Free Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile Page A

in the CIA, Gust Avrakotos would always feel a bit like the poor street kid, nose against the glass, looking in at the party, knowing he would never be asked to attend such gatherings. And dinner at Archie’s was hardly the only thing that made Avrakotos feel like an outsider. “Almost everyone was a fucking blue blood in the CIA in 1961 when I came in,” he says. “They were just beginning to let Jews move up that year. But there still weren’t any blacks, Hispanics, or females—just some token Greeks and Polacks.”
    Some of Avrakotos’s friends actually schemed to wangle an invitation to Archie’s. They felt it could help just to be seen with this patrician. But Avrakotos hadn’t kowtowed to the plant manager’s sons in Aliquippa, and he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought about the Agency’s blue bloods. As far as he was concerned, they operated in an “old boys’ network” to keep his kind down and “the only reason half of them got anywhere is because they jerked off Henry Cabot Lodge’s grandson at some prep school.”
    Avrakotos had a chip on his shoulder; there was no question about that. But he did make friends with some of the Agency’s well-born officers, and he accepted the notion that some of the real aristocrats—originals like Roosevelt—were at least authentic. Nevertheless, as he rose through the ranks he came to loathe a certain type of blue blood with a rage that bordered on class hatred.
    The CIA hadn’t started opening its ranks to gifted “new” Americans like Avrakotos until 1960, and the move had had nothing to do with social justice. There were no quotas in those days. The fact was that these first-generation types, brought up on the streets of America and speaking the languages of the Old Country, had certain strengths that the CIA had come to feel it needed.
    A kind of panic about the Communist threat had been sweeping over Washington. In every city in the 1950s air raid sirens were regularly set off. Tens of millions of children got used to scurrying into bomb shelters or crawling under their desks as part of drills to prepare for a Soviet nuclear assault. In every corner of the globe the dark hand of the Communists was seen to be at work.
    The commission by which the CIA came to live during those years was spelled out in one telling paragraph from a blue-ribbon panel explaining to President Truman why it was essential for the United States to abandon its traditional sense of fair play in this all-out struggle for the world:
 
    It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination…there are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, it must use more clever, more sophisticated and more effective means than those used against us.
     
    It was almost as if Gust Avrakotos’s early life in Aliquippa had been designed to turn him into the kind of back-alley spy that Harry Truman’s advisers were urging the CIA to nurture and unleash on the Communists. The one thing no one needed to teach this man was how to “subvert and destroy” his enemies.
    Aliquippa is one of those American company towns always described as a melting pot. Immigrants from all over the world poured in here for jobs in the huge steelworks that the Jones and Laughlin company built. But the hard people of this steel town never lost any of their ethnic pride, or their ethnic hatreds. You can still see the workingman’s anger in Avrakotos when he drives up the hill to Plan Six, where the WASP managers used to live in their five-and six-bedroom stone houses. He calls them “cake eaters” and talks about them with the same contempt he uses for the Agency’s blue bloods.
    When Jones and Laughlin moved into Aliquippa on the rolling hills just north of Pittsburgh, it didn’t specify where the workers should live. But every ethnic group insisted on living, marrying, partying, and going to