A ROGUE ELEPHANT IN THE AGENCY WOODS
Gust 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 steelworker'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 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 firstgeneration 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 church with its own. As recently as 1980, fourteen thousand steel workers earned their living there.
Today it's as if the bomb had struck. There's nothing but great hulking iron forms and rusting steel. About the only sign of life are a few teams of workers dismantling one of the abandoned steel plants to sell as scrap to the Japanese. But Avrakotos remembers Aliquippa the way it was when he was growing up and delegations of Japanese used to come in buses to study this marvel of industrial America. They brought movie cameras and notebooks to record everything about the workings of the largest integrated steel mill in the world. No one felt anything but pride as the plant operated at full tilt twenty-four hours a day, spewing out great clouds of pink and black smoke that would engulf the ethnic neighborhoods of Aliquippa.
"That's Plan Seven, where the Dagos lived," Avrakotos says, like a tour guide passing through the ruins of some past civilization. "Plan Twelve was all Irish. The Polacks lived in Plan Five. Plan Eleven is where the niggers were." For all his years at the CIA, Avrakotos has never stopped using the brutal street talk of his youth. He's as proud of it as he is of the scars that lace his body from teenage knife fights. "Each of the plans had a gang, and they fought like cats and dogs," he explains. "Each plan fought among itself, but when the niggers came we all banded together. You had to be very fucking practical. … The guys who made it out of Aliquippa had one thing in common: you can't fuck around all day trying to make up your mind. The niggers will overrun you."
This kind of talk is jarring, but it was the language of Aliquippa—and it shaped Avrakotos's brutal instinct for the jugular. There are legends in Aliquippa about the ones who escaped and made good: Henry Mancini, who got his start at the musical and political Italian clubs; Mike Ditka, Avrakotos's high school friend from Plan Seven, the former Chicago Bears tight end whose name is synonymous with toughness; Tony Dorsett of the Cowboys. Becoming a sports hero was one way out.
The mafia was another. There were three thousand Sicilians in Aliquippa. Most of Avrakotos's friends were Sicilians, and he knew the Alamena family as "men of honor." Gust's father, Oscar Avrakotos, distributed Rolling Rock beer for them, and they always treated the Avrakotoses with respect. But the Sicilian mafia wasn't an option for a Greek-American. And anyway Oscar Avrakotos had high hopes for his son.
Like many other immigrants, Oscar's American experience had begun at Ellis Island, as an eight-year-old boy from the Greek Island of Lemnos. He had come over with his brother in 1894 and for three decades toiled in the sweatshops of New England and the "Iron House" of Aliquippa. But then Oscar broke away from the pack with a vision of making a fortune selling his own soda pop.
With his hard-earned savings he bought a bottling assembly line from the Smile and Cheer-up Company of St. Louis. He named his new company after the Greek sun god, Apollo. Apollo was his good-luck god, and he figured the name would win customers from the Greek Orthodox church, not to mention workers in the mills.
As the owner of the Apollo Soda Water Company, Oscar was a man of means, at least by the standards of Lemnos. He was close to fifty when he went back to the old country and took a bride, Zafira Konstantaras, twenty-one years younger and with a big dowry. Back in Aliquippa three years later, Gust Avrakotos was born into a household that would know nothing but unrelenting hard work. His earliest memories are of his father moving about in the kitchen at 4:30 A.M., eating his breakfast of pork chops and potatoes and polishing off several beers and a couple of shots, if it was cold, before walking downstairs to begin the day's labor.
By five A.M. he would have the bottling machine cranked up and moving. On one side was Louisa, a large black woman, who placed the dirty bottles on the beginning of the thirty-five-foot line. Miraculously, the chain apparatus would turn the bottles upside down as soap and water poured in and out, to prepare them for an infusion of Oscar's secret cherry and cola formulas. There were always incidents. The bottles would sometimes explode from the pressure like hand grenades, sending glass shrapnel all over the room. One such piece sliced into Gust's face and cost him a full day's work.
At first it was a thrill for the boy to be included. But by sixteen, he had accumulated forty quarters of Social Security and the novelty had worn off. This was the kind of punishing physical labor that quickly makes a man out of a boy.
It was at the Apollo Soda Water Company that Avrakotos developed his frightening convictions about revenge. His first mentor had been Wasil Rosinko, a Ukrainian who worked at the end of the bottle line, heaving cases into the trucks. Rosinko had found his wife in bed with another man and had murdered them both. After Rosinko spent fifteen years in prison, Oscar gave him his job back, and Wasil took it upon himself to help educate Oscar's boy. He warned young Gust never to trust a Ukrainian woman and taught him that revenge is sweet.
But Avrakotos's most powerful memory was of his mother at the kitchen table demanding to know what Oscar intended to do about an insult: "You're not going to let this pass, are you? You are going to get even, aren't you?"
In the Avrakotos household, revenge was a matter of family honor. As a boy of twelve, Gust would go with his father to the bars to collect unpaid bills. He learned not to show fear when Oscar would face down bartenders and begin hurling bottles, threatening to take the bar apart if the money due him was not paid immediately. The Avrakotos family did not tolerate freeloaders.
There was no TV in the house, and on Saturday nights Gust would be allowed to sit at the table in the kitchen to listen to his father and uncles talk politics and trade family stories. The men were particularly proud of the family name in spite of its ambiguous meaning in Greek: "without pants" or "those without pants." Whenever she became frustrated with Oscar, Zafira would suggest that some ancestor had been caught in a compromising sexual relationship.
The Avrakotos men insisted that the name referred back to men who functioned as a kind of praetorian guard in ancient times. These Avrakotoses were a fierce warrior class, so the family legend went, who would throw off all their clothes when going into battle and charge the enemy. The sight of screaming, naked warriors was enough to cause most opponents to break and run.
Whether or not the legend is true, these stories shaped the young boy's sense of his identity and destiny. And they help explain why his father made such extreme demands on his son. He forced Gust to take private lessons in Greek and Latin. "Each new language gives you a new set of eyes and ears, a new window on the world," he repeatedly told his complaining child. Even free time on Sunday was given over to torturous work at the Greek Orthodox Church, where, amid chanting priests and incense, Gust would spend four hours serving as an altar boy. But the main thing Oscar and Zafira did for their son was to fill him with the sense that he must get out of the steel town. And the path of liberation that Oscar chose gleamed like a vision directly across the street from their home.
Like Andrew Carnegie, the founders of Aliquippa had built a library. It was not a simple, utilitarian building but a shining citadel of limestone and bronze in the form of a Greek temple. On the cornices in great letters were carved the words HISTORY, SCIENCE, FICTION, PHILOSOPHY, BIOLOGY, and ASTRONOMY. Every evening after dinner, after hours of humping beer kegs and a full day at school, Gust Avrakotos would walk the two hundred feet across Franklin Avenue, pass through the great bronze doors of the Benjamin Franklin Jones Memorial Library, and take the seat at a mahogany desk reserved for him. There he would switch on the individual bronze reading lamp with its Tiffany-style glass shade and begin the serious work of the day. It was what his father expected and demanded.
The library was like a window into the world of the possible beyond the bars, the union halls, and a life of servitude in the Iron House. In the winter, it might be snowing when he entered the library, but the white accumulation would have already turned black with soot by the time he finished his evening studies. Inside the classics were all there; fine oil paintings hung on the wall; the beamed ceilings were high, the windows huge. At the doorway towered a bronze statue of the founder, Benjamin Franklin Jones, passing on his unspoken message to all who entered that here in this temple of learning was a way out for those willing to apply themselves.
Each night all the ethnic achievers of Aliquippa would be there—studying, wandering through the stacks, improving their minds. And none of the deserving working-class kids of Aliquippa worked so hard or did so well as Gust Lascaris Avrakotos, who graduated as valedictorian of Aliquippa High. Then followed two years working his way through Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, until disaster struck and Oscar had to close down his beloved Apollo Soda Water Company. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had moved into Aliquippa, cutting prices. According to the family's Old World code, Gust had to leave school to pay off his father's debts.
For the first time, Gust went to work in the mill. Then he began traveling up and down the Allegheny Valley for the Greek-American Cigarette Vending Machine Company, selling cigarette machines to bars. He had never left Pennsylvania, but by the time he was twenty-one, he knew how people from numerous different countries talked and thought and drank and sang and argued. He knew the world the way few American boys his age do, because every one of those political clubs where he delivered beer and sold cigarettes was a virtual enclave of foreigners. There was the Syrian Club, the Cedars of Lebanon Club, the Pan-Slovak Club, the Russian-American Club, the Croatian Club, the Ukrainian Club—one for virtually every country of the Old World, and Avrakotos had discovered that he could increase his sales if he knew what each of these groups cared about.
"I started reading to find out what the fuck to say when I was trying to sell cigarettes in the different bars. To sell, you needed to talk to the Serbs and the Croatians and you needed to know what they cared about. And the one thing that was common was that not many of them were saying anything nice about the Communists. Not the Ukrainians, not the Serbians, not the Croatians, the Polacks, the Czechs, the Slovaks. … They all fucking hated the Russians. All of them were out of their countries because of the Russians. The Syrians of course hated the Jews. Maybe the only group not anti-Communist were the blacks. They were more practically biased. The others blamed the Russians for everything. For why we were working sixteen hours a day in the mill and paying taxes."
Avrakotos became a master at endearing himself to all of these prickly tribes. He can still say in perfect Slovak, "Take your balls and stuff them up your ass." This always pleased the Slovaks, who laughed appreciatively and offered the crazy Greek a boilermaker.
These forays into the ethnic enclaves of western Pennsylvania and the special skills required to maneuver there were not designed to serve any particular purpose beyond moving beer and cigarettes. Unbeknownst to Gust, they also constituted a remarkable introduction into the worlds he would later pass through for the CIA.
Curiously, it was not the Agency but IBM that first wanted to enlist Avrakotos. After paying off his father's debts in 1959, he had gone back to school at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in mathematics. The IBM recruiter was so impressed that he offered Gust $15,500. "I was twenty-four years old and that was a lot of money in those days [roughly equivalent to $60,000 today]. All I had to do was get my master's and they'd pay my tuition." But then the recruiter started to tell him about IBM's corporate image and how they would expect him to adapt to some of their ways of doing things—a dress code, for one. And then there was the issue of his car.
It was a 1947 Dodge four-door, and it was the pride of Avrakotos's life. "We called it the fuckmobile," he recalls fondly today. "It had over three hundred thousand miles on it and was all souped up to look like a Lincoln Zephyr—like a gangster car. So I said, 'What's wrong with the car?'"
"It's old."
"It's an antique," Gust said.
"Around here we drive Pontiacs," the IBM man explained.
Avrakotos was on his way to his fourth interview with IBM when his favorite professor, Dr. Richard Cottam, suggested that he might like to speak to a man connected with American intelligence. Cottam, an expert on the Middle East whom Jimmy Carter would later tap for secret missions to Iran, was one of those men the CIA looked to in the country's universities to spot potential. Avrakotos still remembers the university room where he was told to report for the interview: 7 E21.
There was nothing physically interesting about the CIA man, but he knew how to talk Avrakotos's language. He registered pleasure that Gust had graduated summa cum laude. He said it was useful that Gust spoke Greek and that he was so good with figures. "But it was clear right away what really interested him," Gust recalls. "He recognized my real talent—that I was a fucking street guy."
"How do you feel about playing in dark alleys?" he asked.
"I love it," replied Avrakotos.
"You're just what I'm looking for."
When Avrakotos told him how much IBM was offering, the visitor said he was embarrassed and could offer only a third of that—$5,355 a year. "But I can give you one thing IBM can't," he said. "I can have you trained and overseas doing something for your country in one and a half years."
Avrakotos was hooked by the idea of becoming a spy for America. Instead, for the next three months the CIA spied on him. The office of security sent its sleuths to Aliquippa to ferret out any Communist influences in his family. They flew him to Washington (his first trip on an airplane) for a series of lie detector tests to see if he was homosexual or if he had anything to hide. Finally, the CIA told him they were going to induct him into their elite case officer–training program—not the office of security, not logistics or science and technology. They were going to take Oscar Avrakotos's son into their ultimate inner sanctum, into the Directorate of Operations, Archie Roosevelt's club.
When Avrakotos tried to read up on the CIA, he discovered there were no books or magazine articles explaining what the Agency did or what kind of people worked there. No one wrote about the CIA then; it was considered unpatriotic. The Agency was just moving into its $250 million headquarters hidden in the woods of Langley, Virginia, eight miles up the Potomac from the White House. Its design gave it the look of a modern campus or, perhaps, a corporate headquarters and some fifteen thousand employees worked there, but no sign acknowledged its existence from the road except a false one that read BUREAU OF PUBLIC WORKS. Any citizens who went looking for this nonexistent bureaucracy would find themselves facing a police barricade and a polite order to turn around.
It was into this mysterious world that Avrakotos descended on August 1, 1962. The majority of the fifty recruits in his class were from the Ivy Leagues—predominantly Harvard, Yale, and Brown. The others came from places like the Universities of Pittsburgh, Nebraska, or Kansas, or technological schools such as Carnegie Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The way Avrakotos computed it, "There were thirty-eight Ivy Leaguers and twelve of us." But he quickly developed a begrudging respect for all his classmates. He was impressed to find that the Agency had compiled a list of the country's valedictorians and had managed to enlist many of them. "When you grow up realizing the only way to get out of the shithole is by using your brain, you respect brains. And all these people were using their fucking brains, all of them."
Half had master's degrees; many spoke several languages. Avrakotos remembers one Harvard man who could recite Chaucer as if he were carrying on a simple conversation. For the next year and a half these fifty chosen ones stayed together, learning the tradecraft of the spy.
At Camp Peary, Virginia, the Agency's boot camp near Jamestown, Virginia, where the first Americans made their settlement, the new spies learned how to use firearms and detonate explosives. They went through a demanding survival course and parachuted out of planes. They traveled to different cities to practice shadowing and shaking surveillance. They learned how to sketch and diagram, how to make surreptitious entries, how to work with bugging experts and polygraph operators, how to pass messages secretly, how to infiltrate agents, how to compromise or recruit their adversaries.
There was a sense, in those days, of readying for war. The two superpowers were spending the bulk of their national budgets preparing to deliver an all-out nuclear attack within a matter of minutes. Over fifteen thousand nuclear warheads were aimed at each other's cities and military targets. On the border of Western Europe stood ninety Soviet divisions. The United States and its NATO allies conducted constant exercises in anticipation of an all-out conventional war. But no one doubted that it would inevitably go nuclear if so much as a division crossed the frontier. The superpowers had turned themselves into helpless giants, neither side willing to use its true might. With no other real outlet, the entire globe became the battleground of the spies. There was hardly a country where the KGB and CIA were not facing off in one way or another.
Avrakotos and his classmates assumed they'd be going into battle the moment they got their first assignment overseas. It was a time when places no one thought much about kept leaping onto the front pages as critical battlegrounds of the Cold War: the CIA's Cubans fighting the Soviets' Cubans; the American-backed Vietnamese against the Communist Vietnamese.
CIA agents came to view themselves as global cancer surgeons trying to identify and remove—or at least contain—even the most minor malignancies, lest they grow into full-scale threats that might later precipitate a nuclear confrontation. It was dirty business but deemed as necessary as the cut of a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon. A Castro in Cuba could spread his revolution not just to Central America but throughout Latin America. As the colonial powers began pulling out, all of Africa was up for grabs; a black Castro could infect the entire continent. There was no middle ground in this struggle. And everywhere the invisible generals in the only true battles allowed to be fought were the spies.
This was the world Gust Avrakotos moved into in 1963, when, after completing his training, he was given his first overseas post. It would be hard to underestimate the sense of destiny he felt when he learned he would be posted to the country of his parents' birth. Now he was going back, not just to defend Greece's freedom but, as President Kennedy put it, to be "a watchman on the walls of freedom."
Greece was not just the cradle of democracy; it was where the Cold War had begun. The Truman Doctrine had been created to counter the threat of armed Communist infiltration in Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan had poured in hundreds of millions to rescue the economy, and the CIA was determined to keep the Greeks, who were NATO allies, from voting for leftists.
By the time Avrakotos arrived, the Agency was intervening in every aspect of Greek life. It had created and funded the Greek Central Intelligence Service, whose operatives worked with it hand in glove. CIA men busied themselves planting stories, funding candidates, monitoring the Communists, neutralizing their champions, showering their own clients with gifts and services. It was a massive undertaking, but Avrakotos was surprised to discover that 142 agents were already in place. The station chief didn't even bother to introduce himself for two months.
This was a strange, insular world for a new CIA operative to get used to. There was a virtual taboo against befriending Americans in Greece, and most of the real diplomats at the embassy treated their spy colleagues as if they were untouchables. "They called us 'spooks,'" Avrakotos recalls. "It's different in a small embassy like in Dakar or Calcutta, where there may only be five people posted and you're the only Americans in town. But in the big embassies in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, London, spooks are separate. It's a real caste system. You can tell the way they spit it out when they ask for your opinion. 'Well, what do the spooks think?'"
The "spooks" themselves considered case officers green for their first two tours. Some of the veterans insist that you really can't be a true pro until you have twenty years of espionage behind you. But Avrakotos was an irrepressible self-starter. He spoke Greek like a native and knew how to build on opportunities. On April 21, 1967, he got one of those breaks that can make a career, when a military junta seized power in Athens and suspended democratic and constitutional government. Liberals in the United States and around the world were outraged, but overnight "the colonels' coup" turned Avrakotos into one of the CIA's indispensable, frontline players.
Well before this, he had made it his business to get to know the colonels. They had all started off life as peasants before joining the army, and they felt a kinship with this charismatic, working-class American whose parents had come from Lemnos. They could speak Greek with him. He drank and whored with them, and they knew from the heart that he shared their ferocious anti-Communism.
Avrakotos understood that the colonels had expected the United States to thank them, however discreetly, for preventing the anti-American candidate, Andreas Papandreou, from taking power. The polls had indicated that Papandreou would win the election, and the colonels suspected that the CIA itself was trying to sabotage Papandreou's campaign. But world reaction was so bitter and the move so brutally antidemocratic that the Johnson administration took to verbally attacking the junta and threatening to cut off U.S. assistance.
After the colonels arrested Papandreou, who had lived in the United States for years, the embassy sent Avrakotos to deliver a message to them. The United States had taken the unusual step of issuing the Greek leader an American passport, and the embassy wanted the junta to permit him to leave the country. "That's the official position. You should let him go," the young CIA man told the colonels. "But unofficially, as your friend, my advice is to shoot the motherfucker because he's going to come back to haunt you."
This was vintage Aliquippa wisdom and just the kind of statement made at just the right moment to cement a true conspirators' friendship. One can only imagine the trouble Avrakotos might have gotten into if the ambassador had learned about his private remarks—but he didn't, and now, at twenty-nine, Avrakotos had suddenly leapt to the front of the pack and transformed himself into the CIA's all-important agent at the very heart of the new power center of Greece.
For the next seven years, the colonels insisted on dealing with Avrakotos as their principal American contact. Ostensibly he worked for the Department of the Army as a civilian liaison to the Greek military. He moved freely in and out of their offices. He took them out on his boat at night and for picnics and outings on weekends. He was, for all practical purposes, an invisible member of the ruling junta.
Avrakotos tells of driving up to the Athens Hilton, where he lunched every day. The doorman saluted the CIA man and took his keys just as one of the colonels came up to meet him for lunch. "How come they let you park your car here?" the colonel demanded. "They won't even let me do that."
"Well, I don't know what you do, but I run the country," Avrakotos growled, and his buddy laughed with delight.
Accounts of Avrakotos at this high point evoke a Costa-Gavras character—a shadowy American in dark glasses, whispering to his fascist colonels. It was a time of coups and countercoups. Greece and Turkey came to the edge of war over Cyprus. Both countries were members of NATO, and Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco shuttled in and out, trying to keep the alliance from tearing apart. In spite of the significance of the diplomacy, the only American always welcome to the changing military strongmen was Gust Avrakotos. It's hard not to feel a certain unease about such a figure.
But those were days of Cold War, and the kinds of things he did were deemed crucial to the secret struggle. Just how dangerous a game Avrakotos was playing did not become fully evident until two days before Christmas 1975, when Richard Welch, the chief of the Athens station, was cut down on his front doorstep by three masked gunmen. Welch, one of those gentleman spies who spoke four languages and studied the classics, had supposedly been a mere first secretary at the embassy until that November, when an Athenian English-language magazine had identified him as CIA and published his name, photograph, and address.
It was a frightening moment for American operatives abroad. A CIA renegade, Philip Agee, had exposed over two hundred of his former colleagues in his sensational book, Inside the Company. And a Washington journal, Counterspy, had launched a campaign to expose agents wherever they could be found.
A Greek terrorist group, the 17 November, instantly claimed responsibility for the assassination. Within months Avrakotos's cover was blown by another Greek leftist magazine. From that time on, Gust was vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country's many ills—preposterous stories that would have been amusing had they not carried with them the threat of death.
The articles described him as "the Head of the Dark Forces of Anomaly," the "Butcher of Cyprus," "the Fascist CIA Overlord of the Colonels," "the Brutal Killer of Cypriot Women and Children," even the "CIA collaborator with the Turks." The Communist Morning Daily was the most colorful. "Under every big rock, when lifted, live vermin, evil vipers and spiders. And under every questionable activity in our land is found the head CIA vermin and viper, Avrakotos."
Several of Avrakotos's friends from the junta were murdered, two with the same .45 that had killed Welch. Avrakotos became an even more intensely disciplined professional, systematically changing routes, cars, and meeting places, sometimes spending three hours of evasion getting to a five-minute contact. "Typically terrorists will have three targets," he says, "and they almost always pick the easiest to go after. I became a very hard target. That's how I stayed alive."
The terrorists and the ever pervasive KGB were not the only ones targeting Avrakotos and the CIA at that time. Back home, agents were being dragged before congressional committees to account for decades-old efforts to assassinate foreign leaders or overthrow governments. And for the first time, reporters were attempting to expose current CIA activities.
Every operative with an ordinary instinct for self-preservation was keeping a low profile. But for Gust Avrakotos there was unfinished business. His station chief, Dick Welch, had been murdered and, as he saw it, his job was to find and murder the murderers. It was the code of his family. It was the way of Aliquippa. "I wanted to go out and hit thirty-five or forty of the 17 November people," he recalls. "We had a list, and I didn't care if we hit some of the wrong ones. So what?" Furthermore, his friends in the Greek Central Intelligence Service (CIS) and the Athens police force would take care of the dirty work. All they needed was the signal.
"But I was ordered down," Avrakotos remembers philosophically years later. "'We don't do assassinations,' they said. I was just working at the wrong time." And so the tough steel-town kid backed off. But it was a different story when it came to Philip Agee. Like most of his colleagues, Avrakotos was enraged by Agee's campaign to expose agents and he wanted to make him suffer.[2]
In the U.S. media, however, Agee was receiving a surprising amount of sympathetic treatment. A number of journalists portrayed Agee as an American innocent, radicalized by the Vietnam War and the evil he had discovered. Esquire magazine published Agee's own apologia, in which he explained with righteous indignation why he considered it an act of conscience to try to destroy the organization in which he had served.
This was all much too much for Avrakotos, who began scheming with friendly intelligence services throughout Europe to label Agee a Cuban agent, thus getting him banned from their countries. It was at this moment, says Avrakotos, that the CIA's deputy director for operations flew to Athens to order him to cease and desist: "He said I couldn't use the same tactics that Agee was using against us and that my efforts were violating Agee's civil rights. He said I would go to jail if I continued."
The CIA's operations chief is like the commanding general of a secret army. His word is supposed to be law to case officers in the field. The man was clearly under tremendous pressure, but Avrakotos saw him as siding with a man who was trying to expose CIA agents. He flew into a rage. "'I understand you testified before the Pike Committee and used my name. Well, you just violated my civil rights, and if you come after me, then I'll come after you, you bastard!' I lectured him on what he should be doing. And you know what? That story went all over the world. Everyone was saying at all the stations: Do you know what Gust just did in Athens? He actually called the DDO a cocksucker."
Few case officers could have gotten away with that, but Avrakotos was one of those killer operatives that every spy agency comes to depend on. He had been indispensable in Greece, and he was only trying to defend the agency. Beyond that, in spite of all his tough talk and his hatred of the blue bloods, no one who had worked with Avrakotos doubted that he loved and honored the CIA as if it were his own family. "I was never in a fraternity. The CIA is my fraternity," he said in retirement. "I still have people who know me in over three-quarters of the stations overseas, and even today if I call any of them and say I want something, it will be done, no questions asked."
The fact was that by 1977, Gust Avrakotos was head over heels in love with the Agency. When he returned to Aliquippa his father treated him as a man of honor: "You're the one who is educated, you've seen the world. Tell us, what's happening?" Oscar asked his son. "What are you doing about the Communists?"
"I told him that the Agency won't let us talk about our work and he said, 'Good, I'm proud. … Whatever you can do for your country, it's not enough.'"
There were moments in Athens, such as when a coup would hit and Henry Kissinger and the rest of the U.S. government would look to Avrakotos, that he would dream of climbing to the Agency's very top. Then Gust could visualize perfectly the moment when he, Gust Lascaris Avrakotos, from the long line of Greek defenders of the emperors, would be sworn in as director of Central Intelligence.
But those were Avrakotos's dreams before the intelligence scandals following Watergate rocked the CIA. Before Admiral Stansfield Turner took over the Agency for Jimmy Carter and sent out his cold form letters on October 31, 1977. That purge of the CIA's Operations Directorate, still known inside the Agency as the Halloween Day Massacre, changed forever the way Avrakotos felt about the CIA.
Until then Avrakotos had never complained about the death threats or the attacks by Congress or the press, because he and every other member of the Clandestine Services believed that "mother CIA would always take care of her own." It was similar to the confidence that U.S. fighter pilots feel when they are shot down in combat, knowing that everything possible will be done to rescue them, even to the point of risking more lives to save theirs.
That is why he was so stunned in 1978 when four of his agents opened envelopes from the new CIA director containing termination notices. The targets of the purge had all been first- or second-generation Americans, like him. They were the Greek speakers, the ones who didn't mind getting their hands dirty, the ones Avrakotos believed were the most valuable. When he checked elsewhere he discovered that other new Americans were also being let go: four Japanese from the Tokyo station, three Italians from the Rome station, three Chinese. The criteria seemed to be designed to terminate the men who knew the language and the culture and who had served the longest in one spot, agents just like him.
At first Avrakotos thought perhaps it was a mistake. He convinced two of the four to appeal. Langley's return cable to one of the men who had requested an explanation stung Gust like nothing he had experienced in his adult life. "We understand you have appealed," it read. "But you are a native Greek operating on native turf in a native language. You really are not an American."[3]
"When they said that about him not being an American, I knew they could say that about me," recalls Avrakotos. "That's when I lost my loyalty to the bureaucrats. That's when I said, 'I don't give a fuck about my career or about trying to become the director. I'm going to fight these fuckers to change it and, if I can't, I'll leave.'"
The return cable that Avrakotos wrote, signing his friend's name, read: "I was born in the United States. I'm a second-generation American of Greek heritage. I served in World War II with honor. For you to call me anything else is a disgrace. I would like to send your comments to my senator in New York, Jacob Javits."
"Well, they shat in their pants. That's when they gave my friend his stay of execution. And do you know what he did when they reinstated him? He gave them thirty days' notice and resigned. Isn't that beautiful?"
Greece was now different for Avrakotos, murky and ambiguous. By 1978 he had been at this game for twelve years. He had been through eleven coups and four attempted coups; he had gone through the murder of his station chief and a thousand different dramas. He was bitter about the firing of his friends, and he had just broken up with his wife. He was burned out, and he didn't want to subject his son to any of these battles anymore. He put in for a transfer.
When he went to say good-bye to his counterpart, the chief of the Greek Central Intelligence Service, the man told him he was relieved Avrakotos was finally leaving: "You're good, but they would have gotten you if you'd stayed. It would only have been a matter of time."
And so the back-alley spy was finally brought home to America—to a post in Boston, where he was given command of a little-known operation to recruit foreign businessmen. He was good at this specialty.
For him it was like a sport. He would study his prey so that by the time he got to the liaison, he would know the man's family history, what he enjoyed eating and drinking, whether he liked boys or girls, what his material aims and psychological needs were. Years selling in the ethnic enclaves of western Pennsylvania had taught him how to hook a customer and close a deal. In the weeks before the hostage-rescue mission, he managed to convince two Iranians to go into Tehran to provide the Delta Force rescue team with realtime intelligence of any last-minute changes in security around the embassy.
His favorite deputy in Boston was John Terjelian, a physically menacing Armenian-American who "had one of those faces like Jack Palance's that scare the shit out of you." Avrakotos loved this man. There was something about him that was pure Aliquippa. His favorite story was about how the Turks had buried his four Armenian uncles alive up to their necks, poured honey on their faces, and watched as the insects ate their heads. "But you know they never talked," he told Avrakotos proudly. "And do you know what? I have the same attitude."
It was because of Terjelian that Avrakotos first began to consider the possibility that Afghanistan might be turned into Russia's Vietnam. On Christmas Day 1979, when the news came over the radio that the Russians were invading, Avrakotos went into the office to check the cable traffic. He opened the door to find Terjelian already there, eagerly reading the cables and laughing.
The huge Armenian was shouting out his favorite word: muti, which means something like "jerk" in old Armenian slang. "Those fucking mutis. The Russians are mutis; they're fucking mutis."
"What the fuck are you talking about, John?"
Terjelian explained that he had spent three years in Kabul and that "no one fucks with the Afghans and gets away with it."
Avrakotos says, "John's the kind of guy who likes to do the things men do: skydiving, flying planes, ten whores at once, throwing spears, riding camels. He'd done all of that in Afghanistan. He'd even walked through remote parts of the country, and he was telling me that these were the only people who had ever frightened him."
This last admission made a large impression on Avrakotos because Terjelian was one of the only people who had ever made him feel physically menaced. Back in 1979 at this curious hidden CIA office in Boston, the idea of the Afghan tribesmen torturing and killing Russian soldiers gave these two lonely bachelors something to laugh about, and Avrakotos decided that Terjelian should write up a report for the DDO.
No one appears to have paid any attention at headquarters, but Terjelian's report had a huge impact on Avrakotos once he took over the Afghan war, particularly the warning he offered about these ferocious tribesmen: "Don't put white men in charge. Don't give [the Afghanis] a lot of money. Don't trust them. It would be like throwing money into a cesspool. All they need," he wrote, "is a little help and the Russians will be sorry they ever went into that country."
The idea that there was a nation of warriors waiting in the mountains to kill Russians took seed in Avrakotos's mind. But in 1979 he never imagined that he—or, for that matter, the CIA—would ever even consider the remote possibility of giving these people hundreds of thousands of weapons and billions of rounds of ammunition to take on the Red Army. Back then the CIA was rapidly pulling back from the world. It had gone a long way toward getting rid of the old street fighters like Avrakotos, and the talk was all about drawing down and avoiding the kind of high-risk covert operations that only created trouble for the Agency. A new and gentler CIA was being born, and it was not the kind of environment that seemed likely to permit such a rude figure as Gust Avrakotos to win a spot in the Agency's ruling elite.
After Avrakotos's three-year tour in Boston, the CIA brought him back to headquarters and started to use him for particularly difficult and sensitive missions. "My nickname was 'Dr. Dirty,'" he explains almost bitterly. He was still considered a valuable asset but too freewheeling to entrust with serious responsibility. So Avrakotos was thrilled when he learned that Alan Wolfe, head of the European Division, had handpicked him to become station chief in Helsinki. Wolfe was the legendary officer who had moved in advance of Henry Kissinger to set up the secretary of state's fabled opening to China. And the Helsinki assignment was one of the Agency's most important frontline posts targeted on the Soviets. For Avrakotos, it had an even greater significance. Until then he had been somewhat typecast as a back-alley operator, identified almost exclusively with Greek operations. The fact that Wolfe, whose judgment everyone respected, had picked him for a post that demanded worldly, diplomatic skills meant that, for the first time, Avrakotos would be moving out of his ethnic box and truly into the heart of the Clandestine Services. Once again, he could dream of rising to the highest levels.
Helsinki was a done deal and Avrakotos had already enrolled in Finnish-language school when Wolfe's tour as European Division chief ended and a new man, William Graver, took over. Graver happened to be another of the Agency's walking legends. At six feet seven inches he was an imposing figure who had been with the CIA ever since its founding. He held a rank equivalent to that of a four-star general and seemed to believe that the Clandestine Services should be staffed by the kind of gentleman spies that he had known when he'd served in the OSS, during World War II. On that score, Gust Avrakotos was all wrong, and rather quickly Graver decided he would not honor Alan Wolfe's appointment.
The morning after Labor Day 1981, Graver summoned Avrakotos to his large corner office on the fifth floor of headquarters. Avrakotos remembers a creepy feeling overwhelming him the moment he set foot in the room. Graver had spent much of his career in Germany, and as far as Avrakotos was concerned he might have walked into SS headquarters: "The most striking thing about Graver is that he was Teutonic. By Teutonic I don't mean the blond, handsome, Aryan type. By Teutonic, I mean stiff, wooden, no sense of humor." The only decorations Graver seemed to have were certificates and diplomas on the wall, mostly in German. Even Graver's aides looked like Teutons to Avrakotos, "the kind that carry briefcases and almost click their heels. It was like going in to see the führer."
Graver remained seated, leaving Avrakotos standing like an uncomfortable schoolboy. The division chief said that the coveted Helsinki station chief job was no longer his. The assignment was on the books, but Graver was taking it away. The conversation had barely begun when, contrary to all protocol, Avrakotos ended it. Not merely that, but he ended it by telling Graver to go fuck himself.
As Avrakotos turned and burst past the secretaries and case officers in Graver's outer office, he knew he'd transgressed in a world that is not generous to those who break the internal code of conduct. The CIA, and particularly its elite Clandestine Services, maintains a pretense of informality. Its officers dress in civilian clothes and call each other by their first names. But underneath, it is organized just like the military, and majors (Avrakotos's equivalent rank) don't get away with telling off four-star generals. Bill Graver was now in a position to effectively put an end to Gust's career.
Graver no doubt assumed that he had caught Avrakotos by surprise and that the poor fellow had simply lost control. But Graver had no idea who he was dealing with and what a dangerous enemy he had just made for himself. Whatever qualities as a gentleman Avrakotos may have lacked in Graver's eyes, when it came to espionage no one could outdo him. As was his practice, Avrakotos had cultivated a spy in the division who had tipped him off to Graver's plans weeks earlier. The source had even alerted Gust that another officer had already been picked for a post Graver now had said he would consider giving to him. At that point Avrakotos concluded that Graver was not just taking away his promotion, he was out to destroy and humiliate him.
Perhaps if Graver had simply said he didn't want anything to do with Gust, it would have ended there. But a rage verging on violence had swept over Avrakotos when he was faced with Graver's calculated lie. The man didn't have the balls to say it straight; to the wounded Greek, it was simply the Halloween Day Massacre all over again. The Teutonic bastard seemed to think he could get away with this latest ethnic cleansing and expect Gust Avrakotos to just say "thank you very much" and disappear.
Something dark and dangerous detonated inside Avrakotos that previously he had unleashed only on America's enemies. He had an attitude about the blue bloods—the "cake eaters"—who ruled the CIA; there's no question about that. But the truth is, he revered the Agency and gave it and his country every ounce of his quite remarkable talents and energies. Graver had hurt him in ways that went beyond the crippling of Avrakotos's career. It was almost as if he had taken away all of Gust's previous accomplishments and declared him unfit to serve anywhere in his division. Now, after the outburst, this man who didn't even know him was in a position to make sure that Avrakotos would have no further prospects for advancement.
But life can sometimes be like a Dickens novel, with characters who meet early on destined to cross paths later, as if for a purpose. That was certainly the case with the friendship that Avrakotos had forged in Greece with Clair George, recently risen to become the second man in the Clandestine Services and heir apparent to take over the Directorate of Operations.
If there was any one person who owed Gust, it was Clair George, and Avrakotos fully expected that this old friend would come to his rescue. The two had forged their friendship over three years in Athens at the height of the 17 November terrorist campaign. George had volunteered to take over the Athens station just after Richard Welch was assassinated, and he had looked to Avrakotos to guide him through the treacherous landscape of Greece in the 1970s. For all practical purposes, he had shared with Avrakotos the responsibility for running the CIA's huge Athens station. Gust handled the underground side of the station—the network of safe houses, the security teams, and the liaisons with the military and the local police. In the wake of Welch's assassination, when everything important entailed dirty work, Gust was king, and Clair George depended on him. They spent their days and often their nights together, always the principal targets of 17 November and always plotting how to strike first. They drank together, they reveled together and, like a ferocious guardian angel, Avrakotos watched over George's safety, even passing on to him his longtime personal driver and bodyguard.
By curious coincidence, George and Avrakotos came from little towns just ten miles apart in Pennsylvania. George, a postman's son, found it easy and rewarding to adopt the manner, clothing, and attitude of the CIA's ruling elite. Gust would kid him mercilessly about being a Beaver Falls pussy, the kind of sissy Aliquippans used to love to beat up. But in truth, Avrakotos loved the man. He even approved of George's chameleon-like ability to assimilate and move onto the Agency's fast track. What Avrakotos valued most, however, was the way George had stood by him and the ethnic officers targeted during the Halloween Day Massacre. George hadn't signed his own name to any of the cables back then, but he had given his silent support, which was enough to make Gust feel confident that George would back him now. When Graver demanded that Avrakotos be punished, George had his old friend come up to the seventh floor for a heart-to-heart talk.
"Costa, Costa," George began, using Avrakotos's old Greek nickname. George didn't say anything explicit about what Gust must do. He was trying to be helpful—to make Gust recognize that he had a first-class problem that needed to be dealt with. He appealed to Gust not to offend Graver again. "He can hurt you badly."
"You know who I am," Avrakotos said. "I'm not going to kiss his ass; he didn't want me anywhere in his division."
"Yes, but you can't tell him to go fuck himself—he's very powerful."
When Graver's secretary called a few days later to schedule another meeting, Avrakotos assumed that George had smoothed things over. Nevertheless, he had his guard up as he walked back into the large fifth-floor office. The last time, Graver had asked him to close the door. He asked again this time, but Avrakotos decided to leave it open. "I didn't know what was going to happen, but I wanted witnesses," he explained. Once again, Graver remained seated.
"Well," Graver finally said, after a long pause.
"Well, what?"
"The ADDO [assistant deputy director for operations] said you were going to apologize."
It may be that Avrakotos had some kind of death wish. Perhaps he had allowed himself to expect good news from Graver. He may have been disappointed to find that Clair George had not delivered for him. But it didn't really matter, because he was now left with no good choices. Not all that much was being asked of him: a gesture, even some small effort to make peace. But it was suddenly too late for that. Once again Avrakotos was overcome with a feeling of class rage and anger that verged on violence. Once again he looked straight in Graver's eyes, and once again he crossed the line.
"You can go fuck yourself."
