Charlie Wilson's War (49 page)

Avrakotos lost his cool. It was one thing to suffer this kind of repression in Pakistan, but Yousaf was playing on Avrakotos’s home turf. Beyond that, Avrakotos was paying for the guns and the ammunition and making it possible for the Pakistanis to organize this jihad. He was even paying for dinner, and he didn’t like this chain-smoking, tight-assed Muslim trying to tell him what not to drink in his own hometown. “I’ll stop drinking,” Avrakotos barked, “when you stop smoking. My doctor says it’s like suicide to smoke, and Allah does not permit suicide.”

The Agency was not doing a good job on this trip of winning the heart of the man they needed on board to make the Afghan program work. There was also another slight, one that seems almost incredible, given the effort the Agency was making to strengthen its relationship with Yousaf.

For reasons that were quite inexplicable to Vickers, the CIA protocol team in charge of organizing the brigadier’s schedule had decided that Yousaf would enjoy going to the theater. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf is a fundamentalist Muslim who turns to Mecca five times a day in prayer and who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; by nature he is suspicious of Christians. The play the CIA selected for him to attend with Vickers and Avrakotos at Ford’s Theater was
Godspell
.

It was, needless to say, a very grim-faced Pakistan general who sat between Vickers and Avrakotos that evening. His arms folded over his barrel chest, he scowled at the musical, whose author clearly had not understood that Muhammad was the greatest of all the prophets.

All was not lost, however. The Agency’s relationship was saved in part by Yousaf’s enormous respect for Avrakotos’s boss, Bert Dunn, the Near East Division chief. Dunn had served in Afghanistan and had been responsible during the Kennedy years for helping Pakistan establish its own special forces unit. He spoke Dari and Pashto and was much loved by the Pakistan military, which had known and trusted him for years.

Yousaf was pleased to receive Dunn’s praise for all he was doing for the jihad. But things broke down with Yousaf again over the most basic question of how to arm an insurgent movement. Yousaf didn’t want to let the CIA ship the huge amount of ammunition that Vickers felt was absolutely necessary to keep the fighters in steady combat. When Yousaf cited insufficient infrastructure to transport the ammunition, Vickers countered by getting Gust to offer to build warehouses, upgrade train tracks, buy thousands of new trucks, even ship in mules and camels.

More complicated was Yousaf’s adamant insistence that the CIA equip all of the mujahideen with AK-47s. Vickers had been the biggest critic of the bolt-action Enfield in favor of the AK, but his objective now was to create a lean, tough, well-armed guerrilla army. The last thing he wanted was to buy hundreds of thousands of AKs and then not be able to give anyone enough ammunition for sustained combat.

The Agency was not about to make this point directly, and Vickers, the rough equivalent of an army captain in Brigadier Yousaf’s eyes, was not inclined even to suggest such a thing. So something of an impasse was reached in which Vickers could not say either that he was worried about corruption or that he felt Yousaf was an imbecile when it came to military strategy and tactics. The net result was a logjam, which appeared to be unmovable until Avrakotos intervened with a bit of baksheesh distributed skillfully at just the right moment.

At one of those dreary official receptions in Islamabad where the Muslim government serves only fruit juice, Avrakotos ran into Brigadier Raza, the Pakistan ISI general who had held Yousaf’s job during Howard Hart’s tour. Unlike Yousaf, Raza was no fundamentalist. He liked Americans and they liked him, and Raza was not offended when Avrakotos showed him the flask he had concealed in his suit and offered to spike the general’s fruit juice.

After accepting his fourth ration of Russian vodka, Raza volunteered a suggestion. Perhaps the CIA would have more luck with the ISI if Avrakotos would consider giving a contract for ammunition to a certain Pakistani arms manufacturer.

Avrakotos had a half billion dollars to spend on arms that year, so he quickly gave $8 million of that to the Pakistanis to make .303 ammunition for the mujahideen. “It was chicken feed,” he said. “We paid a penny or two more per round, but we didn’t have to pay for transportation. I had Charlie come out and go through the factories with me, and we complimented the Pakistanis on their quality control.” In such a manner, apparently, was the barrier to the historic CIA escalation removed. Avrakotos does not assert any direct quid pro quo or claim that Yousaf’s troublesome positions were anything but the product of his wrong-minded professional judgment. But for whatever reasons, the Agency officials most knowledgeable about these negotiations do say that after the placement of this relatively small arms contract, the Pakistani resistance disappeared.

For Avrakotos, dealing with crises became routine, but at one point in 1985 he found himself having to cope with a screaming problem that seemed to belong to another century: mules. The challenge of secretly moving tons of weapons into position for the Afghans was always a logistical nightmare. The CIA had literally hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition constantly traveling by sea and air to Pakistan. Once in Pakistan, the lethal goods were transported by train and truck to the border. At that point, however, everything had to move the old-fashioned way: if not on a man’s back, then by mule or camel.

The Russians therefore placed the highest priority on hunting down and slaughtering the mujahideen’s long mule caravans. So many of these beasts were wiped out by gunships that in 1985, an urgent call suddenly came into the task force headquarters warning of a crisis that had placed everything at risk. “Where the fuck do you go to buy donkeys?” Avrakotos remembers asking Vickers. Later an incredulous CIA director called Avrakotos: “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re buying mules?”

In fact, Avrakotos soon had agents all over the world looking for the best deal on mules. When the Egyptians landed one of the first major contracts, the Pakistanis got insanely jealous and began complaining about health hazards because a number of mules had died shortly after arrival. They insisted on health certificates for the next batch, presuming this would force the Agency to buy locally.

But Mohammed Abu Ghazala’s resourceful arms salesman General Yahia al Gamal wanted the next contract for 2,500 mules at $1,300 each, cash on delivery, so he engineered a great Egyptian put-down. “You have to realize that donkeys and mules are the lowest form of life in Egypt,” explains Avrakotos. “Even a camel has greater status. But the Egyptians provided each donkey and mule with an ID card and vaccination certificate.” As if that wasn’t enough to make fun of the Pakistanis, General Yahia outfitted every donkey with a piece of plastic sporting an Arabic name. “Yahia thought it was hysterical. He even gave them passports.”

According to Avrakotos, the Pakistanis only reluctantly accepted this zanily credentialed herd, but they were sufficiently insulted that they refused to permit any more Egyptian mules into Pakistan. The experiences of the CIA buying and shipping mules to Afghanistan over the next few years became the subject of legendary stories in the halls of Langley. At one point, the Pakistanis became so ornery that they wouldn’t permit the CIA’s transporter to leave the mule manure in Pakistan. They made the planes carry the smelly droppings back to Europe.

It would take months to establish the mule-supply lines. One early shipment of sorry creatures purchased in Brazil arrived in Pakistan with all the animals dead. Eventually the mujahideen were moving their supplies on the backs of Tennessee mules, and the halls of Langley were soon filled with rumors (later confirmed by the Agency’s spies) that the freedom fighters were copulating with these animals.

In an attempt to paint a bright face on this curious practice, Avrakotos explained that in Greece and other Near Eastern cultures there is no scorn placed on buggery as long as the person in question assumes the right position. “The key question is whether you are the fucker or the fuckee,” he said. The mujahideen were taking the dominant male role here; thus, by their code of honor, Gust explained, there was no cause for shame. The Office of Logistics, however, was not as understanding as Avrakotos. They were quite appalled by the stories, particularly when they learned that the mujahideen had also eaten a number of their prized Tennessee mules.

No sooner had Avrakotos’s operatives dealt with the mule crisis than he was faced with a new and truly threatening challenge. The White House had taken Andy Eiva and Gordon Humphrey’s accusations of corruption in the CIA pipeline to heart and had demanded a major policy review. Now that hundreds of millions of dollars were at play with an uncertain outcome on the battlefield, Avrakotos understood that it would be devastating if the conclusion were drawn that the Pakistanis were stealing the CIA blind.

It isn’t easy to control graft in a massive covert arms operation like the Afghan war, and certainly some level of corruption is part of doing business in the Third World. Gust found it perfectly acceptable to dole out an $8 million contract now and then if it bought him cooperation. At the same time, he understood that crude corruption could bring them all down.

For that reason, the task force had adopted all kinds of extraordinary measures to keep their allies honest. Here Art Alper’s boys made all the difference by placing tiny sensors in random shipments of weapons, which were then followed by satellite, to see where they ultimately went. Spies were recruited among the mujahideen themselves, as well as from the ranks of the Pakistani military. Finally, the Agency also ran a network of fifteen “third-country agents,” neither Pakistani nor Afghans but Europeans operating inside the war zone under the cover of being foreign journalists, doctors, or documentary filmmakers. They reported how the mujahideen were doing militarily, as well as whether the money, food, and arms shipments were getting through. Beyond that, satellites were now regularly being used to verify Afghan claims of downed planes and tanks.

The task of responding to the White House fell on Vickers’s shoulders, and instead of looking at it as a defensive exercise aimed simply at keeping the bureaucrats from closing the operation down, he saw it as an opportunity to win their support. He quickly spelled out the full range of measures that had already been put in place to prevent the kind of corruption that Eiva and Humphrey alleged. He had no doubt that his detailed explanation would lay the corruption matter to rest. One of the questions from the White House asked for an explanation of the program’s overall objective; clearly the volume of weapons and support flowing into Pakistan now dwarfed the intent of the original Presidential Findings, so Vickers went on the offensive.

Rather than pretend that Afghanistan was still a bleeding campaign, Vickers urged Avrakotos and Bert Dunn, the division chief, to come clean and to acknowledge that the Agency now believed that the policy should unapologetically be to win the war. Avrakotos and Dunn signed off, and Vickers reduced the answer to a simple and momentous line for the president to endorse, which he did in National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166. The object of the CIA’s campaign, he wrote, was now to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan “by all means available.”

I
n the first week of 1985 Wilson hired a new administrative assistant, a fifty-five-year-old Texan named Charlie Schnabel. Technically, Schnabel was supposed to spend his days in the small office next to the congressman, watching over the staff and making sure legislation was being tended to and constituents’ problems were being solved. Strictly speaking, Schnabel, who had never been out of the country except for a brief visit to Mexico and who had never given a serious thought to the workings of U.S. foreign policy, was expected to stay in the capital and certainly not to have anything to do with a CIA war in Afghanistan. But years later, Wilson’s former assistant, Charles Simpson, would remark that the twin impact of his departure and Schnabel’s arrival removed the one restraining influence that had previously kept Wilson somewhat straight. It may be hard to believe that anyone could outdo Charlie Wilson when it came to the art of rule breaking, but Charlie Schnabel turned out to be every bit his boss’s equal and then some.

Schnabel is a slow-moving man who wears cowboy boots, speaks with a southern drawl, and subscribes to
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. You see his type often on the dusty back roads of East Texas: driving a pickup truck, a rifle hanging on a rack in the back window, a hound by his side, heading off into the woods for a weekend of hunting. But he’s also reminiscent of that breed of cunning southern lawyers who open trials by saying, “I’m just a country boy.”

Schnabel was nobody’s fool. For twenty-two years he had been secretary of state of the Texas Senate, responsible for running the institution that Wilson’s famous drinking friend Larry King immortalized in
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
This experience taught him just about everything there was to know about the way things work in American politics. Over the years he had broken in or done serious business with just about every major Democratic political figure ever to come out of Texas.

He had watched over all the newcomers in their turn. On more than one occasion, the ever understanding secretary of state had carried Wilson home drunk in his arms. He’d gotten Wilson out of the jail and had sometimes even managed to get his DWI charges dropped or modified. So prepared was Schnabel for the inevitable foibles of his many wild Texas charges in those days that he had the wife of the county prosecutor and the wife of the county clerk on his payroll.

All of which is to say that Schnabel had not kept his post in the Texas senate because he was a timid or cautious bureaucrat. As his wife, Nadine, commented one day when a visitor to their capital apartment noted how curious it was that her husband had a Soviet RPG grenade launcher, an AK-47 with a large supply of live ammunition, and other captured weapons from the Afghan war, “Oh, Charlie’s rule in life is: ‘Don’t pay attention to the rules.’”

Schnabel was in fact something of a Texas legend—and in spite of his penchant for stretching the rules, the senators who had known him over the years never felt he had ever done anything bad. They figured that the Schnabels of the world are the ones who make the system work in spite of itself. There had been one embarrassing incident, a prosecution centering on a political favor he had done for a college sports program. He was indicted but plea-bargained his way out with a misdemeanor conviction. His old senatorial friends stood by him, and in a Wilsonesque statement, Schnabel remarked to the press, “I always like to do what I can for American sports.”

Wilson was not one to be put off by the accusations of some mean-spirited prosecutor, and in late 1984 he called Schnabel and asked him to take over Simpson’s job as his administrative assistant. “The answer was no. Schnabel had had many other offers to go to Washington over the years, but he liked his life in Texas. He liked his 120-year-old farmhouse near Austin, he loved his hunting and fishing, and he was a part of the life of the state—a man with so many debts owed him that he could almost live out the rest of his life just calling in the chits.

“Don’t say no,” Wilson implored, and thus began a full-court press. “Don’t worry about the hunting,” the congressman said on the phone. “I’m on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, and anywhere in the world where we have a defense facility you can fly there and hunt. They’ll take care of you.”

This curious offer caught Schnabel’s attention, so when Wilson sent him a plane ticket and spending money to come up to the capital to look it over, he accepted the invitation. He wasn’t planning to be swept away, but the romance of Washington started to work on him, and Nadine, who had joined him on the trip, turned out to have relatives who lived nearby. She wanted to stay.

The next day Schnabel went out and bought a house—an act that he purposefully concealed from Wilson when he went in for a final chat. “I told him I was still worried about the hunting,” remembers the cunning negotiator. Wilson then iced the deal with a hard-and-fast repetition of his commitment: “Don’t worry about the hunting.”

In Schnabel’s scrapbooks from these Washington years, gory documentation of Wilson having made good on his promise is revealed on page after page. The pictures show the congressman’s AA in camouflage uniform near a military base with bow and arrow by his side, holding up a gentle-faced Bambi by its antlers. In another location Schnabel, with Texas Speaker of the House Gib Lewis, is grinning into the camera. The two good old boys are in northern Pakistan, on the Silk Route from China, in search of the nearly extinct Marco Polo sheep. The animal is very much on the endangered species list, but Schnabel explains proudly that President Zia himself waived this prohibition and provided the congressman’s esteemed assistant with an official guide and a Mercedes to hunt the beast. In another picture we see Schnabel beaming as he presents Zia with a ten-gallon hat, custom-made in Texas for the Muslim dictator.

One particularly gruesome set of photos reveals a pickup truck piled high with deer from the grounds of the Indian Head, Maryland, navy base. Schnabel explains that this deadly harvest of deer came from the night he led a SEAL team on a hunting spree, everyone wearing night-vision goggles and shouting
“Allahu Akbar”
before unloading their high-powered weapons into the unsuspecting prey. The resulting venison, properly blessed before slaughter, was then given to a collection of visiting Afghan fundamentalists.

In a sense, Washington never knew what hit it when Charlie Schnabel came to town. To a certain extent, Charlie Wilson didn’t either. Until Schnabel’s arrival, Wilson had worked the Afghan account in Congress all alone. His defense staffer rarely knew what the congressman was up to. But Schnabel is a self-starter with a gift, if not a genius, for getting along with people, and he began making friends with the mujahideen who visited the congressman’s office.

In the beginning, Schnabel admits, it was not so much the purity of the Afghans’ cause that got to him as much as the romance of it all and the fact that “it was just exciting, just so much goddamn much fun. I’d talk to these muj when they’d come into the office and ask them, ‘What can I hunt in Afghanistan? I want to kill something.’ And they’d say ‘Come to the Panjshir, it’s the greatest hunting in the world—the Panjshir Valley.’” So while other adventuresome Americans who became fixated on Afghanistan always wanted to go to the Panjshir to meet Ahmad Shah Massoud, the great mujahideen commander, Schnabel was drawn to Massoud’s valley for very different reasons. He was desperate to go because the Panjshir is where you find the Marco Polo sheep and the ibex.

When it came to all things to do with Afghanistan, Wilson’s relationship to his administrative assistant was eccentric in the extreme. The two never really coordinated their efforts, and Wilson rarely chose to include Schnabel in his CIA dealings. But he always encouraged his AA’s Afghan interests, and before long the two men had worked out an implicit understanding of the rules of engagement they would follow.

It went something like this: Schnabel had Wilson’s blessings to intimidate bureaucrats in his name: he could smuggle contraband to the mujahideen; he could also carry stationery from the office, write letters requesting unusual assistance from, say, the Pakistan intelligence service, and sign them “Charles Wilson.” All of this Schnabel was empowered to do, and as his passion for the Afghan cause grew, he came to operate with such frequency and effectiveness in Wilson’s name that Abdul Haq, one of the legendary Afghan commanders and a favorite of American reporters, remarked, “We used to think of the two Charlies as one.” And President Zia, after receiving a ten-gallon hat, took to affectionately calling Schnabel “The Other Charlie.”

In effect, during those years, Charlie Schnabel came to operate as a virtual second Charlie Wilson. The result was to substantially enhance Wilson’s ability to influence events. During this period the real Charlie Wilson would take the high road as the patron and defender of the CIA’s Afghan program. Schnabel, meanwhile, as the congressman’s representative, moved about as the undercover bomb thrower, organizing the Andy Eiva–Gordon Humphrey–style crazies who saw the Agency as the enemy. Schnabel himself had come to see the Agency as the problem and his boss as an apologist of sorts. But he forgave Wilson this sin because the two of them were playing a kind of good cop, bad cop routine.

Without any direct commission, Schnabel was soon operating along the fringes, helping to menace bureaucrats, including some at the CIA, and stirring the pot for the muj in ways that Wilson felt he could not afford to do openly. In a sense he became the dark side of Charlie Wilson, free to operate but with the implicit understanding that if he got in trouble he was on his own.

The way he got to the front was by wrangling seats on the Pentagon’s humanitarian-aid flights to Pakistan. Inevitably, in those early years before the prohibitions on the CIA’s support program were lifted, Schnabel could be counted on to be overloaded with contraband for the mujahideen. On one of his first flights it was long-range sights for sniper rifles. John McMahon wouldn’t let the Agency give them to the mujahideen out of fear that Congress might accuse the CIA of supporting assassination efforts. Schnabel had gotten his rich Texas friends to put up the money for the telescopic sights, and as was his custom, he told Wilson about his smuggling exploits only after the fact.

The old Texas politician always greased his way with charming stories and gifts for everyone on every end: captured Soviet war trinkets for the American officials who manned the humanitarian-aid flights, and American military items or congressional pens and seals for the Pakistani ISI agents waiting at the airfield. They looked the other way because he was such a charmer, because he was speaking in Congressman Wilson’s name, and because Schnabel would do such things as get their children scholarships to Texas universities, or visas or medical care through the burgeoning programs that would be opened up in the coming years.

As Schnabel got deeper and deeper into the war, he began crossing lines further and further into no-man’s-land. There would be live ammunition strewn about his small office; Makarov pistols, AK-47s, and an RPG grenade launcher under his bed at home; and down in the congressional storeroom, so many rugs and fur coats from Pakistan that it resembled a small market.

But it was his love of the Afghan people that burned deepest in Schnabel’s sensibilities. In the scrapbooks he keeps are scores of photographic portraits of different mujahideen. All those faces of old men and young boys, faces of noble warriors wearing turbans and Chitrali hats. “You don’t see much ferocity in the eyes of a mujahideen,” he explains paging through the books. “Rather it’s the steady, calm, ‘I’m going to get you’ look. They would tell me, ‘We won’t stop till the blood is flowing in the streets of Moscow.’ They’d say it as a matter of fact ‘because God is on our side and Allah will prevail, but we are willing to fight to the last man’ and it was no bullshit. They all grew up that way. They grew up as hunters.”

Soon after falling in love with the mujahideen, Schnabel dressed himself up in their clothes and went off with them on operations, in violation of the strict embassy ban on any U.S. officials crossing the border. Inside Afghanistan he would discover the wonder of
naswar,
the opiated snuff that the Afghans put under their tongues for inspiration. They would come to call him “Naswar Charlie,” and back in Washington, one emotional night, he would even go so far as to convert to Islam, taking the name Abdullah.

All of this Schnabel did very much on his own, but in the eyes of everyone he dealt with, he was always operating in Charlie Wilson’s name. And what made it possible for him to operate so effectively in what was supposed to be the CIA’s arena had nothing to do with the U.S. spy agency. It was, rather, his relationship to a seemingly innocent, humanitarian-aid program run by the Agency for International Development (AID). In large measure because of the two Charlies, this seemingly innocent program would be transformed into an indispensable second front in the CIA’s Afghan war.

The State Department official initially responsible for setting up this effort, known as the Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program, was Assistant Secretary of State Gerald Helman. As he tells the story, by early 1985 Afghanistan had suddenly become a hot program in the National Security bureaucracies. The conservative revolution was in full swing. Ronald Reagan had just won reelection by a landslide, and the State Department did not want to look as if it were failing to support the Reagan Doctrine, which called for U.S. support of anti-Communist guerrillas.

State first sensed an opportunity when the tough old veteran U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at this time, Dean Hinton, met with Helman and began to urge action to counter a crisis that he saw developing on the Afghan border. Hinton was one of the handful of career diplomats who during the Cold War always seemed to be posted in spots where the CIA was active.
*
In 1984, before going out to Pakistan, Hinton had talked to all the experts and found no one who thought there was any chance whatsoever of pushing the Red Army out of Afghanistan.