Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  This was the beginning of a sometimes touching, sometimes ludicrous chapter in the war, in which Charlie Wilson caused America to open its arms to these exotic freedom fighters. At first, it all seemed quite wonderful. Joanne Herring came out of political retirement to join Charlie in welcoming the first load of wounded heroes to arrive in Houston. It was a dramatic event: wounded mujahideen in wheelchairs with their freedom hats, local Afghans cheering and noisily stamping on a Soviet flag as cameras recorded it all for the six o’clock news. And everywhere these Afghan martyrs were sent for medical care in those days, sympathetic stories about their cause would follow.

  But then the problems began. For one thing, these puritanical mountain men with their fundamentalist Islamic ways, which required that proper Afghan women cover themselves from head to foot, weren’t prepared for the virtual nudity of the American nurses. The mujahideen were, however, just men, so one can imagine their reaction upon seeing young blond women with much of their legs and arms and even portions of their necks and upper chests stark naked—the Devil’s own temptresses reaching down to touch them. This nightmarish diplomatic problem fell upon its author, Schnabel, to deal with. In most instances he was able to smooth things over with the agitated nurses by explaining the cultural divide. But he had no idea what to say to the hospital boards once tribal war broke out in the hospital ward.

  The problem began with the arrival of a rather fanatical fundamentalist from Yunis Khalis’s faction, the same leader who had asked Wilson for the suits of Spanish armor. The Afghan was a large man by the name of Afridi who had a sensitive medical problem. His wife couldn’t have children, and since he was a major commander and something of a mullah in his own right, he’d managed to get a McCollum flight for the two of them, to revitalize her reproductive system.

  After a bit of investigation Schnabel discovered that the real problem was not with Afridi’s wife. According to Schnabel, “Afridi didn’t have any bullets in his gun, and he went through terrible psychological anguish.” Apparently he compensated by becoming aggressive toward rival tribesmen, at one point precipitating a fight that terrified the nurses. The Afghans, being Afghans, had broken up into fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist camps, as well as dividing along tribal lines, and Schnabel received a frantic call in Washington warning of an impending slaughter.

  By the time he arrived, on the day’s last flight into Dallas, they were all brandishing knives. “I hear you want to kill each other,” he said. “I want you to know that you’re all going back on the next plane if you don’t straighten out. Now give me your knives.” No one moved. The veteran political fixer then tried appealing to the common cause. “Allah loves you both,” he urged, getting between them. “Allah loves you, just like Allah loves you. That ought to make you feel good. He loves all of you.”

  It was a heartfelt effort on Schnabel’s behalf, but the Afghans only glared more menacingly at one another. “They argued, got mad, thrust their forefingers out at each other,” recalls Schnabel, “but after this the arguments suddenly stopped and they hugged. We all hugged. You know, right side, left side, and right side again. We hugged so much that my face got scratched up by all those beards.”

  Schnabel returned to Washington feeling a bit like a hero, quite convinced that he had pulled off a masterly reconciliation. But a few days later came another frantic late-night call from the hospital. They were at it again, and this time it was really serious.

  It just wouldn’t do to have Charlie’s boys cutting one another’s throats in a distinguished Texas hospital. Clearly Wilson’s reputation was on the line. In fact, the whole program for the Afghan wounded was on the line. And, to a certain extent, Schnabel felt the entire war effort could be placed in jeopardy. A lesser spirit might have given up on these incorrigible tribalists, but Schnabel hadn’t served as secretary of state of the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for nothing, and as he flew west he came up with a plan.

  The fundamentalists among the Afghans had been unhappy about their food. They couldn’t eat the hospital fare because their religion demanded that animals be sanctified before slaughter. Schnabel seized on this as an opportunity to flatter and co-opt the leading troublemaker, Afridi, by turning him into the party’s mullah. And so now Wilson’s ever-resourceful aide found himself and the burly fundamentalist looking over a sea of chickens in the local processing plant. Afridi, with appropriate solemnity, was uttering the “Allahu Akbar” chant. That night, the mullah seemed at peace with himself over the chicken dinner.

  But Afridi’s troubles were deep-seated, and in no time he was back stirring the pot, telling the mujahideen that they were all entitled to two calls home per week and that his personal enemy in the next ward, Rashid, was being allowed to make calls when they were not. With that the knives came out again. Schnabel, in desperation, called Afghan’s military commander in Peshawar, who warned Afridi that he was compromising the jihad. But nothing could calm this agitated Muslim, and when the McCollum flight returned him to his tribe, according to Schnabel, “they hung him by his neck with a rope and took him out of his misery.”

  The wounded program nevertheless proved to be stunningly effective at building goodwill in America. There were other mishaps, but the more typical experience for the hospitals and communities that took in the Afghans was the discovery of an incredibly brave and impressive people. Up until that time the press had not paid much attention to the Afghan war, but now local news stories about the noble Afghans were appearing all over the country wherever mujahideen were being placed for treatment.

  The wounded program was transforming Wilson’s entire office as well. Charlie had previously kept his Afghan work all to himself, not even sharing basic details. With Schnabel enlisting everyone in the effort, however, it was as if Charlie’s district lines had suddenly expanded to take in a large slice of South Asia as well. Wilson’s press secretary, Elaine Lang, was planting stories about the wounded program everywhere. His aides—arguably the most effective on the Hill, with a record of getting more satisfaction from the federal government on behalf of Charlie’s constituents than any other congressional office—were widening their focus to taking care of Afghanistan’s wounded, as well.

  All of the programs that Wilson was expanding or helping launch were soon taking on lives of their own. More important, they were beginning to fit into one another as if by design, even though there had been no grand architect, other than the now sober and single-minded congressman. His office, meanwhile, was coming to resemble a zany Hollywood stage set as an unlikely procession of exotic figures began appearing with greater and greater frequency: bearded mujahideen commanders, Pakistani generals, Mossad agents from Israel, Saudi princes, Egyptian arms merchants and field marshals, CIA station chiefs, division chiefs, intelligence analysts, Russian experts, demolition experts, Pentagon weapons designers. The talk was always about war—about killing Russians in a campaign thousands of miles away, a conflict that few in America seem to know or care about. And yet had any of this congressman’s liberal colleagues known what kind of plots and vicious killing devices were being dreamed up and ordered into production during these astonishing sessions, they surely would have been horrified.

  The incongruity of it all struck each and every one of the visitors as they moved past the bank of tall and dramatic young Texan women in the reception area and were greeted by the beaming cowboy congressman, who acted as if he alone spoke for America when it came to Afghanistan. Down the hall and throughout the capital, his Democratic colleagues were noisily at war with the CIA—launching investigations, trying to shut down its secret wars in Central America. But in Room 2265 of the Rayburn Building, Wilson made it seem as if America and the Democratic House and just about everyone was completely behind this effort to take on the Russians, and he calmly commited Congress to producing sums of money that no president or CIA director would ever have imagined requesting.

  Needless to say, it was unusual to find a Capitol Hill office dedicated almos
t exclusively to a CIA campaign to kill Russians in Afghanistan. And curiously, as the war unfolded, the congressman’s growing role became more and more obvious, as huge heroic photographs of mujahideen commanders began going up on the wall. Soon there would be a giant picture of the congressman himself inside Afghanistan, sitting astride a white horse surrounded by fierce-looking freedom fighters and appearing as striking as a Hollywood movie star. The strange part about the goings-on here was that almost no one ever took these clues to his real role seriously. Almost everyone assumed that this Texas congressman was just playing out some little boy’s fantasy. As Avrakotos would always marvel, it was just about as good a cover as he had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 28

  Muj on the Move

  THE SILVER BULLET

  From the Los Angeles airport, you get to the Stinger factory by heading east on the Santa Monica Freeway. It’s about an hour’s ride east toward the mountains before you’re into the other southern California, a small-town world of Taco Bells, car washes, and Sizzlers. And then just beyond the Humane Society shelter in Rancho Cucamonga, the General Dynamics plant suddenly springs out of nowhere.

  Building 600 is about as anonymous a structure as can be found anywhere in America. But in the fall of 1985, the ladies of Rancho Cucamonga were busy inside it, assembling the silver bullet that would soon wreak havoc on the Red Army in Afghanistan. Had any of the holy warriors seen this facility in 1985, they would have been deeply confused, for Building 600 is truly an infidel’s factory.

  To begin with, almost all of the workers were women—and California women at that. Most were in their twenties or thirties, many were blond, and more than a few favored tight jeans. They tended to be young mothers from two-income families or single mothers raising kids of their own.

  Their work—connecting miniature wires, looking through microscopes and large magnifiers to solder circuits—required a careful hand and patience. Starting pay was $4.80 an hour and went as high as $11 for those with seniority. The ladies normally pulled eight-hour shifts, but in 1985 the Stinger was considered so vital to the defense of the United States that work in Building 600 continued around the clock.

  Some areas of the plant were sealed off and temperature-controlled. It was like a hospital operating room; the women and few men dressed in white gowns and plastic caps. They worked with tiny gyroscopes and miniature motors; some of the coils they handled had only one five-thousandth of an inch clearance between parts. The whole exercise was exceedingly delicate, but miraculously what emerged at the end was a thirty-five-pound dark green tube that could be dropped on the ground, frozen, thrown in a lake, or kept around for ten years.

  Even after all that abuse, the electrical engineers and rocket scientists from Building 600 insisted, their Stingers would be ready for action. They were designed for American soldiers to use, but as it turns out, they were sufficiently user-friendly to make it possible for a simple man with no technical knowledge to put the dull tube on his shoulder, get a MiG or helicopter in his sights, pull the trigger, and bring down a $20 million jet fighter or gunship.

  The U.S. Army thought so highly of the Stinger in those Cold War years that it stockpiled them in Europe as fast as the ladies of Building 600 could make them. The Joint Chiefs, citing the need for as many as possible to prepare for all-out war with the Red Army in Europe, claimed that none could be spared for a CIA sideshow, and they asked Deputy Director John McMahon to block any efforts to deploy them in Afghanistan.

  On the wall of the warehouse where these thirty-five-pound shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles were warehoused was the motto “If it flies it dies.” But for the Afghans in the fall of 1985, the Stinger was still not an option the U.S. government was prepared to consider.

  For Charlie Wilson, the quest for something to shoot down the Hind gunship had become a total obsession. When the CIA director, Bill Casey, told Wilson that there was no silver bullet to deal with the Hind, he was alluding to the ancient belief that certain enemies of mankind surface now and then with such power and evil that they are virtually invincible and can be stopped only by a magical weapon—a silver bullet. The Lone Ranger, the hero in the cowboy stories that Wilson and Avrakotos listened to on the radio as boys, always carried with him such magic bullets to guide into the hearts of the evil ones he was pitted against.

  For all practical purposes, the Mi-24 Hind flying gunship was the superweapon of the Afghan war. In 1985, it remained the Soviets’ one invincible, bloodcurdling instrument that threatened to finally rob the mujahideen of hope. Perhaps never had any soldiers enjoyed such total superior force as the men who flew the gunships against the Afghans. Descending out of the clouds they would hover just out of range of the mujahideen’s machine guns. The pilots would look down on tribesmen as if they were ants. Their only question was, Which to shoot first and with what weapon? After firing a burst from a Gatling gun at a thousand rounds per minute, or laying down napalm bombs, or launching one of their 128 rockets, they knew it was just a short flight back to their comfortable barracks at Bagram, where vodka and a hearty meal awaited them. For these dark gods of the sky, flying the gunships was a routine mission of death—so far removed from the ground that they would never hear the sounds of men screaming or feel the sweat and terror and agony they were inflicting.

  To be caught by a Hind was the nightmare of the Afghan freedom fighters, and it was literally Charlie Wilson’s nightmare as well. The gunships were still flying into his dreams—the same leering Slav mowing down the helpless fighters. From the moment Wilson had sat by the bedside of a mujahid who had been mauled and tortured by this beast, he had become determined to find a silver bullet to bring it down.

  But the Texan was not looking for supernatural intervention. He was an old gunnery officer with an almost religious faith in America’s ability to come up with technological fixes that verged on magic. The issue was deciding to do it. It had taken the United States only four years to build the A-bomb once Hitler and Tojo looked as if they might win. Kennedy had been able to put a man on the moon in a decade when the Soviets seemed to be pulling ahead. So why, Wilson kept asking, couldn’t the mighty United States figure out how to shoot down a helicopter?

  The Stinger was no secret to Charlie or Gust. They knew it was the best mule-portable plane killer in the world. But in the fall of 1985 the CIA was adamant about not introducing an American weapon. Putting in the Stinger would have been like advertising the CIA’s involvement in the war in Red Square. What possible reason did the Agency have to be running this war if not to maintain cover for U.S. involvement? And if the Agency were to hand out these instruments to the fundamentalist holy warriors, who would control them? The idea of a Khomeini loyalist shooting down a TWA flight with a General Dynamics Stinger was too much.

  For Charlie Wilson, denied the weapon, the restless quest continued. He was relentless and single-minded in his conviction that there had to be a weapon to challenge the Hind. If not the Swiss Oerlikon, then the Israeli Charlie Horse. If not the Charlie Horse, then perhaps the Swedish RBS 70, which he had forced the upgraders to buy and try out. If not the Swedish weapon, then perhaps his plan to place a phosphorus charge in the 12.7mm machine-gun ammunition. Once lodged in the Hind’s armor, he argued, the bullets would act as incendiary devices. He became fixated on this, and by that fall, Mohammed’s Egyptians, as well as the Communist Chinese and the tinkerers, were all trying to develop this version of the silver bullet.

  Even Gust Avrakotos, who had long since abandoned the idea of finding a single weapon to deal with the Hind, was so infected with Wilson’s mania that one day he too went over the edge. A twisted old Agency veteran named Sam, whose son had died in the Vietnam War, told him he could build a Stinger from scratch using cannibalized parts. What Sam described was an amalgam of all the anti-aircraft missiles then in operation—the SA-7’s great motor, the “beautiful fins” from the Blowpipe, the wonderful aerodynamic casings from the Redeye, and the Stinger’s great warhead.
The only problem, acknowledged Sam, was with the patents. “Fuck the patents. This is a covert war,” Gust told him. “Let them sue us.”

  Mike Vickers, meanwhile, was coolly insisting that they already were assembling the equivalent of the silver bullet. No one weapon, not even the Stinger, could do it all, he argued. The secret was in the mix, in the combination of weapons that were just then being introduced into the field. As usual, he was taking the long view, explaining how their efforts were just beginning to come together and how it would be another six months or more before the weapons and training could all be introduced and begin paying off.

  It was not an easy argument to make at that point, because the mujahideen seemed to be in big trouble. That fall, General Varennikov, in a bid to break the resistance, sent twenty thousand troops up to the Pakistan border to overrun the mujahideen stronghold at Khost. A Time magazine article reporting the loss quoted a dramatic message from the Afghan commander, Jalaluddin Haqani: “We have been without sleep for forty-eight hours. It is the biggest battle of the war. We have lost many men but we will not lose the war.”

  To many, it looked like a full-scale disaster, but Vickers told Gust that Khost was nothing to be alarmed about. It was like all the big battles in Vietnam. What good had it done the army to win the battle of Hamburger Hill? After tremendous casualties, the U.S. soldiers had discovered that they were king of a desolate hillside in the middle of nowhere. They had won a great victory, but then they simply left Hamburger Hill and the Vietcong moved back in.

  Vickers was now seeing in Afghanistan the mirror image of what had happened to the United States in Vietnam. The Soviets were supposed to be providing support to the independent Afghan government. It was, in fact, their puppet government. The Red Army was supposedly just serving as advisers and suppliers of the Afghan army, which had been close to 100,000 strong at the beginning of the war. Now, after the tremendous infusion of Soviet arms and money, it was down to 30,000, and units were defecting en masse to the mujahideen. Once the Soviets had determined that the Afghans wouldn’t fight, they’d found themselves with no choice but to take over the fighting. It had been the same for the United States. And just as in Vietnam, the Soviet infantry hadn’t been organized to cope with a dedicated, cunning, and increasingly well-armed guerrilla force. To compensate, the Soviets, like the Americans before them, had grown increasingly dependent on air power.