Crile George - Charlie Wilsons war: the extraordinary story of the covert operation that changed the history of our times

Charlie Wilsons War

The Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History: The Arming of the Mujahideen by the CIA

George Crile

ATLANTIC BOOKS

London

Copyright page

This book was previously published with the title My Enemys Enemy .

First published in the United States of America in 2003 by Grove/Atlantic Inc., New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright George Crile, 2003

The moral right of George Crile to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78239 790 8

Printed in Great Britain by CPD (Wales), Ebbw Vale

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Dedication

To Barbara Lyne, without whom this story would not have been told

Epigraph

Four things greater than all things are,Women and Horses and Power and War.

Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of the Kings Test

Contents

In little over a decade, two events have transformed the world we live in: the collapse of our Cold War nuclear foe, the Soviet Union; and the discovery, after 9/11, that we face a new global enemy in the form of militant Islam. Both have profoundly affected the United States, and in each instance Americans were caught by surprise, unable to explain what had triggered these events.

9/11 was a watershed, as stunning in its boldness as it was frightening in its message. To this day, we know little about how it all worked or what was in the minds of the men who carried it out. Other than a shared religious identity, about the only obvious common denominator among the nineteen terrorists was having spent time in Afghanistan.

The fact that Afghanistan was the cradle of the attack should not have come as a surprise, for both the territory and the Islamic warriors who gather there are familiar to our government. Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were, in effect, Americas surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Unions Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the Communist empire.

Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIAs biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history, but somehow it never registered on the American consciousness. When viewed through the prism of 9/11, the scale of that U.S. support for an army of Muslim fundamentalists seems almost incomprehensible. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At one point over three hundred thousand fundamentalist Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA; thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was over, some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.

At the time, it was viewed as a noble cause, and when the last Soviet soldier walked out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, the leaders of the CIA celebrated what they hailed as the Agencys greatest victory. The cable from the CIA station in Islamabad that day read simply: We won. But the billions spent arming and training the primitive tribesmen of Afghanistan turned out to have an unintended consequence. In a secret war, the funders take no creditand no doubt thats why the mujahideen and their Muslim admirers around the world never viewed U.S. support as a decisive factor in their victory. As they saw it, that honor went to Allah, the only superpower they acknowledge. But for the few who know the extent of the CIAs involvement, its impossible to ignore the central role that America played in this great modern jihad, one that continues to this day.

This book tells the story of the CIAs secret war in Afghanistan, of the men who dreamed it, and of the journey they took to see it through. If the campaign had different authors, men more associated with shaping foreign policy or waging wars, it might have surfaced earlier or been the subject of debate. But the unorthodox allianceof a scandal-prone Texas congressman and an out-of-favor CIA operativethat gave birth to the Afghan jihad kept this history under the radar. It is the missing chapter in the politics of our time, a rousing good story that is also a cautionary tale.

The entrance to CIA headquarters is just off the George Washington Memorial Parkway, about a ten-minute drive up the Potomac from the White House. On a sunny, humid day in June 1993, an air-conditioned bus exited the parkway, onto Dolley Madison Boulevard and slowed down at the turnoff to the Langley headquarters. A bouquet of flowers had been left on the grassy island in the intersection. Each day now someone had taken to leaving a fresh floral arrangement here to mark the spot where three months earlier a young Pakistani with an AK-47 had calmly gunned down two Agency officials and made his escape.

It had never been easy for outsiders to get into the CIAs sprawling wooded compound, not even before the assassinations. The day the innocuous-looking bus pulled up to the security gate was some three years after the Berlin Wall had come down and a year and a half since the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. But although the Cold War was over, the CIA, that forty-six-year-old shrine to anti-Communism, was very much intact, and no one was talking about dismantling it. At the gate the uniformed guards immediately recognized the bus and the driver. It was a CIA vehicle with an Agency employee at the wheel, but the security men wanted to know who the others were.

Im Congressman Charlie Wilson, and theyre fixing to give me an award in there, the tall figure in a dark blue suit announced as the guards mounted the bus. The congressmans voice is a bit startling at firstbooming is the only way to describe it, a melodious, large Texas baritone that carries with it a sense of authority and importance. None of the other men or women in the bus looked terribly important. Generally speaking, no one ever looks impressive in a bus. But after listening to the congressman, the guard called the directors office and, without checking so much as a drivers license or searching any of the visitors briefcases or handbags, waved the vehicle through the gate.

The woods of Langley were particularly lush that morning. It was June 9, 1993, a week after Charlie Wilsons sixtieth birthday, which he had celebrated with a party for three hundred at the Roof Terrace Restaurant of the Kennedy Center. Casablanca was the theme he had chosen for the event. It was his favorite movie, and he had appeared for the occasion in a white dinner jacket specially tailored to look like the one Humphrey Bogart wore when he played the role of Rick. A big band played dance music from the 1940s and 50s, and a characteristically bizarre collection of guests gathered to pay tribute to the rule-breaking congressman from the Bible Belt of East Texas. Six feet, four inches tall, square-jawed, Hollywood handsome, he had taken to the dance floor with one woman after another to relive the memories of his outlandish exploits.