Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  It would have been a sobering insight for the Communist rulers if they could have followed what happened in the few minutes after Wilson finished reading the Associated Press dispatch. The mysterious force in the U.S. government that was destined to hound the Red Army with a seemingly limitless flood of ever more lethal and sophisticated weapons was about to be activated.

  No one, however, was paying attention, not even in the American government, when Charlie Wilson picked up a phone and called the Appropriations Committee staffer who dealt with “black appropriations,” the CIA funds. The man’s name was Jim Van Wagenen, a former college professor and onetime FBI agent. Wilson had just been named to the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. He was now part of the band of twelve men in the House responsible for funding CIA operations.

  The congressman knew enough about the eccentric workings of the subcommittee to know when a member can act alone to fund a program. “How much are we giving the Afghans?” he asked Van Wagenen.

  “Five million,” said the staffer.

  There was a moment’s silence. “Double it,” said the Texan.

  CHAPTER 2

  Teddy and Charlie

  DEFENDER OF TRINITY

  So far as anyone can tell, no congressman prior to Charlie Wilson had ever moved unsolicited to increase a CIA budget. From the beginning of the Cold War, Congress had granted that exclusive right to the president. But as dramatic as the doubling might sound, it had no visible impact on the war. It wasn’t reported or debated, and it never even registered on the KGB’s radar screen in Russia. At best, all it did was provide the mujahideen with a few thousand more Enfield rifles and perhaps some machine guns, so that they could go out and die for their faith in greater numbers.

  Wilson’s intervention had not cost the congressman much more than a telephone call to a key staffer and a few additional minutes when the subcommittee met to appropriate the nation’s secret intelligence budget. The truth is, it was an impulsive action, a personal gesture to bolster a painfully inadequate U.S. program.

  Wilson so easily crossed the line into this covert arena that no one stopped to question his right to be there or worry about the precedent he might be setting. It would be another two years before he would return to put this precedent to the test. But this is where, quite impulsively, he first demonstrated that there could be another power center in the American government, one that could act in a way that was totally unpredictable to drive a U.S. covert policy.

  For a moment, a very different Charlie Wilson had surfaced—a master politician able to find tools that could be used in ways that others would not have considered. But it had all taken place behind closed doors, and just for a fleeting moment. Before anyone could notice, the congressman had resumed the inexplicable role he had chosen for himself as a hopelessly irresponsible public servant.

  The truth is, there were always two Charlie Wilsons at work in Washington. But he was moving heaven and earth in those days to allow only one image to surface, and to promote that image so loudly that no one would go looking for the other. To begin with, he staffed his office almost exclusively with tall, startlingly beautiful women. They were famous on the Hill, known to all as “Charlie’s Angels.” And to his colleagues’ amazement, whenever questioned about this practice, Wilson invariably responded with one of his favorite lines: “You can teach them how to type, but you can’t teach them to grow tits.” That was the way he tended to present himself in public, which was tame compared to the way he decorated his condo. It was almost a caricature of what Hugh Hefner might have designed as the ultimate bachelor’s lair. Manly hedonism was the theme, down to the last detail: mirrored walls, an emperor’s size bed outfitted with plush down pillows and a royal blue comforter, an entertainment center featuring a giant television and stereo, and a gleaming tanning bed to maintain his year-round tan. Finally, the congressman’s most distinctive innovation: the Jacuzzi, not hidden away in the bathroom but so deliberately situated in the center of the bedroom that it forced the unsuspecting eye to draw all the worst possible conclusions about the man who slept in this room. Particularly when visitors came close and discovered silver handcuffs dangling elegantly from a hook within easy reach of the tub. The site of these instruments of hedonism invariably left his colleagues and distinguished guests speechless.

  It would be an exaggeration to suggest that this was all a false front. Charlie Wilson, after all, is a bona fide hedonist. But he is also guilty of concealing his other identity. It’s only when he’s alone and everyone else is sleeping that the other Charlie Wilson surfaces. It’s a nightly affair. Usually at about three or four A.M. he finds himself awake and turns to his library, with its thick volumes of military history. He’s not like other insomniacs, who simply try to get back to sleep. He reads like a scholar steeped in his field but also like a man in search of something personal, poring through accounts of the struggles of the world and the men who counted—Roosevelt, Kennedy, and all the great generals.

  But invariably, it is to the biographies and speeches and histories of Winston Churchill that Wilson always returns on these night journeys, to read again and again about the man who was cast into the political wilderness, written off as an alcoholic alarmist, and then, when all was lost, rose to the occasion to save his country and his civilization from the darkness of Hitler. It’s no wonder that Charlie Wilson never shared his sense of personal destiny. It wouldn’t have made much sense in his year of the hot tub had he even whispered of his inner conviction that he and Winston Churchill might have something—anything—in common.

  Nor did he explain why the painting over his bed, his one steady nightly companion, was like a talisman to him. The painting—a lone pilot in the cockpit of a Spitfire, patrolling the night skies of London—had hung over his boyhood bed in tiny Trinity, Texas, at a time when the Nazis were sweeping across Europe. Night after night, on the second floor of the white frame house, in the corner room that Charlie shared with his uncle Jack, the boy would sit staring out the window, ever vigilant, searching the sky for signs of Japanese bombers and fighter planes, whose characteristics were burned upon the memory of this seven-year-old defender of Trinity. “They aren’t coming, Charlie,” his kindly uncle Jack would assure him. “But if they do, you’ll be the first to see them.”

  There was nothing distant or unfamiliar about World War II for the citizens of this timber town along the railroad tracks in deep East Texas. Every night, not just Charlie and his family but everyone in Trinity gathered around their radios to find out how the war was going, knowing that everything rested on the outcome. When the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Charlie Wilson, age eight, sat in the living room of the white frame house across from the Methodist church and listened to Franklin Roosevelt describe the “day of infamy.” The young boy with the huge imagination had already become obsessed with the war and with the magical voices coming out of the RCA radio: Roosevelt with his fireside chats, Murrow from London under the Blitz, and particularly Winston Churchill. It was a voice from far away, heard on a radio in a tiny town in the back of beyond. But those ringing, defiant words of Churchill, mocking Hitler and infusing a nation with the will to fight on, no matter what the cost, never to be conquered, would leave Wilson forever struck by the power of one man’s spirit to change history.

  Young Charlie began reading everything he could find about war, saving his money to send away for a giant American flag from Sears Roebuck, which he draped from the front of the house each morning. He bought a Canadian Mountie’s uniform and insisted on wearing it every day. He tried to stage mock battles with his friends, but no one would play the role of the Nazis or the Japs.

  All of Trinity was transformed by the war. Everyone gathered scrap metal for the cause, even the aluminum foil that wrapped chewing gum. Charlie’s mother prepared bandages, and he and his friends helped assemble medical kits, putting their names and addresses inside. It was a great event when a soldier wrote back to thank them and
report that he had used their kit after being wounded.

  Every soldier from Trinity had his picture in the window of the local drugstore. There were eighty or ninety of them, and whenever one would return, wounded or discharged, Charlie would sit at his feet at the soda fountain and listen to his stories.

  Often he even saw the true face of the enemy close up. The War Department maintained a huge prisoner of war camp just seven miles from Trinity at a railroad depot called Riverside. Trains would unload German prisoners, who would then march three miles to the POW camp. As Wilson remembers, “It was a great treat in 1943 when the town doctor drove me to Riverside to watch the men of the Afrika Korps being unloaded—these were Rommel’s troops. Those sons of bitches were goose-stepping off of the train with great pride and arrogance in the very uniforms in which they were captured.” The sight of goose-stepping Nazis burned deeply in the boy’s consciousness. He had now seen the enemy. There they were—Hitler’s men just ten miles from Trinity.

  The young Wilson began going to the library each day to read up on weapons systems. He felt particularly menaced by the Messerschmitts, the German fighter-bombers that had savaged London. And he truly believed that Trinity might be next. “In the post office they had posters of all the Japanese and German airplanes, so we could spot ’em if they ever came over. Well, we had a little sawmill in Trinity, and all of us figured out it was probably a major target of the Japanese.” Night after night, little Charlie Wilson would go to the window and scan the skies, Trinity’s first line of defense, ready to spring at a moment’s notice to alert the sheriff to a surprise attack.

  The Japanese finally surrendered. While his mother played the piano at a service of thanksgiving at the Methodist church on V-J Day, the eleven-year-old boy was permitted to climb into the steeple to ring the bells in triumph.

  Most boys his age did not follow the menacing transformation of America’s World War II ally the Soviets. Wilson had been thrilled when Stalin’s forces had turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad in late 1942. But with increasing alarm, he read and listened to the accounts of Stalin gobbling up Eastern Europe. When Churchill came to America in 1947 and warned of an “iron curtain” falling over Europe Charlie took his words to heart, and when the Communists tested the bomb Wilson was depressed for days, convinced that America had a new enemy every bit as dangerous as Hitler.

  This was the early shaping of an American patriot and, for Wilson, just the beginning of a lifetime fascination with war, weapons, public service, and something else—a curious conviction that didn’t come to him all at once but grew with greater and greater force and clarity as the war unfolded and the voices over the radio began to deliver a separate message to Charlie. As time went on, he would come to feel that one day, his would be the voice on the radio.

  Wilson’s father was an accountant for the timber company. They had little money but were better off than most people in town. They lived in a pleasant house and were pillars of their community. Charles Edwin Wilson had almost known despair when the mill closed down during the Depression and he was laid off. But the next day he had signed on with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal jobs program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he worked as a roads supervisor, intensely proud of the fact that he had never missed a day’s work.

  Wilson’s father had one fixed ambition for his son: to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. He insisted it would be a ticket to success. And so he lobbied his local congressman and, after two tries, got his son an appointment to Annapolis. Charlie flunked the first test because he was so scrawny. The second he passed only after wolfing down fifteen bananas, to bring his six-foot-four-inch body up to the academy’s 140-pound minimum.

  In September 1952 Wilson’s proud parents drove their boy to Houston in the family’s new Chevrolet and put him on a TWA flight for his trip across the country. Wilson remembers his first plane ride on the propeller-driven Constellation, which delivered him to the start of his military career. Wilson and his fellow midshipmen in the starting class of two thousand were warned that less than half of them would graduate; and over the years, it was always touch-and-go whether Charlie would make the cut. He was a classic military screwup, constantly reprimanded for talking in formation, not having his shoes shined, leaving his light on after curfew. But somehow he made it through, in 1956 graduating eighth from the bottom of his class and with the distinction of having more demerits than any other graduate in anyone’s memory.

  Because of Annapolis, Wilson missed Korea. But at twenty-five, as a gunnery officer on a destroyer sailing the world with the American fleet at the height of the Cold War, he felt that he was at last coming into his own. He was in command of the warship’s weapons, and his gunnery teams almost always won the mock battles, in part because he had his men practice more than anyone else. They always ran out of ammunition long before they could get back to their home port to be resupplied. Wilson did this to sharpen his men’s skills, but also to empty the ammo boxes so that he could fill them with cheap alcohol bought on shore leave in Gibraltar to smuggle back to the States. Wilson’s training style was unconventional, but he ended up with the happiest men and the best shots in the fleet.

  Wilson was now feeling the power of America, moving about sometimes with the entire U.S. Atlantic fleet and other times with NATO naval units. “We were undisputedly the kings of the world, and everybody knew it. We were arrogant sons of bitches. But they loved us.” He sailed everywhere in those years—to Athens, Marseilles, Naples, Karachi, Beirut—and everywhere he went he felt proud. America was rebuilding Europe through the Marshall Plan, the dollar was powerful, and there was more than a woman in every port for the smiling, open-faced, fun-loving young officer in the starched white uniform.

  There were also long stretches of downtime at sea that Wilson put to good use, reading all of Churchill’s wartime books, consuming each as they came out and moving on to biographies of Roosevelt and George Kennan’s prescription for dealing with Communism.

  From his destroyer on Christmas morning 1956, he wrote to his parents and kid sister, evoking the same spirit that had led the young boy to keep vigil at his bedroom window in Trinity, scanning the sky for enemy Messerschmitts.

  Dear Mother, Daddy and Sharon:

  It’s now 5:15 a.m. Christmas morning. I have the 4 to 8 watch so I am up bright and early as always on Christmas. This will be my third duty day in a row as I am standing by for some of the married fellows so they can be with their families.

  This business of being away from home today is certainly not by choice, but neither is it something without reason. I can console myself and I hope you too, by simply realizing that we are doing a job here that must be done. It is only through constant vigilance on the part of the few that a secure, peaceful Christmas can be enjoyed by many.

  These read like lines for a Jimmy Stewart character, but the sentiments were very much Wilson’s own. In later life he would usually disguise such nakedly idealistic thoughts. That letter, however, without any hint of self-consciousness, is key to understanding Wilson’s later compulsion to be the lone cowboy sounding the alert, mobilizing “the forces of freedom.”

  Patrolling the seas during those Cold War years, Wilson came personally to feel the menace and reach of Soviet power. His destroyer spent most of its time chasing the Soviet submarines that hounded the fleet. The destroyers purposefully badgered them with mock attacks, forcing them under for days on end. The great triumph would come when, after two or three days of pursuit, a sub would finally be forced to surface. The Americans would snap photos of the disgraced Russians and give them the finger, while the enemy would shake their fists in return. “I always kept my depth charges on total alert,” Wilson recalls with bravado. On more than one occasion, the young gunnery officer appealed to the ship’s captain to permit him to blast one of the subs. “I promised a clean kill,” Wilson recalls. “Nobody would have ever known what happened to the fuckers, but they wouldn’t let me do it.”

  After t
hree years at sea chasing Russian submarines, Wilson was assigned to a top secret post at the Pentagon, where he was part of an intelligence unit that evaluated the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces. Having chased Soviet submarines, he now found himself rehearsing for all-out nuclear war. Back then, the U.S. response time to an incoming Soviet nuclear attack was thirty-five minutes. There were frequent simulated attacks, and Charlie often stood in for the top generals, who had only seven minutes to dive into waiting helicopters to be flown to the “Rock,” the secret underground bunker carved into a Maryland mountain. “I would be sitting there where the button is, and if you’re twenty-seven, it makes you feel very cocky knowing that here’s Moscow, and here’s Kiev, and if they fuck with us I’ll just hit all these buttons.”

  In spite of his bravado, the experience was sobering. Day after day he confronted the reality of an enemy he knew was rehearsing America’s nuclear destruction, and he resented it. It became a lifelong obsession to bring down this evil power. And all of his idealism and patriotic passions, which had been building since childhood, suddenly found an inspirational outlet when John Kennedy launched his campaign for the presidency.

  Kennedy appealed to every aspect of the young naval officer’s imagination: a war hero, he was a dashing, handsome idealist rallying the country to greatness and making it all look like fun. After work each day, hours spent studying the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile threat, Wilson would rush from the Pentagon to the Kennedy campaign headquarters, where he volunteered. Like so many others of his generation, Wilson became caught up in the aura of romance that Kennedy lent to public service.