Charlie Wilson's War (7 page)

From his new position on Appropriations, Wilson began to learn how Israel and other special interests use their power. He discovered that the authorizing committees, like Foreign Affairs, were little more than debating societies. He now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year. He watched and saw how one man, if he’s on the right subcommittee and knows how to play the system, can move the entire nation to fund a program or cause of his choice.

By the late 1970s, Wilson was starting to feel his power. He had become part of a small tribe of Democrats alarmed by what they perceived to be a policy of appeasement by their own party. The Israelis had been whispering in Wilson’s ear ever since Jimmy Carter came into office that the United States was getting soft, looking the other way as the Communists advanced everywhere unchecked. But Wilson’s concerns were independent of the Israelis’. He genuinely believed that the Soviets were out to conquer the world. And he was unnerved when he saw the pictures of President Carter embracing Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev and kissing him on both cheeks at the arms-control talks. To him it was an ominous replay of that critical moment before World War II when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, pursuing his policy of appeasement, emerged from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time.”

Timing is everything, and it was just at this moment, with these dark thoughts racing in Wilson’s head, that Congressman Jack Murphy appeared in Charlie’s office to make an appeal. Murphy was the kind of Democrat Wilson could relate to, a West Point graduate and decorated Korean War veteran. They were drinking friends, but Murphy had not come to socialize. The two considered themselves part of a lonely group of Democrats holding the line against the Soviets. And Murphy was preaching to the converted when he savaged the president for appeasing the Communists. Now, he said, Carter was about to betray America’s oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America. It was unconscionable to stand by and let it happen, and Wilson was the only man in Congress with the power and the balls to stop it.

Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza was a particularly unattractive dictator, with thick black-rimmed glasses, weighty jowls, and a disturbing leer when he smiled. But over a bottle of Scotch in Wilson’s private office, Murphy told a heartwarming story about how he had gotten to know Tacho as a schoolboy at LaSalle Military Academy in New York, and later as his roommate at West Point. Somoza had created a little U.S.A. in Nicaragua, Murphy explained; the U.S. Army had trained his entire army officer corps, and his son was a Harvard man.

More important, he reminded Wilson, the dictator had turned his country over to the CIA in 1954, when it had needed help to overthrow the Guatemalan government, and Tacho had played a critical role in the Bay of Pigs as well. His only crime, Murphy said, was that he always supported the United States, and now Jimmy Carter wanted to destroy him because the hand wringers at the State Department claimed he was violating human rights. At that very moment, Murphy announced to dramatize his point, the Cuban—and Soviet-armed—Sandinista guerrillas were attacking the cities of Nicaragua. If Wilson didn’t use his leverage on the Appropriations Committee to try to protect Tacho, Carter would get away with cutting off all Somoza’s military and economic aid, at a moment when it might just do him in.

The zeal with which Wilson took up the challenge caught everyone, particularly the Carter White House and the State Department, utterly by surprise. By the time Charlie intervened, saving Somoza seemed to be a lost cause. The Appropriations Subcommittee had already sent the bill that cut Somoza’s funding to the House floor. The unwritten rules of the Appropriations Committee dictate that members don’t challenge the overall subcommittee bills once they have been reported out. But in a stunning political maneuver, Wilson took the Nicaraguan-aid issue to the floor, where he threatened to scuttle the president’s entire foreign-aid bill if Somoza’s money was not restored. He told his colleagues that Somoza had done “an enormous amount of dirty work for the U.S., that he was virtually an arm of U.S. intelligence.” It was hardly a popular cause. The columnist Jack Anderson had just labeled Somoza the greediest dictator in the world, to which Wilson responded, “No one is perfect, no one is pure.” Miraculously, Wilson won the first round. To the disgust of liberals, the media, and the administration, Somoza’s entire $3.1 million aid package was restored. A jubilant Representative Murphy insisted that Wilson accompany him to Managua over the July 4 recess to meet Tacho.

One of Wilson’s more endearing features is an ability to understand how ridiculous he often looks to those witnessing his antics. Many years later he would recall with humor the lavish dinner party Somoza threw for him. “Everyone was looking at me with enormous respect,” Wilson recalled, “as if I were Simón Bolívar. Tacho gave this great toast in which he credited me with being the only thing preserving freedom in the hemisphere. The entire oligarchy of Managua was there applauding. I will admit, it was kind of heady.”

After the toasts, Somoza invited Wilson into his private underground office in the bunker. “It was kind of Hitlerian,” Wilson recalls. Somoza would later spend his final days in Nicaragua in that bunker, vainly directing his army to bomb the cities of his country as the Sandinistas closed in on him. But that night Somoza, flushed with the victory in Congress, was brimming over with bravado.

The dictator was seated in front of a giant West Point flag. “I want you to know that dealing with Tacho Somoza is not a one-way street,” he said, leering as he took a thick wad of greenbacks out of his desk drawer. He mumbled something about campaign contributions.

“I almost shit,” Wilson remembers. “I said, ‘Well, not now. I don’t need any money now. Maybe in the future.’” The congressman says he was not about to take the money, but he couldn’t quite get himself to turn it down completely. “It just looked so tempting,” he says, remembering Somoza mentioning the figure of $50,000. “In those days that was a good bit of change, but I didn’t take the fucking money.”

Wilson says the rejection made for an awkward moment. In spite of this, the dictator managed to win him over. Wilson liked the West Point flag in the bunker, the dictator’s easy American slang, his friendship with General Alexander Haig, and his bravado. Beyond that, they shared a common bond over Israel. Wilson’s Israeli friends had spoken glowingly about Tacho’s father, who had opened up Nicaragua for European Jews before World War II and voted for Israel’s entry into the United Nations. “He was a soul brother to the Israelis,” Wilson explains, someone they owed and supported to the very end. (There was even a shipload of Israeli weapons on its way when Somoza fell.) And Wilson was particularly swayed by the Israelis’ insistence that Jimmy Carter’s human-rights policy was shortsighted and that Tacho was by far less evil than anything that might follow.

Most of Wilson’s Democratic colleagues, certainly most of the American press corps, and eventually most of the Nicaraguan people came to view Somoza as a corrupt dictator guilty of ruthless force against his own people. But Wilson saw him through his own peculiar lens as an abandoned and betrayed U.S. ally threatened by every Russian-backed leftist in the hemisphere. He was running a rearguard action from the Appropriations Committee to save Somoza, even threatening to torpedo the president’s highest priority, the Panama Canal Treaty. But the tide in America had turned against such indiscriminate anti-Communism, and Wilson thought he had used up all his options to rescue Somoza. That is, until he found himself face-to-face with the renegade ex-CIA operative Ed Wilson.

The congressman’s encounter with this outlaw came about by chance because of one of those peculiar problems that seem to beset Charlie Wilson. He had fallen hopelessly in lust with his confidential secretary, Tina Simons. Like many of the women in the office, Tina was curvaceous, up-beat, and available, but Wilson had imposed a most unfortunate discipline on himself when it came to romance: he would not woo any of the women on his staff. The smitten congressman decided there was only one thing to do: he asked a mutual friend to get her a job. As chance would have it, she ended up as the all-purpose office manager, decorator, and social secretary for Ed Wilson.

Memories fade, and the name Ed Wilson may no longer strike a chord, but in his day he came to represent something new and evil in the American experience. He was a former CIA agent who, like Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness,
had taken to serving the interests of dark forces. By the time the congressman met Ed Wilson, a
Washington Post
article had accused him of working for Muammar Qaddafi. But no formal charges had been brought, and the renegade managed to make many influential Washingtonians believe that he was, perhaps, operating under very deep cover on some convoluted mission.

The former CIA operative would later be indicted for selling sophisticated explosives to Qaddafi, or for recruiting hit squads to dispose of the Libyan leader’s political enemies, but when Charlie Wilson met him, Ed Wilson presented himself as a multimillionaire with a sprawling horse farm in the hunt country of Virginia and a lavish town house in the capital where he held court with a daring collection of former and present CIA men and other mysterious characters.

Charlie had never met a full-fledged CIA operative before, and Ed Wilson appealed to his sense of what a CIA agent should look like. “He was taller than me, weighed about two fifty, just a very lethal-looking person, dark, ominous, but a good sense of humor and a good guy to drink with.”

The congressman took to meeting his former secretary at this exotic town house, where, accompanied by much alcohol, Ed Wilson began telling Charlie how things really worked in the CIA. “Ed had convinced me that he personally killed Che Guevara and I thought, Shit, if he got Che, he can sure get that little turd Ortega,” Wilson said, referring to the Sandinista guerrilla leader. This ex-CIA thug set off a lightbulb in Charlie Wilson’s head; if Jimmy Carter wouldn’t do what was necessary to save the United States, then, by God, he and Ed Wilson would come to the rescue of Tacho Somoza.

A meeting was arranged at the Palm Bay Club in Miami Beach, Somoza’s favorite weekend retreat. The dictator brought along his hot-blooded mistress, Dinorah Sampson. Charlie Wilson brought Tina Simons and Ed Wilson. Somoza seemed more than intrigued when Ed Wilson described the one-thousand-man army of former CIA operatives he said he could mobilize to crush the Sandinistas. “We were all drinking, getting more excited, more excited, killing Ortega, killing everybody, and then Tacho asked Tina to dance.”

Everything was going swimmingly when the dictator, now blind drunk with visions of a thousand CIA cutthroats doing in his enemies, began to fondle Tina. It all happened so fast that the two Wilsons could barely believe their eyes. Dinorah, a very fit weight lifter, began pulling apart the two dancers, screaming in Spanish at her lover, then ripped off Somoza’s glasses and stomped them on the ground.

One can only imagine how a military dictator must feel when humiliated like this. It couldn’t have been easy for Tacho to return to the table. Perhaps it was simply a need to reassert his manhood that changed his mind about Ed Wilson’s proposal, which had so recently enchanted him. But more than likely it was the price tag. Somoza was a notorious tight-wad, and the congressman remembers to this day Somoza’s look of horror when Ed Wilson said he could save the dictator for a mere $100 million—$100,000 per man. To the congressman’s dismay, Somoza passed on the offer. He just said, “Out of the question.” Wilson later observed that the whole exercise had been “very amateurish on my part.” Putting the best possible face on this maiden effort to hijack a U.S. foreign policy, he explained, “I wanted to try to do something to hold the Ortegas of the world at bay, until Carter learned better or we got a new president.”

Shortly afterward, Somoza lost the support even of his country’s business community. On July 17, 1979, with the rebel forces closing in, the dictator fled Nicaragua. It had not been Wilson’s finest hour, and the disasters were only beginning. Just over a year later, Charlie found himself looking at a picture of a screaming Dinorah Sampson on the front page of the
Washington Post.
She was running from the flaming wreckage of Tacho’s white Mercedes-Benz in Asunción, Paraguay, the only country that had been willing to offer sanctuary to Somoza. The killers had pumped eighteen bullets into Tacho’s body and face before finishing off the job with a rocket attack. Soon after, the man who had gotten Wilson into the affair, Representative Jack Murphy, was caught taking a bribe in the FBI’s ABSCAM sting operation and sent to jail. Meanwhile, Ed Wilson had become a hunted man after being indicted for his illegal dealings with Qaddafi. Captured in the Bahamas, he was tried and sentenced to fifty-two years in jail, where he languishes today.

From his maximum-security cell in White Deer, Pennsylvania, he insists that he had always been operating under the authority of what he calls the “inner CIA.” The congressman’s girlfriend, Tina Simons, suddenly found herself fearing for her life. After testifying against Ed Wilson, she permanently disappeared into the federal witness protection program. The Sandinistas, the Communist-backed guerrillas who Wilson had tried to stop, suddenly emerged as the preoccupation of Ronald Reagan in his not-so-secret Contra war.

Charlie Wilson escaped unscathed but unsettled. He had intervened, believing he was acting selflessly to counter a threat that the country had not yet recognized. His heart may have been in the right place, but his head certainly was not. And by the time it was over, he had managed to make himself look like a dangerous fool. It was in the aftermath of this debacle that Wilson slipped into his colorful midlife crisis—a despairing patriot, convinced that his country was headed toward disaster but no longer certain that he would have a role in its salvation. For a moment, when the courage of the Afghans temporarily inspired him, he shook off his stupor long enough to double the CIA’s Afghan budget. But it was just for a moment, and then he disappeared back into what he called “the longest midlife crisis in history.”