Charlie Wilson's War (20 page)

Until the story broke, Wilson’s political star had been rising. He had been scheduled to be one of the Democratic Party’s representatives to respond to President Reagan’s State of the Union address. He was immediately replaced once newspapers across the country headlined the charges: “Lid Blown Off Big D.C. Drug Ring,” “Drug Probe Targets Wilson.” The congressman professed innocence to the reporter from the
Dallas Morning News:
“I don’t think it’s a Communist plot but I think it probably is a vendetta kind of thing.” And to his constituents he promised, “I won’t blame booze and I won’t suddenly find Jesus.” Under the circumstances he was doing as well as anyone possibly could, but nonetheless the nickname “Cocaine Charlie” began making the rounds.

Wilson was now a hunted man. Rudolph Giuliani, the then-famed prosecutor, was heading the Justice task force. G-men and DEA agents were working back through every nook and cranny of the congressman’s past, locating his old girlfriends, playing tough with them, and taking depositions from all his employees, past and present.

Years later, Wilson would remember how easy it was to drown in suspicion: “You think your friends don’t want to be seen with you. You’re hesitant to say hello to your mother on the phone. You want to use the pay phone down the hall. You can’t sleep. You want to talk all day to your lawyer until you realize that it costs $300 to talk, but you call anyway. And then you think of all the people in your life you’ve done things against who would like to bear witness against you.”

Wilson’s longtime administrative assistant, Charles Simpson, was genuinely worried about his boss. “There were four or five nights when I was almost afraid to leave him alone,” he recalls. “He was that low, drinking straight vodka in the office. Just him and me.”

At the center of this drama now stood a startled Liz Wickersham, the former
Playboy
cover girl who had accompanied Wilson on his Las Vegas weekend. Paul Brown told the FBI that Liz had been with Wilson in the Fantasy Suite when he’d snorted cocaine and in the Cayman Islands, where, Brown said, they had done it again. She had also been with him in the limousine coming back from Las Vegas, where, Brown claimed, Wilson had once again inhaled the white powder.

Wickersham was a potential time bomb, and Charlie’s lawyer ordered him to cut off all contact with her. For the moment, any thought of Afghanistan was driven from his mind as he was forced to stand by, paranoid, and listen to the prosecutors’ rumors about what Liz was telling them. “I just don’t understand this, I can’t believe she said that,” he would tell Simpson in his cups late at night when he heard that Liz had confirmed that he had used cocaine in the Caymans. In fact, she told them she had taken a photograph of him “because he just looked silly and it was quite unusual…to see a congressman do that.” She also reported that she thought she had seen him smoking marijuana in Washington.

Wilson took this news as a betrayal. He didn’t yet understand that Liz was, in fact, his savior. At that critical moment in early 1983, this perky blond beauty queen found herself alone, holding the line against a federal posse threatening to make her swing if she didn’t rat on the congressman. But all she would give the feds when she testified was information about Wilson’s drug use outside the country, where U.S. law doesn’t apply. Most important, she flatly denied any knowledge of cocaine use on the occasions Brown said he had witnessed it. She held the line in every area that could have brought Wilson down.

But back in February and March 1983, Wilson didn’t yet understand that Liz was acting as his protector; he only knew that there were constant camera crews waiting for him to walk the gauntlet, three or four cameras following him everywhere. “They were like guns. I had an almost irresistible urge to grab them and pull them out of their hands.” It was all getting to him and Wilson was beginning to act erratically, firing his lawyer one drunken afternoon, rehiring him the next morning. Meanwhile, the frustrated investigators were pulling out all the stops, sending out subpoenas to every major limousine driver in town, determined to find the driver who was said to have witnessed the congressman snorting cocaine in the limo.

In Wilson’s mind it was as if a growing army of bounty hunters was moving about the capital, searching for any pretext to put him away. He might easily have left the Afghan playing field at this point for good, but his lawyers, upon learning of his scheduled trip to Israel and Pakistan, urged him to go. “Get out of the country. Keep to your routine,” they advised.

This advice—just the thought of escaping from this nightmare—lifted the congressman’s spirits. He realized that friends would be waiting for him everywhere he landed. Best of all, he already had a traveling companion who had agreed to come along for the ride. Two months earlier in Islamabad, while drunk in the secret basement disco, Wilson had vowed never to return to Pakistan without an American girl in tow. Incredibly, in a moment of drunken abandon, fate had led him to Carol Shannon.

Shannon was something of a local celebrity in the Dallas–Fort Worth area because of her skills as an exotic belly dancer. After watching her perform, and well into his cups, Charlie had asked her to dance and then impulsively had made the invitation.

“Now, darling,” the congressman had said with mock gravity on the dance floor. “If you’re really serious about this belly dancing, come with me to Cairo and I’ll have you dance for the defense minister of Egypt.” The invitation was made only half in earnest, but as time went on, Wilson began to think, Hell, that’s not such a bad idea, bringing my own personal belly dancer. Now, in his lawyer’s office, it was as if the clouds had lifted. Soon he would be far away from this city of cutthroats, traveling first class to countries where the leaders would treat him with respect. The light came back into his eyes as he prepared to rejoin the crusade.

A
t the age of six, in deep East Texas, Carol Shannon had felt the urge to dance. But her family’s Baptist congregation viewed dancing as the work of the Devil. They preached a doctrine of the man as master of the house with the obligation to whip the evil spirit out of his children. At times the little girl didn’t understand why her father shouted accusations and used his belt on her naked skin, causing it to break and bleed. Then one day, after he had caught her dancing and given her a particularly cruel thrashing, he struck her with his fist, again and again.

Afterward, alone in her bedroom, she was confused. And then mysteriously, she found herself turning on the radio and beginning to dance to the music, swaying before the mirror. As her body began to respond, she began laughing, then laughing louder, and finally laughing with joy.

Years later, when her husband, an archconservative Texas legislator, decided to run for the state senate, Charlie Wilson flew in from Washington to organize the opposition. Carol’s husband told her that Wilson was a dangerous liberal who would ruin the United States and destroy big business. “He is the enemy,” Carol remembers him telling her. But Wilson’s candidate won, and Joe Shannon’s political career was destroyed.

When Carol’s marriage began to go sour, she signed up for belly-dancing courses to win back her husband’s love. One night she asked him to turn the television off. She lit candles and performed for him. He said it was very interesting and then put out the candles and turned the TV back on.

But this Dallas housewife had an unmistakable genius for this unusual dance form. She was a beauty—once Miss Sea & Ski and Miss Humble Oil, she was now in her late thirties, with black hair and gleaming eyes. Men became infatuated when they saw her perform. Her dreams, however, went beyond such simple triumphs. She’d come to believe that in a previous life she had been Nefertiti, the ancient Egyptian queen of the Nile, and she found that when she danced, this bond with another identity released her spirit, freed her of her childhood terrors. Women started coming to her for lessons. She taught at the junior high school and danced wherever she could, at bachelor parties and retirement events. And then came the breakthrough.

In 1978, the Fort Worth Symphony invited her to dance solo in a performance of
Samson and Delilah.
The Devil’s work or not, dancing had carried little Carol Shannon of East Texas onto center stage before Fort Worth’s high society. A full symphony orchestra, the ultimate symbol of a city’s culture, was validating her as a woman and an artist.

It was all too much for her husband, who left her a week later. But for the dangerously liberal congressman who had helped destroy Joe Shannon’s career, the sight of this exotic housewife, appearing like a vision out of the
Arabian Nights,
was irresistible. He befriended her after one of her performances and soon found himself falling in lust, if not love. Later, when he was being hounded by the drug investigators, instead of turning to the elevated Joanne Herring, Wilson looked to the small-town girl from Kilgore, Texas.

Charlie found Carol Shannon to be a kindred spirit and when the drug charges mounted and he felt he had no choice but to hold a press conference she flew to Washington to be with him when he faced the newsmen.

That evening they sat together on the balcony of Wilson’s condominium. From there they could see straight down the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagon. Off to the right they could see the outlines of Arlington National Cemetery, but by far the most dramatic of the patriotic symbols, set just a hundred yards away, was the Iwo Jima memorial, where a marine honor guard was going through the evening ritual of taking down and folding the American flag. Wilson told her that he had chosen his apartment because of what the statue meant to him—and how badly he now felt for his people back home and for the grief he was causing them. “He said he had gone into politics because he wanted to make the country a better place for everyone and he really wanted to see peace in the world. There were tears in his eyes,” she recalls. At the end of the weekend, Carol told the troubled man, “I love you to death. I’m only a plane ride away. If you ever need me, I’ll always be there. I’m your friend.”

Now, two months later, it was as if Carol Shannon was stepping into a fairy tale. She was in a first-class seat next to the smiling congressman, heading off to dance for the Egyptian defense minister. “You know that old television show
Queen for a Day
? Well, Charlie made me queen for three weeks.”

When they landed in Israel, Zvi Rafiah was waiting at the airport. A U.S. diplomat was also there, by now so familiar with Wilson’s routine that he didn’t bother the congressman about his schedule. He just handed him a wad of cash—the per diem allotted to all traveling congressmen—and left Wilson to his Israeli friends.

Carol was thrilled to be in the land of the Bible. Wilson would disappear with Zvi every morning, sending her off in the embassy’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes to see the holy sights. One afternoon, he came back “acting like a kid in a candy store,” she said. She didn’t completely understand what he was talking about, but she remembers that it had to do with T-55 tanks and secret deals with Pakistan. “I’ve never breathed a word about this before,” she recalled. “And Charlie only gave me bits and pieces, but he was so excited because he thought he was going to be able to do something that no one else could. Charlie is a giver, and here he was saving the world.”

What Wilson was doing during the day in Israel was scheming with Zvi’s associates at IMI, the weapons conglomerate that produces the country’s artillery, tank shells, and machine guns. It has the second biggest payroll in Israel and is inextricably entwined with the military and security apparatus of the Jewish state.

Wilson’s scheming was conducted not merely out of Carol’s sight but outside that of the U.S. embassy, which ordinarily monitors congressional activities abroad. One of the reasons for shadowing visiting members of Congress is to discourage them from engaging in negotiations that could place U.S. interests at risk. Wilson, however, never shied away from negotiating, in effect, on behalf of his government, and on this occasion he and his Israeli friends had a wide range of business to transact. The Lavi fighter plane was at the top of Israeli Aircraft Industry’s agenda, but Wilson told them not to worry, everything was on track. They turned next to the T-55 upgrade proposal and to what their congressional friend could offer President Zia, on behalf of Israel, when he met with him in Pakistan at the end of the week. The Israelis were hoping this deal would serve as the beginning of a range of under-the-table understandings with Pakistan that the congressman would continue to quietly negotiate for them.

Wilson was in his element with these tough Israelis. He had already told Zvi of his frustrations with the CIA; now, in Tel Aviv, he was challenging IMI to invent a weapon that the Afghans could use to shoot down the murderous Hind helicopters. “You Jews are supposed to be so smart,” he said, “so come up with something and I’ll get the Pentagon to fund it.”

Charlie Wilson was marching himself into a true forbidden zone. Congressmen are not allowed to commission a foreign power to design and construct a weapons system. Nor do they have the authority to commit the Pentagon to pay for such a weapon. But these were minor outrages compared to Wilson’s potentially explosive attempt to bring the Israelis into the Muslim jihad that the CIA was funding against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

It’s hard to conceive of anyone other than Charlie Wilson making such a proposition, much less being taken seriously. But such was the stature of this old congressional patron of Israel that the IMI chief immediately set his weapons experts to work. By the time Wilson was ready to leave, they’d presented him with an impressive-looking design, complete with detailed specifications. It was a mule-portable, multirocketed device named, to the congressman’s delight, the Charlie Horse. Flushed with excitement, Wilson told Zvi and his boss that he would present it to the CIA with an ultimatum: either use it or come up with something better.

Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, the troubled congressman came up with an ingenious method to enlist the Israelis in the jihad. It helped put the memories of Sabra and Shatilla to the back of his mind.

The next morning, on March 31, 1983, five days into his trip, Wilson and Carol Shannon stepped into the world’s most peculiar commercial aircraft. There were no markings on the plane, not even a tail number. This was the Jerusalem-to-Cairo shuttle mandated by the Camp David Accords. It was the only flight linking Israel to any part of the Arab world in those days, and Charlie had managed to assemble a marvelously bizarre collection of traveling companions for the flight. Zvi Rafiah, the Israeli whom Wilson had always believed to be a Mossad agent, sat next to his wife, both of them visibly jumpy about this flight into enemy territory. Charlie’s Israeli movie-star friend, Gila Almagor—no less jumpy—added a certain sparkle to the entourage.

The contrast among the passengers was almost comical: the Texas girl filled with innocent excitement at the prospect of seeing Cairo; the three Israelis quaking in their boots. They could barely believe they were on this plane. None of them had dared visit Egypt before, but the congressman wanted his Israeli friends to meet his great Egyptian friend, and he’d assured them safe passage. They would be under the protection of none other than the Egyptian defense minister, Field Marshal Mohammed Abu Ghazala. And the field marshal himself would be at the airport to greet them.

Wilson made it all sound so natural and easy. But by what strange coincidence had this Texas congressman come to be the Egyptian defense minister’s intimate friend? The answer begins with Denis Neill, that resourceful Washington lobbyist who had gone to work for Egypt in 1980 after Camp David restored diplomatic relations between Cairo and Washington. Neill had sensed fantastic foreign-aid opportunities for his client and, knowing Wilson’s power and his penchant for personalizing causes, he had urged Abu Ghazala to cultivate the congressman. It hadn’t taken much of an effort. Abu Ghazala, it turns out, was just Wilson’s kind of man: a hero of the 1973 war, a true hater of Communists, and, best of all, a Muslim who drank whiskey, loved women, and was possessed with an endless supply of ethnic jokes from every country in the world. Wilson saw him as just plain fun, and as Neill had shrewdly predicted, a friendship blossomed. As the connection grew, miraculously, Charlie Wilson, the old Israeli commando, added another identity to his portfolio: champion of Egypt’s foreign aid as well as Israel’s.

There was, of course, more to this story, and Denis Neill is quick to point out that he was merely piggybacking on the preexisting lobbying efforts of General Dynamics. “They’re the ones who introduced Charlie to Egypt, because F-16s are the mainstay of Egyptian foreign aid and F-16s are made in Texas.” But the essential ingredient that Neill added to the mix was the smiling face of Abu Ghazala. Once the issue of Egyptian aid became personalized in Wilson’s mind, there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do to get his friend Mohammed his fair share of the U.S. taxpayers’ money. Now, whenever Abu Ghazala came to the congressman’s office he was treated as Zvi Rafiah’s equal, and that was saying a lot.

Rafiah had always acted as if he owned Wilson’s office. One of the staffers kept a list of people he needed to lobby. He would use the phones, give projects to the staff, and call on Charlie to intervene whenever he needed him. Abu Ghazala’s lobbying style was as industrious as Zvi’s, and the office quickly learned to treat his causes as every bit as important. Wilson always delivered for his friend Mohammed.

When the congressman’s plane approached the Cairo runway in March 1983, he had just shepherded through a foreign-assistance package for Egypt worth a billion dollars. Mohammed knew the importance of acknowledging such a gesture; and if it meant rolling out a red carpet for a collection of Israelis whom the congressman had brought along for the ride, so be it. When the door to the unmarked plane opened, a military band struck up “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Top brass were everywhere on the runway, cutting salutes to Wilson as if he too were a field marshal. For Carol, her fantasy about Nefertiti was being fulfilled on the spot. “I was received like a queen,” she says. “A convoy swept us away.”

At the hotel, the congressman signed Carol in as Mrs. Wilson, whispering that it was against the law to sleep in the same room if you weren’t married. Carol had a moment of fright in the lobby when she overheard two Arabs from Saudi Arabia talking about a princess who had just been beheaded for sleeping with a man she wasn’t married to. As a gesture to calm the worries of his Israeli guests, Mohammed placed armed guards outside the bedrooms of each of the congressman’s friends. This only caused Gila to become convinced she had been taken prisoner. But nothing could diminish Carol’s thrill when Abu Ghazala told her he was looking forward to her performance that evening.

One might think it would be like carrying coals to Newcastle for a U.S. congressman to bring his own belly dancer to entertain the second most powerful man in Egypt. But Carol Shannon had a surprise in store for him. In Egypt, in those years of renewed fundamentalism, it was dangerous for a belly dancer to perform moves deemed too suggestive by the Muslim hierarchy. To Carol’s surprise, belly dancers were not permitted to show their bare arms or their bellies, which had to be covered with fishnet. No pelvic grinds were allowed, not even the floor routine that was the staple of her performance. That night in Cairo, with the nervous Israelis seated at the table and a beaming Charlie Wilson offering encouragement, Carol Shannon decided not to give in to the Muslim fundamentalists, any more than she had to her own Christian extremists back home. “I figured, just arrest me. I’m going to do it my way.”

It’s not possible to fully appreciate the impact of a belly dancer without being the person for whom the performance is given. In Carol Shannon’s routine, the pasha—the great man for whom she performs—sits on a chair in the middle of the floor as the dancer, often with two or three other women writhing next to her, begins to circle.