Wilson’s partner in influencing CIA policy toward Afghanistan was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers’ town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Only in 1960 had the CIA begun to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called “new Americans,” meaning ethnics, such as Chinese-, Japanese-, Hispanic-, and Greek-Americans. Up until then, it had followed the British model, taking only Ivy League sons of the Eastern establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred for the blue bloods, or “cake eaters,” as he called them, who looked down on him. After spook school at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Virginia, he was posted to Athens because he was fluent in Greek, and he remained there right through the CIA-sponsored reign of terror of the Greek colonels. 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 too uncouth to send to any European capital. He sat around Langley for a long period without any 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.”73
If Charlie Wilson was the moneybags and spark plug of this pair, Avrakotos was the street fighter who relished arming the tribesmen in Afghanistan with Kalashnikovs and Stinger surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles. In 1976, Wilson became a member of the House Appropriations Committee at a time when its chairman used to have a sign mounted over his desk: “Them that has the gold make the rules.” Wilson acted on this principle and advanced rapidly on this most powerful of all congressional committees. He was first appointed to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for Speaker Tip O’Neill and, in return, O’Neill assigned Wilson to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA’s budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon’s budget is “black”—that is, totally hidden from the public and all but a privileged few congressmen. As a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he could add virtually any amount of money to whatever black project he supported. In short, he had stumbled upon the world of “earmarks,” a euphemism that refers to the power of members of Congress to insert into appropriations bills funds for special projects that the executive branch has not asked for and that are often not in the nation’s best interest.
The practice of earmarking continues in widespread use at the present time. In 1998, the 2,000 earmarks slipped into all thirteen appropriations bills had an overall value of $10.6 billion. By 2004, the numbers had grown to 15,584 earmarks worth $32.7 billion. In a 2005 interview, Wilson, by then a lobbyist for Pakistan, said, “We would never have won the [anti-Soviet Afghan] war if it hadn’t been for earmarking because the [CIA] would have never spent the money the way we wanted it to.”74 So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee by supporting defense projects in their districts, they never objected to his private obsessions. In 1986, Wilson was finally able to join the House’s Intelligence Committee, which only added to his ability to earmark, doubling and tripling the secret funds he could direct to Afghan operations.
Like several influential Americans with right-wing political orientations, Wilson came under the influence of the charismatic head of Pakistan’s army, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq. In July 1977, Zia had seized power, declared martial law, and in 1979 hanged the president who had promoted him, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In retaliation, President Jimmy Carter cut off all U.S. aid to Pakistan. However, in 1980, Congressman Wilson visited Pakistan at the urging of a conservative lady friend from Houston and came under the spell of the general. He also learned for the first time about the heroic anticommunist mujahideen who were fighting against the Soviet Union across the border in Afghanistan, and became a convert to their cause. Using earmarked funds, he restored Zia’s aid money and added several million dollars to the CIA’s efforts to arm the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched. Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training, arms, and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisers on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters’ banker, providing hundreds of millions with no strings attached. Several governments, including Egypt, China, and Israel, secretly supplied arms.
However, Pakistan’s motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the United States. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in his own country, Afghanistan, and throughout the world, but he was not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Afghanistan’s jihadists.
Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard against an independence movement among the Pashtuns, the largest tribal group in Afghanistan and one of the largest in Pakistan, that, if successful, might cause the breakup of Pakistan. In other words, while he backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds, he was quite prepared to use them strategically. From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans from whatever source first pass through the hands of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI. The CIA was delighted to agree. In doing so, the agency helped lay the foundation not just for the decimation of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban but for Pakistan’s anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.
Congressman Wilson’s greatest preoccupation in cooperating with Zia was to supply the Afghans with weaponry that would be effective against the Soviets’ most feared weapon—the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable mujahideen as well as— in Vietnam War fashion—to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson actually favored giving the Afghans the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland. (It was later charged that he was on the take from the Zurich-based manufacturer of the weapon.)75 His CIA sidekick Avrakotos considered it too heavy for guerrillas to move easily but could not openly stand in Wilson’s way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the Afghans with the far lighter American-made Stinger shoulder-fired missile, which had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the relatively slow-moving Hinds, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev decided to cut his losses by getting out altogether. In Wilson’s post-Soviet-withdrawal tour of Afghanistan, mujahideen fighters triumphantly fired their Stingers just for his benefit. They also presented him with a souvenir—part of the launcher of the first Stinger to bring down a Hind gunship—which he still proudly displays today in his Washington office.
Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after a set of Geneva Accords ratified the formal terms of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the Soviet troops departed, the warlord Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the United States lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. The pro-Soviet government in Kabul did not fall immediately. Hekmatyar was never ultimately as good as the CIA imagined him to be. His only real accomplishment was to plunge the country into a murderous civil war. In 1994, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support to the newly created Taliban, who proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul, now practically a city of rubble. The next day they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled eight thousand female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the Taliban closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”76 His predictions would prove all too accurate.
Saudi Arabian motives differed from those of both the United States and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a movement of Wahhabi religious extremists, espoused Islamic radicalism elsewhere as a way to keep it under control in their kingdom. “Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth,” Steve Coll writes, “embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake.... The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by
