How to Succeed in Washington
CRITCHLOW, JAMES
How to Succeed in Washington Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History By George Crile Atlantic Monthly. 550 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by James...
...and elsewhere...
...Congress, where he soon became a "master politician...
...Dirty...
...He operated on the assumption that, because Congress is a "co-equal branch of government," he had the right to usurp the customary powers of the Executive...
...The book re-creates in dramatic detail scenes in the bowels of the CIA, in private offices on Capitol Hill, and in hotel bedrooms in the U.S., Europe and Asia...
...A back-alley fighter, he bucked the odds to get a degree in mathematics and a Phi Beta Kappa key...
...But after 1979 the Afghan struggle against the Soviet invasion galvanized him as never before...
...Their subversive meetings bypassed established channels of contact between Congress and the CIA...
...Avrakotos' career might have ended there had he not made common cause, furtively, with Congressman Wilson...
...Until his retirement in 1996, Wilson was repeatedly re-elected by his Bible Belt constituency, despite being a liberal Democrat and, in George Crile's words, "a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer...
...Improbably for someone from his "pro-life" district, he consistently voted for women's choice...
...Crile traces Wilson's emotional attachment to the mujahedeen to his visiting a Peshawar hospital and pointedly donating blood to Afghan refugees maimed by Soviet gunships...
...That War, with its moral unambiguity, influenced him profoundly...
...one of them, a Texas belly dancer, entertained local dignitaries along the way...
...Its protagonists turn John Adams' principles upside down, shattering the American conceit of establishing a government of laws, not men...
...Usually American officials looked the other way, but once a stickler of an Air Force colonel balked...
...Thus he dealt directly with the president of Pakistan, over the head of the local CIA station chief...
...Wilson is driven by a zeal for causes, especially of those he considers "underdogs...
...Experienced as a Navy gunnery officer, the high-living Congressman took it upon himself, with the help of a former Green Beret weapons genius, to decide what the mujahedeen needed and set about procuring it in the U.S...
...It was during a romantic involvement with her that Wilson first got interested in Afghanistan...
...support for the central government in Kabul seems to be pointing the country toward more warlordism...
...One wonders, too, about the verbatim accuracy of lengthy quotes obviously drawn from secondhand sources...
...Later, he damaged his career by telling a high-ranking superior to "go f__ himself...
...His prowess as a CIA operative in the Cold War earned him the in-house nickname of "Dr...
...As it happened, he arrived in Israel shortly after the mass killings at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon...
...Even today, lukewarm U.S...
...From then on, he brought his own with him...
...He resigned his Navy commission to run for the Texas Legislature, where he spent 12 years before being elected to the U.S...
...He eschews highfalutin generalizations in favor of racy vignettes...
...Fortunately, their objective is limited, but their experience suggests the opportunities our system might afford others with less savory ends...
...Wilson solved the problem with a call to Zia ul Haq, who sent his presidential plane for the Congressman and his friend "Sweetums," leaving the colonel the task of flying alongside in the U.S...
...A selective antiCommunist, he refused support for the CIA's clandestine aid to the Nicaraguan contras because he considered their effort "a lost cause...
...Clearly, he has conducted extensive interviews with Wilson—who has told a Texas newspaper (the Nacogdoches Sentinel) that he "cooperated but did not approve" the project—and with some others involved...
...Wilson & Co...
...A third major player is Joanne Herring, a Right-wing Houston hostess whose lavish hospitality to visiting dignitaries led, among other things, to her becoming the honorary Pakistani consul in her city...
...But the main blame for the turmoil that came later lies with neglect by the administrations of George Bush I, Bill Clinton and Bush II (until 9/11...
...Wilson provided his paramours with government transportation, in violation of regulations...
...He admires Winston Churchill, whose World War II speeches he listened to on the radio in Texas...
...After work we only went out with Agency people...
...But Wilson also has a serious side...
...foreign policy in Afghanistan by circumventing or overriding objections from those in legitimate authority...
...We drank with them, slept with them, and if you were lucky you'd get laid three times a week, always with an Agency person...
...Crile is reticent about his sources, however...
...It tells of an ad hoc band of kindred spirits recruited from both Right and Left for the single purpose of helping the Afghan mujahedeen repel their invaders...
...Reviewed by James Critchlow Author, "Nationalism in Uzbekistan: A Soviet Republic's Road to Sovereignty" This is a real-life saga of government by crony...
...Crile introduces his narrative with a flash-forward to 1993, when the Congressman arrives at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to receive an unprecedented "Honored Colleague" award from the Director himself...
...He had come to believe it was up to him to take independent action, because the CIA and the Pentagon did not really want the mujahedeen to win...
...A quote from Avrakotos echoes the inbred CIA culture: "Everyone worked six and a half days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day...
...The Congressman was then more interested in helping Israel, but he agreed to stop in Pakistan at the tail end of a swing through the Middle East...
...The book describes the ingenious ways he and his confederates overcome bureaucratic resistance...
...He told Crile: "As I saw it, the tie that brought us together was chasing pussy and killing Communists...
...although he is not Jewish and had practically no Jews in his district, he sees Israel as surrounded by hostile Arabs...
...He continued to support Israel, but with diminished zest...
...This yields a riveting glimpse of the inner workings of a secret area of government...
...One of his passions has been Israel...
...A New York Times editorial called him "the biggest party animal in Congress...
...Still, if one suspends moral and political concerns, this is a helluva story...
...He even managed to award a contract to Israel, defying the conventional wisdom—which the mujahedeen soon disproved—that Muslims will not fight with Jewish-made weapons...
...She had visited the border region at the behest of one of her socialite friends, and urged Wilson to go there to see for himself what the mujahedeen were doing against great odds...
...As a young Navy officer who finished near the bottom of his Annapolis class, he was characterized by one superior as "the best officer who ever served under me at sea and the worst in port...
...Ordered to apologize, he repeated the insult...
...can claim a large share of credit for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, yet they also bear some of the guilt for the residue of modern weapons, Toyota pickup trucks and military training that facilitated the rise of the Taliban...
...Wilson's relations with the CIA brass were not always so smooth...
...A trip to the scene left him disenchanted with his friend Ariel Sharon and ripe for a new cause...
...The scene is dominated by a large screen bearing the words "Charlie Did It," a quote from Pakistan's late President Zia ul Haq, who had much to do with Wilson's success in arming the mujahedeen...
...Following his camera instinct, Crile gives us closeups of his characters that may make them larger than they would appear in longshot reality...
...The author, a producer with CBS '60 Minutes, observed Wilson's activities firsthand when he went to the Afghanistan border region to work on a television documentary...
...According to the author, he is the only white Congressman who regularly played poker with the House Black Caucus...
...After the first of a dozen such visits, he returned to Washington and insisted on giving the CIA more money than it really wanted for the mujahedeen...
...On his first visit to Pakistan, the Lothario Wilson discovers that local women are all but unapproachable...
...In essence, they hijack U.S...
...Wilson's main henchman was a maverick CIA staffer, Gust Avrakotos, a tough second-generation GreekAmerican from a Pennsylvania steel town...
...plane to take care of their baggage...
...Crile seems to agree with Emerson that "that there is properly no history but biography...
...The group derived its power from its leader, Charles Wilson, a charismatic 6'4" Texan and influential member of the House Appropriations Committee in the defense and foreign policy areas...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
