Charlie Wilson's War (63 page)

It was only a matter of hours before Yousaf’s men spotted a tall foreigner entering Abdul Haq’s walled compound. Haq was the natural choice for Wilson’s guide to the jihad. He was probably the U.S. reporters’ favorite mujahideen commander, a brave, young fundamentalist with enormous charm.

Yousaf controlled Haq’s right to be in Peshawar, not to mention his access to CIA weapons; nevertheless, Haq refused to consider his directive. The Afghan said he had no choice but to take the congressman in, no matter what Zia or the brigadier or anyone else said. Yousaf had just run head-on into the Pashtun’s ancient code of honor, hospitality, and revenge. Haq explained that he had already given his word; Wilson was now under his protection, and by his code he must fulfill his commitment to take the American into the war zone and return him safely.

So in spite of Brigadier Yousaf and the iron control of the ISI, later that day the congressman was speeding through the tribal zone in Haq’s four-wheel-drive, one of those vehicles that Larry Crandall’s Cross Border program had given to the commander to spread goodwill. Dressed like a holy warrior, Wilson was preparing himself emotionally for whatever they might run into, when a jeep coming from the border signaled them to pull over. The driver reported heavy fighting between two tribes up ahead. Wilson’s driver got a very worried look on his long Afghan face when a Pakistani tribal guard ran up to them with news that the entire road was caught up in the fighting.

With the sound of intense gunfire and explosions close by, the driver turned the vehicle around and headed back to Peshawar. Apologizing profusely, he explained that his orders had been to take Wilson into Afghanistan, to protect him there, and to bring him back safely. He would not be forgiven if he led Commander Haq’s guest to his death before they had even crossed the border.

It didn’t take Wilson long to figure out what had happened, and by the time he burst into the Peshawar house of Kurt Loebeck, the CBS stringer who had introduced him to Abdul Haq, Wilson was beside himself with rage. He knew he had been taken. Loebeck listened with amazement as the congressman got General Akhtar on the phone and lit into the intelligence chief: “It’s my war, goddamn it. I’m paying for it, and I’m damn well going to see it.”

Under normal circumstances, Akhtar did not take well to outsiders lecturing him. In his shadowy ISI empire, his word was law. But Akhtar had absolutely no interest in provoking Wilson’s fury. Nor did Foreign Minister Yaqub Khan, who remembers this confrontation as a matter of the gravest national concern. “We had to ask, What if he were killed on such a trip…. For Charlie it was a romantic adventure. For us it was a horrible position without any possible benefit.”

Ultimately it was Zia’s dilemma, so the call was passed on to him. Zia had many reasons for not wanting Charlie to go into Afghanistan, not the least of which was that it violated his strict rule against any U.S. government officials entering the war from his country. He did not even acknowledge that Pakistan was helping the mujahideen, much less that it was working with the CIA, and here Wilson had been planning to take a reporter in with him. But the real reason went far deeper than that, and Zia could not spell it out.

Pakistan was then facing a historic threat to its own survival, and strange as it may seem, Zia saw Charlie Wilson as an indispensable part of the country’s national defense. That year that India had mobilized again, and Zia and his staff had been forced to contemplate Pakistan’s chances if war should break out. The picture was incredibly grim. For one thing, India had the bomb. It had exploded a nuclear device back in 1974, and no one doubted that it had the ability to wipe out Pakistan. Beyond that, India’s huge army had already defeated Pakistan in three wars. To add to Zia’s paranoia, he considered India a virtual client state of the Soviet Union. With Hinds now being shot out of the sky by ISI-delivered Stingers, and Black Tulips flying even more dead soldiers back to Russia, no one needed to point out to Zia that this was a moment when Moscow might well encourage India to go for broke.

The great unpredictable element in this entire mix, the unknown that threatened to unravel absolutely everything for Zia, was the matter of the bomb—or, rather, the intense national effort then being mounted in Pakistan to build an Islamic bomb. If the American Congress were confronted with evidence that Pakistan was on the verge of having a bomb, there was no question it would trigger an immediate move to cut off all foreign aid.

It was all quite unfair from Zia’s point of view. No one in the Reagan administration had any illusions about Pakistan’s bomb-building program. Even Zia’s democratic predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been working on the bomb. Nor would it have escaped any of the Reaganites that once Pakistan had a bomb, it would use American F-16s if it ever wanted to drop one on India.

The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would not only provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb.

Zia understood, however, that if he were ever caught red-handed, the White House could not protect him from the wrath of Congress. That was where Wilson, with his seat on the Appropriations subcommittee, came in. By now Zia knew how critical this committee was to Pakistan’s fate. There had already been one close call in 1985, when a Pakistani agent had been caught in the United States trying to buy Kryton high-speed triggers, the switching devices used to fire nuclear weapons. Steve Solarz, the powerful chairman of the South Asia subcommittee, had immediately called for hearings and it looked as if he were going to lead a battle to cut off the dictator. The CIA’s seventh floor was alarmed at what might happen to the Afghan program in the event of a cutoff. Ironically, the CIA had helped to bring on the crisis; part of its job was to expose Zia’s bomb-building efforts,
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and every station chief in Islamabad had given this a high priority.

At one point, Vernon Walters, a former CIA deputy director and Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, flew to Pakistan to warn Zia of the dangers for everyone if he persisted in this effort. Zia had looked him straight in the eye and told him the reports were not accurate. Pakistan was not building the bomb. It was as clear and sincere a statement as any head of state could make. When later asked about another outright misrepresentation he had once made, Zia explained to two high-level State Department officials, “It is permissible to lie for Islam.”

But in 1985 there was no way for Zia to explain away the Kryton triggers. Nor was it possible to imagine a more perfect issue for Steve Solarz to pursue than the bashing of Zia ul-Haq. What could be more popular for a leading Jewish congressman from New York than to kill an Islamic bomb?

The White House had done what it could to convince Congress not to cut off Pakistan. Wilson understood that this was a battle that could not be won with debating points; reportedly, he went to Solarz armed with certain classified intelligence about India’s nuclear program. He is said to have suggested that India might be more exposed than Pakistan when it came to the issue of the bomb.

The crisis passed, but Pakistan didn’t halt work on the nuclear program. Zia was no less committed to this objective than Roosevelt had been during World War II when he’d commissioned the Manhattan Project. The acquisition of essential devices like Kryton triggers, which could be acquired only in the United States, would have to be pursued. With the Indian threat looming, the Pakistanis were not about to stop taking risks, and Zia had every reason to believe that somewhere, sometime, another of his agents might well be caught. If that happened, he would need Charlie as his last line of defense on the nuclear issue.
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These were some of the thoughts that weighed heavily on the president of Pakistan when he found himself on the phone with an enraged Charlie Wilson. Zia had always gone the extra mile to be flexible with Charlie. The strict Muslim, so vilified for reimposing fundamentalist Islamic codes, had never complained about the congressman bringing his beauty queens and belly dancers to his strict Islamic state. But now Charlie was demanding the right to experience combat with the mujahideen. He wanted the dictator to help him risk his life in Afghanistan.

As a true believer, Zia was ultimately a fatalist. It was either written in the Great Book that Charlie Wilson should die at this time or it was not. On the phone he told his very difficult American friend that he would send his helicopter to Peshawar the next morning to pick him up. In Islamabad they would make plans for the trip inside. But Charlie would have to give Akhtar time to set it up properly. There would be no reporters, no loose talk to alert the Soviets to his intentions. The trip would be everything Charlie wanted, but he would have to do it on Zia’s terms.

Once Zia had given his word, Charlie was mollified. And so with Colonel Rooney running interference, the congressman and his true love headed off for the exotic leg of their junket. In Hong Kong, Charlie bought clothes for Sweetums and several suits and shirts for himself. The Red Chinese were circumspect. There were no brass bands and no entry to their secret weapons factories. At Wilson’s request they did arrange to have several survivors of the great Long March brief this important congressman on how Mao, Chou En-lai, and the Communists had made their way to victory in the 1948 revolution and how they had later trained and armed the North Vietnamese.

Sweetums endured all of this in anticipation of the last stop in Tahiti. But, as always happened with Charlie’s grand junkets, nothing ever quite worked out for Annelise. And sure enough, she stayed out in the sun so long their first day in Tahiti that she had to be taken to the hospital with sun poisoning. By the time she returned, Charlie was preoccupied with a news story that made him think the entire Afghan program was in jeopardy. The article claimed that the CIA had commingled proceeds from the Iranian arms deal with Afghan funds in a secret Swiss bank account. Reporters were asking the obvious question: had the CIA diverted Afghan funds to the Contras? Charlie was beside himself.

As of that time, seven years into the war, no member of Congress had yet stood up on the floor to challenge the CIA’s operation. It was one of the legislative miracles of all time. Everything had been worked out in the shadows, behind closed doors, and as a result it had the look of having total bipartisan support. But Wilson knew that backing for any CIA program was at best a mile long and about a millimeter deep.

Back in Washington, Wilson confronted Tom Twetten, demanding to know what was going on. He had no idea that Gust had tried to stop the Iran operation—or that Twetten had created the problem by overruling Avrakotos and forcing the finance chief to give him the Swiss bank account number. But Gust was gone, and Twetten was able to draw on his three years of dealings with Wilson. He assured him that no funds had been diverted. There had only been an overnight parking of the money. So Wilson moved quickly to control the damage. His press secretary, Elaine Lang, sent out word that the congressman would be holding a press conference to talk about the Iran-Contra diversion.

Not since the cocaine scandal had so many reporters crowded into Wilson’s office. The networks, the wires, and the major papers were all expecting him to reveal a CIA crime or misdeed. Wilson prefaced his remarks by saying he knew more about the Afghan program than any other single person—that he had exhaustively investigated the matter. He had even grilled Director Casey. He was there to personally guarantee that no Afghan money had been diverted. Due to an accounting error, the Contra money had been in the wrong account for a day or two, but that was the end of it.

The reporters had come in search of red meat and weren’t at all happy to be told there was no scandal, but Wilson had effectively put them off the trail. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing left to report. Charlie had not hesitated to throw himself into the defense of the program. Still, for just a moment, he did find himself first perplexed, then furious at the idea that the CIA had been helping Khomeini. When Bill Casey came before him in a closed session of the Defense subcommittee, he asked for an explanation.

Casey mumbled and rambled. The effects of his brain tumor were showing, and Wilson couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say—something to do with OSS days and how they should have assassinated Hitler. Wilson just shook his head. Without Gust he no longer had any way of knowing what was really going on inside the Agency. Anyway, he had already thrown in his lot with the CIA; he figured the Agency needed him more than ever now.

He also realized that once again there was a silver lining in the Iran-Contra disaster. Rarely can the government and the press handle more than one great scandal at a time. The Contra war had always been a heaven-sent distraction, and once again congressional staffers, reporters, and politicians were climbing all over the supposedly covert Nicaraguan operation. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan it was a completely free ride.
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Charlie Wilson felt that 1986 had been the magic year of his life. In November he had won reelection to a seventh term with 68 percent of the vote. His congressional office was virtually running itself in terms of constituent services, and he had finally secured a seat on the Intelligence Committee. He was now on the three committees that decided everything connected to the Afghans. No congressman had ever even dreamed of holding so much influence over any foreign policy, certainly never over a huge and critically important covert foreign policy. By this time, even the officials at State had come to embrace him as a vital partner in anything they might need to accomplish. Robert Peck, the late deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East offered a virtual eulogy in describing Wilson: “Charlie made himself in many ways the central figure in the Afghan war. He did it by being an honest broker. He could create problems, too, but that’s not why you went and opened your heart to him. It’s because he delivered. You could put that money in the bank and draw on it. Charlie always delivered.”