Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  On the other side of that door, Charlie Wilson cowered in silence. The hammering and the loud, demanding voices wouldn’t stop. Finally he crept to the phone to whisper instructions to Trish not to come: “The police are after me. They’re in the building.”

  Wilson’s administrative assistant, Charles Simpson, was jolted awake by the phone call: “Simpson, I’ve really screwed up this time. Here’s what you’ve got to do.” By this time Wilson had already called his lawyer, who’d advised him that the police might well attempt an arrest, but that he would be safe as long as he drove directly to Congress. Federal law prohibits local authorities from arresting a national legislator on his way to or from Congress. But Wilson didn’t want to go to Congress. He had to get to Doc Long’s plane, which was waiting for him at Andrews Air Force Base. There was every reason to believe that the frustrated Virginia police might attempt an arrest once he left the Wesley. But again Wilson’s good luck held.

  The Key Bridge, it turned out, falls under the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia, not Virginia, so the Arlington police banging at the door had been outside their authority. Simpson would always say that his boss’s finest moments were when he was backed into a corner. With the authorities closing in, Wilson proceeded to make his own luck. His main threat now was from the D.C. police, yet until recently he had been chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the District of Columbia.* He had always been very generous with the federal city, particularly with the police force, whose budget he had always protected. And just before the sun came up he put in a call to one of the friends he had made in the police department.

  Wilson explained his problem: an air force jet was scheduled to take him out of the country on government business in a matter of hours. “I may have told him that it was a mission that had to do with saving the world from Communist aggression in Afghanistan,” Wilson recalled with some humor years later, “and that there might well be substantial raises in store for the District police.” The bottom line was this: could he leave the country? “No problem, Mr. Chairman. Just check in with us on your return.”

  Wilson still had to cope with the likelihood that the Virginia police might attempt an arrest. But the Pentagon solved that problem for him. As is its custom when providing flights for members of Congress, they dispatched an escort officer and car to pick Wilson up at his apartment to make sure he arrived safely at the plane. The congressman tried to look calm as the officer opened the door to the car, but he hadn’t slept and he was agitated. He couldn’t help but glance around nervously as they glided through Arlington, past the scene of the crime, back into the District, and finally to the safety of Andrews.

  On board Wilson asked for a bullshot, as his hangover was fierce. For a moment, looking down on the capital, it all seemed peaceful. Then the cables started coming into the cockpit.

  Back in the office, the Angels were frantically trying to reach Charlie to warn him that cameras and questions were likely to be waiting at Orly. With each news bulletin detailing the congressional hit-and-run, a new cable from Washington arrived and was sent back to the unhappy congressman.

  The plane was filled with Wilson’s Appropriations colleagues and their wives, and soon Charlie had confided the whole sorry story to Doc Long. Another, more conventional chairman might have thought Wilson was compromising the delegation or perhaps besmirching the reputation of the entire U.S. House of Representatives. “Doc kind of looked at me as if I was Peck’s bad boy,” Wilson says, referring to the old Jackie Coogan silent film. “He was very tolerant. I’ve gotten by on that many a time in my life.”

  But Wilson’s loyal administrative assistant, Charlie Simpson, felt that he couldn’t put up with it anymore. The only reason Simpson had quit his job as a tenured professor of history at Sam Houston University was because he’d believed that Charlie was one of those politicians who come along only once in a decade. When they had flown into Washington together in 1972, Simpson remembers, Wilson had asked the taxi driver to pull over at the Lincoln Memorial. “I have to learn how to be a congressman and you need to learn how to be an AA [administrative assistant],” Wilson had told Simpson. “And this is the first thing we have to do.” The cab waited as the two men climbed to the top of the white marble steps. “Charlie read every word written on the walls,” Simpson recalls. “And as we were leaving, there were almost tears in his eyes.” The experience left the AA believing that perhaps the two of them shared a special destiny.

  Over the years, Simpson had learned to cope with Charlie’s women, his drinking, his dictators, his outlaw friends, his short attention span, his overall irresponsibility—and even the drug business. But when Wilson had called that morning to say he had just rammed a motorist and run away, something in Simpson had snapped.

  “There’s a young man with a Mazda RX-7,” Wilson had told Simpson. “If he calls you, get his car repaired.” Simpson remembers his rueful response: “Okay, I’ll take care of it. You go along.” Somehow he managed to put out the fires that Wilson had left raging behind, explaining with a straight face to the press why the congressman had left the scene of the accident: “He thought he’d hit a bridge railing and came on home.”

  Simpson then contacted the aggrieved motorist and offered to have his car fixed. It had been a nasty accident. The repair bill was $3,800, but Simpson handled the victim so well that he never even discussed litigation. “The kid was new in town, been here two months. He just didn’t know when he had us by the balls.”

  It all worked out fine, but for the first time Simpson felt dirty. “From that day on, I didn’t give a shit what Wilson wanted,” Simpson said. He would never look at Wilson with the same blinders that had served them both so well over the last decade. Now he saw only an irresponsible, overgrown boy. A year later, when the senior senator from Texas, Lloyd Bentsen, offered to make Simpson his administrative assistant, he sought Wilson’s blessing and, upon receiving it, accepted.

  On board the air force plane the morning after the wreck, Wilson felt about as low as a snake’s belly. For the first time, he too wondered if he had any legitimacy left. The Afghan cause had sustained his self-respect throughout the worst of the drug days, but now he didn’t know if he could even go through with this campaign to win over Doc Long.

  Luckily, Joanne Herring was waiting for him in Paris—ready to breathe pure inspiration back into the deflated and badly hungover congressman. Right away he told her that his career might be over, that the hit-and-run on top of the dope charges might well be the last straw. He was offering to let her off the hook.

  But nothing that Charlie did that year seemed to shake her—not the drugs, not the stories of Liz and the hot tub, not even the belly dancer in Pakistan pretending to be the congressman’s secretary. The hit-and-run on the Key Bridge she treated as little more than a speeding violation. Perhaps the best explanation as to why she was so forgiving is that Joanne Herring, that summer, was very much in the throes of her born-again revelations.

  Just the year before she had found Christ. And like all born-agains, the Tempter was a very familiar figure to her. As she saw it, the Devil was throwing roadblocks in her man’s way—trying to derail him because Charlie was headed into a mighty battle with the forces of evil. Herring was a product of Texas oil and the John Birch Society and, most recently, a disciple of the Count de Marenches’s vision of a global Communist conspiracy in which even well-known capitalists were agents. All of this somehow coalesced for her into a clear vision once she was born again. She now saw an apocalyptic struggle in which she and Charlie had become instruments of Jesus.

  She told the self-flagellating Wilson that there was no time for moping, that he was wonderful, and that they had God’s battle to fight. It was to begin that very night at the home of the Viscomtesse de Grèves, “the most beautiful woman in Paris.” It had been no small matter persuading this French patrician to host a dinner for a group of unknown American politicians, and Charlie had to play his part.


  Joanne had long since evolved a theory about the way she, as a Texas socialite, could influence the course of world events. It had to do with grand dinners and glitz and fun and how you bring people together. For her, a dinner party was not entertainment alone but deadly serious business. It all came down to the mixture: business with pleasure, high society with the people who actually make the world work, moving them around from course to course, matching them with partners they would never otherwise encounter, always maneuvering to bring together the ones who could change the world according to her designs.

  Doc Long was hardly the sort of person you’d expect to be the guest of honor at an aristocratic gathering in Paris, but the viscomtess had been sympathetic to Joanne’s seduction plan and had summoned “le tout Paris.” As Joanne articulates it today, the strategy was very simple: “What we wanted to do is make Doc Long have so much fun that when he got to Zia, the ground would be prepared, just like it had been for Charlie when he first went to Pakistan.”

  She saw the evening as a perfect first step and was fast on her way to becoming each of the congressmen’s new best friends. The pictures from this interlude in Paris show Joanne dressed in fanciful pink Little Miss Muffet outfits, sexy affairs with a parasol and a very short skirt. In each of these photos she is the center of a sea of smiles: Doc Long is grinning from ear to ear, and Mrs. Long is smiling too. “It’s always a big mistake to ignore the wives,” Joanne explains, and on this trip she concentrated much of her attention on making sure all of them were on board.

  The delegation next stopped off briefly in Syria, then went on to Israel, where the chairman was treated with great respect. Nobody needed to tell the Israelis to make an effort with this man who, along with his planeload of appropriators, sent large amounts of U.S. aid each year for every man, woman, and child in the country.

  Charlie, meanwhile, went off on his own to visit his old Israeli friend Zvi Rafiah, and Rafiah’s boss, Michael Shore, the chairman of IMI. As always, the Russian gunships were foremost on Wilson’s mind, and he was eager to find out where things stood with the Charlie Horse, the anti-aircraft gun IMI had agreed to design for the Afghans.*

  After briefing Wilson, the two Israelis brought up a personal matter: they were worried that their friend might lose the upcoming election because of the scandals surrounding him. They wanted him to know that Israel needed Wilson in Congress and that since they couldn’t contribute to his campaign directly, they would make sure their friends in America did. They then gave him a captured PLO Kalashnikov, which Charlie proudly carried onto the air force plane with utter disregard for the rigid rules prohibiting such illegal arms shipments. “Doc got a kick out of me having it on the plane,” Wilson recalls. “He also liked the fact that the Israelis liked me so much.”

  The Israelis had gone out of their way for Joanne as well after Charlie had alerted them to her religious passions. “He knew that the first thing in my life is Jesus Christ and he arranged for the Israelis to take me everywhere Jesus had gone,” Joanne recounted with appreciation years later. Her experience visiting the Stations of the Cross managed to make her even more convinced of the sacred nature of the mission she had embarked on with Charlie. It seems hard to imagine, but on this trip she says that she succeeded repeatedly in getting the congressman to join her in intense prayer sessions. “We prayed that the dinners would go well, that Zia would be well received,” she says. “We prayed for Charlie and for him to have the strength to get through it all, and for the Lord to guide us with Doc Long.”*

  As they left Jerusalem for Pakistan, Joanne really set to work. She moved from seat to seat, telling not just the members but their wives all her stories about bringing capitalism to little Pakistani villages, and about how the wonderful General Zia was sacrificing everything to help the Afghans. She knew that Zia had a horrible reputation, and her way of dealing with it was to confront head-on the “false accusations” that Zia had in effect murdered his predecessor, Bhutto. From seat to seat she carried her curious and impassioned message: “I want to make it really clear to you that Zia did not kill Bhutto,” she said, until on her third stop she encountered a blank stare from one of the congressmen. “He said to me, ‘Who’s Bhutto?’ and I thought, These guys are going out here to visit this country and they don’t know doodle-de-twat about it.” Undeterred, Herring smiled charmingly, filled him in on the real history, and, like a pro, moved her pitch on to the next seat.

  Doc Long, that magical dispenser of U.S. foreign-aid dollars, had grown accustomed to being made much of by governments. But General Zia, at the prodding of his honorary consul, made sure that the chairman got a reception he would never forget—literally, a red-carpet affair with a brass band, braided generals in full-dress uniform, lines of soldiers at attention, and small children with arms full of flowers running up to honor the suspicious old man.

  Wilson and Joanne now had Doc trapped in their choreographed sequence of events. Pakistan might have been in bad odor with the chairman because it was a military dictatorship, but that also meant that when Zia ordered the military to put on a good show, the whole country performed. The golfers in the delegation were taken to the local country club and served tea at the ninth hole with linen and silver. The merchant at the antique shop in Rawalpindi offered such incredible bargains that the wives were convinced that General Zia had ordered discounts.

  The centerpiece of the trip, however, was a helicopter trek to the front. It began in Peshawar at the refugee camps, with two and a half million destitute Afghans in their mud-walled compounds. Then on to the Red Cross hospital, where the delegation saw Afghan boys and young men without arms, legs, some without eyes, none complaining. Doc Long was the only member of Congress with a son who had been wounded in Vietnam, and it was impossible for him not to be impressed with the quiet courage of these men.

  As always, Charlie gave a pint of his own blood for the mujahideen—the kind of act that humbles those who don’t participate. Then the delegation, wives and all, left to meet the Afghan elders, who had assembled in a tent to greet the old American chief they had been told could help them.

  Long’s aide Bill Shursh remembers being awed by the sight and smell of the Afghans as he walked with Doc into the tent. One after another, the leaders stood up to address Long, in every instance telling him about the Russian gunships that were slaughtering their people and were invulnerable to the bullets from their rifles and machine guns. Shursh himself remembers thinking that these were real freedom fighters. “They made the Contras and the Cambodians look like urban cowboys,” he says.

  Like every other visitor from the United States who came here in those days, Doc Long could not help but respond when the entire assembly of Afghans began roaring in unison the cry of jihad, Allahu Akbar, God is Great. Suddenly, he too could feel the presence of the Red Army just across the mountains. He was with men his own age who were bearing arms—men with gray beards and fierce eyes telling him about the murderous helicopters. They wanted someone from the delegation to speak to them, and Wilson shrewdly declined, offering the stage instead to his chairman.

  Doc began by making a reasonably supportive but not excessive statement about the horror of the Soviet atrocities. From the tent came another great cry of Allahu Akbar. Wilson watched with amazement and some amusement as the seventy-two-year-old former professor of economics seemed to have an adrenaline rush. Suddenly, the old man was roaring to these Muslim warriors that he was going to get them what they needed to knock the helicopters out of the sky. “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” they cried. Every time Doc said anything at all, the Afghans would clap, throw up their hands, and thunder back their battle cry.

  It was like the most heated revival meeting in East Texas. By the time Doc Long left the tent, Wilson realized that he had just witnessed the conversion of this enemy of the CIA into an honorary mujahid. That night, back in Islamabad, Zia administered the coup de grâce.

  Ordinarily, he shunned his predecessor’s luxurious palac
e, but Joanne and Charlie had told Zia how responsive Doc was when much was made of him. And so Zia had turned Bhutto’s palace into a vision out of the Arabian Nights, and Joanne even got him to relax his Islamic restrictions for this one event. She understood that he could not include women at the dinner, but she insisted that he gather everyone together at the end of the evening or else the wives would feel insulted.

  As usual, Zia listened to his honorary consul and after the final course, before inviting the women in, Zia asked Doc for a word alone. Like most Americans, about the only thing Doc Long knew about Zia was bad: he was a military dictator who presided over a fundamentalist state. But Zia had a way with Americans that always caught such suspicious visitors utterly by surprise.

  Twenty years before this dinner, as a young Pakistani captain, Zia had been assigned to a year of military training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. One Friday evening, shortly after arriving, the Muslim officer was sitting alone in his austere quarters feeling homesick. There was a knock at the door. A man and his wife from Louisville introduced themselves and said they were interested in making friends with foreign officers. Would he like to go to dinner with them?

  Captain Zia ul-Haq had never forgotten that generosity of spirit, nor that of the many other Americans he had come to know. In later years, whenever he received Americans in Pakistan, President Zia always returned the hospitality he had found in Kentucky with a warmth that was clearly genuine. Like everyone else, Doc Long found himself entranced by this man of charm, intelligence, and seeming sincerity.

  Wilson was not present at the encounter, but he quickly recognized that a communion of sorts had been established that night. The United States might have lost its nerve, but Chairman Clarence D. Long, an elder of the College of Cardinals, had personally committed himself, the entire Appropriations Committee, and the government of the United States to pouring hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan and, specifically, to providing those marvelous Afghan warriors with the weapons they needed.