Charlie Wilson's War (15 page)

For seven months Avrakotos and his astonishingly loyal network managed to make a mockery of the Agency’s entire system of security. With every extra day Clair George was pushed into an ever more complicated position. What could he say if Gust’s bizarre operations were to surface publicly? What possible explanation could he offer for permitting a senior CIA officer to vanish without an assignment for months? It had been a stunning performance on Avrakotos’s part—a somewhat unnerving demonstration of his skills as an operative. But in the end there was nothing to be gained from his victory if he could not get back into the field.

Fate has a curious habit in this history of stepping in at just the right moment. And it was during his time in limbo, just after Clair George had sabotaged Avrakotos’s scheduled entry into the Contra Task Force, that Gust’s black network tipped him off to an opening in the CIA’s Near East Division, that would change everything for him. By chance, that posting, put him together with an old Agency friend, one of the few Ivy Leaguers Avrakotos really liked. His name was John McGaffin, and he had known Avrakotos since his days as station chief in Cyprus. McGaffin was now running the Afghan program. In the CIA cafeteria, he was amazed when he heard the full story of Gust’s recent adventures. “If it’s really true that you have nothing to do,” he said, “why not come upstairs. We’re killing Russians.”

O
f all the payoffs for being a member of the House of Representatives, Wilson would always say that none compared to the junkets: first-class, all-expenses-paid trips to exotic places, where the American embassy and the host government treated him like visiting royalty.

The junket that was destined to forever change Wilson’s life and the fate of the Afghans began on October 14, 1982, on a Pan American flight from Houston. The first-class ticket and all other expenses were picked up by the Appropriations Committee, for whom he was on a fact-finding mission to review U.S. foreign-assistance programs. He was scheduled to meet the Afghans but had tacked this on to the end of his itinerary only to accommodate an insistent Joanne Herring.

En route to Israel, Wilson decided to stop off in Lebanon for another look at the Israeli intervention, which he had praised so effusively in June. He lunched on C rations with the U.S. Marines, who had just been sent to Beirut by Ronald Reagan on an ill-fated peacekeeping mission that would end in catastrophe and many deaths at the hands of a suicide bomber. It was a sunny fall day, and Wilson enjoyed one of those moments that make an old navy man feel good about being an American—in the company of lean U.S. boys in crisp uniforms keeping a troubled peace.

His next stop was a visit to the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps just outside Beirut, where thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites lived. Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times
had just reported that in September the Israelis, led by Wilson’s hero, Ariel Sharon, had permitted Lebanese Christians to enter the camps and had stood by for two full days as their allies slaughtered hundreds of young men, women, and children. The Israelis claimed the operation had been aimed at PLO terrorists, and when Wilson approached the camps, no one had yet acknowledged that a massacre of innocents had taken place. “In my usual knee-jerk fashion I assumed there was a certain amount of sensationalism in the press and assumed Israel’s culpability had been exaggerated, but I also felt it was my duty to see for myself.”

Wilson, a student of military history, knew that war is never without horrors. He had met General Sharon with Ed Koch in the desert in 1973, when Sharon was the hero of the Yom Kippur War, and they had become friends. To him Sharon was an Israeli George Patton; he assumed that the general might have been heavy-handed but that he had done nothing more than what was broadly necessary. When Wilson walked into the camps, accompanied by his State Department control officer, he was still a true-believing defender of Israel. What he saw and heard shattered him.

“When we got into the camps,” he recalls, “the grief and mourning was still going on. It had been maybe a week since the attack, and we walked down and ran into this woman who was an American Jew, obviously very liberal. She had been some sort of public-health nurse in an American humanitarian effort, and she was very impressive.”

“She had on soiled clothing from tending the wounded, and she told me that her people had done something terrible. She walked us down to where the victims had been buried in a mass grave. And there were so many Palestinians weeping and bringing little pitiful flowers and I began to get a really terrible feeling in my stomach about it. And what was hanging over me was the Israeli guilt.”

Wilson tried to believe the Israeli explanation that their soldiers hadn’t known what was going on. “But then we walked about fifty feet and one of the American embassy people showed me where the Israeli command post was, and I looked at it and at that moment I lost it. My heroes were forever blemished because they would have had to be blindfolded not to have seen and heard what was happening. And then it was clear that they set up the whole thing and sat there and watched it.”

Something dies in a man like Charlie Wilson when he loses his faith in the purity of a cause. Ever since he was a boy in Trinity listening on the radio to Winston Churchill defying the Nazis he had dreamed and prepared for the day when he would play his part in some worldwide struggle for decency. That’s what he felt he had been doing by championing Israel. Each year he would feel the excitement mounting as he approached the King David Hotel, where he always stayed. But this time, with the terrible visions screaming in his head, the drive from Beirut to Jerusalem was an ordeal.

What kept his emotions in check as he crossed the border and headed down to the ancient capital was the realization that he would be having dinner with his friend Zvi Rafiah. Wilson personalizes everything, and when it came to the work he did on his various causes abroad, that was particularly true. In Afghanistan it was for Gust Avrakotos; in Israel, it had always been for Zvi, ever since he’d first met the smart, tough Israeli diplomat during the Yom Kippur War.

Over the next nine years, the two had worked together on a never-ending series of Appropriations efforts. Wilson had confided everything in Rafiah, and together they had tapped ever more funds for Israel from the subcommittee. Along the way Wilson had become close to Zvi’s wife as well. When Rafiah had left Washington to join Israeli’s largest defense company, Israeli Military Industries (IMI), Wilson had continued to help him. He’d gotten the Pentagon to buy a “bunker busting” bazooka from IMI, and almost every year after that Wilson had dreamed up some new congressional gift for Zvi’s IMI and for Israel.

Congressmen usually have the American embassy set up meetings with government officials and organize their visits in foreign countries. But in Israel, Zvi always took care of Wilson’s schedule. He understood the congressman’s need to mix business with pleasure, and so along with the meetings with everyone who counted, there would be receptions and dinners with the country’s leading musicians, scientists, artists, and writers.

Wilson could say things to Rafiah that he would tell no one else, and that night at dinner in Jerusalem, he shared his confusion and anger over the suffering he had just witnessed. Rafiah made it hard for him to blame the entire country; Wilson could feel his friend’s personal distress at what had happened. Rafiah assured him that large numbers of thoughtful Israelis were just as horrified.

Wilson is a political pro, and professionals don’t go running to the press or needlessly make enemies out of unforgiving friends like the Israelis. On the surface he conducted himself as if nothing had changed. He went through all the meetings at IMI and with the defense minister to discuss the Lavi, the Israeli fighter plane. But at the U.S. embassy he found himself in a shouting match with the ambassador, Sam Lewis, who tried to argue Sabra and Shatilla from an Israeli point of view. Wilson had liked Lewis’s advocacy before, but now the fact that the U.S. ambassador was building himself a retirement home in Israel aggravated Wilson. He felt that Lewis had become little more than an Israeli agent.

The congressman felt marooned and betrayed by what he had witnessed. “I never recovered from that, but it wasn’t something I wanted to make a big issue of. My history and everything with Israel was just too deep.” In the following months and years Wilson managed to win funding for the Lavi. But back in October 1982, when he said good-bye to his friends in Tel Aviv, it was with the sense that he could never feel the same in Israel again. “I simply withdrew emotionally from my previous affection. It’s a terrible thing to become disenchanted with your first love.”

As Wilson progressed to the last leg of his trip, going to Pakistan to accommodate Joanne Herring, he was heading to one of the countries that the Israelis viewed with the greatest suspicion. For the Israelis, Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq was not quite a devil in the league of Saddam Hussein but he was close: his air force pilots flew interceptors for most of the Gulf States, a division of his army served as mercenaries for the Saudis, and, most alarming, the dictator was known to be building an “Islamic bomb.”

The idea that Zia ul-Haq and the Afghans could replace the Israelis as the center of Wilson’s world drama never occurred to the congressman. But as he took off for Pakistan, he was returning to a country that had charmed him two decades before when, as a young naval officer, his ship had sailed into the harbor at Karachi. He had expected to find a very backward people but in his letter home, he described the Pakistan navy men as better trained than their U.S. counterparts, their ships gleaming, their officers charming; and all pro-American. The only downside was the difficulty in getting the girls to consider a date, as he explained in his letter:

 

I have seen a couple that really were knockouts but custom doesn’t allow it. The girls themselves are really classic beauties, the essence of grace and femininity. Really captivating. Well enough I suppose for the lovely ladies of Pakistan. It seems that each part of the world excels in this realm. Or maybe I am just over susceptible to this particular attraction.

 

There was another reason why Wilson was inclined to smile on Pakistan: he had never liked India, and India and Pakistan are blood enemies. This prejudice is something visceral with the congressman. He doesn’t like the way Indians talk or hold their heads. Furthermore, he considered them hypocrites, professing neutrality while firmly ensconced in the Soviet camp for decades.

These sentiments were music to the ears of the Pakistan military, which already had reason to view this congressman as a special friend. Back in 1971, just before Wilson was elected to Congress, India, with its Soviet-equipped army, had invaded and defeated Pakistan in the Bangladesh war. When Wilson was sworn in to office in 1973, the Indians were still holding 91,000 Pakistani prisoners in terrible conditions. Yaqub Khan, the elegant former general who was then Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, had desperately approached every congressman and senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, trying to find someone to help. Wilson alone had responded, immediately taking to the House floor to denounce the Indians and pressure the State Department to demand the prisoners’ release. When the Indians finally disgorged the prisoners, Yaqub Khan gave much of the credit to Wilson, and a delegation of prisoners’ wives were flown to Washington to present him with a citation of gratitude.

The Pakistan ambassador concluded that Wilson was a comer and decided to cultivate him. The future foreign minister was deliberately trying to assemble friends in America who might one day rally to support his country. The shrewd Yaqub Khan also picked Joanne Herring to be Pakistan’s honorary consul in Houston, and it was at one of his black-tie dinners to honor Wilson that Joanne and the congressman met. These seeds that the general turned diplomat had planted back in the early 1970s were finally sprouting, almost a decade later, as Wilson’s plane approached Karachi.

It was a murky landscape in Pakistan in late 1982 when the congressman landed to honor his commitment to Joanne Herring. The mujahideen had been fighting the Soviets for almost three years. Some 2.7 million Afghans had already made their agonizing trek over the mountains to seek refuge in this exotic Muslim nation. They were still pouring in at a rate of thousands a month, creating huge walled cities of mud huts. Close to one-fifth of the Afghan people were huddled in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province. Wilson didn’t fully understand it at the time, but this zone of displaced Afghans had become the true front line of the Cold War.

The basic law of modern guerrilla warfare is that no insurgent movement can survive without a sanctuary for its fighters. The Vietcong depended on Cambodia and North Vietnam. The CIA’s Nicaraguan Contras spent most of their time hovering in camps across the Honduran frontier. No guerrilla force could have survived in Afghanistan itself once the Red Army poured in over 100,000 combat troops backed by satellites and tanks, MiG bombers and helicopter gunships. Without Pakistan, there could not have been a sustained resistance. It was in Pakistan that the Afghans maintained their base camps, received their CIA weapons and training, and deployed for their guerrilla operations. The Soviets knew this and set out to intimidate Zia on two fronts: they built up the Indian army on Pakistan’s eastern flank and began striking mujahideen bases over the border on its western flank.

Zia’s chief of staff during those days, General Aref, says that the pressure got so intense that even Zia’s own generals urged him to cut off the mujahideen. “The Soviets were saying that Pakistan, by arming the Afghans, was technically fighting the Soviet Union itself.” The Soviets were shelling border towns, killing Pakistani civilians as well as Afghans and flying MiGs into Pakistani airspace. “A psychological image was created in Pakistan that we were earning this punishment because we were supporting the mujahideen against a superpower.”

At Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral in Moscow, Yuri Andropov, the new Soviet strongman, took Zia aside and threatened to destroy his government if he didn’t cut off the Afghan “bandits.” Zia, with his elegant Mao jacket and that famous gap-toothed smile, simply looked the Communist Party boss in the eye and replied that there were no Afghan guerrillas in his country. Zia’s closest advisers all say the reason the general insisted on backing the Afghans so provocatively in the early years, well before he trusted the Americans to stand by him if the Red Army came into Pakistan, was because of his mystical religious convictions.

It’s difficult for Westerners to understand the Islamic concept of jihad, but in Islam the word
jihad
is known and understood by all as a call to defend their faith in a “holy war.” There has been only one pure holy war in modern times that rallied Muslims everywhere, and that was the jihad of the Afghan tribesmen.

Although he didn’t know it, Wilson was about to enter a Muslim religious war in which Zia ul-Haq was the central player. Up close it was hard to think of Zia in a religious context. He was not the kind of Muslim that Americans were used to seeing on their television sets in those days. He wasn’t anything like Khomeini, with his chanting Iranian Muslims flogging themselves with chains, and he bore no resemblance to Saddam Hussein and his radical anti-Western rhetoric.