Charlie Wilson's War (52 page)

That was when Charlie discovered how much fun being in Congress could be if you’re on the right committee and if you know what to ask for. Over the years, Charlie became one of the all-time master craftsmen at bending the business of his Appropriations subcommittees to the fancies of his private life. That was critically important for Charlie because he had absolutely no money to spend. In fact, in the spring of 1985, the local Texas papers revealed that he had the distinction of being the poorest member of the Texas delegation, with a negative net worth estimated as high as a million dollars of debt. For Charlie, the joy of being a congressman was that on a junket money was not necessary. And as the Paris-bound Orient Express made its elegant way through the night on Charlie’s fifty-second birthday, the magic was working its spell on Sweetums. She was fast forgetting the humiliation of the U.S.S.
Saratoga
and finding it quite pleasing to be with this charming, handsome man who could make her feel like she was once again walking onstage at the Miss World pageant.

For Wilson, however, this junket was fast turning into an agonizing and increasingly frightening experience. By the time he toasted Sweetums at his birthday dinner, he had begun to think he might be in serious physical trouble. There had been an incident in Morocco when he couldn’t swim across the La Mamounia pool. He had assumed the chest pains were caused by dysentery, probably from the local cucumbers he had eaten with the Royal Moroccan Army. On the train in his tuxedo, in between laughing and telling charming stories, he convinced himself that the lingering hollow feeling and the cold sweat was just the tail end of the intestinal problem.

In Paris, Charlie was just one of a slew of senators and congressmen who make the annual pilgrimage to the air show. But since he was a senior member of Defense Appropriations, he knew that Sweetums would be pampered and spoiled by every defense contractor worth his salt. And sure enough, the lobbyists had messages piled up at the hotel—invitations to dinners, cocktail parties, the theater.

Paris was supposed to be the high point of the trip, but it was Sweetums’s fate to have nothing but disasters accompany her on all of her travels with Charlie. Coming back from dinner that first night, Wilson took three steps out of the restaurant and couldn’t continue. “I took him up to the room,” she remembers. “He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t lie down. Later we found out he was literally drowning with blood in his lungs.”

A lifetime of drink had finally caught up with Charlie Wilson. His heart was literally soaked in alcohol and barely functioning, a condition not uncommon to alcoholics. When he got to the American hospital where Rock Hudson had just died, his blood pressure was so low that it took the nurses thirty-two tries to get an IV into his veins. In critical condition he was evacuated to the U.S. military hospital at Rhine Main, Germany, for preliminary treatment.

The doctors there put him on blood thinners and drugs to force his devastated heart to continue beating. In his fog, after discovering that the hospital had been built by Hermann Göring for the Luftwaffe pilots, his imagination offered him an explanation as to why he was there: “I imagined myself as a wounded pilot from the other side who had just made it back with my Messerschmitt shot to shreds.”

Ten days into this fog, as if he were in fact a great war hero, he woke up to find the general in charge of the military hospital at his bedside saying there was a call from the White House. The president needed him in Washington. Would he fly home immediately to cast a vote for Ronald Reagan to save the Contras?

For an anti-Communist from East Texas, this was a command performance. A giant air force plane was flown into Rhine Main with a medical team on board to carry the congressman across the Atlantic to rescue the Nicaraguan “freedom fighters.” “It made me feel like a big shot of immense proportions,” he remembers.

It was a critical moment for the Contra war, a congressional face-off where two or three votes would make the difference. When two of Wilson’s liberal colleagues, Tom Downey and Bob Mrazek, spotted him being wheeled onto the floor of the House in his navy pajamas and sustained by an IV, they ran over and threatened to unplug his life-support system if he didn’t vote right.

Charlie felt heroic enough to bark them down with his typical banter. “They had to fly my skinny ass all the way from Germany to keep you pinkos from wiping out freedom in Central America,” he said. It was hard for anyone to be upset with Charlie no matter what he did. Not even Tip O’Neill would ask this famous war hawk to turn down a direct appeal from the president.

There was little joy back in the hospital, where the naval doctor whom Charlie would come to call “Dr. Doom” presented him with what amounted to a death notice. The tests had indicated that the congressman’s alcohol-soaked heart was functioning at only 16 percent. That was the amount of blood that comes out when the heart beats (a normal person has a 50 percent rate). The doctor told Wilson, his sister, and Charlie Schnabel that he didn’t think Wilson was going to get any better. The best he could hope for, Dr. Doom suggested, was eighteen months.

“I wanted him to tell me I would have to give up corn on the cob or I’d have to take an extra pill,” recalls Charlie, who was reacting like a typical alcoholic. He simply couldn’t accept some doctor telling him that he could never have another drink and that he was going to die in eighteen months, whether he had a drink or not. Restlessly, Wilson insisted on a second opinion—and then many other second opinions—but every new specialist only confirmed Dr. Doom’s terrible diagnosis.

With some sixth sense that destiny had not yet called his number, Wilson, living on oxygen and unable to walk up even a few steps, announced to his physician, “Dr. Doom, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He booked a flight to Houston to consult an eminent cardiologist, Dick Cashion. As he saw it, he was appealing Doom’s unjust verdict. If all else failed, Charlie thought, at least Cashion might arrange for a transplant. That way he’d be able to maintain his boozing lifestyle.

Just being in Cashion’s hospital made him feel better. He recalls his pleasure the first night when a waiter arrived in a black tuxedo to offer him a choice of six entrées. The waiter also said he could arrange for wine and cocktails for the congressman’s guests. This was the kind of healing atmosphere that Wilson could identify with.

The next day Cashion told him they would be taking a piece of his heart out with a procedure that would start in his jugular. For the first time, Charlie began to realize there might not be any good news at the end of this story, and he began to put in calls to all of his closest women friends—Sweetums, Snowflake, the Israeli dancer Ziva, and Trish. Guardedly he asked one after another, “Will things be okay? Can they be like they always were if I’m not drinking anymore?” Curiously, he thought that without alcohol, he wouldn’t be good company.

Charlie Schnabel, who witnessed this performance, remembered Wilson’s relief after discovering that his girlfriends wouldn’t desert him if he had to go on the wagon.

A cable from the station in Paris had alerted Gust to the problem: “Wish to inform headquarters that Congressman Wilson appears to have suffered a heart attack.” Avrakotos had been in the cafeteria when Deputy Director John McMahon paged him to come up to the seventh floor to read the cable. He recalls, “When I walked in, McMahon said, ‘It may be serious. In fact, he may not make it. Did you know he was an Annapolis graduate?’ And then McMahon added, ‘It sure would be a bad day for us if we lost him.’”

Over the next few days, as Wilson made his way back across the Atlantic and into the military hospital in Bethesda, Avrakotos suddenly came to feel almost alone and exposed. To a certain extent he had thought of himself as the architect of the conspiracy with Wilson, but now he was forced to recognize that without Charlie, he might still be the pariah of the Directorate of Operations, roaming the halls without purpose.

The program was the first thing Gust thought about. The Agency was now committed to pushing the Soviets out “by all means available.” Everything depended on sustaining congressional funding. As he articulated it years later, it was a frightening bottom-line concern: “How the fuck do you get more money for the program if Charlie’s gone? But the other bottom line I discovered was that I didn’t want to lose this friend.”

That was the discovery that caught the tough Aliquippan by surprise. The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered that he actually loved Charlie Wilson. “He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking congressmen in the last forty years have gone to bat publicly to get the CIA more money? That made him unique. Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, when the Cold War was one big fucking goatfuck, no one was publicly calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatemala or Cuba or anywhere.”

Avrakotos now recognized what Wilson had done for and meant to him. Mainly he realized that Charlie had given him legitimacy. For twenty-three years he had served in the shadows, never recognized outside of his bureaucracy and even there shunned as a kind of thug and outsider. But now, in large measure because of Wilson’s patronage, Gust had been inducted into the CIA’s most celebrated inner circle—the career executive service, one of perhaps forty officers from the Clandestine Services to be so recognized.

It had been a long trek for this roughneck from Pennsylvania. Gust Avrakotos, a Greek beer distributor’s son, could eat in the executive dining room with the Ivy Leaguers and Mr. Casey. Charlie had not just given his career a gigantic boost, he had made him feel like he belonged. The glamorous congressman with all the girls and all the power had also reached out and touched him as a friend, and it meant everything to Gust. “I was honorable in Charlie’s eyes. Charlie really liked me, and I can’t say that about many people.”

From his hospital bed, Wilson made the first move with a call to Gust’s secret number and a question that immediately made Avrakotos feel much better. “Gus,” Charlie asked (he still hadn’t learned that there was a
t
at the end of the agent’s first name), “how many planes have you shot down today?”

“I’ll be right over,” Avrakotos responded, not minding in the least the mauling of his name. As always, Avrakotos wasn’t authorized to visit a member of Congress without prior approval and then only with a CIA nanny present; the trek to Bethesda Naval Hospital was yet another trip off the reservation.

Instinctively he understood that Wilson would not want conventional sympathy. And so he appeared at Charlie’s bedside with a giant bottle of Scotch, a package of condoms, and, most important, a stunning secret satellite photograph. “You didn’t see this, Charlie,” he began.

Wilson was genuinely lifted by the satellite photograph, which revealed what had just happened at the Shindand air base in Afghanistan. Fifteen Soviet MiGs destroyed on the runway, the damage visible in explicit and stunning detail. Best of all was the story Gust told Charlie about what had happened. It might as well have been a scene out of the movie
Rambo,
as Gust explained it. The Afghans, armed with satchel charges, had slipped onto the base, fixed the charges, and destroyed fifteen fighter jets on the ground. The photograph was so clear that it showed wings and twisted metal on the runway, and Gust boasted that this little act of mujahideen daring had cost the Kremlin at least $150 million. “We got our money back on that one hit alone,” he told Wilson.

Later John McMahon arrived at the hospital room proudly bearing the same strictly classified picture to cheer Charlie up. McMahon, however, had Office of Security agents clear the room first. To Avrakotos’s enormous relief, Wilson did not blow his cover by admitting that he had already seen the photo.

Charlie’s hospital room was witness to any number of strange visitors that June, not just CIA friends but Pakistani and Egyptian ambassadors bringing personal greetings from Dictator Zia and Defense Minister Abu Ghazala. Charlie’s sister, Sharon, was in the room one day when Sweetums, Trish, and Ziva all appeared at the same time. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack,” recalled Sharon. “It was a bit awkward,” Charlie remembers, “but it raised my prestige on the floor considerably.”

But mostly, for this bigger-than-life character suddenly laid low and struggling to breathe, it was a time of desperation. Curiously, Wilson turned his concerns away from his own condition and instead found himself preoccupied by the fate of the Afghans. “I’d lay in the bed and think about those helicopters and I worried that maybe Dr. Doom was right,” he says. “I worried that without me, Gust would lose his edge at Langley, that the money would dry up, that Cogan would be made director of the CIA, that Helman would become secretary of state.” Wilson had always romanticized the Afghans, but with his own fate so much in jeopardy, he came to see the mujahideen’s war as almost a holy cause. “To me they were just these mythical heroes who were totally good and who somehow might change the world. And I just felt that if I died they would die as well.”

Then came the miracle. In Houston, Dr. Cashion, the eighth specialist Wilson had sought out, announced that there was hope. “He said if I stopped drinking, I had a thirty-three and a third chance of getting well, the same chance of staying like I was, and a thirty-three and a third chance of deteriorating.” To a man who had been living with what amounted to a death sentence, this was not just a stay of execution. As he walked out of the hospital he felt overwhelmed with a sense that he had been given a reprieve for a purpose. “It was a beautiful day at the end of June and I remember thinking, You’ll never have another drink. I always figured I had nine lives, but this time I realized I’d better really go after what I wanted. I thought, Well, let’s just put all our energy and thought into our little project in the Hindu Kush.”

Something deep was now stirring in Charlie Wilson. “You always have religious thoughts when you come face-to-face with your mortality,” he says. “I felt at peace with what I’d done with my life because, even in my darkest days of alcohol abuse, I’d never neglected my constituents, never for a minute. But that day I left the hospital, I really felt I had been given a new lease on life and all my energies would be channeled into really draining the last drop of Russian blood out of Afghanistan. I was still thinking there had to be a way to shoot down those fucking helicopters, and I was going to find it.” It was an altogether new Charlie Wilson who arrived back at his office to pick up where he had left off.