by George Crile
There was, of course, more to this story, and Denis Neill is quick to point out that he was merely piggybacking on the preexisting lobbying efforts of General Dynamics. “They’re the ones who introduced Charlie to Egypt, because F-16s are the mainstay of Egyptian foreign aid and F-16s are made in Texas.” But the essential ingredient that Neill added to the mix was the smiling face of Abu Ghazala. Once the issue of Egyptian aid became personalized in Wilson’s mind, there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do to get his friend Mohammed his fair share of the U.S. taxpayers’ money. Now, whenever Abu Ghazala came to the congressman’s office he was treated as Zvi Rafiah’s equal, and that was saying a lot.
Rafiah had always acted as if he owned Wilson’s office. One of the staffers kept a list of people he needed to lobby. He would use the phones, give projects to the staff, and call on Charlie to intervene whenever he needed him. Abu Ghazala’s lobbying style was as industrious as Zvi’s, and the office quickly learned to treat his causes as every bit as important. Wilson always delivered for his friend Mohammed.
When the congressman’s plane approached the Cairo runway in March 1983, he had just shepherded through a foreign-assistance package for Egypt worth a billion dollars. Mohammed knew the importance of acknowledging such a gesture; and if it meant rolling out a red carpet for a collection of Israelis whom the congressman had brought along for the ride, so be it. When the door to the unmarked plane opened, a military band struck up “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Top brass were everywhere on the runway, cutting salutes to Wilson as if he too were a field marshal. For Carol, her fantasy about Nefertiti was being fulfilled on the spot. “I was received like a queen,” she says. “A convoy swept us away.”
At the hotel, the congressman signed Carol in as Mrs. Wilson, whispering that it was against the law to sleep in the same room if you weren’t married. Carol had a moment of fright in the lobby when she overheard two Arabs from Saudi Arabia talking about a princess who had just been beheaded for sleeping with a man she wasn’t married to. As a gesture to calm the worries of his Israeli guests, Mohammed placed armed guards outside the bedrooms of each of the congressman’s friends. This only caused Gila to become convinced she had been taken prisoner. But nothing could diminish Carol’s thrill when Abu Ghazala told her he was looking forward to her performance that evening.
One might think it would be like carrying coals to Newcastle for a U.S. congressman to bring his own belly dancer to entertain the second most powerful man in Egypt. But Carol Shannon had a surprise in store for him. In Egypt, in those years of renewed fundamentalism, it was dangerous for a belly dancer to perform moves deemed too suggestive by the Muslim hierarchy. To Carol’s surprise, belly dancers were not permitted to show their bare arms or their bellies, which had to be covered with fishnet. No pelvic grinds were allowed, not even the floor routine that was the staple of her performance. That night in Cairo, with the nervous Israelis seated at the table and a beaming Charlie Wilson offering encouragement, Carol Shannon decided not to give in to the Muslim fundamentalists, any more than she had to her own Christian extremists back home. “I figured, just arrest me. I’m going to do it my way.”
It’s not possible to fully appreciate the impact of a belly dancer without being the person for whom the performance is given. In Carol Shannon’s routine, the pasha—the great man for whom she performs—sits on a chair in the middle of the floor as the dancer, often with two or three other women writhing next to her, begins to circle.
“Don’t breathe,” she commanded as she pulled a sword out of a sheath and shimmied up to within inches of the defense minister’s face. It was less than two years since the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat, and the minister’s bodyguards lurched out of their seats; Wilson snapped at them to back off. Shannon, with her bare arms and undulating, naked belly, was now violating all of the taboos, surrounding the field marshal with her veils and exposing, for his eyes only, her heaving breasts and pelvic grinds.
Abu Ghazala had never before experienced this variation on his country’s dance, and he was far too entranced to worry when she moved the sword from near his head and aimed it at his groin. This was the signature moment that this Dallas belly dancer had built into all of her performances. For her it had a special meaning. “It’s the only time I have real power over a man,” she explains.
But in Cairo that night it was all too much for the bodyguards when she pulled back her sword as if she were about to plunge it straight into the field marshal. They sprang to their feet, which only heightened the impact of her dance, as she laughed boldly and knowingly at the great and powerful man before her.
For a fleeting moment, she had threatened the field marshal’s manhood, and now she was returning it with a laugh and a look that seemed to be an invitation. “He was foaming through his eyes,” remembers Carol. “Charlie had to tell him, ‘You can’t touch her.’ And he respected that, but he told me he wanted me to return to Egypt as his guest.” That night Carol Shannon went to bed convinced that she was in the country of her ancestors.
There was also business to be transacted on this trip, so Charlie arranged for Carol, now accompanied by the Rafiahs, to ride camels into the desert and to visit the pyramids. Meanwhile, at the Defense Ministry he told Abu Ghazala that he needed to be able to do an end run around the timid CIA. Specifically, he wanted to know if Mohammed had any weapons in his arsenal that could make a difference for the Afghans.
Abu Ghazala smiled and declared that Charlie need look no further. Until Sadat changed sides in the late 1970s, Egypt had been a Soviet client state. Its warehouses were filled with Soviet weapons, and its factories were still tooled to manufacture Soviet-licensed material. Egypt was already providing some of the weapons in the CIA’s Afghan pipeline, but Abu Ghazala explained that there was no end to the quantity and sophistication of what he could provide. And because of their friendship, he assured Wilson, there would be no problems whatsoever in getting Egypt to go along. No one else need be involved. No Foreign Office discussions would be necessary. If Charlie could get the money, Abu Ghazala would supply everything else to bring down the gunships.
The Texan was now in full throttle, violating diplomatic taboos at every stop: bringing Israeli spies and movie stars to Cairo, commissioning the Israelis to design an anti-aircraft gun for the CIA, and negotiating secret weapons deals with the Egyptian defense minister. He had also made Carol Shannon’s life complete. She could go home now knowing that she had danced in Cairo and won the heart of a modern pharaoh.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we will be arriving in Karachi, Inshallah, God willing, in four hours. This is the prayer that the prophet, Muhammad, peace be upon him, always recited at the start of any travel…”
When Wilson’s Pakistan International Airways jet glided to a halt in Karachi, the U.S. embassy’s control officer was waiting on the runway. The ambassador had been cabling frenetically, “Please advise re identity of Congressman Wilson’s traveling companion.” Wilson had been careful not to reveal Carol’s identity to the American press corps, which had hounded him in both Texas and Washington. They would have had a field day if they had discovered that the scandal-ridden congressman was headed off on a junket with a belly dancer. (In fact, Carol was so sensitive to Wilson’s precarious political position that she never even developed her photographs from the trip.)
In Jerusalem, the congressman had felt so safe in the hands of old friends that he’d told them everything about Carol. In Cairo, he had artfully dealt with the prohibitions against cohabitation by saying Shannon was his wife. But by the time he reached Zia’s rigorously Islamic nation, Wilson realized it was not safe to flout local custom. Here it wasn’t uncommon to see women dressed in burkas, and Wilson decided not to take any risks. He sternly told Carol to wear lots of clothes, show no skin, and avoid seeming too friendly. The congressman had come to Pakistan on a mission that not even his own government knew about, and he was doing his best to be discreet. He now introduced his belly dan
cer to everyone as a member of his staff. It was his one gesture to propriety, and amazingly, he thought people would believe him, even though Carol insisted on wearing the skin-tight jumpsuits she had bought specially for the trip.
Wilson’s first objective was to visit the victims of the so called “toy bombs,” tiny antipersonnel mines that the Soviets were reported to be spreading all over the Afghan countryside—maiming children who unsuspectingly picked them up. And so, for the second time, he flew to Peshawar and visited the International Rescue Committee Hospital, where he once again gave blood for the jihad. He wouldn’t allow Carol to come along; he said it was “too sad.”
For Charlie Wilson, however, it was always strangely energizing to visit these warriors whose conviction was so great that they never complained. Going to the front did not seem all that dangerous to this self-destructive congressman. On the contrary, losing himself in the presence of these fearless victims, knowing that the Red Army was just over the border, always liberated him from the terrors of his personal life. He was engaging in what psychiatrists call counterphobic behavior—finding one horror to force out the memory of another.
At home he was his own worst enemy. In Pakistan, there was a real enemy just across the mountain range. Throughout the entire Afghan campaign, twice a year or more, Wilson would always visit this hospital. He would do it to renew his fury at the Soviets, almost like Zia’s repeated visits to Mecca for inspiration. Wilson’s entire imagination and value system as a boy had been shaped by the wonder of the outgunned British fighting on against the Nazis to defend everyone’s freedom when there seemed to be no hope. Here in the hospital, the words of his boyhood inspiration, Winston Churchill, would swirl in his consciousness as he moved about the wounded Afghans: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
At such moments, Wilson always experienced an adrenaline rush. To him, the Afghans were not victims. They were almost mythological characters out of a legend, with their long beards, their burning eyes, their refusal to admit pain or fear or doubt. To him, they symbolized the raw essence of freedom and self-determination. His inner voices would tell him that it was his destiny to be the only congressman to come here, to be the only one who could see what these warriors could do to wreak havoc on the Soviets, if they were only given the tools.
In a curious way, Howard Hart came the closest of anyone in a position of power in the U.S. government to sharing Wilson’s passion for the Afghan cause. By this time, however, Hart had come to loathe Charlie Wilson, and he was horrified to learn that the congressman was back in his territory.
Hart was careful not to criticize Wilson openly. But with winks and inflections he went to some trouble to make sure his counterpart, Pakistan’s chief of intelligence, General Akhtar, knew that Wilson was bad news and that it would be best not to deal with him. Even a decade later, Hart would still be under the impression that Akhtar and Zia shared his dislike and mistrust of the congressman.
Hart’s reading of the Pakistanis’ reaction to Charlie Wilson may well have been his single greatest intelligence misjudgment. Still, it is hard not to be sympathetic with Howard Hart. By the rules of the Cold War, the only way an American station chief could operate effectively was if he could play with a hidden deck of cards. Otherwise, the CIA might as well have turned its account over to the State Department.
According to this logic, Hart needed to be the source of all secret U.S. information to his Pakistani counterparts. Yet Wilson was running about stripping the bedcovers off his delicate operation, not only suggesting that Hart and the CIA were timid but claiming that he could force them to play a bigger and bolder game. He was, quite simply, wrecking the special advantage that a CIA official like Hart has in dealing with a country like Pakistan.
Hart did not realize all of this at first, but he intuitively understood that there was an alien force moving about in his carefully seeded garden. His disadvantage was that Wilson had a far larger field of vision than he did, larger even than that of the CIA director or the White House, because the bottom line in all government programs is money from Congress. And unlike almost everyone else, Wilson always had a sense of what was possible and what was not in his world of Appropriations.
He was certain of one thing: it would be easy to get more money for this CIA program. In fact, he suspected that he could get his committee to appropriate more money whether Langley wanted it or not. In reality, what he was already plotting with the Pakistanis was far more radical than anything Hart could have imagined.
For example, years later, when Hart was asked if he knew about Wilson’s efforts to bring the Israelis into the Afghan war, he dismissed this story out of hand, insisting that the Pakistanis would never have permitted it. “I would have burst into hysterical laughter and locked myself in the bathroom before proposing such a thing,” he said. “It was bad enough for Zia to be dealing with the Americans, even secretly. But the Israelis were so beyond the pale that it would have been impossible. You have to understand that the Pakistanis were counting on maintaining the image of holding the high moral ground—of a religious brother helping a religious brother…. It’s beyond comprehension to have tried to bring the Israelis into it.”
Yet right under Hart’s nose, Wilson had proposed just such an arrangement, and Zia and his high command had signed on to implement it. Seven years later, Hart still knew nothing about it. He had seen only the grotesque vision of a drunken congressman, stained by a drug scandal and blundering about the Islamic world with a belly dancer in tow. “He was just a terribly egregious fellow,” he says. “I found Charlie to be repugnant.” As far as Hart was concerned, this was a man no true Muslim could tolerate.
He might have asked why this congressman, so offensive to the Pakistanis, was permitted to take his “secretary” to the Khyber Pass when just a week before Hart himself had been denied permission to go there. In fact, President Zia had exercised his martial-law authority to grant Charlie the right to show his girlfriend the legendary gateway to Afghanistan. For Carol Shannon, sitting queenlike in the convoy’s lead vehicle as it made its way up the forbidden mountainous road that spring day, it was yet another fantasy come true.
Five miles out of Peshawar, she was told they were crossing into the tribal zone, where no nation’s law prevails. Pakistani law would protect them as long as they remained on this narrow road, but once they were off it, for hundreds of miles the tribes ruled. The convoy took them past giant walled compounds where the Afghan drug lords lived and then into Landi Kotal, the last town before the pass, where the Afridi tribesmen openly pursued their ancient and honorable trade in opium and hashish.
When Rudyard Kipling wrote about the goings-on in these lands, he described the endless war of espionage that the British and Russians waged against each other here during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “the Great Game.” Neither imperial power had been willing to permit the other to gain control of this keystone of central Asia, yet neither was willing to resort to all-out war; for most of the time, they had chosen to fight through surrogates.
The Soviets had rewritten the rules of the Great Game on December 27, 1979, when they’d sent their 40th Army in to occupy Afghanistan. At the Khyber Pass that spring day three years later, Carol Shannon watched with wide eyes as her hero made his own move to enter the Great Game. At the barracks of the Khyber Rifles, a Pakistani colonel pointed down to the legendary pass where invading armies since Alexander had entered and exited Afghanistan. Carol could actually hear artillery fire and see puffs of smoke where the Red Army was punishing the resistance. “It was not like a movie. It was real. You could just feel how powerful Russia was.”
While Carol was getting her first look at war from the Khyber lookout point, off to the side Wilson was meeting with a group of Zia’s generals, urging them to let Israeli technology multiply their tanks’ killing power.
He told them they would need it if the Red Army ever followed through on its threats and stormed the frontier, or if the Indian army continued its massive buildup. He explained that he wasn’t asking them to like the Israelis or to acknowledge any dealings with them. He was simply saying it was good for Pakistan, good for the Afghans, and it could be kept a secret.
For these generals, talking to Charlie Wilson was an altogether new and seductive experience. For once a powerful U.S. official was not harping on what couldn’t be done or what shouldn’t be done or suggesting anything other than triumphant outcomes. He was, in an eerie way, the very messenger for whom they’d been longing.
Yaqub Khan, that towering intellectual figure who had served as Zia’s commanding officer before becoming his foreign minister, has a theory about why Charlie Wilson had such a large impact on the Pakistan military. He explains, “Armies exist to win on the battlefield, and once defeated they cannot rest until defeat has been avenged.” By this logic, the Pakistani army had developed a deep psychological need for victory by the time of the Afghan war. In each of its three wars with India, Pakistan had been overwhelmed by the far larger and more powerful Indian army. Even though its commanders believed that in all respects—from general to rifle-man—the Pakistanis were superior soldiers, they had been vastly outgunned. On top of that, the Indians had the bomb. This was one of the reasons the Pakistanis were racing to build a bomb of their own, and it helps explain why they had been so quick to intervene so deeply in the Afghan war. By the time Wilson visited the Khyber Pass, Pakistani officers and special-forces enlisted men had begun slipping into Afghanistan dressed as mujahideen. The Pakistanis were now playing a very dangerous game. But as Yaqub Khan suggests, it was potent therapy for Zia and his military. By becoming the indispensable link between the mujahideen and the West, the Pakistanis were able to lash out at India’s superpower patron, the Soviets. Afghanistan’s conflict had become the Pakistan army’s war of redemption, but not even the generals understood this at the time, says Yaqub Khan.