by George Crile
The rest—getting the trusty staffers on the subcommittee to conceal the appropriation in a line item that no one would ever find—was hardly a challenge. Charlie Wilson was now presiding over another congressional first: his very own invisible $10-million-a-year exotic-weapons program. There were days in his office when he felt as if he were playing the role of M in a James Bond novel, summoning the government’s most ingenious inventors to decide what weapons and devices to commission for his freedom fighters.
Wilson had originally intended to fund this program through the CIA so that Gust could run it, but Avrakotos wanted no part of it. It was a year and a half since Charlie had come up with the money to buy the Swiss Oerlikons, and not so much as one had been given to the mujahideen. In frustration Wilson had begun lobbying the Agency to give the Israelis a contract for the Charlie Horse, the weapon Charlie had commissioned Zvi’s engineers to design for the mujahideen.
But bringing the Israelis into the CIA’s Muslim jihad was not what Avrakatos considered a reasonable option. There were many reasons why he was adamantly opposed to dealing with Israel. To begin with, it would risk alienating the Saudis, who were putting up half the money for the program. Beyond that, why risk alienating the legions of Muslim hotheads around the world who would draw the most extreme conclusions if it became known that the CIA was sneaking Jewish weapons into the jihad?
Avrakotos had an even greater concern, which he wasn’t at liberty to share with Wilson. It centered on his suspicions about the role Israel was playing with Oliver North and the White House in their ill-fated arms-for-hostages negotiations with Iran. From the time he’d first learned about North’s operation he had smelled a disaster in the making. The more he learned, the more he came to believe that the Israelis were walking a naive and inexperienced Oliver North and, with him, the United States into a trap. Repeatedly he would try to keep the Agency from being sucked into what was to become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. As it turned out, he didn’t have the power to do that, but he was determined not to permit the Israelis to become identified with any direct CIA commission connected to Afghanistan.
So instead of the CIA taking on the Weapons Upgrade Program, it went to the Pentagon. But, in fact, Charlie Wilson himself ended up overseeing much of this eccentric program out of his own congressional office, and it turned out to be a wild and remarkable success story. “There were all these little scientists in the Pentagon—bureaucratic misfits who just needed to be freed,” Wilson recalled years later. “We gave them a little money and made them immune to procurement laws. They’re mad-scientist types. They love to tinker with things that blow up but hate to fill out forms. Hate to follow the chain of command. Hate to wait.”
Typical of the characters who gravitated to this program were Chuck Barnard and his brother. They had grown up working in their father’s auto garage, and as far as they were concerned the Pentagon didn’t just buy $600 toilet seats; it made $20 million tanks that couldn’t survive in a face-off with one of their $1 million stripped-down Volkswagens armed with a range of their favorite high-tech weaponry. In their view, almost everything the Pentagon did to develop and buy weapons was wasteful, ineffective, and designed to fight some previous war.
For the first time, thanks to Wilson, these tinkerers were free to innovate at will and more or less without restraint. Within weeks, they began developing an astonishing collection of weapons. The Spanish mortar, for example, was designed to make it possible for the mujahideen to communicate directly with American navigation satellites to deliver repeated rounds within inches of their designated targets. Global-positioning technology is well known today, but back in 1985 it struck Wilson as the most astonishing capability. Just the thought of Afghan tribesmen who had never seen a flush toilet signaling an American satellite to fire precision rounds at a Red Army stronghold was almost too much to believe. The weapon’s name was purposefully misleading, chosen to conceal the fact that major portions of this “Spanish mortar” were being built by the Israelis.
Milt Bearden, the station chief who would dominate the war’s later years, actually came to rely on the steady stream of crazy new weapons that kept coming on-line from this offbeat program. His strategy called for introducing a new weapon into the battle every three months or so, in order to bluff the Red Army into thinking their enemy was better armed and supported than it was. The Spanish mortar, for example, with its satellite-guided charge, was rarely deployed and may only have succeeded because the Pakistani ISI advisers were along to direct the fire. But the Soviets didn’t know that. When the weapon was first used it wiped out an entire Spetsnaz outpost with a volley of perfect strikes. And as soon as Bearden learned from the CIA’s intercepts that the commander of the 40th Army had helicoptered to the scene, he knew that from that day on, the Soviets would have to factor in the possibility that the mujahideen had acquired some deadly targeting capability. For that reason alone, the weapon was a success even if never fired again.
Bearden became so intoxicated with this kind of psychological warfare that he later developed plans to have a group of mujahideen shoot dead Russian soldiers with crossbows. To him, the vision of men who might kill you with a bow and arrow one day or with a satellite-guided mortar the next would be unnerving to any army.
Neither Vaughn Forest nor Charlie Schnabel were officially part of the program, just as Wilson’s name never appeared on any organizational chart. But both men became so intimately involved with the tinkerers and the decisions about which weapons to develop that they began to hold their own informal meetings, which Wilson often attended and which Schnabel nicknamed “the Sewing Circle.” Wilson reveled in the decidedly unbureaucratic spirit among these happy warriors as they talked about the next killing machine they planned to smuggle to the mujahideen: “I’d like to see the look on Ivan’s face when he gets this one up his ass,” they would say, laughing.
While Charlie and the tinkerers were starting to tap into the outer realms of twentieth-century technology, their freedom fighters were often stuck in another age. In a meeting with the elderly fundamentalist mujahideen leader Yunis Khalis, Wilson managed to remain respectful when the Muslim commander said he had just seen a movie with soldiers wearing thick Spanish armor. The red-bearded Afghan explained that the Russians had placed millions of mines throughout his country and his men were taking fearful losses. Could the congressman arrange to send several thousands suits of armor so his men could navigate safely through the minefields?
No, Wilson explained, because he had even better devices in the works. Sometimes Charlie could hardly believe what the tinkerers were coming up with for these medieval warriors. He could picture a bearded mujahideen on a mountaintop looking like a child flying a large toy airplane. But the tinkerers had built this model airplane with a video camera mounted on its wing so that an Afghan could guide this flying bomb right through the window of a Soviet compound from miles away. The concept was incredibly simple. It drew on the marvel of fiber optics, which allows signals to be passed in two directions simultaneously. In this case it meant that an Afghan operating the drone could see the camera’s images in a monitor and use a joystick to direct the explosive load wherever he might want to send it. In deference to Wilson’s commanding influence, the tinkerers would call this weapon, powered by a chain-saw motor, “the Texas Chainsaw.”
The Weapons Upgrade Program, dominated by its band of free thinkers, was dramatic in more ways than one. The tinkerers turned out to be wildly productive, in large part because they weren’t restrained by any of the normal bureaucratic controls. But the downside of this freedom became painfully evident early on when a freelance tinkerer on his way to Charlie’s office to demonstrate a weapon he had designed blew up a Texaco gas station not far from the Capitol.
For a moment it looked as though the incident might bring down the entire operation. The man responsible was one of Vaughn Forest’s protégés, Colonel Bill Dilger, a retired air force pilot with two hundred missions over Vie
tnam. Dilger had flown an A-10 air-to-ground-support plane after Vietnam, and he had come up with an ingenious scheme to turn the plane’s GAU-8 Gatling gun (with its depleted uranium ammunition) into a portable single-shot, long-range tank destroyer that the mujahideen could carry with them on the ground. He was just one of the slew of enthusiasts who were offering ideas for doing in the Russians, and thanks to a call from Wilson, Dilger had been given a small development grant from the upgrade program.
As chance would have it, Dilger had met Charlie Schnabel and Vaughn Forest for lunch to rehearse the presentation he planned to give Wilson later that day. After several drinks the exuberant inventor had insisted on showing off his wondrous device, which was in the back of his Dodge pickup. He boasted about its lethal characteristics: its ability to fire from a mile away and penetrate a four-foot-thick concrete Russian fort or burst right through the armor of a tank. For some reason he had loaded the huge gun with live ammunition, and it appears that it inadvertently fell when he left it propped up on a pedestal in the back of his truck at a gas station.
Schnabel happened to be walking by that afternoon with a load of laundry when he heard the detonation. Dilger’s demonstration had begun prematurely. The live shell had discharged and gone straight through a truck, two gas pumps, and into another car before the entire station went up in flames. Dilger, panicking, leapt into his pickup and fled the scene. The weapons manual, however, which he had just had translated into Pashtun, spilled from the back of the Dodge as he pulled away. Within minutes the local news channels were reporting frightening alerts: terrorists had just blown up a gas station at the edge of the nation’s capital and terrorist literature had been found in the wreckage.
By the time Dilger came to his senses and returned to the gas station, the authorities were quite convinced that he was, in fact, a terrorist. That evening Wilson and Schnabel would watch this Weapons Upgrade grantee on the local news programs shielding his face as he left the Arlington courthouse.
A sensitive and complicated set of negotiations followed. Dilger was forced to sell his house to cover his legal bills. Although he had been utterly irresponsible, the government had no choice but to assume responsibility for the damage, since Weapons Upgrade money had gone into developing the gun. The Pentagon paid off the two wounded bystanders. Schnabel’s car was shrapneled, but he claimed nothing. Needless to say, the CIA chose not to buy the weapon; miraculously, Wilson and the program managed to escape the scandal. Such minor setbacks aside, the program’s return on the dollar was so high that it continues to this day, a testimony to how effective government can be without government rules and regulations.*
Some of the program’s weapons, like the Texas Chainsaw, were never used in Afghanistan. Prototypes were put through preliminary testing in Pakistan, and there were serious plans to kamikaze one into a Soviet Il-76, the world’s largest plane, when it landed at Bagram Air Base loaded with Scud missiles near the end of the Soviet occupation. But ultimately the seventh floor at Langley worried that if such a weapon was deployed, terrorists worldwide would discover how easy it is to build such delivery systems and turn them against the West.
Much later, a version of the Chainsaw did make an appearance in the Gulf War. And in that same campaign the Charlie Horse 2, a multibarrel rocket that hurls so much ordnance of such diverse and devastating nature that it can literally wipe out everything moving along a huge perimeter, was also deployed. “My little babies were at play all over the Gulf,” Charlie would say, beaming with paternal pride, when he discovered how effective his tiny $10-million-a-year research-and-development program had become.
Back in the fall of 1985, Wilson listened to another of Vaughn Forest’s grandiose schemes, and like a genie granting wishes, he turned to the Appropriations well to make this one come true as well. The knight of Malta explained that on his visits to the refugee camps and on treks inside the war zone he had seen that the mujahideen and their families were in desperate need of almost everything—boots, tents, sleeping blankets, medicine, canteens, winter coats, cooking utensils. You name it, they needed it, and the irony was that the U.S. military had vast stores of these very goods that they had long ago designated surplus and that were wasting away in warehouses.
Forest had looked into the law and discovered that the Pentagon could give away as much of this surplus as it liked just so long as the gift was for “humanitarian assistance.” The next challenge was finding a way to transport the goods to Afghanistan, and that’s where Forest came up with a truly innovative proposition. Each month, he told Wilson, U.S. Air Force reserve pilots spent hours flying huge, empty C-5A transports in continental-length circles to maintain their flight proficiency. Why not have them fill the C-5s with surplus and task the reserve pilots and navigators to put in their time flying “humanitarian-aid shipments” to Pakistan? It wouldn’t cost the U.S. government much of anything.
This time Wilson called on his Foreign Operations subcommittee to insert an extra $10 million into the State Department’s open budget to fund the program. Forest had appealed to Charlie to name the flights after his then little-known boss, Congressman Bill McCollum. (Such gestures are the way passionate aides like Vaughn Forest manage to win a free hand to operate in their congressman’s name.)
Officially, the McCollum flights were part of an open U.S. humanitarian mission. But there was nothing remotely open about the way they operated. In fact, the Pakistanis originally balked at letting the flights in at all. Wilson used his influence with Zia and won clearance, but only with very severe restrictions. The C-5s were required to land in the middle of the night and be gone before sunrise.
For the uninitiated, the stealthlike arrival of a McCollum flight was an eerie and impressive experience, from the moment a giant C-5A cargo plane started circling the military airfield in Islamabad, waiting for darkness to fall. Landing without lights, the plane became a growing shadow as it approached the group of Pakistanis and Americans clustered by the runway. Then light suddenly poured out as the back of the plane began to open, revealing a hold half the length of a football field able to transport over a quarter million pounds of supplies. It was a scene out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The behemoth’s hydraulic lifts began to hiss, and miraculously the beast knelt down, as a colossal ramp was lowered to the runway, where young American airmen supervised the unloading of what appeared to be a city’s worth of sleeping bags, boots, field hospitals, medicines, uniforms, binoculars, and body bags. The entire show, from touchdown to takeoff, was run by the ISI.
It was never easy for the U.S. embassy to figure out exactly which of these American night visitors fell into the McCollum category and which might be carrying a load of SA-7s for the CIA. On more than one occasion the wrong U.S. agency would be on hand to greet and unload the plane.
By the war’s end, the quantity and variety of surplus goods flown into Pakistan was breathtaking—literally tens of thousands of tons. But almost as distinctive was the way Schnabel managed to commandeer the McCollum flights as his private airline. He went to Pakistan twelve times, perhaps more than any other Washington official. Without it, he never would have become a force in his own right. A McCollum flight took two full days, with a stop in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. And each time this other Charlie took the trip, his stature with the CIA station, the ISI, the U.S. embassy, and the Afghan commanders grew.
Schnabel not only used the McCollum program to smuggle sniper sights and walkie-talkies to Pakistan; coming back he would bring Afghan rugs and fur coats for the Angels, and a constant flow of captured Red Army memorabilia for the boss and his friends. He remembers one flight when he smuggled three Kalashnikovs, two thousand rounds of ammunition, three rifle grenades, and a Tokarev pistol, all rolled up in two carpets.
Schnabel never mounted a McCollum flight without packing a surprise. One C-5 carried thousands of fruit trees, which were then moved down the Grand Trunk Highway in trucks to the North-West Frontier, to be smuggled over the border to start
reforesting the scorched earth of the war zone. On another trip he brought along two of the weapons upgraders—demolition experts who trained navy SEALs in their dark arts. To a certain kind of American, there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire, and these two were so eager to get their hands dirty helping the mujahideen kill Russians that they spent their two-week vacation with Schnabel teaching his friends how to make the most deadly pipe bombs and booby traps.
Schnabel managed to turn all of this crusading into enormous fun. The flights would take him to the Karakoram Highway, the old Silk Route he’d traveled when hunting for the great curve-horned, nearly extinct Marco Polo sheep. He also arranged to have one of his Texas patrons donate sixty black buck to replenish the dwindling herd of the same breed that the war was wiping out; somehow Schnabel managed to convince the McCollum flight authorities that such cargo fit into the broad category of humanitarian assistance.
By this time he had taken over Wilson’s liaison chores with the Afghan lobby in Washington, in particular with the Committee for a Free Afghanistan and its much-loved director, Mary Spencer, who was constantly asking Wilson to help raise money to finance surgery for badly wounded Afghan fighters. Schnabel ended up spending an inordinate amount of time fund-raising to buy tickets to fly the fighters to the United States for treatment. Soaring homeward on a McCollum flight late one night, the resourceful politico was struck by how empty the huge C-5A was. It came to him all at once: if he could put the wounded mujahideen on these cavernous planes, he wouldn’t have to raise any more money. Wilson was so intrigued with the idea that when he next visited Pakistan he told a group of war-weary commanders that he would soon bring a planeload of wounded freedom fighters back to the States for specialized treatment.