Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  The main reason why Vickers did not overreact to the Khost defeat, however, was because of the intelligence reports he was studying from a very different mujahideen experience with the Red Army. The ex–Green Beret didn’t show emotion easily, but he was clearly ecstatic as he brought out the most recent satellite photographs to show Avrakotos how the mujahideen had just wasted an enormous armored convoy along a fifty-mile stretch of highway running from Kabul to Gardez. The incredibly sharp pictures revealed the carcasses of seventy-five smoking Soviet vehicles.

  What excited this young strategist most about the ambush was that the CIA had played no role in planning it. They had not even known it was about to happen. To Vickers, that was the ultimate confirmation of the effectiveness of his new mix of weapons and training. In just a matter of months these mountain warriors had suddenly leapt into the late twentieth century—operating burst transmitters and frequency-hopping radios, coordinating different units, and using timing devices and a wide range of weapons in a carefully sequenced pattern. Looking at the satellite photographs of the wreckage, the Special Forces veteran wasn’t all that sure that his old outfit could have done any better.

  It wasn’t the first time the mujahideen had mounted successful ambushes. The resistance had often hit convoys during Howard Hart’s tour. But the Soviets assumed that anytime they moved with armor on the ground and Hinds flying shotgun, their convoys would be essentially invulnerable. Now, Vickers told Gust, it was a completely new ball game. If the muj could mount this kind of ambush regularly, it would throw the Soviets’ entire Afghan strategy into a cocked hat.

  It didn’t take much for Gust to grasp the significance. The 40th Army’s strategy called for controlling the major cities as well as maintaining invincible garrisons across the country. Early on, the Soviets had conceded the countryside to the mujahideen. But they’d assumed that from their strongholds they would always be able to move in strength with near impunity to wipe out villages and create free-fire zones and thus slowly grind down the resistance.

  What Vickers saw in the Gardez-to-Kabul ambush demonstrated that the Soviets’ entire Afghan strategy was vulnerable; this, he argued, was the moment to reinforce success. The Soviets were doing their best to trumpet Khost into a major public relations victory, but Vickers believed that the battle was nothing more than a predictable setback for a guerrilla force. He said the Red Army would now have little choice but to pack up and leave Khost, because if they stayed they would just become a fat target for the mass of guerrillas right across the border in Pakistan. And sure enough, the Soviets and their Afghan allies soon pulled out and the mujahideen moved back in. The supply lines from Pakistan were reestablished, and the war went on.*

  The simple truth, as Vickers saw it, was that in this lone encounter the mujahideen had proved that they could become the army of technoguerrillas that he had set out to create. They were the true magical weapons in this war, and he could suddenly see with blinding clarity that they could win.

  That fall Vickers and Avrakotos put in requisition orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition—and that was just for one year. The only real question in Vickers’s mind now was whether, for the foreseeable future, the CIA would be able and willing to continue to serve as the arsenal of the holy warriors’ increasingly expensive jihad. Around the same time, Charlie Wilson appeared, almost as if on cue, with an almost ludicrous question: “Could you use another $300 million?”

  “Try me,” Gust said jauntily, fully realizing how strange this question would have seemed coming from anyone other than Wilson. The congressman was operating out of his subcommittee like a political alchemist, looking about for ways to magically expand Gust’s budget. On this occasion he had just discovered a $300 million warfare program that the Pentagon had decided to abandon. If the money wasn’t spent by the end of the fiscal year, just eight days away, the full $300 million would revert to the Treasury. Charlie told Gust he figured he could persuade the Pentagon to give it up for Afghanistan if the CIA could be convinced to ask for it.

  “Reprogramming” Pentagon funds was the way Wilson had paid for all of his special gifts to Gust. But the odds against pulling off such an immense diversion of moneys into a covert program in eight days were immense—by normal standards, quite impossible. Even if anyone at the CIA could be convinced to initiate such a proposal, Gust figured, it would take a minimum of nine months just to move the idea through the Agency’s bureaucracy. Everyone would be terrified about asking for such a gargantuan sum. There would have to be elaborate studies commissioned, reports written to justify the money. The White House would have to get into it. The Intelligence Committees would hold hearings. The director would have to testify before both the House and Senate watchdog committees, and then he would have to do it again before the Appropriations subcommittees.

  But Charlie Wilson wasn’t talking about business as usual in the covert-funding department. He was telling Gust they could push through $300 million (really $600 million with a Saudi matching grant) in eight days if Gust was willing to stop everything and make a run for it. Varennikov had launched his attack on Khost that same September, but in terms of the ultimate fate of the Afghans, the significant contest was unfolding back in Washington as Gust, Charlie, Mike, and the task force threw themselves into an almost impossible race against the clock.

  The first obstacle came from an unexpected quarter. “The Pentagon started to bitch about not wanting to give up the money,” recalls Wilson, “so I told the comptroller, ‘If you don’t like giving us the $300 million, how would you like it if we just cut $3 billion from your budget next year?’ And I meant it. I told them they didn’t just have to get out of the way, they had to get out of the way fast.”

  Once the Pentagon rolled over, the battle shifted to Congress, where eight separate committees had to be convinced that there was a compelling reason to divert such a huge sum to Langley. The entire exercise would have been impossible if Vickers, in his normal fashion, had not already worked up a budget explaining precisely how he could use this money. The supremely confident GS-11 was now saying that the optimum annual budget for this supposedly secret war was $1.2 billion.

  This was an insanely large sum for a covert operation, particularly given the intense anti-CIA passion then running in Congress. The only reason Vickers and Avrakotos were even able to propose such radical budgets inside the CIA was because of Gust’s boss, Near East Division Chief Bert Dunn. In the Agency, Dunn was known as Mr. Afghanistan. He had not only served in Kabul, he spoke the languages, and he was a weapons expert with a great deal of experience working with the military. All of that counted for a lot when an officer like Dunn assumed a post with the equivalent rank of a four-star general with command of an entire division of the world.

  Dunn had been Clair George’s deputy in the African Division. Clair George, of course, knew Avrakotos intimately and respected his talents. But he also knew how extreme and unpredictable Avrakotos could be, and their relationship was strained. In marked contrast, Dunn was the steady, honest broker, the pro. There was only so much any operations director could cope with; he had to delegate. He had to trust someone. And if Bert said it made sense to add $600 million to the Afghan budget, that was enough for Clair George and probably for John McMahon as well. In this case, even Bill Casey was actively lobbying for the money.

  While the Agency stood united, Wilson was operating on the Hill as if he were Gust’s mole and the CIA’s one-man lobby. The tall Texan was using every opportunity—riding the elevators with other members, walking onto the floor for votes to smoke out what questions might be asked in the different committees, calling Gust to pass on suggested answers.

  By this time, Wilson had become the great educator of Congress on all matters pertaining to Afghanistan. In the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, in conference with the Senate, with Tip O’Neill and the Democratic leadership, with Republican friends like Henry Hyde and archliberal allies like Dav
e Obey, Wilson was constantly entertaining everyone with riveting stories about what was going on in this secret James Bond world. Gust kept him informed, in part to serve as the Agency’s spokesman, and Charlie made it all come alive for everyone.

  He would describe the wonder of the CIA’s exotic alliances—with Saudi kings and princes serving as bankers, with earnest Communist Chinese offering their weapons to shoot down Soviet Communists. He made Mohammed a living character, not just selling arms but personally ordering weapons from his frontline troops to be sent to the holy warriors. This was the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time, he would say over and over again. Everyone was secretly a part of it—the British, French, Canadian, and German intelligence services; even Singapore was doing its part.

  And then he would always bring up the ugly thing that always struck a responsive chord, even if no one else would say it publicly: “This is our chance to send the Soviet young men home in body bags like they sent our boys back in body bags. Let’s make this a Vietnam for the Soviets.” He always concluded that they—Congress, the House, the liberal Democrats, and his fellow subcommittee members—were the patriots funding this war. Not the great anti-Communist president, not the Pentagon or the CIA or State. It was their war. In conference he might say it was the entire Congress’s war. With Tip, it was the Democrats. But in the subcommittee, where it all began, he would look at his eleven colleagues and say that this was their war.

  These sophisticated, cautious politicians, even the liberals, were proud men who loved representing the most powerful nation in history, and each felt some primitive chord resonate in them when Wilson talked about this good cause and their right to pay the Evil Empire back. They liked it when he talked about the exotic rule breakers they were funding. They liked it when he personalized the war and made them feel that it was theirs, too.

  But Wilson was anything but charming when he met opposition. One of the staffers remembers all too well: “He would cajole, threaten, rant, and rave like a pit-bull dog. He was way ahead of the government on everything. At markups [where the committee lays down its first budget] if a staffer called for cuts in one of his programs he would say, ‘Now that we’ve heard from the Communists, let’s hear from the real Americans—the people who were voted into office.’”

  Jim Van Wagenen, one of the senior defense staffers who handled the black accounts, recalled being in Wilson’s office one day when a Pentagon official said, “We can’t do that.” Wilson responded, “Let me have the staff tell you how you can do it.” “He didn’t give a tinker’s damn how he was going to get what he wanted,” remembers the staffer. “He’d say, ‘It will hurt you, or you can make it easy on yourself.’”

  On day five of this eleventh-hour campaign, Gust and Charlie thought they were on the verge of pulling off the $300 million reprogramming when one of Charlie’s friends on the House Intelligence Committee told him there was a seven-to-seven deadlock vote and that the chairman, Lee Hamilton, intended to let the program die. Ordinarily Charlie moved the House through humor, charm, and by doing things for his fellow representatives. But in this case there was no time, so he sought out his secret benefactor, Tip O’Neill, and told the Speaker that the Democrats would be embarrassed if Hamilton didn’t back down. He didn’t need to say anything more. He knew that O’Neill, in spite of his leadership of the opposition to Reagan’s Contra war, hated to have the party accused of being unpatriotic. “Tip, do you want the Democrats to be responsible for pulling the rug out on the mujahideen? There ain’t no nuns over there, Tip, so you don’t have to worry about that,” Wilson added, referring to O’Neill’s passionately antiwar sister who was a Maryknoll nun.

  When asked about Charlie’s maneuvers to outflank Hamilton, the former Speaker acknowledged that he had intervened to get the committee’s approval. “We ironed things out behind the scenes, which was customary in those days,” the Speaker explained. It also helped that Charlie had delivered for Tip in the past.

  The battle now shifted to the task force, which had only a couple of days before the fiscal year ended, at midnight on September 30. It was again a matter of “use it or lose it,” but by now Gust had become a master at playing this game. Hilly Billy, his finance guru, had taught him that the money does not actually have to be spent in a given year so long as it has been obligated to be spent. But that still meant that the task force only had a few days to get $300 million worth of contracts signed.

  It was almost comical, this mad dash to spend the money. Gust, Vickers, and the logistics chief, Tim Burton, had prepositioned agents all over the world—Egypt, Switzerland, Pakistan, Singapore, and China—just waiting for an okay to commit the funds. Right up until midnight on the thirtieth, the wires were burning up as the cables confirming the contracts rolled in on deadline.

  In the end, Gust not only committed the $300 million but a bit more, just to be safe. Soon after, he and Casey flew off to Saudi Arabia to hit the Saudis up for their matching share. Now Vickers had $600 million to add to the already immense budget.

  It had all taken place without a vote on the floor of Congress and without any public acknowledgment, but it was another turning point in the war and the Kremlin had no idea that yet another enormous escalation was in the works. Because of the way the $300 million had to be committed ahead of time but not actually spent, Vickers realized that the CIA wouldn’t have to spend it all by the next fiscal year as it normally would, with the rest of its congressionally appropriated budget. He convinced Gust they could ration this money so that their budget could be maintained at about three quarters of a billion dollars for the next two years. The Saudi matching funds, however, were not subject to the same congressional regulations.

  The Wilson-Avrakotos partnership had now managed to elevate the Agency’s Afghan program beyond the normal budgetary control of Congress. Inexplicably, no one on the Hill—much less in the press—seemed to know about or pay any attention to this dubious achievement, in spite of the hyperactive scrutiny that Wilson’s liberal colleagues were subjecting the Agency to, with questions and accusations about every possible detail of the flagging Contra operation.

  It was another first, and Gust decided it was time to make some meaningful gesture to the man who had made all of this possible. Almost as a reward, or perhaps as an acknowledgment of the dominant role Wilson had come to play in this unprecedented CIA operation, Gust invited Wilson to come out to headquarters to visit his Dirty Dozen in the war room. It was all a thrill for Charlie, and to Avrakotos’s surprise, when Charlie walked through the door, the task force members spontaneously stood and broke into applause. “I don’t know what it did for his health, but you could see the rays of sunshine and pleasure emanate from him,” remembers Avrakotos. “And you know what, it was sincere. No matter what each individual might once have thought of him, you could tell they were genuinely honored that Charlie, the great benefactor who was giving them the wherewithal to beat the shit out of the Russians, was visiting them.”

  The additional $600 million, on top of the already huge budget for 1986, represented such a radical increase that Avrakotos and Vickers had no choice but to prepare a detailed report, known as a memorandum of notification (MON), to alert the president to the fundamental change in the nature of the Afghan operation. It’s a requirement that anytime a CIA operation leaps out of the boundaries authorized by a finding an MON must be submitted to the White House to make sure the president is still prepared to go along with it.

  Once again Vickers was tasked with drafting the report, which had to begin by addressing the concern that the Agency’s escalation might be on the verge of provoking a Soviet invasion of Pakistan. For months now Avrakotos had figured that if he were in command in Kabul, he never would have allowed a CIA escalation without responding in kind deep inside Pakistan. By now he would already have burned down the port of Karachi, where the CIA weapons and ordnance ships were unloading tons of explosives each week. He would have sent saboteurs to seek out and bomb the m
unitions dumps spread out all around Peshawar. A hillside in Islamabad next to a mosque contained enough hidden explosives to blow up the capital. These were the obvious targets. There had been terrorist bombings and assassinations but mostly in the border areas and not on a scale large enough to shake Zia’s resolve. And so when this didn’t happen, Gust argued that the Kremlin had already blinked and the Agency was, in effect, free to escalate at will.

  That was the line of reasoning that Vickers set forth in the draft of the MON that Gust sent on to the seventh floor for review. Bill Casey, Clair George, Bob Gates (later to become DCI), and even the cautious John McMahon endorsed this call for all-out secret war—the CIA was going for broke.

  The fall of 1985 witnessed something new in the CIA’s six-year-old Afghan war: the national security bureaucracy suddenly discovered its significance. Charlie Wilson had started the bandwagon moving, but as in all great endeavors, others were now sensing opportunities and scrambling to jump on. It was impossible not to recognize that the Contra war was all but dead, but the president was now personally committed to the Afghan freedom fighters, and Congress was pouring unprecedented amounts into the Agency’s war chest. Afghanistan no longer looked like a sideshow. In the fall of 1985, the bureaucrats from State, the Pentagon, and the NSC who gathered in Room 208 of the Old Executive Office Building were demanding the right to get in on the action.