by George Crile
Wilson found this argument empty. With twenty thousand employees, the CIA should be able to take care of a simple concealment problem. Cogan was clearly feeding him a lot of sludge, and he didn’t like it. He was demanding a specific answer, and Cogan didn’t want to tell him outright that he wasn’t going to buy the guns.
“Well, how about the $4 million we put in for boots?” Wilson asked with contempt. “There hasn’t been one damn boot delivered. And I understand there were eighty-two cases of frostbite last week. Do you need end-user certificates to send boots, Mr. Coburn?”
Avrakotos, meanwhile, sat quietly, fascinated by the spectacle of this congressman viciously reaming his boss, whom everyone else treated with such reverence. Over the course of the next few months, while Cogan stone-walled him, Charlie would come to hold him personally responsible for the slaughter that continued in the mountains. “The only thing I care about, Coburn,” he had said at the end of that meeting, “is shooting down those helicopters, and I don’t care if it hurts your feelings or not. There is nothing I won’t do, absolutely nothing.”
While Wilson was doing battle with Cogan, Joanne Herring was in a state. All of her grand plans were suddenly in jeopardy. She had organized a party that was designed to put her and her political salon on the map, but to her horror, most of the important people she had been counting on were turning her down. The party was billed as a “Welcome to Washington” dinner for Prince Bandar, the dashing young American-trained fighter pilot serving as Saudi ambassador to the United States. Joanne had known Bandar ever since his flight training in Texas, when he’d attended her extravaganzas in River Oaks. Since then, the prince had married Faisal’s daughter and become, for all intents and purposes, a surrogate son of the Saudi monarch.
“I just assumed that because of his history everyone would accept,” recalls Joanne. That assumption would have been sound had she given the party a couple of years later, after Bandar emerged as the most powerful and influential ambassador since World War II. In those days, however, Bandar’s most impressive accomplishments stemmed from his work in the shadows.
Just a few months after Joanne’s invitation, Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, would visit Bandar at his palatial house overlooking the Potomac to ask the Saudi prince to secretly fund the Contras. Bandar would quickly win approval from the throne to pay a million dollars a month to keep the CIA’s Contras in the field. Soon enough, Bandar’s many discreet favors for the American government would raise his profile with Washington’s power elite. George Bush would take the prince and his family on fishing vacations; Colin Powell would come over to his house to play handball. Indeed, during the Gulf War, Bandar would become a de facto member of the National Security Council.
But back in early 1984, his name was not working for Joanne. It was all doubly embarrassing because she had taken Charlie to lunch at the prince’s house, where she had gone over the guest list and promised a party to end all parties. As always, she was mixing pleasure with business. By this time, thoughts of marriage to Charlie had passed, but Joanne was as deeply committed to their common crusade for Zia and the Afghans as ever, and she knew that few men in Washington could be as helpful to Charlie as the young ambassador.
It was a tightly held secret, but Wilson knew from classified briefings that the Saudis were secret partners of the CIA in the Afghan war, and he was eager to meet Bandar. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had had an even more dramatic impact on the desert kingdom than it had on America. The Saudis sit on at least one-third of the world’s known oil reserves—perhaps the greatest treasure trove any nation has ever possessed. But the 870,000-square-mile kingdom with a population not much greater than that of Los Angeles County has no real army to protect its wealth. The royal family was convinced that once the Red Army invaded Afghanistan and took up positions a few hundred miles from the kingdom, the Kremlin’s grand design would call for moving on their oil fields next.
In Washington shortly after the invasion, Jimmy Carter had announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force and committed the United States to protecting Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil states from any aggression. For their part, the Saudis had moved to turn their country, in effect, into a forward base for American military forces. They’d commenced building vast underground facilities where weapons and ammunition could be prepositioned for an American-led intervention. They’d built airfields with hardened hangars able to withstand two-thousand-pound bombs, erecting hundreds more than were needed for their own air force, making it possible for the United States to fly in naked and be instantly ready for war. Fuel and bombs and bullets and food had all been placed in storage for the day when they might be needed for an American rescue mission.
When the Gulf War erupted a decade later, all those immense secretive preparations made the colossal American and allied operations possible. The underground command centers, where U.S. and Saudi generals worked side by side, rivaled anything in the Pentagon. Suddenly it became clear that the United States and Saudi Arabia enjoyed a very special relationship indeed.
But back in the early 1980s, the billions of dollars’ worth of high-performance jets and AWACS radar planes that Saudi Arabia was seeking to purchase from the United States were the source of deep and bitter political battles in Washington. And Prince Bandar, then in his early thirties, was at the center of the campaign to convince Congress to grant the Saudis’ requests. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, and the Israelis, who had mobilized all their forces to block the sales, were horrified when Wilson, one of their most trusted champions, broke ranks.
So intense was the 1982 AWACS battle that scores of the congressman’s most important Jewish backers, who had scheduled a major fund-raiser for Charlie, canceled the event the day after Wilson voted to sell the AWACS. Despite this, Wilson held the line, actually lecturing his Jewish friends on how Israel’s very survival depended on reaching out to moderate Arabs.
Bandar was well aware of the significance of Wilson’s AWACS support, but that was history. What clicked when Joanne put them together at lunch was their mutual fascination with Afghanistan. Bandar had been the king’s point man three years earlier, when the new CIA director, Bill Casey, had approached the prince about helping fund an escalation in the Afghan war. Bandar had flown to Jidda with Casey to serve as the Director’s translator for the meeting with the king.*
“What can you do to help us?” Casey had asked King Fahd. But Fahd, no stranger to the workings of American politics, had countered by introducing a note of reality into the discussion: “That’s not a fair question. What I tell you I’ll do, I’ll do. But you have your Congress to deal with. So you do what you can—and I’ll match it.” Knowing the king’s vast resources, Casey had sprung to his feet, arms extended, saying, “You’ve got a deal.”
By the time Bandar hosted Joanne and Charlie for lunch, the arrangement had been in place more than two years. Wilson was eager to find out if the Saudi commitment would extend to his $40 million special Oerlikon appropriation. Beyond that, he wanted to know how the Saudis would react to the far larger increases in the CIA’s Afghan budget he had in mind.
As it turned out, Wilson could not have found a more willing accomplice. Bandar not only supported the Afghan war; secret dealings with the United States were now in his blood. Wilson could see that just by looking at the huge photograph in the gold frame displayed on a pedestal in the prince’s living room. It showed one of Charlie’s early political heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, talking to Bandar’s grandfather, King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. The picture captured the two men in the middle of World War II scheming to undermine British influence in the Middle East.
From grandfather to grandson, little had changed in the way these tribal patriarchs conducted their affairs. Abdul Aziz had grown up before oil transformed his desert kingdom, and he’d passed on to Bandar’s generation the highly personalized Bedouin tradition of diplomacy. That day in 1984, B
andar did not need to consult his country’s legislature to tell Wilson that the Saudis would embrace a gun that could shoot down the Hind. He knew that the king would smile on any increases Wilson might make in the CIA’s support for the jihad.
Charlie did not look or talk that day as if he were anything but an equal of Bandar. But sitting at the prince’s table with Joanne was an exotic experience for the man from the tiny town of Trinity. Dining with kings and princes, moving in the world of characters who shape history was what he had dreamed about in that dusty Depression town. Wilson had always managed to fill his life with characters who looked and acted as if they had escaped from a novel, but Bandar was in a class of his own: a U.S.-trained fighter pilot with a house in Aspen so large that it would create a town crisis over the right of millionaires to build such oversized structures.
Everything he said that day pleased Wilson. It wasn’t a contract, but Bandar left the clear impression that the Saudis would match any future appropriations Wilson might make. To Charlie, that meant anytime he struck on behalf of the mujahideen, it would double the blow against the Soviets.
Many years later, after the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, Bandar would arrange a hero’s welcome for Wilson in Saudi Arabia. But even back in 1984 one can imagine how pleasing it must have been for the prince to meet such a refreshingly different U.S. representative. Bandar was used to Democrats dependent on Jewish contributions, who always seemed to vote against Saudi arms sales even as they privately told him how much they respected the kingdom’s moderate positions. He was keenly aware that most Democratic congressmen didn’t want anything to do with the CIA unless it was to reign the Agency in. Joanne had brought him a congressional powerhouse who not only sided with Saudi Arabia in its historic confrontation with the Israel lobby but could single-handedly force massive increases in U.S. funding for a Muslim jihad.
Within a year of the lunch, Gust Avrakotos would take advantage of this budding relationship between the prince and the congressman. As the Afghan budget doubled, and then doubled again into the hundreds of millions, the king would inevitably be late with his matching funds. Casey and Avrakotos would fly to Riyadh or Jidda to personally collect, but more often than not there was no time for this flattering diplomacy. Bills would come due and the program’s relationship with its suppliers would be placed in jeopardy. Avrakotos, not wanting to alienate the king by being too pushy, would turn to Wilson.
“Allah will not be pleased if the king abandons his freedom fighters,” Charlie would tell Bandar in a voice that seemed at once playful and serious. “If you don’t do this soon, I’m going to tell Joanne.” Bandar would laughingly feign alarm at this bogus threat: “Oh no, don’t do that! Allah will soon be smiling, Charlie. You will see.”
Much of the business in Washington is transacted in this manner. That’s why in 1984 Joanne felt so menaced by the many regrets to her dinner invitations. Bombing out on a high-profile party like this one could be terminal, politically as well as socially.
“I spent three weeks on the telephone, personally calling everyone. We had to get them back,” she recalled of her efforts. “I got Charlie to call his friends on the Armed Services Committee and at the Pentagon.” Wilson was already going the extra mile for Joanne, even assigning some of his secretaries to help her with logistics, just as he had done the year before for her Zia party. It was clearly stretching the rules to deploy congressional staff for such work, but an argument could always be made that Joanne’s parties were critical to some aspect of U.S. diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Joanne’s other friends were also rallying. A financially strapped Charles Fawcett took the train from Los Angeles to Washington. Joanne had sent him a plane ticket, but out of pride he had sent it back. On the train he was robbed, and he arrived without suitable clothes to wear to the party. But the ever-resourceful ex-RAF ace, king of B-grade movies and defender of the Afghans, penciled a vividly accurate sketch of the robber, and his black tie was returned by the police just in time for the party.
By this time, Joanne had taken a romantic interest in another Texan, Jimmy Lyons, who flew into town in his private jet. Lyons was the son of the woman who had first introduced Joanne to the John Birch Society and the Minutewomen. Lyons proudly describes himself an “ultraconservative” who believes that the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations were, in some sinister fashion, the real forces behind the Communist Party.
Joanne’s romance with Charlie was always centered on Afghanistan. When Jimmy Lyons came into the picture, she adopted another romantic crusade: Angola and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-Communist freedom fighters. The way Lyons saw it, big business was in bed with the Communists, and nowhere was that more apparent than in Angola, where Gulf Oil and other U.S. corporations were shamelessly doing business with the Marxist government. When Congress prohibited the CIA from helping Savimbi, Lyons personally intervened. He not only flew the guerrilla chief about in his private plane, he urged Savimbi to blow up Gulf Oil’s facilities. Joanne was entranced by Lyons’s zeal and by his willingness to throw his own resources against the dark forces. “Whatever I needed,” gushed Joanne, “Jimmy would provide. And he had this wonderful plane.”*
The night of her party, Lyons, Fawcett, and Wilson attentively served as Joanne’s uncomplaining lieutenants while she made last-minute changes to the place cards and settings in the grand ballroom of the Hay-Adams hotel. Perhaps only Herring could have designed an event with such strange bedfellows and such grand visions.
By the time the first guests arrived, Zia’s honorary consul had once again created a vision of a Pakistani palace. The room was ablaze with hand-embroidered, sequined tablecloths and brass candlesticks. Joanne had been magically transformed into the most frivolous devil-may-care southern belle. No one would have guessed the heroics that had gone into making this potential disaster a triumph. It was part of Joanne’s grace under pressure, and in the end, the party was a smashing success.
Henry Kissinger, who often stayed with Baron di Portanova in Acapulco and who was part of Joanne’s circle, flew in to toast Bandar. The smiling prince was seated on Joanne’s right and her childhood friend White House Chief of Staff James Baker was on her left. A glittering collection of Texas oil money, military chiefs, senators, astronauts, and diplomats filled the room.
Wilson was hardly the center of attention that night, but Joanne had given him a seat of honor, placing him between Buckets and Barbara Walters. Di Portanova regaled Wilson with stories of the dangers that would befall the United States if San Marino, the tiny Manhattan-sized republic for which he served as honorary consul, were to return to Communism. For Charlie, the party was another exhilarating triumph of networking chez Joanne. It did not hurt to have a special channel to the richest Muslim power on earth, or to the conservative elite like Baker and Caspar Weinberger. And it was reassuring to know that even if marriage was no longer in the cards, he and Joanne would still continue crusading side by side.
The first indication of just how committed the CIA was to blocking Wilson’s Oerlikon initiative came from the Pentagon. While Wilson was still in Pakistan, General Richard S. Stillwell, in charge of all the Pentagon’s black activities, had stormed into the congressman’s office demanding to speak to the administrative assistant. When Charles Simpson appeared, the very first words out of Stillwell’s mouth were “Who the hell is Charlie Wilson and what the hell does he think he’s doing with the Afghan program?”
The retired general was not even trying to be diplomatic as he laid down the law to Simpson. No one had asked Wilson for the appropriation, and even if the Agency had additional funds, it wouldn’t be able to use them effectively. Finally, he barked, Wilson should know the $40 million was scheduled to come out of existing Pentagon funds, and he was in a position to block that. His parting wisdom was that the congressman had no business sticking his nose into operational details of a covert program.
Wilson was not overly distressed when Simpson reported the
encounter. A mere general could never frustrate one of the key defense appropriators. But a far more effective coalition was mobilizing, and it took Wilson a while to figure out who the real enemy was. He would have been well served to follow what had been happening at the other end of the Capitol, where an able and well-liked U.S. senator was also running into trouble when he sought to expand support for the mujahideen.
There was only one other serious champion of the mujahideen during this time, a liberal Democratic senator named Paul Tsongas, who managed, in spite of ferocious opposition from the Reagan White House, to win passage of a congressional resolution calling for increased support for the mujahideen. It remains something of a puzzle why Tsongas and Wilson, two ingrained liberals, emerged as the only early champions of the Afghan rebels. No one in those days would have dreamed of calling the Reagan administration soft on Communism, but Charlie Wilson couldn’t find anyone in the administration who seemed to want anything more than a safe bleeding campaign.
For him, Afghanistan had become a political mystery. Why was it that Ronald Reagan could invade Grenada, commission Star Wars, bypass Congress to keep his secret Contra war alive, and frighten everyone by branding the Soviets the Evil Empire, yet when Wilson made his move to up the ante and counter the most egregious Soviet aggression, he met only resistance?
Stillwell had at least been up front; no one else was. According to Wilson, the CIA initially blamed the State Department for the resistance; the Pentagon said it was the fault of the Office of Management and Budget, which was refusing to release the $40 million. But the OMB people Wilson spoke to said the Pentagon had refused to take the money out of existing naval funds, as the bill had specified. The reason for the delay was “congressional confusion.”