothing
so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire."
Crile's sole measure of success is the number of Soviet soldiers
killed (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed
to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period from
1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.
However, he never mentions that the "tens of thousands
of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are
some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen
at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer
Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked
airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Today, the world awaits what is almost certain to happen soon
at some airport -- a terrorist firing a U.S. Stinger low-level
surface-to-air missile (manufactured at one time by General
Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga) into an American jumbo jet. The
CIA supplied thousands of them to the moujahedeen and trained
them to be experts in their use. If the CIA's activities in
Afghanistan are a "success story," then Enron should
be considered a model of corporate behavior.
Nonetheless, Crile's account is important, if appalling,
precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman
and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign
policy. From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the 2nd
District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. His
constituency was in the heart of the East Texas Bible Belt and
was the long-held fiefdom of his fellow Democrat, Martin Dies,
the first chairman of the House Un-American Affairs Committee.
Wilson is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and "handsome, with one
of those classic outdoor faces that tobacco companies bet millions
on." He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth
from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any
other cadet in Annapolis history.
After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in
Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as "Good Time
Charlie," "the biggest playboy in Congress."
He hired only good-looking women for his staff and escorted
"a parade of beauty queens to White House parties."
Even Crile, who featured Wilson many times on "60 Minutes"
and obviously admires him, describes him as "a seemingly
corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA
was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble
if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."
Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the moujahedeen
was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants
from the steel workers' town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960
did the CIA begin to recruit officers for the Directorate of
Operations from among what it called "new Americans,"
meaning such ethnic groups as Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and
Greek Americans. Until then, it had followed its British model
and taken only Ivy League sons of the Eastern Establishment.
Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred
of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters," as he called
them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school"
at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to
Athens, where, as a Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.
During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental
in destroying Greek freedom and helping to turn the country
into probably the single most anti-American democracy on Earth
today. Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On
April 21, 1967, he [Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that
can make a career. A military junta seized power in Athens that
day and suspended democratic and constitutional government."
Avrakotos became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels.
After the fall of the colonels' brutally fascist regime, the
17 November terrorist organization assassinated the CIA's Athens
station chief, Richard Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust
came to be vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister
force responsible for most of the country's many ills."
He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent
assignment -- he tried for Helsinki -- because the head of the
European Division regarded him as simply too uncouth to send
to any of its capitals. He sat around Langley for several years
without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of
the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have
nothing to do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs?
We're killing Russians."
Wilson was the moneybags and sparkplug of this pair;
Avrakotos was a street fighter who relished giving Kalashnikovs
and Stingers to the tribesmen in Afghanistan. Wilson was the
more complex of the two, and Crile argues that his "Good
Time Charlie" image was actually a cover for a Barry Goldwater
kind of hyper-patriotism. But Wilson was also a liberal on the
proposed Equal Rights Amendment and a close friend of the late
Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), and his sister Sharon
became chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood.
As a boy, Wilson was fascinated by World War II and developed
an almost childlike belief that he possessed a "special
destiny" to "kill bad guys" and help underdogs
prevail over their enemies. When he entered Congress, just at
the time of the Yom Kippur War, he became a passionate supporter
of Israel. After he traveled to Israel, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee began to steer large amounts of money
from all over the country to him and to cultivate him as "one
of Israel's most important Congressional champions: a non-Jew
with no Jewish constituents." Jewish members of Congress
also rallied to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations
Committee in order to guarantee Israel's annual $3-billion subsidy.
His own Texas delegation opposed his appointment.
Wilson was not discriminating in his largess. He also
became a supporter of Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza, the
West Point graduate and dictator of Nicaragua who in 1979 was
swept away by popular fury. Before that happened, President
Carter tried to cut the $3.1-million annual U.S. aid package
to Nicaragua, but Wilson, declaring Somoza to be "America's
oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America," opposed
the president and prevailed.
During Wilson's long tenure on the House Appropriations Committee,
one of its subcommittee chairmen, Clarence D. "Doc"
Long, used to have a sign mounted over his desk: "Them
that has the gold makes the rules." Wilson advanced rapidly
on this most powerful of congressional committees. He was first
appointed to the foreign operations subcommittee, which doles
out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for then-Speaker Thomas
P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.). The chairman of the
Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time, Rep. John Murtha
(D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation
in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik offered members
of Congress large cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson on the Ethics
Committee to save Murtha, which he did. In return, O'Neill assigned
Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee and made him
a life member of the governing board of the John F. Kennedy
Performing Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his young
dates. Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA's budget and
40 percent of the Pentagon's budget is "black," hidden
from the public and even from Congress. As a member of the defense
subcommittee, he could arrange to have virtually any amount
of money added to whatever black project he supported. So long
as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee,
such as supporting defense projects in their districts, they
would never object to his private obsessions.
About this time, Wilson came under the influence of a
remarkable, rabidly conservative Houston woman in her mid-40s,
Joanne Herring. They later fell in love, although they never
married. She had a reputation among the rich of the River Oaks
section of Houston as a collector of powerful men, a social
lioness and hostess to her fellow members of the John Birch
Society. She counted among her friends Ferdinand and Imelda
Marcos, dictator and first lady of the Philippines, and Yaqub
Khan, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, D.C., who got Herring
named as Pakistan's honorary consul for Houston.
In July 1977, the head of Pakistan's army, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq,
seized power and declared martial law, and in 1979, he hanged
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president who had promoted him. In
retaliation, Carter cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan. In 1980, Herring
went to Islamabad and was so entranced by Zia and his support
for the Afghan freedom fighters that on her return to the United
States, she encouraged Wilson to go to Pakistan. There he met
Zia, learned about the Afghan moujahedeen and became a convert
to the cause. Once Reagan replaced Carter, Wilson was able to
restore Zia's aid money and added several millions to the CIA's
funds for secretly arming the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar
of which the Saudi government secretly matched.
Although Wilson romanticized the mountain warriors of
Afghanistan, the struggle was never as uneven as it seemed.
Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training and
arms and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisors
on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters'
banker, providing hundred of millions with no strings attached.
Several governments, including those of Egypt, China and Israel,
secretly supplied arms. And the insurgency enjoyed the backing
of the United States through the CIA.
Wilson's and the CIA's greatest preoccupation was supplying
the Afghans with something effective against the Soviets' most
feared weapon, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army
used it to slaughter innumerable moujahedeen as well as to shoot
up Afghan villages. Wilson favored the Oerlikon antiaircraft
gun made in Switzerland (it was later charged that he was on
the take from the Zurich-based arms manufacturer). Avrakotos
opposed it because it was too heavy for guerrillas to move easily,
but he could not openly stand in Wilson's way. After months
of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their
objections to supplying the American Stinger, President Reagan
signed off on it, and the "silver bullet" was on its
way. The Stinger had never before been used in combat. It proved
to be murderous against the Hinds, and Soviet President Mikhail
S. Gorbachev decided to cut his losses and get out altogether.
In Wilson's postwar tour of Afghanistan, moujahedeen fighters
surrounded him and triumphantly fired their missiles for his
benefit. They also gave him as a souvenir the stock from the
first Stinger to shoot down a Hind gunship.
The CIA "bluebloods" fired Avrakotos in the
summer of 1986, and he retired to Rome. Wilson became chairman
of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, at which time he wrote
to his CIA friends, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the
hen house. Do whatever you like." After retiring from Congress
in 1996, he became a lobbyist for Pakistan under a contract
that paid him $30,000 a month. Meanwhile, the United States
lost interest in Afghanistan, which descended into a civil war
that the Taliban ultimately won. In the autumn of 2001, the
United States returned in force after Al Qaeda retaliated against
its former weapon supplier by attacking New York and Washington.
The president of the United States went around asking, "Why
do they hate us?"
Crile knows a lot about these matters and presents them
in a dramatic manner. There are, however, one or two items that
he appears unaware of or is suppressing. For the CIA legally
to carry out a covert action, the president must authorize a
document called a finding. Crile repeatedly says that Carter
signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing
to the moujahedeen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
on Dec. 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed
the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion,
and he did so on the advice of his national security advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion.
Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview
with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director Robert M. Gates
says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie
Wilson to learn that his heroic moujahedeen were manipulated
by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the
USSR its own Vietnam. The moujahedeen did the job, but as subsequent
events have made clear, they may not be grateful to the United
States.
Mr. Johnson is the author of Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy and the End of the Republic, to be published in January
by Metropolitan Books
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