Charlie Wilson's War (6 page)

These read like lines for a Jimmy Stewart character, but the sentiments were very much Wilson’s own. In later life he would usually disguise such nakedly idealistic thoughts. That letter, however, without any hint of self-consciousness, is key to understanding Wilson’s later compulsion to be the lone cowboy sounding the alert, mobilizing “the forces of freedom.”

Patrolling the seas during those Cold War years, Wilson came personally to feel the menace and reach of Soviet power. His destroyer spent most of its time chasing the Soviet submarines that hounded the fleet. The destroyers purposefully badgered them with mock attacks, forcing them under for days on end. The great triumph would come when, after two or three days of pursuit, a sub would finally be forced to surface. The Americans would snap photos of the disgraced Russians and give them the finger, while the enemy would shake their fists in return. “I always kept my depth charges on total alert,” Wilson recalls with bravado. On more than one occasion, the young gunnery officer appealed to the ship’s captain to permit him to blast one of the subs. “I promised a clean kill,” Wilson recalls. “Nobody would have ever known what happened to the fuckers, but they wouldn’t let me do it.”

After three years at sea chasing Russian submarines, Wilson was assigned to a top secret post at the Pentagon, where he was part of an intelligence unit that evaluated the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces. Having chased Soviet submarines, he now found himself rehearsing for all-out nuclear war. Back then, the U.S. response time to an incoming Soviet nuclear attack was thirty-five minutes. There were frequent simulated attacks, and Charlie often stood in for the top generals, who had only seven minutes to dive into waiting helicopters to be flown to the “Rock,” the secret underground bunker carved into a Maryland mountain. “I would be sitting there where the button is, and if you’re twenty-seven, it makes you feel very cocky knowing that here’s Moscow, and here’s Kiev, and if they fuck with us I’ll just hit all these buttons.”

In spite of his bravado, the experience was sobering. Day after day he confronted the reality of an enemy he knew was rehearsing America’s nuclear destruction, and he resented it. It became a lifelong obsession to bring down this evil power. And all of his idealism and patriotic passions, which had been building since childhood, suddenly found an inspirational outlet when John Kennedy launched his campaign for the presidency.

Kennedy appealed to every aspect of the young naval officer’s imagination: a war hero, he was a dashing, handsome idealist rallying the country to greatness and making it all look like fun. After work each day, hours spent studying the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile threat, Wilson would rush from the Pentagon to the Kennedy campaign headquarters, where he volunteered. Like so many others of his generation, Wilson became caught up in the aura of romance that Kennedy lent to public service.

It’s not legal for active-duty servicemen to campaign for public office, but Wilson decided to disregard that detail. He took thirty days’ leave from the navy and entered his name in the race for Texas state representative. Tall and skinny, always dressed in a suit, Wilson ran his campaign in East Texas the way the Kennedys had made famous in Massachusetts. His mother, his sister, and all their friends went door to door selling the idea of Charlie as a fresh, new idea in Texas politics. He won and managed to complete his Pentagon tour without anyone noticing his entry into the political arena. In 1961, at twenty-seven, he was sworn in to office in Austin, Texas, the same month his political role model became the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

For the next twelve years Wilson made his reputation in Texas as the “liberal from Lufkin,” viewed with suspicion by business interests. He battled for the regulation of utilities and fought for Medicaid, tax exemptions for the elderly, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a minimum-wage bill.
*
Historically, the Second District congressional seat had been a hard place for a liberal Democrat to seek office. It was an ultra-right-wing political franchise, made famous by Martin Dies, a red-baiting inquisitor who had unapologetically forced child actress Shirley Temple to testify about her supposed knowledge of Communists in Hollywood. But fortune knocked when Dies’s successor, the incumbent congressman John Dowdy, was caught taking a bribe. Wilson immediately threw himself into the special election, in spite of a recent arrest for drunk driving and its attendant highly embarrassing mug shot. By that time he had become something of a legend in Austin as a hell-raiser, and his opponent capitalized on this, papering the district with blowups of the mug shot of the unmistakably inebriated Wilson and the question “Do you want this man to represent you in the U.S. Congress?”

In spite of this, Charlie won, demonstrating the intuitive understanding of and bond with his Bible Belt constituents that would allow him to hold onto their support through the many scandals that lay ahead. Unlike other politicians, Wilson never tried to hide his failings from his constituents. In fact, he seemed almost to turn his innocent sins to his advantage. Time and again it seemed that the voters of the Second Congressional District would forgive him almost anything if he was honest with them. What they hated was hypocrisy, and whatever his shortcomings, Wilson was no hypocrite. There was, perhaps, one other reason why the dour, supposedly puritanical voters chose to make Charlie Wilson their representative: the Second District can be a deadly boring place except when Charlie was there. People couldn’t help but like and forgive this boyish politician who always made them feel good whenever he entered a room.

During the 1960s and ’70s, as he built his political base in East Texas, Wilson could never shake the feeling that he had cheated his country by not giving the twenty years of military service expected of Annapolis men. He had been too young to serve in World War II, he had been at the Naval Academy during Korea, and when it came time for Vietnam he found himself as a freshman congressman reluctantly voting against the war. As he saw it, America’s South Vietnamese allies just weren’t willing to fight, and for Charlie Wilson, that meant they weren’t worth backing. In those days it was very much in the mainstream for a young liberal Democrat to vote against the war. But it always made him feel a bit like a traitor.

Wilson’s first serious entry into the arena of U.S. foreign affairs came in his first year in office in 1973, when he discovered the cause of Israel. U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state, national security advisers, and CIA directors would invariably be puzzled by what prompted Wilson to take up the curious causes he chose to champion. Often they would suspect the basest motives—outright payoffs or some other ulterior temptation. The real explanation begins with his mother, Wilmuth.

Wilmuth Wilson was a woman of conviction. In Trinity, Texas, a conservative southern community, she was the town liberal and a force to be reckoned with. A mainstay of the Democratic Party and a pillar of her church, she stood out as a fearless defender of the rights of Trinity’s black citizens. “I suspect ours was the only house in town where the word
nigger
wasn’t used,” Charlie remembers. She openly befriended blacks, and throughout the Depression, when hoboes and tramps would come to the back door to see if they could sharpen knives in exchange for a meal, Wilmuth would always send Charlie to talk with them, telling him that they were good people just down on their luck. “Always,” she told her young son and his kid sister, Sharon (who would go on to become chairman of the board of Planned Parenthood), “always stand up for the underdog. If you’re ever in doubt, back the underdog.”

As corny as it may sound, the lesson took. It certainly helps to explain why, two years before he was elected to Congress, Charlie Wilson was the only person in Lufkin, Texas, who subscribed to the
Jerusalem Post.
He made this unusual move immediately after reading
Exodus,
Leon Uris’s novel about the founding of the modern state of Israel. It was the ultimate story about worthy underdogs, the kind Wilmuth had taught him to honor.

Wilson had been in Congress only a few months and had just won a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee when Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the combined forces of the Arab League launched a surprise attack on Israel during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. For a few days, as Wilson followed every news account, he thought the Arab forces might actually overrun the Jewish state. At one point he became so concerned that he put in a call to the Israeli embassy, asking the switchboard operator to connect him with someone who could brief him about the war.

In Washington during those days, the Israeli embassy was a center of remarkably effective intrigue. Its mission was to support the survival of Israel by ensuring the billions in economic and military assistance that the United States gives each year. Jewish congressmen and senators were natural allies and visited regularly. So, too, were elected officials with many Jewish constituents. What made the call from Charlie Wilson to the embassy’s congressional liaison officer, Zvi Rafiah, so unusual was that Wilson is not Jewish and had virtually no Jews in his district.

Rafiah is a very short, very smart Israeli who Wilson always believed was a highly placed Mossad agent. He was used to dealing with all sorts of people, but he says he has never encountered anyone like Wilson. To begin with, Rafiah was not accustomed to having congressmen or senators come to him; they always summoned him, and he would appear at their offices armed with charts, maps, slides, military attachés, and ministers.

Wilson’s arrival an hour after his call startled Rafiah. He was wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson and from the perspective of the five-foot-six Rafiah, the congressman looked like a giant. But what surprised the Israeli most was Wilson’s impressive command of military history and his keen understanding of weapons and tactics. Rafiah quickly realized that Wilson had developed a powerful identification with the Israeli cause, and when the congressman said he wanted to go to Israel immediately, Rafiah was quick to accommodate.

Three days later Wilson was driving in a jeep in the Sinai with fellow representative Ed Koch. The Israeli army was taking them to the front of the Yom Kippur War, sweeping them past still burning Soviet tanks. He was ecstatic to be in the presence of these heroic warriors. It was the beginning of a ten-year love affair with everything to do with Israel. “I bought the whole thing—the beleaguered democracy surrounded by Soviet-armed barbarians—survivors of Nazi concentration camps—David versus Goliath.”

Wilson would go on to become one of Israel’s most important congressional champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents. Years later Zvi Rafiah would muse on this curiosity: “I visited his district once, and I was very impressed with the oil pumps and the big fat cows lying in the shade. Every time I describe a rich country, I describe this scene in Lufkin—the cows in the shade of the oil pumps. But believe me, there are no Jews in Lufkin.”

There was perhaps another ingredient beyond his mother’s exhortations that went into Wilson’s embrace of Israel. His future co-conspirator in Afghanistan, the CIA’s Gust Avrakotos, suggests that Charlie had a kind of James Bond syndrome: “As I saw it, the tie that bound us together was chasing pussy and killing Communists.” Avrakotos’ blunt language tends to turn people off, but the CIA man has a raw genius for understanding what makes Wilson tick. And his point is that, along with a worthy underdog to champion, two other ingredients were necessary to fully mobilize Charlie Wilson: a Communist bully to put down and a beautiful woman by his side.

In Israel it began with a raven-haired captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. She was the congressman’s official guide to the war zone, and Wilson’s infatuation began on that first trip into the desert to see the burning Russian tanks. Ed Koch still remembers his horror when the beautiful captain’s commanding officer, offended by her growing fascination with the goy in the cowboy hat, ordered her not to return the next day. Koch saw Wilson as a potentially invaluable asset to Israel: a non-Jew on the Foreign Affairs Committee who was more passionate about Israel than any of its Jewish members. “He was unique,” Koch recalls. “An oil man who was pro-Israel.” Koch quickly took the commander aside. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “The woman is twenty-one. Let her take care of herself.” Captain Lilatoff remained at her post.

Wilson admits that he was infatuated with the beautiful officer whose husband was off fighting in Egypt. But he says the relationship remained purely platonic, mainly because a few days later, in the lobby of his hotel, he was introduced to Israel’s leading movie star, Gila Almagor. “I remember thinking, This is a hell of a place. You get Russian tanks burning on the desert, beautiful captains, and movie stars.” To Wilson, Israel was filled with nothing but glorious underdogs who didn’t want or need Americans to fight their wars for them. All they were asking for was U.S. military supplies and economic assistance, to counter the Arabs who wanted nothing less than to use their Soviet arsenals to annihilate Israel.

By the time he got back to Washington, Wilson had become, in his own words, “an Israeli commando” in the U.S. Congress. And quite to his surprise and delight, a remarkable thing happened: The Jews of Houston and Dallas discovered the congressman from Lufkin. Without any solicitation, contributions began rolling in from all over the country. “The AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] people loved me because here I was, a cowboy from Texas, hysterical about their cause,” remembers Wilson. The congressman soon found himself giving the major United Jewish Appeal speech of the year in Washington and addressing Young Jewish Leadership conferences all over the country.

This friendship with Israel grew so intimate that, years later, when Wilson determined that the CIA wasn’t willing to provide Afghan rebels with an effective mule-portable anti-aircraft gun, he secretly asked the Israelis to design one. They came through, as they always did. And when Wilson was engulfed in a drug scandal that jeopardized his 1984 reelection campaign, Ed Koch mobilized supporters in New York and Jewish backers of Israel from all across the country to pony up $100,000 in campaign contributions and save the day. It was also the Jews in Congress who would rally to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee, where he could help make sure the annual $3 billion a year in aid continued to flow. Getting the Appropriations assignment as a junior congressman was an amazing political maneuver because his own Texas delegation opposed it; they backed a Texan with more seniority. The only other congressman to ever defy his own delegation and seek an Appropriations seat was Lyndon Johnson; but LBJ failed. It was Wilson’s Jewish friends who made it possible.