Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  In the summer of 1983, Wilson first had to find a way to get his foot in the door with Doc Long. That’s where Wilson’s peculiar genius as a master of unconventional strategy kicked in. Doc had a problem: he liked junkets. More importantly, the chairman had developed a taste for grandiose junketing. In particular, he liked to travel to Europe, and he liked to go better than first class on specially detailed air force jets. Long’s problem that summer was that he couldn’t convince enough congressmen from his committee to go with him to justify the cost of the government plane. The members didn’t say so openly, but Charlie knew the reason: no matter how grand the trip, they couldn’t bear the thought of having to spend any time at all with this rather disgusting and hopelessly eccentric tyrant.

  In one of those negotiations that Wilson is a master at putting together, the congressman cut an explicit deal with his chairman. He would convince enough of his colleagues to go if Doc would include a trip to Pakistan to give General Zia and the Afghans a hearing.

  It was an offer Doc could not refuse, and Charlie negotiated it so skillfully that Long didn’t feel in the least offended. He even listened to Charlie’s argument that Zia was not only a nice man when you got to know him but an invaluable ally, absolutely critical to the mujahideen’s war.

  After agreeing to put Pakistan on the itinerary, the chairman directed his staff to have the CIA send someone to brief him on Afghanistan and Zia’s importance to the war effort. Wilson welcomed this initiative, until he looked up to find his least favorite CIA man, Chuck Cogan, sweeping into the hearing room with his retinue. True to form, Cogan sat down in the witness seat in an imperial manner. It was to be a classified briefing—no press, no public—but to Wilson’s growing alarm, the CIA’s Near East division chief proceeded to stonewall the chairman. He actually refused to tell him anything whatsoever about the Afghan operation or about Pakistan’s role in supporting it, answering quite reasonable queries with “I can’t share that information.”

  In fairness to Cogan, it can be said that he was playing the game according to the rules. In his mind, Doc Long was just another congressman sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Long wasn’t on any of the committees cleared for CIA briefings. It didn’t occur to this mandarin of the CIA that it would be prudent to at least accord the chairman the same respect that was second nature to secretaries of state and defense when they approached Doc’s throne. Nor did it occur to Cogan to think that this peculiar old man, who did not control the CIA’s budget, could hurt him or his Agency.

  Long’s reaction to Cogan startled even Wilson, who had witnessed a number of the chairman’s more excited tirades before. The former economics professor began shrieking, “Poppycock, this is poppycock. I’m not going to sit here and have the Congress of the United States insulted by some two-bit little bureaucrat.” Wilson says the chairman then began hurling chairs about the room, knocking inkwells off his desk, sputtering, and ordering Cogan to leave, vowing that he would never be permitted back into his committee as long as Clarence D. Long was in Congress.

  Wilson was now convinced that all was lost. Long considered Cogan’s performance to have been an attack on a coequal branch of the U.S. government. It was an offense that had to be avenged. And, according to Wilson, Long decided to retaliate against the CIA by cutting off all U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan.

  Wilson was so alarmed that he immediately forced his way through on the phone to alert the CIA’s number two man, John McMahon. Wilson explained that it was highly likely that Long was about to strike out against the Agency by making massive cuts in the administration’s proposed $600 million foreign-aid budget for Pakistan. Charlie did not have to explain to McMahon the consequences of suddenly cutting Pakistan’s military and economic assistance. It would be a slap in the face to Zia, the man whose cooperation the CIA relied on to mount its Afghan operation. The $600 million in aid was part of a quid pro quo, and if it was lost, there was no question that the CIA would immediately suffer the consequences.

  The next day a highly solicitous John McMahon appeared before Doc Long, utterly responsive to all of the chairman’s questions. He was there to repair the damage, to kowtow to the chairman. As Wilson saw it, the CIA deputy director’s virtuoso performance was the only thing that kept Doc Long from sabotaging the entire Afghan program.

  As the society columnist for the Washington Post, Maxine Cheshire had often written about Charlie Wilson before leaving journalism to marry one of Wilson’s Texas friends. Charlie was happy to hear from her when she called from Houston that summer, but he had no idea what she was talking about when she said, “I sure am glad Willie has been able to help.” It was another of those bizarre coincidences: the limo driver that the Justice investigators had finally tracked down turned out to have been Maxine’s son.

  Bill Cheshire had told Justice that he keenly remembered the time he drove the congressman home from the Baltimore airport. But, no doubt to the dismay of the federal sleuths, he’d declared that no drugs were present. And he’d explained that he certainly would have remembered such a thing, since he had recently left his rock band out of disgust for the drug habits of his musical colleagues.

  Justice had now lost out on its most promising lead, but Wilson’s political antenna told him that some bigger force was, perhaps, moving to help convince the department that it needn’t pursue its investigation any further. As Charlie saw it, it was a stroke of good fortune that his fellow target was none other than the only son of that icon of Republican conservatives Barry Goldwater. Whatever the actual reasons, in late July the federal prosecutors announced, “We have insufficient admissible, credible evidence to support criminal charges.” As to the specific Wilson investigation, Justice included a statement that there had been a jurisdictional problem (a clear reference to Liz’s testimony that Wilson’s cocaine use had been confined to the Caymans, where U.S. law does not apply).

  At his desk in the Rayburn House Office Building, Wilson, staring out the window to the capital lawn, told a group of assembled reporters, “I feel relieved.” He then asked a staffer, “Would you bring me a glass of wine, to calm my nerves a little bit?”

  There was still the House ethics investigation to cope with, but Wilson, instead of adopting a saintly and repentant demeanor, immediately went out and celebrated. The Austin American-Statesman soon reported to its Texas readers how “Good-Time Charlie’s” friends had thrown him a “Beat the Rap Party.”

  It seems almost inconceivable now, but sometime during this year of women and alcohol and constant scandal, Joanne Herring, the socialite who appeared regularly in the society pages as the “Queen of Texas,” had found herself falling hopelessly in love with Charlie. It had happened in late May at the Paris air show. Wilson had invited Joanne to come along to see his world of defense contractors and military men at this biennial extravaganza. She was going to reciprocate by introducing him to her world of European royalty. They had an early celebration for Charlie’s fiftieth birthday at Maxim’s, and during the six-day trip Joanne walked with him through the acres of weapons displays as he doggedly searched for a mule-portable anti-aircraft gun to give to the mujahideen.

  She went with him as he launched into animated discussions with the Bofors arms salesmen from Sweden and the Oerlikon reps from Switzerland. No one else in the U.S. government was hunting for mule-portable anti-aircraft guns. To begin with, the CIA hadn’t asked for them. But here was Wilson, with Joanne by his side, openly discussing whether the Bofors RBS-70, a three-man portable anti-aircraft gun, made sense for the Afghans.

  There is an innocent feel to these air shows. They’re organized almost as social events, disguising the rather obvious fact that the defense contractors and weapons merchants are there to court buyers. It’s nothing short of a massive arms bazaar, not unlike a car or boat show, only the buyers tend to be governments or, sometimes, people trying to overthrow governments. It was the greatest of all places for Charlie to impress Joanne because here Charlie Wilson was not
just another congressman. As an outspoken hawk on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee during the Reagan arms buildup, he was treated as one of the greatest arms patrons in history.

  Much of what Charlie was doing in Paris was unclear to Joanne. So many different people representing so many strange interests seemed to have business with him. Bertie van Storer, the aristocratic representative from Oerlikon, the Swiss gun manufacturer, took them to Maxim’s for dinner and insisted that, unlike the Swedes, Oerlikon not only had the right weapon for the Afghans but would have no trouble selling it to the CIA. The Washington lobbyist Denis Neill was omnipresent, as was his client the Egyptian defense minister, Mohammed Abu Ghazala, whose country was now receiving $900 million in U.S. aid. The field marshal, who was at the show as Egypt’s all-powerful arms merchant, was gallant with Joanne, and said nothing about Charlie’s belly dancer. He, too, insisted that he had the perfect gun for the Afghans and that Charlie must bring Joanne and return to Egypt to see for himself.

  Strangest of all to Joanne was the couple from Israel. True to form, Wilson explained that this was the same raven-haired Israeli captain who had so entranced him in the Sinai on his first trip to Israel with Ed Koch. Wilson suggested that she and her husband were true Israeli war heroes and were engaged in clandestine business. “Charlie had told me he was working with the Jews,” Joanne says, “but I didn’t see how he did it—arms for Israel and arms for Egypt.” In this case, Wilson did not tell Joanne that he was pursuing his secret negotiations to put together the Israel-Pakistan back channel.

  The world Joanne introduced to Charlie at night in Paris was as bewildering to Wilson as his arms bazaar was to her. She took him to elegant black-tie dinners where many of the guests seemed to be pretenders to the ancient thrones of Europe. At one point Wilson found himself seated next to an elderly lady whom Joanne had introduced as royalty, and he braced himself for an evening of dutiful conversation.

  “Do you know Imelda Marcos?” the woman asked the congressman in a rather affected voice.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said, taking a sip of his soup.

  “I do,” he remembers the matronly lady saying. “You haven’t missed much. She’s such a greedy cunt.”

  Wilson says he had a hard time keeping himself from spitting the soup out on the table. When he recovered, he said in his most courtly manner, “Baroness, I think you and I are going to have a lovely evening.”

  Joanne was not like any other woman Wilson had known. Old-fashioned about their courting, she stayed with her Parisian friends instead of at the Le Meridien hotel, where Charlie was camped out in U.S. government–financed splendor. But they partied and stayed up well into the night, whereupon he would leave Joanne to walk home along the Avenue Foch and engage in playful conversation with the ladies of the night.

  Paris was a marvelous interlude from the horrors of Washington. Pampered and flattered by defense contractors during the day, amused and impressed by aristocrats at night, Wilson found himself being swept off his feet by this woman who had managed to turn him into her champion to rescue the mujahideen.

  After their fourth dinner at Maxim’s and while dancing at a disco, Wilson stopped and told Joanne that he loved her. Before the night was out, they were talking about marriage and beginning to make plans. “He started asking me if I thought I could lead his kind of life,” Joanne recalls. And it was a very good question and I really wasn’t sure. I remember I didn’t answer, but then I decided that I loved him.”

  Back in Washington, Charlie discovered just what it meant to sign on with Joanne as she began throwing her enormous energies into her future life with Charlie. First of all, her mother had the congressman’s family “checked out.” She told Joanne that he came from “people of modest means, but fine people.”

  Years later, trying to explain why she had agreed to marry Wilson in the midst of the cocaine scandal, Joanne said, “I never gave a thought to the drug business.” While others might have seen him as a hopeless sinner, Joanne saw a flawed but heroic figure fighting the Communist devil, doing God’s work, and she meant to be a part of it. She says that she had been reborn with Charlie and that “part of this came from thinking I had to do something with my life that was worthwhile. And what better way than to serve your country and to serve your Lord.”

  Meanwhile, Joanne was moving into Wilson’s office. Agnes Bundy, who handled Charlie’s Appropriations work, remembers Joanne sweeping in “like Scarlett O’Hara in her canary-yellow dress and a black cape to organize all of us. We wondered who this woman was.”

  She was Charlie’s girl, and the congressman now had her picture on his desk and was talking to her six or seven times a day. The two of them started to go out looking at apartments together, and Joanne summoned Charles Fawcett to Washington. Her idea was to create a salon that would change the course of history. Fawcett was to be a lobbyist for the Afghans as well as others enslaved by the Russians. In her mind the salon would be the meeting place for the greatest minds of the age. She saw it as a revolutionary cell that would spread the conservative gospel to the rest of the country and the world.

  But before rescuing the world, the Afghans had to be saved. According to Charlie, that meant they had to win over Doc Long. With that objective in mind, Wilson had invited Joanne to come along on the chairman’s upcoming junket, not however, as Wilson’s official companion but in her curious diplomatic position with General Zia’s government.

  Officially, Joanne was only Zia’s honorary consul in Houston, but she had such astonishing sway over the Muslim dictator that in a moment of abject weakness that had horrified the entire Pakistan Foreign Office, he had committed to making this blond American woman his roving ambassador at large, and had further agreed to provide her with a turbaned Pashtun tribesman to serve as her footman in Washington.

  At last, everything seemed to be falling in place for the embattled congressman. He had beaten the rap, he had won the heart of the “Queen of Texas,” and now he had three weeks to give to the jihad.

  From his office on the Hill, he called Joanne in Houston. They exchanged little endearments of unending love and agreed to meet the next day in Paris, where they would begin their mission to convert Doc Long.

  CHAPTER 13

  Joanne Herring and Zia ul-Haq

  THE SEDUCTION

  OF DOC LONG

  When Wilson had bought his secondhand Lincoln Continental from Liz Wickersham’s father in Orange, he’d joked that its hood was as vast as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. He had named it “the Nimitz,” after the greatest of Texas admirals, Chester W. Nimitz, who had fought his fleet across the Pacific to bring down the Japanese empire.

  Wilson’s always delighted in the feeling that came over him whenever he took its wheel. On August 11, 1983, the night before his long journey to the front, he was feeling particularly heroic as he swung onto the Key Bridge and began to accelerate. He had just finished a romantic dinner with Trish Wilson, a warmhearted and good-looking blonde he had dated off and on for years. He was scheduled to meet Joanne the following day in Paris. But Paris was an ocean away and it had always been hard for the congressman to deny himself such simple pleasures as an evening with an old friend. They had gone to the Trieste Restaurant, and Charlie had gotten himself a little drunk. He could never resist Manhattans on such occasions—the glasses were so elegant—and with Trish staring admiringly into his eyes, he’d outlined the dangerous mission upon which he was about to embark. It had made him feel like a heroic character in a movie, perhaps an RAF pilot in a London bar the night before a big raid. By the fifth round, Trish had agreed to spend the night with him, and after his eighth Manhattan, he had set off in the Nimitz while Trish drove back to her apartment for a change of clothes. They were to meet at his place in half an hour.

  It was raining as the congressman roared across Key Bridge. And then—bang! A twenty-two-year-old motorist who had just moved to Washington from Minnesota found his brand-new Mazda hurtling
sixty feet before slamming into a guardrail that saved him from plunging into the Potomac.

  Mr. and Mrs. Steven Standiford, who later provided eyewitness accounts of the rear-end bashing, said they had been concerned when they’d noticed the big blue car weaving from lane to lane in front of them. They’d watched horrified, as the Lincoln smashed the little Mazda, then lurched back from the wreckage. The hood of the Nimitz was crunched straight into the air, and its driver seemed to be craning his neck anxiously out the window to take in the scene. With a sweeping maneuver, the Lincoln then sped away into Virginia, but not before Mr. and Mrs. Standiford had noted the car’s unusual license plate: Texas 2.

  Behind the wheel of the Nimitz, Wilson was now thinking clearly. It was dangerous to drive any further; the mangled hood blocked his vision. The only way for him to see the road was to stick his head out the window. But it was just two more minutes to the Iwo Jima statue and his apartment building. And once in the Wesley’s underground garage, he would be safe. He was moving quickly now, scurrying from the car, hitting the elevator’s ninth-floor button, then flinging his front door open and, just as quickly, locking it from inside.

  Years later, he reconstructed this moment: “I was drunker than shit. I had hit this car and knocked it forever. I knew that if the cops came I was dead meat. So, after determining that the driver was not hurt, I just drove home and locked myself in my apartment. The police must have the world’s fastest computer in northern Virginia, because they found my car and were banging on my door in thirty minutes.”