Charlie Wilson's War (53 page)

F
or Avrakotos, there was something slightly unnerving about Wilson’s miraculous recovery. It would be another eighteen months before Charlie took a drink, and for the first time in his adult life he was soberly focused. Schnabel had ordered all alcohol removed from the congressman’s house in Texas, from the condo in Arlington, and from the offices on the Hill. But for once it wasn’t necessary. Wilson was observing his own ban, and it was transforming his mood.

Each morning he would take the members’ underground subway from his Rayburn office to the Capitol, striding past the security guards into the sealed room under the dome where the CIA provides a copy of the national intelligence daily brief for members with the highest security clearances. Charlie was usually the only congressman present as he poured through the Agency’s most up-to-date intelligence on battles and Soviet casualties.

There were times when Gust found it almost intimidating to brief his revived patron. Wilson was acting like a man with little time left, particularly frustrated that his Oerlikons were still not in action, and always asking the question Avrakotos hated to answer: “How many Hinds have you shot down this week?”

“It takes time Charlie,” Gust would begin before launching into Vickers’s standard refrain. “It’s the mix that’s important. And you’ve got to teach the mujahideen how to use these weapons.” But Wilson wasn’t willing to let it go at that. He had full confidence in Avrakotos, but Afghanistan had been a journey of discovery for him. By the fall of 1985 he had come to know that the CIA was not the only force he could call on. He had learned that his influence on Appropriations gave him the ability to run his own operations should he sense an opportunity. That’s where Charlie Schnabel came into the picture.

By that time Schanbel had become Wilson’s envoy to an assortment of odd characters who made up the American Afghan lobby. The tendency is to call them right-wingers, but they really defied labeling, with views even more extreme than Gordon Humphrey’s. Wilson thought they were all a bit crazy but potentially useful, as long as he didn’t have to deal with them personally. Schnabel made that possible since all of them seemed to feel a kindred spirit for the “other” Charlie. Just weeks after Wilson got out of the hospital, Schnabel urged the congressman to meet with one of these people.

Vaughn Forest was an obscure and somewhat abrasive aide to a little-known congressman. He was not the sort of man who instills trust in most politicians, but Wilson was intrigued when Schnabel explained that this former Florida cop and Vietnam Special Forces medic had just returned from a monthlong trek into the Afghan war zone. As an aide to Florida congressman Bill McCollum, he'd been well aware that the U.S. government absolutely prohibited any of its employees from crossing into the war zone with the mujahideen. But that kind of rule-breaking zeal appealed to Wilson, and he graciously agreed to a meeting.

Forest’s route to Afghanistan, like that of so many of the Americans who would become infatuated with the mujahideen’s cause, was a curious one. It had grown out of a passionate Catholicism that had caused him to spend his vacations providing humanitarian assistance to war refugees in Central America.

To his enormous surprise, in 1984 this work came to the attention of a group of Catholics, who invited him to join the ancient order of the Knights of Malta. At a ceremony in Washington, the famed trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams performed the ritual induction, forever altering Forest’s life. According to legend, the original knights had been crusaders from noble families. To Forest, it was as if he had been ordained by some mystical power to fulfill the obligations of this exalted order, which called on its knights to devote their lives to rescuing those in distress.

It was this new commission that caused him to fly to Pakistan on his vacation to contact the mujahideen, and then to walk over the mountains with one of their bands for a month of fighting. Vickers’s new flood of weapons had not yet made it through the pipeline, and Forest, who knew nothing of the program under way, was appalled by the way the Afghans were being armed and supported.

Drawing on his Vietnam experience, he began preparing his own detailed plans for revamping everything. On the way home he stopped in Rome to visit the headquarters of the Knights of Malta. The headquarters, which is located on two acres of sovereign territory near the Spanish steps in Rome, is actually a country, the smallest in the world and the only one with a front door. Forest had been a bit disappointed by the building’s fading architectural features, but he emerged from his meeting there with the name of a fellow knight whom he was told might be of use to him. Back in Washington, from his desk in the overcrowded Longworth Building congressional office, he called the number he had been given. “Hello, this is Vaughn Forest,” he said. “I believe the grand mufti of Rome wrote to Director Casey about me. Is he in?”

Forest heard a muffled voice saying, “Tell him to come out.” He was an anonymous aide to a congressman who served on no committee dealing with intelligence or foreign affairs. He had no realistic way of gaining access to William Casey, America’s spy chief, but suddenly and effortlessly Vaughn Forest found himself seated in the director’s office talking knight-to-knight.

This kind of experience can do strange things to an enthusiast like Vaughn Forest. Casey flattered him and applauded the young man’s interest and then passed him on to another good Catholic, Ed Juchniewicz, the associate deputy director for Operations. Juchniewicz says he liked Forest, took him seriously. “Let’s face it, he was an extreme right-winger,” Juchniewicz recalls. “But here was a kid with all of the best intentions. He wanted to help and he had all the right credentials as far as Casey was concerned. So I spent some time with him and found he had a lot of neat ideas.”

The truth was, Vaughn Forest managed to rub just about everyone else in the Agency the wrong way. Avrakotos, who was asked to see him, recalls, “He was a real odd bird, plus what he had to say was really off-the-wall.” But now, thanks to Charlie Schnabel’s recommendation, this persistent knight was sitting in Charlie Wilson’s office, and the congressman liked what he was hearing.

Forest explained that after returning from Afghanistan he had scoured the bureaucracy to find out if anyone in the U.S. government was trying to make high-tech, user-friendly weapons for anti-Communist guerrillas. No one was, not at the CIA or in the military. But Forest said he had discovered a group of weapons tinkerers in the Pentagon’s Tactical Land Warfare Division who were filled with notions of how to develop offbeat, mule-portable devices to help the mujahideen kill Russians. They would like nothing more than to be given the opportunity.

Vaughn Forest was so low on the Washington totem pole that he hadn’t even been able to get anyone at the Pentagon to listen to him, much less think about how to get Congress to fund a program to design and produce lightweight exotic killing devices. Under the best of circumstances—with a conventional-weapons plan that no one opposes—moving a program through Congress would take at least a year. But not for Charlie Wilson, once he turned to his fellow appropriators to shortcut the system and turn Forest’s vision into a reality. Within a few weeks of hearing Forest’s implausible proposition, Charlie emerged from a House-Senate Appropriations conference with a commitment to fund the most unconventional weapons program of the decade.

Its official name was the Weapons Upgrade Program, but it might just as well have been called “Charlie Wilson’s personal Afghan war chest.” One of the more unusual features of the program was a clause that exempted it from having to follow the rules and regulations that guide all of the Pentagon’s other weapons procurement and development programs. It was such a radical departure that Wilson knew it would have no chance of ultimately being implemented unless it first won the endorsement of the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger.

Thanks to Joanne and her carefully orchestrated dinner parties, Charlie had come to know Weinberger socially. Beyond that, for almost four years, in spite of being a liberal Democrat, he had been a critical ally on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, voting for each and every item in Reagan’s massive arms buildup. At one hearing, he’d even told Weinberger, “Mr. Secretary, there are a lot of things I don’t understand and some with which I don’t agree. But because you say they are important, I’m going to vote for them all.” As Charlie saw it, the bottom line was that he had done a lot for Weinberger, and it was time to cash in his chips.

At breakfast with the defense secretary, Wilson began by saying, “All I want is $10 million”—but then came the catch. For starters, he wanted the Pentagon to give the program a complete waiver on all red tape—no specs, no feasibility studies, no minority contracts, not even competitive bidding. There wasn’t time, he argued. The mujahideen were fighting and dying for America. They were fighting America’s war against America’s principal enemy and no one in the government was trying to create weapons and devices that could give these primitive freedom fighters a chance. Money was not the issue, said Wilson. This was war, and he wanted Weinberger to unleash the Pentagon’s most devilish inventors and tinkerers to think big and small and to begin delivering the goods within weeks. He added one final request: he wanted to be granted some measure of personal control over the program. As Wilson recalls this moment, Weinberger initially expressed concern about the legality of such a program, but only for a moment. Yes, he said; Charlie could count on his support.

The rest—getting the trusty staffers on the subcommittee to conceal the appropriation in a line item that no one would ever find—was hardly a challenge. Charlie Wilson was now presiding over another congressional first: his very own invisible $10-million-a-year exotic-weapons program. There were days in his office when he felt as if he were playing the role of M in a James Bond novel, summoning the government’s most ingenious inventors to decide what weapons and devices to commission for his freedom fighters.

Wilson had originally intended to fund this program through the CIA so that Gust could run it, but Avrakotos wanted no part of it. It was a year and a half since Charlie had come up with the money to buy the Swiss Oerlikons, and not so much as one had been given to the mujahideen. In frustration Wilson had begun lobbying the Agency to give the Israelis a contract for the Charlie Horse, the weapon Charlie had commissioned Zvi’s engineers to design for the mujahideen.

But bringing the Israelis into the CIA’s Muslim jihad was not what Avrakatos considered a reasonable option. There were many reasons why he was adamantly opposed to dealing with Israel. To begin with, it would risk alienating the Saudis, who were putting up half the money for the program. Beyond that, why risk alienating the legions of Muslim hotheads around the world who would draw the most extreme conclusions if it became known that the CIA was sneaking Jewish weapons into the jihad?

Avrakotos had an even greater concern, which he wasn’t at liberty to share with Wilson. It centered on his suspicions about the role Israel was playing with Oliver North and the White House in their ill-fated arms-for-hostages negotiations with Iran. From the time he’d first learned about North’s operation he had smelled a disaster in the making. The more he learned, the more he came to believe that the Israelis were walking a naive and inexperienced Oliver North and, with him, the United States into a trap. Repeatedly he would try to keep the Agency from being sucked into what was to become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. As it turned out, he didn’t have the power to do that, but he was determined not to permit the Israelis to become identified with any direct CIA commission connected to Afghanistan.

So instead of the CIA taking on the Weapons Upgrade Program, it went to the Pentagon. But, in fact, Charlie Wilson himself ended up overseeing much of this eccentric program out of his own congressional office, and it turned out to be a wild and remarkable success story. “There were all these little scientists in the Pentagon—bureaucratic misfits who just needed to be freed,” Wilson recalled years later. “We gave them a little money and made them immune to procurement laws. They’re mad-scientist types. They love to tinker with things that blow up but hate to fill out forms. Hate to follow the chain of command. Hate to wait.”

Typical of the characters who gravitated to this program were Chuck Barnard and his brother. They had grown up working in their father’s auto garage, and as far as they were concerned the Pentagon didn’t just buy $600 toilet seats; it made $20 million tanks that couldn’t survive in a face-off with one of their $1 million stripped-down Volkswagens armed with a range of their favorite high-tech weaponry. In their view, almost everything the Pentagon did to develop and buy weapons was wasteful, ineffective, and designed to fight some previous war.

For the first time, thanks to Wilson, these tinkerers were free to innovate at will and more or less without restraint. Within weeks, they began developing an astonishing collection of weapons. The Spanish mortar, for example, was designed to make it possible for the mujahideen to communicate directly with American navigation satellites to deliver repeated rounds within inches of their designated targets. Global-positioning technology is well known today, but back in 1985 it struck Wilson as the most astonishing capability. Just the thought of Afghan tribesmen who had never seen a flush toilet signaling an American satellite to fire precision rounds at a Red Army stronghold was almost too much to believe. The weapon’s name was purposefully misleading, chosen to conceal the fact that major portions of this “Spanish mortar” were being built by the Israelis.

Milt Bearden, the station chief who would dominate the war’s later years, actually came to rely on the steady stream of crazy new weapons that kept coming on-line from this offbeat program. His strategy called for introducing a new weapon into the battle every three months or so, in order to bluff the Red Army into thinking their enemy was better armed and supported than it was. The Spanish mortar, for example, with its satellite-guided charge, was rarely deployed and may only have succeeded because the Pakistani ISI advisers were along to direct the fire. But the Soviets didn’t know that. When the weapon was first used it wiped out an entire Spetsnaz outpost with a volley of perfect strikes. And as soon as Bearden learned from the CIA’s intercepts that the commander of the 40th Army had helicoptered to the scene, he knew that from that day on, the Soviets would have to factor in the possibility that the mujahideen had acquired some deadly targeting capability. For that reason alone, the weapon was a success even if never fired again.