"Charlie Wilson's War"

In George Crile's thrilling tale of good intentions gone wrong, one boozing congressman convinces the U.S. to support the Afghan mujahedin -- many of whom 20 years later want to see us dead.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 21, 2003 | How do you react to a very funny book about something that isn't funny at all? George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War" is a classic story of good intentions gone wrong, a comedy of can-do Americanism loose in a world it really doesn't understand. Crile's protagonist, the boozing, womanizing Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, and his roster of allies ranging from socialites to dictators to CIA operatives, are figures who might have stepped out of one of the late Ross Thomas' comic thrillers of Americans up to their necks in Third World skullduggery.

Crile, a producer at "60 Minutes," has hold of a story here that everyone else missed, and his elation at having a big scoop dovetails with the enthusiasm that Charlie Wilson brought to his cause -- arming the Afghan rebels to defeat the invading Soviet army in the '80s. Crile has written an extraordinarily entertaining piece of reportage that has much to tell us about how the U.S. armed a group of people who are now using the weapons we provided them to kill us. A fiction writer would be hard-pressed to come up with a comparable tale of American shortsightedness, or one with more hairpin reversals and rich, comic irony.

But there is a contradiction at the heart of the book that Crile has not been able to resolve. He's torn between seeing Charlie Wilson as a hero and knowing what his unconditional support of the mujahedin cost us. Crile has written a satirical epic of inadvertent hero worship.

Crile's confusion over Charlie Wilson is likely to be the reader's as well. You'd have to be very straitlaced not to like the guy. In the '80s, Wilson was an east Texas congressman, a Democrat, a social liberal and a fierce anticommunist who had a seat on the House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for funding both the Pentagon and the CIA. Wilson's public persona was something of a joke. A rangy 6-footer (his cowboy boots added a few inches) with a booming voice and the demeanor of the prototypical confident American, Wilson was more known for his shenanigans than his statesmanship. The ladies in his life included a Playmate, a former Miss World contestant, an east Texas divorcée who became his personal belly dancer, and a Houston socialite who so endeared herself to the Pakistan dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq that Pakistan's then ambassador to the U.S. made her the country's honorary consul.

At the beginning of the book, Wilson is enduring the scandal of being found in the hot tub of the Fantasy Suite at Caesar's Palace with two showgirls and a goodly supply of cocaine. "Both of them," he remembers, "had ten long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder ... The Feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I inhale or exhale -- and I ain't telling." When he was later appointed to the House Ethics Committee (largely due to the machinations of then House Speaker Tip O'Neill) he told a reporter it was because "I'm the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented." There's no getting around how refreshing that sounds now, following a period where the government went crazy because the president got a blow job.

It was just that sort of reputation that made people underestimate Charlie Wilson, and thus allowed him to work unseen. From the time he was a boy, mesmerized by the battles the Allies waged in World War II, Wilson saw himself as a man of destiny. Graduating from Annapolis (with more demerits than anyone in his class) and spending his time at sea chasing Russian submarines, Wilson was possessed of an unwavering patriotism and convinced of the Soviet threat. Inspired by John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech, Wilson won election to the Texas Legislature in 1961 and then to Congress 12 years later. Never having seen combat duty, Wilson felt that he had, in Crile's words, "cheated his country."

In Congress, he became a passionate advocate of Israel. That advocacy left him heartbroken in 1982 when he went to a Palestinian and Lebanese Shiite refugee camp outside Beirut where Ariel Sharon had permitted Lebanese Christians to enter and begin a two-day slaughter. With that experience, and his lifelong hatred of the USSR, it was easy for him to transfer the need to find a heroic cause to the mujahedin, then fighting the Soviet invaders.

His chipper Virgil in this circle of hell was the aforementioned Houston socialite Joanne Herring. Like Wilson, she's an easy figure to laugh off. She became acquainted with the plight of the Afghans through her then husband, a Texas oil tycoon. Her response to the poverty she encountered in Afghan villages was to persuade her designer friends, among them Emilio Pucci, Oscar de la Renta and Pierre Cardin, to come up with designs Afghan women could use as patterns to make dresses and rugs and thus lift themselves out of poverty. Meeting Wilson, she used her wiles to persuade him that the mujahedin were a cause worth promoting. And seeing his potential through Joanne Herring's eyes made it easier for Charlie Wilson to believe he was on his way to being the man he'd always wanted to be.

It should be said that Wilson wasn't entirely thinking with his pecker. The news reports of Afghan refugees fleeing into Pakistan by the thousands and helicopter gunships destroying villages while the mujahedin refused to give up were honestly appalling. For the right, it was a nightmare of Soviet imperialism, and for the left it was another chapter in the series of outrages against Hungary and Czechoslovakia and other countries. With the will to do something for the Afghan rebels, and in the catbird seat of the House Appropriations Committee, Charlie Wilson only had to find the people who could guide his efforts. The contacts provided by Joanne Herring were one channel. And Gust Avrakatos was another.

Avrakatos is the book's second major character, emphasis on character. A Greek-American out of the steel towns of Pennsylvania, and like Charlie, stirred to public service by JFK's "Ask not what your country to do for you" speech, Avrakatos was a cunning and ruthless CIA agent whose working-class crudeness kept him out of the Agency's inner circle, the province of the "gentlemen spies" epitomized by Allan Dulles. With typical bluntness, Avrakatos says of the CIA's old-boy network, "the only reason half of them got anywhere is because they jerked off Henry Cabot Lodge's grandson at some prep school."

If Avrakatos knows this talk sounds colorful, it's also his genuine way of speaking. Crile notes that he still speaks the language of the rough Pennsylvania streets where he grew up. He called his black secretary (who adored him and who he rescued from financial ruin by co-signing a loan, cutting up her credit cards and putting her on a strict budget) at the CIA a "nigger" several times a day. Yet his working-class ethic led him time and again to champion the secretaries at the Agency (who were also an invaluable source of information). When Avrakatos was re-posted in late 1986, the black workers gave him their annual Brown Bomber Award, the only white man ever to receive it. The woman who presented it to Avrakatos said, "We want to give this award to the blackest motherfucker of us all."

Next Page: Charlie Wilson represents everything blinkered and duplicitous about American intelligence

• View blog reactions