by George Crile
A call from a friend interrupted his morning ritual: “Do you have your television on?”
The sight of the World Trade Center in flames stunned him, but like most Americans, he assumed it had to have been a horrendous accident. Some ten minutes later he was watching when the second plane appeared on-screen and flew straight into the second tower. A sickening realization gripped him: it had to be the work of terrorists, and, if so, he had little doubt that the killers were Muslims.
“I didn’t know what to think, but figured if I got downtown I could learn more.” By then Wilson had retired from Congress and was working as a lobbyist, with Pakistan as one of his main accounts. At 9:43 A.M., half an hour after the first attack, he was driving across the Fourteenth Street Bridge with the windows up and news radio blasting so loud that he didn’t hear the explosion that rocked the Pentagon less than a mile away. A woman was in Wilson’s condo and, as a measure of how different things were, she was his wife; he had been happily married for two years now. The shockwaves from the Pentagon were so intense that the floor under Barbara Wilson’s feet shook.
That night, Charlie found himself back on the same terrace, where twelve years earlier he had toasted General Gromov on the day the Soviets marched out of Afghanistan. This time he was looking down the Potomac at the sight of the Pentagon burning. For five straight nights he watched, until the fires were finally put down and the smoke cleared. He didn’t know what to make of it all at first. When the photographs of the nineteen hijackers appeared in newspapers across the country, he took some comfort in pointing out that they were all Arabs, not Afghans. “It didn’t register with me for a week or two that this thing was all based in my mountains.”
For most Americans, the events of 9/11 were quickly tied to Afghanistan when it was learned that the hijackers had all spent time there. Much was made of this by the Bush administration, which assailed the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and for allowing Afghanistan to become a breeding ground for international terrorists. The American public rallied behind the president when he launched his “war on terror.” But almost everyone seemed confused about who the terrorists were, and all but clueless to explain why they hated the United States so much.
For anyone trying to make sense of this new enemy, it would seem relevant that for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government sponsored the largest and most successful jihad in modern history; that the CIA secretly armed and trained several hundred thousand fundamentalist warriors to fight against our common Soviet enemy; and that many of those who now targeted America were veterans of that earlier CIA-sponsored jihad.
While news reports explored every possible avenue that might explain America’s new enemy, there was curiously little commentary on the role the United States had played in Afghanistan’s recent past. The fact that the CIA had supported the Afghans in their guerrilla war against the Soviet Union was mentioned. But the impression left was of a nuisance campaign, like the one the Agency ran with the Nicaraguan Contras. And it was perhaps to be expected that no one from the administration chose to spell out the scope and nature of the CIA’s role in the Afghan jihad. It would have been embarrassing at best. And there is no doubt that it would have complicated the president’s effort to build a consensus for war. But that left the American people very much in the dark about their own immediate history.
Afghanistan was the largest and most successful covert operation ever mounted by the CIA. But the scope and nature of this campaign has still not registered in the consciousness of most Americans. Nor is it understood that such secret undertakings inevitably have unforeseen and unintended consequences, which in this case remained largely ignored. None of the sponsors of the campaign, least of all Charlie Wilson, has ever felt responsible for the path the CIA-sponsored jihad has taken; perhaps that’s because their intentions were so pure and because the specific objectives they sought were initially so overwhelmingly successful.
The origins of this book go back to a time when the Afghans were viewed by most everyone in the U.S. government as freedom fighters, allies against a common foe. It was January of 1989, just as the Red Army was preparing to withdraw its last soldiers from Afghanistan, when Charlie Wilson called to invite me to join him on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East. I had produced a 60 Minutes profile of Wilson several months earlier and had no intention of digging further into his role in the Afghan war. But I quickly accepted the invitation. The trip began in Kuwait, moved on to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and then to Saudi Arabia—a grand tour that took us to all three of the countries that would soon take center stage in the Gulf War. For me, the trip was just the beginning of a decade-long odyssey.
There were two surprises on that trip, revelations that opened my eyes to a bigger story: the first was the princely reception given to Wilson wherever he went in the Arab world. The second was my introduction to Gust Avrakotos, recently retired from the CIA and reunited with his co-conspirator for the first time in several years. As we moved from Kuwait down to the battlefield of Basra, where hundreds of thousands had died in the closing battles of the Iran-Iraq War, I began talking to Avrakotos, and in short order I realized that the Afghan campaign had been anything but a typical CIA program.
When our commercial flight back to Baghdad was canceled, Avrakotos managed to get us onto a lavish Boeing 707 owned by a Saudi religious leader by telling him about Wilson’s role in the Afghan war. We shared the flight with a delegation of holy men from the strict Wahhabi sect, some of whom were still sending money and Arab volunteers to the jihad in Afghanistan. The plane was, in effect, a flying mosque: luxuriously outfitted with solid-gold bathroom fixtures, soft leather seats, and numerous monitors that tracked the direction of Mecca for the plane’s passengers. It was in this setting that Avrakotos began to tell me about the Afghan program and about a side of Charlie Wilson I had never seen. In marked contrast to the congressman’s image as a good-natured, even-tempered fellow, Avrakotos described him as a man who struck terror in the bureaucrats at the CIA and the other agencies involved in the Afghan war. Soon it dawned on me that these two men had been engaged in an extra-governmental conspiracy, and that Avrakotos held the key to understanding the CIA side of it.
In Riyadh, a royal receiving party met us at the airport. A caravan of brand-new white Mercedes-Benzes, complete with police escort, swept us off to the palace for a meeting with the king’s brother, Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan. After tea, Wilson delivered his message: he had come to thank the Saudi royal family for its extraordinary generosity in matching the Americans dollar for dollar in Afghanistan. It became clear that the gratitude went both ways when Wilson was shown to his quarters several hours later—a preposterously lavish suite with a living room that seemed to be the size of a football field.
“We want you to know, Mr. Congressman,” the prince’s aide said, “that these are larger quarters than we provided for George Bush. Mr. Bush is only the vice president. You won the Afghan war.”
While Charlie Wilson greatly appreciated this princely salute, he still had unfinished business to attend to. Wilson knew that all great campaigns needed closure—that moment when victory is acknowledged and a grateful nation honors its heroes—and he was hell-bent on creating such an event to honor the mujahideen victory. More than just a yearning for his own personal glory, Wilson felt he owed it to the Afghans.
Throughout the Muslim world, the victory of the Afghans over the army of a modern superpower was seen as a transformational event. But back home, no one seemed to be aware that something important had taken place and that the United States had been the moving force behind it. Any chance of an American appreciation for the Afghan miracle was fast disappearing, as one incredible event after another began to unravel the Soviet eastern bloc. That August, Lech Walesa and his movement pushed aside the Communists and took power in Poland. Then in November, the ultimate symbol of Communist oppression, the Berlin Wall, came down. It was just nine months after the Red Arm
y’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and the dominoes were now falling in central and Eastern Europe. As Charlie Wilson saw it, his Afghans had played a decisive role in helping to trigger and hasten the collapse of the Communist eastern bloc. Some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in the war, but more than a million Afghans had died, and no one had ever thanked them for their sacrifice.
That was precisely the message that Wilson and Zia had intended to deliver with the victory parade they had so carefully planned. These two patrons of the jihad, mounted on great white horses, were to ride side by side down the main avenue of Kabul. Freedom fighters would line the street as far as the eye could see, filling the air with thundering cries of “Allahu Akbar,” along with volley upon volley of CIA-dispensed joy shots. This celebration of freedom would be seen and remembered around the world, and the partnership of America and its Muslim friends would be seared into everyone’s consciousness. That particular vision died with Zia, but Charlie had not given up.
In 1989, the year of the Afghan victory, Charlie brought his kid sister Sharon, Sweetums, Gust, and a collection of friends with him to Pakistan, where he was scheduled to receive the country’s highest decoration. It should have been a moment of triumph, but Charlie found himself preoccupied by the unpaid debt to the mujahideen and by his need to make America discover and recognize the great victory it shared with the Afghans. That’s when he came up with an idea so spectacular that even Cecil B. DeMille might have been impressed.
There are few stage sets in the world as dramatic and as filled with a sense of history as the parade grounds high up in the mountains of the Khyber Rifles, the regiment that guards the fabled pass leading into Afghanistan. Wilson took his entourage there to show them the site of the extravaganza he was planning. Ostensibly he was only organizing his wedding to Sweetums. When he had asked her to marry him that spring, he promised a ceremony no one would ever forget. What he didn’t say was that he had now decided to have the wedding serve a dual purpose.
It’s hard to surprise Gust Avrakotos. But watching Wilson that day, he was struck once again by the magic in this man. Somehow Charlie had managed to enlist the diplomatic and intelligence services of both Pakistan and the United States to assume responsibility for the logistics and planning of the wedding. Milt Bearden, along with the Pakistani intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, had accepted Wilson’s commission to see to it that the streets and parade deck would overflow with bearded Afghan warriors. Without the mujahideen, Charlie explained, the event would have no meaning. The seven Afghan tribal leaders were to be enthroned at one end of the gathering; and thousands of mujahideen would fire off joy shots at every important interval in the service. Milt, as usual, had added a dramatic flourish with his offer to provide tracer rounds at a ratio of five to one in order to enhance the celebratory nature of the Afghans.
The ceremony itself was to be performed by Wilson’s great friend from the Appropriations Committee, Bill Gray—the black congressman and former Baptist minister who was the number three man in the House Democratic leadership. That struck Avrakotos as quite typical of Charlie—bringing his own Baptist minister to the Khyber Pass. But it got better. Gray would be part of an official congressional delegation that Speaker Jim Wright had agreed to lead to Pakistan to attend the event, as if it were a state function. The delegation was to include the members of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, where so many of the key battles of the war had been fought.
For best man, Charlie had tapped his old drinking buddy, field marshal Abu Ghazala, the defense minister of Egypt. Wilson’s great friend, the high-placed Israeli Zvi Rafiah, would maintain a low profile somewhere in the crowd. There was no telling how many mandarins of the CIA and the Pakistan intelligence service would be in attendance, but there would be many. And all of Charlie’s Angels would be on hand, along with Baron Ricky di Portanova, the baroness, Charles Fawcett, and Joanne Herring, the Christian godmother of the Muslim victory.
Listening to Wilson describe the guest list, it suddenly dawned on Gust what Charlie was doing. Here, on this magnificent stage on the roof of the world, he was planning to unveil all of the secret cast of characters who had played leading roles in the great drama he had just produced—the players who had changed history. And to make sure the world got the message, he invited me to come along with a 60 Minutes camera crew.
It all might have happened if Charlie hadn’t gotten careless a couple of weeks later. He had flown to California to serve as the grand marshal in the annual Mule Day parade, an honor recognizing all that the congressman had done to enlist Tennessee mules in the great anti-Communist jihad. But early that morning, when Sweetums called Charlie’s hotel room, Snowflake answered the phone.
It was the end of the affair; there would be no wedding at the Khyber Pass, no parade. It was also the last time that Wilson, or anyone else, would even think about publicly glorifying the Afghans. Charlie had planned a victory parade, but in truth, the Afghan war hadn’t ended. The Soviets were gone but their puppet government was very much in place, as was the CIA’s Afghan war budget. This was the beginning of the dark side of the Afghan adventure.
Throughout the war, Wilson had always told his colleagues that Afghanistan was the one morally unambiguous cause that the United States had supported since World War II—and never once had any member of Congress stood up to protest or question the vast expenditures. But with the departure of the Soviets, the war was anything but morally unambiguous. By 1990 the Afghan freedom fighters had suddenly and frighteningly gone back to form, reemerging as nothing more than feuding warlords obsessed with settling generations-old scores. The difference was that they were now armed with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and explosives of every conceivable type. The justification for the huge CIA operation had been to halt Soviet aggression, not to take sides in a tribal war—certainly not to transform the killing capacity of these warriors.
It was a turning point that demanded a reevaluation; someone in the U.S. government needed to take the lead in charting a new course. For a brief time, Wilson looked as if he might assume the role of a statesman. His model for enlightened leadership had always been the men who led America during and after World War II, when the United States defeated and then rebuilt Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan. He proposed a billion-dollar U.S. aid package to begin rebuilding Afghanistan and did his best to rally support. At the end of that first year, he set off for Moscow to see what could be done to end the surrogate war that continued to rage. The Russians were pumping an estimated $3 billion a year into Afghanistan to prop up the puppet government led by Najibullah, while the CIA, with Saudi matching funds, maintained the enormous flow of weapons to the feuding warlords.
At his meeting with Andre Kosyrov, the future Russian foreign minister argued that the United States and Russia now had a common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan and particularly in preventing radical Islamic elements from taking power. The Soviets’ preoccupation, Kosyrov explained, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader who had so impressed Joanne Herring and whose close ties to Pakistan’s ISI made him the leading recipient of CIA weaponry. Kosyrov insisted that Gulbuddin’s brand of militant Islam was just as dangerous to America as it was to the Soviet Union—a point Charlie had heard frequently that year from his own side.
What struck Wilson most on his visit was not Koserov’s reasoned appeal, but the discovery that, whatever the sins of the Communist regime, the people of Russia had been liberated. He witnessed the explosion of religious faith after years of repression, and he attended a daring production of the musical Hair in the union hall of a cigarette factory. But everywhere, the scarcity of consumer goods shocked and saddened him. This, he realized, was a defeated nation.
When Charlie returned to Washington, the men running the CIA’s Afghan program were alarmed to read an interview in the New York Times that presented him in a dovish light. Wilson says they immediately descended on his office to “whip me into shape. Th
ey complained about the interview and said it looked as if I had traded in my hound dog for a poodle and my pickup truck for a BMW.” Beyond the jibing, Wilson says that the Saudis, who had just honored Charlie, expected the United States to hold firm in its support of the mujahideen.
It was sad to see how quickly Wilson’s effort at statesmanship collapsed. He found that it wasn’t easy to stop what he had started. He was a politician and a dealmaker, and as he put it, “I had asked the Saudis and the CIA to run with me. When they told me what they expected in return, I decided to go along with it. I didn’t have the old fire and zeal, but I knew I had to pay back.”
In the second year after the Soviet withdrawal, Wilson delivered another $250 million for the CIA to keep its Afghan program intact. With Saudi matching funds, the mujahideen would receive another half billion dollars to wage war. The expectation was that they would join forces for a final push to throw out the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime, restore order, and begin the process of rebuilding. The Agency even sent word to Wilson that as an act of gratitude for the renewed budget, the mujahideen planned to take Jalalabad by June 1, Charlie’s birthday. It didn’t happen. Instead the Najibullah forces held, as the Afghans bickered and disgraced themselves by massacring prisoners.
That year, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait; adding insult to injury, Gulbuddin and Sayaf—the mujahideen leader closest to the Saudis, whose men had guided Wilson into Afghanistan for the 60 Minutes shoot—both publicly sided with Hussein against the United States. Their subsidies, however, continued.
With the news from Afghanistan growing darker, Charlie escaped so deep into drink that he began attending sessions of the congressional chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. No member of Congress had ever acquired a position of such towering influence over the CIA as had Charlie Wilson at that particular time. He was consulted on every aspect of the Agency’s dealings with Congress, and incredibly, at the same time, he chaired the committee that served as the congressional watchdog over the CIA. At best, though, Wilson was operating on automatic pilot, rarely attending the special briefings the Agency put on for him and refusing to meet with the mujahideen when they came to Washington. It was almost as if he didn’t want to see or hear what was happening to his old freedom fighters.