Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  The Agency’s professionals had long since become accustomed to congressional efforts to close down operations or to investigate supposed excesses. But this move of Wilson’s to force the Agency to be more provocatively aggressive blindsided everyone. Hart and Cogan had assumed they could wait out Wilson and he would eventually go away. Instead, he had simply bullied his way into their poker game and now, with his $40 million appropriation on the books, was directing them to do something that they claimed was madness. They had little choice but to try to reason with him.

  The problem Hart and the other CIA officials had in talking to Wilson in those days was that they had such radically different notions about what would constitute a victory in Afghanistan. Hart never had trouble explaining the logic behind his Afghan strategy to professionals like Louis Stokes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice chair of the Senate committee, when they came through Pakistan wondering where the growing CIA campaign was going.

  He would always begin by explaining that even if they didn’t quite see how it would all end, there were compelling reasons why the best scenario for the United States was simply more of the same. For starters, the CIA’s analysts now believed that every dollar that the United States slipped into the insurrection cost the Soviets at least ten to counter. That was the beauty of being on the right side of the guerrilla war; it’s expensive to fight men who are not afraid to die. They just go around blasting hardware and soldiers without warning—bleeding the occupiers at will.

  There was another factor. The Soviets were not using their old weapons in Afghanistan; they were deploying frontline troops along with their most sophisticated Hind helicopters, MiG fighters, and T-72 tanks—men and machinery that otherwise would be committed to the European battlefield, where as many as fifty divisions of U.S. and Soviet troops sat eyeball to eyeball. Every ruble they spent and every soldier they committed to Afghanistan was one less available for the European front.

  Beyond that, the Pentagon was ecstatic with the war booty the CIA was capturing. Whatever the Soviets were using in Afghanistan was thought to offer a window into how the Red Army would fight when the big one broke out on the NATO frontier. The Agency, on behalf of its military cousins, began offering the mujahideen huge rewards for the capture of a Hind, and even more for a KGB communications van. A million dollars was said to be the reward for one of these treasures, but the bounty was extravagant for all sorts of items. The Pentagon’s Soviet analysts seemed to have an indiscriminate appetite for everything the 40th Army used—tanks, mines, recoilless rifles, flak jackets, medical kits.

  No one in the press, and certainly no one in the U.S. government, was talking about a victory in Afghanistan. In fact, all of the media accounts continued to portray the Afghans as heroic victims, doomed to be destroyed. But Howard Hart saw things differently. Now well into his third year as the CIA’s field marshal, he felt that he was on the verge of pulling off a historic covert triumph. By that he didn’t mean a conventional victory over the Red Army. The resistance was not only intact, contrary to almost all of the experts’ predictions; it was now a genuine problem for the Soviets. Hart calculated that perhaps 400,000 Afghans had been armed in some fashion or other with CIA weapons. He would be the first to acknowledge that the mujahideen were hardly an army. They were more like a rabble-in-arms—but what a rabble. The veteran of the Khomeini humiliation sometimes had to pinch himself at the thought of having hundreds of thousands of Muslim fanatics moving about Pakistan and the Hindu Kush, all living for the moment when they could aim their CIA weapons at a Soviet infidel.

  “It was the first time the Soviets had to pay,” recalls Hart with passion. “We had watched Hungary; we had watched Czechoslovakia; we watched East Germany; each day we watched the Wall. This repulsive, repugnant machine was out there, and we finally found a place where we could get at them.”

  By the time Wilson intervened with his Oerlikon legislation, Hart figured he was riding the most ferocious beast ever to confront Communism. Hart thought of himself as facing off against the commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Kabul, and he was so confident of his long-term strategy that he would later boast, “I had him by the balls. I was killing his men and there was nothing he could do about it.” As Hart saw it, every day that the Soviets stayed in Afghanistan with their existing force levels, the United States won.

  His one consuming fear was that the Soviets would wake up and realize just how much pain the CIA and Zia were exacting and either withdraw or, more likely, escalate. As Hart saw it, he now had the war on a footing where there was simply no downside to the American involvement. The only thing looming on the horizon that could spoil it all was Wilson. The congressman was on his way back to Pakistan, and Hart decided he had no choice but to go out of channels and somehow try to reason with him.

  When Wilson arrived in Pakistan in January 1984, Hart was not even on his list of people to see. The congressman was so frustrated with the CIA that he was deliberately making an end run around it. Much to Hart’s annoyance, Wilson immediately began a round of private meetings with Akhtar and Zia, who expressed amazement and gratitude for what he and Doc Long had achieved—not just for the $40 million Afghan appropriation but for saving the entire Pakistan aid program from drastic cuts. “Mr. Wilson, you always surprise me,” declared a pleased Zia.

  Wilson’s main reason for coming, however, was to personally bring news to the Afghan rebels of the Hind-killing Oerlikons. Professor Mojadeddi had genuinely alarmed him in Washington with his grim accounts of the gunship slaughter. Wilson intended to play the role of cheerleader, talking up the miraculous new weapon in the pipeline to keep Mojadeddi and the other Afghan leaders from losing hope in the months before the Oerlikon and the other weapons could be delivered.

  It was a mission with noble intentions, but Charlie could never deny himself a bit of pleasure from even the most sensitive of his national security efforts. He had chosen for his traveling companion on this trip a five-foot-nine, Nordic blonde named Cynthia Gale Watson, whom he introduced to everyone as “Snowflake.”

  Wilson’s practice of always bringing a beautiful woman along on his foreign adventures was far more complicated than just making sure he had a romantic partner in the deserts of Islam. He thirsted for glory and respect, but his lifestyle had left him with a reputation for little more than scandal and excess. All of his remarkable feats of derring-do abroad took place in the shadows. No one at home, none of his constituents, not even anyone on his staff fully understood what a key player he was in the countries where he was now operating. Even his sister, Sharon, perhaps the most important person in the world to Charlie, had no idea what he was about. It was only on the junkets, when the brass bands came out to greet him and he was received as a statesman—in Israel, Egypt, and Pakistan—that the role he was playing in these flash points of history became public.

  But what good was it all without a witness—without someone to tell him how very wonderful he was? Charlie needed a witness to validate the experience, and this time it was Snowflake. Like most of Charlie’s loves, she was a beauty queen, the former Miss Northern Hemisphere, a farm girl from Minnesota who could plow a field, break a horse, make her own clothes, and run faster than any woman in the state, and who now, at twenty-eight, dreamed of becoming a movie star. Most important, she was a good American girl, filled with enthusiasm and a sense of wonder at this man who was performing miracles, not only for her but for his country.

  Snowflake fell into her part effortlessly, weeping over the wounded mujahideen at the Red Cross hospital, watching her hero give blood for the freedom fighters, walking arm in arm with Charlie through a sea of refugees as little children sang him their song of the jihad. All of this was just boilerplate for Wilson, who had come to Peshawar to meet “with the seven tribes,” as he explained to Snowflake. “There are seven ruling leaders. They all banded together to fight this war, and they’re coming to meet with me to see if they can get some ar
ms.”

  Snowflake was thrilled when Charlie told her she could sit in on the war meetings. Not wanting to offend the fundamentalist warriors, she went to great lengths to dress conservatively—in a pink nylon jumpsuit with a zipper straight down the front. She even braided her hair and wore combat boots, feeling that a “semimilitary” outfit would put the visitors more at ease.

  The first of the mujahideen leaders to arrive in Charlie’s room, the engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was biblical in appearance, with his long, black beard and turban. He was then only thirty-eight, but there was a timeless air to him, an almost feline quality and a gentleness to his manner and speech. Even at that early moment in the war he awed his fellow mujahideen as the most ruthless and uncompromising of them all.

  Gulbuddin was the darling of Zia and the Pakistan intelligence service. Like other mujahideen leaders, he had been working with the ISI since the early 1970s, when Pakistan had begun secretly backing fundamentalist students at the University of Kabul who were rebelling against Soviet influence in the Afghan government. Back then Gulbuddin was very much a part of the emerging global wave of Islamic radicalism, opposed to any attempts at altering fundamental tenants of the faith. By all accounts, he was responsible for the practice of throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who failed to cover themselves properly.

  The Red Army had a legend of its own about Gulbuddin. To the Soviets he was the bogeyman behind the most unspeakable torture of their captured soldiers. Invariably his name was invoked with new arrivals to keep them from wandering off base unaccompanied, lest they fall into the hands of this depraved fanatic whose specialty, they claimed, was skinning infidels alive.

  Gulbuddin’s reputation would grow to such sinister proportions by the latter part of the war that many U.S. newsmen would almost agree with the Soviets in comparing him to Khomeini and would accuse the CIA of backing the wrong horse. He ran his Hezb-i-Islami organization like the Communist Party, with utter ruthlessness. Nevertheless, Gulbuddin was the “freedom fighter” whom Charlie Fawcett and then Joanne Herring had come to know and love when they had made the movie Courage Is Our Weapon. And Charlie Wilson was fascinated with him because he had heard that Gulbuddin could kill Soviets like no other. Furthermore, Wilson had a specific question for the engineer that he wanted to put to him without the CIA’s knowledge.

  That New Year in Peshawar, into the lobby of the Pearl Intercontinental Hotel swept Gulbuddin and his entourage—a tall figure in white with five bodyguards carrying AK-47s. Up to Wilson’s suite he strode, the ascetic fundamentalist holy warrior finally coming face-to-face with his American patron. As if on cue Cynthia Gale emerged from the congressman’s adjoining room in her pink jumpsuit, her hand thrust out in greeting: “Pleased to meet you.”

  What could the engineer possibly have been thinking? By his Muslim standards, Snowflake was half naked. Whatever his reaction, Gulbuddin’s face remained neutral, almost benign, as he and the congressman began to talk.

  “It was just very, very exciting to be in that room with those men with their huge white teeth,” remembers Snowflake. “It was very clandestine. There was this secretive feel to it.” To her Gulbuddin, as well as all the other Afghans who visited the suite that night, looked on Charlie as “the great god that was going to save their lives.”

  This last observation would doubtless have come as a particular surprise to Gulbuddin, that disciplined worshipper of Allah, the one and only true god. Seven years later he would reveal just how much he appreciated all that Charlie and the United States had done for the jihad by siding with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. But that evening in Peshawar, sitting with the Texas congressman and his blasphemous traveling companion, Gulbuddin was all smiles.

  Wilson began by telling the commander about the Oerlikons and the flood of more and better weapons soon to come. Then he put his question to the engineer: the congressman had certain important contacts with the Israelis, but the CIA was giving him no end of trouble on his proposal to take advantage of a significant opportunity. If Wilson could get the Americans to buy Soviet weapons that the Israelis had captured from the PLO, would Hekmatyar have any trouble accepting them?

  “We take Russian weapons from dead Russians to use against them—I don’t see why we can’t take them from the Israelis,” replied the engineer wryly. In fact, Gulbuddin seemed to have no problem with the origin of any weapons for the jihad. “Allah has many mysterious ways of providing for his faithful,” he said.

  Wilson was delighted. He resolved right then to disregard the CIA’s objections and ratchet up his efforts to pressure the Agency to buy the PLO weapons and fund the Charlie Horse.

  The next Afghan to find himself face-to-face with Snowflake that night was Professor Mojadeddi, the mujahideen leader Charlie had taken to meet Bill Casey at the White House. The small professor was surrounded by an even more menacing band of bodyguards than Gulbuddin had brought with him. “Do they really have to worry that much about the Soviets trying to kill them?” Wilson asked a Pakistan ISI man later. “It’s not the Soviets they’re worried about,” the man said matter-of-factly. “It’s each other. They’re all trying to keep from being killed by their rivals.”

  Howard Hart would have choked had he witnessed the comic opera of Wilson and Snowflake that evening—singing the praises of the Oerlikons, suggesting to the fundamentalists that they link up with Israel, and then asking that hopelessly naive question about the bodyguards. It would only have confirmed Hart’s conviction that Wilson didn’t have a clue as to whom he was dealing with.

  Hart understood that, like most Americans who’d discovered the Afghan war, Wilson was in the initial stages of unconditional adulation. Typically that meant seeing the mujahideen as pure of heart, brave, intensely religious, and worthy of total support. Like all newcomers, Wilson appeared even to have embraced the fantasy that these tribesmen could weld themselves into a single unified resistance.

  Hart had gone down this path himself, but that had been long ago. “Akhtar and I used to sit around talking about how nice it would be if they could create the equivalent of the Free French and find themselves an Akbar de Gaulle,” remembers Hart. “But the Afghans are hardly a people, much less a nation. They are a nation of tribes constantly at war with each other. They are very heterogeneous, with an extreme ethnocentricity which makes them not only hate or suspect foreigners but Afghans living two valleys away.”

  Hart had made his peace with this profound flaw in the Afghans and had even come to believe that a large part of their potency as a guerrilla force came from the fact that they were disunited. It made it hard for them to coordinate their military activities, but it also meant that there was no single leader whose head could be cut off to destroy the insurgency. In fact, there was no centralized anything except a distribution system for weapons and support that, in utter frustration, the Pakistanis had finally created to impart some measure of organization and control.

  The ISI, with the consent of the CIA, had chosen seven leaders from a mob of heroic chieftains. To a certain extent, the power of the seven and their respective political parties was a creation of Pakistan intelligence. The desperate mujahideen were told that in order to get weapons, food, medical supplies, training, or assistance for their families, they had to join one of these authorized groups. So began the only form of unity that would exist in this war. It was just an illusion, however, and the only thing that kept the Afghans from one another’s throats was their common hatred of the Soviet infidel and hence the need to restrain their tribal fighting in order to retain access to the weapons and money that the CIA was making available to them.

  This would become frighteningly clear in 1989, just weeks after the Red Army’s withdrawal, when Gulbuddin’s commanders in the Helmand Valley would trick a delegation of Massoud’s warriors into negotiating. They guaranteed them safe passage, even swearing on a Koran that they would honor this commitment. But once the trusting Tajiks came into the Pashtuns’ territory, they were
set upon, tortured, and killed. What Hart knew well, even back in 1984, was that there was a cruel and disturbing side to the Afghans.

  Which is not to say that Howard Hart did not feel deeply about his clients and their cause. Like everyone else, he had been swept up by it. But he put limits on his emotional attachments. Professional detachment was necessary to play “the Great Game” effectively. All seasoned commanders are faced with the need in war to sacrifice one flank in a feint, or to lose an entire unit, if necessary, for the good of the whole. To Hart and the CIA, the mujahideen had become a division, albeit a strange and unpredictable division, in a much larger struggle against the advancing Soviet empire. The station chief’s task in Afghanistan was to keep the mujahideen in the field, to give them enough so that they could hope for victory but not enough to endanger the larger goals of the United States.

  Above all else, the head of the Islamabad station prided himself on being a realist, and there were profound limits to what was possible in Afghanistan. For him and his Agency, the central reality was that the Red Army did not lose wars. Not since 1921, when the Treaty of Riga had ended the Russo-Polish War and ceded Russian land to Poland, had the Soviets been forced from territory they had paid for in blood. Afghanistan would not be another Vietnam. The Soviets didn’t operate with the same restraints as the Americans. There was no horde of journalists and politicians questioning every military action. Just across the border from the mujahideen camps and the great refugee centers in Pakistan, the Soviets were busy carpet bombing villages, poisoning wells, killing livestock, causing over half the Afghan population to flee their homes. Perhaps it wasn’t yet genocide, but the Red Army was capable of almost anything.