by George Crile
None of these initiatives was ever cleared with State or the White House, and had Wilson chosen to seek prior approval it is almost certain he would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off. As a matter of policy, touring members of Congress always have an embassy representative present when they meet with high-level officials of the host government. To the great aggravation of the tough U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Dean Hinton, Zia always insisted on meeting privately with Wilson on every one of Charlie’s numerous visits to Islamabad. At these sessions the two men would talk as partners, often as virtual co-conspirators. To Zia a personal commitment of continued U.S. financial support to the Pakistan army made by Charles Wilson of Defense Appropriations was as good as gold and far more reliable than anything anyone else in the U.S. government might promise. The two men horse-traded and schemed, and only after they had completed their sensitive matters would Wilson invite the ambassador to sit in on the latter half of the discussion.
At the heart of everything Wilson was able to do, however, was the conspiratorial partnership he had entered into with Avrakotos. Gust was now coming by his office every week, sometimes visiting two or three times a week, and they would talk on the phone incessantly. Wilson, in his huge office in the Rayburn building with the twenty-five-foot ceilings and the great map of the world on his wall, would never look or sound awestruck when Gust arrived. But this was indeed Charlie’s greatest adventure, and he lived for those meetings with his CIA friend.
Gust, who would arrive alone, was now filling his patron in with the kind of operational details that even senators and congressmen on the Intelligence Committees are not permitted to know. In fact, because of the Agency’s rigid code of compartmentalization, not even division chiefs in other areas of the Agency knew what Charlie did. “There were times in those early years when I felt as if I were some character in a great spy novel,” recalls Wilson.
Indeed, by early 1985 Wilson was moving invisibly in so many areas at once that it would have been next to impossible for anyone to assess his overall impact. In a front-page story in the Washington Post Bob Woodward surfaced one of Wilson’s key roles as “the catalyst” responsible for funding the biggest covert operation since Vietnam.
Now, just as Gust was shaking his outcast identity and experiencing a rush of recognition from his CIA colleagues, Wilson began to notice a shift in the way Washington insiders were treating him. For the first time, he could sense genuine respect from the people he cared most about—the admirals from his Annapolis class, senior Pentagon officials, the inner Reagan crowd, and, most vividly, from his congressional colleagues, some of whom started to call Afghanistan “Charlie’s war.”
The mujahideen, who had always visited Wilson’s office when they came to Washington, were now arriving with a special fervor, acting more like they were attending a majlis with a Saudi prince. They would listen in amazement as this ebullient Texas cowboy pointed to the tiny model of an Oerlikon on his desk and boasted how hundreds of these million-dollars-a-unit anti-aircraft weapons would soon be inside Afghanistan shooting down the Hinds.
Had the CIA’s analytic division been asked to turn out a psychological portrait of the congressman at that time, as it did of Zia and other world leaders, it surely would have revealed a perplexing pattern of behavior: whenever things start to go well for Wilson, some Freudian impulse seems to prompt him to create havoc. And since everything was going so close to perfection in early 1985, Charlie went to work to spoil it all.
As usual, the incident was connected to a woman. One of the high points in Wilson’s social calendar each year was the black-tie White House reception for Kennedy Center board members. As always, Charlie went to extraordinary lengths to make a dashing appearance. And according to his well-established ritual, that meant he needed a beauty queen on his arm. This year he chose a former Miss U.S.A., Judi Anderson. But no sooner had he introduced his date to the president and first lady than he found himself thunderstruck by a striking young woman on the arm of a colleague from the Ethics Committee, Don Bailey. This was the woman Charlie would soon be introducing to Zia, Gust, and CIA station chiefs all over the world as “Sweetums.”
“Hi, I’m Judi Anderson,” Charlie heard his date say.
“That rings a bell,” said the woman who was destined to become Charlie’s constant companion on all his Afghan travels for the next four years.
“It should,” replied Wilson’s date. “I was Miss U.S.A.”
“Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” replied Sweetums in one of those thinly disguised notes of triumph, “I was in the Miss World pageant.”
Following the unwritten rules of the House calling for honor among thieves, the next day Wilson approached his Ethics Committee friend to ask if the beauty from the White House reception, Annelise Ilschenko, was spoken for. Bailey good-naturedly gave his blessing, but then Charlie discovered that Annelise was ill disposed to be seen in public with him.
“He had a sleazy reputation,” recalls Ilschenko. “He was known as a womanizer, and I didn’t want it. The rumor was that when he went on the floor Charlie would look up at the boxes for pretty blondes and then have the pages go up and say, Charlie Wilson wants to meet you.”
Ilschenko recalls him falling down the stairs drunk at the River Club one night and lushing about “with his belly dancer” on another. “He was just not to be taken seriously,” she says. But in spite of this she was drawn to him, and she did accept occasional dinner and dancing invitations, finally agreeing to accompany him for a weekend he promised she would never forget. The U.S. Navy had agreed to host the senior member of Defense Appropriations and his personal delegation aboard the 4,300-man aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Saratoga. Charlie, who had also invited three of his Texas drinking pals, thoughtfully brought along his twenty-seven-year-old defense aide, Molly Hamilton, “so that Annelise would not feel so isolated being the only lady on board.”
Of all the Angels, Hamilton was the one who turned Gust’s knees to jelly. She didn’t know anything about defense, but Charlie didn’t rely on staffers to do his thinking for him and he loved to watch the reaction on his guests’ faces when he would ask his defense aide to sit in on conferences. As he saw it, a big part of the job was entertaining the defense lobbyists who contributed mightily to his campaigns. Hamilton, however, was not exactly a good-time girl, and she was frankly appalled on this weekend junket by what she perceived to be a clear abuse of congressional power.
Charlie’s entourage was jetted onto the carrier’s deck, where the great hooks brought the U.S. Navy jets to a screeching halt. That night, the captain, in dress uniform, had a marvelous dinner on the deck with the sounds and sights of the U.S. empire playing in the background. To Hamilton’s discomfort—she was well aware of the strict prohibition against alcohol aboard a U.S. Navy vessel—Charlie had somehow managed to bring a healthy supply of liquor along. He hadn’t served as a gunnery officer sneaking whiskey aboard in empty shell casings for nothing. Hamilton’s unhappy memories of the evening are of a frightening sea of seventeen-foot waves, people drinking, and everyone going to excessive lengths to accommodate the congressman and his date.
It was meant to be one of those “old boy” weekends where a bit of good, clean fun can be carried out without anyone tattling. But nothing Charlie does ever remains a secret for long, and to Annelise’s horror, Jack Anderson’s column, carried in the Washington Post and some four hundred newspapers across the country, spelled out in humiliating detail how the congressman had taken a beauty queen for a weekend boondoggle at the taxpayers’ expense.
The story, which made page one of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, didn’t sit well with Ilschenko’s parents. Charlie personally apologized to them, then magnanimously offered to pay the navy $650 for Annelise’s expenses. In response to reporters, he explained that he had only brought Ilschenko along so that Hamilton, his staffer, wouldn’t feel so “isolated being the only lady on board.” Finally, after tending to this damage control, he begg
ed Annelise for another chance, promising that next time he would take her on the trip of her life and he would pay the bill.
The experience Charlie offered his new true love was the product of much thought and a kind of boldness about junketing that only a compulsive risk taker like Wilson could propose. The trip began in Marrakech, where he had the Pentagon reserve the Churchill Suite at the exotic La Mamounia hotel. Since Charlie was officially on a “fact-finding trip” for Defense Appropriations, the Pentagon sent along a liaison officer to take care of logistics.
There had to be a technical reason for being in Morocco, so Charlie paid a visit to his friends in the Royal Moroccan Army to watch them blast guns in the desert. “You see, I was evaluating anti-Communist activities because I was getting my way paid. But then, of course, I had to find time to lie out in the swimming pool with Sweetums and take her to the bazaar.” It was even better for Sweetums in Venice, where Charlie had arranged a magical dinner and gondola ride on the Grand Canal. This leg of the journey was more difficult for Wilson to justify, but he managed to. “Fortunately,” he explains, “the air force base in Naples felt a great urgency to give me a briefing in Venice and sent two generals, as I recall.”
And then the pièce de résistance: the overnight trip to Paris on the fabled Orient Express. Wilson had the good sense not to bill the U.S. government for this exotic leg of the trip. But the Pentagon added a pleasant flourish by sending along an escort officer to make sure everything was perfect during their travels. It was June 1, 1985, Charlie’s birthday, and the the young officer came dressed in formal uniform for the champagne dinner, with Charlie in black tie and Sweetums in the stunning dress he had bought her for the occasion.
This spectacular Morocco-to-Paris junket for Sweetums was clearly stretching the rules of reasonable conduct, even for a senior member of Defense Appropriations. But in fairness to the congressman, he was only doing what he had been taught to believe was standard operating practice. As with most things, one’s first experience is seminal, and few newcomers have been offered such a blinding insight into the way things work in Congress as when Charlie Wilson first joined the Foreign Affairs Committee in 1974 and was invited by one of the House’s senior committee chairmen, Olin “Tiger” Teague, to attend the Paris air show. “Well, Tiger, I don’t have the money,” explained the embarrassed freshman. Teague laughed, and Wilson remembers his astonishment at discovering that the U.S. government pays for first-class plane tickets and first-class hotels, provides funds for meals, and supplies limousines, foreign service officers as guides, and, of course, the best seats at the air show. All of this is free, with the objective of providing the legislators with a fact-finding experience that will make them wiser when they come back after the break to design legislation.
What left the deepest impression on the novice congressman, however, was the way the senior foreign service officers at the embassy threw themselves into helping the committee members’ wives find the best shopping deals in Paris. After Charlie had spent two weeks living better than he had ever imagined possible, the air force plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base to reveal a demonstration of respect for the power and prestige of the House that would linger with Wilson for the rest of his days in Congress. Two lines of station wagons were lined up on the tarmac, each one with the name of a member of the delegation prominently displayed on the windshield. No sooner had the plane pulled to a stop than a collection of uniformed men quickly moved into the cargo hold and placed the fruits of the junket–shopping spree in the cars. Without so much as a thought about customs, the uniformed officers swept the chairman and his booty—two station wagons filled with antiques—off the air force base and into the District.
That was when Charlie discovered how much fun being in Congress could be if you’re on the right committee and if you know what to ask for. Over the years, Charlie became one of the all-time master craftsmen at bending the business of his Appropriations subcommittees to the fancies of his private life. That was critically important for Charlie because he had absolutely no money to spend. In fact, in the spring of 1985, the local Texas papers revealed that he had the distinction of being the poorest member of the Texas delegation, with a negative net worth estimated as high as a million dollars of debt. For Charlie, the joy of being a congressman was that on a junket money was not necessary. And as the Paris-bound Orient Express made its elegant way through the night on Charlie’s fifty-second birthday, the magic was working its spell on Sweetums. She was fast forgetting the humiliation of the U.S.S. Saratoga and finding it quite pleasing to be with this charming, handsome man who could make her feel like she was once again walking onstage at the Miss World pageant.
For Wilson, however, this junket was fast turning into an agonizing and increasingly frightening experience. By the time he toasted Sweetums at his birthday dinner, he had begun to think he might be in serious physical trouble. There had been an incident in Morocco when he couldn’t swim across the La Mamounia pool. He had assumed the chest pains were caused by dysentery, probably from the local cucumbers he had eaten with the Royal Moroccan Army. On the train in his tuxedo, in between laughing and telling charming stories, he convinced himself that the lingering hollow feeling and the cold sweat was just the tail end of the intestinal problem.
In Paris, Charlie was just one of a slew of senators and congressmen who make the annual pilgrimage to the air show. But since he was a senior member of Defense Appropriations, he knew that Sweetums would be pampered and spoiled by every defense contractor worth his salt. And sure enough, the lobbyists had messages piled up at the hotel—invitations to dinners, cocktail parties, the theater.
Paris was supposed to be the high point of the trip, but it was Sweetums’s fate to have nothing but disasters accompany her on all of her travels with Charlie. Coming back from dinner that first night, Wilson took three steps out of the restaurant and couldn’t continue. “I took him up to the room,” she remembers. “He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t lie down. Later we found out he was literally drowning with blood in his lungs.”
A lifetime of drink had finally caught up with Charlie Wilson. His heart was literally soaked in alcohol and barely functioning, a condition not uncommon to alcoholics. When he got to the American hospital where Rock Hudson had just died, his blood pressure was so low that it took the nurses thirty-two tries to get an IV into his veins. In critical condition he was evacuated to the U.S. military hospital at Rhine Main, Germany, for preliminary treatment.
The doctors there put him on blood thinners and drugs to force his devastated heart to continue beating. In his fog, after discovering that the hospital had been built by Hermann Göring for the Luftwaffe pilots, his imagination offered him an explanation as to why he was there: “I imagined myself as a wounded pilot from the other side who had just made it back with my Messerschmitt shot to shreds.”
Ten days into this fog, as if he were in fact a great war hero, he woke up to find the general in charge of the military hospital at his bedside saying there was a call from the White House. The president needed him in Washington. Would he fly home immediately to cast a vote for Ronald Reagan to save the Contras?
For an anti-Communist from East Texas, this was a command performance. A giant air force plane was flown into Rhine Main with a medical team on board to carry the congressman across the Atlantic to rescue the Nicaraguan “freedom fighters.” “It made me feel like a big shot of immense proportions,” he remembers.
It was a critical moment for the Contra war, a congressional face-off where two or three votes would make the difference. When two of Wilson’s liberal colleagues, Tom Downey and Bob Mrazek, spotted him being wheeled onto the floor of the House in his navy pajamas and sustained by an IV, they ran over and threatened to unplug his life-support system if he didn’t vote right.
Charlie felt heroic enough to bark them down with his typical banter. “They had to fly my skinny ass all the way from Germany to keep you pinkos from wiping out freedom in
Central America,” he said. It was hard for anyone to be upset with Charlie no matter what he did. Not even Tip O’Neill would ask this famous war hawk to turn down a direct appeal from the president.
There was little joy back in the hospital, where the naval doctor whom Charlie would come to call “Dr. Doom” presented him with what amounted to a death notice. The tests had indicated that the congressman’s alcohol-soaked heart was functioning at only 16 percent. That was the amount of blood that comes out when the heart beats (a normal person has a 50 percent rate). The doctor told Wilson, his sister, and Charlie Schnabel that he didn’t think Wilson was going to get any better. The best he could hope for, Dr. Doom suggested, was eighteen months.
“I wanted him to tell me I would have to give up corn on the cob or I’d have to take an extra pill,” recalls Charlie, who was reacting like a typical alcoholic. He simply couldn’t accept some doctor telling him that he could never have another drink and that he was going to die in eighteen months, whether he had a drink or not. Restlessly, Wilson insisted on a second opinion—and then many other second opinions—but every new specialist only confirmed Dr. Doom’s terrible diagnosis.
With some sixth sense that destiny had not yet called his number, Wilson, living on oxygen and unable to walk up even a few steps, announced to his physician, “Dr. Doom, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He booked a flight to Houston to consult an eminent cardiologist, Dick Cashion. As he saw it, he was appealing Doom’s unjust verdict. If all else failed, Charlie thought, at least Cashion might arrange for a transplant. That way he’d be able to maintain his boozing lifestyle.