AFTER a decade or so in Congress, Charlie Wilson had certainly made an impression there. Not that he did much on the legislative side. He went on the House floor only to see if there was talent in attendance, and if there was he would send up an invitation. On the stroke of lunch, most days, he would stroll into his office to greet the shapeliest staff in Washington, picked not for their typing but their tits, because why should a man be depressed when he came into work? They once posed with him toting AK-47s, but that was part of another, secret, story.
He was Texas-loud, six-foot seven in his cowboy boots, with bright suspenders, a rowdy laugh and a rugged, western face. Other people in that town might go round looking like constipated hound dogs, but he was having fun and sharing it, partying and junketing first-class all over the country on the federal dime. The apogee came in 1980 in a hot tub at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, with two strippers naked but for their high-heeled shoes, each equipped with ten red fingernails filled with beautiful white powder which they wafted under his nose. The feds later spent a million bucks investigating whether he had inhaled it; he wasn’t telling. He revealed, however, that he wore a robe “at first”, because he was, after all, a congressman.
And a good one. The second side of Charlie Wilson was the man who represented the piny woods and the oilfields of east Texas, with small dry towns wedged among forests named after Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. God-fearing, Jesus-saved people voted for him (their “designated sinner”, as his biographer, George Crile, described him) because he got them a veterans’ hospital and a highway and the Lufkin civic centre where, every autumn, he hosted a dominoes tournament for seniors. He was a local boy, whose father had worked for a timber company, and lumber interests never had to ask a favour twice. Mr Wilson’s bus came regularly to each township to listen to complaints; and though some of them called him a booze-head and a pussy-hound, and didn’t care for his support of abortion, more remembered him as the man who got money for Lufkin municipal airport alongside O’Hare and La Guardia.
All this won him 36 years as a legislator, 12 in the whiskey-watered state capitol in Austin and 24 in Washington. But there was a third side to Mr Wilson, which few knew about until the publication in 2003 of Mr Crile’s book. It was he who organised and largely procured the money for the CIA’s most successful covert operation, the backing in the 1980s of the mujahideen of Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet invaders. He did so with all the guile he could muster, manoeuvring himself with help from the pro-Israel lobby (he was always solid on that, and called in the chit now) on to the Appropriations Committee and thence on to the two crucial subcommittees dealing with foreign ops, both white and black.
From stones to Stingers
His enthusiasm for the “muj” knew no bounds. He increased their money from $5m a year to $750m, first by kissing every ass in the committee room and then by getting the Saudis to match funds. To hold the CIA’s dragging feet to the fire—because Langley was afraid of annoying the Soviets, when Mr Wilson wanted them to die as swiftly and painfully as possible—he made sure the dollars were mandated for Afghanistan. To keep American prints off the operation, he ordered anti-aircraft guns from Israel, bullets from Egypt and cut-price AK-47s from China. He nagged until the Stingers were sent that changed the course of the war. When the muj ran into transport problems, he shipped out mules from Tennessee. When the CIA would not get them field radios, he bought $12,000-worth of stuff from Radio Shack. He went to the region 32 times, astonishing Afghan warlords and General Zia of Pakistan by showing up with beauties called “Snowflake” or “Firecracker” in tight pink jumpsuits. All this later made a film, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, in which Tom Hanks played him. You couldn’t make it up.
Many marvelled that Good Time Charlie had so fiercely embraced this cause. His Houston socialite lover, Joanne Herring, first made him visit Afghan wounded, implying that helping them was a test of his virility, but Mr Wilson was a pacifist who couldn’t bear to shoot a squirrel out of a tree. His passion had to have deeper roots. He loved military history, reading it at night when he couldn’t sleep; he worshipped Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill, whose wartime broadcasts he had picked up as a boy. His flat in Washington (with giant bed, silver handcuffs and Dom Pérignon in the fridge) looked down on the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial.
For him, the Afghan war was simply another case of good versus evil. There were no grey areas. If America stood for anything, it was to kick Communist butts. Wasn’t it true, some wiseacres grumbled, that by arming the warlords he had opened the way for the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Charlie Wilson thought that stupid, just hindsight talking. He had helped noble, barefoot warriors to fight with something more than knives and stones. And in so doing, as they said in Lufkin, he had put up two fingers to the devil and at least some of his works.