Free Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile

slipped into his colorful midlife crisis—a despairing patriot, convinced that his country was headed toward disaster but no longer certain that he would have a role in its salvation. For a moment, when the courage of the Afghans temporarily inspired him, he shook off his stupor long enough to double the CIA’s Afghan budget. But it was just for a moment, and then he disappeared back into what he called “the longest midlife crisis in history.”
    In retrospect, the Somoza fiasco was a turning point for Wilson, and only later would he realize its positive impact. He had discovered that, even with a wildly unpopular cause, he had the power to intimidate the most high-level bureaucrats. And most important for what he would later do in Afghanistan, he had crossed over a line and, in effect, experimented with running his own foreign operation with a renegade operative who wasn’t afraid to break the rules.

CHAPTER 3
     

    Gust Avrakotos
     
     

A ROGUE ELEPHANT IN
THE AGENCY WOODS
     
    G ust Avrakotos hadn’t gone to Harvard. He didn’t have important relatives or fancy summer vacations. He hadn’t inherited tennis lessons, money, or classic good looks. He was the son of Greek immigrants from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and the CIA simply didn’t go to places like that to recruit its elite case officers. Aliquippa was a steel-worker’s town, and for most of its early years, the Agency seemed to think its Clandestine Services should be filled with men of breeding.
    That’s how the British had always picked their spies, and the founders of the CIA had taken the British as their model. British spies belonged to clubs. They dressed like gentlemen. Their top officers had gone to boarding schools, then cemented their friendships as young men at Oxford and Cambridge. This was a class that had been at the spy game for centuries; they had learned that a man’s family and schools stood for something.
    That, at least, was the legend about the British. So it was natural, when Congress created the CIA in 1947, that the American leadership would look to the same class for its service. And to a remarkable extent, the CIA did manage to fill its ranks with sons of the establishment.
    Take Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie. Brilliant at Groton and Harvard, a classical scholar with six languages and a robust appetite for healthy adventure, he was one of the first generation of Agency operatives. On the surface, he led a rather dull existence as a midlevel State Department officer. But “everyone” knew that Archie worked for the CIA, and there were few who didn’t welcome an invitation to one of his elegant Georgetown evenings.
    There was always a sense at the Roosevelts’ of being at the center of things both past and present. As Archie’s distant cousin the columnist Stewart Alsop used to joke at such gatherings, “A man should have furniture, he shouldn’t have to buy it.” In Archie’s house there were ancestral portraits on the wall and that patrician glow that comes from the mix of old wood, Oriental rugs, gleaming silver, and the kindly faces of faithful retainers.
    Archie presided effortlessly over these gatherings—actually thinking of them as “informal” because the dress called for dark suits instead of dinner jackets. There was little general conversation at the table. The ritual called for each man to speak first to the woman on his right and then, at an appropriate moment, to turn and converse with the dinner partner on his left. It was not until after the women left the men to their cigars and brandy that the talk would turn to matters of state.
    Then Archie might talk about the latest rebellion of the Kurds or what his friend the Shah of Iran was up to. But even here it was all terribly discreet. The Agency would never have to worry about a Roosevelt being polygraphed—it was part of the noblesse oblige of the man to know intuitively how to keep a secret.
    No matter how long he served or how far he rose