Charlie Wilson's War

by George Crile

  The CIA was simply not prepared for this new crowd of enthusiasts, who arrived on the scene armed with the deepest suspicions about the Agency itself. Included in the entourage were some of the Vlasov’s army advocates, as well as others who were beginning to argue that the Pentagon might be better suited to run this war. It was hard for any of the participants to appreciate how large and bold and radical the CIA’s weapons and training program had already become. On one key point, however, they shared a common concern with Wilson: finding a silver bullet to shoot down the invincible helicopter gunships.

  The moving force in this group was an engaging, well-born conservative intellectual named Mike Pillsbury, then serving as the Pentagon’s deputy undersecretary in charge of overseeing covert programs. Pillsbury, a former Senate staffer and China expert, had been an early believer in the Afghan campaign. He’d worked for Senator Gordon Humphrey at one point but had also served as a kind of foreign policy Machiavelli for a string of other conservative senators, including Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, Chic Hecht, and, to a certain extent, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Malcolm Wallop.

  Repeatedly during 1985 he had tried to persuade the National Security Council to authorize the introduction of the American-made Stinger surface-to-air missile, widely acknowledged as the most effective mobile anti-aircraft weapon available. But each time Pillsbury had attempted to win approval, he’d failed. According to Pillsbury, his boss, Assistant Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle, had told him to give up the fight. But, undaunted, he redoubled his efforts to forge a critical alliance with Ambassador Mort Abramowitz—Secretary of State George Shultz’s intelligence chief—and had brought in his own collection of aggressive, conservative senators to support his effort.

  Pillsbury’s conviction (and hence that of his Senate group) was that the Afghans were not being given meaningful support, such as Stingers, because overly cautious and cowardly CIA officials were blocking it. His main source for these views was Vince Cannistraro, the veteran CIA officer whom the White House had put in charge of reviewing intelligence operations, despite a recent reprimand for his role in the infamous Contra assassination manual.

  But among conservative intellectuals in the Reagan administration, like Pillsbury, Cannistraro was seen as a martyr to the cause of anti-Communism. Pillsbury says that he and other members of the 208 Committee were deeply swayed by Cannistraro’s description of a CIA that had lost its way: “He told us that Clair George was the enemy and that George and McMahon were stopping the Stinger. He said the only way to turn Casey around to support the Stinger was to do in McMahon.” Pillsbury now suspects that Cannistraro was, in effect, running a black propaganda operation out of the White House to bury John McMahon, the official responsible for derailing his career. At a bare minimum, he managed to unleash an unprecedented public attack on McMahon. From the moment Cannistraro took Andrew Eiva aside in the Old Executive Office Building and told him that McMahon was the enemy of the mujahideen as well as the one responsible for blocking the Stinger, the desperately earnest Eiva had known what he had to do.

  With the exception of Philip Agee, American critics of the CIA have generally observed certain rules of engagement. The idea of identifying an Agency official by name, accusing him of treasonous practices that cannot be verified, and mounting a political campaign to get him fired was simply unthinkable. But with Cannistraro’s words ringing in Eiva’s ears, that was the course of action that he and Free the Eagle adopted when they launched a massive direct mailing to get the traitor. One hundred thousand letters were sent out to Free the Eagle’s archconservative supporters, seeking money to mount the campaign.

  “Why does the CIA persist in failing to supply effective weapons to the Afghan Freedom Fighters?” the letters asked. “Why does the CIA choose to send weapons that are old, defective, and in some cases useless? Who’s behind this massive—and deadly—blunder? To be perfectly honest, my friend…it’s because a certain public official—namely John McMahon—is failing to carry out American policy….That’s why I am asking you to sign the enclosed letter addressed to White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan and then mail it to him at the White House….John McMahon must change his ways or he must go!”

  Donald Regan had been targeted by Free the Eagle’s founder, Neil Blair, because they moved in the same conservative circles. “I would buttonhole him in person at dinners or White House receptions and ask, ‘Why are you keeping a son of a bitch like McMahon over at the CIA?’” Blair was brutally frank about his methods of persuasion. “If you want to know where our strengths came from, we raised and gave funds in the primary and general elections to key Republican senators, and when the Republicans took the Senate in 1982 they took over key committees and subcommittees and they were beholden to us. And when they came to power they opened doors for us; they kicked ass for us. They’d call George Shultz and chew him out. They’d call CIA people over and hold their feet to the fire on issues like Afghanistan. And that’s how our influence began and everything spread from there.” At its height, the campaign became so intense that every time Regan attended a fund-raiser, someone from Free the Eagle would leap out of the crowd demanding to know when the White House was going to deal with the saboteur.

  The CIA higher-ups simply didn’t know what to do. One of the problems was that it was supposed to be a secret operation. As a matter of policy, agents don’t discuss covert operations. And even if they had decided to try to defend themselves, the Agency wouldn’t have dared advertise what it was, in fact, doing in Afghanistan. How could it possibly explain that it was now riding the tiger of militant Islam—fully committed to the single biggest and most ruthless secret war in its history? In reality, the CIA had given its liberal Democratic critics just about every conceivable ground agreement to go on the attack and to question whether such a runaway operation, gargantuan in size and ruthlessness, made sense. But not a peep had been heard from the Left.

  It should be acknowledged that McMahon was in fact a voice of caution in Bill Casey’s CIA—alarmed at the Contra excesses, furious at some of the Iran dealings, and always worried that the Afghan war might precipitate a Russian invasion of Pakistan. But those concerns were hardly unreasonable. What must have seemed most unfair to the deputy director was that although he’d initially insisted on banning sniper rifles and had fought the introduction of American weapons like the Stinger, he had nevertheless been a key element in making the unprecedented escalation possible. And Avrakotos, the ultimate rule breaker, always saw him as a critical ally. In late 1985 and early 1986, it was preposterous to accuse McMahon or anyone at the CIA of lacking in courage or resolve when it came to providing meaningful support to the Afghans. But McMahon had no choice but to keep silent: “Technically we weren’t supposed to be supporting the Afghans at all, so there was no way I could defend myself or the Agency,” he says.

  Ed Juchniewicz, then number two man in the Directorate of Operations, maintains that Free the Eagle’s campaign, quickly picked up by congressional conservatives like Senator Malcolm Wallop of the Intelligence Committee, ultimately contributed to McMahon’s resignation. “Most of us shrugged the attacks off, but they had a tremendous impact on John. He felt they were definitely out to get him. It was a hell of a thing to happen to the deputy director of the Agency, Casey’s right-hand man.”*

  While Eiva and Free the Eagle were moving on the low road, Pillsbury says that Cannistraro, sounding much like a cultural anthropologist explaining the conduct of an insular and paranoid tribe, was doing a good job of portraying the Agency in an equally dark light. He would invariably begin by describing McMahon as a “very nice man” who, unfortunately, had been traumatized by the intelligence scandals of the 1970s. Cannistraro explained that ever since then, McMahon had done his best to keep the Agency out of covert operations that might get them in trouble. That’s why he was blocking the things that needed to be done to give the Afghans a chance. Listening to Cannistraro, Pillsbury assumed that the only th
ing McMahon and the Agency really cared about was making sure they didn’t get in trouble.

  It was in this climate that the final bureaucratic battle over the Stinger was waged. Mike Pillsbury had become so obsessed with this mission that he arranged for the entire 208 Committee, accompanied by his conservative senators, to fly to Pakistan to lobby Zia to endorse the effort to deploy the Stinger. Zia had always insisted on personally approving each new weapon introduced into the jihad. Six months earlier, Zia had told Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, that he had no objection to the Stinger. Gust had accompanied Nunn on this trip, but by then the Agency had learned that Zia often played a double game with the Americans, saying one thing and then letting his intelligence chief take a different position. This time, with a delegation of Senators present, Zia’s green light had a major impact on the debate in Washington.

  Soon after that trip, Pillsbury’s boss, Fred Ikle, persuaded the Joint Chiefs to drop their objections, and with that the CIA lifted its opposition. Now even Secretary of State George Shultz joined the bandwagon, calling for the deployment of the Stinger as a means of quickly increasing the costs of the war to the Soviets. U.S. policy, he argued, should seek to persuade the new Communist party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, to cut his losses and get out before Afghanistan turned into Gorbachev’s war. There was a green light from the National Security Council, a signature from President Reagan, and suddenly the ladies of Building 600 were assembling Stingers for the fundamentalist followers of Allah in Afghanistan.

  At least a half dozen officials claim major credit for this breakthrough, among them Pillsbury and Cannistraro. Entire books are being written about this decision, based on the assumption that the fate of the Afghan war hinged on the decision to deploy the Stinger. Ironically, neither Avrakotos nor Wilson was directly involved in this decision and claims any credit. But in truth Wilson had already fought and won this battle two years before, when he’d forced the Agency to break the color line and buy the Swiss Oerlikon. It was Charlie’s Oerlikon victory that opened the door to the British Blowpipe and the American Stinger.

  More important, now that the Agency was running a covert war budgeted at over three quarters of a billion dollars annually, no one could realistically argue that America’s handprint, indeed its flag, was not all over this war. What Wilson had forced the Agency and the White House to acknowledge was that if the Soviets hadn’t already lashed out after the introduction into the war of more than a billion dollars’ worth of weapons, it seemed safe to assume that they would not be shocked to discover that one of the weapons was made in the United States.

  Wilson was thrilled to learn of the Stinger decision, but not because he thought it would be decisive. At that point no one had any idea just how devastatingly effective a weapon it would prove to be. “We figured the more shit we put in there, the better,” remembers Wilson. “But we had already been disappointed by the SA-7s and the Blowpipes. And when the Paks first tried out the Stingers they didn’t hit anything. We thought the Stinger was just adding another component to the lethal mix we were building.” From Wilson’s standpoint, the best thing about the Stinger decision was that, at last, no one was pretending anymore.

  According to Wilson, there still remained the question of whether Zia would be willing to deploy the Stinger, risking Soviet fury by removing this last fig leaf from the American secret war. At dinner in Islamabad that February, Charlie had taken advantage of his private session with Zia to bring up the Stinger question. By then Wilson had come to think of Zia as almost a surrogate father, and Zia looked to Charlie as if he were one of his own trusted advisers. When Zia had confided that he was still uncertain about letting the Stingers into the jihad, Wilson had suggested that he should consider an important benefit beyond the weapon’s battlefield value to the mujahideen. The Stinger, he’d said, would become a symbol of the special relationship that had been forged between the United States and Pakistan. It would serve to identify the two countries as partners in the great battle against Soviet tyranny. It would further cement the bond between Zia and the Reagan administration, and in turn, Charlie had said, it would make it far easier for him to continue to increase U.S. military and economic assistance to Pakistan.

  Wilson had caught Zia’s attention with this argument. The military dictator had already walked Pakistan way out on a limb by turning his country into the base camp for the Afghan jihad. There would have been no jihad without Zia, but without the massive U.S. military and economic assistance that had poured into Pakistan, the dictator would never have been able to justify the sacrifices he had forced upon his country. Pakistan had become the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, and year after year Charlie Wilson had been solely responsible for increasing that U.S. foreign assistance by tens of millions of dollars.

  Wilson’s importance to Zia and Pakistan went beyond the extra money. Every year the Appropriations subcommittee members fought a battle royal over charges that Pakistan was actively pursuing an Islamic bomb. And every year Wilson, sometimes single-handedly, beat back those accusations. The fact is, Pakistan was working on the bomb, as Wilson, the CIA, and almost everyone else knew. Furthermore, it was not about to stop. The one thing all serious Pakistani politicians agreed on was the need for a nuclear deterrent. It was the only way, they believed, they could survive against a militarily superior India, which had already overrun the country in three previous wars.

  Zia knew that as long as Pakistan was backing the mujahideen, Charlie Wilson would be with them, whether they had the bomb or not. As usual, the kind of negotiation that Charlie had with Zia over dinner in February would have horrified the State Department. And, as usual, it worked. That night when Wilson left Zia’s residence it was with a powerful sense of accomplishment. His idea had always been to bring America fully into the battle, and now that was going to happen.

  So in the spring of 1986, the ladies of Rancho Cucamonga were unknowingly tasked by their country to become the armorers of a Muslim jihad. They were piecing together the delicate circuits and parts of an innocuous-looking weapon that would soon be revered by the holy warriors of Afghanistan as the most sacred of all the instruments that Allah had placed in their hands. On each of the weapons cases given to the Afghans was a mysterious name, inscribed in black letters: GENERAL DYNAMICS. Few of the mujahideen could read English, but all of them knew that Allah writes straight with crooked lines, and whatever the words might say, the silver bullet that had been given to them was a gift from God.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Stinger

  THE OTHER

  SILVER BULLET

  It does not remotely detract from Milt Bearden to call him the luckiest station chief in the CIA’s history. By most accounts he was so devilishly effective during his three years running the Afghan program that he earned the good fortune with which he began his tour. Bearden was like a man who had inherited great wealth and, instead of screwing it up, managed to build an even greater fortune.

  Avrakotos had personally recruited Bearden in early 1986 to take over the Islamabad station. Ever since Howard Hart had left, the station had been run by a competent but weak personality named Bill Piekney. Gust had taken advantage of his weakness. Using Charlie’s money as leverage, he had trampled on the tradition of the chief of station as king and had managed to call the shots from Langley. But by February 1986 Vickers’s redesign was over and Piekney was in trouble. He had been falsely accused, but the miniscandal confused the political scene and Avrakotos seized the opportunity to push for his early departure.* As Gust saw it, you either have strength in Washington or strength in the field, and with Vickers’s work completed, he figured the program needed a classic field marshal.

  Milt Bearden was not the kind of man that Avrakotos was going to be able to push around, and Gust wanted it that way. Bearden was a Texan, a great storyteller, a natural salesman, and a very tough customer. At the time Avrakotos approached him, he wasn’t yet a legend, but he was the v
eteran of twenty-five years of operations who had roamed the Third World managing dictators like the Sudan’s Numiery. He had won Gust’s admiration when Gust had been running the station in Boston, and the two had successfully teamed up to recruit a spy. Later Avrakotos had spent an evening drinking with him in Texas. They liked each other, and when Gust found out that Bearden was languishing as deputy division chief for the Far East—an impressive enough title but filled with bureaucracy and no way back into the field for at least two years—he hit him with an offer: “I’ve got a job that will knock your socks off.”

  “If it’s so great, why aren’t you taking it?”

  “I would if I could, but Clair won’t let me have it.”

  “Tell me more,” Milt said.

  Gust amazed him with the description of the size of the program and his conviction that it was working, no matter what the press and the analysts might be saying. And then he described the role of “the crazy congressman from Texas who is behind the program. I told him he would love Charlie and Charlie him. And in fact Charlie did fall in love with Milt. They’re both from Texas.”

  Of the many wonders Bearden discovered about the program upon arriving in Islamabad, the one he found most appealing was that the American press corps was not really asking any questions.

  It remains one of the great mysteries of this entire history that virtually no one in the press—or Congress, for that matter—seemed to care that the CIA was running the biggest operation in its history: that it was supporting efforts to kill thousands of Soviets, that it was fighting a very dirty war, that it was arming tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists. Bearden couldn’t quite figure out why no one was concerned about these facts, but he loved it. The only thing the reporters seemed to want to do was get an Afghan to take them into the war zone for an adventure tale of being with the mujahideen in the Hindu Kush.*