I want to share an excerpt from the book Charlie Wilson’s War. I like the excerpt because it demonstrates many things. It gives an inside look at how the CIA went about the business of bleeding the Russians in Afghanistan. It gives a particularly vivid picture of the brutality of the war, and of the mujahideen. But most of all, it is an opportunity to laugh at Richard Perle and Oliver North’s expense.
:::flip:::
Because I am using an excerpt here, I will provide a cast of characters.
Date: 1985
Gust Avrakatos– CIA officer responsible for arming the mujahideen. At one point he controlled 70% of the CIA’s operations budget.
Richard Perle– Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy
Oliver North– working out of the National Security Council
Bill Casey– Director of Central Intelligence
Sen. Gordon Humphrey– right-wing nut-job supporter of the mujahideen.
Walt Raymond– former CIA, working at the National Security Council
Andrew Eiva– An American adviser to Afghan “mujahedeen” groups and an official of the Federation for American-Afghan Action
Clair George– Director of Operations at the CIA, indicted for Iran-Contra, pardoned by Bush Sr.
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 Avrakatos’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 Akrakatos 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 Avrakatos 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.
Avrakatos 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 to defect to those fuckers all armed to the teeth?” Avrakatos 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. Avrakatos said to Walt Raymond, “You know, Walt, you’re just a fucking asshole, you’re irrelevent.”
Avrakatos 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 Avrakato’s insulting manner. The director complained to Clair George, who responded by forbidding Avrakatos 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 Avrakatos’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 Avrakatos 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 demanded of Perle.
In spite of the angry complaints, Claire George and everyone else on the seventh floor agreed with Avrakato’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 Avrakato’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 Avrakatos that there were no defectors.
Avrakatos describes what happened next with the kind of pleasure he feels only when achieving revenge. It had been impossible to locate two prisoners, much less two defectors. The CIA found itself in the preposterous position of having to pony up $50,000 to bribe the Afghans to deliver two live ones. “These two guys were basket cases,” says Avrakatos, “One had been fucked so many times he didn’t know what was going on. The other was an alcoholic. We brought them back to the United States and I said to Walt Raymond, “Do you want me to give them your telephone number? They’re yours now.”
Finally, Avrakatos turned the Soviets over to Ludmilla Thorne at the Freedom House. “One guy had hallucinations of the KGB murdering him. The other started fucking with boys.” At that point, Avrakatos says, he went to Perle to announce the good news that the Agency had twelve more willing to come over. “I turned the tables on them and demanded they take them all. And they didn’t want to. That was the new Vlasov’s army. In all I think we brought three or four more over. One guy ended up robbing a 7-Eleven in Vienna, Virginia.”
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