Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  After this incident, Joanne and Charlie Fawcett decided they had to rescue Charlie from the bottle. Together they composed an anonymous note “from a true admirer who only wants to see you realize your destiny.” “Alcohol is going to ruin you,” it warned. “For your own good and for the country, you must stop.” Together they took this anonymous communiqué and slipped it into Charlie’s mailbox—a touching gesture that didn’t seem to have any impact at all.

  In spite of her concerns, Joanne stood by her man and single-handedly raised close to $50,000. In all, the congressman pulled in an amazing $600,000—an astounding sum for a primary campaign in a depressed rural district where the local contributions totaled a mere $20,000.

  His war chest notwithstanding, Wilson was running scared. His chief opponent, Jerry Johnson, was precisely the kind of candidate one would expect the voters of the Bible Belt to support. A fifty-year-old rancher and family man, he was a deacon and Sunday school teacher at a Baptist church. “Unlike the incumbent,” his political ads promised, “I won’t go into the Washington real estate and nightclub business and forget where I come from and who I’m working for. He’s forgotten that we didn’t elect him to sightsee the Khyber Pass and sit with Moslem refugees.”

  The other opponents, like Lloyd Dickens, echoed the same theme of ridding the district of an embarrassment: “Charlie Wilson has shown that he is against the concept of the American family, from his Playboy lifestyle to his pro-abortion stand.”

  As Election Day approached, the polls weren’t improving, but somehow Wilson seemed to pull himself together. Something seemed to be energizing him. It was a dream—a recurring dream that began coming to him almost nightly. It always began the same way, in an Afghan village where four or five Hind gunships are sweeping in low. A young Afghan boy and a couple of men in baggy pants are firing frantically with their rifles and pistols, but their bullets bounce off the armored bellies. And then, as in a movie close-up, the pilot’s Slavic face comes menacingly into focus, leering as he opens fire with his guns, mowing down the villagers.

  It was a nightmare, but to Charlie Wilson it always seemed real—as if he were there in that village night after night, watching those brave men being murdered in cold blood. Instead of feeling haunted, somehow he almost welcomed its nightly arrival. It seemed to cleanse him and leave him feeling that there was a reason why he should win this election.

  The slaughter in Afghanistan was at its peak that spring. With the knowledge that his own government was not willing to give the Afghans a weapon that could protect or at least avenge them, Wilson would wake from the dream energized, thinking, “What am I going to do to those fuckers tomorrow?” And by “those fuckers,” he didn’t mean the Soviet pilots. He meant the polished bureaucrats in Washington.

  He began calling Langley from his mobile campaign office the day after the dream first came to him in Texas. “You just don’t give a fuck about the Afghans, do you?” he found himself shouting in frustration at Chuck Cogan. When the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon, tried to argue once again that an escalation would be dangerous to Pakistan, Wilson cut him off: “As long as Zia’s not afraid, that’s not your concern, John.”

  When Wilson demanded a timetable for the Oerlikons, McMahon would only say, “Keep your britches on, we’re working on it.” When Wilson got through to Casey, the director would fob him off with sympathetic words: “I hear you, I hear you. Get back to me in a few days if nothing happens.”

  Once when Wilson was particularly incensed, he reached a surly General Stillwell at the Pentagon, who told him that the Oerlikons were the wrong weapon and that the CIA shouldn’t even be running the war if it was going to get that big. Wilson’s response caught the powerful general by surprise. “If I remember correctly,” Stillwell recalled years later, “the congressman said something like he was going to put my pelt on his wall if I kept up my opposition.”

  The reason the CIA and their allies in the Pentagon and elsewhere were prepared to risk Wilson’s fury was because they were counting on the voters of the Second Congressional District to rid them of this meddlesome politician. Given the accumulated scandals, it seemed inconceivable that his constituents would return such a persistent sinner to office.

  But in the final days of the Wilson campaign, something noticeable began to happen. It had to do with an atmosphere around him. Anyone who studies television knows that it is less important what a person says on TV than how he projects himself. Afghanistan wasn’t an issue in the campaign, but something about the way Charlie felt about the cause of Afghanistan and his mission there burned so brightly inside him that it made him look as if he had been “born again.” He may not have found God, but Charlie Wilson’s constituents could see that his needle was once again pointing north.

  On primary night everyone who counted in Charlie’s life gathered at his house on Crooked Creek—his mother and sister, staffers and friends. Charles Fawcett and Joanne added a touch of glamour by driving in from River Oaks in an exotic recreational vehicle that had been a gift to Fawcett from the king of Morocco. The house was full of friends, but there was, among them all, a sense that this might be Charlie’s Waterloo, particularly when disastrous early returns from Nacogdoches came in: Jerry Johnson, the Sunday school teacher, had swept the county.

  A concerned Charlie Fawcett took Wilson aside to try to cheer him up: “That doesn’t mean a thing, Charlie—you can be far more effective for the mujahideen out of Congress than in.” Wilson was horrified by this well-meaning pep talk. The fact was that he would be utterly useless to the mujahideen if he lost. In fact, he didn’t really know what value he could be to anyone.

  Arthur Temple, the timber baron who had been Charlie’s political patron since he’d first gone into politics, sat Buddha-like and disapproving as he watched the election reports. Temple was a kind of surrogate father to Charlie, an influential businessman and progressive reformer who had once believed that Charlie could go all the way to the top. Even Charlie’s mother looked concerned. She had been by his side ever since he first ran for office, campaigning at teas and going door-to-door like the Kennedy women. What was there to say to her now except that he had brought this ruin down upon himself? Finding it too trying to put on a brave face, Charlie asked Joanne to come with him into the bedroom. “He told me things didn’t look good,” she remembered. “I just told him he was wonderful. He was a real hero to me.”

  When all seemed lost, the tide began slowly to turn. By the end of the night, the tally stood at 55 percent for Wilson, 45 percent divided between the four others. Miraculously, at his lowest moment, Charlie had found his moorings. He hadn’t told his born-again constituents that he wanted their vote so that he could save the Afghans or even because he wanted to do in the Evil Empire. He hadn’t had to. Whatever it was about him, they liked what they saw. He was there to stay, with all his seniority and unsettling allies. And when he returned to the capital two days later, all his pent-up energy was turned on Langley.

  At this very moment, Gust Avrakotos’s fortunes were also shifting. He had managed to win himself a powerful new patron. Ed Juchniewicz (pronounced Gin-oh-witz) was Clair George’s number two man, the associate deputy director for Operations. Like Gust, Juchniewicz was not part of the Agency’s old-boy elite. He was a second-generation American whose father had been born in Poland. A former marine, he had spent most of his first twenty years at the CIA in the Soviet division. Juchniewicz was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist hater, and by 1984 he was the second most important man in the Clandestine Services. Day in, day out, his primary responsibility was selecting officers for the division’s key assignments, but when Clair George was out of town he served as deputy director for Operations. He could be a powerful friend, and his thinking ran very differently from that of Chuck Cogan and the rest of the seventh floor.

  Juchniewicz didn’t like the idea of a wasting action in Afghanistan. No doubt because of his own family history, he responded personally to the plight of people
enslaved by Communism. He had been to the mujahideen training camps near the Afghan border, had sat with the elders, and watched shoeless young boys preparing to go fight the Red Army. His response was understandably moralistic, from a man whose father’s homeland was behind the Iron Curtain: “How in Christ’s name could you send these guys into battle and say, You don’t have much of a chance, but do your best. That is despicable.”

  Juchniewicz had watched Avrakotos take command of the Afghan account with growing admiration and then cheerleading. Gust was only the acting chief, but he was playing as if he were there for the long haul.

  While Wilson had appeared to be going down and out in East Texas, the Soviets had gone on the attack. There were scenes that spring in Afghanistan of military striking power not witnessed in the world since Vietnam. Great clouds of dust rose as the 40th Army marched twenty thousand troops into the Panjshir Valley to finish off Massoud once and for all.

  Unlike earlier campaigns, these Soviet troops were highly trained and motivated. They rode into battle in tanks and armored personnel carriers, with MiGs and helicopter gunships overhead providing close air support. Any previous distinction that the Soviet command might have made between the mujahideen and the civilian population that provided assistance of any kind suddenly disappeared as silver-bodied Tu-16s operating from bases in the Soviet Union began carpet bombing even primitive mud-walled villages where the mujahideen might have received support.

  At Langley, Avrakotos was not surprised. He had been waiting for the escalation, knowing that the Agency had been egging it on. As he saw it, the Soviets had no choice. Given their mentality, they couldn’t let a bunch of ragheads openly defy them. The 40th Army was now moving to crush the resistance, and Avrakotos took the position they might just succeed if the Agency didn’t start playing tough.

  It was precisely because of Avrakotos’s killer approach to the job that Juchniewicz became his advocate. He had become angry at the way the war was being run. “The Paks were in charge of everything, running the whole show, and I said, ‘That’s bullshit. We want to help plan battles, want to look at the kind of training they’re getting.’” So Juchniewicz went to the director and said that Afghanistan was going nowhere and that the Agency had to get tougher. According to him the director said, “Go ahead, make your call, you’re in charge.”

  That simple statement of Casey’s is the kind of murky opening that men like Juchniewicz and Avrakotos are wont to take advantage of. One day when Clair George was out of the country and Juchniewicz was the acting chief, Avrakotos burst into the ADDO’s office with a challenge: “It’s been almost a year that I’ve been helping McGaffin as acting chief, and the rule is that if you have the job for three months and you want it, you get it. I want it. Unless you want another fucker in here who just follows orders.”

  Juchniewicz was not the kind of man who was ruffled by such a presentation. “You’re right,” he responded. “I’m going to do it. I shouldn’t, but Clair’s gone.” Chuck Cogan was reportedly appalled and tried to challenge the appointment. According to Avrakotos, Juchniewicz silenced Cogan with a communiqué of unusual clarity: “Higher authority wants a mean fucker in the job.”

  Juchniewicz had the technical authority to make this appointment, but given Avrakotos’s intensely complicated history with Clair George, it had required some guts. Now, unless George was prepared to overrule his deputy, it was a fait accompli. Recalling that moment, Juchniewicz observed that his boss was furious but somehow compromised in his ability to challenge the appointment. “Clair had a secret admiration for Gust from their time together in Athens. People didn’t understand the depth of their relationship. But it was one of those love-hate relationships.” He says the two had had a falling out over something that no one fully understood. “In my own heart I always felt Gust had something on Clair, something he knew about Clair himself or about the family. Clair didn’t like that. Gust would never betray a trust or confidence, but Clair couldn’t stand it.”

  According to one account, George spent the better part of fifteen minutes shouting at Juchniewicz until the deputy said that he had already spoken to Casey and McMahon about Gust and they thought his appointment was a good idea. Perhaps George should check with them, he said, knowing that was about the last thing George would want to do.

  In the end, the DDO chose not to overturn the decision and instead congratulated Gust, saying that he was happy to have been able to do it for him. Avrakotos, who knew exactly what George had been doing, played along. Why not? He now had the job.

  Part of the pleasure of that circumstance involved watching his rival, Alan Fiers, slowly self-destructing. Denied Afghanistan, Fiers would end up in charge of the Contra war, which would soon be outlawed by Congress. He would play a role on the fringes of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme. Finally, it would be his fate to become the Clandestine Service’s first Judas. Faced with near-certain imprisonment for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, Fiers would take the special prosecutor’s offer of immunity if he told all. In a courtroom filled with former brothers of the Clandestine Service, a weeping Alan Fiers would give the testimony that would doom his old chief, Clair George.

  Juchniewicz would later look back on his act of bureaucratic daring and say that pushing Fiers aside and gambling on Avrakotos might well have been his most prescient decision in a long CIA career.

  By the time Avrakotos had maneuvered himself into his new post, Charlie Wilson and the CIA were in a virtual state of war. What would soon become clear to Avrakotos is that Wilson had the will and the ability to win. That first came into focus at Langley when Wilson drew on his real strength, the power to punish. He called Jim Van Wagenen, the Defense Appropriations staffer responsible for black programs and asked, “What are the CIA’s crown jewels?” Recognizing the veiled threat in the question, Van Wagenen sprang into action, informing John McMahon that Wilson was going to go after the Agency’s pet programs if they didn’t back off. The staffer made it clear that Wilson enjoyed the support of the full subcommittee on this one and that the Agency was now on the verge of alienating those very legislators on whom they relied for money.

  Wilson even managed to make the CIA believe he would go after crown jewel number one, the Contra war in Nicaragua. “I’m sure I implied that I might go over to the other side on the Contras,” admits Wilson somewhat sheepishly, because it would have been a bold defection from the anti-Communist camp. “But at that point I was willing to do anything I could to embarrass them. I probably threatened them well beyond what I could have done, but I always try to make people think I’m a little crazy.”

  This, of course, is the madman theory of how power is best exercised, the notion that a reputation for unpredictability and excessive use of force makes threats more effective. It’s worth noting that Wilson was making these rumblings at a time when the Democratic majority in the House had already mobilized against the CIA because of Nicaragua. Had the hawkish Wilson taken his conservative following and made common cause with the opposition, it might well have been a rout for the Agency.

  In retrospect, Wilson acknowledges that this debate over the Oerlikon, a weapon that ultimately proved to be of marginal value, was really not about the weapon itself. It was about his personal march, under the aegis of the U.S. Congress, onto the seventh floor of Langley to force the Agency into a bigger war than it wanted to fight. As he sees it now, this bureaucratic battle in 1984 was the defining moment of the Afghan war. Every other tactical decision to escalate, including the introduction of the American Stingers two years later, followed from it.

  “They were offended to the point of despair and they weren’t going to let it happen,” remembers Wilson. “But I knew there was no point to this war if you couldn’t shoot down the helicopters. They wanted to fight to the last Afghan and not expose the United States to any risk at all. But I didn’t have any interest in killing a million Afghans to cause the Russians some mild embarrassment, and it still absolute
ly enrages me to think of it.”

  Wilson and the Agency’s seventh floor were now locked in a dangerous confrontation that Avrakotos likened to a bureaucratic “Showdown at the O.K. Corral.” And he knew that the first thing to suffer would be his Afghan budget. Director Casey was also beginning to sense danger—so much so that he asked Avrakotos to explain what Cogan had been saying to Wilson and what might be done to defuse the situation.

  Avrakotos was typically blunt: “If you didn’t know better you’d say Cogan was working for the Soviets,” he told the director. This was mutually understood hyperbole, and he then explained that he couldn’t understand why the Agency wanted to pick a fight with Wilson. “Buy the Oerlikon, see if the gun works,” he urged Casey. “We’re pissing all over our friends. “

  The director was famous for the way he would often mumble in such moments, so that it was hard to know what he was saying. Avrakotos interpreted the mutter as a go-ahead to take independent action. “In that game on the seventh floor, if the director hints at something, that’s a green light,” he explained. “No one was going to question me.”

  Avrakotos was never one to wait for written instructions. He was a patriot, but he drew his operational inspiration from the Janissaries, the elite warriors of the old Ottoman emperors. “You’re a Janissary when you play your own game—when no one knows what the rules are,” he explains. “And once you get a band of adventurers working for you, it’s a bit much to expect they won’t have some adventures of their own.” So with that mumble from Casey the modern Janissary moved into action.

  As a boy in Aliquippa, Gust’s favorite game was playing chicken in the dead of night on the long empty roadways next to the steel mills. All the high school girls and their boyfriends would come out and stand by the side of the road to watch these feats of daring. Two cars would face each other in the same lane a quarter of a mile apart, then accelerate from a dead start to maximum speed. The first to blink, to veer off into the other lane, would be the chicken.