Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Zia’s relationship with the United States could not have been worse; nor could he have been closer to his honorary consul, who took the novel position with the dictator that the invasion was a great blessing in disguise. “At last there were Russians crossing the border,” she told him. “Before, they were just using nicknames like FMLN or FSMLN. But now they were Russians, and I knew there was a possibility to do something.”

  That kind of bravado was typical of Joanne Herring, who, at age forty-eight, was accustomed to seizing and holding center stage and refusing to let anything get her down. She had married two men, raised two boys, and worked five days a week for twelve hours a day on her television talk show. She was one of the social dragons of Houston and a tireless promoter of Pakistan. But the year after the invasion, for the first time in her life, she felt defeated. She found that no one seemed to want to hear about Zia or Pakistan, much less about Afghanistan. It seemed that life was passing her by, and she felt alone. After a long struggle, her husband had died of cancer, and Joanne turned to her church in Houston, where she remembers sobbing at the altar, in a state of complete despair. “I never thought I would laugh again,” she says. “I thought my life was over.”

  Joanne Herring remembers those dark days with a shudder, but mainly she remembers how Charlie Wilson arrived to save her life. They had met two years before at one of her River Oaks parties, after he had passed an important piece of oil and gas legislation that her husband had thought impossible. Joanne collected powerful men, and as she told him about the virtues of Pakistan, she locked eyes with the handsome congressman. Wilson left with the distinct impression that Joanne Herring had been flirting with him. So he was delighted when she called him one day out of the blue, in the midst of her depression.

  It is said that hypochondriacs make the best nurses, and if Charlie Wilson was responsible for lifting Joanne Herring from her depression back in 1981, then it was because he knew where she was coming from. Very few were aware of the depths of Charlie Wilson’s frequent depressions—the insomnia, the alcoholism, the asthma, the trips to the doctor, the constant loneliness. He disguised it well. No matter what his inner mood, whenever the public door opened, the darkness disappeared, replaced by the bigger-than-life, can-do Texan.

  For Joanne Herring, that overflowing energy was like a miracle cure. “Charlie taught me to laugh again and made my life really wonderful,” she said. A curious romance began, with much talk of Christ, anti-Communism, and Zia ul-Haq. As the weeks passed, she found her spirits returning. “Everyone else’s eyes would glaze over when I would talk about the Afghans, but Charlie was interested in these things.”

  As the romance bloomed, Herring found herself reborn as a ferocious champion of Zia and the Afghans, and she became convinced that Wilson was the one who could save the day. “I really gave Zia a story on Charlie,” she recalls, “because I was scared someone could do an investigation of Charlie and write him off. I told Zia, ‘This is the man who can really do it for you.’ You see, they were very frightened of America.” Joanne also began to use all of her wiles to pull Wilson into the Afghan war. “I knew that if he was serious about something, he went all out. I’d say to Charlie, ‘You are powerful, you are wonderful, just think what you can do.’ It had to be a sort of brainwashing,” she explained. “But it was very easy, because Charlie thought in those terms too. You can raise that spirit in a Texan. It’s there.”

  Wilson, now fully under Herring’s sway, quickly accepted her invitation to River Oaks to meet the man who she said would explain it all. “You will adore this man,” she told Wilson. “There have been eighteen books written about him. He has been decorated by every country in the world. To give you an idea, he was the first man in the Belgian Congo after the bloodbath, he married eleven Jewish girls to get them out of Nazi Germany and said he didn’t have one honeymoon. Every time there has been a disaster in the world, Charles Fawcett was there. You will never meet anybody like him.”

  For those who don’t know her, there are times when Joanne Herring sounds quite detached from reality. But the stories she told about Fawcett turn out to be largely true, including her account of how he had recently lured her into Afghanistan. She explained that six months earlier, she had been at home in River Oaks when a message from Afghanistan came in “via the underground.” It was from her friend Charles Fawcett, a note scribbled with crayons on the back of a child’s notebook: “Come immediately. Bring film equipment. The world doesn’t know what’s going on here.”

  It was hard for the congressman not to be impressed as he listened to Joanne describe how she had left immediately for Islamabad and then crossed into the war zone with Fawcett. “All this had to be very secretive,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Zia sent his planes and helicopters with us to the border. He even sent troops to areas where they were not supposed to go. You see, the least little thing could have created a Russian invasion. Zia kept telling me that the Russians wanted nothing more than for his troops to cross over so that they could justify an invasion.

  “They dressed me like a man. I had a bodyguard who was seven feet tall with a handlebar mustache and an Enfield rifle.” At one point, Joanne told Wilson, this giant moved her about in a barrel to hide her. “It was so cold that all the men gave me their blankets. But it was like sleeping under a dead hippo. I was so cold, it was horrible, but it was the most exciting thing in my life.”

  As she told this story to Wilson, she played on themes she knew would move his Texas spirit. She described how these primitive tribesmen would bow to Mecca in prayer five times a day. She emphasized how few weapons they had and described how the Afghans treated their guns like library books—as soon as one warrior crossed the border, he would turn in his gun, handing it over to another man going off to face death. “It was so humbling,” she went on. “Nothing ever affected me like seeing those twenty thousand men raising their guns and shouting to fight to the last drop of their blood.”

  When Joanne introduced Wilson to Fawcett, she was operating on the powerful conviction that they had two things in common: an impulse to stand up for the underdog, mixed with a thirst for glamour and adventure.

  Charles Fernley Fawcett is an immensely likable man and, as Joanne had hoped, he immediately charmed Wilson with tales of nonstop swash-buckling, adventure, and good deeds. As Wilson learned, Fawcett had begun life as an orphan of sorts, watched over very loosely by an uncle from the well-heeled Fernley-Fawcett family of South Carolina. By fifteen, Fawcett says, he had commenced an affair with his best friend’s mother; “a wonderful woman,” he recalled warmly. “If that’s child molestation, I would wish this curse on every young boy.” But this mother of his dreams cut off the relationship, and at sixteen the handsome, powerful young man, already an all-state football player, escaped on a tramp steamer bound for the great flesh-pots of the world.

  The young Fawcett was one of those gifted all-purpose talents. He had a commanding voice; a strong, beautiful body, which he bared for sculptors; an artistic talent, which made him a gifted sketcher; and a musical ear, which allowed him to play the trumpet well enough to go back-stage one night and get a few tips from Louis Armstrong: “What you do, my boy, is you pick up the trumpet thusly, and you put it to your lips thusly, and then you blow, boy, blow.”

  One day, after watching a professional wrestling match, he went backstage and asked the wrestler to show him some moves. For the next year he traveled through the back-alley theaters of Eastern Europe playing the role of the honest American boy heroically fighting underhanded opponents. “It got to the point that I didn’t care that the villain always pinned me,” Fawcett remembers, “because I was clean, and the others were dirty and the audience was always for me. So much so that they sometimes would storm the ring trying to get the other guy.”

  Fawcett still has scrapbooks, news clippings, and book entries that document an otherwise unbelievable life: an ambulance driver in France at the outb
reak of World War II; an RAF pilot during the Battle of Britain, scrambling to his Hurricane to take on Messerschmitts over London; and even a tour as a member of the French Foreign Legion. At the end of the war, Fawcett came down with tuberculosis and was discharged from the legion. He was reduced to playing “Taps” at funerals and digging up graves to identify Nazi victims until an old friend rescued him with an offer of a bit part in a movie. Over the next two decades Fawcett reinvented himself as an actor, appearing in over a hundred B-grade movies, many of them in Italy. He was a star of sorts, but always cast in the role of the villain. He performed his own stunts, leaping out of buildings, brawling with Buster Crabbe, and riding horses off cliffs. He may have been a second-tier player during the day, but at night, in the words of the gossip columnists, he was “the king of Rome” and “the mayor of the Via Veneto.” Warren Beatty remembers him as the centerpiece of the Dolce Vita of the city, loved and adored by everyone.

  It was there that Fawcett met Baron Ricky di Portanova, who would later marry Joanne’s childhood friend Buckets. At that time, di Portanova didn’t advertise his title; he was penniless and relied on his deep voice to scratch out a living dubbing films into English. He and Fawcett shared a tiny apartment off the Via Veneto. Whoever had a woman for the night got the bed. The toilet was down the hall.

  Had it not been for Joanne Herring, di Portanova might have remained impoverished. His mother was a Cullen but she was mentally impaired and had virtually no contact with her family or its fortune. Joanne convinced di Portanova to return to the United States and sue for his share of the family fortune. When the suit was finally settled, di Portanova received, under dictates of the Texas Trust Act, a reported million dollars a month in income. His life was transformed. Overnight, he became a centerpiece of Houston’s high society, the exotic, international jet-setter, Baron di Portanova, so flam-boyantly rich and extravagant that he tried to buy the famous “21” Club restaurant in New York as a birthday present for Buckets.

  Like many men who come into fortunes late in life, the baron romanticized his penniless days in Rome with his old friends. And twenty years later, alarmed when he discovered that Fawcett was in bad health and had run out of money, he insisted that his old roommate come immediately to Houston to supervise the construction of his mansion’s vast new swimming-pool wing. Fawcett accepted the plane ticket and the appointments with Houston’s best doctors, and moved in with the baron and the baroness, quickly becoming a prominent, much-loved extra man in Houston’s roaring ’70s society. But somehow he didn’t feel right about living in this lap of luxury. To begin with, all was not well in the baron’s house.

  The year before, di Portanova’s loyal valet had been mysteriously shot and killed while carrying a platter of cold partridges in to lunch. The baron insisted that he, not the valet, had been the real target. No evidence ever surfaced to warrant such thoughts but di Portanova’s paranoia was now so intense that his household was rife with rumors of rival kinsmen plotting against him. When the entire swimming-pool wing burned to the ground, once again the baron suspected foul play. It was all too much for Fawcett, who found himself irrationally guilt stricken, convinced that somehow he could have prevented the disaster.

  In truth, the old adventurer had grown restless in the baron’s house—too long without a cause and feeling decadent. So when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the sixty-year-old Fawcett announced to his devoted friend, Joanne Herring, that he intended to leave Houston for the mountains of Afghanistan to pass on to the Afghan resistance tactics he had learned in the Foreign Legion.

  No amount of cajoling from the baron and baroness could change Fawcett’s mind, so they gave in and threw him an elegant going-away dinner in the wine cellar of Houston’s finest restaurant. Joanne Herring saw him off at the airport the next morning, and six months later, after receiving his scribbled note, she was in Afghanistan with a camera crew to help Fawcett rally the conscience of the world.

  Wilson was entranced by Fawcett, whom he considered a Renaissance romantic. “He loves beauty, he loves war, and he loves killing bad guys,” Wilson remembered. As far as Wilson was concerned, Fawcett was a hero, an American who “had killed fascists in Spain, shot down Messerschmitts over London, and had been in the Hindu Kush shooting Russians. How could I say no to a guy like that?”

  But it was not so easy to be flattering about Fawcett’s film. He had chosen Joanne to serve as his blond interviewer and persuaded Orson Welles, an old friend from the Via Veneto, to be the narrator. The baron threw himself into promoting the effort with a lavish black-tie dinner for the Houston premiere. The setting he chose was the newly reconstructed wing of his mansion, built around a giant Grecian swimming pool with oversized chandeliers.

  As the lights went down, a lone mujahid warrior was seen on the back of a rearing stallion. An Afghan with a great white beard, bearing a startling resemblance to Fawcett, ran up to the mounted horseman and asked, “Commander, where are you going?” In the background, music straight out of an Errol Flynn adventure rose up. “I’m going to fight the Russians,” the mujahid warrior growled. “But, Commander, how can you fight the infidel without weapons?” Onto the screen flashed the film’s title: “Courage Is Our Weapon.”

  Joanne Herring watched with mixed reactions. “Fawcett just couldn’t bear to cut any of it,” she says. She acknowledges that the film is something less than sophisticated, particularly during her interviewing segments. “Here the Afghans were, telling me how the Russians had stuck a bayonet into a pregnant woman’s stomach, and I’m trying to understand their language, and smiling, always smiling, because I’m trying to encourage them to speak English.”

  When the lights came on after the two-hour documentary, the baron tapped his champagne glass and stood to offer a toast. “Theeees,” he said, gesturing to his lavish swimming-pool annex with the great chandeliers, “theees is not reality.” Pointing theatrically to the projector, Fawcett, and Herring, he continued: “Theees movie, theees eeez reality.”

  Wilson was delighted to be included in the baron’s social circle. “I’d never met any of those people before,” recalls Wilson. “It’s the kind of fantasy world that every Texan has always heard about and found exciting.” But Wilson, the great anti-Communist, had to cope with the fact that Fawcett and Joanne had gone into the war zone. They had actually taken risks to do something about the Communists. He didn’t quite know what to say when Joanne insisted that the CIA was playing a fake game in Afghanistan, that the U.S. consul she had met at the frontier was a kind of apologist for the Russians, and that brave men were dying because of congressional neglect. It didn’t matter that he had made a telephone call to double the covert-aid budget for the mujahideen. A few million dollars more was a meaningless gesture, she said. Joanne Herring wanted Wilson to become the mujahideen’s true champion. Wilson’s manhood, she implied softly, was on the line.

  CHAPTER 5

  Charlie and his congressional office staff

  THE SECRET LIFE

  OF CHARLIE WILSON

  No one questions the modern politician’s reliance on spin doctors, press secretaries, and image makers. It’s such a common practice that it can be stated as a virtual law of political physics that under normal circumstances, politicians will always emphasize the positive and never deliberately create a negative public image for themselves.

  What always set Charlie Wilson apart was his impulse to do just the opposite: invariably, he promoted his vices and hid his virtues. As late as 1996 the New York Times would all but dismiss him in an editorial as “the biggest party animal in Congress.” If Wilson made it hard for the Times to recognize the power and influence he wielded in 1996, it was nothing compared to the public face he projected during the early 1980s, when he seemed to be little more than a public joke. He almost never spoke on the House floor. He wasn’t associated with any legislative initiatives. In this regard, his cover was nearly perfect.

  But what every professional in the House of Repr
esentatives knew was that simultaneously another very different Charlie Wilson was at work. He was, in effect, running a tunnel right into the most powerful places in Washington. If there was such a thing as an underground ladder in Congress, then Wilson was climbing it speedily, so much so that Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson included the Texan in his list of the capital’s ten most effective back-room operators. Wilson was a genius at the inside game of maneuvering in the Balkanized world where power is distributed in blocks and where deals are made when you have something to trade. And ironically, because Wilson was such a political pro, his outrageous lifestyle seemed to actually enhance his position. For one thing, from the very beginning, everyone in the House knew who Charlie Wilson was. He was impossible to miss: too tall, too handsome, too loud, with too many striking female staffers by his side.

  He’d first broken from the pack and become a part of the legend of his party in 1976, when he’d defied his own Texas delegation and maneuvered his way onto the all-powerful Appropriations Committee. That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent. The committee’s power is so great that its twelve subcommittee chairmen are known collectively as the “College of Cardinals.” The full committee holds the purse strings of the entire federal government, but it’s such an immense job that responsibility for the various branches of government are broken down and delegated to individual subcommittees. In the end, that means that a lone appropriator who stays on a subcommittee long enough and knows what he wants can amass extraordinary individual power over agencies and the policies they pursue.