According to author George Crile, the bureaucracy punished Avrakotos for his dissent and then banished him to a do-nothing job with little responsibility, just as his greatest success, the Afghan program, was showing results.[1][5] Avrakotos was reassigned "just as the Stinger antiaircraft missile launchers downed the first Soviet gunships" and after a brief role in an African assignment, he retired from the CIA in 1989.[3] Gust's predictions about Iran–Contra were accurate, as the Iran–Contra affair resulted in numerous prosecutions of government officials and years of congressional hearings and controversy.