Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  Luttwak had some bad news. The Afghan war could never become Russia’s Vietnam, he said. It was a lost cause. The best mujahideen fighters were being wiped out and the CIA was right not to provide American weapons to the tribesmen.* It would be foolish to provoke the Russians into an attack on Pakistan.

  But Charlie and Joanne were not there to be told they were chasing a lost cause; they wanted to find out which gun to buy. Luttwak said there were only three non-American versions available on the world market. He was partial to the Swiss Oerlikon. He had actually visited the Swiss mountain forces and was confidant that although the primitive Afghans were not up to using most sophisticated weapons, the Oerlikon could work for them. It wasn’t complicated, and it was light enough that the barrel could be carried on a line of mules.

  Now the amorphous drive to help the mujahideen had a specific focus. Wilson was envisioning Oerlikons on every mountaintop in Afghanistan. He told Joanne that his first challenge was not likely to take place in the House. He owned the Appropriations subcommittee. But the Senate would have to sign off on it, and there the most important man would be the Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

  This was Joanne’s territory—the Republican establishment—and she quickly applied her formula for making things happen by organizing a dinner for the senator with Lord Robert Cranborne as the guest of honor. This was vintage Joanne. Cranborne had one of those titles that inevitably impress Americans. A friend of Charlie Fawcett’s, Cranborne had been actively involved in the Afghan war from the beginning. He flew over on the Concorde for the dinner with the specific mission of lobbying the senator.

  That night the English lord talked eloquently about how the U.S. media had no compunction about reporting every negative thing it could find about Vietnam, but in Afghanistan, the press seemed willing to give the Red Army a free ride as it pursued a policy of near genocide. It was hard not to be impressed with Cranborne, who was then running Afghan Aid, a foundation that provided assistance to Ahmad Shah Massoud in the Panjshir, helping Massoud keep his men in the field.

  It was an effective evening, a creative exercise on Joanne’s part, carefully designed to cast Charlie in a new light with the powerful senator who chaired the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. For the Oerlikon bill to sneak through, Wilson was going to need Stevens’s support.

  Joanne was systematically putting Charlie together with other powerful Republican friends as well. Wilson had met Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense, and CIA director Bill Casey when they’d testified before his committees, but that had been bloodless and very different from being known as the honored friend of the fascinating, well-connected, archconservative Joanne Herring.

  “I’d give them all the pitch about Charlie,” remembers Joanne. “I’d say he isn’t just a boll weevil, he’s better. He’s your most significant instrument, because he’s a real Democrat but he believes what you believe.”

  “All of this was done,” Joanne acknowledged years later, “so that when d’Artagnan came charging with his light brigade, he wouldn’t meet an irresistible force.”

  One of the peculiarities of the CIA’s Afghan campaign was that none of the Agency officers knew or dealt with the Afghans they were supporting. This was one of Zia’s conditions that the CIA had agreed to in order to win the right to operate out of Pakistan. But Charlie Wilson was not bound by any such restrictions. And so in the fall of 1983, when an Afghan doctor who lived in Orlando, Florida, called to say that his brother, the interim chief of the CIA’s mujahideen alliance, was in town, Wilson quickly agreed to a meeting.

  Professor Sigbhatullah Mojadeddi is a small man with glasses and a gray beard, and the story he told that day moved and enraged Wilson. Mojadeddi, a Muslim intellectual who speaks six languages, comes from a family said to be descended from the third caliph. By the time he shook hands with Wilson, more than a hundred members of his immediate family had been assassinated, killed, or simply lost somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. He himself had been jailed and tortured in 1978 after protesting in Kabul. What caught Wilson’s imagination as he listened to the Afghan leader was his insistence that the Soviets could not win: “They are not a superpower. There is only one superpower: Allah.”

  Interspersed with this inspirational talk of faith was a challenge: “Why can’t the United States do something to stop the gunships? We can’t hold off the world’s largest power with our bare hands. The DshK bullets only bounce off the armor.” What could they do with no modern weapons and so little ammunition? The slaughter was intolerable.

  Wilson invited Mojadeddi to join him and Joanne for lunch at the Democratic Club. Almost immediately Joanne began to sing the praises of an Afghan leader she had gotten to know when making her documentary with Charles Fawcett. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was his name, and she had found him marvelous beyond words. The meek-looking professor became instantly agitated and began, in a most remarkable fashion, to denounce Gulbuddin as a true monster and an enemy of Afghanistan. He accused Gulbuddin of being a dangerous fundamentalist, busy assassinating moderate Afghans, a man no self-respecting nation should support.

  If nothing else, Joanne Herring has the courage of her convictions. Zia himself and the Pakistani leaders had told her that Gulbuddin was the Afghan they respected most. She held her ground. It was an explosive argument, with neither side yielding but with Mojadeddi saying some very disturbing things about Gulbuddin’s alleged bloodthirstiness and his Islamic radicalism. America would be sorry one day if it didn’t stop favoring him, he warned.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA would find itself agreeing with Mojadeddi. In March 2002, it launched a satellite-guided missile in an attempt to assassinate Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan leader who had been the largest recipient of CIA weapons during the jihad. But back then, Wilson figured that he had just stumbled into some ancient tribal rivalry and that it made no sense to try to figure out who was right and who was wrong. The only relevant question, in the face of the great Soviet evil, was whether they both were trying to kill Russians. Of that he had no doubt, so he temporarily put out of his mind an issue that would later cast a shadow over the CIA’s great victory in Afghanistan.

  Wilson decided that Mojadeddi could be a powerful advocate for the Afghan cause and set about trying to arrange an audience with CIA Director Bill Casey. Wilson knew all about Casey’s dream of finding a country where the United States could begin to roll back the Communists. Casey believed it would happen in Nicaragua, but Wilson thought that if the old OSS spymaster could just meet the Afghans, he would buy into the plan to fund a radical escalation of the war.

  Only after some bullying did Casey agreed to receive Wilson, Mojadeddi, and his brother in the corner office he maintained in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House. The great patron of anti-Communist freedom fighters listened as Professor Mojadeddi described the experience of having a Hind helicopter sweep in on an Afghan village. Mojadeddi was still recounting the horror stories to Casey fifteen minutes later when he and his brother asked if they could excuse themselves to pray.

  Wilson describes Mojadeddi as a born performer and says he suspected that the Mojadeddi brothers orchestrated the call to prayer for effect. But at the time, even Wilson was moved as they took their prayer rugs to the far corner of the suite, turned to Mecca, and began to pray loudly.

  While this unusual scene was unfolding in the CIA director’s office, Wilson saw a moment to drive home his point and whispered, “Bill, we’re just allowing these brave men to sell their lives too cheaply.”

  “Charlie, there is no silver bullet,” Casey replied sincerely.

  “Well, there’s got to be some way to knock those Hinds down, or at least make them think they’re going to be knocked down,” Wilson answered. The Mojadeddi brothers rejoined the conversation just as Wilson started to talk to Casey about his wish to put Oerlikons into the war.

  “I’d like to have a heavier ca
nnon too, but it’s just too expensive,” Casey said.

  “Mr. Director, you don’t understand that money is not the issue here. We’ll fund anything you want. You ask for it and I’ll pay for it.”

  Wilson remembers Casey looking at him as if he had come from a different planet. Congress was trying to close down the Contra war completely, and he did not seem to believe that Wilson was for real when he declared, with the Mojadeddis listening in amazement, “Mr. Director, I’m going to drown you in money.”

  What Charlie Wilson did next has no precedent. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA and the White House had always acted alone in deciding how much money would be spent on covert programs. Congress’s only role was to rubber-stamp the requests or try to stop them. Never before had a congressman presumed the right to throw money at the Agency to escalate a secret war. More unthinkable, however, was Wilson’s chutzpah in dictating what kind of weapon the CIA should introduce into a covert operation.

  Radical as his plan might have been, Wilson had no real doubts about his ability to win the votes of his eleven colleagues on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee. Each year they gathered behind closed doors, like justices of the Supreme Court, deciding how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for the nation’s defense. They wrestled, of course, with the awesome responsibility of spending enough to protect the country while maintaining fiscal responsibility. But there was also the very human question of pork. Each of the eleven men had to stay in office, and there was no better way to do this than to bring home the bacon—the jobs, the schools, the highways, the bridges—and as everyone in Congress knew, there was no more effective pork than a piece of the giant defense pie.

  Wilson occupied a special place on this committee because he asked for little and almost always supported everyone else’s pork-barrel proposals. Murtha had his research grants for Penn State, and Norm Dicks was always trying to relocate much of the defense establishment to his district in Washington. Charlie was always gracious in his support, and since he had absolutely no defense contractors in his district, it was never a question of a quid pro quo. And now, in the case of the Oerlikon bill, Wilson was not asking his colleagues for billions. All he wanted was $40 million for a cause (shooting down Soviet gunships) that not even a liberal Democrat could find fault with. He was like Fred Astaire sweeping across the ballroom when he floated from the subcommittee with approval for the full $40 million—$17 million of it earmarked for an anti-aircraft cannon to bring down the Hind.

  This first step had been almost anticlimactic in its ease, but next, he had to persuade the defense appropriators from the Senate to go along with his unprecedented maneuver to escalate the CIA’s war. Here anything could happen, so when the House and Senate defense appropriators met, Wilson adopted a simple strategy of building up chits. “I voted for everything anyone proposed no matter what,” he recounts. “I kissed every ass in the room.” Wilson voted for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons—systems that more often than not were to be built in districts where the men he sat with came from.

  He waited until his friend Senator Ted Stevens asked if there was anything else to be considered from the House side. “Yes,” Wilson said, rising to his feet. “I’d appreciate $40 million for the Afghan freedom fighters with $17 million of that specifically earmarked for getting them a better anti-aircraft gun than they presently have.” He used a phrase that Doc Long had first coined and that would later become his trademark in such deliberations: “This is the only place in the world where the forces of freedom are actually fighting and killing Russians.”

  The House appropriators, of course, stood as one with Wilson. To his surprise, no one on the Senate side objected. “I looked around the table and was flabbergasted. No one blinked. No one said no.” Wilson says that moment was a revelation: it was as if he had pushed on a door and discovered that there was no lock and no one to complain if he charged in.

  CHAPTER 16

  Howard Hart

  HOWARD OF

  AFGHANISTAN

  The press had no pictures of Howard Hart. They didn’t even know his name. The few congressmen on the Intelligence Committees who had met him had received only the most general briefings. Not even the State Department was aware of how he ran his operation. No one in the Islamabad embassy, where the station was housed, dreamed of asking him what he was doing. Strangest of all, only a very small group of people in the CIA knew the details of Hart’s campaign. Although Hart and the CIA worked with many branches of the government and drew heavily on the Pentagon’s support, no one attempted to dictate to the station chief what tactical decisions he should be making in the most sensitive of covert wars against the Red Army—no one but Charlie Wilson.

  That was why Hart reacted so badly when news of Wilson’s $40 million legislative gift reached him at the station in Islamabad. Charlie had innocently assumed that the CIA would appreciate what he had just done. After all, Tip O’Neill and his House Democrats were virtually at war with the Agency. They had just cut off all funding for the Contras, and the last thing any of the Agency’s leaders expected from that same Congress was a $40 million appropriation earmarked for secret warfare in Afghanistan. It was an enormous sum for those days—$10 million more than the entire U.S. contribution to the mujahideen the year before—but to Wilson’s dismay, no one at the Agency seemed to appreciate the gesture, least of all Howard Hart.

  Case officers are different from most people. They’re trained to be paranoid. Their job is to identify and evaluate threats, and the one thing Hart could spot from a mile away was a first-class challenge to his command. To him, Wilson’s Oerlikon maneuver was nothing short of a direct slap in the face. Yet that was precisely what Wilson had just done with the bill that he had somehow gotten through Congress. Taken literally, the legislation virtually ordered the CIA to deploy an anti-aircraft cannon in Afghanistan, and Hart quickly determined that the only weapon that fit the congressman’s specifications and that made sense for the CIA to buy was the Swiss Oerlikon. It was definitely not a Soviet weapon, and if Wilson was going to force Hart to put this big, Western gun into the war zone, he might just as well write “CIA” in neon letters all over it. In fact, in one fell swoop, this extraordinarily meddlesome congressman was threatening to upend the inflexible Cold War rule that the American hand never be displayed in a proxy war.

  In retrospect, the CIA’s efforts to conceal its role in those early years of the Afghan war seem extreme. Only Soviet weapons that the Afghans themselves could have captured or acquired were allowed into the Agency’s pipeline. U.S. Air Force planes would then fly the CIA’s war goods to Saudi Arabia, where they would be unloaded, repackaged, and flown to Pakistan on Saudi cargo planes. Additional weapons and ammunition came by ship. Pakistani intelligence agents, not Americans, passed the weapons on to the mujahideen. Even the satellite targeting studies drawn up in Washington for the freedom fighters were translated into primitive hand-drawn pictures so that they looked as if they were the work of an Afghan scout.

  Hart had another reason, beyond knee-jerk dogma, for worrying about the consequences of introducing Wilson’s Oerlikons into the war zone. Over the long years of the Cold War, a kind of unwritten understanding had emerged between the superpowers about rules of engagement in proxy wars. The implicit understanding in Afghanistan was that the United States would not taunt the Soviets with an overt demonstration of involvement. That, at least, was the way Hart and his CIA colleagues saw it. Of course, it was an open secret that the CIA was arming the mujahideen, but no one admitted it and the voluntary discipline of concealment engendered a certain restraint. As long as the United States observed this self-restraint, Hart and the CIA high command assumed, the Soviets would also refrain from upping the ante.

  Hart’s very specific fear about the Oerlikons was that the expensive Swiss automatic cannons would startle and anger the Kremlin and cause it to reevaluate its entire war strategy. If the Red Army were to move with a million troops—
or even only a half million—instead of its current force level of 120,000, it could break the resistance, Hart believed. And then the Soviets would surely move on Pakistan.

  Under this scenario the Red Army wouldn’t even need to invade. With tens of thousands of troops on the frontier there would be endless ways to make life hellish for Zia—cross-border raids, sabotage of CIA arms depots, stirring up of trouble among the three million Afghan refugees. Bombings and assassinations were already plaguing the refugee world in the North-West Frontier, and Hart could see how easily things could rage out of control if the Soviets ever decided to go for broke. Would the United States be prepared to send American boys to defend Zia ul-Haq, the man who'd murdered Benazir Bhutto’s father, the dictator building a Islamic bomb?

  All these thoughts and more were running through his head as he sat down with his paramilitary expert and composed a return cable to headquarters attempting to explain why it would be lunacy for the CIA to buy the Swiss gun. For starters, the weapon was incredibly heavy, requiring at least three mules to transport it. On top of that, each round cost upwards of $50, and firing at a rate of several hundred rounds a minute, the Oerlikon could eat up its sixty-round magazine in a matter of seconds. How could the Agency move all that ammunition through the mountains to keep such a gun in action? And how could the Oerlikon be used except in one fixed location? Guerrillas were supposed to be mobile. Hart suggested that even his counterpart in Pakistan intelligence, General Akhtar, shared his reasoning.

  When the cable reached Langley, Cogan and Deputy Director John McMahon embraced its conclusions. But what moved them to join Hart in resisting the Oerlikon had less to do with the gun’s limitations than it did with the underlying principle to which Hart needed only allude. The station chief’s coded red alert had come through loud and clear. This was a test case that went beyond the immediate danger of testing the Soviets with the Oerlikon: Wilson’s bill was challenging the CIA’s historic right to run its own operations.