Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  For Charlie Wilson the trip had been his rite of passage. “I felt I had entered the ranks of the initiated,” he recalls. “I had dinner right afterward at Army House with Zia and Akhtar. Zia got all carried away about how he wanted to get in there and fight them himself. He was particularly jealous when I told him the muj had let me fire some of the volleys. I was most grateful to Zia and Akhtar for letting me do this. It had been far more than I had expected.”

  Milt Bearden’s first words to Wilson were harsh. He told the congressman that what he had done was unconscionable. He had placed the entire program in jeopardy, and everyone was very upset. Having made his statement for the record, the exuberant station chief then laughed loudly and demanded that Wilson tell him everything. Charlie recounted his adventure to Bearden and then said he had tried to find one thing wrong with the program. He had asked every Afghan what they needed and what they were not getting, and he had not been able to find so much as a flaw. Never in his entire career in government had he encountered a program so perfect.

  Bearden had a special treat for Wilson. The station chief believed in inspiring the troops, and so he had arranged to build what he called the Stinger Museum. Every spent gripstock that had shot down a Soviet aircraft had been brought back and mounted on a wall, with the famous lines from Kipling inscribed on a huge plaque: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains…”

  Charlie was the first to be taken to see this temple of Soviet doom. There Bearden had assembled a delegation of ISI officers and mujahideen. With great solemnity, the station chief, on behalf of the CIA, the ISI, and the Afghan freedom fighters, presented Charlie with the spent gripstock from the Stinger that Engineer Ghaffar had used to bring down the first Hind. It was mounted beautifully on a dark mahogany frame. Charlie had it sent back on a McCollum flight and hung it over the door to his office—a dull green tube that meant so many things to this very complicated man. It was the silver bullet of the Afghan war. Others could claim they were the ones responsible for the Stinger. But to Milt Bearden, to Akhtar, Zia, and the Afghans, the first Stinger belonged to the congressman from East Texas. It was to serve as an explanation for the uninitiated that behind those doors sat the real magical weapon of the Afghan jihad.

  Wilson was somehow not the same man when he returned to Congress. He was bigger now. He was in a world of men and women who operate only with words and in committee—funding legislation or telling real men of action what they can’t do. But now he was no longer just responsible for funding an exotic, important foreign policy. Now, in the minds of his colleagues, it really was becoming Charlie Wilson’s war. Charlie was personally fighting the Russians. They were talking about him on his white horse.

  The Democrats, meanwhile, had been reduced by Ronald Reagan to a party of whining naysayers. While Wilson had been off on his adventure, the Democrats had been on national television attacking the CIA and the Reagan administration for Iran-Contra. But no political party likes to be identified only as opposing policy. With Afghanistan, Charlie was giving them something they could claim credit for. This was the good war. It was also Congress’s war. And, mainly, it belonged to the House.

  Just at this time, Charlie’s old adversary Steve Solarz saw the picture of Wilson on the white horse with a bandolier of machine-gun bullets strapped across his chest. Solarz, who is an avid reader of the Flashman historical novels, experienced one of those “aha!” moments: Charlie Wilson was a dead ringer for the books’ hero.

  “This is you,” he told Charlie when he gave him a copy to read. It was actually not a very flattering tribute. The hero, Colonel Harry Flashman, is nothing short of a cad—an Englishman obsessed with chasing women, a coward at heart who owes his remarkable rise to fame and glory to astonishing coincidence, good luck, and the occasional surfacing of extraordinary talent and virtue.

  Flashman can be found at the Charge of the Light Brigade, thinking that he is running away from the battle until he learns that he is in fact riding right into the ranks of the enemy. Then, as in every drama in the Flashman series, the charming, dissolute, skirt-chasing rogue, having gotten himself by mistake into the thick of a noble challenge, performs with astonishing courage and effectiveness.

  Whether dealing with Otto von Bismarck, with the British army in China, or with the sorry expeditionary force that wanders into Afghanistan in 1848, Flashman is the ultimate antihero, a man forever doing the right thing for the wrong reason. No matter how dissolute or poorly intentioned he is most of the time, there always comes a moment when he rises to become a true hero. But the sad truth about Flashman is that if he had things his way, he would simply have frittered away his life in pursuits that would win him the disrespect and contempt of any organization that employed him.

  Curiously, Charlie took immediately to the Solarz analogy and declared that he was indeed Flashman. It may be that he liked the cover; Flashman was, after all, a man caught up in great historical dramas. Even if he were a lout at heart, he did come through in the pinch, and Charlie found it easier to make this identification with his Afghan role than he did trying to define himself in a serious vein. He was just not able to dwell on himself as a hero without first loudly proclaiming that it was a lie. He actually began promoting the Flashman image. He created his own elite club of “Flashman’s Raiders.” Those he chose to initiate into this inner circle would get copies of the novels and a leather jacket with the club’s name embroidered on the back. He even wrote to Gust at Langley describing the new organization and granting his old friend honorary membership.

  Very much in the spirit of Flashman and to Sweetums’s distress, Charlie began drinking again. It didn’t seem to matter all that much. He was keeping it under control, and altogether things were at last going very, very well.

  Even though no one was yet predicting victory, the CIA’s battlefield reports were amazing. The mujahideen had even run an operation over the border, crossing into what Bill Casey had called “the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union,” where tens of millions of Muslims lived. The Agency was terrified that this kind of provocation inside the Soviet Union might precipitate a fearsome response. Still, it showed how brazen the mujahideen had become.

  In Geneva, the State Department had begun claiming that the Russians seemed genuinely interested in negotiating a way out. And then the law of the unexpected struck in the Achilles’ heel of the whole program. In July, just after Congress had passed legislation authorizing a new aid package to Pakistan, a man widely believed to be Zia’s agent, Arshad Pervez, was caught in Philadelphia trying to buy twenty-five tons of a specialty steel alloy vital to the building of a nuclear bomb.

  It was dramatically worse than the Kryton-trigger affair of 1985. This time there was a Solarz amendment on the books that would force the White House to stop all aid. There was no realistic way to avoid it: Congress was going to cut Zia off, and Solarz was the first to alert Wilson to this likelihood when he informed him on the floor of the House about what his Pakistani friends had done now. “I believe Steve told me about Pervez with some glee,” recalls Charlie.*

  Wilson would later call his subsequent efforts to save Zia’s military aid “my greatest achievement in Congress.” Perhaps he remembers it this way because he is at heart a political artist and can assess the value of an accomplishment by the difficulty of the task. Everything else he had accomplished had been carried out in the shadows and behind closed doors. Here he had to operate publicly against a coalition of virtuous liberals. He had the thankless task to trying to defend the right of a Muslim dictator to break U.S. law in order to build an Islamic bomb while still qualifying for massive U.S. foreign aid. And he had to do it in the name of protecting a massive CIA killing-war.

  On the face of it, this was a lost cause. U.S. policy was firmly committed to nuclear nonproliferation. A law had clearly been violated. The president had no choice but to trigger the Solarz amendment and cut off Zia’s aid. Even if Reagan claimed a national security waiver, Congress wa
s now committed to enforcing its own law.

  But Wilson would end up forcing his colleagues to abandon their pretense of ethical deliberation. For this lone issue, he would strip Congress down to a body that operates solely on the basis of power and horse trading. Here, he would call in every chit and, to the horror of his liberal friends, win.

  As Wilson and the CIA saw it, all might be lost if the United States publicly slapped Zia in the face and withdrew its aid. They knew that without Zia running Pakistan by martial law, there could be no Afghan war. Officially there was no Pakistani involvement with the mujahideen, but the population of Pakistan certainly knew about it and didn’t like it. The Soviets were bombing their borders, sponsoring terrorist attacks. There were three million Afghan refugees and tens of thousands of armed warriors in Pakistan. And all of this at a time when Pakistan had to worry about a new war with India. The only reason Zia was able to maintain the loyalty of his army in the continuation this policy was because of the billions he was receiving in U.S. military and economic aid. If that was taken away, all bets were off.

  At the Pakistan embassy over dinner, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski confronted Steve Solarz with a question: “Steve, what are your objectives in cutting off aid to Pakistan? Because if you do, I foresee the following things happening: one, the Afghan resistance collapsing and the Soviets triumphing; two, the present government in Pakistan will disappear; and three, you’ll have an anti-American government in Pakistan in possession of the bomb. Is that what you want?”

  But for Solarz and fellow Democrats dedicated to nuclear nonproliferation, the issue had gone beyond debate. A law had been violated and a Muslim dictator was thumbing his nose at America. Solarz summoned the CIA to closed hearings and expressed outrage at what he saw as a pattern of gross violations by Pakistan. A brilliant young CIA analyst delivered devastating testimony at these hearings, which Wilson attended simply “to try to intimidate Steve a bit.” Lurking behind Wilson’s presence was always the threat of retaliation against India. But none of that mattered with the Pervez outrage.

  Charlie had been worried about Pakistan’s aid package well before the Pervez incident. That February in Islamabad he had told Zia that he couldn’t hold the line alone anymore. “I told him that the antinuclear and disarmament forces were becoming increasingly strident, that he now had the third biggest AID program, and that I was having troubles with Obey. Solarz was holding hearings. Glenn and Pressler were getting adamant in the Senate. I said it was all going to come to a head that fall in the appropriations bill and I needed a pit bull to help me.”

  Zia responded by hiring a friend of Charlie’s, the devilishly effective lobbyist Denis Neill. “There’s no one in his class,” Wilson explained. “He had made all the contributions to the Appropriations and Foreign Affairs members. He had courted the staff. That’s where Denis wrote the book. Hill and Knowlton are great at social stuff, but that’s not what wins these kinds of fights. In the Foreign Operations Committee in the middle of the night, you know who sends in pizza and beer. It’s Denis. He’s always in the wings. He can’t go in but he’s there.”

  The Pervez arrest had come at an awkward time. Thanksgiving was upon them. But the two old pros decided they had to win converts from different political persuasions who could argue their case. Zia agreed to receive a delegation, and Charlie began twisting arms, calling members’ wives, promising the experience of a lifetime. Finally he put together a delegation of seven key members and their wives, who’d agreed to spend Thanksgiving in Pakistan. The fire-breathing conservative Bob Dornan, the much-respected California liberal George Brown, and the former all-American basketball player Tom McMillen were included in the group. Wilson had chosen members others would listen to.

  Charlie knew exactly how his colleagues would react to the training camps. The idea was to make them fall in love with the mujahideen, to feel the patriotic drama under way and recognize that Pakistan’s bomb issue was really about whether these freedom fighters were going to be abandoned. The congressmen were predictably impressed by the courage and ferocity and faith of the warriors. They might even have been somewhat transported by donning mujahideen outfits for the trip to the secret training camps and then watching Wilson give blood, shaming some of them into following suit.

  By now Peshawar was filled with American volunteer doctors and nurses being funded by Crandall. The atmosphere was electric. But it was at the official state dinner that Wilson and Zia performed their magic for the delegation.

  The ugly unspoken issue was the Islamic bomb, and when Wilson stood up he confronted the issue in his own uniquely outrageous manner. “Mr. President, in history I have three heroes. Winston Churchill, President Lincoln, and President Zia ul-Haq.” He looked directly at his colleagues before he continued. “But for Zia’s presence at the helm of Pakistan, the history of mankind and the free world would be different. After consolidating their gain in Afghanistan, the Russians would have fulfilled their centuries-old dream of reaching the Indian Ocean and dominating the world.” And then he addressed the bottom line: “Mr. President, as far as I’m concerned you can make all the bombs you want because you are our friends and they, the Indians, are our enemies. But not all Americans feel the same way, and there are some questions, Mr. President, that you have to answer because this issue is getting hot.”

  A solemn Zia now approached the rostrum, his glasses and a prepared speech in hand. Charlie’s intuition pulled him back to his feet: he didn’t want a canned performance, so he complained that since he had not had the benefit of glasses or a speech, nor should the president of Pakistan.

  “My friend Mr. Charles Wilson,” Zia began, “has complained that I should not use my glasses or notes because he has neither on his person. So I cannot be unfair to my esteemed friend Charlie. And since he has taken away my official brief I will speak from my heart.”

  The dictator ordered the servants to leave the banquet hall and had his aide-de-camp bolt the doors from the inside. Zia was not above lying in the interest of Islam, particularly when it came to such things as the bomb. But his words this day had the ring of sincerity to them.

  He spoke of the dilemma of a loyal husband making assurances to his wife. “Sometimes she must rely on his word. She can’t always ask for proof.” His country’s nuclear program was exclusively for peaceful purposes. He asked that they accept his word: Pakistan had no intention of building a delivery system.

  He then began a moving history of what he and Charlie and their two countries had done together. He spoke of the valor of the Afghans and the significance of the moment. “Now, if at this stage our American friends cut us off or threaten to cut off aid then it would be a betrayal of history, and the judgment of history would be very severe on those who take this decision. We did not accept the conditions of America”—he was referring to when he’d rejected Jimmy Carter’s aid program as “peanuts”—“at the early stage, so how can Americans expect us to do so at this stage when we have bled the Russians nearly unconscious? Whether there is American aid or not we will continue to fight. We’ll continue to fight, and I don’t know how much more cost in human lives and limbs we will have to pay. So please go back and assure my American friends and all those who are now insisting that we should succumb to American pressure that Pakistan is not ready to accept any conditional elements. The task may be difficult, but with Mr. Charlie Wilson on Capitol Hill it is not impossible.”

  At the airport later, when the Pakistani press asked for comments, Wilson deferred to his liberal colleague George Brown. It was part of Charlie’s political artistry to know when to yield and to let the issue become Brown’s, not his.

  Back in Washington, however, only one congressman stepped forward to lead the battle. With Denis Neill by his side, Charlie was now moving through the congressional directory calling every person he had ever done anything for. “This is payback time,” he would say. It was that basic. He was calling in his debts.

 
; Neill offers the best explanation of why Charlie (and he) finally pulled off their victory at 5 A.M. in the House-Senate conference. “Most of Congress is about words and debating, and you can never really resolve anything. But Appropriations is simply about money and it’s very practical.” The trade-offs were explicit: Charlie wanted money for Zia. He wanted his colleagues to give him the money. He had done it for them before; he would do it for them again. “Are you with me or are you with Solarz?” is the way he put it to each of his colleagues. Everyone knew that Charlie would remember forever which side they chose.

  The morning of the showdown, Charlie Schnabel, who had come in to the office early, long before anyone else, picked up the phone, which would not stop ringing. It was Zia calling simply to pass on encouragement: “Tell Charlie to put on his wrestling togs and do battle.”

  At stake were hundreds of millions of dollars. Pakistan had become America’s third biggest aid recipient after Israel and Egypt, and the battle to cut it off culminated at the House-Senate conference that night. As Denis Neill described it; “The Joint Conference is like a poker game. To be a real player you have to know what you’re doing. You have to know how to read the other players, and you have to know when to make your move.” When the game began, the master lobbyist could only sit outside the door and wait to see how his ace would fare.

  Wilson’s profound difficulty that night was that the anti-Pakistan coalition on the committees had the votes to defeat him. Understandably, they wanted and repeatedly asked for a straight up-and-down vote, but Charlie used his first maneuver to trump them. He was, in effect, able to set the agenda insofar as aid to Pakistan was concerned because he had a deal with subcommittee chairman Dave Obey. The first thing he had done was to make sure the divisive issue would not be brought up until the very end, when members would be tired and eager to get home. Secondly, he knew that Obey would find a way not to permit a direct vote.