Charlie Wilson's War (50 page)

But as the CIA funding mushroomed that fall, so did Hinton’s enthusiasm for the operation. “For the first time we were playing offense instead of defense,” he explains. He was unnerved, however, by a series of intelligence reports that concluded that the Soviets were laying waste to a huge strip of land between the Pakistani border and their major garrisons and cities in Afghanistan. Villages were being bombed, irrigation canals destroyed, livestock slaughtered, crops burned, and civilians murdered, tortured, and forced to flee the country. If this were permitted to continue, it was argued, the war would be lost before the new military assistance could have an impact. Guerrillas simply couldn’t wander on foot across vast uninhabitable areas. Famine and disease were said to be moving at a terrifying pace. As important as anything else was the total absence of any medical care. If this continued, the entire military program would be in jeopardy. Hinton warned Helman that something had to be done to stop the flow of refugees and keep the Afghans in their villages as sources of support for the warriors. He used the term
genocide
to describe the war policy the Red Army was pursuing over the border.

Helman was not exactly a daring official. Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing, and the leadership of the department had already taken note of the fact that Congress was not just smiling on the CIA’s Afghan program; it was hurling money at the problem and browbeating the administration to do more. Specifically, the State Department’s leaders noted that Congress, through Charlie Wilson’s Oerlikon bill, had earmarked money to provide humanitarian aid to the mujahideen. After listening to Hinton’s warnings, Helman decided to endorse the veteran diplomat’s proposal that the State Department contribute to the war effort by starting a humanitarian-aid program under its banner.

Thus was born the Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program. It was initially conceived as a modest program to smuggle food and some medical care across the border—a total of $6 million for 1985. The State Department considered the program to be highly provocative, since it would be the first U.S. effort to openly provide aid to the mujahideen in the war zone.

In truth, very little could be done with $6 million. To complicate matters, the Agency for International Development, which was assigned the task, had little interest in running a program that sounded a lot like a CIA operation. During Vietnam, AID had gotten burned rather badly for providing cover to CIA operatives and for running programs that were very much part of the CIA’s efforts. As Helman explains the dilemma, “We were violating a lot of ground rules that said you shouldn’t interfere in the private affairs of another country and certainly should not be operating covertly against another country’s will.” As a result, the AID leadership would have preferred to have nothing to do with this program. They initially planned only to provide the Pakistanis with humanitarian goods and let them distribute the material to the Afghans. And had it not been for Charlie Wilson, the program almost certainly would have remained small, cautious, and not particularly worthy of comment.

But the Cross Border program happened to come on-line just as Wilson had decided to use his appropriations muscle to fund an effort devised by a California doctor—a friend of Charles Fawcett’s—to train and send cadres of combat medics into Afghanistan. This zealous figure, Dr. Bob Simon, had already enlisted one hundred American volunteers, doctors and nurses, a third of them from Texas. They were to teach the Afghans themselves how to care for their wounded and ill. His ambitions went beyond simple battlefield medicine; he wanted to use this American volunteer effort to focus world attention on the atrocities being committed by the Red Army. As far as Wilson was concerned, this was precisely what the Cross Border program should support.

The idea of encouraging, much less openly funding, Americans to enter the CIA’s proxy war was just about the last thing State and AID wanted to permit. The task of explaining to Wilson why it was not going to be possible to fund his doctor was given to Assistant Secretary Gerald Helman. And for Charlie Schnabel, who had just joined Wilson’s office, the experience of witnessing what happened to the veteran diplomat was an eye-opening introduction into the kind of leverage he would later put to use as Wilson’s surrogate.

Helman was solicitous with Wilson. He said the State Department was indebted to the congressman for his role in helping launch the program. Then he explained that, as Wilson could well understand, there were national security concerns that demanded certain restraints in the kinds of support that the United States could provide. Chief among those was an absolute prohibition on any Americans crossing the border. “It’s too risky to expose Americans to danger and perhaps cause them to be taken hostage,” he said.

To this day Helman is amazed at Wilson’s response: “Hell, that’s exactly what I’m aiming for. I want to use American doctors as bait so they’ll be captured and force our chickenshit government to give the muj an anti-aircraft cannon that will take care of the Hind Mi-24 helicopter.” Wilson remembers a somewhat tamer response, but acknowledges that he made it clear that if American doctors wanted to go into the war zone, that was their privilege. Whatever his actual words, they were enough to startle the diplomat.

“I had to pinch myself,” remembers Helman. “I couldn’t figure out if he was pulling my leg. No one in his right mind would want that, but he said this in a room full of people.”

When Helman dug in his heels and refused to budge, Wilson finally summoned Under Secretary of State Michael Armacost to his office for a showdown. Under secretaries are particularly solicitous of the few senior members of the Foreign Operations subcommittee. There can be terrible problems if one of these representatives decides to seek vengeance, and the way Wilson put his question to Armacost left the official in a precarious place. “Look, Mike,” he said, “if it’s State’s position that the president’s policy is wrong, then say so directly. Clearly, the president intended for wounded mujahideen to have medical care, and if you don’t want to do it then you better tell me.”

Wilson remembers this confrontation as “one of my better performances. I was still drinking and at my absolute meanest. I told him that in my twelve years in Washington I had never seen any single bureaucrat so able to frustrate the will both of the president and Congress as Gerry Helman.”

Soon after, Helman was relieved of his responsibilities for the Cross Border Program, and Simon, over Helman’s dead bureaucratic body, was given a $600,000 grant to set up operations in Peshawar close to the border. Schnabel marveled at Wilson’s ability to take down an assistant secretary. The congressman would soon offer an equally vivid illustration of his power to reward as well as to punish.

The congressman had assumed the very worst when Larry Crandall, the man AID had picked to head up the Cross Border program, asked to see him. The pink-faced bureaucrat with the somewhat self-satisfied air had reminded Wilson of Helman, and he had been harsh with him, saying, “Until you prove to me that you have vials of morphine and medical care going into the mujahideen, I don’t want to see you in here.”

What Wilson had no way of knowing at the time was that Larry Crandall was a bureaucratic gunslinger—another of those self-appointed crusaders who somehow found themselves being pulled into Charlie Wilson’s orbit. Crandall had reached that time in his life when he wanted to make his mark, and it was as if all of his professional years had been spent preparing him for this assignment. As a young AID officer in Vietnam, he had worked intimately with the CIA, supervising an interrogation center. Just before the Soviet invasion, he had served two years in Kabul. He knew the people and the terrain. Equally as important, Crandall was respected at AID and something of a genius at knowing how to push his timid agency to the absolute breaking point.

His first move, once he arrived in Peshawar on September 2, 1985, instantly put him into a league of his own. He had $6 million to spend by September 30, the end of the fiscal year. It was money the president had taken out of a Syrian AID program, and if he didn’t spend it by the deadline, it would be lost to the Treasury. Another AID man might have taken the safe course and thrown the money into the bottomless pit of refugee assistance.

But Crandall had visited the same border clinics that had radicalized Wilson. “I saw what kind of damage was being done and I started to think, These no good S.O.B.s can’t get away with this.” Crandall wasn’t interested in playing it safe with the Agency for International Development’s money. He was already into the war and sensed that anything he might want to do required a relationship with the mujahideen leaders. With what appeared to be reckless abandon, he issued orders to buy hundreds of brand-new Isuzu and Toyota four-wheel-drives and trucks, which he promptly presented to the leading Afghan commanders. The only condition was that the vehicles be used in the fighting and absolutely not for commerce inside Pakistan.

“I wanted to make a big impression on them quickly,” Crandall explains. “I wanted to hit them fast with something big so they would take us seriously. It got us into a lot of trouble with AID, because AID likes to think when it buys vehicles for the government they are in a parking lot at night so that they can be counted. In this case most of the trucks disappeared, never to be seen again, and AID couldn’t understand this. But it established our bona fides with the mujahideen. All of a sudden those bastards loved us. And all of a sudden it gave me access that no one else had.”

That was typical of Crandall—a bold move early on to get the attention of the men he would need later. To his surprise, he had discovered that neither the CIA nor the U.S. embassy had any overt contact with the mujahideen. In fairness to the embassy, that was because Zia had outlawed it. So when Crandall asked to meet some of the resistance leaders, the consulate couldn’t help him. By chance, while walking down the streets of Peshawar, he ran headlong into one of the locals who used to work for him at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. “I told him my problem—that I had to get in touch with the resistance but the embassy didn’t know how to do it. That was at six
P.M.
, and by two
A.M.
my hotel room was filled with mujahideen.”

For the first time, a U.S. government official was talking and negotiating with the warriors the CIA had been arming for five years. The CIA was still not permitted to meet these people, but Crandall reasoned that since he was running an overt program, supposedly dealing only in humanitarian aid, the prohibition did not apply to him.

No one had told him to do this and certainly none of his bosses would have liked the idea, but Crandall was now beginning to operate his AID program the way the CIA would ordinarily have moved in any other country where it was supporting a rebel force. The specific objective and the exact nature of all of Crandall’s plans would remain essentially concealed for many years, even though the program was technically overt and would grow to over $100 million a year.

Avrakotos tends to dismiss Crandall’s efforts as inept and clogged with unnecessary bureaucracy, but the truth is that this program fast became a critical second front in the CIA’s war, in more ways than one. Certainly Crandall had the kind of mind and experience that could rival that of most chiefs of station, and everything he did in designing and running this rapidly expanding and supposedly open humanitarian-aid program was designed to make a difference in the mujahideen’s fighting power.

Crandall was actually no stranger to the CIA. His first big AID job had been in a Vietnam province, working side by side with the Agency’s Phoenix program operatives. They were selectively killing suspected Vietcong while he was trying to win the loyalty of the local Vietnamese. He had walked away with a keen sense of how easy it was for a determined guerrilla force to wreak havoc with a superpower.

During Crandall’s two years in Kabul he had not been particularly charmed by Afghanistan. But he’d left with profound respect for the Afghans’ orneriness and had paid little attention to the pessimists who’d seemed to dominate the policy circles around the Afghan question. He was stunned by how down the embassy officials were about the Afghans’ prospects when he arrived to survey the situation. “Everyone was constantly talking about Russian stick-to-itiveness as opposed to U.S. jumpiness.”

His own very different conclusion, after meeting the Afghans, was almost identical to that of Mike Vickers: there weren’t enough Soviet troops to pacify that country. The key was to keep the Afghans in the battle; as long as they didn’t become demoralized, they could do the same thing as the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. He set out to use AID’s money to win the hearts and minds of the Afghans.

The vision of America buying Third World hearts and minds in Vietnam had become discredited. But as Crandall saw its Afghan application, it simply meant doing more than just giving out guns. The Cross Border program had been started to counter the Soviets’ scorched-earth policy—to stop the flow of refugees out of Afghanistan. That meant, first of all, getting out food and medicine and a reason for people to stay in their villages. As Crandall saw it, that could only be done if the commanders became true leaders able to care for their own families and to offer things of material value to their people.

But how do you offset the horrors of a war zone? To begin with, it meant he had to take AID into the smuggling business in a big way—with trucks and mules and camels and donkeys to slip in food and medicine. Later he organized training for teachers and supplied kits for them to pack in over the mountains to establish underground schools in devastated villages. Within a year he would be doling out tens of millions of dollars to the private volunteer organizations that began to flock into the Muslim stronghold of Peshawar, so that American nurses, doctors, and health workers could set up shop, not only providing care in Pakistan but constantly training new cadres of Afghan men and women to provide health care inside the war zone.