Charlie Wilson's War (17 page)

His schedule called for the traditional tour of the U.N.-supported refugee camps, a scene that appalled everyone who came to Peshawar: millions of proud Afghans living in mud huts without running water or the ability to feed themselves. That month twenty thousand more had poured in—young boys and girls dressed in bright tribal clothing; the women with their faces covered. They came from the mountains and valleys of a country where their ancestors had lived for centuries, a legendary warrior nation not easy to intimidate and uproot.

All brought horror stories with them of what had caused them to flee their country. In particular they talked of helicopter gunships that hovered over their villages—hounding them even as they fled. It began to dawn on Wilson that there were only Afghans in this part of Pakistan and that he was witnessing an entire nation in flight from the Communists. This spectacle of mass suffering roused him but he had been to refugee camps before and for him there was something almost impersonal about such a mass of humanity. What did catch his attention that day was the absence of men—no teenagers, not even forty or fifty year olds. He was told they were all fighting in the jihad.

It was at his next stop, the Red Cross hospital on the edge of Peshawar, that he lost his heart to the Afghans. Wilson’s whole sense of himself rested on his self-image as a champion of the underdog. The victims of Sabra and Shatilla had shaken him, and he was not proud that he had chosen to remain silent in the face of such brutality. Perhaps this had something to do with his reaction in the hospital when he met his first Afghan warriors.

Scores of young men were laid out on hospital cots. The doctors sat with Wilson at the bed of a young boy and explained that his hand had been blown off by a Russian butterfly mine designed to look like a toy. This threw Wilson into a rage. A young Afghan who had stepped on a land mine explained he was proud of his sacrifice. “He told me his only regret was that he couldn’t have his feet grown back so he could go kill Russians.”

Wilson moved from bed to bed, undone by the carnage but increasingly aware why most of them were there. He spoke to a wounded commander as the effects of an anesthetic started to kick in. The man was waving his hand in a circle, speaking in Pashtun, describing the horror of the Russian gunship that had put him there. Not one of them complained about their lost limbs. But every one of them described their fury at the Russian gunships. And to a man, they asked for only one thing: a weapon to bring down this tool of Satan. Wilson wanted desperately to give something to these warriors and, before leaving, he donated a pint of his own blood.

His next stop was a meeting with a council of Afghan elders, hundreds of whom were waiting for him in a huge colorful tent, decorated with cotton fabrics that looked like floating Oriental rugs. As he walked in, Wilson was dazed by the sight of long white beards and turbans, and the men’s fierce, unblinking eyes. The Pakistanis had told them that the congressman had come as a friend offering assistance, and as he entered they shouted, “
Allahu Akbar
”—God is Great.

To Wilson it was like a scene out of the Old Testament. When the elders invited the Texan to speak, he delivered what he thought would be just the right message. “I told them that they were the most courageous people in the world and I said, We’re going to help you. None of your families will suffer from lack of shelter and food. I pledged that their soldiers would not be left to die in agony and that we would give them millions in humanitarian assistance.”

An old man rose to respond. He told Wilson he could keep his bandages and rice. What they needed was a weapon to destroy the gunships. These old men were no different from the young warriors in the hospital. They were all fixated on the Russian Mi-24 Hind helicopter. If he wanted to help, he should get them a gun to knock this devil out of the sky. It was at this moment that Charlie Wilson realized he was in the presence of a people who didn’t care about sympathy. They didn’t want medicine or charity. They wanted revenge.

It’s not uncommon for a single childhood experience—particularly if it is a traumatic one—to end up shaping an entire life. Sometimes it offers the only key to understanding what leads a person to make choices that would otherwise seem irrational. That certainly is the case with Charlie Wilson and his decision to embrace the lost cause of the Afghans.

As is true with many boys, Charlie’s dog was his best friend, his constant companion. Everyone in Trinity knew that Teddy was Charlie’s dog. Whenever the two would burst into Cochran’s corner drugstore they would get equal billing: “Hello, Charlie. Hello, Teddy.”

And that’s where Teddy died—a hideous, agonizing end on the floor of Cochran’s store with Charlie and a crowd of neighbors and friends watching in horror. Charlie’s mother, Wilmuth, held the boy back, fearing the dog might have rabies. For ten minutes, he watched, completely helpless. He was thirteen.

Later, when the pharmacist discovered that Teddy had been fed finely ground glass, Charlie knew immediately who had done it. It was the work of his twisted neighbor, Charles Hazard, an old man who was forever threatening to do in any stray dog who soiled his well-manicured garden.

It was the spring of 1946, and that night Charlie poured gasoline over Hazard’s precious plants and set his lawn on fire. But in the cold light of dawn, he realized that this wasn’t sufficient revenge. That’s when he had one of those brilliant flashes that never failed in later years to spring fully grown into his mind whenever he found himself in similar situations, facing bullies who needed to be reigned in. Hazard was a city official, and Charlie suddenly realized that an election was about to be held.

On this occasion, he found himself recalling his mother’s fury at the way the liquor interests had managed to bribe Trinity’s black citizens with beer and cash to accept a ride to the polls to vote down the referendum to outlaw alcohol. Looking out over Charles Hazard’s blackened lawn, Charlie concluded that if he could only get a car, he could mobilize his own secret army of voters to defeat Hazard. In those days, farm boys could get special driving permits at thirteen. He got his permit and then persuaded his parents to let him use the family’s new car, the first they’d ever had, a two-door Chevrolet.

When the polls opened, Charlie was waiting with his first carload of voters. He said only one thing before letting them out: “I don’t want to influence your vote, but I’d like you to know that Charles Hazard poisoned my dog.”

By the time Hazard arrived at the polling place that afternoon, his fate was sealed. About four hundred people had voted, and Charlie had bused in ninety-six of them. By a margin of sixteen votes, the reign of Charles Hazard had come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

That evening, thirteen-year-old Charlie Wilson strode down the street to Hazard’s house and announced that he was pleased to report that his black constituents had just ended Hazard’s career. “You shouldn’t poison any more dogs,” he said before leaving.

Thirty-six years later, something about the mujahideen’s appeal to stop the Soviet gunships brought back memories of his dog. “I started to think to myself: Where are all the congressmen who are always talking about humanitarian aid, and the human-rights activists? Where are they now?” In the fall of 1982, the mujahideen had no congressional champions. In fact, they had no one in any position of power who believed that they had a chance for victory. Wilson had no logical reason to believe that he could help these tribesmen fight a ruthless superpower. But he felt the same rush of anger and clarity that had made it possible for a thirteen-year-old boy to bring down his dog’s murderer. Surrounded by these determined men, Wilson saw a path to honor, if not victory. “It began to dawn on me right then and there that I didn’t know what was going to happen, but with my rage and their courage I knew we were going to kill some Russians.”

Standing by these biblical figures, he realized that Joanne Herring had been right. His whole life had been leading to this moment. This was the place where he could change history. “I saw how clearly it could be presented at home. I knew right then we would be able to overcome the liberals’ objections to projecting American power. Because this was the Red fucking Army! This was simply an issue of good and evil.”

Wilson had one final stop on his schedule, the most important of all—a meeting with Zia ul-Haq. When asked these days about his heroes, Charlie Wilson puts three at the front of the list: Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and General Zia ul-Haq. Zia’s place on this list is, needless to say, unusual. In 1982 most of Wilson’s congressional colleagues saw Zia as a smiling dictator who had hung his predecessor, killed democracy, and was building an Islamic nuclear bomb; and whose Muslim fundamentalism was robbing women of what little equality and dignity they possessed.

But none of this alarmed Wilson. He trusted Joanne Herring’s instincts and he knew that if Zia could put up with her flamboyant ways, he was not an inflexible fundamentalist. Wilson was also shrewd enough to realize that Zia was the key to anything that might be done with the Afghans. When he returned from Peshawar and set off that night for dinner with the president, he was eager to meet this man and decide for himself whether they could join forces to up the ante in Afghanistan.

General Zia ul-Haq was a bugler’s son, a child of the British army and, in his manner, British through and through. He had accumulated great power as Pakistan’s military dictator, but he presented himself in a simple, even humble manner. He was waiting on the steps of the old colonial chief of staff’s house when Wilson arrived. Up close, Zia did not seem remotely like the ruthless Islamist he was reported to be. He had a mesmerizing aura, and Wilson was immediately charmed by his warm greeting and the absence of any imperial trappings.

The congressman hated it when alcohol was not served, but he took the fresh fruit juice that was offered in good cheer. After the predictable exchanges about mutual friends, he found himself speaking with rage about what he had just witnessed. “Zia became very animated and talked about wanting to go fight the Russians himself,” Wilson remembers as if it were yesterday. “He was all fire and passion, pounding the table, saying ‘there is a way. We can win. We can beat them. We’ve got to all think about nothing but shooting down those helicopters.’ I could feel the fire in his belly, and it excited me.”

This was the first of many meetings to come where these two unlikely allies would sit alone, keeping the U.S. ambassador and other important dinner guests waiting while they plotted the demise of the Russian empire. Wilson that night talked straight and tough with him about his unconventional plans. “I told Zia that in spite of the opposition, as long as he didn’t detonate a bomb or execute any more Bhuttos, I could double or triple the American commitment with a minimum of commotion. He looked at me a long time and said, ‘You know I’ve been promised many things by Americans before.’”

Wilson was careful in responding: “‘Mr. President, I’m a man of many character flaws, but I can promise you one thing: I will never tell you I can do something in Congress that I can’t deliver.’ Zia looked at me and said, ‘That’s very important. I believe that.’”

Before Wilson left Zia’s residence that night, they embraced and agreed to talk again the following month. Zia was scheduled to meet Ronald Reagan in Washington, but first he would fly to Houston to attend an elaborate dinner that Joanne Herring was organizing in his honor.

In the scheme forming in Wilson’s mind, he now had almost all the elements in place to go back to Washington to work his Appropriations magic. There was just one mystery to be cleared up: what was the CIA’s game? Why hadn’t they been asking for more sophisticated guns and much more money? The White House was behind the program. President Reagan referred to the Afghans as “freedom fighters.” No one in Congress had any problems giving weapons to these men. So why wasn’t the CIA giving them what they needed?

Only one person in Pakistan could answer that question. And after seeing Zia, he directed the U.S. embassy in the name of “the Honorable Charles Wilson, member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense” to request a meeting with Howard Hart, the CIA’s man in Pakistan.

I
t’s a tribute to the CIA’s cult of secrecy that by the time Charlie Wilson met Howard Hart, in November 1982, he had never, to his knowledge, talked to an active member of the CIA’s Clandestine Services. He was on the subcommittee that appropriated the Agency’s money, but he had no understanding of what the CIA really did or how its officers operated.

Howard Hart wasn’t happy about briefing the congressman. The cable from headquarters had arrived in the crammed CIA station with this simple directive: “The Honorable Charles Wilson, Democratic representative from Texas, arriving Islamabad. As member of Defense Appropriations subcommittee he is entitled to full classified briefing on the Afghan war.” The station chief figured there was almost nothing positive that could come from this meeting. But Wilson was on a committee the CIA couldn’t afford to alienate, and Hart, ever the disciplined secret soldier, set out to do his duty.

Any successful case officer must have a capacity to charm and manipulate, and Howard Hart made sure to put on his most charming self when he greeted the congressman downstairs in the temporary U.S. embassy.

Ever since a mob of Muslim fanatics had burned down the new $22 million embassy to the ground three years earlier, life in the temporary mission had been a claustrophobic nightmare. Hart’s team was unusually small, given the scope of its mission in Pakistan: only twenty-five people, including secretaries and technical workers, to keep the Afghan war going and to spy on the Pakistanis and their nuclear program. And all he could get for them was three windowless rooms on the fifth floor, so crowded that his agents had to take turns using the few desks and telephones.

The CIA, as a practice, locates its stations abroad in U.S. embassies. In Islamabad, Hart operated under the cover of being the first political secretary, the same job that Dick Welch, the Athens station chief, had held when he was gunned down outside his home several years before. Hart’s operation was officially known as the Regional Affairs Office. He and his fellow officers were located on the fifth floor in what amounted to a vault with a combination lock on the door.

This was all very new to Wilson, who felt a bit like a kid when he realized he was about to enter his first CIA station. But he carefully took stock of Howard Hart. The congressman’s only prior exposure to the CIA had been through the renegade operative Ed Wilson, now beginning his fifty-two-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Ed Wilson had lectured him on how the Agency had been “deballed,” as he put it, and taken over by careerists interested only in playing it safe. The congressman still had his suspicions about the Agency, but the one thing he did know for certain when he walked through the embassy with the handsome, blond forty-two-year-old American was that Howard Hart was the real McCoy. To Wilson, he seemed almost to be stepping out of a movie. The congressman thought he looked a bit like Nick Nolte, his voice eerily like William Holden’s. Beyond that, Hart had the kind of command presence that an old navy man like Wilson always found deeply impressive.

For his part, the station chief was choreographing this experience for the congressman. He knew how the mumbo jumbo awed outsiders, and so he was playing his part to the hilt. He effortlessly punched the code into the combination lock and let the congressman into his secret room. Motioning for Wilson to sit down, Hart busied himself with a briefcase, which opened to disclose a row of dials. When he finished adjusting them, the sound of the 1812 Overture filled the room—a standard Agency technique to counter bugging. Not wanting to appear the amateur, Wilson did his best to look utterly accustomed to the ritual.

Hart pulled out satellite pictures and pointed to the map, prepared to give the congressman one of his tour de force performances. He had already heard from his sources that Wilson was carping about the level of CIA support. It was too bad he couldn’t tell this blowhard with the pretty-boy hairdo and the cowboy boots how he had single-handedly escalated a set of village rebellions into an ongoing national war. But that would require confiding in a loose cannon about the way things work in the Directorate of Operations—and that was an inner sanctum that Howard Hart was not going to permit Charlie Wilson or any other congressman to enter.

The small, intense world from which Howard Hart came was Archie Roosevelt’s old club, the same fraternity within a fraternity that had inducted Gust Avrakotos in 1962 and Hart four years later. Hart was so proud of his place within this elite that he would always say he had not joined the CIA but the Clandestine Services of the United States of America. Later in his career, when he was asked to talk to new recruits, that was always the message he would begin with: “You are not joining the CIA. You are joining America’s Clandestine Services. There are fewer case officers operating abroad than there are meter maids in New York. You are America’s spies. You were selected because you are the most gifted young men and women of your generation, but all we can promise you is that, after training, we’ll send you to some terrible place. And when you finish your tour there, we’ll send you to some other terrible place. And then the worst fate of all is that we’ll make you come back to Washington for a year every once in a while, where you will have to live with the bureaucracy. And if you do anything good you can’t tell anyone about it. Other than that, it is a wonderful life.” The point Howard Hart was making to each class of new recruits was that they were joining a priesthood, and no one should apply or begin to serve if he didn’t feel the sense of mission. It could not be for money or fame; it had to be for love of country.

Howard Phillips Hart had been a small boy when he first experienced the wonder of being an American. His father was a banker in the Philippines in 1941 when the Japanese occupied the country and put all foreigners in prisoner-of-war camps. There were about three hundred Americans, British, and Canadians living in the camp where Hart and his family were held captive. It wasn’t such a bad life for a small boy who hadn’t known anything different. There was just enough to eat and good fellowship, and the adults had time to spend with the children. But it got suddenly menacing when General MacArthur fulfilled his promise and began the liberation of the Philippines.

Around Christmastime in 1944, as the U.S. forces moved into Manila, word spread through the camp that all of the prisoners were to be murdered. Over the next two weeks, American forces captured 20,000 of the 400,000 Japanese occupying the Philippines; the rest fought to the bitter end or committed suicide. But the Americans had yet to free the camp prisoners. One bloodred morning in January 1945, on a day the Japanese were preparing to execute their charges, the young boy looked up and saw the sky filled with parachutes. As gunfire filled the camp, Hart’s mother told her son that the American soldiers were coming to rescue them. Three hundred paratroopers began landing all around. Suddenly, the small boy was in the arms of a large American G.I. As shells exploded around them, everyone ran to the water’s edge, where the U.S. Navy had sent a flotilla of amtracs to ferry the prisoners to safety across the lake. The four-year-old boy was impressed with the explosions, but the memory that would stay with him was of the G.I. carrying him to freedom.

After the war, Hart’s father resumed his life as a banker in the Philippines. At night, when family friends would gather, they’d always end up talking about their wartime experiences organizing guerrilla forces to battle the Japanese. Hart stood in awe of these Americans who had risked their lives to fight for freedom. These late-night talks became a kind of ongoing seminar for the boy, who listened and stored away their wisdom on guerrilla tactics and strategy. When his turn came in Afghanistan, he would draw from those lessons and push that advice on the mujahideen: Never try to take and hold territory. Hit and run. Don’t use radios to communicate; the enemy will intercept your messages and find you. Don’t build base camps that need to be defended. Stay light and mobile.

Hart was like most Americans brought up abroad after World War II—he considered the United States to be the all-powerful beacon of freedom, and being an American in the Third World felt special. When he became old enough, his father sent him off for polishing to Kent, a boarding school in Connecticut for young men, and then on to college at Colgate. But midway through Hart’s college career, his father went bankrupt, and he was forced to drop out. A friend told him that if he moved to Arizona, he could enroll at the University of Arizona for free. A surprising number of gifted academics were clustered at the University of Arizona, where Hart went on to receive a graduate degree in Oriental studies, specializing in South Asia and learning Urdu.

His decision to pursue a career in the service of his country came to him all at once on a cold January day in 1961, listening to John Kennedy’s innaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Just as it did for Gust Avrakotos and Charlie Wilson, both of whom were listening at the very same time, the words had an explosive impact on the young man. With the memory of the huge G.I. who had come out of the sky to carry him to freedom and the words of President Kennedy, Hart felt he had no choice but to serve his country, and he decided then and there that, if it would have him, he would join the CIA.

In June 1966, Hart was inducted into the Agency and spent the next two years at the Camp Peary spy school. After graduating, he was sent to India and Pakistan where he spent five years as a junior officer. But he got his first chance to play in the big leagues in 1978 when he was sent on a secret mission to Iran during the final days of the Shah’s regime. The CIA case officers and staff at the huge Teheran station were all registered with the Shah’s government, Hart’s assignment was to operate deep under cover. Soon after revolution swept the Ayatollah and his virulent anti-American followers into power, the entire 125-man CIA station was evacuated.

Hart, still under cover, was left behind in enemy territory as the acting CIA station chief. At 35, a mere GS-13, he was now operating clandestinely as his country’s eyes and ears in charge of a tiny collection of unregistered agents. For the next four months he lived with constant terror. Tehran was occupied by militant, gun-toting student radicals convinced that every American they saw was a spy. Rifles were always being pointed at his head. Crazed revolutionaries repeatedly hurled him to the ground, accusing him of being with the CIA and threatening to kill him.

Hart had made a pact with himself, back when he’d said good-bye to his wife and boys and had shaken hands with the departing station chief. A heavy smoker, he’d decided that he might well die one day from lung cancer, but he was not, by God, going to die at the hands of a Muslim fanatic. He realized that this challenge was what his whole life, and all his CIA training and experience, had been leading to.

Day after day Hart maneuvered through a terrifying landscape. He and his four agents had the keys to eighty cars and 250 apartments left behind by the departing Americans. They kept moving, maintaining their cover, and reporting back to Langley. When the student radicals stormed the embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage, Hart transmitted his last dispatch, then made his way to the border and back to Washington.

It was one of those career-making events. The crisis had hit and Howard Phillips Hart had distinguished himself. He would receive the first of five coveted and rare intelligence medals—more, he was told, than any other CIA officer had ever been awarded.

Back in Washington, Hart was put in charge of the Pakistan-Afghanistan desk. He was there when the Russians invaded just after Christmas in 1979. When Jimmy Carter discovered old-time Cold War religion and asked the Agency to do something about Afghanistan, Hart helped write the first finding for the president to sign. And when the president ordered a rescue mission for the hostages being held in the Tehran embassy, Hart was tapped to head up the CIA’s part of the operation. For the next six months he went underground, coordinating with Delta Force and the Pentagon’s Special Operations Unit.

In Egypt, the night before launching the April 25 rescue operation, Hart met with the Delta Force team in a large hangar where the CIA had assembled a huge model of the U.S. embassy. Hart knew every nook and cranny of the place. Just the day before, one of the CIA’s agents in Tehran had come up with the exact location where the Americans were being held, and Hart walked the secret warriors through every room they might have to enter. At the end of the briefing, as the Delta Force soldiers were filing out of the room, one young sergeant took Hart aside and asked, “Sir, where do I put the flag?”

“What do you mean?” Hart asked.

The soldier unbuttoned his camouflage suit and there, wrapped around his chest, was a large American flag.

“Oh shit, that’s a good idea,” Hart said. So the two went back to the model and Hart decided it should be nailed to the wall over the second-floor balcony of the ambassador’s residence. “The revolutionary guards will take it down,” he said, “but by then the TV crews will have filmed it. That’s the place to put it.”

Hart was on board the C-130 Hercules when the Delta Force team landed in the desert during the Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt. He wore a flak jacket, carried an M-16, and was going in. But then the disaster hit. A helicopter collided with an airplane, and eight Americans died. The mission was aborted, and suddenly Howard Hart was at the door of his C-130 pulling one Delta Force soldier after another into the plane. When he reached out to pull the last man in, he saw tears smudging the dark camouflage paint under the soldier’s eyes. It was the young Delta Force sergeant. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “about the flag.”

Back in Egypt, Hart wept. This could have been a chance for America to stand tall again. For Howard Hart, it could have been an opportunity to pay the country back for that moment in Manila thirty-five years earlier when he and his family had been rescued. But it was not America’s day.