Charlie Wilson's War (13 page)

A special prosecutor, Barry Prettyman, had just persuaded the House to expel one of the ABSCAM defendants, a veteran lawmaker, who was still appealing his conviction. Never before had the House expelled one of its own members. With the zealous prosecutor at the helm, the committee was expanding its inquiry beyond the six members who had been indicted and was rumored to be offering deals in exchange for testimony that would take the scandal into the Speaker’s office. What finally caused O’Neill to draw a line in the sand was the prosecutor’s move against his intimate friend and key political lieutenant Representative John Murtha.

The Speaker immediately summoned Charlie Wilson into his office to make an offer he knew Wilson would ultimately find impossible to refuse. “I want you to go on the Ethics Committee,” O’Neill said.

Wilson wasn’t altogether sure if O’Neill was serious: “Tip, that’s crazy. I’m not on the side of the Ethics Committee and everyone knows it. They’d laugh us off the floor if you put me on that committee.”

The truth is the Speaker was operating in this instance much like a spy chief. He didn’t specifically tell Wilson that he wanted him to go rescue Murtha; he didn’t need to. O’Neill knew that all he had to do was get Wilson on the Ethics Committee, and the rest would take care of itself.

“Chally,” the Massachusetts congressman continued with a twinkle in his eye, “do you remember that appointment you’ve been asking about for the Kennedy Center Board?”

There was nothing Wilson craved more than a seat on the board of the Kennedy Center, and O’Neill knew it. To a married legislator, a lifetime appointment to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts might not mean much, but for a divorced congressman going through a midlife crisis, with so many beautiful women to romance and not enough money to properly entertain them, it meant just about everything. Wilson still has a childlike enthusiasm in his voice when he explains why he lusted for that appointment: “It’s the best perk in town. It means that I get the box right next to the president’s box for the ballet when I want it. I get to go to all the cast parties, meet all the movie stars, and I get an extra invitation to the White House every season.”

Most important for Wilson, it meant that with no money down, he could dress up and play out his Good-Time Charlie role with a beautiful new girl on his arm as many as forty or fifty evenings a year if he liked, since he’d have free tickets to most of the shows. It was like a safety net for this broke romantic, knowing that on any given night he would always be able to give one of his girlfriends an evening of true glamour. For months Wilson had been pleading and lobbying the formidable House Speaker to grant him this appointment. But the tough old Irish pol hadn’t come to rule the House by giving valuable perks away for free. And so Wilson’s appeals had fallen on deaf ears—until now.

“Well, it’s a package deal, Chally.”

O’Neill understood that Wilson’s identity as a noisy braggart was perfect cover for the covert operation he had in mind. “The word on Charlie was that he didn’t talk,” recalled O’Neill’s former whip, Tony Coelho. “From time to time the Speaker needed to mount irregular operations, and Wilson was one of those irregulars Tip could count on.”

Wilson accepted the Speaker’s deal. Delighted at his lifetime appointment to the Kennedy Center board, he was a happy warrior as he raced to the rescue of his imperiled friend John Murtha.

He had his work cut out for him. Watching Representative Murtha on the ABSCAM tapes is not an experience designed to make a citizen feel better about Congress. A member of the Ethics Committee at the time, he did refuse the bribe, but he did not exactly close the door on a future negotiation: “You know, you made an offer. It might be that I might change my mind someday.”

Others might have felt that Murtha had disgraced the institution and deserved to be prosecuted and thrown out of Congress, but Wilson genuinely did not. To begin with, he admired Murtha. The two were on Defense Appropriations together; they were both fierce anti-Communists; and Murtha was a decorated Korean War veteran who had volunteered for two combat tours with the marines in Vietnam, which meant he started off as a hero in Wilson’s eyes. As Charlie framed the controversy, his friend had actually done nothing wrong. He hadn’t taken the bribe from the FBI’s “sheikh”; his only sin had been to say he’d think about it. And if the Ethics Committee members were even thinking of lynching a patriot like Murtha simply because he had lust in his heart, then it was time that the entire committee be put to a very public morals test of its own.

Wilson arrived on the Ethics Committee just as O’Neill had hoped—like a wrecker. He told a
Washington Post
reporter that the committee was on a partisan witch-hunt and that what was really on trial was not John Murtha but the integrity of the House of Representatives. He was clearly spoiling for a fight, daring someone to take him on.

That was not the way things are supposed to work on the Ethics Committee. The members were supposed to sit around in a sober manner, quietly review the evidence, and make their rulings. It was a horrible thought to have to go head-to-head with Charlie Wilson, a man who seemed to revel in his reputation as a rule-breaking, skirt-chasing sinner. Ordinarily a special prosecutor in Prettyman’s position could count on having enormous leverage over members of the committee. All it took to damage a normal representative’s reputation was a leak to the press indicating that the member was trying to derail an investigation. But it was clear from his opening statement that Wilson would have liked nothing more than to battle it out in the press “on behalf of an innocent man who happens to be a war hero.”

Prior to Wilson’s intervention, the committee had given the special prosecutor something of a free hand; but shortly after Charlie’s arrival the rules of the game changed completely and before Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation. “This matter is closed,” proclaimed the newly appointed Ethics Committee chairman Louis Stokes, another of the Speaker’s reliables.

Prettyman was stunned. But bound by an oath of secrecy, there was nothing he could do other than resign in protest. Meanwhile, a teary Murtha had confided to a colleague that Wilson’s effort had saved his life.

The Murtha rescue operation was one of those small, unrecorded incidents with far-reaching consequences. For O’Neill, the intervention ended the threat to his hold on the House and unleashed him to become Ronald Reagan’s liberal tormentor. Wilson would laugh off the incident as if it had been an entertainment: “It was the best deal I ever made. I only had to be on Ethics for a year, and I get to stay on the Kennedy Center for life.” But he understood that something far deeper had taken place. Relationships had been cemented that would be crucial to Wilson’s Afghan campaign.

Murtha would rise to become chairman of the awesomely powerful Defense Subcommittee that Wilson would turn to later when the CIA tried to resist his efforts to up the ante in Afghanistan. Whenever angry Agency officials tried to complain about this dangerous meddling, Murtha would always make it clear that when it came to Afghanistan, the subcommittee deferred to Charlie. “The thing about Murtha,” says a respectful Wilson, “is that he always remembers.” And looming over both of them would be the expansive Irishman with the big cigar, providing a special waiver for Peck’s bad boy, “Chally,” to cross over the line to work with the CIA. This was how things worked in Tip O’Neill’s House.

Joanne Herring was one of the few outside Congress who truly understood Wilson’s potential. As their romance blossomed, she looked deep into his eyes and got Wilson to spell out for her what he could do with his power. She was thrilled at what she heard and began putting her considerable wiles to work persuading him to take up the cause of the mujahideen.

Joanne was able to see things in Wilson that were invisible to others. She had cracked Charlie Wilson’s code. She understood that underneath his devil-may-care lifestyle, Wilson was deeply ambitious, consumed with Churchillian visions for himself. She considered his womanizing of no particular consequence, the kind of thing that great men with large ambitions are prone to do. She was never disapproving. Instead she just whispered like a siren into his ear, telling him he could change history: “The mujahideen need you. You can do it, Charlie. You can do anything you put your mind to.” That year, in spite of his many other flirtations, Wilson found himself beginning to fall under Joanne’s sway, swept away by her charisma and stirred by her suggestion that he had a special destiny.

The war was not going at all well for the Afghans. While they were universally praised for their courage, their cause seemed utterly hopeless. They didn’t have any American champions of consequence, and those who did speak for them were a strange and offbeat group. A former Green Beret and Lithuanian-American put out a newsletter complaining about the antique weapons the CIA was giving to the mujahideen; reporters occasionally quoted him. A handful of enthusiastic, right-wing women in New York and Washington knocked on congressional doors, trying to appeal to the Reagan conservatives. And then there was Joanne’s friend Charles Fernley Fawcett. The passions of this bighearted, white-haired American were so touchingly pure and his efforts to dramatize the plight of the Afghans so tireless that in 1981 General Zia had awarded him Pakistan’s highest civilian decoration. Fawcett had then gone on the road in a quixotic effort to arouse the conscience of a world that didn’t seem to care. He had taken his film,
Courage Is Our Weapon,
not only to Baron Ricky’s living room but also to college campuses, salons in Palm Beach, and private clubs in Singapore—strange places where the rich gathered and invariably emoted generously but did nothing. The high point of Fawcett’s efforts came when the well-bred sixty-one-year-old crusader managed to get Director William Casey to host a screening of his film at CIA headquarters.

In spite of this gesture from the director, Joanne continued to lecture Wilson about the CIA’s appalling refusal to do anything of consequence to help the freedom fighters. Now, when Wilson came for weekends to her glamorous River Oaks mansion, she had him share a room with Fawcett in a separate wing of the house, to make sure the two got to know each other. Whether it was Joanne’s wiles or those large candid eyes of Fawcett urging Wilson to do his part, the congressman finally threw in the towel that summer and told Joanne and Fawcett that he would go to Pakistan to meet Zia and their Afghans.

What he didn’t tell her was that he intended to visit Pakistan at the tail end of a scheduled fall trip to Israel. In the political arena, Wilson was not a man to dilute his efforts. As he’d often explained to Joanne, the reason he was able to do so much was because he rarely went to the well, and then only when he knew he could win. His power in the House had come primarily as a result of his work with the Israeli lobby, and the cause that burned brighter than ever for him that year was still the survival of the Jewish state.

In the spring of 1982, many of Israel’s strongest American supporters had been enraged when the Israeli army, led by General Ariel Sharon, had launched a blitzkrieg invasion of Lebanon under the guise of clearing out PLO strongholds. There was bitter controversy over the attack when Wilson flew into Lebanon, the first U.S. congressman to tour the battlefront. When he reemerged two days later in Jerusalem to hold a press conference, it was in the role of an unapologetic “Israeli commando,” assuring the critics that Sharon had done the right thing.

The congressman began his remarks to the newsmen gathered at the King David Hotel by saying, “I come from a district with four hundred thousand white Baptists, one hundred thousand black Baptists, and no more than one hundred Jews.” After establishing his supposedly neutral credentials, he went completely overboard in portraying the attacking Israelis as if they were the uncontested liberators of the people of Lebanon. “They have no complaints, except their houses have been blown up,” he said. He talked about seeing an old Arab mopping the brow of a sick Israeli with a damp rag. “The biggest surprise I had was the enthusiasm, the universal enthusiasm, with which the Lebanese welcomed the Israeli army. In every instance their voices were of relief and appreciation of the Israelis. That’s just the way it is. It ain’t no other way.”

The hard-line Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was so impressed by this unsolicited endorsement that he sent a transcript to President Reagan and asked for a personal meeting with this marvelous congressman. They met in Jerusalem in Begin’s apartment. The old Irgun commando thanked Wilson and asked if the congressman had any advice. “Well, you’re not famous for taking advice,” Wilson replied, “but if I were you I would let Sharon clean the PLO out while he has them by the throat before world pressure builds too much.”

Begin was delighted at this suggestion, but in a matter of weeks Wilson would find himself back in Lebanon, traumatized by the sight of a massacre that caused him to regret any suggestion he might have made about egging on Ariel Sharon. Meanwhile Charlie’s gushing endorsement of the invasion triggered his first registry on the Communist screen in Moscow. The Soviet daily
Izvestiya
ran a mocking column demanding to know how it had come to pass that this American congressman was touring the war zone with the Israeli army: “It is clear that he is a reliable man brought there by American Zionist organizations and the Israeli embassy in Washington.”

Wilson found out about the
Izvestiya
complaint from the CIA, which monitored the Soviet press and sent him a copy of the article. All of this delighted the congressman, who was reveling in his role as an indispensable protector of Israel. That year Wilson was also consumed by a grand design that he and his old friend Zvi Rafiah had been working on for months with the Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens. Arens had approached Wilson personally with a request to see if he could win a waiver from the U.S. government for foreign-aid money to be used by Israel to develop its fledgling fighter-plane industry. The fighter jet was to be called the Lavi, which means “young lion” in Hebrew.