Charlie Wilson's War (30 page)

Snowflake was thrilled when Charlie told her she could sit in on the war meetings. Not wanting to offend the fundamentalist warriors, she went to great lengths to dress conservatively—in a pink nylon jumpsuit with a zipper straight down the front. She even braided her hair and wore combat boots, feeling that a “semimilitary” outfit would put the visitors more at ease.

The first of the mujahideen leaders to arrive in Charlie’s room, the engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was biblical in appearance, with his long, black beard and turban. He was then only thirty-eight, but there was a timeless air to him, an almost feline quality and a gentleness to his manner and speech. Even at that early moment in the war he awed his fellow mujahideen as the most ruthless and uncompromising of them all.

Gulbuddin was the darling of Zia and the Pakistan intelligence service. Like other mujahideen leaders, he had been working with the ISI since the early 1970s, when Pakistan had begun secretly backing fundamentalist students at the University of Kabul who were rebelling against Soviet influence in the Afghan government. Back then Gulbuddin was very much a part of the emerging global wave of Islamic radicalism, opposed to any attempts at altering fundamental tenants of the faith. By all accounts, he was responsible for the practice of throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who failed to cover themselves properly.

The Red Army had a legend of its own about Gulbuddin. To the Soviets he was the bogeyman behind the most unspeakable torture of their captured soldiers. Invariably his name was invoked with new arrivals to keep them from wandering off base unaccompanied, lest they fall into the hands of this depraved fanatic whose specialty, they claimed, was skinning infidels alive.

Gulbuddin’s reputation would grow to such sinister proportions by the latter part of the war that many U.S. newsmen would almost agree with the Soviets in comparing him to Khomeini and would accuse the CIA of backing the wrong horse. He ran his Hezb-i-Islami organization like the Communist Party, with utter ruthlessness. Nevertheless, Gulbuddin was the “freedom fighter” whom Charlie Fawcett and then Joanne Herring had come to know and love when they had made the movie
Courage Is Our Weapon.
And Charlie Wilson was fascinated with him because he had heard that Gulbuddin could kill Soviets like no other. Furthermore, Wilson had a specific question for the engineer that he wanted to put to him without the CIA’s knowledge.

That New Year in Peshawar, into the lobby of the Pearl Intercontinental Hotel swept Gulbuddin and his entourage—a tall figure in white with five bodyguards carrying AK-47s. Up to Wilson’s suite he strode, the ascetic fundamentalist holy warrior finally coming face-to-face with his American patron. As if on cue Cynthia Gale emerged from the congressman’s adjoining room in her pink jumpsuit, her hand thrust out in greeting: “Pleased to meet you.”

What could the engineer possibly have been thinking? By his Muslim standards, Snowflake was half naked. Whatever his reaction, Gulbuddin’s face remained neutral, almost benign, as he and the congressman began to talk.

“It was just very, very exciting to be in that room with those men with their huge white teeth,” remembers Snowflake. “It was very clandestine. There was this secretive feel to it.” To her Gulbuddin, as well as all the other Afghans who visited the suite that night, looked on Charlie as “the great god that was going to save their lives.”

This last observation would doubtless have come as a particular surprise to Gulbuddin, that disciplined worshipper of Allah, the one and only true god. Seven years later he would reveal just how much he appreciated all that Charlie and the United States had done for the jihad by siding with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. But that evening in Peshawar, sitting with the Texas congressman and his blasphemous traveling companion, Gulbuddin was all smiles.

Wilson began by telling the commander about the Oerlikons and the flood of more and better weapons soon to come. Then he put his question to the engineer: the congressman had certain important contacts with the Israelis, but the CIA was giving him no end of trouble on his proposal to take advantage of a significant opportunity. If Wilson could get the Americans to buy Soviet weapons that the Israelis had captured from the PLO, would Hekmatyar have any trouble accepting them?

“We take Russian weapons from dead Russians to use against them—I don’t see why we can’t take them from the Israelis,” replied the engineer wryly. In fact, Gulbuddin seemed to have no problem with the origin of any weapons for the jihad. “Allah has many mysterious ways of providing for his faithful,” he said.

Wilson was delighted. He resolved right then to disregard the CIA’s objections and ratchet up his efforts to pressure the Agency to buy the PLO weapons and fund the Charlie Horse.

The next Afghan to find himself face-to-face with Snowflake that night was Professor Mojadeddi, the mujahideen leader Charlie had taken to meet Bill Casey at the White House. The small professor was surrounded by an even more menacing band of bodyguards than Gulbuddin had brought with him. “Do they really have to worry that much about the Soviets trying to kill them?” Wilson asked a Pakistan ISI man later. “It’s not the Soviets they’re worried about,” the man said matter-of-factly. “It’s each other. They’re all trying to keep from being killed by their rivals.”

Howard Hart would have choked had he witnessed the comic opera of Wilson and Snowflake that evening—singing the praises of the Oerlikons, suggesting to the fundamentalists that they link up with Israel, and then asking that hopelessly naive question about the bodyguards. It would only have confirmed Hart’s conviction that Wilson didn’t have a clue as to whom he was dealing with.

Hart understood that, like most Americans who’d discovered the Afghan war, Wilson was in the initial stages of unconditional adulation. Typically that meant seeing the mujahideen as pure of heart, brave, intensely religious, and worthy of total support. Like all newcomers, Wilson appeared even to have embraced the fantasy that these tribesmen could weld themselves into a single unified resistance.

Hart had gone down this path himself, but that had been long ago. “Akhtar and I used to sit around talking about how nice it would be if they could create the equivalent of the Free French and find themselves an Akbar de Gaulle,” remembers Hart. “But the Afghans are hardly a people, much less a nation. They are a nation of tribes constantly at war with each other. They are very heterogeneous, with an extreme ethnocentricity which makes them not only hate or suspect foreigners but Afghans living two valleys away.”

Hart had made his peace with this profound flaw in the Afghans and had even come to believe that a large part of their potency as a guerrilla force came from the fact that they were disunited. It made it hard for them to coordinate their military activities, but it also meant that there was no single leader whose head could be cut off to destroy the insurgency. In fact, there was no centralized anything except a distribution system for weapons and support that, in utter frustration, the Pakistanis had finally created to impart some measure of organization and control.

The ISI, with the consent of the CIA, had chosen seven leaders from a mob of heroic chieftains. To a certain extent, the power of the seven and their respective political parties was a creation of Pakistan intelligence. The desperate mujahideen were told that in order to get weapons, food, medical supplies, training, or assistance for their families, they had to join one of these authorized groups. So began the only form of unity that would exist in this war. It was just an illusion, however, and the only thing that kept the Afghans from one another’s throats was their common hatred of the Soviet infidel and hence the need to restrain their tribal fighting in order to retain access to the weapons and money that the CIA was making available to them.

This would become frighteningly clear in 1989, just weeks after the Red Army’s withdrawal, when Gulbuddin’s commanders in the Helmand Valley would trick a delegation of Massoud’s warriors into negotiating. They guaranteed them safe passage, even swearing on a Koran that they would honor this commitment. But once the trusting Tajiks came into the Pashtuns’ territory, they were set upon, tortured, and killed. What Hart knew well, even back in 1984, was that there was a cruel and disturbing side to the Afghans.

Which is not to say that Howard Hart did not feel deeply about his clients and their cause. Like everyone else, he had been swept up by it. But he put limits on his emotional attachments. Professional detachment was necessary to play “the Great Game” effectively. All seasoned commanders are faced with the need in war to sacrifice one flank in a feint, or to lose an entire unit, if necessary, for the good of the whole. To Hart and the CIA, the mujahideen had become a division, albeit a strange and unpredictable division, in a much larger struggle against the advancing Soviet empire. The station chief’s task in Afghanistan was to keep the mujahideen in the field, to give them enough so that they could hope for victory but not enough to endanger the larger goals of the United States.

Above all else, the head of the Islamabad station prided himself on being a realist, and there were profound limits to what was possible in Afghanistan. For him and his Agency, the central reality was that the Red Army did not lose wars. Not since 1921, when the Treaty of Riga had ended the Russo-Polish War and ceded Russian land to Poland, had the Soviets been forced from territory they had paid for in blood. Afghanistan would not be another Vietnam. The Soviets didn’t operate with the same restraints as the Americans. There was no horde of journalists and politicians questioning every military action. Just across the border from the mujahideen camps and the great refugee centers in Pakistan, the Soviets were busy carpet bombing villages, poisoning wells, killing livestock, causing over half the Afghan population to flee their homes. Perhaps it wasn’t yet genocide, but the Red Army was capable of almost anything.

What was so grating about having to deal with Wilson was that he just didn’t understand the game. He seemed to think that the interests of the Afghans and the CIA should be identical. Hart, however, underestimated the twists and turns of Wilson’s thinking both about the mujahideen and about what he was hoping to accomplish in Afghanistan.

On one level the station chief was right: Wilson did romanticize these mountain warriors. It was the old business of his dying dog Teddy. Only a Dr. Freud could have fully explained what compelled Wilson throughout his adult life to champion the cause of underdogs. But there was never any question that his mind always raced back to that moment with his mutt writhing on the drugstore floor, dying from the ground glass that the selectman had poisoned him with.

Forty years later, Wilson didn’t just want to help the Afghans; he needed to help them. They too had been poisoned, their children maimed with toy bombs. Old men were being thrown down wells by the Communist thugs. Gunships were swaggering through the skies, looking for caravans of mules or camels to mow down. They were wiping out villages friendly to the rebels. They were even murdering columns of refugees just for sport as the women and children tried to walk out of the country. In the landscape of Wilson’s mind, the Hind had become the murderous selectman. But the mujahideen weren’t giving up, and Wilson wanted revenge for them.

As a boy, he had been inspired by the struggle of World War II, where the United States had demonstrated that it had the power to work its will when it had the courage to fight. The lines he had read on the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial the day he had arrived in Washington to take office had never left him—the lines about the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” To Wilson, Afghanistan was every bit as important a battlefield for democracy as Gettysburg, but the United States was asking the mujahideen to give their lives too cheaply.

Charlie Wilson wanted to make the Red Army suffer. He was after revenge, and he would prove tireless and maniacal in his drive to arm the mujahideen. But he was also in ways an unlikely champion of these stoic, bloodthirsty warriors.

On a personal level, Charlie was a near pacifist. He had hunted only once in his life, as a twelve-year-old. He had shot a squirrel in a tree, and when the furry creature had fallen to the ground yelping, Wilson had been horrified at the agony he had caused. The shaken boy had been horrified to have to put the animal out of its misery. Never again would Charlie Wilson raise a gun against a living creature.

You would never know this looking at the gun case in his house on Crooked Creek in Lufkin. It is filled with weapons from around the world—Uzis from Israel, M-16s, Russian assault rifles, Enfields, shooting canes, shotguns, .30-06s, and pistols large and small. But never would this congressman fire one to take a life.

Outside his home, along the creek, he’s installed forty bird feeders and countless varieties flock to take advantage of the New Deal breakfast he provides year-round for the cardinals and sparrows and blue jays. There are also specially designed feeders with corncobs and a sitting perch, where the squirrels can eat with the knowledge that no one will be coming after them in this game preserve.

But when it came to the Afghan war, this softhearted bird lover was out for blood. What Howard Hart did not understand was that Wilson was not just swept away by the romance of the freedom fighters; there was a more pragmatic side to his embrace of them, something akin to the friendship that Winston Churchill developed for Joseph Stalin during World War II. “I like that man,” Churchill had told Anthony Eden in an impulsive moment.

Churchill, however, had not been naive about Stalin. More than anyone in the West, he knew that the Soviet leader was responsible for the murder of millions. But context is everything, and in the 1940s, during the struggle for the world, the prime minister found it nothing short of exhilarating to have the guns of this thug and his Red Army targeted on Hitler. Before the war was over the Soviets would pay the price of twenty million lives to put down the Nazis. Having an ally like that was no small thing.