Charlie Wilson's War (51 page)

As Crandall saw it, the significance of the effort in those first few months was that it showed the American flag for the first time and filled the Afghans with hope that the superpower was standing tall alongside them. “We created a mentality,” he explains. “When we would go to big rallies at refugee camps they would talk about how the Americans are coming, the Americans are coming. Even at mosque prayers we heard it.”

Wilson, who had first seen only “a horrid little shit” of a bureaucrat standing before him, would soon come to love this man. Schnabel would arrange for Crandall’s daughter to intern in Wilson’s office. The congressman would throw fancy parties for him on his return visits, and above all, Charlie would conspire with Crandall against his bosses at AID.

Soon after their first meeting, Crandall returned to Wilson’s office. He closed the door and, just as Avrakotos had done a year and a half earlier, said in a very different voice than Wilson had heard before, “Now, this conversation never happened. And if you ever say I came here, I’ll deny it. But we could use twice as much money next year, and this is what we can do with it to change the war.”

One reason for this conspiracy was that Crandall’s bosses were determined to kill this program. In a meeting of fifty AID officers, one of the assistant directors had said that the Cross Border program was less important than the program operating in East Timor. And there was no AID program in East Timor.

When the same official accompanied Crandall to tell Wilson that he was offering far too much money for the Cross Border program and that AID did not feel it could assimilate it, Wilson cut him off. “You’re here to listen, not to talk,” Wilson said. When the official made another appeal to reason, Charlie cruelly laid down the bottom line: “Every time you talk, I’m going to take $15 million from a place where you want to be spending it, and I’ll add that $15 million to the Afghan program.” By this time Wilson was coordinating his efforts with Senator Gordon Humphrey, who was even more adamant about upping the ante. And so the program, begun at $6 million in 1985, leapt to $15 million in 1986; to $30 million in 1987; to $45 million in 1988; and finally topped out at $90 million in 1989. By then Crandall would be deep into war logistics, building highways and bridges in Afghanistan so that ordnance could be moved in days rather than months to supply Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. He was sending in huge amounts of wheat, much more than needed, knowing that the Afghans would sell it to generate operating funds. And by then he would have taken over the business of supplying vital Tennessee mules, officially to carry humanitarian cargo only. But no one bothered to tell the mujahideen at the border that they might be violating AID rules by adding a mortar or box of AK ammo to the load. All of this was coming at the same time as the massive weapons program, and in many respects, Crandall’s operation initially had a larger impact. The reason the Afghans had succeeded in holding out against the Soviets was not because they were winning battles. Basically, they lost every direct contest they engaged in. Nor was it because they inflicted such tremendous casualties or costs on the Red Army. It was more because they simply kept in the game in spite of fearful losses both to their warriors and to the vast majority of the population that stood with them. It’s estimated that by 1985, one of every three Afghans had been forced out of the country by the Red Army. Hundreds of thousands had died as a direct result of the invasion and occupation, and that year it appeared to many, even to Mike Vickers, that a certain war weariness was setting in.

The flood of new weapons and the training programs made an enormous difference. But in a curious way, Crandall’s Cross Border program may have provided the greatest lift to the spirits of the warriors because, for the first time, the Afghans could say and believe that the United States was moving in behind them. Until this point, they did not really know where the CIA guns were coming from. The weapons were all of Soviet origin and were handed out by the Pakistanis. But now Crandall was handing out brand-new Toyota pickups, and the word was getting out about the giant cargo planes that landed in the night and disgorged incredible amounts of U.S. goods for the mujahideen. Crandall and his team were holding regular meetings with the mujahideen leaders, filling them in on the programs they were going to start and have the Afghans run.

It was a stunning concept. Crandall was going to provide them with the wherewithal to roll back the scorched-earth policy. For five miserable years, the Afghans had retreated from their country, watching as their villages were destroyed and their families forced into exile. Now the pink-cheeked bureaucrat was talking about setting up clinics, training medics and doctors, creating schools, and teaching Afghans to read. Crandall wanted them to begin preparing for the time when they would be returning to Afghanistan to rebuild their country.

It wasn’t long before Crandall was operating a kind of shadow CIA program. Wilson sometimes thought that Crandall might actually be a CIA man. His program supported the same fighters and shared the same ISI infrastructure for moving goods. In Islamabad and Peshawar, he became a pasha, no doubt the greatest smuggling lord that that ancient caravan route had ever known. He took gracefully to the role, surrounding himself in his embassy office and home with fine Afghan and Persian rugs, and mahogany furniture hand-tooled by Peshawar craftsmen in the old style.

At first, Crandall says, he tried to shield his officers from the shadowy role that his programs were playing in the CIA’s campaign. But soon they came to revel in their role, describing themselves boisterously as “the other Agency.” And when Schnabel would arrive everyone would receive him as if he were the patron himself. AID occupied a suite on the embassy’s second floor, sealed off by a combination lock, just like the CIA station on the floor above. Crandall soon gave Schnabel the combination; cars and drivers were put at his disposal. The AID director would not assist the other Charlie’s smuggling efforts, but he would smile broadly and look the other way when the sniper sights and other contraband passed through the AID-maintained International Medical Corps (IMC) clinics.

The most telling indicator of the Cross Border program’s relevance was the station chief’s invitation for Crandall to sit in on the CIA’s war sessions. Since Crandall’s men were the only Americans dealing directly with the mujahideen, they had become an invaluable new and reliable source of information. Crandall was now able to offer better tactical advice on how long it would take to get supplies to a given commander, or what tribes were likely to hijack a caravan, or who would take bribes from the Red Army, or which mujahideen were doing the most fighting.

There was another factor, impossible to quantify but nevertheless critical. In the fall of 1985 and into the next year, the Kremlin had to wrestle with a difficult choice: whether to take the war to Pakistan or to get out altogether, as the United States had with Vietnam. Central to the Politburo’s thinking was the need to evaluate just how far the United States was prepared to go in Afghanistan.

Clearly the discovery of the exotic and public non-CIA programs Wilson was funding must have made for a sickening moment in Moscow. Until late 1985, in accordance with the Presidential Findings, the U.S. had moved in stealth: no American components were even allowed to go into any of the mujahideen’s weapons. Indeed, few Afghans even knew where the weapons came from.

Before this, the courageous French doctors from Médecins sans Frontières had been virtually the only ones to go into the war zone. But now into Peshawar burst a flood of American doctors, nurses, and health-care workers. All shapes and varieties of private American volunteer organizations were setting up shop in Peshawar, and all of them seemed to be settling in for the long haul.

It was a community of free spirits that Crandall began to fund. He gave two former hippies a grant to operate a clinic on the actual border, under the name of Freedom Medicine, and sent his daughters out for weekend experiences in freedom fighting. Behind one walled compound in Peshawar he installed professors from the University of Nebraska, working under a Cross Border grant to develop plans for creating the new government of Afghanistan. Thanks to a program sponsored by Gordon Humphrey, at the edge of the city, behind a rather nondescript building, a school was being formed to teach mujahideen how to shoot war footage with small video cameras.

A pretty young pediatrician from Manhattan came to Crandall for a grant to organize a harrowing trek into Nuristan to inoculate Afghan children against the great killers of the war—measles, mumps, and chicken pox. And at night, all these adventurers were gathering noisily at the newly formed American Club in Peshawar, drinking and acting as if they were operating in the days of the Berlin airlift. “Three years in a row, Charlie doubled my budget,” remembers Crandall. “He would always say, ‘What do you need? There are no limits.’”

What happened in the months and years that followed, to the great displeasure of and opposition from AID’s leaders, was the explosion of this seemingly innocent little program into what Wilson provocatively called “the noblest smuggling operation in history.” But it also served as a Trojan horse of sorts for the CIA. Operating with its innocent cover, this AID program would soon merge directly into the CIA’s ongoing operation by providing the first direct American link to the Afghans themselves.

Up until the Cross Border program Zia, Akhtar, and the Pakistan ISI had steadfastly forbidden the CIA from any direct contact with the mujahideen. But now Crandall’s people were everywhere on the Afghan frontier. They were operating with the mujahideen, smuggling contraband into the war zone. The whole policy of trying to conceal the American hand was suddenly moot. Inadvertently, the Cross Border program was clearing the way for the introduction of the ultimate Hind killer, the thirty-five-pound General Dynamics surface-to-air missile known as the Stinger.

C
ontrol of U.S. foreign policy is supposed to rest with the president. As a practical matter, highly popular presidents, like Ronald Reagan, are almost always able to mount foreign initiatives without serious challenge. But in 1985 Tip O’Neill and his House Democrats seized control of two of the president’s most passionate causes. Everyone who read the papers that year knew about the first challenge—the House-led attack on the CIA’s Contra war in Nicaragua. In spite of Reagan’s appeal to a joint session of Congress, the Democrats cut off all funding for this CIA operation.

Opposition to CIA secret warfare was seen as a core principle that the Democratic Party wanted to be identified with. That identity was so strong that the second Democratic-led initiative went all but unnoticed. At a time when the Contras could not get a dime from Congress, Charlie Wilson had managed to turn the CIA’s cautious bleeding campaign in Afghanistan into a half-billion-dollars-a-year operation that dwarfed any prior Agency effort. For all practical purposes Wilson had hijacked a U.S. foreign policy and was busy transforming it into the first direct winner-take-all contest with the Soviet Union. And the only reason he was able to take on this role was because of the license to operate given to him by Tip O’Neill.

With Tip’s eyes voluntarily averted and with the Democratic majority’s acquiescence, Wilson was operating behind the lines like a bandit. He was now engaged in the kind of sensitive diplomacy that is technically illegal for anyone other than the White House to conduct: cutting arms deals with the defense minister of Egypt; commissioning Israel to design weapons for the CIA; negotiating all manner of extraordinarily controversial matters with the all-important U.S. ally General Zia. There was even a moment when Wilson would find himself outside of a hotel in London introducing two delegations of the highest-level representatives of Israel and Pakistan. It was Charlie’s very own peace initiative that would result in the creation of a back channel between the two ostensibly enemy nations. “I figured that that may have been one that no one else could have put together,” he reflected in later years.

None of these initiatives was ever cleared with State or the White House, and had Wilson chosen to seek prior approval it is almost certain he would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off. As a matter of policy, touring members of Congress always have an embassy representative present when they meet with high-level officials of the host government. To the great aggravation of the tough U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Dean Hinton, Zia always insisted on meeting privately with Wilson on every one of Charlie’s numerous visits to Islamabad. At these sessions the two men would talk as partners, often as virtual co-conspirators. To Zia a personal commitment of continued U.S. financial support to the Pakistan army made by Charles Wilson of Defense Appropriations was as good as gold and far more reliable than anything anyone else in the U.S. government might promise. The two men horse-traded and schemed, and only after they had completed their sensitive matters would Wilson invite the ambassador to sit in on the latter half of the discussion.

At the heart of everything Wilson was able to do, however, was the conspiratorial partnership he had entered into with Avrakotos. Gust was now coming by his office every week, sometimes visiting two or three times a week, and they would talk on the phone incessantly. Wilson, in his huge office in the Rayburn building with the twenty-five-foot ceilings and the great map of the world on his wall, would never look or sound awestruck when Gust arrived. But this was indeed Charlie’s greatest adventure, and he lived for those meetings with his CIA friend.

Gust, who would arrive alone, was now filling his patron in with the kind of operational details that even senators and congressmen on the Intelligence Committees are not permitted to know. In fact, because of the Agency’s rigid code of compartmentalization, not even division chiefs in other areas of the Agency knew what Charlie did. “There were times in those early years when I felt as if I were some character in a great spy novel,” recalls Wilson.

Indeed, by early 1985 Wilson was moving invisibly in so many areas at once that it would have been next to impossible for anyone to assess his overall impact. In a front-page story in the
Washington Post
Bob Woodward surfaced one of Wilson’s key roles as “the catalyst” responsible for funding the biggest covert operation since Vietnam.

Now, just as Gust was shaking his outcast identity and experiencing a rush of recognition from his CIA colleagues, Wilson began to notice a shift in the way Washington insiders were treating him. For the first time, he could sense genuine respect from the people he cared most about—the admirals from his Annapolis class, senior Pentagon officials, the inner Reagan crowd, and, most vividly, from his congressional colleagues, some of whom started to call Afghanistan “Charlie’s war.”

The mujahideen, who had always visited Wilson’s office when they came to Washington, were now arriving with a special fervor, acting more like they were attending a
majlis
with a Saudi prince. They would listen in amazement as this ebullient Texas cowboy pointed to the tiny model of an Oerlikon on his desk and boasted how hundreds of these million-dollars-a-unit anti-aircraft weapons would soon be inside Afghanistan shooting down the Hinds.

Had the CIA’s analytic division been asked to turn out a psychological portrait of the congressman at that time, as it did of Zia and other world leaders, it surely would have revealed a perplexing pattern of behavior: whenever things start to go well for Wilson, some Freudian impulse seems to prompt him to create havoc. And since everything was going so close to perfection in early 1985, Charlie went to work to spoil it all.

As usual, the incident was connected to a woman. One of the high points in Wilson’s social calendar each year was the black-tie White House reception for Kennedy Center board members. As always, Charlie went to extraordinary lengths to make a dashing appearance. And according to his well-established ritual, that meant he needed a beauty queen on his arm. This year he chose a former Miss U.S.A., Judi Anderson. But no sooner had he introduced his date to the president and first lady than he found himself thunderstruck by a striking young woman on the arm of a colleague from the Ethics Committee, Don Bailey. This was the woman Charlie would soon be introducing to Zia, Gust, and CIA station chiefs all over the world as “Sweetums.”

“Hi, I’m Judi Anderson,” Charlie heard his date say.

“That rings a bell,” said the woman who was destined to become Charlie’s constant companion on all his Afghan travels for the next four years.

“It should,” replied Wilson’s date. “I was Miss U.S.A.”

“Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” replied Sweetums in one of those thinly disguised notes of triumph, “I was in the Miss World pageant.”

Following the unwritten rules of the House calling for honor among thieves, the next day Wilson approached his Ethics Committee friend to ask if the beauty from the White House reception, Annelise Ilschenko, was spoken for. Bailey good-naturedly gave his blessing, but then Charlie discovered that Annelise was ill disposed to be seen in public with him.

“He had a sleazy reputation,” recalls Ilschenko. “He was known as a womanizer, and I didn’t want it. The rumor was that when he went on the floor Charlie would look up at the boxes for pretty blondes and then have the pages go up and say, Charlie Wilson wants to meet you.”

Ilschenko recalls him falling down the stairs drunk at the River Club one night and lushing about “with his belly dancer” on another. “He was just not to be taken seriously,” she says. But in spite of this she was drawn to him, and she did accept occasional dinner and dancing invitations, finally agreeing to accompany him for a weekend he promised she would never forget. The U.S. Navy had agreed to host the senior member of Defense Appropriations and his personal delegation aboard the 4,300-man aircraft carrier the U.S.S.
Saratoga.
Charlie, who had also invited three of his Texas drinking pals, thoughtfully brought along his twenty-seven-year-old defense aide, Molly Hamilton, “so that Annelise would not feel so isolated being the only lady on board.”

Of all the Angels, Hamilton was the one who turned Gust’s knees to jelly. She didn’t know anything about defense, but Charlie didn’t rely on staffers to do his thinking for him and he loved to watch the reaction on his guests’ faces when he would ask his defense aide to sit in on conferences. As he saw it, a big part of the job was entertaining the defense lobbyists who contributed mightily to his campaigns. Hamilton, however, was not exactly a good-time girl, and she was frankly appalled on this weekend junket by what she perceived to be a clear abuse of congressional power.

Charlie’s entourage was jetted onto the carrier’s deck, where the great hooks brought the U.S. Navy jets to a screeching halt. That night, the captain, in dress uniform, had a marvelous dinner on the deck with the sounds and sights of the U.S. empire playing in the background. To Hamilton’s discomfort—she was well aware of the strict prohibition against alcohol aboard a U.S. Navy vessel—Charlie had somehow managed to bring a healthy supply of liquor along. He hadn’t served as a gunnery officer sneaking whiskey aboard in empty shell casings for nothing. Hamilton’s unhappy memories of the evening are of a frightening sea of seventeen-foot waves, people drinking, and everyone going to excessive lengths to accommodate the congressman and his date.

It was meant to be one of those “old boy” weekends where a bit of good, clean fun can be carried out without anyone tattling. But nothing Charlie does ever remains a secret for long, and to Annelise’s horror, Jack Anderson’s column, carried in the
Washington Post
and some four hundred newspapers across the country, spelled out in humiliating detail how the congressman had taken a beauty queen for a weekend boondoggle at the taxpayers’ expense.

The story, which made page one of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
didn’t sit well with Ilschenko’s parents. Charlie personally apologized to them, then magnanimously offered to pay the navy $650 for Annelise’s expenses. In response to reporters, he explained that he had only brought Ilschenko along so that Hamilton, his staffer, wouldn’t feel so “isolated being the only lady on board.” Finally, after tending to this damage control, he begged Annelise for another chance, promising that next time he would take her on the trip of her life and he would pay the bill.

The experience Charlie offered his new true love was the product of much thought and a kind of boldness about junketing that only a compulsive risk taker like Wilson could propose. The trip began in Marrakech, where he had the Pentagon reserve the Churchill Suite at the exotic La Mamounia hotel. Since Charlie was officially on a “fact-finding trip” for Defense Appropriations, the Pentagon sent along a liaison officer to take care of logistics.

There had to be a technical reason for being in Morocco, so Charlie paid a visit to his friends in the Royal Moroccan Army to watch them blast guns in the desert. “You see, I was evaluating anti-Communist activities because I was getting my way paid. But then, of course, I had to find time to lie out in the swimming pool with Sweetums and take her to the bazaar.” It was even better for Sweetums in Venice, where Charlie had arranged a magical dinner and gondola ride on the Grand Canal. This leg of the journey was more difficult for Wilson to justify, but he managed to. “Fortunately,” he explains, “the air force base in Naples felt a great urgency to give me a briefing in Venice and sent two generals, as I recall.”

And then the pièce de résistance: the overnight trip to Paris on the fabled Orient Express. Wilson had the good sense not to bill the U.S. government for this exotic leg of the trip. But the Pentagon added a pleasant flourish by sending along an escort officer to make sure everything was perfect during their travels. It was June 1, 1985, Charlie’s birthday, and the the young officer came dressed in formal uniform for the champagne dinner, with Charlie in black tie and Sweetums in the stunning dress he had bought her for the occasion.

This spectacular Morocco-to-Paris junket for Sweetums was clearly stretching the rules of reasonable conduct, even for a senior member of Defense Appropriations. But in fairness to the congressman, he was only doing what he had been taught to believe was standard operating practice. As with most things, one’s first experience is seminal, and few newcomers have been offered such a blinding insight into the way things work in Congress as when Charlie Wilson first joined the Foreign Affairs Committee in 1974 and was invited by one of the House’s senior committee chairmen, Olin “Tiger” Teague, to attend the Paris air show. “Well, Tiger, I don’t have the money,” explained the embarrassed freshman. Teague laughed, and Wilson remembers his astonishment at discovering that the U.S. government pays for first-class plane tickets and first-class hotels, provides funds for meals, and supplies limousines, foreign service officers as guides, and, of course, the best seats at the air show. All of this is free, with the objective of providing the legislators with a fact-finding experience that will make them wiser when they come back after the break to design legislation.

What left the deepest impression on the novice congressman, however, was the way the senior foreign service officers at the embassy threw themselves into helping the committee members’ wives find the best shopping deals in Paris. After Charlie had spent two weeks living better than he had ever imagined possible, the air force plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base to reveal a demonstration of respect for the power and prestige of the House that would linger with Wilson for the rest of his days in Congress. Two lines of station wagons were lined up on the tarmac, each one with the name of a member of the delegation prominently displayed on the windshield. No sooner had the plane pulled to a stop than a collection of uniformed men quickly moved into the cargo hold and placed the fruits of the junket–shopping spree in the cars. Without so much as a thought about customs, the uniformed officers swept the chairman and his booty—two station wagons filled with antiques—off the air force base and into the District.