Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story by Jack Devine, Vernon Loeb

aircraft, and that nothing else would be viable. The SA-7 antiaircraft missile was ubiquitous worldwide, and it would have been easy to flood the field with it, but our research showed that it was not very effective and had been a failure in trying to knock down U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War. The Swedish had the RB-70, which was exceptionally effective, but we doubted we would get Swedish approval to deploy it in combat. So in the end we turned to the lethal Stinger.
    At the same time, we were also looking for a higher-caliber round that could penetrate the armor of the Hind helicopter. Dempsey recalls finding a Chinese antiarmor tungsten round that was not as good as the higher-velocity SLAP (saboted light-armor penetrator) round, but it was cheaper at just a dollar a round rather than $15 to $20. This was a significant difference when we needed to supply approximately 120,000 fighters. So we married the tungsten round to the 12.7-millimeter machine gun, which is very similar to the U.S.-manufactured .50-caliber. It worked well but not great. Still, it got the job done and helped knock out Soviet aircraft.
    The procurement of weapons came through a somewhat complicated budgeting device known as end-of-year supplemental funding—that is, whatever the Department of Defense hadn’t managed to spend by the last day of the fiscal year, September 30. Covert action is often paid for with end-of-year funds. Weeks ahead of time we would get a report that read, “The Department of Defense is going to have this amount, and it looks like we’ll get this much.” That meant we had to have cables with all our field stations and suppliers around the world ready to go, with someone on the other end agreeing to the order. If you were a day late, the money would be gone. There were some discretionary funds that didn’t have to be committed in this way, but they amounted to peanuts when compared to the end-of-year Pentagon funds. And we never knew exactly how much we were going to get. Congress did not want a line item.
    Every year that I was there, DOD always had a large surplus. For the Pentagon, $1 billion is a relatively small number, but there were other high-cost technical programs, such as satellites, that had to be funded. The Stingers were different—a direct purchase from the Pentagon. They weren’t too expensive—at around $60,000 each—so a few million dollars got you a lot of these lethal weapons. Still, it remained to be seen whether the mujahideen could be trained to fire them effectively at the Hinds, and whether the Stinger’s guidance system was superior to the Soviet’s antimissile technology, despite our field testing.
    The entire time I was running the task force, the only calls I ever received from the White House were requests for a surge prompted by a news story—“Can you ramp up operations in the field as fast as possible?” But given our funding system, a surge was impossible, since virtually all major purchases were made on the last day of the fiscal year, and there was nothing left to surge with after that: the piggy bank was empty. Likewise, the weapon assembly lines around the world took months to crank up; there were no shelf items to draw upon. This was not an ideal way to run a war, but somehow it worked.
    In the summer of 1986 we knew we would be getting a huge amount of money in addition to the end-of-year surplus, thanks largely to items Charlie Wilson was inserting into appropriations legislation. Instead of getting $200 million, we received $350 million, not counting matching funds from the Saudis.
    When Tim Burton and I traveled abroad that August to make sure we had everything in place for the end of the fiscal year, our first stop was Egypt. There was an arms factory there built with U.S. tax dollars that was two blocks long. For the Egyptians, our orders represented a huge infusion of cash, which helped them build up their arms industry. Wilson had particularly close relations with