by George Crile
Praise for Charlie Wilson’s War:
“A vivid narrative…Charlie Wilson’s War is a behind-the-scenes chronicle of a program that is still largely classified…. Few people who remember Wilson’s years in Washington would discount even the wildest tales.”
—David Johnston, The New York Times Book Review
“Who can possibly resist a story about a maverick Texas congressman who managed to bring the Soviet Union to his knees? Charlie Wilson’s War is a cross between Tom Clancy and Carl Hiaasen, with the distinguishing feature that it’s all apparently true.”
—Gerard DeGroot, The Christian Science Monitor
“Charlie Wilson’s War reads like a best-selling novel…. Crile’s globe-trotting research and adroit writing have produced a vastly entertaining book that outmuscles most spy novels in its quota of sheer thrills and chills.”
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“What a tale, what a yarn. Good Time Charlie Wilson of Lufkin, Texas, noted boozer and pussyhound, teams up with a rule-bending CIA agent to secretly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to the mujahideen of Afghanistan. Over the years, they slowly bleed the Red Army to defeat, ultimately causing the fall of the Soviet Union. I know it sounds far-fetched, even fantastic, but Crile has boatloads of evidence to back up his thesis. This has to be one of the wildest stories ever told. It’s a whale of a tale and I recommend it highly.”
—Molly Ivins, The Texas Observer
“Crile’s account is important, if appalling, precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy.”
—Chalmers Johnson, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Irresistible…The story of this odd and world-shaping partnership really can’t be believed until Crile and his thorough reporting gradually make it clear that yes, it all really happened.”
—Steve Kettman, San Francisco Chronicle
“[Crile] has hold of a story here that everyone else missed…an extraordinarily entertaining piece of reportage that has much to tell us about how the United States armed a group of people who are now using the weapons we provided them to kill us.”
—Charles Taylor, Salon
“Practically impossible to put down…will keep even the most vigorous critics of this Contra-like affair reading to the end.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Crile has raised the bar on books of this sort. It has more political intrigue, more suspense, more intense psychological analysis, and more technological know-how than anything Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum could fantasize about. And it has something else besides: It’s true.”
—Shannon Friedman, Charleston Gazette
“Vibrant storytelling…An entirely new take on Reagan-era history with international sweep and modern implications, neatly laid over the intriguing, untold inner workings of [the CIA].”
—Jan Jordan, Houston Chronicle
“A gripping read for students of the Cold War, anyone who wants the lowdown on how their tax dollars really get spent, Central Asian junkies or those who delight in cloaks, daggers, and plausible deniability.”
—The Economist
“This I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-fiction tale has it all: a Marlboro Man handsome leading man, a parade of impossibly gorgeous women, sex, and spies…. But Crile’s book is also a disturbing meditation on the unintended consequences of a U.S. foreign policy so single-mindedly focused on beating the Soviets that we unwittingly helped arm and organize a new Evil Empire.”
—Kathy Kiely, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“A bizarre chapter of contemporary history that could have been written by Ian Fleming, Charlie Wilson’s War is a true tall tale of silver screen–sized characters that, for better or worse, changed the world…and it goes a long way toward answering the question asked by many Americans: Why do they hate us?”
—Mary Brown Malouf, The Salt Lake Tribune
“If you like tell-all books about the unbelievable things that our elected folks can do for you, you will love this book. Charlie Wilson’s War has it all, as well as an explanation about how our most feared enemy, Osama bin Laden, got his start with a little unintended help from his friends right here in the United States.”
—Saralee Terry Woods, The Nashville City Paper
“An amazing tale, made all the more amazing because it was missed by the press. George Crile has written a book revealing the extraordinary details and intrigue of a secret war, and that alone would be a monumental achievement. But he has also written a book about how power works in Washington, about how the CIA succeeded in this war but failed because it armed an ally who became our enemy, about how we might better understand Islamic fundamentalism, about how a solitary Congressman guilefully moved the U.S. government, and all of this comes with a breathtaking cast of characters worthy of a Le Carré novel. Only it’s all true. And just as vivid.”
—Ken Auletta
CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
The Extraordinary Story of How
the Wildest Man in Congress and
a Rogue CIA Agent Changed
the History of Our Times
GEORGE CRILE
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2003 by George Crile
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Photographs on Introduction, Chapter 3, 11, 14, 17, 19, 23, 27, 28, 30, and 34 courtesy of George Crile; Chapter 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32, and 33 courtesy of Charlie Wilson; Chapter 6, 20, courtesy of Gus Avrakotos; Chapter 8, 16, courtesy of Howard Hart; Chapter 9 courtesy of Austin Police Department; Chapter 13 courtesy of Joanne Herring.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crile, George.
Charlie Wilson’s war: the extraordinary story of how the wildest man in Congress and a rogue CIA agent changed the history of our times / George Crile.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4341-9
1. Afghanistan—History—Soviet occupation, 1979–1989—Secret service—United States. 2. Wilson, Charlie, 1933–3. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 4. Military assistance, American—Afganistan. I. Title.
DS371.2.C75 2002
958.104'5—dc21
2002019074
Grove Press
An imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
TO BARBARA LYNE,
without whom this story would not have been told
“Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.”
—Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of the King’s Jest
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Introduction: A Strange Award at Langley
Chapter 1: A Hot Tub in Las Vegas
Chapter 2: Defender of Trinity
Chapter 3: A Rogue Elephant in the Agency Woods
Chapter 4: A Texas Bombshell
Chapter 5: The Secret Life of Charlie Wilson
Chapter 6: The Curse of Aliquippa
Chapter 7: How the Israelis Broke the
Congressman’s Heart and He Fell for the Muj
Chapter 8: The Station Chief
Chapter 9: Cocaine Charlie
Chapter 10: The Congressman Takes His Belly Dancer to the Jihad
Chapter 11: The Rebirth of Gust Avrakotos
Chapter 12: The United States v. Charles Wilson
Chapter 13: The Seduction of Doc Long
Chapter 14: Gust’s Secret
Chapter 15: The Opening Salvo
Chapter 16: Howard of Afghanistan
Chapter 17: Cogan’s Last Stand
Chapter 18: The Birth of a Conspiracy
Chapter 19: The Recruitment
Chapter 20: No Wasps Need Apply
Chapter 21: Man of Destiny
Chapter 22: Mohammed’s Arms Bazaar
Chapter 23: The Senator and His Even Crazier Right-Wing Friends
Chapter 24: Techno Holy Warriors
Chapter 25: “The Noblest Smuggling Operation in History”
Chapter 26: Dr. Doom Declares Charlie Dead
Chapter 27: Charlie’s Irregulars
Chapter 28: The Silver Bullet
Chapter 29: The Other Silver Bullet
Chapter 30: The Brown Bomber
Chapter 31: “It’s My War, Goddamn It”
Chapter 32: A Jihad to Remember
Chapter 33: The Price of Glory
Chapter 34: “Here’s to You, You Motherfucker”
Epilogue—Unintended Consequences
Source Notes
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In little over a decade, two events have transformed the world we live in: the collapse of our Cold War nuclear foe, the Soviet Union; and the discovery, after 9/11, that we face a new global enemy in the form of militant Islam. Both have profoundly affected the United States, and in each instance Americans were caught by surprise, unable to explain what had triggered these events.
9/11 was a watershed, as stunning in its boldness as it was frightening in its message. To this day, we know little about how it all worked or what was in the minds of the men who carried it out. Other than a shared religious identity, about the only obvious common denominator among the nineteen terrorists was having spent time in Afghanistan.
The fact that Afghanistan was the cradle of the attack should not have come as a surprise, for both the territory and the Islamic warriors who gather there are familiar to our government. Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were, in effect, America’s surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the Communist empire.
Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIA’s biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history, but somehow it never registered on the American consciousness. When viewed through the prism of 9/11, the scale of that U.S. support for an army of Muslim fundamentalists seems almost incomprehensible. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At one point over three hundred thousand fundamentalist Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA; thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was over, some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.
At the time, it was viewed as a noble cause, and when the last Soviet soldier walked out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, the leaders of the CIA celebrated what they hailed as the Agency’s greatest victory. The cable from the CIA station in Islamabad that day read simply: “We won.” But the billions spent arming and training the primitive tribesmen of Afghanistan turned out to have an unintended consequence. In a secret war, the funders take no credit—and no doubt that’s why the mujahideen and their Muslim admirers around the world never viewed U.S. support as a decisive factor in their victory. As they saw it, that honor went to Allah, the only superpower they acknowledge. But for the few who know the extent of the CIA’s involvement, it’s impossible to ignore the central role that America played in this great modern jihad, one that continues to this day.
This book tells the story of the CIA’s secret war in Afghanistan, of the men who dreamed it, and of the journey they took to see it through. If the campaign had different authors, men more associated with shaping foreign policy or waging wars, it might have surfaced earlier or been the subject of debate. But the unorthodox alliance—of a scandal-prone Texas congressman and an out-of-favor CIA operative—that gave birth to the Afghan jihad kept this history under the radar. It is the missing chapter in the politics of our time, a rousing good story that is also a cautionary tale.
Gust Avrakotos and Charlie Wilson
INTRODUCTION: A STRANGE AWARD AT LANGLEY
The entrance to CIA headquarters is just off the George Washington Memorial Parkway, about a ten-minute drive up the Potomac from the White House. On a sunny, humid day in June 1993, an air-conditioned bus exited the parkway, onto Dolley Madison Boulevard and slowed down at the turnoff to the Langley headquarters. A bouquet of flowers had been left on the grassy island in the intersection. Each day now someone had taken to leaving a fresh floral arrangement here to mark the spot where three months earlier a young Pakistani with an AK-47 had calmly gunned down two Agency officials and made his escape.
It had never been easy for outsiders to get into the CIA’s sprawling wooded compound, not even before the assassinations. The day the innocuous-looking bus pulled up to the security gate was some three years after the Berlin Wall had come down and a year and a half since the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. But although the Cold War was over, the CIA, that forty-six-year-old shrine to anti-Communism, was very much intact, and no one was talking about dismantling it. At the gate the uniformed guards immediately recognized the bus and the driver. It was a CIA vehicle with an Agency employee at the wheel, but the security men wanted to know who the others were.
“I’m Congressman Charlie Wilson, and they’re fixing to give me an award in there,” the tall figure in a dark blue suit announced as the guards mounted the bus. The congressman’s voice is a bit startling at first—“booming” is the only way to describe it, a melodious, large Texas baritone that carries with it a sense of authority and importance. None of the other men or women in the bus looked terribly important. Generally speaking, no one ever looks impressive in a bus. But after listening to the congressman, the guard called the director’s office and, without checking so much as a driver’s license or searching any of the visitors’ briefcases or handbags, waved the vehicle through the gate.
The woods of Langley were particularly lush that morning. It was June 9, 1993, a week after Charlie Wilson’s sixtieth birthday, which he had celebrated with a party for three hundred at the Roof Terrace Restaurant of the Kennedy Center. Casablanca was the theme he had chosen for the event. It was his favorite movie, and he had appeared for the occasion in a white dinner jacket specially tailored to look like the one Humphrey Bogart wore when he played the role of Rick. A big band played dance music from the 1940s and ’50s, and a characteristically bizarre collection of guests gathered to pay tribute to the rule-breaking congressman from the Bible Belt of East Texas. Six feet, four inches tall, square-jawed, Hollywood handsome, he had taken to the dance floor with one woman after another to relive the memories of his outlandish exploits.
No congressman or senator in anyone’s memory had ever succeeded in flouting the rules so repeatedly for so many years and managed to survive. By this time, in the dull era of the 1990s, he had become the ultimate master of the Washington high-wire act, and that night his many strange and unusual friends had stood back and marveled as Charlie danced the night away, offering a toast to “Friends, to power, to passion, to black lace” before exiting with Ziva, a beautiful Israeli ballerina, on his arm.
A week later, riding in the CIA bus to his rendezvous with history, Wilson was preparing himself to rise to the occasion. He lo
oked remarkably fit and useful. There was not a trace of gray in his full head of hair. On this day he actually had the look of a reliable, responsible, sober-minded man.
The others in the bus, mostly Wilson’s staff, began gawking out the window the moment they passed the security checkpoint. They were all staring at the sprawling secret compound, trying to lock in a memory of this forbidden zone that their champion was making it possible for them to see and experience.