by George Crile
What was so grating about having to deal with Wilson was that he just didn’t understand the game. He seemed to think that the interests of the Afghans and the CIA should be identical. Hart, however, underestimated the twists and turns of Wilson’s thinking both about the mujahideen and about what he was hoping to accomplish in Afghanistan.
On one level the station chief was right: Wilson did romanticize these mountain warriors. It was the old business of his dying dog Teddy. Only a Dr. Freud could have fully explained what compelled Wilson throughout his adult life to champion the cause of underdogs. But there was never any question that his mind always raced back to that moment with his mutt writhing on the drugstore floor, dying from the ground glass that the selectman had poisoned him with.
Forty years later, Wilson didn’t just want to help the Afghans; he needed to help them. They too had been poisoned, their children maimed with toy bombs. Old men were being thrown down wells by the Communist thugs. Gunships were swaggering through the skies, looking for caravans of mules or camels to mow down. They were wiping out villages friendly to the rebels. They were even murdering columns of refugees just for sport as the women and children tried to walk out of the country. In the landscape of Wilson’s mind, the Hind had become the murderous selectman. But the mujahideen weren’t giving up, and Wilson wanted revenge for them.
As a boy, he had been inspired by the struggle of World War II, where the United States had demonstrated that it had the power to work its will when it had the courage to fight. The lines he had read on the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial the day he had arrived in Washington to take office had never left him—the lines about the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” To Wilson, Afghanistan was every bit as important a battlefield for democracy as Gettysburg, but the United States was asking the mujahideen to give their lives too cheaply.
Charlie Wilson wanted to make the Red Army suffer. He was after revenge, and he would prove tireless and maniacal in his drive to arm the mujahideen. But he was also in ways an unlikely champion of these stoic, bloodthirsty warriors.
On a personal level, Charlie was a near pacifist. He had hunted only once in his life, as a twelve-year-old. He had shot a squirrel in a tree, and when the furry creature had fallen to the ground yelping, Wilson had been horrified at the agony he had caused. The shaken boy had been horrified to have to put the animal out of its misery. Never again would Charlie Wilson raise a gun against a living creature.
You would never know this looking at the gun case in his house on Crooked Creek in Lufkin. It is filled with weapons from around the world—Uzis from Israel, M-16s, Russian assault rifles, Enfields, shooting canes, shotguns, .30-06s, and pistols large and small. But never would this congressman fire one to take a life.
Outside his home, along the creek, he’s installed forty bird feeders and countless varieties flock to take advantage of the New Deal breakfast he provides year-round for the cardinals and sparrows and blue jays. There are also specially designed feeders with corncobs and a sitting perch, where the squirrels can eat with the knowledge that no one will be coming after them in this game preserve.
But when it came to the Afghan war, this softhearted bird lover was out for blood. What Howard Hart did not understand was that Wilson was not just swept away by the romance of the freedom fighters; there was a more pragmatic side to his embrace of them, something akin to the friendship that Winston Churchill developed for Joseph Stalin during World War II. “I like that man,” Churchill had told Anthony Eden in an impulsive moment.
Churchill, however, had not been naive about Stalin. More than anyone in the West, he knew that the Soviet leader was responsible for the murder of millions. But context is everything, and in the 1940s, during the struggle for the world, the prime minister found it nothing short of exhilarating to have the guns of this thug and his Red Army targeted on Hitler. Before the war was over the Soviets would pay the price of twenty million lives to put down the Nazis. Having an ally like that was no small thing.
What Hart could not quite comprehend was that, in the end, what the congressman liked most about the Afghans was their terrifying passion to kill the common enemy, their refusal to bow under in spite of the odds. He even admired their revenge taking, when they would put their prisoners to gruesome deaths.
Although Hart didn’t yet know it, any ability that he might have had to modify Wilson’s designs was all but lost late that night in Peshawar at the Pearl Intercontinental. Well after the last Afghan leader had left and Charlie and Snowflake went to bed, there was a knock on the congressman’s door. Snowflake was frightened, at first, to hear the whispering voices of the mujahideen. Professor Mojadeddi, accompanied by his bodyguards, entered the room carrying something in a pillowcase. Snowflake said she backed off as Mojadeddi pulled a captured Russian AK-47 out of the pillowcase.
“It was very hushed, and this private, quiet ceremony unfolded,” she remembers from her cramped quarters in Beverly Hills, where she is still trying to get established. The professor presented the AK with great solemnity—it was the sincerest thanks he could offer for the Oerlikons. This was the kind of gesture that moved a Texan like Charlie Wilson. He’d be with them now to the end; and the only end was victory.
Wilson would illegally ship that captured Russian assault rifle home and place it on the wall of his living room in Lufkin. Whenever he was in trouble politically, he would turn to it almost as if it were a talisman. It would become the centerpiece in a political ad that moved his constituents and became famous among his congressional colleagues for its brazen appeal to John Wayne–style patriotism.
“This is a Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle,” Wilson intoned in the ad. “It’s the instrument of Communist terrorism worldwide—in Rome, in London, in Lebanon, and in Afghanistan. Everywhere except here, because we’re big and we’re strong. With continued adequate military strength and eternal vigilance and God’s help, we’ll never see a Kalashnikov on the banks of the Neches.”
In slow motion, with a weird, frightening sound in the background, the congressman from the Second Congressional District hurls Mojadeddi’s captured AK into the river. Perhaps only in Texas could such an ad have found a sympathetic audience. But it was not created for cynical political reasons. This was the way Wilson saw himself, and this heroic self-image made him see Howard Hart not as a daring spy but as a timid bureaucrat unwilling to take a risk for freedom.
The station chief was not authorized to seek out visiting congressmen to discuss classified matters, particularly not legislation. It was taboo, and under normal circumstances, he would never have considered it. But now, with the threat of the Oerlikon looming, he deliberately crossed the line, sought out Wilson, and asked for the opportunity to brief him.
The two men acted as if they were pleased to see each other when they met in the old Agency for International Development building, which was still serving as the temporary embassy. On the fifth floor Hart ushered Wilson into the cramped suite that functioned as the CIA’s Islamabad station, and in the secure room known as “the tank,” Hart once again put on the 1812 Overture. His paramilitary expert was already there, and the two men began their carefully prepared presentation. It was designed to explain how much more effective it would be to the war effort if Wilson would let the Agency use the Oerlikon money to buy 12.7mm DshKs and 14.5mm machine guns.
Charlie had, of course, already heard Hart’s spiel about the DshK’s effectiveness. But this time Hart felt he was making a far more compelling argument. The paramilitary expert had prepared plastic overlays to place over the station’s war maps. The first one showed a handful of blue dots representing the Oerlikons that could be deployed with the millions of dollars Wilson had laid aside for them. Afghanistan is about the size of Texas and Hart, pointing to the handful of dots, made it clear how little damage they could do.
He t
hen superimposed another overlay, with hundreds of red dots indicating the number of heavy machine guns that he could deploy with that same amount of money. “I can kill more Russians with these than with the Oerlikons. And the Oerlikons will just piss the Russians off and might provoke them to attack a base camp they might otherwise ignore.”
Perhaps it was the music in the background that imparted a sense of history and drama. The station chief felt the power of his own argument and simply could not imagine how the congressman could fail to see its logic.
Wilson was polite. They had made a fine case, a persuasive case, but he had studied this problem and the Oerlikon was just what the mujahideen needed. At this point Hart got a creepy feeling that to Wilson the Oerlikon had become “sort of a messianic cause of his, the magic weapon.”
But Wilson was not talking about an either-or situation. “Howard, you can have more 12.7s, too,” he said. The idea of just throwing more money at a CIA campaign was simply outside of Hart’s experience—and, for that matter, outside the experience of the CIA. He paid no attention to it. Instead, he reminded the congressman of the danger to Pakistan if the Oerlikon were introduced, and he said that General Akhtar agreed with him.
Wilson had the station chief outflanked here as well. He had just finished talking to Akhtar and, indeed, to Zia himself. “Howard, the Pakistanis ain’t stepping back,” he said. “They’re steppin’ up.”
The two men might just as well have been speaking different languages. Hart was ostensibly addressing the narrow subject of the Oerlikon but was really making one last stab at keeping the program in the hands of the professionals. And Wilson was confusing the issue by trying to be accommodating, doing his best to make Hart understand that money was no longer an issue. He was offering a bigger pie—for that matter, many more pies if that’s what the warriors wanted.
“Howard, you don’t seem to understand,” he said in frustration. “We’re going to buy you every fucking Oerlikon, every fucking Blowpipe, every fucking SA-7 we can get in Eastern Europe. And Howard, you just tell me how many DshKs you want and you can have them too. Just tell me how many.”
It was all very sad, this confrontation. Hart was thinking about managing perpetual conflict, using the Afghan war to help slowly erode the strength of the enemy in a global campaign that might go on for decades. Wilson was running with the logic of the old Barry Goldwater line “Why not victory?”
It was particularly offensive for Hart to be treated as if he were some kind of timid bureaucrat. It had been no easy task convincing the Pakistanis to permit the war to escalate. Hart had built the relationship with a nervous and suspicious ISI. He had become a personal face that General Akhtar could look to and trust. Good old H2. Akhtar knew that with Hart in place it was safe to move forward together on this most dangerous of tiger hunts.
By 1984 Akhtar’s special-forces operatives were moving in and out of Afghanistan dressed as mujahideen, leading special operations and ambushes and killing Russians. That was truly provocative, and Hart was proud that he had helped bring about an escalation of the CIA’s efforts far larger than anyone had thought possible when he’d taken over. When Akhtar complained to Hart about his discovery that the English were trying to sneak ordnance and support to Massoud in Panjshir, Hart could draw on their friendship and say, “Oh, General, leave them alone. You know the British are only a Third World army, and you have the fifth largest in the world. They won’t hurt anything.”
That was Howard Hart the pro. His Afghan program may have been modest by comparison to what was to come once “Charlie’s money” started pumping billions into the war, but everything that was done later with the mujahideen was built on the back of the relationship Hart had forged with Akhtar. Perhaps it was in part pride of ownership that caused Hart to refuse to play with Wilson now. Perhaps it had something to do with their unpleasant last meeting. Whatever it was, Hart could not cope with Wilson’s pompous offer of unlimited weapons. Good God, the man talked as if he wanted to declare war on the Soviet Union. What good was it to have the CIA run a covert operation if a P. T. Barnum was allowed to hop into the ring and start barking out circus lines?
Five months later, Howard Hart would pack his bags, take his wife and two teenage sons, and leave Pakistan and the Afghan war for good. He longed to stay on, but perhaps it was fortunate that his three-year tour was up.
On his last night, the station chief and his three-man Afghan team had a farewell dinner with General Akhtar. At the end of the evening, the ISI chief took Hart aside and hugged him. The Pakistani would never shake the habit of calling the next station chief by Hart’s affectionate nickname, H2.
Back at Langley, Director Casey honored him with the Agency’s highest decoration. But as is the custom of the Clandestine Services, at the end of his Afghan tour, Hart saluted, closed the door, and never looked back. He wouldn’t really ever find out what Avrakotos and Wilson did next to transform the war. He had left the encounter with Wilson knowing that he had done everything possible to stop a disaster in the works. Now it was up to Chuck Cogan; he would have to hold the line back at Langley. There would be many new arenas for Hart to go into—many other challenges the CIA would have in store for him. But in the end, he would always look back on Afghanistan as his proudest hour.
CHAPTER 17
Joanne, Charlie, and friends
COGAN’S LAST STAND
Chuck Cogan had come of age in the CIA in the 1960s—long before Congress demanded or even claimed the right to serve as its watchdog. By the time Cogan had climbed to the top of the Agency, he had not found it easy to adapt to the idea of politicians intruding into this private world. But he was a good soldier, and ever since the law establishing intelligence oversight committees was enacted in 1980, he had done his part to brief members and staff on the House and Senate side.
Cogan had drawn the line, however, when Wilson had moved to insinuate himself into the operational details of the Agency’s business. In his quasi-military world, Cogan enjoyed the status of a three-star general. He didn’t just oversee the Afghan operation; he had to deal with the hostage nightmare, with Khomeini, with Saddam Hussein, with the spread of nuclear weapons, and on and on. This was no playground for amateurs. He had been quite up front in telling Wilson that the Agency would not go along with his request to fund the Charlie Horse. The whole idea of an Israeli anti-aircraft gun for a Muslim jihad was absurd. Nor was he going to permit any non-Soviet weapons into Afghanistan. Wilson’s response had been crude, almost threatening, but the CIA veteran had assumed that this was just congressional bluster. The fact was that Wilson had been trespassing in areas where he did not belong, and Cogan had politely shown him the door.
No doubt Cogan would have been happy never to see Charlie Wilson. Unlike his colleagues and predecessors, however, Wilson did not accept Cogan’s implied premise that the CIA had an exclusive right to decide the nature of this war. Things may have worked that way before, but Wilson had decided to change all that. It was really quite simple, as he saw it. Congress not only represented a coequal branch of the U.S. government, it had the power of the purse. The bill he had muscled through called on the CIA to spend $17 million for a Swiss anti-aircraft cannon (as well as another $23 million to be left to the CIA’s discretion) to be deployed in a campaign that everyone knew the president enthusiastically endorsed. Just to be sure the CIA got the message, Wilson had included language obligating it to inform him in advance of how it intended to spend the balance of the $40 million appropriation he had sponsored. And so, when the congressman requested a meeting, the Agency found itself with no real choice but to send Chuck Cogan back to try to sort things out.
The way Wilson saw it, “The CIA basically woke up one morning to discover they had an extra $40 million they hadn’t asked for. It was kind of a good news–bad news deal. Good because they like money; bad because it specified that the money should be used for an anti-aircraft cannon they didn’t want. But then a lot more money for the things t
hey did want—boots, morphine, and saws to cut off legs and arms. They had to come and clear it first.”
Left with the unpleasant task of returning to Wilson’s office to try to reason with the congressman, Cogan again tapped Avrakotos. As the two men moved through the cavernous white marble halls of the Rayburn office building, Cogan, with the slightly thuggish-looking Avrakotos by his side, was still convinced that he would be able to put this meddling congressman back in his cage; but best, he thought, to wear the man down with good arguments.
Wilson received Cogan and Avrakotos at his desk, next to the giant map of the world that covered an entire wall of his office. He was all business, interested only in hearing when the guns would be deployed. Unfortunately, the division chief had some bad news: “preliminary studies” indicated that the Oerlikon was simply too heavy for the Afghans to carry up to the heights where it could be useful. An even bigger problem, he explained, were the shells. So many would be needed that scores of mules would have to be provided. The Agency would end up having to go into the mule business. Wilson recalls Cogan suggesting that as many as two hundred of these pack animals might be needed just to take care of one Oerlikon over the course of a year.
Cogan stressed the top-secret nature of the briefing. Another congressman might have been intimidated, but Wilson had been studying the Jane’s series of weapons reference books, as well as conferring with his own arms expert, Ed Luttwak. He knew that the Agency was already giving the mujahideen Soviet 14.5mm machine guns, which weighed more than the Oerlikon. So what was the big deal about his guns?
Cogan shifted gears: end-user certificates were a big problem. The Swiss, with their fetish for neutrality, would be compromised if the Soviets cornered them and demanded to know who had paid for the guns. The U.S. cover would be blown. It could have nightmarish ramifications, he confided. It would require finding a government willing to lie for the CIA and assume responsibility for the Oerlikons.