Charlie Wilson's War (31 page)

What Hart could not quite comprehend was that, in the end, what the congressman liked most about the Afghans was their terrifying passion to kill the common enemy, their refusal to bow under in spite of the odds. He even admired their revenge taking, when they would put their prisoners to gruesome deaths.

Although Hart didn’t yet know it, any ability that he might have had to modify Wilson’s designs was all but lost late that night in Peshawar at the Pearl Intercontinental. Well after the last Afghan leader had left and Charlie and Snowflake went to bed, there was a knock on the congressman’s door. Snowflake was frightened, at first, to hear the whispering voices of the mujahideen. Professor Mojadeddi, accompanied by his bodyguards, entered the room carrying something in a pillowcase. Snowflake said she backed off as Mojadeddi pulled a captured Russian AK-47 out of the pillowcase.

“It was very hushed, and this private, quiet ceremony unfolded,” she remembers from her cramped quarters in Beverly Hills, where she is still trying to get established. The professor presented the AK with great solemnity—it was the sincerest thanks he could offer for the Oerlikons. This was the kind of gesture that moved a Texan like Charlie Wilson. He’d be with them now to the end; and the only end was victory.

Wilson would illegally ship that captured Russian assault rifle home and place it on the wall of his living room in Lufkin. Whenever he was in trouble politically, he would turn to it almost as if it were a talisman. It would become the centerpiece in a political ad that moved his constituents and became famous among his congressional colleagues for its brazen appeal to John Wayne–style patriotism.

“This is a Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle,” Wilson intoned in the ad. “It’s the instrument of Communist terrorism worldwide—in Rome, in London, in Lebanon, and in Afghanistan. Everywhere except here, because we’re big and we’re strong. With continued adequate military strength and eternal vigilance and God’s help, we’ll never see a Kalashnikov on the banks of the Neches.”

In slow motion, with a weird, frightening sound in the background, the congressman from the Second Congressional District hurls Mojadeddi’s captured AK into the river. Perhaps only in Texas could such an ad have found a sympathetic audience. But it was not created for cynical political reasons. This was the way Wilson saw himself, and this heroic self-image made him see Howard Hart not as a daring spy but as a timid bureaucrat unwilling to take a risk for freedom.

The station chief was not authorized to seek out visiting congressmen to discuss classified matters, particularly not legislation. It was taboo, and under normal circumstances, he would never have considered it. But now, with the threat of the Oerlikon looming, he deliberately crossed the line, sought out Wilson, and asked for the opportunity to brief him.

The two men acted as if they were pleased to see each other when they met in the old Agency for International Development building, which was still serving as the temporary embassy. On the fifth floor Hart ushered Wilson into the cramped suite that functioned as the CIA’s Islamabad station, and in the secure room known as “the tank,” Hart once again put on the 1812 Overture. His paramilitary expert was already there, and the two men began their carefully prepared presentation. It was designed to explain how much more effective it would be to the war effort if Wilson would let the Agency use the Oerlikon money to buy 12.7mm DshKs and 14.5mm machine guns.

Charlie had, of course, already heard Hart’s spiel about the DshK’s effectiveness. But this time Hart felt he was making a far more compelling argument. The paramilitary expert had prepared plastic overlays to place over the station’s war maps. The first one showed a handful of blue dots representing the Oerlikons that could be deployed with the millions of dollars Wilson had laid aside for them. Afghanistan is about the size of Texas and Hart, pointing to the handful of dots, made it clear how little damage they could do.

He then superimposed another overlay, with hundreds of red dots indicating the number of heavy machine guns that he could deploy with that same amount of money. “I can kill more Russians with these than with the Oerlikons. And the Oerlikons will just piss the Russians off and might provoke them to attack a base camp they might otherwise ignore.”

Perhaps it was the music in the background that imparted a sense of history and drama. The station chief felt the power of his own argument and simply could not imagine how the congressman could fail to see its logic.

Wilson was polite. They had made a fine case, a persuasive case, but he had studied this problem and the Oerlikon was just what the mujahideen needed. At this point Hart got a creepy feeling that to Wilson the Oerlikon had become “sort of a messianic cause of his, the magic weapon.”

But Wilson was not talking about an either-or situation. “Howard, you can have more 12.7s, too,” he said. The idea of just throwing more money at a CIA campaign was simply outside of Hart’s experience—and, for that matter, outside the experience of the CIA. He paid no attention to it. Instead, he reminded the congressman of the danger to Pakistan if the Oerlikon were introduced, and he said that General Akhtar agreed with him.

Wilson had the station chief outflanked here as well. He had just finished talking to Akhtar and, indeed, to Zia himself. “Howard, the Pakistanis ain’t stepping back,” he said. “They’re steppin’ up.”

The two men might just as well have been speaking different languages. Hart was ostensibly addressing the narrow subject of the Oerlikon but was really making one last stab at keeping the program in the hands of the professionals. And Wilson was confusing the issue by trying to be accommodating, doing his best to make Hart understand that money was no longer an issue. He was offering a bigger pie—for that matter, many more pies if that’s what the warriors wanted.

“Howard, you don’t seem to understand,” he said in frustration. “We’re going to buy you every fucking Oerlikon, every fucking Blowpipe, every fucking SA-7 we can get in Eastern Europe. And Howard, you just tell me how many DshKs you want and you can have them too. Just tell me how many.”

It was all very sad, this confrontation. Hart was thinking about managing perpetual conflict, using the Afghan war to help slowly erode the strength of the enemy in a global campaign that might go on for decades. Wilson was running with the logic of the old Barry Goldwater line “Why not victory?”

It was particularly offensive for Hart to be treated as if he were some kind of timid bureaucrat. It had been no easy task convincing the Pakistanis to permit the war to escalate. Hart had built the relationship with a nervous and suspicious ISI. He had become a personal face that General Akhtar could look to and trust. Good old H2. Akhtar knew that with Hart in place it was safe to move forward together on this most dangerous of tiger hunts.

By 1984 Akhtar’s special-forces operatives were moving in and out of Afghanistan dressed as mujahideen, leading special operations and ambushes and killing Russians. That was truly provocative, and Hart was proud that he had helped bring about an escalation of the CIA’s efforts far larger than anyone had thought possible when he’d taken over. When Akhtar complained to Hart about his discovery that the English were trying to sneak ordnance and support to Massoud in Panjshir, Hart could draw on their friendship and say, “Oh, General, leave them alone. You know the British are only a Third World army, and you have the fifth largest in the world. They won’t hurt anything.”

That was Howard Hart the pro. His Afghan program may have been modest by comparison to what was to come once “Charlie’s money” started pumping billions into the war, but everything that was done later with the mujahideen was built on the back of the relationship Hart had forged with Akhtar. Perhaps it was in part pride of ownership that caused Hart to refuse to play with Wilson now. Perhaps it had something to do with their unpleasant last meeting. Whatever it was, Hart could not cope with Wilson’s pompous offer of unlimited weapons. Good God, the man talked as if he wanted to declare war on the Soviet Union. What good was it to have the CIA run a covert operation if a P. T. Barnum was allowed to hop into the ring and start barking out circus lines?

Five months later, Howard Hart would pack his bags, take his wife and two teenage sons, and leave Pakistan and the Afghan war for good. He longed to stay on, but perhaps it was fortunate that his three-year tour was up.

On his last night, the station chief and his three-man Afghan team had a farewell dinner with General Akhtar. At the end of the evening, the ISI chief took Hart aside and hugged him. The Pakistani would never shake the habit of calling the next station chief by Hart’s affectionate nickname, H2.

Back at Langley, Director Casey honored him with the Agency’s highest decoration. But as is the custom of the Clandestine Services, at the end of his Afghan tour, Hart saluted, closed the door, and never looked back. He wouldn’t really ever find out what Avrakotos and Wilson did next to transform the war. He had left the encounter with Wilson knowing that he had done everything possible to stop a disaster in the works. Now it was up to Chuck Cogan; he would have to hold the line back at Langley. There would be many new arenas for Hart to go into—many other challenges the CIA would have in store for him. But in the end, he would always look back on Afghanistan as his proudest hour.

C
huck Cogan had come of age in the CIA in the 1960s—long before Congress demanded or even claimed the right to serve as its watchdog. By the time Cogan had climbed to the top of the Agency, he had not found it easy to adapt to the idea of politicians intruding into this private world. But he was a good soldier, and ever since the law establishing intelligence oversight committees was enacted in 1980, he had done his part to brief members and staff on the House and Senate side.

Cogan had drawn the line, however, when Wilson had moved to insinuate himself into the operational details of the Agency’s business. In his quasi-military world, Cogan enjoyed the status of a three-star general. He didn’t just oversee the Afghan operation; he had to deal with the hostage nightmare, with Khomeini, with Saddam Hussein, with the spread of nuclear weapons, and on and on. This was no playground for amateurs. He had been quite up front in telling Wilson that the Agency would not go along with his request to fund the Charlie Horse. The whole idea of an Israeli anti-aircraft gun for a Muslim jihad was absurd. Nor was he going to permit any non-Soviet weapons into Afghanistan. Wilson’s response had been crude, almost threatening, but the CIA veteran had assumed that this was just congressional bluster. The fact was that Wilson had been trespassing in areas where he did not belong, and Cogan had politely shown him the door.

No doubt Cogan would have been happy never to see Charlie Wilson. Unlike his colleagues and predecessors, however, Wilson did not accept Cogan’s implied premise that the CIA had an exclusive right to decide the nature of this war. Things may have worked that way before, but Wilson had decided to change all that. It was really quite simple, as he saw it. Congress not only represented a coequal branch of the U.S. government, it had the power of the purse. The bill he had muscled through called on the CIA to spend $17 million for a Swiss anti-aircraft cannon (as well as another $23 million to be left to the CIA’s discretion) to be deployed in a campaign that everyone knew the president enthusiastically endorsed. Just to be sure the CIA got the message, Wilson had included language obligating it to inform him in advance of how it intended to spend the balance of the $40 million appropriation he had sponsored. And so, when the congressman requested a meeting, the Agency found itself with no real choice but to send Chuck Cogan back to try to sort things out.

The way Wilson saw it, “The CIA basically woke up one morning to discover they had an extra $40 million they hadn’t asked for. It was kind of a good news–bad news deal. Good because they like money; bad because it specified that the money should be used for an anti-aircraft cannon they didn’t want. But then a lot more money for the things they did want—boots, morphine, and saws to cut off legs and arms. They had to come and clear it first.”

Left with the unpleasant task of returning to Wilson’s office to try to reason with the congressman, Cogan again tapped Avrakotos. As the two men moved through the cavernous white marble halls of the Rayburn office building, Cogan, with the slightly thuggish-looking Avrakotos by his side, was still convinced that he would be able to put this meddling congressman back in his cage; but best, he thought, to wear the man down with good arguments.

Wilson received Cogan and Avrakotos at his desk, next to the giant map of the world that covered an entire wall of his office. He was all business, interested only in hearing when the guns would be deployed. Unfortunately, the division chief had some bad news: “preliminary studies” indicated that the Oerlikon was simply too heavy for the Afghans to carry up to the heights where it could be useful. An even bigger problem, he explained, were the shells. So many would be needed that scores of mules would have to be provided. The Agency would end up having to go into the mule business. Wilson recalls Cogan suggesting that as many as two hundred of these pack animals might be needed just to take care of one Oerlikon over the course of a year.

Cogan stressed the top-secret nature of the briefing. Another congressman might have been intimidated, but Wilson had been studying the
Jane’s
series of weapons reference books, as well as conferring with his own arms expert, Ed Luttwak. He knew that the Agency was already giving the mujahideen Soviet 14.5mm machine guns, which weighed more than the Oerlikon. So what was the big deal about his guns?

Cogan shifted gears: end-user certificates were a big problem. The Swiss, with their fetish for neutrality, would be compromised if the Soviets cornered them and demanded to know who had paid for the guns. The U.S. cover would be blown. It could have nightmarish ramifications, he confided. It would require finding a government willing to lie for the CIA and assume responsibility for the Oerlikons.

Wilson found this argument empty. With twenty thousand employees, the CIA should be able to take care of a simple concealment problem. Cogan was clearly feeding him a lot of sludge, and he didn’t like it. He was demanding a specific answer, and Cogan didn’t want to tell him outright that he wasn’t going to buy the guns.

“Well, how about the $4 million we put in for boots?” Wilson asked with contempt. “There hasn’t been one damn boot delivered. And I understand there were eighty-two cases of frostbite last week. Do you need end-user certificates to send boots, Mr. Coburn?”

Avrakotos, meanwhile, sat quietly, fascinated by the spectacle of this congressman viciously reaming his boss, whom everyone else treated with such reverence. Over the course of the next few months, while Cogan stone-walled him, Charlie would come to hold him personally responsible for the slaughter that continued in the mountains. “The only thing I care about, Coburn,” he had said at the end of that meeting, “is shooting down those helicopters, and I don’t care if it hurts your feelings or not. There is nothing I won’t do, absolutely nothing.”

While Wilson was doing battle with Cogan, Joanne Herring was in a state. All of her grand plans were suddenly in jeopardy. She had organized a party that was designed to put her and her political salon on the map, but to her horror, most of the important people she had been counting on were turning her down. The party was billed as a “Welcome to Washington” dinner for Prince Bandar, the dashing young American-trained fighter pilot serving as Saudi ambassador to the United States. Joanne had known Bandar ever since his flight training in Texas, when he’d attended her extravaganzas in River Oaks. Since then, the prince had married Faisal’s daughter and become, for all intents and purposes, a surrogate son of the Saudi monarch.

“I just assumed that because of his history everyone would accept,” recalls Joanne. That assumption would have been sound had she given the party a couple of years later, after Bandar emerged as the most powerful and influential ambassador since World War II. In those days, however, Bandar’s most impressive accomplishments stemmed from his work in the shadows.

Just a few months after Joanne’s invitation, Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, would visit Bandar at his palatial house overlooking the Potomac to ask the Saudi prince to secretly fund the Contras. Bandar would quickly win approval from the throne to pay a million dollars a month to keep the CIA’s Contras in the field. Soon enough, Bandar’s many discreet favors for the American government would raise his profile with Washington’s power elite. George Bush would take the prince and his family on fishing vacations; Colin Powell would come over to his house to play handball. Indeed, during the Gulf War, Bandar would become a de facto member of the National Security Council.

But back in early 1984, his name was not working for Joanne. It was all doubly embarrassing because she had taken Charlie to lunch at the prince’s house, where she had gone over the guest list and promised a party to end all parties. As always, she was mixing pleasure with business. By this time, thoughts of marriage to Charlie had passed, but Joanne was as deeply committed to their common crusade for Zia and the Afghans as ever, and she knew that few men in Washington could be as helpful to Charlie as the young ambassador.

It was a tightly held secret, but Wilson knew from classified briefings that the Saudis were secret partners of the CIA in the Afghan war, and he was eager to meet Bandar. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had had an even more dramatic impact on the desert kingdom than it had on America. The Saudis sit on at least one-third of the world’s known oil reserves—perhaps the greatest treasure trove any nation has ever possessed. But the 870,000-square-mile kingdom with a population not much greater than that of Los Angeles County has no real army to protect its wealth. The royal family was convinced that once the Red Army invaded Afghanistan and took up positions a few hundred miles from the kingdom, the Kremlin’s grand design would call for moving on their oil fields next.

In Washington shortly after the invasion, Jimmy Carter had announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force and committed the United States to protecting Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil states from any aggression. For their part, the Saudis had moved to turn their country, in effect, into a forward base for American military forces. They’d commenced building vast underground facilities where weapons and ammunition could be prepositioned for an American-led intervention. They’d built airfields with hardened hangars able to withstand two-thousand-pound bombs, erecting hundreds more than were needed for their own air force, making it possible for the United States to fly in naked and be instantly ready for war. Fuel and bombs and bullets and food had all been placed in storage for the day when they might be needed for an American rescue mission.

When the Gulf War erupted a decade later, all those immense secretive preparations made the colossal American and allied operations possible. The underground command centers, where U.S. and Saudi generals worked side by side, rivaled anything in the Pentagon. Suddenly it became clear that the United States and Saudi Arabia enjoyed a very special relationship indeed.

But back in the early 1980s, the billions of dollars’ worth of high-performance jets and AWACS radar planes that Saudi Arabia was seeking to purchase from the United States were the source of deep and bitter political battles in Washington. And Prince Bandar, then in his early thirties, was at the center of the campaign to convince Congress to grant the Saudis’ requests. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight, and the Israelis, who had mobilized all their forces to block the sales, were horrified when Wilson, one of their most trusted champions, broke ranks.

So intense was the 1982 AWACS battle that scores of the congressman’s most important Jewish backers, who had scheduled a major fund-raiser for Charlie, canceled the event the day after Wilson voted to sell the AWACS. Despite this, Wilson held the line, actually lecturing his Jewish friends on how Israel’s very survival depended on reaching out to moderate Arabs.

Bandar was well aware of the significance of Wilson’s AWACS support, but that was history. What clicked when Joanne put them together at lunch was their mutual fascination with Afghanistan. Bandar had been the king’s point man three years earlier, when the new CIA director, Bill Casey, had approached the prince about helping fund an escalation in the Afghan war. Bandar had flown to Jidda with Casey to serve as the Director’s translator for the meeting with the king.
*

“What can you do to help us?” Casey had asked King Fahd. But Fahd, no stranger to the workings of American politics, had countered by introducing a note of reality into the discussion: “That’s not a fair question. What I tell you I’ll do, I’ll do. But you have your Congress to deal with. So you do what you can—and I’ll match it.” Knowing the king’s vast resources, Casey had sprung to his feet, arms extended, saying, “You’ve got a deal.”

By the time Bandar hosted Joanne and Charlie for lunch, the arrangement had been in place more than two years. Wilson was eager to find out if the Saudi commitment would extend to his $40 million special Oerlikon appropriation. Beyond that, he wanted to know how the Saudis would react to the far larger increases in the CIA’s Afghan budget he had in mind.

As it turned out, Wilson could not have found a more willing accomplice. Bandar not only supported the Afghan war; secret dealings with the United States were now in his blood. Wilson could see that just by looking at the huge photograph in the gold frame displayed on a pedestal in the prince’s living room. It showed one of Charlie’s early political heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, talking to Bandar’s grandfather, King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. The picture captured the two men in the middle of World War II scheming to undermine British influence in the Middle East.

From grandfather to grandson, little had changed in the way these tribal patriarchs conducted their affairs. Abdul Aziz had grown up before oil transformed his desert kingdom, and he’d passed on to Bandar’s generation the highly personalized Bedouin tradition of diplomacy. That day in 1984, Bandar did not need to consult his country’s legislature to tell Wilson that the Saudis would embrace a gun that could shoot down the Hind. He knew that the king would smile on any increases Wilson might make in the CIA’s support for the jihad.

Charlie did not look or talk that day as if he were anything but an equal of Bandar. But sitting at the prince’s table with Joanne was an exotic experience for the man from the tiny town of Trinity. Dining with kings and princes, moving in the world of characters who shape history was what he had dreamed about in that dusty Depression town. Wilson had always managed to fill his life with characters who looked and acted as if they had escaped from a novel, but Bandar was in a class of his own: a U.S.-trained fighter pilot with a house in Aspen so large that it would create a town crisis over the right of millionaires to build such oversized structures.

Everything he said that day pleased Wilson. It wasn’t a contract, but Bandar left the clear impression that the Saudis would match any future appropriations Wilson might make. To Charlie, that meant anytime he struck on behalf of the mujahideen, it would double the blow against the Soviets.