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a major covert operation.
    The compartmented program that I would be taking over had for two years been the personal domain of Gust Avrakotos, chief of the South Asia Operations Group. His close relationship with Wilson became the basis for George Crile’s 2003 book, Charlie Wilson’s War , and the movie Wilson would come to warn me about years later. 2 After the president signed NSDD 166 and the decision was made to up the ante in Afghanistan, Casey and his deputies on the seventh floor thought Avrakotos too combative and difficult to manage the escalation, and transferred him to a job in the Africa Division. His counterpart in the field, a Russian specialist serving as chief in Islamabad, who was seen as too cautious and pessimistic about the prospects for success in Afghanistan, was also reassigned.
    As I took over the reins for the Afghanistan issue, I was stunned to learn just how large this “little” program was, and realized only much later that Twetten had put me in charge of running the last, and largest, CIA covert operation of the Cold War. One day early on, I found myself sitting on the sofa in Director Casey’s seventh-floor office, explaining how I planned to turn Avrakotos’s crew of about a dozen operations officers and analysts into an organization capable of acquiring enough Soviet Bloc weaponry to arm 120,000 insurgents and move millions of tons of ammunition and matériel a month through Afghanistan’s treacherous mountain passes.
    I had, by then, dealt with Casey on several occasions. As a station chief in Latin America, I brought the head of my host country’s intelligence service to see him at CIA headquarters. I hadn’t gotten off on a very good foot with this foreign official. He was a talented intelligence operator but somewhat arrogant and hard to deal with. I inherited a grudge he had against the Agency, through no fault of my own, but then I unintentionally made it worse. A few years before my arrival, his political party had been voted out of office and he had called the station to ask for help in obtaining a U.S. visa, which he should have been given as a matter of professional courtesy. Instead, he was told with a flash of petulance to take his place “in line outside the embassy just like everyone else.” I’m sure a fed-up case officer thought he was bringing the official down a peg by denying him the favor, but the satisfaction the case officer would have felt from such an action is almost always ephemeral and sets up a disastrous second act should your target ever return to power—as he did a few years later. By that time the case officer was gone and I was just arriving. Almost immediately, I paid a call on the foreign official. He told me he wanted to conduct a joint mail-interception operation. I told him that with new rules and regulations flowing from the Church Committee investigation—a congressional committee that had looked into illegal intelligence gathering by the Agency, the NSA, and the FBI—I wasn’t sure how much help we could be, but that I would check. This was my mistake. “Just tell me whom I need to talk to, who has the authority to do it, and I will deal with them,” the official said. I clearly should have given him a more deft, Latin answer, something like, “Sure, sounds like a good idea; I’ll look into it,” then moved on to another subject and let the topic die a slow death from neglect. Lack of follow-through would have been a more sophisticated response, which he would have understood without losing face or being given an opportunity to challenge my authority.
    Shortly thereafter, we made the liaison visit together to Langley, which gave me the chance to start mending our relationship. I am used to large egos; his was huge. By the time he told me he was the equivalent of the CIA director, I had learned my lesson and let that claim sit unchallenged.
    When I brought him in to see Casey after lunch, I ended up translating, even though my guest