Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  His first move, once he arrived in Peshawar on September 2, 1985, instantly put him into a league of his own. He had $6 million to spend by September 30, the end of the fiscal year. It was money the president had taken out of a Syrian AID program, and if he didn’t spend it by the deadline, it would be lost to the Treasury. Another AID man might have taken the safe course and thrown the money into the bottomless pit of refugee assistance.

  But Crandall had visited the same border clinics that had radicalized Wilson. “I saw what kind of damage was being done and I started to think, These no good S.O.B.s can’t get away with this.” Crandall wasn’t interested in playing it safe with the Agency for International Development’s money. He was already into the war and sensed that anything he might want to do required a relationship with the mujahideen leaders. With what appeared to be reckless abandon, he issued orders to buy hundreds of brand-new Isuzu and Toyota four-wheel-drives and trucks, which he promptly presented to the leading Afghan commanders. The only condition was that the vehicles be used in the fighting and absolutely not for commerce inside Pakistan.

  “I wanted to make a big impression on them quickly,” Crandall explains. “I wanted to hit them fast with something big so they would take us seriously. It got us into a lot of trouble with AID, because AID likes to think when it buys vehicles for the government they are in a parking lot at night so that they can be counted. In this case most of the trucks disappeared, never to be seen again, and AID couldn’t understand this. But it established our bona fides with the mujahideen. All of a sudden those bastards loved us. And all of a sudden it gave me access that no one else had.”

  That was typical of Crandall—a bold move early on to get the attention of the men he would need later. To his surprise, he had discovered that neither the CIA nor the U.S. embassy had any overt contact with the mujahideen. In fairness to the embassy, that was because Zia had outlawed it. So when Crandall asked to meet some of the resistance leaders, the consulate couldn’t help him. By chance, while walking down the streets of Peshawar, he ran headlong into one of the locals who used to work for him at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. “I told him my problem—that I had to get in touch with the resistance but the embassy didn’t know how to do it. That was at six P.M., and by two A.M. my hotel room was filled with mujahideen.”

  For the first time, a U.S. government official was talking and negotiating with the warriors the CIA had been arming for five years. The CIA was still not permitted to meet these people, but Crandall reasoned that since he was running an overt program, supposedly dealing only in humanitarian aid, the prohibition did not apply to him.

  No one had told him to do this and certainly none of his bosses would have liked the idea, but Crandall was now beginning to operate his AID program the way the CIA would ordinarily have moved in any other country where it was supporting a rebel force. The specific objective and the exact nature of all of Crandall’s plans would remain essentially concealed for many years, even though the program was technically overt and would grow to over $100 million a year.

  Avrakotos tends to dismiss Crandall’s efforts as inept and clogged with unnecessary bureaucracy, but the truth is that this program fast became a critical second front in the CIA’s war, in more ways than one. Certainly Crandall had the kind of mind and experience that could rival that of most chiefs of station, and everything he did in designing and running this rapidly expanding and supposedly open humanitarian-aid program was designed to make a difference in the mujahideen’s fighting power.

  Crandall was actually no stranger to the CIA. His first big AID job had been in a Vietnam province, working side by side with the Agency’s Phoenix program operatives. They were selectively killing suspected Vietcong while he was trying to win the loyalty of the local Vietnamese. He had walked away with a keen sense of how easy it was for a determined guerrilla force to wreak havoc with a superpower.

  During Crandall’s two years in Kabul he had not been particularly charmed by Afghanistan. But he’d left with profound respect for the Afghans’ orneriness and had paid little attention to the pessimists who’d seemed to dominate the policy circles around the Afghan question. He was stunned by how down the embassy officials were about the Afghans’ prospects when he arrived to survey the situation. “Everyone was constantly talking about Russian stick-to-itiveness as opposed to U.S. jumpiness.”

  His own very different conclusion, after meeting the Afghans, was almost identical to that of Mike Vickers: there weren’t enough Soviet troops to pacify that country. The key was to keep the Afghans in the battle; as long as they didn’t become demoralized, they could do the same thing as the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. He set out to use AID’s money to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans.

  The vision of America buying Third World hearts and minds in Vietnam had become discredited. But as Crandall saw its Afghan application, it simply meant doing more than just giving out guns. The Cross Border program had been started to counter the Soviets’ scorched-earth policy—to stop the flow of refugees out of Afghanistan. That meant, first of all, getting out food and medicine and a reason for people to stay in their villages. As Crandall saw it, that could only be done if the commanders became true leaders able to care for their own families and to offer things of material value to their people.

  But how do you offset the horrors of a war zone? To begin with, it meant he had to take AID into the smuggling business in a big way—with trucks and mules and camels and donkeys to slip in food and medicine. Later he organized training for teachers and supplied kits for them to pack in over the mountains to establish underground schools in devastated villages. Within a year he would be doling out tens of millions of dollars to the private volunteer organizations that began to flock into the Muslim stronghold of Peshawar, so that American nurses, doctors, and health workers could set up shop, not only providing care in Pakistan but constantly training new cadres of Afghan men and women to provide health care inside the war zone.

  As Crandall saw it, the significance of the effort in those first few months was that it showed the American flag for the first time and filled the Afghans with hope that the superpower was standing tall alongside them. “We created a mentality,” he explains. “When we would go to big rallies at refugee camps they would talk about how the Americans are coming, the Americans are coming. Even at mosque prayers we heard it.”

  Wilson, who had first seen only “a horrid little shit” of a bureaucrat standing before him, would soon come to love this man. Schnabel would arrange for Crandall’s daughter to intern in Wilson’s office. The congressman would throw fancy parties for him on his return visits, and above all, Charlie would conspire with Crandall against his bosses at AID.

  Soon after their first meeting, Crandall returned to Wilson’s office. He closed the door and, just as Avrakotos had done a year and a half earlier, said in a very different voice than Wilson had heard before, “Now, this conversation never happened. And if you ever say I came here, I’ll deny it. But we could use twice as much money next year, and this is what we can do with it to change the war.”

  One reason for this conspiracy was that Crandall’s bosses were determined to kill this program. In a meeting of fifty AID officers, one of the assistant directors had said that the Cross Border program was less important than the program operating in East Timor. And there was no AID program in East Timor.

  When the same official accompanied Crandall to tell Wilson that he was offering far too much money for the Cross Border program and that AID did not feel it could assimilate it, Wilson cut him off. “You’re here to listen, not to talk,” Wilson said. When the official made another appeal to reason, Charlie cruelly laid down the bottom line: “Every time you talk, I’m going to take $15 million from a place where you want to be spending it, and I’ll add that $15 million to the Afghan program.” By this time Wilson was coordinating his efforts with Senator Gordon Humphrey, who was even more adamant about upping the ante. And so the program, begun at
$6 million in 1985, leapt to $15 million in 1986; to $30 million in 1987; to $45 million in 1988; and finally topped out at $90 million in 1989. By then Crandall would be deep into war logistics, building highways and bridges in Afghanistan so that ordnance could be moved in days rather than months to supply Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. He was sending in huge amounts of wheat, much more than needed, knowing that the Afghans would sell it to generate operating funds. And by then he would have taken over the business of supplying vital Tennessee mules, officially to carry humanitarian cargo only. But no one bothered to tell the mujahideen at the border that they might be violating AID rules by adding a mortar or box of AK ammo to the load. All of this was coming at the same time as the massive weapons program, and in many respects, Crandall’s operation initially had a larger impact. The reason the Afghans had succeeded in holding out against the Soviets was not because they were winning battles. Basically, they lost every direct contest they engaged in. Nor was it because they inflicted such tremendous casualties or costs on the Red Army. It was more because they simply kept in the game in spite of fearful losses both to their warriors and to the vast majority of the population that stood with them. It’s estimated that by 1985, one of every three Afghans had been forced out of the country by the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands had died as a direct result of the invasion and occupation, and that year it appeared to many, even to Mike Vickers, that a certain war weariness was setting in.

  The flood of new weapons and the training programs made an enormous difference. But in a curious way, Crandall’s Cross Border program may have provided the greatest lift to the spirits of the warriors because, for the first time, the Afghans could say and believe that the United States was moving in behind them. Until this point, they did not really know where the CIA guns were coming from. The weapons were all of Soviet origin and were handed out by the Pakistanis. But now Crandall was handing out brand-new Toyota pickups, and the word was getting out about the giant cargo planes that landed in the night and disgorged incredible amounts of U.S. goods for the mujahideen. Crandall and his team were holding regular meetings with the mujahideen leaders, filling them in on the programs they were going to start and have the Afghans run.

  It was a stunning concept. Crandall was going to provide them with the wherewithal to roll back the scorched-earth policy. For five miserable years, the Afghans had retreated from their country, watching as their villages were destroyed and their families forced into exile. Now the pink-cheeked bureaucrat was talking about setting up clinics, training medics and doctors, creating schools, and teaching Afghans to read. Crandall wanted them to begin preparing for the time when they would be returning to Afghanistan to rebuild their country.

  It wasn’t long before Crandall was operating a kind of shadow CIA program. Wilson sometimes thought that Crandall might actually be a CIA man. His program supported the same fighters and shared the same ISI infrastructure for moving goods. In Islamabad and Peshawar, he became a pasha, no doubt the greatest smuggling lord that that ancient caravan route had ever known. He took gracefully to the role, surrounding himself in his embassy office and home with fine Afghan and Persian rugs, and mahogany furniture hand-tooled by Peshawar craftsmen in the old style.

  At first, Crandall says, he tried to shield his officers from the shadowy role that his programs were playing in the CIA’s campaign. But soon they came to revel in their role, describing themselves boisterously as “the other Agency.” And when Schnabel would arrive everyone would receive him as if he were the patron himself. AID occupied a suite on the embassy’s second floor, sealed off by a combination lock, just like the CIA station on the floor above. Crandall soon gave Schnabel the combination; cars and drivers were put at his disposal. The AID director would not assist the other Charlie’s smuggling efforts, but he would smile broadly and look the other way when the sniper sights and other contraband passed through the AID-maintained International Medical Corps (IMC) clinics.

  The most telling indicator of the Cross Border program’s relevance was the station chief’s invitation for Crandall to sit in on the CIA’s war sessions. Since Crandall’s men were the only Americans dealing directly with the mujahideen, they had become an invaluable new and reliable source of information. Crandall was now able to offer better tactical advice on how long it would take to get supplies to a given commander, or what tribes were likely to hijack a caravan, or who would take bribes from the Red Army, or which mujahideen were doing the most fighting.

  There was another factor, impossible to quantify but nevertheless critical. In the fall of 1985 and into the next year, the Kremlin had to wrestle with a difficult choice: whether to take the war to Pakistan or to get out altogether, as the United States had with Vietnam. Central to the Politburo’s thinking was the need to evaluate just how far the United States was prepared to go in Afghanistan.

  Clearly the discovery of the exotic and public non-CIA programs Wilson was funding must have made for a sickening moment in Moscow. Until late 1985, in accordance with the Presidential Findings, the U.S. had moved in stealth: no American components were even allowed to go into any of the mujahideen’s weapons. Indeed, few Afghans even knew where the weapons came from.

  Before this, the courageous French doctors from Médecins sans Frontières had been virtually the only ones to go into the war zone. But now into Peshawar burst a flood of American doctors, nurses, and health-care workers. All shapes and varieties of private American volunteer organizations were setting up shop in Peshawar, and all of them seemed to be settling in for the long haul.

  It was a community of free spirits that Crandall began to fund. He gave two former hippies a grant to operate a clinic on the actual border, under the name of Freedom Medicine, and sent his daughters out for weekend experiences in freedom fighting. Behind one walled compound in Peshawar he installed professors from the University of Nebraska, working under a Cross Border grant to develop plans for creating the new government of Afghanistan. Thanks to a program sponsored by Gordon Humphrey, at the edge of the city, behind a rather nondescript building, a school was being formed to teach mujahideen how to shoot war footage with small video cameras.

  A pretty young pediatrician from Manhattan came to Crandall for a grant to organize a harrowing trek into Nuristan to inoculate Afghan children against the great killers of the war—measles, mumps, and chicken pox. And at night, all these adventurers were gathering noisily at the newly formed American Club in Peshawar, drinking and acting as if they were operating in the days of the Berlin airlift. “Three years in a row, Charlie doubled my budget,” remembers Crandall. “He would always say, ‘What do you need? There are no limits.’”

  What happened in the months and years that followed, to the great displeasure of and opposition from AID’s leaders, was the explosion of this seemingly innocent little program into what Wilson provocatively called “the noblest smuggling operation in history.” But it also served as a Trojan horse of sorts for the CIA. Operating with its innocent cover, this AID program would soon merge directly into the CIA’s ongoing operation by providing the first direct American link to the Afghans themselves.

  Up until the Cross Border program Zia, Akhtar, and the Pakistan ISI had steadfastly forbidden the CIA from any direct contact with the mujahideen. But now Crandall’s people were everywhere on the Afghan frontier. They were operating with the mujahideen, smuggling contraband into the war zone. The whole policy of trying to conceal the American hand was suddenly moot. Inadvertently, the Cross Border program was clearing the way for the introduction of the ultimate Hind killer, the thirty-five-pound General Dynamics surface-to-air missile known as the Stinger.

  CHAPTER 26

  Charlie and Sweetums

  DR. DOOM DECLARES

  CHARLIE DEAD

  Control of U.S. foreign policy is supposed to rest with the president. As a practical matter, highly popular presidents, like Ronald Reagan, are almost always able to mount foreign initiatives without serious challenge. But in
1985 Tip O’Neill and his House Democrats seized control of two of the president’s most passionate causes. Everyone who read the papers that year knew about the first challenge—the House-led attack on the CIA’s Contra war in Nicaragua. In spite of Reagan’s appeal to a joint session of Congress, the Democrats cut off all funding for this CIA operation.

  Opposition to CIA secret warfare was seen as a core principle that the Democratic Party wanted to be identified with. That identity was so strong that the second Democratic-led initiative went all but unnoticed. At a time when the Contras could not get a dime from Congress, Charlie Wilson had managed to turn the CIA’s cautious bleeding campaign in Afghanistan into a half-billion-dollars-a-year operation that dwarfed any prior Agency effort. For all practical purposes Wilson had hijacked a U.S. foreign policy and was busy transforming it into the first direct winner-take-all contest with the Soviet Union. And the only reason he was able to take on this role was because of the license to operate given to him by Tip O’Neill.

  With Tip’s eyes voluntarily averted and with the Democratic majority’s acquiescence, Wilson was operating behind the lines like a bandit. He was now engaged in the kind of sensitive diplomacy that is technically illegal for anyone other than the White House to conduct: cutting arms deals with the defense minister of Egypt; commissioning Israel to design weapons for the CIA; negotiating all manner of extraordinarily controversial matters with the all-important U.S. ally General Zia. There was even a moment when Wilson would find himself outside of a hotel in London introducing two delegations of the highest-level representatives of Israel and Pakistan. It was Charlie’s very own peace initiative that would result in the creation of a back channel between the two ostensibly enemy nations. “I figured that that may have been one that no one else could have put together,” he reflected in later years.