Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  In June 1966, Hart was inducted into the Agency and spent the next two years at the Camp Peary spy school. After graduating, he was sent to India and Pakistan where he spent five years as a junior officer. But he got his first chance to play in the big leagues in 1978 when he was sent on a secret mission to Iran during the final days of the Shah’s regime. The CIA case officers and staff at the huge Teheran station were all registered with the Shah’s government, Hart’s assignment was to operate deep under cover. Soon after revolution swept the Ayatollah and his virulent anti-American followers into power, the entire 125-man CIA station was evacuated.

  Hart, still under cover, was left behind in enemy territory as the acting CIA station chief. At 35, a mere GS-13, he was now operating clandestinely as his country’s eyes and ears in charge of a tiny collection of unregistered agents. For the next four months he lived with constant terror. Tehran was occupied by militant, gun-toting student radicals convinced that every American they saw was a spy. Rifles were always being pointed at his head. Crazed revolutionaries repeatedly hurled him to the ground, accusing him of being with the CIA and threatening to kill him.

  Hart had made a pact with himself, back when he’d said good-bye to his wife and boys and had shaken hands with the departing station chief. A heavy smoker, he’d decided that he might well die one day from lung cancer, but he was not, by God, going to die at the hands of a Muslim fanatic. He realized that this challenge was what his whole life, and all his CIA training and experience, had been leading to.

  Day after day Hart maneuvered through a terrifying landscape. He and his four agents had the keys to eighty cars and 250 apartments left behind by the departing Americans. They kept moving, maintaining their cover, and reporting back to Langley. When the student radicals stormed the embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage, Hart transmitted his last dispatch, then made his way to the border and back to Washington.

  It was one of those career-making events. The crisis had hit and Howard Phillips Hart had distinguished himself. He would receive the first of five coveted and rare intelligence medals—more, he was told, than any other CIA officer had ever been awarded.

  Back in Washington, Hart was put in charge of the Pakistan-Afghanistan desk. He was there when the Russians invaded just after Christmas in 1979. When Jimmy Carter discovered old-time Cold War religion and asked the Agency to do something about Afghanistan, Hart helped write the first finding for the president to sign. And when the president ordered a rescue mission for the hostages being held in the Tehran embassy, Hart was tapped to head up the CIA’s part of the operation. For the next six months he went underground, coordinating with Delta Force and the Pentagon’s Special Operations Unit.

  In Egypt, the night before launching the April 25 rescue operation, Hart met with the Delta Force team in a large hangar where the CIA had assembled a huge model of the U.S. embassy. Hart knew every nook and cranny of the place. Just the day before, one of the CIA’s agents in Tehran had come up with the exact location where the Americans were being held, and Hart walked the secret warriors through every room they might have to enter. At the end of the briefing, as the Delta Force soldiers were filing out of the room, one young sergeant took Hart aside and asked, “Sir, where do I put the flag?”

  “What do you mean?” Hart asked.

  The soldier unbuttoned his camouflage suit and there, wrapped around his chest, was a large American flag.

  “Oh shit, that’s a good idea,” Hart said. So the two went back to the model and Hart decided it should be nailed to the wall over the second-floor balcony of the ambassador’s residence. “The revolutionary guards will take it down,” he said, “but by then the TV crews will have filmed it. That’s the place to put it.”

  Hart was on board the C-130 Hercules when the Delta Force team landed in the desert during the Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt. He wore a flak jacket, carried an M-16, and was going in. But then the disaster hit. A helicopter collided with an airplane, and eight Americans died. The mission was aborted, and suddenly Howard Hart was at the door of his C-130 pulling one Delta Force soldier after another into the plane. When he reached out to pull the last man in, he saw tears smudging the dark camouflage paint under the soldier’s eyes. It was the young Delta Force sergeant. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “about the flag.”

  Back in Egypt, Hart wept. This could have been a chance for America to stand tall again. For Howard Hart, it could have been an opportunity to pay the country back for that moment in Manila thirty-five years earlier when he and his family had been rescued. But it was not America’s day.

  Back in Washington, when Hart received his second Intelligence Star for that mission, it was a bittersweet moment. But there wasn’t time to look back. Ronald Reagan had been swept into office with a promise to restore America’s standing abroad. His new CIA director, William Casey, was talking about going on the offensive. Casey wanted to bloody Russian noses in Afghanistan, and Hart was the logical choice to take on the Afghan operation.

  Until then the CIA had been running a modest and uncertain effort out of Pakistan to back the mujahideen. When the Near East Division Chief, Chuck Cogan, tapped Hart to take over the program, he didn’t presume to tell him what U.S. and CIA policies should be. The two men had gone through the Iranian hostage crisis together and now the rescue mission. They were soul mates, and Cogan was leaving it up to Hart to decide whether or not the Agency should move to expand its role in the war.

  As the new chief of the station in Islamabad, command center of the CIA’s Afghanistan operation, Hart quickly decided the time was right. As he settled into his command and presided over the steadily increasing arms flow to the mujahideen, Hart took on the air of a field marshal. Not since Vietnam had an American been responsible for putting so many men into battle, he would later note. Most compelling, he figured, was that he was the first officer ever to be given the mandate to kill America’s true enemy, the troops of the Red Army. He was now the man of the hour, and it was inconceivable that the congressman he was briefing would ever have a significant part to play in the Afghan war. He had no idea that the two of them were headed on a collision course.

  As far as Hart was concerned, this exercise was simply to give the congressman a memorable experience—to let him see the inside of a CIA station and hear a bit of secret talk before he was put on a plane back to Washington. Then Hart could get back to the business of killing Russians. Without any real sense of the man he was talking to, Hart launched into one of his boilerplate briefings, and for a time he had the congressman in the palm of his hand as he laid out the gruesome history of the Soviet invasion.

  At the map, he explained to Wilson that over 100,000 Soviet soldiers were still in Afghanistan, garrisoned in all of the country’s major cities, military bases, and airfields. In Kabul and the major cities, the KGB controlled the Afghan intelligence service, KHAD, and Soviet “advisers” were in all the ministries. The Kremlin, Hart said contemptuously, has the gall to say they only have a “limited contingent” of troops here. The official position in Moscow was: “there’s no war being fought in Afghanistan.”

  Wilson’s mind raced as he listened to Hart describe the mujahideen’s indomitable fighting spirit. Hart explained that even as the two men spoke, this CIA-backed holy war was growing. The more Afghans the Russians killed, the more enlisted in the jihad. In the beginning, he said, they had acted as if they were still in the nineteenth century—sniping with Enfields, even mounting the kind of ambushes that T. E. Lawrence would have organized with his Arab units. Hordes of them would mass and run screaming at Soviet caravans led by tanks and armored personnel carriers and bristling with heavy machine guns, rockets, and tactical air support. Thousands upon thousands of Afghans died, but the mujahideen, fueled by their religious convictions and their legendary warriors’ tradition, refused to accept defeat. Now, almost three years later, they were growing both in size and ability. What had once been a nuisance for the Soviets was becoming a bleedi
ng wound.

  The CIA man explained that he had watched them pouring over the border, heading for Peshawar. Some came from valleys where foreigners had never gone, where the language they spoke might be known to no one else in the world. Usually there had been no telephones or radios, not even postal delivery, but somehow they had all gotten word that Peshawar was the mecca of the jihad, the place to go for weapons. They came, not knowing what Afghans elsewhere were doing—all moving in the same direction, mystically organizing themselves into small bands that somehow, when it was all added up, turned into a strangely coherent guerrilla force. The mujahideen were moving on foot and on horseback across Afghanistan. They were bringing their families to Pakistan. The heads of the clans were arriving with their sons and nephews, their cousins and brothers, all looking for guns, to return as family and village military units.

  Hart had no illusions about these people, most of whom were Pashtun tribesmen. He knew how stubborn they were, how primitive and impossible to reason with. How foreign the concept of unity was to them. How brutal they could be with their prisoners if they took prisoners. To Hart, ever the Cold War strategist, there was a simple equation: as long as the mujahideen were prepared to pay almost any price to kill Russians, it was a heaven-sent opportunity for America to help them against the common foe.

  Charlie Wilson had paid careful attention to what Howard Hart said, and at the outset he had been impressed. “I felt better about Howard after listening to him,” Wilson recalled years later. “I could see then that he had an enthusiasm for the fight. But it was a different fight than I had in mind. His idea was to be a burr under the saddle, an extreme nuisance, and he seemed very enthusiastic about this. But he never envisioned killing the beast.”

  The fact was, in Howard Hart, Charlie Wilson was confronting a CIA mind-set that had long before grown accustomed to fighting lost causes. There had been two Agency successes, always cited in the books—the government overthrows in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in ’54—but those were thunderbolt wonders pulled off with smoke and mirrors, golpes as they call them in Latin America.

  The other interventions had invariably been grim affairs, designed to hold the line against Communism by launching spoiling actions all over the globe. Any officer who permitted his emotions to run loose in this cruel arena, where the “containment” game was being played, could have had his heart broken every year: all those sad campaigns to overthrow Sukarno; the colossal failure of the Cuban operations; the long and hopeless war in Indochina. It had almost become the trademark of the CIA’s Operations Division to: fight and lose and finally be exposed and then mocked and vilified in the press, in Congress, and even at home by their children.

  In late 1982, the suggestion that the CIA inflame the Afghans by giving them enough weapons to seek a victory over the Red Army would have sounded preposterous to Hart. No expert anywhere believed the mujahideen had a chance against the limitless reserves of men, armor, and air power of the country that had been willing to sacrifice over 10 million lives to destroy Hitler.

  So when Wilson announced to Hart that money was no object and that he would personally see to it that Congress appropriated whatever amount Hart wanted for the mujahideen, the station chief was suddenly alarmed. “God protect us from our friends,” he thought. At that very moment back in Washington, liberal Democrats in Congress were in an uproar over a Newsweek cover story about the CIA’s latest “secret war” in Nicaragua and here was this well-meaning fool, all puffed up and ready to tell the world that the CIA needed millions more for a war against the Red Army that fortunately no one seemed to even know was being fought. Hart figured Wilson was the kind of politician who might just succeed in compromising the entire operation, all in the name of rescuing it. “I looked at him as a very dangerous man who could get me in serious shit if I wasn’t careful. I knew that Charlie was trying to draw me into some kind of statement that he could use. It was a trap I was not prepared for. I said, ‘Wait a minute. I have a risk of going outside my channels of reporting here.’”

  It was hard also for Hart not to be offended by the congressman’s thinly veiled implication that he was not thinking big enough and that the CIA was dragging its heels. This infuriated him because he believed, with some justification, that he had almost single-handedly taken the CIA into an involvement far deeper than anyone at the Agency had imagined possible just a year before. Whatever this overeager congressman might believe, there was a real war going on now in Afghanistan, and the reason why so many coffins were going back to the USSR had nothing to do with Charlie Wilson. It was because of what Hart had pulled off the previous year in Bangkok at the Agency’s annual South Asia chiefs of station meeting.

  Like so much else to do with the CIA, that meeting had been one of those invisible events no one ever hears about. But to Hart, Bangkok was the watershed event of the Afghan war. That was when he had convinced the Agency to take the risk of escalating. For Hart, Bangkok had been like a class reunion. Near East Division Chief Chuck Cogan was the headmaster who, along with his deputy, John McGaffin, presided over this annual gathering of spy chiefs from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, India, and all the other stations of South Asia.

  The meeting was an exotic bazaar of spies with exotic stories to tell. The station chiefs from Tehran and Baghdad were there with stories from the Iran-Iraq War where over a million Muslims had already gone to their graves. The man from Delhi had the latest on the increasing dangers of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Sri Lanka was descending into absolute hell. The Kurds were stirring in northern Turkey. But early on, Cogan and McGaffin split from the crowd to meet privately with Hart.

  The three were part of that select world of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations that Gust Avrakotos could never quite join, and as Hart sat down to brief them, it was with the ease that comes from belonging to the same family. Charlie Wilson and Avrakotos would later unite in hatred of Chuck Cogan, whom they came to see as the obstacle, preventing meaningful assistance to the mujahideen.

  But Howard Hart adored Cogan and everything he stood for. Years later, looking back at that moment in Bangkok when he, Cogan, and McGaffin had sat weighing the fate of the Afghan resistance, he figured that they represented just about everything that was right about the United States and particularly everything that was right and honorable and important about the Agency’s Clandestine Services. “We trusted each other,” Hart said. “John and I were two of Cogan’s bright young men. We were cut out of the same mold. We dress the same way. We had the same social confidence. For Christ’s sake, McGaffin and I went to the same prep school together. And Chuck was so supportive. He always called me ‘Howard of Afghanistan.’ He was a GS-18, the equivalent of a three-star general, and a division chief. He was one of the barons of the Directorate of Operations, as we laughingly called ourselves.”

  Hart had come to Bangkok with a masterful presentation for his two friends, in support of a major CIA escalation. All three men knew there were two questions that had to be addressed. First, were the mujahideen for real? Could they sustain a resistance against the Soviets? Hart said they could—they were prepared to die in fantastic numbers, and he was convinced that, if supplied, they would fight hard for many years. Second, and even more important, would the jumpy Pakistan authorities, allow the war to expand? On this point Hart felt particularly proud to report that he had succeeded in forging a powerful relationship with Zia’s intelligence chief, General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, who now supported the proposed initiative. Most important, Zia himself had signed off on it.

  Cogan wanted to know what Hart had in mind. “I said we needed $12 million more or some figure like that,” Cogan remembers. “I just picked the number from my head. It wasn’t that much in raw dollars, but it was a very big deal because it marked a significant increase in the percentage of funding and it meant that Chuck would have to go back to the Agency’s senior leadership and then to the White House and Congress for a new approval.”

  Hart didn’t tr
y to hide anything about the downside of this ferocious rabble. He knew what worried Cogan, so he anticipated the division chief’s criticism by offering his clever observation about the nature of the Afghans. “‘They’re so crooked,’” he said, “‘that when they die you don’t bury them, you just screw them into the ground.’ But then I explained that they probably would not rip us off any more than the American army would in a wartime situation. I said that the mujahideen might never be organized the way we would like, but there was a spirit and a commitment to a cause that lived in them now and might not be around in a little while if it did not get them more support.”

  “Carpe diem,” Hart said after finishing his initial pitch. “Seize the day.” It was the kind of flourish, perhaps, that only those who had gone to certain prep schools could get away with in such an encounter. The ball was now in Cogan’s court, and Hart was sympathetic to his division chief’s caution. It was risky business in 1982 for a CIA man to propose a large-scale covert operation. The Agency had basically been out of that business for years—ever since the accumulated impact of the congressional investigations, the press exposés, the Halloween Day Massacre, and Jimmy Carter.

  Only two years earlier, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hart says, the Agency had nothing going against the Communists except perhaps a few insignificant undertakings like smuggling Korans over the Soviet border. He can recall vividly everyone’s caution when the Agency was called upon to write the first Afghan finding for the president to sign. He was then the desk officer for Afghanistan, and no one could even remember what a finding was supposed to look like or what the language was supposed to be. So they had gone to the files and dug one up. Cogan and he had talked and reached the conclusion that they didn’t dare call for anything radical right away; they proposed something like $700,000, much of it for communications equipment. But now Hart was asking the same division chief to sign off on millions to kill Soviet soldiers.