Gust Avrakotos was a Central Intelligence Agency case officer, mentor to John Kiriakou, and one of the central figures in Charlie Wilson’s War.[1] Within the CIA he was both prolific and divisive: “He killed a lot of Russians, a lot. Medals, promotions, couldn’t get along with anybody. Everybody hated Gust and Gust hated everybody. But he was a sweetheart deep down — you just had to know how to deal with him.”[2]
Relationship with John Kiriakou
Avrakotos served as a father figure to Kiriakou during the latter’s career.[1] The two worked together on the Revolutionary Organization 17 November task force. Kiriakou has called him his operations mentor in the plainest terms: “I learned more from Gust than I learned from any other person in my entire adult life.” He says Avrakotos took a liking to him because both were Greek Orthodox from western Pennsylvania and non-Ivy League graduates.[3]
A widely retold episode between the two illustrates Avrakotos’s temperament: Kiriakou mentioned in passing that the 17 November group’s second victim, the chief of the Hellenic National Police named Mylonas, had been a torturer during the Greek military junta. Avrakotos grabbed Kiriakou by the lapels, slammed him against a wall, and shouted “Mylonas was my friend.” Kiriakou warned him to take his hands off or he would make him sorry; after Avrakotos let go, Kiriakou said “I’m sorry he got shot in the head, but he was a torturer. Keep your hands to yourself next time.” Avrakotos afterward told him: “I really respect you for the way you reacted.”[2][4]
The broken-mirror recruitment technique
Avrakotos taught Kiriakou a cold-pitch technique from his own work in the 1950s, which Kiriakou subsequently used to recruit the station chief of an enemy intelligence service in Athens. The method:
- Identify the target’s vehicle by its diplomatic license plate
- Approach the parked vehicle carrying a heavy book bag
- Strike the side mirror with the book bag, breaking it off
- Pick up the mirror and inquire at neighboring residences for the owner — both for cover and to identify the residence
- Knock at the target’s door, apologize, offer to pay for the damage
- Invoke Arab cultural hospitality norms to obtain entry by requesting a glass of water
- Once inside, demonstrate Arabic language ability by speaking with any children present, ensuring the target hears
- Drop the cover and deliver the pitch in front of the target’s family[5][6][7]
In the operation Kiriakou ran on Avrakotos’s plan, the pitch was delivered in front of the target’s four-year-old daughter and consisted of a single statement and a 24-hour deadline: “This is my card with my real name, I’m from the CIA in Washington. Your guy is going down — he’s going to die. You can die with him, or you can be on the side of the good guys. You have until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning to make that decision.” The target called at 10:00 the next morning; the operation produced a successful recruitment and shut down a substantial threat to American personnel.[7][8][9]
Kiriakou was promoted to GS-13 or GS-14 (equivalent to a military Lieutenant Colonel) on the strength of this operation.[10]
”Dr. Dirty”
Avrakotos’s internal nickname at the CIA was “Dr. Dirty.” Kiriakou: “I said to him one time, ‘Why Dr. Dirty? I’ve found you to be anything but dirty.’ And he said, ‘Cuz I’ll stab you in the back just like everybody else in this building will, but then I’m going to spin you around and stab you in the front.’”[11]
Per Kiriakou, what made Avrakotos unusual in the agency was his outsider profile: “He came into the agency in those early days when everybody was coming from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton — and he was from Pitt. He had a degree in Soviet studies from Pitt, and he was kind of an ethnic, you know, full-blooded Greek from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.” The Aliquippa connection (Kiriakou himself is from New Castle, PA) was their bond at the operations course where Avrakotos taught Kiriakou.[12][13]
Avrakotos’s working maxim, repeated to Kiriakou: “The job of an operations officer is to recruit spies to steal secrets. That’s what you’re going to learn to do here. Recruit spies to steal secrets.”[14]
The Greek-junta godfather
A particular episode Kiriakou recounts: during his Athens tour, in the middle of a three-hour surveillance-detection route deep south of the city, Kiriakou spotted Avrakotos standing on a street corner. Avrakotos had told him he would be out of contact for ten days. When Kiriakou later asked what he had been doing in Athens, Avrakotos confessed he had been visiting the family of George Papadopoulos — the colonel who had led the 1967–74 Greek military junta, a regime that murdered thousands. “He said, ‘You know, I’m godfather to Papadopoulos’s son.’ I was like, ‘What? It’s like being godfather to Hitler’s son.’” Avrakotos: “He’s my godfather. I take our religion seriously.”[15][16][17]
Decline and end of career
Avrakotos suffered from chronic high blood pressure that produced a series of mini-strokes, each of which left him a little meaner and more paranoid. Per Kiriakou, Avrakotos became convinced Kiriakou had told a colleague he had seen Avrakotos escorted out of CIA headquarters in handcuffs — an event that had not occurred and a conversation Kiriakou had never had. Security was eventually called over the way Avrakotos was screaming at him in the hallway.[18][19]
His career ended when he became convinced George Tenet — then CIA Director — had personally denied him a good parking space and began emailing Tenet directly about it. “Everybody in the agency knows George’s email address. … And so he was like, ‘You know, why’d you take away my parking space?’ And of course nobody ever responded to him, but it got to the point where Tenet finally said, ‘It’s time for Gust to go.’”[20][21]
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the film
Kiriakou credits Avrakotos, who died in 2005, as the single person most responsible for pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan — crediting him even though, outside of Charlie Wilson’s War, his story was otherwise never told.[22] Upon Kiriakou’s return from Pakistan in 2002, Avrakotos told him a movie was going to be made about him — the film that became Charlie Wilson’s War, in which Avrakotos was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.[23]
‘We used sex until Reagan’ (Jay Dyer)
John Kiriakou says Gus Avrakotos — his mentor, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War — taught him about the CIA’s use of sex in espionage: “We used sex all the time until Ronald Reagan became president,” stopping because coercion cannot build a lasting source relationship. Avrakotos also told him the story of the Ayatollah who laughed off a honey-pot, asking for the photos “in an 8-by-10.”[24][25]
See also
- John Kiriakou
- Revolutionary Organization 17 November
- George Tenet
- Athens station