by George Crile
Wilson was not one to be put off by the accusations of some mean-spirited prosecutor, and in late 1984 he called Schnabel and asked him to take over Simpson’s job as his administrative assistant. “The answer was no. Schnabel had had many other offers to go to Washington over the years, but he liked his life in Texas. He liked his 120-year-old farmhouse near Austin, he loved his hunting and fishing, and he was a part of the life of the state—a man with so many debts owed him that he could almost live out the rest of his life just calling in the chits.
“Don’t say no,” Wilson implored, and thus began a full-court press. “Don’t worry about the hunting,” the congressman said on the phone. “I’m on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, and anywhere in the world where we have a defense facility you can fly there and hunt. They’ll take care of you.”
This curious offer caught Schnabel’s attention, so when Wilson sent him a plane ticket and spending money to come up to the capital to look it over, he accepted the invitation. He wasn’t planning to be swept away, but the romance of Washington started to work on him, and Nadine, who had joined him on the trip, turned out to have relatives who lived nearby. She wanted to stay.
The next day Schnabel went out and bought a house—an act that he purposefully concealed from Wilson when he went in for a final chat. “I told him I was still worried about the hunting,” remembers the cunning negotiator. Wilson then iced the deal with a hard-and-fast repetition of his commitment: “Don’t worry about the hunting.”
In Schnabel’s scrapbooks from these Washington years, gory documentation of Wilson having made good on his promise is revealed on page after page. The pictures show the congressman’s AA in camouflage uniform near a military base with bow and arrow by his side, holding up a gentle-faced Bambi by its antlers. In another location Schnabel, with Texas Speaker of the House Gib Lewis, is grinning into the camera. The two good old boys are in northern Pakistan, on the Silk Route from China, in search of the nearly extinct Marco Polo sheep. The animal is very much on the endangered species list, but Schnabel explains proudly that President Zia himself waived this prohibition and provided the congressman’s esteemed assistant with an official guide and a Mercedes to hunt the beast. In another picture we see Schnabel beaming as he presents Zia with a ten-gallon hat, custom-made in Texas for the Muslim dictator.
One particularly gruesome set of photos reveals a pickup truck piled high with deer from the grounds of the Indian Head, Maryland, navy base. Schnabel explains that this deadly harvest of deer came from the night he led a SEAL team on a hunting spree, everyone wearing night-vision goggles and shouting “Allahu Akbar” before unloading their high-powered weapons into the unsuspecting prey. The resulting venison, properly blessed before slaughter, was then given to a collection of visiting Afghan fundamentalists.
In a sense, Washington never knew what hit it when Charlie Schnabel came to town. To a certain extent, Charlie Wilson didn’t either. Until Schnabel’s arrival, Wilson had worked the Afghan account in Congress all alone. His defense staffer rarely knew what the congressman was up to. But Schnabel is a self-starter with a gift, if not a genius, for getting along with people, and he began making friends with the mujahideen who visited the congressman’s office.
In the beginning, Schnabel admits, it was not so much the purity of the Afghans’ cause that got to him as much as the romance of it all and the fact that “it was just exciting, just so much goddamn much fun. I’d talk to these muj when they’d come into the office and ask them, ‘What can I hunt in Afghanistan? I want to kill something.’ And they’d say ‘Come to the Panjshir, it’s the greatest hunting in the world—the Panjshir Valley.’” So while other adventuresome Americans who became fixated on Afghanistan always wanted to go to the Panjshir to meet Ahmad Shah Massoud, the great mujahideen commander, Schnabel was drawn to Massoud’s valley for very different reasons. He was desperate to go because the Panjshir is where you find the Marco Polo sheep and the ibex.
When it came to all things to do with Afghanistan, Wilson’s relationship to his administrative assistant was eccentric in the extreme. The two never really coordinated their efforts, and Wilson rarely chose to include Schnabel in his CIA dealings. But he always encouraged his AA’s Afghan interests, and before long the two men had worked out an implicit understanding of the rules of engagement they would follow.
It went something like this: Schnabel had Wilson’s blessings to intimidate bureaucrats in his name: he could smuggle contraband to the mujahideen; he could also carry stationery from the office, write letters requesting unusual assistance from, say, the Pakistan intelligence service, and sign them “Charles Wilson.” All of this Schnabel was empowered to do, and as his passion for the Afghan cause grew, he came to operate with such frequency and effectiveness in Wilson’s name that Abdul Haq, one of the legendary Afghan commanders and a favorite of American reporters, remarked, “We used to think of the two Charlies as one.” And President Zia, after receiving a ten-gallon hat, took to affectionately calling Schnabel “The Other Charlie.”
In effect, during those years, Charlie Schnabel came to operate as a virtual second Charlie Wilson. The result was to substantially enhance Wilson’s ability to influence events. During this period the real Charlie Wilson would take the high road as the patron and defender of the CIA’s Afghan program. Schnabel, meanwhile, as the congressman’s representative, moved about as the undercover bomb thrower, organizing the Andy Eiva–Gordon Humphrey–style crazies who saw the Agency as the enemy. Schnabel himself had come to see the Agency as the problem and his boss as an apologist of sorts. But he forgave Wilson this sin because the two of them were playing a kind of good cop, bad cop routine.
Without any direct commission, Schnabel was soon operating along the fringes, helping to menace bureaucrats, including some at the CIA, and stirring the pot for the muj in ways that Wilson felt he could not afford to do openly. In a sense he became the dark side of Charlie Wilson, free to operate but with the implicit understanding that if he got in trouble he was on his own.
The way he got to the front was by wrangling seats on the Pentagon’s humanitarian-aid flights to Pakistan. Inevitably, in those early years before the prohibitions on the CIA’s support program were lifted, Schnabel could be counted on to be overloaded with contraband for the mujahideen. On one of his first flights it was long-range sights for sniper rifles. John McMahon wouldn’t let the Agency give them to the mujahideen out of fear that Congress might accuse the CIA of supporting assassination efforts. Schnabel had gotten his rich Texas friends to put up the money for the telescopic sights, and as was his custom, he told Wilson about his smuggling exploits only after the fact.
The old Texas politician always greased his way with charming stories and gifts for everyone on every end: captured Soviet war trinkets for the American officials who manned the humanitarian-aid flights, and American military items or congressional pens and seals for the Pakistani ISI agents waiting at the airfield. They looked the other way because he was such a charmer, because he was speaking in Congressman Wilson’s name, and because Schnabel would do such things as get their children scholarships to Texas universities, or visas or medical care through the burgeoning programs that would be opened up in the coming years.
As Schnabel got deeper and deeper into the war, he began crossing lines further and further into no-man’s-land. There would be live ammunition strewn about his small office; Makarov pistols, AK-47s, and an RPG grenade launcher under his bed at home; and down in the congressional storeroom, so many rugs and fur coats from Pakistan that it resembled a small market.
But it was his love of the Afghan people that burned deepest in Schnabel’s sensibilities. In the scrapbooks he keeps are scores of photographic portraits of different mujahideen. All those faces of old men and young boys, faces of noble warriors wearing turbans and Chitrali hats. “You don’t see much ferocity in the eyes of a mujahideen,” he explains paging through the books. “Rather it’s the steady, calm, ‘I’m
going to get you’ look. They would tell me, ‘We won’t stop till the blood is flowing in the streets of Moscow.’ They’d say it as a matter of fact ‘because God is on our side and Allah will prevail, but we are willing to fight to the last man’ and it was no bullshit. They all grew up that way. They grew up as hunters.”
Soon after falling in love with the mujahideen, Schnabel dressed himself up in their clothes and went off with them on operations, in violation of the strict embassy ban on any U.S. officials crossing the border. Inside Afghanistan he would discover the wonder of naswar, the opiated snuff that the Afghans put under their tongues for inspiration. They would come to call him “Naswar Charlie,” and back in Washington, one emotional night, he would even go so far as to convert to Islam, taking the name Abdullah.
All of this Schnabel did very much on his own, but in the eyes of everyone he dealt with, he was always operating in Charlie Wilson’s name. And what made it possible for him to operate so effectively in what was supposed to be the CIA’s arena had nothing to do with the U.S. spy agency. It was, rather, his relationship to a seemingly innocent, humanitarian-aid program run by the Agency for International Development (AID). In large measure because of the two Charlies, this seemingly innocent program would be transformed into an indispensable second front in the CIA’s Afghan war.
The State Department official initially responsible for setting up this effort, known as the Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program, was Assistant Secretary of State Gerald Helman. As he tells the story, by early 1985 Afghanistan had suddenly become a hot program in the National Security bureaucracies. The conservative revolution was in full swing. Ronald Reagan had just won reelection by a landslide, and the State Department did not want to look as if it were failing to support the Reagan Doctrine, which called for U.S. support of anti-Communist guerrillas.
State first sensed an opportunity when the tough old veteran U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at this time, Dean Hinton, met with Helman and began to urge action to counter a crisis that he saw developing on the Afghan border. Hinton was one of the handful of career diplomats who during the Cold War always seemed to be posted in spots where the CIA was active.* In 1984, before going out to Pakistan, Hinton had talked to all the experts and found no one who thought there was any chance whatsoever of pushing the Red Army out of Afghanistan.
But as the CIA funding mushroomed that fall, so did Hinton’s enthusiasm for the operation. “For the first time we were playing offense instead of defense,” he explains. He was unnerved, however, by a series of intelligence reports that concluded that the Soviets were laying waste to a huge strip of land between the Pakistani border and their major garrisons and cities in Afghanistan. Villages were being bombed, irrigation canals destroyed, livestock slaughtered, crops burned, and civilians murdered, tortured, and forced to flee the country. If this were permitted to continue, it was argued, the war would be lost before the new military assistance could have an impact. Guerrillas simply couldn’t wander on foot across vast uninhabitable areas. Famine and disease were said to be moving at a terrifying pace. As important as anything else was the total absence of any medical care. If this continued, the entire military program would be in jeopardy. Hinton warned Helman that something had to be done to stop the flow of refugees and keep the Afghans in their villages as sources of support for the warriors. He used the term genocide to describe the war policy the Red Army was pursuing over the border.
Helman was not exactly a daring official. Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing, and the leadership of the department had already taken note of the fact that Congress was not just smiling on the CIA’s Afghan program; it was hurling money at the problem and browbeating the administration to do more. Specifically, the State Department’s leaders noted that Congress, through Charlie Wilson’s Oerlikon bill, had earmarked money to provide humanitarian aid to the mujahideen. After listening to Hinton’s warnings, Helman decided to endorse the veteran diplomat’s proposal that the State Department contribute to the war effort by starting a humanitarian-aid program under its banner.
Thus was born the Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program. It was initially conceived as a modest program to smuggle food and some medical care across the border—a total of $6 million for 1985. The State Department considered the program to be highly provocative, since it would be the first U.S. effort to openly provide aid to the mujahideen in the war zone.
In truth, very little could be done with $6 million. To complicate matters, the Agency for International Development, which was assigned the task, had little interest in running a program that sounded a lot like a CIA operation. During Vietnam, AID had gotten burned rather badly for providing cover to CIA operatives and for running programs that were very much part of the CIA’s efforts. As Helman explains the dilemma, “We were violating a lot of ground rules that said you shouldn’t interfere in the private affairs of another country and certainly should not be operating covertly against another country’s will.” As a result, the AID leadership would have preferred to have nothing to do with this program. They initially planned only to provide the Pakistanis with humanitarian goods and let them distribute the material to the Afghans. And had it not been for Charlie Wilson, the program almost certainly would have remained small, cautious, and not particularly worthy of comment.
But the Cross Border program happened to come on-line just as Wilson had decided to use his appropriations muscle to fund an effort devised by a California doctor—a friend of Charles Fawcett’s—to train and send cadres of combat medics into Afghanistan. This zealous figure, Dr. Bob Simon, had already enlisted one hundred American volunteers, doctors and nurses, a third of them from Texas. They were to teach the Afghans themselves how to care for their wounded and ill. His ambitions went beyond simple battlefield medicine; he wanted to use this American volunteer effort to focus world attention on the atrocities being committed by the Red Army. As far as Wilson was concerned, this was precisely what the Cross Border program should support.
The idea of encouraging, much less openly funding, Americans to enter the CIA’s proxy war was just about the last thing State and AID wanted to permit. The task of explaining to Wilson why it was not going to be possible to fund his doctor was given to Assistant Secretary Gerald Helman. And for Charlie Schnabel, who had just joined Wilson’s office, the experience of witnessing what happened to the veteran diplomat was an eye-opening introduction into the kind of leverage he would later put to use as Wilson’s surrogate.
Helman was solicitous with Wilson. He said the State Department was indebted to the congressman for his role in helping launch the program. Then he explained that, as Wilson could well understand, there were national security concerns that demanded certain restraints in the kinds of support that the United States could provide. Chief among those was an absolute prohibition on any Americans crossing the border. “It’s too risky to expose Americans to danger and perhaps cause them to be taken hostage,” he said.
To this day Helman is amazed at Wilson’s response: “Hell, that’s exactly what I’m aiming for. I want to use American doctors as bait so they’ll be captured and force our chickenshit government to give the muj an anti-aircraft cannon that will take care of the Hind Mi-24 helicopter.” Wilson remembers a somewhat tamer response, but acknowledges that he made it clear that if American doctors wanted to go into the war zone, that was their privilege. Whatever his actual words, they were enough to startle the diplomat.
“I had to pinch myself,” remembers Helman. “I couldn’t figure out if he was pulling my leg. No one in his right mind would want that, but he said this in a room full of people.”
When Helman dug in his heels and refused to budge, Wilson finally summoned Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost to his office for a showdown. Under secretaries are particularly solicitous of the few senior members of the Foreign Operations subcommittee. There can be terrible problems if one of these representatives decides to seek vengeance, and the
way Wilson put his question to Armacost left the official in a precarious place. “Look, Mike,” he said, “if it’s State’s position that the president’s policy is wrong, then say so directly. Clearly, the president intended for wounded mujahideen to have medical care, and if you don’t want to do it then you better tell me.”
Wilson remembers this confrontation as “one of my better performances. I was still drinking and at my absolute meanest. I told him that in my twelve years in Washington I had never seen any single bureaucrat so able to frustrate the will both of the president and Congress as Gerry Helman.”
Soon after, Helman was relieved of his responsibilities for the Cross Border Program, and Simon, over Helman’s dead bureaucratic body, was given a $600,000 grant to set up operations in Peshawar close to the border. Schnabel marveled at Wilson’s ability to take down an assistant secretary. The congressman would soon offer an equally vivid illustration of his power to reward as well as to punish.
The congressman had assumed the very worst when Larry Crandall, the man AID had picked to head up the Cross Border program, asked to see him. The pink-faced bureaucrat with the somewhat self-satisfied air had reminded Wilson of Helman, and he had been harsh with him, saying, “Until you prove to me that you have vials of morphine and medical care going into the mujahideen, I don’t want to see you in here.”
What Wilson had no way of knowing at the time was that Larry Crandall was a bureaucratic gunslinger—another of those self-appointed crusaders who somehow found themselves being pulled into Charlie Wilson’s orbit. Crandall had reached that time in his life when he wanted to make his mark, and it was as if all of his professional years had been spent preparing him for this assignment. As a young AID officer in Vietnam, he had worked intimately with the CIA, supervising an interrogation center. Just before the Soviet invasion, he had served two years in Kabul. He knew the people and the terrain. Equally as important, Crandall was respected at AID and something of a genius at knowing how to push his timid agency to the absolute breaking point.