by George Crile
Just being in Cashion’s hospital made him feel better. He recalls his pleasure the first night when a waiter arrived in a black tuxedo to offer him a choice of six entrées. The waiter also said he could arrange for wine and cocktails for the congressman’s guests. This was the kind of healing atmosphere that Wilson could identify with.
The next day Cashion told him they would be taking a piece of his heart out with a procedure that would start in his jugular. For the first time, Charlie began to realize there might not be any good news at the end of this story, and he began to put in calls to all of his closest women friends—Sweetums, Snowflake, the Israeli dancer Ziva, and Trish. Guardedly he asked one after another, “Will things be okay? Can they be like they always were if I’m not drinking anymore?” Curiously, he thought that without alcohol, he wouldn’t be good company.
Charlie Schnabel, who witnessed this performance, remembered Wilson’s relief after discovering that his girlfriends wouldn’t desert him if he had to go on the wagon.
A cable from the station in Paris had alerted Gust to the problem: “Wish to inform headquarters that Congressman Wilson appears to have suffered a heart attack.” Avrakotos had been in the cafeteria when Deputy Director John McMahon paged him to come up to the seventh floor to read the cable. He recalls, “When I walked in, McMahon said, ‘It may be serious. In fact, he may not make it. Did you know he was an Annapolis graduate?’ And then McMahon added, ‘It sure would be a bad day for us if we lost him.’”
Over the next few days, as Wilson made his way back across the Atlantic and into the military hospital in Bethesda, Avrakotos suddenly came to feel almost alone and exposed. To a certain extent he had thought of himself as the architect of the conspiracy with Wilson, but now he was forced to recognize that without Charlie, he might still be the pariah of the Directorate of Operations, roaming the halls without purpose.
The program was the first thing Gust thought about. The Agency was now committed to pushing the Soviets out “by all means available.” Everything depended on sustaining congressional funding. As he articulated it years later, it was a frightening bottom-line concern: “How the fuck do you get more money for the program if Charlie’s gone? But the other bottom line I discovered was that I didn’t want to lose this friend.”
That was the discovery that caught the tough Aliquippan by surprise. The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered that he actually loved Charlie Wilson. “He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking congressmen in the last forty years have gone to bat publicly to get the CIA more money? That made him unique. Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, when the Cold War was one big fucking goatfuck, no one was publicly calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatemala or Cuba or anywhere.”
Avrakotos now recognized what Wilson had done for and meant to him. Mainly he realized that Charlie had given him legitimacy. For twenty-three years he had served in the shadows, never recognized outside of his bureaucracy and even there shunned as a kind of thug and outsider. But now, in large measure because of Wilson’s patronage, Gust had been inducted into the CIA’s most celebrated inner circle—the career executive service, one of perhaps forty officers from the Clandestine Services to be so recognized.
It had been a long trek for this roughneck from Pennsylvania. Gust Avrakotos, a Greek beer distributor’s son, could eat in the executive dining room with the Ivy Leaguers and Mr. Casey. Charlie had not just given his career a gigantic boost, he had made him feel like he belonged. The glamorous congressman with all the girls and all the power had also reached out and touched him as a friend, and it meant everything to Gust. “I was honorable in Charlie’s eyes. Charlie really liked me, and I can’t say that about many people.”
From his hospital bed, Wilson made the first move with a call to Gust’s secret number and a question that immediately made Avrakotos feel much better. “Gus,” Charlie asked (he still hadn’t learned that there was a t at the end of the agent’s first name), “how many planes have you shot down today?”
“I’ll be right over,” Avrakotos responded, not minding in the least the mauling of his name. As always, Avrakotos wasn’t authorized to visit a member of Congress without prior approval and then only with a CIA nanny present; the trek to Bethesda Naval Hospital was yet another trip off the reservation.
Instinctively he understood that Wilson would not want conventional sympathy. And so he appeared at Charlie’s bedside with a giant bottle of Scotch, a package of condoms, and, most important, a stunning secret satellite photograph. “You didn’t see this, Charlie,” he began.
Wilson was genuinely lifted by the satellite photograph, which revealed what had just happened at the Shindand air base in Afghanistan. Fifteen Soviet MiGs destroyed on the runway, the damage visible in explicit and stunning detail. Best of all was the story Gust told Charlie about what had happened. It might as well have been a scene out of the movie Rambo, as Gust explained it. The Afghans, armed with satchel charges, had slipped onto the base, fixed the charges, and destroyed fifteen fighter jets on the ground. The photograph was so clear that it showed wings and twisted metal on the runway, and Gust boasted that this little act of mujahideen daring had cost the Kremlin at least $150 million. “We got our money back on that one hit alone,” he told Wilson.
Later John McMahon arrived at the hospital room proudly bearing the same strictly classified picture to cheer Charlie up. McMahon, however, had Office of Security agents clear the room first. To Avrakotos’s enormous relief, Wilson did not blow his cover by admitting that he had already seen the photo.
Charlie’s hospital room was witness to any number of strange visitors that June, not just CIA friends but Pakistani and Egyptian ambassadors bringing personal greetings from Dictator Zia and Defense Minister Abu Ghazala. Charlie’s sister, Sharon, was in the room one day when Sweetums, Trish, and Ziva all appeared at the same time. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack,” recalled Sharon. “It was a bit awkward,” Charlie remembers, “but it raised my prestige on the floor considerably.”
But mostly, for this bigger-than-life character suddenly laid low and struggling to breathe, it was a time of desperation. Curiously, Wilson turned his concerns away from his own condition and instead found himself preoccupied by the fate of the Afghans. “I’d lay in the bed and think about those helicopters and I worried that maybe Dr. Doom was right,” he says. “I worried that without me, Gust would lose his edge at Langley, that the money would dry up, that Cogan would be made director of the CIA, that Helman would become secretary of state.” Wilson had always romanticized the Afghans, but with his own fate so much in jeopardy, he came to see the mujahideen’s war as almost a holy cause. “To me they were just these mythical heroes who were totally good and who somehow might change the world. And I just felt that if I died they would die as well.”
Then came the miracle. In Houston, Dr. Cashion, the eighth specialist Wilson had sought out, announced that there was hope. “He said if I stopped drinking, I had a thirty-three and a third chance of getting well, the same chance of staying like I was, and a thirty-three and a third chance of deteriorating.” To a man who had been living with what amounted to a death sentence, this was not just a stay of execution. As he walked out of the hospital he felt overwhelmed with a sense that he had been given a reprieve for a purpose. “It was a beautiful day at the end of June and I remember thinking, You’ll never have another drink. I always figured I had nine lives, but this time I realized I’d better really go after what I wanted. I thought, Well, let’s just put all our energy and thought into our little project in the Hindu Kush.”
Something deep was now stirring in Charlie Wilson. “You always have religious thoughts when you come face-to-face with your mortality,” he says. “I felt at peace with what I’d done with my life because, even in my darkest days of alcohol abuse, I’d never neglected my constituents, never for a minute.
But that day I left the hospital, I really felt I had been given a new lease on life and all my energies would be channeled into really draining the last drop of Russian blood out of Afghanistan. I was still thinking there had to be a way to shoot down those fucking helicopters, and I was going to find it.” It was an altogether new Charlie Wilson who arrived back at his office to pick up where he had left off.
CHAPTER 27
Charlie Schnabel and Friends
CHARLIE’S IRREGULARS
For Avrakotos, there was something slightly unnerving about Wilson’s miraculous recovery. It would be another eighteen months before Charlie took a drink, and for the first time in his adult life he was soberly focused. Schnabel had ordered all alcohol removed from the congressman’s house in Texas, from the condo in Arlington, and from the offices on the Hill. But for once it wasn’t necessary. Wilson was observing his own ban, and it was transforming his mood.
Each morning he would take the members’ underground subway from his Rayburn office to the Capitol, striding past the security guards into the sealed room under the dome where the CIA provides a copy of the national intelligence daily brief for members with the highest security clearances. Charlie was usually the only congressman present as he poured through the Agency’s most up-to-date intelligence on battles and Soviet casualties.
There were times when Gust found it almost intimidating to brief his revived patron. Wilson was acting like a man with little time left, particularly frustrated that his Oerlikons were still not in action, and always asking the question Avrakotos hated to answer: “How many Hinds have you shot down this week?”
“It takes time Charlie,” Gust would begin before launching into Vickers’s standard refrain. “It’s the mix that’s important. And you’ve got to teach the mujahideen how to use these weapons.” But Wilson wasn’t willing to let it go at that. He had full confidence in Avrakotos, but Afghanistan had been a journey of discovery for him. By the fall of 1985 he had come to know that the CIA was not the only force he could call on. He had learned that his influence on Appropriations gave him the ability to run his own operations should he sense an opportunity. That’s where Charlie Schnabel came into the picture.
By that time Schanbel had become Wilson’s envoy to an assortment of odd characters who made up the American Afghan lobby. The tendency is to call them right-wingers, but they really defied labeling, with views even more extreme than Gordon Humphrey’s. Wilson thought they were all a bit crazy but potentially useful, as long as he didn’t have to deal with them personally. Schnabel made that possible since all of them seemed to feel a kindred spirit for the “other” Charlie. Just weeks after Wilson got out of the hospital, Schnabel urged the congressman to meet with one of these people.
Vaughn Forest was an obscure and somewhat abrasive aide to a little-known congressman. He was not the sort of man who instills trust in most politicians, but Wilson was intrigued when Schnabel explained that this former Florida cop and Vietnam Special Forces medic had just returned from a monthlong trek into the Afghan war zone. As an aide to Florida congressman Bill McCollum, he'd been well aware that the U.S. government absolutely prohibited any of its employees from crossing into the war zone with the mujahideen. But that kind of rule-breaking zeal appealed to Wilson, and he graciously agreed to a meeting.
Forest’s route to Afghanistan, like that of so many of the Americans who would become infatuated with the mujahideen’s cause, was a curious one. It had grown out of a passionate Catholicism that had caused him to spend his vacations providing humanitarian assistance to war refugees in Central America.
To his enormous surprise, in 1984 this work came to the attention of a group of Catholics, who invited him to join the ancient order of the Knights of Malta. At a ceremony in Washington, the famed trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams performed the ritual induction, forever altering Forest’s life. According to legend, the original knights had been crusaders from noble families. To Forest, it was as if he had been ordained by some mystical power to fulfill the obligations of this exalted order, which called on its knights to devote their lives to rescuing those in distress.
It was this new commission that caused him to fly to Pakistan on his vacation to contact the mujahideen, and then to walk over the mountains with one of their bands for a month of fighting. Vickers’s new flood of weapons had not yet made it through the pipeline, and Forest, who knew nothing of the program under way, was appalled by the way the Afghans were being armed and supported.
Drawing on his Vietnam experience, he began preparing his own detailed plans for revamping everything. On the way home he stopped in Rome to visit the headquarters of the Knights of Malta. The headquarters, which is located on two acres of sovereign territory near the Spanish steps in Rome, is actually a country, the smallest in the world and the only one with a front door. Forest had been a bit disappointed by the building’s fading architectural features, but he emerged from his meeting there with the name of a fellow knight whom he was told might be of use to him. Back in Washington, from his desk in the overcrowded Longworth Building congressional office, he called the number he had been given. “Hello, this is Vaughn Forest,” he said. “I believe the grand mufti of Rome wrote to Director Casey about me. Is he in?”
Forest heard a muffled voice saying, “Tell him to come out.” He was an anonymous aide to a congressman who served on no committee dealing with intelligence or foreign affairs. He had no realistic way of gaining access to William Casey, America’s spy chief, but suddenly and effortlessly Vaughn Forest found himself seated in the director’s office talking knight-to-knight.
This kind of experience can do strange things to an enthusiast like Vaughn Forest. Casey flattered him and applauded the young man’s interest and then passed him on to another good Catholic, Ed Juchniewicz, the associate deputy director for Operations. Juchniewicz says he liked Forest, took him seriously. “Let’s face it, he was an extreme right-winger,” Juchniewicz recalls. “But here was a kid with all of the best intentions. He wanted to help and he had all the right credentials as far as Casey was concerned. So I spent some time with him and found he had a lot of neat ideas.”
The truth was, Vaughn Forest managed to rub just about everyone else in the Agency the wrong way. Avrakotos, who was asked to see him, recalls, “He was a real odd bird, plus what he had to say was really off-the-wall.” But now, thanks to Charlie Schnabel’s recommendation, this persistent knight was sitting in Charlie Wilson’s office, and the congressman liked what he was hearing.
Forest explained that after returning from Afghanistan he had scoured the bureaucracy to find out if anyone in the U.S. government was trying to make high-tech, user-friendly weapons for anti-Communist guerrillas. No one was, not at the CIA or in the military. But Forest said he had discovered a group of weapons tinkerers in the Pentagon’s Tactical Land Warfare Division who were filled with notions of how to develop offbeat, mule-portable devices to help the mujahideen kill Russians. They would like nothing more than to be given the opportunity.
Vaughn Forest was so low on the Washington totem pole that he hadn’t even been able to get anyone at the Pentagon to listen to him, much less think about how to get Congress to fund a program to design and produce lightweight exotic killing devices. Under the best of circumstances—with a conventional-weapons plan that no one opposes—moving a program through Congress would take at least a year. But not for Charlie Wilson, once he turned to his fellow appropriators to shortcut the system and turn Forest’s vision into a reality. Within a few weeks of hearing Forest’s implausible proposition, Charlie emerged from a House-Senate Appropriations conference with a commitment to fund the most unconventional weapons program of the decade.
Its official name was the Weapons Upgrade Program, but it might just as well have been called “Charlie Wilson’s personal Afghan war chest.” One of the more unusual features of the program was a clause that exempted it from having to follow the rules and regulations that guide all of the Pentago
n’s other weapons procurement and development programs. It was such a radical departure that Wilson knew it would have no chance of ultimately being implemented unless it first won the endorsement of the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger.
Thanks to Joanne and her carefully orchestrated dinner parties, Charlie had come to know Weinberger socially. Beyond that, for almost four years, in spite of being a liberal Democrat, he had been a critical ally on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, voting for each and every item in Reagan’s massive arms buildup. At one hearing, he’d even told Weinberger, “Mr. Secretary, there are a lot of things I don’t understand and some with which I don’t agree. But because you say they are important, I’m going to vote for them all.” As Charlie saw it, the bottom line was that he had done a lot for Weinberger, and it was time to cash in his chips.
At breakfast with the defense secretary, Wilson began by saying, “All I want is $10 million”—but then came the catch. For starters, he wanted the Pentagon to give the program a complete waiver on all red tape—no specs, no feasibility studies, no minority contracts, not even competitive bidding. There wasn’t time, he argued. The mujahideen were fighting and dying for America. They were fighting America’s war against America’s principal enemy and no one in the government was trying to create weapons and devices that could give these primitive freedom fighters a chance. Money was not the issue, said Wilson. This was war, and he wanted Weinberger to unleash the Pentagon’s most devilish inventors and tinkerers to think big and small and to begin delivering the goods within weeks. He added one final request: he wanted to be granted some measure of personal control over the program. As Wilson recalls this moment, Weinberger initially expressed concern about the legality of such a program, but only for a moment. Yes, he said; Charlie could count on his support.
