Andrew Eiva

Andrew Eiva
Andrew Eiva is a defense policy expert, former lobbyist, linguist and human rights defender. He is best known for his impact on policy and the selection of effective weapons systems during Afghanistan's struggle against Soviet occupation.

Career
After graduating from West Point in 1972, Eiva served in the US Army in Germany with Special Forces where he pioneered early UAV delivery systems. He specialized in guerrilla warfare support and as a refugee from the Soviet occupation in Lithuania, dedicated himself to overthrowing the Soviet empire.

As a lobbyist, Eiva worked to organize committees of ordinary Americans to influence the Congress.

Arming the Afghan Mujaheddin against the Soviets
At the 1984 Republican Convention, Eiva was responsible for having language inserted into the party platform calling for support of the Afghan Mujaheddin in their fight against the Soviets.

From 1983 to 1988, Eiva published the Afghan Update, a newsletter which provided detailed insight into and criticism of CIA and State Department policy. He was executive director of two sister organizations, the Federation for American Afghan Action and the American Afghan Education Fund. Despite his tiny budget, which George Crile mentions in Charlie Wilson's War, Eiva was able to galvanize Congress to effectively support the Afghan resistance.

However, Eiva made powerful enemies among the American political leadership and elites. The CIA absolutely hated him. The Pentagon hated him. The military industrial complex could see no way to profit from his vision. Then there was Congressman Charlie Wilson who pushed his way into steering Afghan policy from his place on the Appropriations Committee. In Charlie Wilson's War, the late George Crile paints a picture that completely overlooks the real policy debate. It wasn't long before Wilson and the CIA snuffed out the crucial issue of supply with bluster, false bravado and carefully orchestrated news accounts. CIA officers now claim to have done things that, in fact, Eiva did before them.

In 1988, Robert Pear in the New York Times reported on Zalmay Khalilzad's assessment that the Afghan mujaheddin had "been taking over a lot more territory a lot quicker than anyone anticipated". Eiva did not want the cause of the freedom fighters to be forgotten. Pear continues, "Lobbyists for the Afghan guerrillas feared that the State Department's upbeat assessment would be used to justify further cutbacks in shipments of weapons. Andrew L. Eiva, chairman of the Federation for American Afghan Action, said the United States had already suspended deliveries of two effective weapons: Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Spanish-made 120-millimeter mortars. "

According to Marguerite Johnson in Time Magazine in 2005, "large amounts of military materiel purchased by the CIA and funneled through Pakistan reportedly are failing to reach the mujahedin guerrillas. Washington Lobbyist Andrew Eiva, executive director of the Federation for American Afghan Action, says that his organization has found 'up to 70% slippage' in CIA supplies".

Support for freedom and resistance movements
Leslie Gelb of the New York Times says that Eiva, in 1983, counted the score of American support for liberation movements since World War II as "0 to 12, with Afghanistan as lucky 13". The other such ventures supported and then dropped by Washington he lists as Lithuania, Albania, the Ukraine, Poland, Tibet, China, Cuba, Kurdistan twice, Angola, the Hmong tribe in Laos and Sumatra. Eiva continues to support freedom and resistance movements around the world, including those in Sudan and Balochistan. He advocates that the people of Balochistan themselves author their own Freedom Charter, rather than accept one written by foreigners.

On 23 February 2010, founder of Christendom College Dr. Warren H. Carroll delivered a lecture entitled "Andrew Eiva and the End of the Communist Empire". Carroll told how Eiva "dedicated his life to the destruction of the Communist Empire, which ruled his first homeland, and for which he had an abiding hatred".

Personal life
Mr. Eiva was born in a refugee camp in Bonn on Oct. 26, 1948, reared on stories about Lithuanian resistance, American support for a while and finally, abandonment. His parents escaped communism and fled from Lithuania to the U.S. in 1949. His grandfather, Gen. Kazimieras Ladyga, fought the Russian revolutionaries at the end of World War I, and was chief of staff of the armed forces of independent Lithuania from 1925 to 1927. General Ladyga was arrested, sent to Siberia, was tortured, and died.

Awards
Andrew Eiva was presented with the Order of the Cross of Vytis in Vilnius, Lithuania on 16 February 2012 for his services to the cause of restoration of the Independent State of Lithuania. Eiva was integrally involved in defending the Lithuanian Parliament during the January Events of 1991. Eiva was also honored on 16 December 2011 at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, DC for his heroic service the cause of Lithuanian independence. Eiva described | his participation in the January Events on that evening.