Gust Avrakotos, American CIA officer (b. 1938)
Gustav Lascaris Avrakotos (January 14, 1938 – December 1, 2005) was an American case officer and the Afghan Task Force Chief for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Avrakotos joined the CIA in August 1962 and was posted to Greece in 1963. Following the 1967 Greek coup d'état and the establishment of a far-right military junta, Avrakotos became the main liaison point for the CIA and the regime. He worked closely with the regime until he returned to a US posting in 1978. He worked for the CIA in the US until late 1982, when he found a position with the CIA's Near East desk, which included oversight of the agency's work in Afghanistan. The following year he became acting Chief of the South Asia Operations Group, which included involvement in Operation Cyclone, the CIA program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviets. He acquired arms and ammunition from numerous sources, and worked with Texas representative Charlie Wilson to build a coalition of international supporters to fund, arm and train the mujahideen.
He left the CIA in 1989 after he had been moved to the CIA's Africa Division, a position of relative obscurity within the organization, after writing a memo opposing the CIA's involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. After working for defense contractor TRW Inc. and then News Corporation, he returned to the CIA as a contractor between 1997 and 2003.
Avrakotos was little known to the public until 2003 when journalist George Crile published Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, a history of US involvement in the Soviet–Afghan War. The book was the basis of the film Charlie Wilson's War, released in 2007, in which Avrakotos is portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.