Charlie Wilson's War (32 page)

Many years later, after the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, Bandar would arrange a hero’s welcome for Wilson in Saudi Arabia. But even back in 1984 one can imagine how pleasing it must have been for the prince to meet such a refreshingly different U.S. representative. Bandar was used to Democrats dependent on Jewish contributions, who always seemed to vote against Saudi arms sales even as they privately told him how much they respected the kingdom’s moderate positions. He was keenly aware that most Democratic congressmen didn’t want anything to do with the CIA unless it was to reign the Agency in. Joanne had brought him a congressional powerhouse who not only sided with Saudi Arabia in its historic confrontation with the Israel lobby but could single-handedly force massive increases in U.S. funding for a Muslim jihad.

Within a year of the lunch, Gust Avrakotos would take advantage of this budding relationship between the prince and the congressman. As the Afghan budget doubled, and then doubled again into the hundreds of millions, the king would inevitably be late with his matching funds. Casey and Avrakotos would fly to Riyadh or Jidda to personally collect, but more often than not there was no time for this flattering diplomacy. Bills would come due and the program’s relationship with its suppliers would be placed in jeopardy. Avrakotos, not wanting to alienate the king by being too pushy, would turn to Wilson.

“Allah will not be pleased if the king abandons his freedom fighters,” Charlie would tell Bandar in a voice that seemed at once playful and serious. “If you don’t do this soon, I’m going to tell Joanne.” Bandar would laughingly feign alarm at this bogus threat: “Oh no, don’t do that! Allah will soon be smiling, Charlie. You will see.”

Much of the business in Washington is transacted in this manner. That’s why in 1984 Joanne felt so menaced by the many regrets to her dinner invitations. Bombing out on a high-profile party like this one could be terminal, politically as well as socially.

“I spent three weeks on the telephone, personally calling everyone. We had to get them back,” she recalled of her efforts. “I got Charlie to call his friends on the Armed Services Committee and at the Pentagon.” Wilson was already going the extra mile for Joanne, even assigning some of his secretaries to help her with logistics, just as he had done the year before for her Zia party. It was clearly stretching the rules to deploy congressional staff for such work, but an argument could always be made that Joanne’s parties were critical to some aspect of U.S. diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Joanne’s other friends were also rallying. A financially strapped Charles Fawcett took the train from Los Angeles to Washington. Joanne had sent him a plane ticket, but out of pride he had sent it back. On the train he was robbed, and he arrived without suitable clothes to wear to the party. But the ever-resourceful ex-RAF ace, king of B-grade movies and defender of the Afghans, penciled a vividly accurate sketch of the robber, and his black tie was returned by the police just in time for the party.

By this time, Joanne had taken a romantic interest in another Texan, Jimmy Lyons, who flew into town in his private jet. Lyons was the son of the woman who had first introduced Joanne to the John Birch Society and the Minutewomen. Lyons proudly describes himself an “ultraconservative” who believes that the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations were, in some sinister fashion, the real forces behind the Communist Party.

Joanne’s romance with Charlie was always centered on Afghanistan. When Jimmy Lyons came into the picture, she adopted another romantic crusade: Angola and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-Communist freedom fighters. The way Lyons saw it, big business was in bed with the Communists, and nowhere was that more apparent than in Angola, where Gulf Oil and other U.S. corporations were shamelessly doing business with the Marxist government. When Congress prohibited the CIA from helping Savimbi, Lyons personally intervened. He not only flew the guerrilla chief about in his private plane, he urged Savimbi to blow up Gulf Oil’s facilities. Joanne was entranced by Lyons’s zeal and by his willingness to throw his own resources against the dark forces. “Whatever I needed,” gushed Joanne, “Jimmy would provide. And he had this wonderful plane.”
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The night of her party, Lyons, Fawcett, and Wilson attentively served as Joanne’s uncomplaining lieutenants while she made last-minute changes to the place cards and settings in the grand ballroom of the Hay-Adams hotel. Perhaps only Herring could have designed an event with such strange bedfellows and such grand visions.

By the time the first guests arrived, Zia’s honorary consul had once again created a vision of a Pakistani palace. The room was ablaze with hand-embroidered, sequined tablecloths and brass candlesticks. Joanne had been magically transformed into the most frivolous devil-may-care southern belle. No one would have guessed the heroics that had gone into making this potential disaster a triumph. It was part of Joanne’s grace under pressure, and in the end, the party was a smashing success.

Henry Kissinger, who often stayed with Baron di Portanova in Acapulco and who was part of Joanne’s circle, flew in to toast Bandar. The smiling prince was seated on Joanne’s right and her childhood friend White House Chief of Staff James Baker was on her left. A glittering collection of Texas oil money, military chiefs, senators, astronauts, and diplomats filled the room.

Wilson was hardly the center of attention that night, but Joanne had given him a seat of honor, placing him between Buckets and Barbara Walters. Di Portanova regaled Wilson with stories of the dangers that would befall the United States if San Marino, the tiny Manhattan-sized republic for which he served as honorary consul, were to return to Communism. For Charlie, the party was another exhilarating triumph of networking chez Joanne. It did not hurt to have a special channel to the richest Muslim power on earth, or to the conservative elite like Baker and Caspar Weinberger. And it was reassuring to know that even if marriage was no longer in the cards, he and Joanne would still continue crusading side by side.

The first indication of just how committed the CIA was to blocking Wilson’s Oerlikon initiative came from the Pentagon. While Wilson was still in Pakistan, General Richard S. Stillwell, in charge of all the Pentagon’s black activities, had stormed into the congressman’s office demanding to speak to the administrative assistant. When Charles Simpson appeared, the very first words out of Stillwell’s mouth were “Who the hell is Charlie Wilson and what the hell does he think he’s doing with the Afghan program?”

The retired general was not even trying to be diplomatic as he laid down the law to Simpson. No one had asked Wilson for the appropriation, and even if the Agency had additional funds, it wouldn’t be able to use them effectively. Finally, he barked, Wilson should know the $40 million was scheduled to come out of existing Pentagon funds, and he was in a position to block that. His parting wisdom was that the congressman had no business sticking his nose into operational details of a covert program.

Wilson was not overly distressed when Simpson reported the encounter. A mere general could never frustrate one of the key defense appropriators. But a far more effective coalition was mobilizing, and it took Wilson a while to figure out who the real enemy was. He would have been well served to follow what had been happening at the other end of the Capitol, where an able and well-liked U.S. senator was also running into trouble when he sought to expand support for the mujahideen.

There was only one other serious champion of the mujahideen during this time, a liberal Democratic senator named Paul Tsongas, who managed, in spite of ferocious opposition from the Reagan White House, to win passage of a congressional resolution calling for increased support for the mujahideen. It remains something of a puzzle why Tsongas and Wilson, two ingrained liberals, emerged as the only early champions of the Afghan rebels. No one in those days would have dreamed of calling the Reagan administration soft on Communism, but Charlie Wilson couldn’t find anyone in the administration who seemed to want anything more than a safe bleeding campaign.

For him, Afghanistan had become a political mystery. Why was it that Ronald Reagan could invade Grenada, commission Star Wars, bypass Congress to keep his secret Contra war alive, and frighten everyone by branding the Soviets the Evil Empire, yet when Wilson made his move to up the ante and counter the most egregious Soviet aggression, he met only resistance?

Stillwell had at least been up front; no one else was. According to Wilson, the CIA initially blamed the State Department for the resistance; the Pentagon said it was the fault of the Office of Management and Budget, which was refusing to release the $40 million. But the OMB people Wilson spoke to said the Pentagon had refused to take the money out of existing naval funds, as the bill had specified. The reason for the delay was “congressional confusion.”

At first, Wilson thought he might be up against a turf battle led by the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose staffers were up in arms about the way he had usurped their role. Ordinarily, a CIA program can be funded only if it is first authorized by the two Intelligence Committees. Having bypassed that step, Wilson now found himself having to make the process legitimate. Because the money had to be taken from existing Pentagon funds—“reprogrammed”—he had pursued the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Arms Services Committee, as well as Intelligence, to sign off on the bill.

The House was no problem. Mel Price, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was so senile that Charlie got a staffer to sign for him. Lee Hamilton, the highly respected House Intelligence Committee chairman, appeared ready to block the bill until Wilson warned his old ally Speaker Tip O’Neill that he was prepared to take to the floor and accuse the Democrats of selling freedom down the river. It was Wilson’s way of cashing in an IOU, and O’Neill put in a call to Hamilton, who dropped his opposition.

That left the Senate—a distasteful place for any congressman to have to go hat in hand. Nevertheless, the Texan booked an appointment with Senator Sam Nunn, who surprised Wilson by quickly signing off. Nunn would turn out to be a quiet and forceful backer of this and all future Afghan programs. Wilson’s next stop was Senator Moynihan, the ranking Democrat on Intelligence, whom he lured out of a hearing; Charlie soon won his approval. The last remaining obstacle was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater. Here Wilson figured he had a certain in if he dared to use it. The senator’s son, Barry Junior, had been a target of the same federal drug-prosecution effort that had hounded him, and Charlie had always suspected that the senior Goldwater had been helpful in getting the case dismissed. So he took a gamble on a joke: “Both Barry and I were subjected to police brutality by Rudolph Giuliani and the Justice Department,” he said with that infectious, rumbling laugh of his, and Goldwater told him to come into the office.

“I know this was turf trespassing on my part,” Wilson began, “but what we want to do is shoot down the Russian helicopters.” Goldwater was an old air force pilot and a legendary anti-Communist, and Charlie told him it was unacceptable for the greatest power on earth not to give the mujahideen an effective anti-aircraft weapon. Wilson was at his patriotic best, and he struck a responsive chord.

In the 1960s, Goldwater’s best-selling political manifesto
The Conscience of a Conservative
had set the conservative revolution in motion with its warning of dire consequences should the United States fail to act boldly and counter the Soviet menace. “Well, fuck the turf,” the silver-haired senator said after listening to Charlie’s appeal.

Wilson realized that this congressional rebellion had been much ado about nothing and that his real problems were not at State, the Pentagon, OMB, or on the Hill. They were coming from Langley. Wilson had thought that the CIA’s main stumbling block must be money, and on this point he was sympathetic. His Democratic colleagues in the House had been so antagonistic to the CIA for so long that it was no wonder the Agency didn’t believe Wilson when he said money was no object. He had assumed that his $40 million gift would have established his bona fides with the CIA’s leaders and encouraged some bolder thinking.

Even after the war was over, Wilson would always remain convinced that Director Casey supported everything he was trying to do for the mujahideen. The director was the last of the adventuring World War II heroes, a man who had been responsible for dropping spies behind the lines in Germany and who talked Wilson’s Churchillian language of standing up to tyranny. And Charlie had witnessed Casey’s emotional response to Mojadeddi that day in the White House when the Afghan leader had turned to Mecca in prayer.

As the months wore on and the Agency surfaced as the problem, Wilson chose to believe that it was the bureaucrats who were poisoning Casey’s thoughts. In Wilson’s mind there was no question who was responsible for this cynical policy of leaving the Afghans helpless in the field. It had to be Charles Galligan Cogan, a man no one had elected, who thought he should decide what the United States would and would not do for the Afghans.

In later years, while affiliated with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Cogan would acknowledge that the CIA had overestimated the Soviet Union and that, in retrospect, the rigid concerns about concealing the American hand to prevent Soviet retaliation had been exaggerated. But back in 1984 he believed that the way to run a U.S. proxy war was the way the CIA had always done it.

If these two men had met when Cogan was starting off at the Agency, Wilson might have found much to admire. Certainly back in the early 1960s he wouldn’t have branded the handsome young case officer a wimp. At twenty-eight, Cogan was the deputy station chief in the Congo; there he ran South African mercenaries, sent Bay of Pigs veteran pilots on interdiction missions against Soviet-backed troops, and rescued nuns from savagery. During this time, headquarters was even bold enough to send assassins down to murder Patrice Lumumba. In the Congo, Chuck Cogan was no pantywaist, nor had he been while serving in the Sudan. But gradually, it is said, he developed airs. Perhaps it began in India, where he learned to ride horses and play polo, or perhaps when he won the patronage of Archie Roosevelt and, later, the friendship of Morocco’s King Hassan and Jordan’s King Hussein. After thirty years in the Agency, Cogan was the perfect choice for royals but the wrong man for Charlie Wilson.