by George Crile
“Nobody enjoys the anguish that a twenty-year-old kid from Leningrad goes through here. And nobody enjoys the fact of his death, because he didn’t have anything to do with it…. But, Harry, there were a hundred and sixty-seven funerals in my district,” he said, referring to constituents who had died in Vietnam. “One hundred and sixty-seven boys from East Texas died from my little congressional district. And they didn’t have anything to do with it either! And I love sticking it to the Russians. And I think most Americans do. They need to get it back, and they’re getting it back. They’re getting it back as we speak. They’re digging in for their last stand at Gardez. And they’re gonna lose! And I love it!”
This last point was made with such somber, Old Testament ferocity that Charlie might have been a mujahid talking about destroying the infidels. No American politician of any stature had said anything like that in two decades. It was so old in its Cold War zeal that it was new. It had nothing to do with that postwar, eastern-elite doctrine of foreign policy that called for containing Communism—no defeats, no victories. Wilson had helped introduce a new idea. This was not Korea with thirty thousand Americans dead for a line that, in the end, didn’t change. Nor was it Vietnam or the Bay of Pigs or the nuclear stalemate. It was, above all, not the posturing, ill-conceived Contra war, which had ended in scandal. This was victory, and Wilson was shamefully vindictive.
Many of the millions of viewers who later watched the “Charlie Did It” segment had no idea how deeply America had been involved in Afghanistan, nor had any but a few heard of Congressman Charlie Wilson. And for anyone who heard those words coming at the camera from the Khyber Pass, Wilson must have looked like some caricature from a John Wayne movie, thirsting for Communist blood.
But Charlie hadn’t moved a nation with such two-dimensional motivation. The forces driving him and, through him, his cause were far deeper. At the heart of his story lay an old-fashioned belief in his country’s mission: the spirit that Kennedy had summoned “to pay any price, bear any burden,” which had fallen dormant; the “live free or die” code of the Afghans that made Charlie think of Bowie and Travis; those special voices the boy had heard in Trinity on the radio—Churchill during the Battle of Britain, Roosevelt rallying the nation. It was the sight of refugees shivering in tents; the appeal of those brave, desperate fighters for help against the demon in the sky; his mother teaching him always to stand up for the underdog.
That was why Charlie Wilson had set off with his rage and all of his cunning to bring down the Red Army. But Gust was equally right about his old friend: Charlie had also done it because it was plain and simple fun, because it was so exotic, and because in the end he had been able to turn it into his war and even pretend for 60 Minutes at the Khyber Pass that he was an uncomplicated American patriot like John Wayne.
In truth, there was a very large element of uncertainty in the minds of the 60 Minutes team as they closed down their shoot. Who was this man and what should a reasonable person think about him? At one point after the taping inside Afghanistan, Peter Henning was riding with the producer in the back of a truck filled with machine guns and mujahideen. “You know, George,” he said, “you’ve got a big problem here. I’ve never seen anything like this before. You could turn Charlie Wilson into the biggest hero you’ve ever heard of…or a complete clown. It just depends which way you want to cut it.”
That was the best one-sentence summary of the whole fifty-five years to date of Charlie Wilson’s life. That had always been the way people looked at Wilson, and something disturbing did begin to happen to him back in Washington as the Russians continued their withdrawal and he waited to see how things would turn out.
It was the old story of the soldier coming back from the campaign and no one bothering to ask what had happened. Some colleagues offered congratulations after the Geneva accords, when the Soviets agreed to a timetable for a final withdrawal. Wilson was still included in all the serious decisions involving Afghanistan, but with the Red Army leaving, it was no longer clear that he had an essential role to play. He was not by any means going completely to seed at this point, but by now he had begun drinking again, which made life with Sweetums even more tense than before. For her it was like watching a man playing Russian roulette night after night. He was fifty-five; she only twenty-eight. Even for a strong-willed Miss World contestant, a tough Ukrainian beauty from Cleveland, it wasn’t easy getting the conqueror of the Red Army to stop drinking whiskey.
The two Charlie Wilsons now were wrestling for center stage. Wilson needed someone like Gust to retool and reenergize him. Instead, thinking that Gust was somewhere in Africa, he sent a letter to the Agency notifying his old friend that he had been drafted into Flashman’s Raiders. Already the bridge-crashing, hot-tub-soaking, Good-Time Charlie was beginning to elbow the secret statesman off to the side. More than ever, the endangered Charlie Wilson craved the hard-won right to continue thinking of himself as a genuine world figure.
One man alone held the key to this haunting need: Zia ul-Haq. Zia knew exactly who Charlie was, and that became Wilson’s purchase on reality. Zia had become his anchor in a troubled sea: just knowing that there existed somewhere in the world a truly great man who knew that he was great too.
The smiling dictator had been Charlie’s only real equal in the Afghan struggle, and in spite of every difference of religion, style, culture, and politics, they had bonded. Uncannily, Rudyard Kipling had foreshadowed this most unlikely brotherhood in a parable set in the very frontier mountains where, a century and a half before, the Afghans had turned back a British imperial army:
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth, When two strong men stand face-to-face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Somehow Zia and Wilson had connected in spite of the clashing differences of their lives. And each had consistently astounded the other for six amazing years, until at last each had come to treat the other as a true friend and partner.
As the jihad approached its climactic hour, the two men faced one piece of unfinished business. They shared a sense that they had been great actors upon the fulcrum of history. When they met now, they talked about the need for a defining moment—like MacArthur on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri accepting the unconditional surrender of imperial Japan. And from the start, they had always agreed on what form that moment should take: tens of thousands of freedom fighters in the central street of Kabul shouting “Allahu Akbar” and blasting off joy shots from their CIA-issued Kalashnikovs, as the two strong men from opposite ends of the earth rode side by side to savor victory for all the world to see.
CHAPTER 34
Congressman Charlie Wilson
“HERE’S TO YOU,
YOU MOTHERFUCKER”
It was out of character for Charlie to be in his office at 9 A.M. Usually he didn’t roll in until it was time to go out for lunch. But on August 17, 1988, he was at his desk when Richard Armitage, the assistant secretary of defense, called with painful news: “President Zia’s plane has gone down with Akhtar and the general, and we’re acting on the premise that it’s true.” The U.S. ambassador, Arnie Raphel, had also been aboard, along with the American military attaché and nine of Zia’s military high command. All were presumed dead.
Wilson knew immediately that the report had to be valid. “In my whole life,” he said revealingly, “I’ve never received any bad news that didn’t turn out to be true.” Charlie got up, locked the door to his office, and didn’t come out until well into the afternoon. Something inside him emptied in those long hours as, alone, he began to calculate the loss, or to try.
He’d miss Akhtar, the insular, almost debonair general with the British manners who, in spite of their similar ages, had always treated Charlie like a mischievous boy but who had become fond enough of him to get Zia to make him a secret honorary field marshal, even though the Pakist
ani army had no others.
And he’d only just begun to get to know Arnie Raphel, the brilliant young ambassador destined, everyone said, to be secretary of state one day. Charlie and Sweetums had recently spent a magical weekend with him in the Hunza Valley, the inspiration for Shangri-La, where everyone is said to be happy and to live to at least one hundred. They had stayed with the mir of Hunza, who lived on the roof of the world and wore little fairy-tale slippers that curled up at the toes. Raphel had just married a lovely State Department colleague, and it had been an idyll of springtime love, with all of them sharing the thrill of this historic moment.
“I loved all three almost equally,” he would say, but it was losing Zia that crushed Charlie. At the state funeral in Islamabad, with a million Pakistanis and mujahideen crowding up to him, Charlie made his way to Akhtar’s successor, Hamid Gul, and broke into tears. “I have lost my father on this day,” he said.
Charlie had no children, and his parents were gone. His entire emotional life had become intertwined with the war. When he returned to Washington, the enormity of the catastrophe overcame him. He told Charlie Schnabel that he couldn’t deal with the Afghans or even the Pakistanis anymore. Schnabel must take over the account.
For a long time Wilson’s absence was not noted, because Schnabel had been moving in his name for so many years now that he could cover almost perfectly, but Schnabel was alarmed for his boss. “I couldn’t even get him to come to the Sewing Circle,” he said, as if describing a child too miserable to go to the ice-cream parlor.
With each Soviet battalion that crawled out of Afghanistan, it was as if the mujahideen reverted further and further to type. They could no longer be called freedom fighters, because their enemy had ceased to fight. Now they could be seen for what they were: Afghans pure and simple, with all the astonishing failings that accompany their amazing qualities.
In Pashtun, the word for cousin also means enemy, and the clans started to tear each other up even before the Russians had gone. A foreboding crept into the minds of the more observant American officials as they thought of the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons stored in mountain caves throughout Afghanistan.
Equally distressing were the questions being raised by State, as well as by some reporters, about those mujahideen factions that had received the bulk of America’s support and that continued to get favored treatment. Many were Islamic radicals, not terribly different in attitude from the kind of Muslims elsewhere who were beginning to frighten the American government. Even Charlie Schnabel, who had become so enraptured with the guerrillas that he had converted to Islam one emotional night, had warned Wilson years before that the warriors of God, whom he had grown to admire and trust, themselves feared such true fanatics as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the special favorite of the ISI and the CIA.
Wilson, however, had been drawing his inspiration from the idea of the movement as a whole. He had purposefully never gotten to know the Afghans as individuals. It was their cause that he embraced and their cause that had been his elixir. He didn’t dare differentiate.
Now the magic was all but gone; there would be no parade shoulder to shoulder with Zia. Still, as the deadline approached for the final Soviet withdrawal, he could not help but feel a pride of creation.
Again he wrote to Gust: “We miss you. Wish you were here. Hope you’re having a good time in Africa. Watch out for the spears.”
“Thanks for the kind words,” replied Gust, “Caught two spears last month.” The letter appeared to have originated in Africa, but Gust was still in McLean, Virginia.
For one glorious week Charlie basked in the glow of the 60 Minutes profile, which included Zia’s tribute and gave Wilson the lion’s share of credit for what was fairly enough billed as the “largest and most successful CIA operation in history.” And then what Zia had said would be “the miracle of the century” came about. On February 15, 1989, Boris Gromov, commander of the once-proud 40th Army, strode across Friendship Bridge in front of a worldwide television audience, the last Russian to leave Afghanistan.
From the station in Islamabad Bearden sent a simple cable: “We won.” Charlie dashed off his own note to Gust: “We did it.”
That afternoon Judge Webster threw a party at headquarters—“the most raucous and overt celebration they’d ever had there,” says Wilson. The walls were covered with dozens and dozens of huge blowups of mujahideen with Stingers and their prey: wrecked helicopters and tanks. A band played as great supplies of food were consumed and whiskey drunk.
“There were so many happy people there, maybe a couple hundred,” Wilson remembers. “They kept coming up to me: ‘You did it, you did it.’ ‘This gives us our pride back.’ ‘This vindicates us.’ ‘You were the only one who thought it would work except us. You believed in us.’ ‘I just wanted to shake your hand.’ There was a lot of hugging going on. I was hugging people I didn’t know. Judge Webster was laughing and carrying on.”
After the director spoke of his great pride in this astonishing accomplishment, he turned the podium over to Wilson, who began by expressing his wonderment at discovering “all the strange and brilliant anthropologists, psychiatrists, culturalists, linguists whom the Agency could just reach down and surface any time it wants. No institution in the world is so filled with such genius and talent and élan.” He then singled out Gust and Frank Anderson and Jack Devine and Milt before speaking “for all of us.” “No one thought we could do it when we started,” he said in that booming voice of his. “And there were lots of times when we all had doubts. But as long as we live, no one will ever be able to take away from us the fact that we delivered a decisive blow to the Evil Empire from which they will never completely recover.”
“It was almost like a pep rally,” Charlie remembers. “I paid tribute to Casey and, of course, the muj, and there was thunderous sustained applause for the judge and me—lots of talk, like we’ve got to find us another war like this one. They were rowdy, extremely rowdy. All kinds of people kept coming up to me: ‘I worked on overhead,’ or ‘I met you in Pakistan,’ or ‘I was involved in logistics.’ I believe the judge finally walked me out. ‘Thanks again,’ he said. I thanked him.”
“I don’t remember what I did next,” Charlie says, “but I’m sure I got very drunk, which is probably what I would have felt like doing because, you know, Gust wasn’t there. My inclination is that I went back to the apartment and sat by myself in front of the fire and got drunk in honor of Zia and Akhtar and Arnie.”
Gust was in Rome that day when Charlie was drinking himself to sleep and Boris Gromov was marching home. Avrakotos was now retired. When Tom Twetten had become the operations director he’d figured he didn’t stand a chance of ever getting another good assignment. As he saw the Russians trying to paint a bright face on their withdrawal, he thought that they had gotten off easily. He figured that the mujahideen and the Agency were responsible for at least 25,000 dead, even if the Kremlin owned up to only half that.
He received just one call of congratulations that day—from a fellow Greek and his closest case officer friend, Peter Koromilas, who had given him his first shot at real responsibility when he was a new agent in Greece. Thanks to Koromilas, Gust, though only a GS-14, had operated through the colonels to virtually run the country and, as he saw it, had “kept it from going Communist.” That day Peter gave him the perfect tribute: “O Tolmon Nika,” an old Spartan war saying meaning “He who dares, wins.”
Koromilas’s call touched Gust and made him think of the young man he had bet on during the Afghan program. “No one will ever give you credit,” he wrote to Vickers, “and in fact history will never record how big your contribution was to getting that fucking general to walk across Afghanistan into Russia.”
Gust also, of course, thought of Charlie and longed to give him a call. But he figured that Wilson would be out celebrating with all of Avrakotos’s old Agency crowd. He couldn’t stand pity, and he didn’t want to feel like an outsider. So he kept to hi
mself in Rome.
It would have broken Gust’s heart to see Charlie that night and to know how lonely his Texas friend was for him. So much had happened since Joanne Herring had first breathed fire into a rather aimless politician. She had seen the potential in him. She had urged him to link up with her hero, Zia ul-Haq, and to stand up for those marvelous freedom fighters who had only “courage as their weapon.”
The political landscape of the world was tilting. Everything was changing so fast. The next morning when the sun woke him, Charlie turned on the television and stepped out onto the terrace. He looked down at the statue of the marines at Iwo Jima, which never failed to move him. Washington itself never ceased to move this bighearted kid of a man from Texas. He was admiring the gleaming white marble of the Capitol and the monuments when he realized that the TV was filled with images of Russians in fur hats, moving in their APCs and tanks. It was a tape rerun, and Gromov was about to walk over Friendship Bridge again. Charlie moved quickly to the refrigerator, where he always kept a bottle of Dom Pérignon for special occasions.
Positioning himself on the terrace before the TV image of the retreating Red Army and the city he loved, the tall man raised his glass to Boris Gromov: “Here’s to you, you motherfucker.”
EPILOGUE: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The morning of September 11, 2001, broke bright and shining in the nation’s capital. As was his custom before leaving for work, Charlie Wilson walked out onto his terrace to take in the spectacular view. Never in history had a nation accumulated such dominance over the rest of the world as the United States had in the decade following the Soviet collapse. Wilson’s name was all but unknown to most Americans, but as he looked out over the monuments and the historic houses of government, he had every reason to believe that he had played a part in the startling disappearance of America’s greatest enemy.
