Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

When Avrakotos talks today about the findings Jimmy Carter signed shortly after the Russians invaded, he makes them sound almost as if they were sacred documents. He says they are far and away the most comprehensive lethal findings ever commissioned, the equivalent of a presidential declaration of war. What makes them doubly unusual is that they were authored by that ultimate liberal and supposed critic of CIA covert operations, Jimmy Carter. Avrakotos, however, also insists that Carter had no idea he was signing such a blank check. And this would appear to be a reasonable conclusion, given the fact that ultimately the findings authorized operations that helped kill as many as 25,000 Soviet soldiers.†

  Ironically, Avrakotos says his predecessor, who authored those findings for Carter to sign, also had no intention of having them used for an all-out killing war. “They were,” he says, “quite literally written to provide the Agency with an insurance policy. My predecessor wrote it that way because he didn’t want to be left there with his dick hanging out if Carter forced him and the CIA to do stupid, counterproductive, dirty tricks in Afghanistan and Congress decided to investigate. He did it to cover his ass and his troops from Watergate-type, Nuremberg-type, Church-type attacks, and this guy is smart and he had the balls to do it.”

  Avrakotos was at the helm when most of the weapons that did the killing were funneled to the Afghans, and he says he always kept those Carter findings in his desk. “And I told everyone with me to make sure they were always there and to take copies whenever we left. They are the orders of the president of the United States until rescinded. I told our lawyers [meaning Larry Penn] never to ask for a clarification, never to ask if the findings authorized what they authorized. When the war winds down, I thought, maybe we would have need for them again. I’d hide them and keep them, but then I’m a dinosaur. To get those four findings again would take a miracle.”

  It’s easy to identify with Avrakotos’s frustration. For the first time in the Cold War, the CIA was operating with Presidential Findings that authorized the CIA to mount operations to kill Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan. Given that fact, it made little sense to claim that it was somehow legitimate to provide guerrillas with hundreds of thousands of AK-47s, tens of thousands of heavy machine guns, land mines by the thousands, not to mention millions of rounds of ammunition, all given with the explicit hope that they would be used to kill Russian soldiers—and then at the same time to claim that providing the Afghans with sniper rifles would somehow violate presidential bans on assassination plotting.

  But then, the lawyers had a different agenda than Avrakotos. They were trying to protect the Central Intelligence Agency, and they had a vivid memory of what happens in Washington when the political winds start shifting. Their job was to identify the most unfair interpretation anyone could possibly put on a covert operation. And if it could be somehow construed as prosecutable, no matter how absurd, they took the position that the Agency should back off.

  Throughout his Afghan tour, Avrakotos did things on a regular basis that could have gotten him fired had anyone chosen to barge into his arena with an eye toward prosecuting him. But then Avrakotos was not just lucky. He was brutally worldly wise, keenly aware of the internal risks he was taking. And so he always made it difficult for anyone to get him, should they try.

  He left no paper trail. He always surrounded himself with like-minded outcasts who understood and approved of his code of conduct. Above all, he became a master manipulator of the system, capable, by sheer bureaucratic skill, to take the Agency into areas others would not have thought possible.

  As Avrakotos is the first to acknowledge, however, none of the astonishing things that he was able to do later to transform the Afghan war would have been possible had it not been for Charlie Wilson. But back in the summer of 1983, Wilson didn’t look like anyone’s champion. In fact he looked like a sorry old drunk who was about to be knocked off by his own government.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson

  THE UNITED STATES

  V. CHARLES WILSON

  Wilson’s drug lawyer, Stuart Pierson, is a good-looking, virile man with enormous self-confidence. As he approached Charlie Wilson’s office in early 1983, about the last thing on his mind was the war in Afghanistan. He was a specialist in white-collar crime, and he was on a mission to rescue yet another endangered politician.

  Such lawyers are accustomed to feeling powerful as they move through the wreckage of great men’s lives. But when Pierson walked into the congressman’s office, past the gorgeous receptionists, and shook hands with the charismatic Texan, he was keenly aware of the physical difference between himself and his new client.

  Pierson is a short man, and he actually experienced a curious shrinking sensation as he dropped several inches into the cushions of the huge hand-tooled and leather-upholstered chairs that Wilson kept in front of his desk. It was ridiculous, but it quickly seemed apparent that Wilson was trying to put him in his place. The congressman remained on his feet, strutting about the room, all six foot, four inches of him, talking cheerily in that booming Texas voice, as if Pierson had dropped by for nothing more than a social visit.

  Pierson, however, sensed danger in the congressman’s aggressive state of denial and decided he had better introduce an element of reality. When Wilson finally offered him an opening by asking, “What’s the worst that can happen to me?” Pierson devastated him with his answer: “It’s not just your political career you can lose, Charlie. You could go to jail over this.” Pierson went on matter-of-factly to explain that the FBI agents were not stupid, and that they would assume that Wilson was deeply involved in a distribution network on the Hill: “A congressman who is allegedly using cocaine has to get it from someone safe. So the natural assumption of any prosecutor is that there has to be a sophisticated network.”

  In a practical sense, said Pierson, what that meant is that every employee, friend, and drinking buddy of Wilson’s would be visited by federal agents. Anyone could turn on him, for real or imagined crimes. “This is not just about Liz Wickersham’s testimony,” he said. “There are other people in your office who could hurt you.” Pierson’s physical stature was suddenly enhanced as the shaken Wilson realized that his fate might well rest in this man’s hands.

  The first thing any criminal-defense attorney does upon taking a case is to impose a damage-control mechanism to prevent the clients from getting into more trouble. But even before this meeting, Pierson had felt a particular urgency. He had been studying Wilson as a psychoanalyst might his patient, and he figured that the congressman’s performance to date had been just about as bad as it could be. When Brian Ross of NBC had cornered him with his camera crew, Wilson had made the mistake of looking like a burglar caught in the beam of a cop’s flashlight, turning on his heels and fleeing back into his hotel room.

  What had alarmed Pierson even more was how Wilson had compounded the disaster by subsequently inviting Ross into his room for an off-the-record talk, in some kind of crazed belief that he could charm his way out of his predicament. Pierson couldn’t quite understand why, after four terms in Congress and after weaving his way through so many scandals, Charlie had not simply beamed confidently at the reporter, like Ronald Reagan always did, and kept moving. Ross’s story might not even have made the evening news had Wilson handled himself like a pro.

  As far as Pierson was concerned, this client was a walking time bomb. If he was to have any chance, Wilson would have to be fenced in, and Pierson proceeded to read him the riot act. Absolutely no talking to the press. Perhaps even more important, he stressed the danger of talking to Liz Wickersham. Everything depended on her. The feds were pressuring her to testify that the congressman had been snorting cocaine. He could end up with an obstruction-of-justice charge for almost anything he said to her. The congressman was all ears now, and Pierson was not about to miss the opportunity to drive home just how grave the situation was. He warned Charlie that it was highly likely that Justice would bug his phones.

>   This was particularly terrifying news to Wilson, who suddenly remembered Chuck Cogan’s visit to his office just a few weeks earlier. Security officials had told him how easy it would be for the KGB to listen in on everything Wilson was saying merely by casting a beam onto his window.

  Soon after Pierson’s warning, window washers suddenly appeared outside the congressman’s window. The staff informed him that furniture cleaners had arrived uninvited. The whole office was reduced to near paranoia as Wilson’s intake of Scotch began assuming alarming proportions. It was at this point that the depression kicked in, so badly that some of the people around Wilson began to worry that he might kill himself. Wilson says he never even considered taking such an action. But his lawyer, Stuart Pierson, fearing that he had perhaps gone too far in arousing his client’s fears, began a massive effort to reassure Charlie. “I almost destroyed my liver on that case,” he remembered years later. “It was hard not to drink with Charlie because I quickly developed a lot of affection for him, and in any of these investigations, you have to provide comfort as well as legal advice.” The lawyer remembers those drinking and therapy sessions today almost with disbelief. Once, in the congressman’s office, he’d watched with amazement as Wilson filled a four-inch tumbler with ice and Scotch. Over the course of an hour and a half, Wilson downed a total of four of these sledgehammers.

  At first Pierson thought the alcohol was necessary—a tranquilizer for his unstable client. But then he began to worry that Wilson was in such a dangerous state of mind that he needed round-the-clock watching. That’s when Pierson discovered the loyalty of Charlie’s friends, who in the end saved the day.

  The first to impress Pierson were the Angels, who quietly took over the office, shielding Charlie from the media, doing his work for him, comforting him, and—best of all, from Pierson’s point of view—keeping their mouths shut. So did all of Charlie’s friends, starting with the most vulnerable of all, Liz Wickersham, who spoiled everything for the prosecutors by holding the line.

  Another friend with more guilty knowledge than perhaps anyone, the famous Texas author Larry King, also found himself being grilled about Charlie’s habits. King had been a wild, two-fisted drinker who had spent many years getting into all sorts of trouble carousing with Charlie, particularly during the time Justice was interested in. King had almost joined Wilson as an investor in Paul Brown’s plan to produce a soap opera with Liz Wickersham as its star.

  On the occasion of his seventh year in AA, and his seventh year of being sober, King stopped to recall his answer to the authorities who wanted to know about Charlie. “I’d like to help you,” he had told the investigators, “but just after the period in question I went into rehabilitation, and everything from that time frame is a blank.”

  It had to have been grotesquely frustrating for the feds, who ran into one stone wall after another as they deposed the congressman’s conveniently forgetful staff and friends. But then that summer they got lucky. The dragnet that had been thrown out to find the limousine driver who had taken Charlie and Liz and Paul Brown back from the airport after the Las Vegas weekend came up with its man.

  One can only imagine the excitement in the halls of the Justice Department as the investigators prepared to interrogate the driver, twenty-year-old Bill Cheshire. The young man told them he remembered the congressman well and said he would be happy to give them a deposition. Now all Justice had to do to put Wilson into a concrete cell was to get Cheshire to confirm what Brown had already told them—that the Texas congressman had snorted cocaine in the back seat of the limousine.

  While the authorities were busy laying their traps for Wilson, the congressman was busy projecting himself publicly as a man without a care in the world. For his fiftieth birthday that June he threw a party for himself on a huge boat that motored up the Potomac. When police helicopters buzzed the party ship repeatedly, flashing blinding spotlights on the deck, the startled guests assumed that the feds were checking Charlie’s party for illicit activity. No, Texas Monthly magazine reported, the police in the copters were not looking for drugs; they just wanted to “check out the female duo performing Motown songs.”

  Wilson followed this up the next month with a Fourth of July extravaganza in honor of the woman he now claimed was his one true love. The invitation read, “Charlie Wilson invites you to a birthday party for Uncle Sam and his Yankee Doodle Sweetheart, Joanne Herring.” Everyone had a grand, drunken evening watching the fireworks from his condominium terrace, unquestionably the best seat in the capital.

  All of this merrymaking, however, was a smoke screen concealing a desperate man. Wilson’s office was being held together those days only by the extraordinary efforts of the highly competent and protective Angels and his paternal administrative assistant, Charles Simpson. They made it possible for Wilson to maintain the appearance of normality. But his depressions were deepening. And as the feds closed in on him that summer, Pierson came to believe that the main drug that soothed Wilson’s nerves and kept him whole was Afghanistan. It was the only thing that allowed him to function as a man of honor on the Hill, the only thing, perhaps, that made him continue to believe that he had some self-worth. “If he hadn’t had Afghanistan, I think he probably would have jumped,” Pierson says.

  To Pierson, Wilson had seemed almost a different man after returning from Pakistan. He had immediately called a press conference to denounce the Russian’s use of “toy bombs.” At that time the press hadn’t been paying particular attention to the Soviets’ brutality, but they gave Charlie a lot of play. In spite of his drug troubles, he had managed to seize the high ground, and for a moment, at least, he was the public prosecutor, indicting the Soviets for their crimes.

  This aggressive posture carried over into Wilson’s dealings with the CIA as well, where, no matter what Chuck Cogan and the others at Langley might have thought about the endangered congressman, they always went to his office when summoned to fill him in on the latest war developments and listen stoically to his demands that they do more.

  It was actually somewhat of a miracle that Wilson was able to maneuver so effectively during this time. To the mujahideen, who flocked to his office whenever they came to Washington, Wilson was never anything but a buoyant presence, always leaving them with a sense that more help was on the way and that he personally guaranteed it.

  When General Ajaz Azim, the new Pakistani ambassador to Washington, came to call, Wilson assumed the role of his political counselor, furnishing him with explicit strategies for their common campaign to generate new funds for the Afghan struggle. The foreign minister, Yaqub Kahn, was another regular who came to seek Wilson’s help. And there were ongoing communications with Zia himself, as well as with the Israelis over the back channel and the tank-upgrade proposals.

  That was all part of what held Wilson together that summer of 1983—his plan to force the CIA and the Reagan administration to radically escalate the war in Afghanistan. As he had told Zia in April, the one obstacle that had to be overcome was Doc Long. He had to be converted, or at least neutralized.

  As chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on government operations, Clarence D. Long presided over the twelve men who doled out the State Department’s entire budget as well as all foreign military and economic assistance. Few outside the U.S. government had ever heard of him, but Chairman Long was one of the barons of the feudal world that is the U.S. Congress, and he made sure that everyone who came before his Appropriations subcommittee understood the power he held over them. He even had what he called his “golden rule” inscribed on a plaque and hung in the hearing room, to make sure there was no confusion over who was in control. It read, “Them that has the gold makes the rules.”

  As chairman, Long was so powerful that no secretary of state or U.S. official, no matter how high the post, could afford to alienate him. He was called Doc Long because he had a doctoral degree in economics from Princeton and had once been a college professor. He was also easily one of the stran
gest and most cantankerous members of Congress—so crazy in appearance that Charlie Wilson describes him as being a dead ringer for the bug-eyed crazed scientist and time traveler in the movie Back to the Future.

  As the chairman’s longtime aide Jeff Nelson explained, “It was always an ordeal for anyone to approach the chairman for anything: Doc had this horrible habit of spitting in the halls. He’d spit as we were walking, often hitting the baseboards on the wall. I remember the capital police looking the other way and just rolling their eyes.” Nelson told of one meeting when Doc summoned the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, and much of his high command to his office, where he slowly and sloppily munched on a tuna-fish sandwich while they briefed him. It was an ugly way of making a point, but Doc liked to remind the higher-ups who wrote out their checks.

  He was strange in the extreme, but highly intelligent and dangerous to anyone who crossed him. Once staffers had to pry apart Doc and David Obey, the subcommittee’s second ranking member, who were literally attempting to strangle each other.

  On the face of it, Wilson had no real reason to think he could win over Doc Long. To begin with, Doc was an ardent supporter of Israel and an equally ardent foe of human-rights violators. For that reason, he didn’t like anything about Zia. Jeff Nelson remembers Long regularly referring to the Pakistan dictator as “that greaseball.” He considered Zia’s Islamic program to be a basic violation of human rights, and he was enraged at the idea of Zia building an Islamic bomb; he saw it as a threat to Israel, and on that subject he was uncompromising. Nelson recalled his astonishment at a hearing when Long warned, “We must be wary about the reproductive rate of Muslims. It’s much faster than Jews.”

  Wilson, however, was not one to be intimidated by Doc’s theatrics. For one thing, he knew that the chairman liked him. They were both staunch supporters of Israel as well as old-fashioned anti-Communists. Beyond that, Charlie knew that Doc had a weakness that could be exploited: he happened to be extraordinarily responsive to flattery. Charlie had watched how easily the Israelis had seduced him, so effectively that Long’s aide had concluded that the main reason Doc had become so passionate about Israel was simply because the Israelis were so wildly attentive to him.