Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  A totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, a country with the greatest landmass in the world, must control its diverse population by force. But there’s only so much an army or a police force can do. Ultimately, control relies on the perception that the government is all-powerful, instantly willing to crush any rebellion with cruel efficiency. In 1986 in Afghanistan, however, the Soviet might was ineffective. The Soviet leaders were forced to think the unthinkable—they had all but given up hope of breaking the resistance.

  Zia had stalled the U.N. talks in Geneva to give the CIA an extra month to rush in supplies. Once the accord was signed, both superpowers would be prohibited from any further arms shipments. Zia wanted to make sure that his (and the CIA’s) Afghans were in a position to do in the Russian Afghan surrogates. But that morning the mujahideen’s secret stash at Ojhiri was wiped out—thirty thousand rockets, millions of rounds of ammunition, vast numbers of mines, Stingers, SA-7s, Blowpipes, Milan antitank missiles, multiple-barrel rocket launchers, mortars. And they were not just exploding, they were killing Pakistanis—over a hundred people died, and more than a thousand were wounded.

  That morning, as the rockets were still flying, the Pakistan dictator called his Washington ambassador, Jamsheed Marker, with terse instructions: “Get Judge Webster [Casey’s successor at the CIA] and Charlie and tell them, for God’s sake, to replace everything.” Marker was amazed at his president’s iron nerves: “He didn’t ask for help to put out the fires or to tend to the wounded. He just wanted one thing. He wanted more missiles.”

  It was a stunning performance from a man who just a few months before had been on the edge of losing all U.S. assistance. Now, with his capital in flames, he was calling on the CIA director to rush another $100 million worth of the most sophisticated weaponry. He told Marker that it was essential for the Russians to know that the United States was doing this, so that the Kremlin would not dare break the Geneva accords.

  This was to be the last time that Zia called on the CIA and Charlie for help, and by all accounts it was one of the Agency’s all-time great logistics triumphs. Within twenty-four hours, huge U.S. cargo planes were unloading Stingers and other weapons taken directly from the frontline stores of NATO. Charlie had called Mohammed that same day to tell him the Agency desperately needed mortars. “Send the plane,” replied Abu Ghazala, who then ordered the mortars to be taken from his frontline troops.

  In Islamabad, where the explosions continued intermittently for two days, Milt Bearden assumed the role of field commander. Bearden was now in his true element. This war had become so much fun that for a man like Bearden there was a downside to it ending so fast. There were so many new weapons and gadgets to test out under real conditions. For example, they still hadn’t tried out the Texas Chainsaw, the fiber-optic-wire-guided drone that a mujahid could fly right into the window of an Il-76 to blow up $100 million worth of Scuds. And everyone was dying to see how the latest version of the Israeli Charlie Horse, a far cry from the original anti-aircraft cannon, would perform. This later weapon was designed to hurl hundreds of antipersonnel devices over a huge area, some floating down by parachute, all exploding at different altitudes with frightening impact.

  But Bearden had not been sent to Islamabad to enjoy himself. He was a pro, and the whole idea was to bring this war to a close. Bearden now decided that the best way to encourage the Soviet retreat was to take the covert war public. For Bearden, the game became not just replacing lost weapons but sticking the knife into the Soviets and twisting it. Make them feel that the Ojhiri arms-depot explosion hadn’t hurt a whit. So when the embassy initially protested the dispatch of resupply planes, on the grounds that they would be identified, Bearden shouted them down: “Paint the planes in fluorescent paint. Put on the lights.”

  At an embassy reception just after the explosion, the station chief, dressed in a dark business suit, spotted his KGB counterpart and invited him into the garden. Overhead the sky was filled with American C-141s and C-5s in holding patterns waiting to land. “Do you know what that is?” Bearden asked, looking up at the Agency’s air bridge. “It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?” His message was clear.

  On April 14, 1988, the signing of the Geneva accords was announced on Moscow television with little fanfare. Unlike the silence and mystery that had surrounded the Red Army’s invasion nine years earlier, this was the silence of humiliation. From Islamabad Zia called the negotiated withdrawal “a miracle of the twentieth century.”

  With hindsight, it now seems that the great resupply effort at Ojhiri probably didn’t matter a bit in terms of the Soviet withdrawal. Bitter and traumatic battles had already been played out in the politburo and the high command of the Red Army. No great power fails to recognize the implications of a visible military defeat—particularly not one whose Red Army had been legendary for its claim that where it went, it never left. The traumatic decision to accept defeat had already been taken. The empire was collapsing, and nothing could stop it.

  But for the Afghan insiders, Ojhiri had been a glorious last hurrah—for Charlie and Zia; Milt and the CIA; Mohammed in the wings with the ever reliable Saudis coughing up their matching share. They had delivered their own personal message to Gorbachev: “We can make this easy on you or we can make it hurt.”

  Ojhiri had been the last run for secrecy and improvisation. The time had come for the regulars to reclaim the government’s foreign policy. In Geneva, Secretary of State Shultz was now at center stage cutting the deal with the Russians. Under Secretary Mike Armacost had assumed Charlie’s ad hoc role coordinating the bureaucracies. Gordon Humphrey—who, after all, was a senator—was broadly recognized as the Afghans’ true congressional champion. And the officials who had moved the Stinger decision along were crowing about how they alone had made all the difference.

  Wilson could be forgiven if, at this moment, he was possessed by the rather conventional impulse to claim a slice of the credit due him. A producer from 60 Minutes had approached him, asking for help on a report about the Cross Border program. The Pakistanis had refused to let the Americans in, and they were seeking help. A loose agreement was reached that Wilson would be interviewed if he happened to be in Pakistan at the same time as 60 Minutes.

  That was when Charlie went to the CIA to ask for his first personal favor. Bill Casey had recently died of a brain tumor. His successor, Judge William Webster, had inherited Wilson without any of the controversy that had accompanied the congressman’s troubled entry into the secret agency. Wilson was now a full partner whose calls were not only answered immediately but whose counsel was sought on every matter pertaining to Afghanistan as well as on any troubles the Agency might be having with Congress.

  For all practical purposes, he was the Agency’s station chief on the Hill, so much so that when he later became head of the Oversight subcommittee, in charge of ferreting out intelligence abuses, he immediately called his Langley friends to celebrate. Over lunch the new watchdog declared solemnly, “Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the henhouse. Do whatever you like.”

  It was typical Wilson bravado, but underneath it all the seventh floor knew that they could always count on him. No one else, at that moment when the CIA was in such bad odor, would have dared take the aggressive position he did, and the Agency had felt deeply indebted. So when Charlie sat down with the judge and his deputy director, Bob Gates, the Agency chiefs were hard put to deny him the one favor he asked. He wanted their help to take 60 Minutes into Afghanistan.

  Neither Webster nor Gates nor anyone Wilson spoke to thought this was a good idea. State and AID were horrified, and Sweetums insisted that Charlie would be skewered. The Pakistanis, with their aversion to such publicity, had absolutely no interest. But Zia, like everyone at this stage, could not say no to the man who had made everything possible.

  Peter Henning, a veteran cameraman for 60 Minutes, had filmed all over the world, been everywhere, seen everything. But back in May 1988, midway into the first day of filming Charlie Wilson
inside the war zone, he realized that he had never seen or heard of a politician receiving such an elaborate reception under such dangerous and unusual circumstances.

  The exotic scenes had begun the moment they’d hit the Afghan border. Out of nowhere a mujahideen honor guard on galloping horses had appeared, looking very much as if they had charged right out of the days of Genghis Khan. The mounted warriors led Charlie and the camera crew down what was billed as the Ho Chi Minh Trail of the Afghan war. At the front and rear of the caravan, five Stinger crews swept the skies for Soviet helicopters. Two hundred mujahideen, bristling with weapons, accompanied them as they drove through territory that looked like a moonscape of bombed-out villages. When they finally arrived at Ali Khel, the first liberated Soviet garrison, a horde of freedom fighters stood on their vehicles and cheered as the congressman got out of his vehicle.

  Henning scrambled behind, filming, as the commanders asked Wilson to go with them inside the fort, where the Russians had left an open bottle of vodka with half-filled glasses on the table. They wanted their patron to see how the Communist infidels had run for their lives. Wilson’s laugh was infectious, deep, rumbling. The mujahideen had looked at the American dressed in their clothes and suddenly they were laughing too. It was all so new and delicious for these men who had sacrificed so much, this moment when they were finally taking back their country.

  But the oddest feature of it all, for Henning, was the way the mujahideen treated the congressman—almost as if he were one of their field marshals. Outside, the warriors had assembled an amazing collection of the weapons the CIA had provided them. They were carefully laid out in a giant semicircle. Each time, as the congressman approached a new gun emplacement, they would fire the weapons—the 14.5s, the multiple-barrel rocket launchers, the Dashikas, the Oerlikons. They always hit their targets, and with each success the bearded warriors would shout to their god, “Allahu Akbar.” Wilson, with his great deep voice and his clenched fist pumping triumphantly in the air, joined in filling the valley with smoke, the sound of guns, and the cry of the jihad: “Allahu Akbar.”

  A cameraman lives by what he sees through his lens, and there was not a moment on this trip when Henning did not feel he was mining gold. At one point the congressman was posing on a mountaintop all but denuded by Russian napalm when—by magic, it seemed—Afghans in turbans and woolen vests emerged out of a small patch woods left, bearing great trays of chicken and lamb, stacks of flat Afghan bread, mounds of rice and yogurt. A long colorful cloth, like an Oriental rug, was spread on the ground. Twenty mujahideen commanders, with bandoliers across their chests and Russian assault rifles by their sides, sat cross-legged before their guest of honor. The Stinger operators guarded the skies as Wilson and his table of Afghan warriors began thrusting their right hands into the overflowing trays of food. Henning did not dare stop filming to eat.

  When Wilson fired a 14.5mm at a mountain target and the mujahideen started cheering, the cameraman was struck with a sense of déjà vu. When the congressman mounted a white horse, it finally came to him: Lawrence of Arabia. From that moment on, Henning couldn’t shake the peculiar feeling that somehow he was filming on a Hollywood set.

  Peter Henning had no way of knowing how accurate his intuition would turn out to be. There had, in fact, been a master hand at work secretly choreographing the scenes that 60 Minutes was taping, and it was none other than Milt Bearden.

  When the congressman had first arrived in Islamabad, Bearden had told him that he had prepared the entire shooting schedule. Ever the master storyteller, the station chief chortled as he laid it all out for his special friend. Two of Bearden’s case officers, in spite of the ban on Americans in the war zone, had already checked the area where Charlie would be going to make sure the land mines had been cleared. Bearden had arranged for the great semicircle of weapons, which the mujahideen would fire for their patron; Russian tanks would be smoldering along the roads. The station chief spoke, Wilson later said with some amusement, as if he were Cecil B. DeMille: “Charlie, you’re not going to believe how fierce the muj are going to look.”

  The night before they’d crossed into Afghanistan, the station chief had accompanied Wilson to a dinner at the private headquarters of General Akhtar. There, in front of a collection of Pakistani officials, the intelligence chief, in a formal ceremony, made Wilson an honorary field marshal in the Pakistani army. Akhtar then presented Charlie with a perfectly tailored uniform, complete with medals and ribbons. He commended him for the service he had performed not only for Pakistan but for the cause of freedom everywhere. There was only one condition: the congressman was not to wear his uniform anywhere in Pakistan. And good luck on his trip tomorrow.

  At first light the next morning, a Toyota Land Cruiser filled with men who looked like mujahideen pulled up to the main security gate of the American diplomatic compound. The guards waved the car through; even in his Afghan outfit they’d recognized Brigadier General Amir Gulistan Janjua, the Pakistani officer who now ran the CIA-Afghan operation. Jenjua’s Land Cruiser rolled past the bougainvillea to the ambassador’s residence and waited patiently for the congressman.

  At the military airport General Janjua took the congressman into a secure area and offered him a selection of hats to choose from. Wilson passed over the turban, which made him look like a buffoon, and settled on a pure white Chitrali hat. It was thoughtful of Milt to have taken such pains over his wardrobe, he reflected, and it was particularly considerate of the station chief to have arranged for the twin satellites to take a look that night at what the Soviets were up to across the border. The report had come back: all clear at Ali Khel. Still, President Zia had put the Pakistani army’s border units on full alert while Wilson and his American guests were in the war zone. A squadron of F-16 interceptors had been moved onto the runway, their engines running. Helicopter rescue teams stood at the ready. On one level it was a repeat performance, but this time it was also Bearden’s show.

  The CIA was nowhere to be seen when the mounted mujahideen suddenly appeared at the border. But lurking in the background, following the caravan just over the horizon, plugged in with walkie-talkies, and dressed in the clothes of the mujahideen, was Bearden. Next to the station chief was his boss, Frank Anderson, who had flown in from Washington to make sure nothing went wrong. Minutes before Charlie’s caravan arrived at Ali Khel, the two CIA men had entered the fort themselves.

  By the very strict standards of their trade, Bearden and Anderson had strayed far off the reservation that day. They were acting a bit like two male dogs claiming their conquered territory by peeing over every strategic bush. The big, bad Red Army was running away, and they just couldn’t help themselves from doing a small jig inside the fort. Before slipping away the two men posed for snapshots, then tacked a tin sheet on the garrison door. It was a coded welcome greeting to their friend—an engraving of a Russian bear swatting desperately at a swarm of stinging bees.

  There is no way to explain Bearden and Anderson’s high-risk gesture that day other than to say that it was payback time. And they weren’t the only ones tipping their hats to Charlie Wilson. The State Department, the embassy in Islamabad, the Pakistani army and intelligence services—all were breaking the rules and doing whatever was necessary to try to acknowledge their debt to this curious rogue congressman. The idea was, quite simply, to help Charlie take credit for the biggest and most successful CIA operation ever—for what might well be considered the last true campaign of the Cold War.

  It was left to Zia ul-Haq to deliver the ultimate tribute. He had made the jihad possible, and for ten years he had ruled on every aspect of the CIA’s war. Until now he had deliberately wrapped the many faces of the jihad in so many layers of mystery that almost no one except himself could fully appreciate what had gone into it. Now, before the 60 Minutes camera, he chose his words carefully as he pronounced Charlie’s rightful place: “If there is a single man who has played a part that shall be recorded in history in golden letters, it is
that right honorable congressman, Charles Wilson.”

  “But how is it possible,” the veteran correspondent Harry Reasoner asked, somewhat puzzled, “for one lone congressman to have accomplished so much?”

  “I’m afraid, Mr. Reasoner, that it is too early to explain it all to you,” declared the arbiter. “All I can say is that ‘Charlie did it.’”

  That would end up being the title of the 60 Minutes segment. It would be the writing on the screen at CIA headquarters when Wilson was brought in to receive his Honored Colleague award years later. But in the spring of 1988, with the Red Army rattling back through the northern passes, Wilson went with the 60 Minutes team to the Khyber Pass, where he delivered what became the concluding words of the broadcast.

  Reasoner, who had lived through Vietnam as a reporter and a father and who felt the sadness of such adventures, referred to the thirteen thousand Soviets who had already died and asked if Wilson did not feel a “sneaking understanding for what the Russians are going through—particularly the field troops—an enemy they can’t understand, being supplied in mysterious ways?”

  Some long-brooding force grew inside Charlie Wilson at that moment as he sat in the sunshine—tan-faced, square-jawed, with Afghanistan in the background and the Khyber Pass and all that it represented surrounding him. He was now talking to all America, and as he saw it, the more relevant statistics were that a hundred thousand Soviet troops were still in Afghanistan; three million Afghans were still huddled in refugee camps in Pakistan; and no one would ever know how many had died of violence, misery, hunger, and cold. When he spoke, he sounded almost menacing.