Into the Wild 
Into the Wild 
The Rehabilitation of Charlie Wilson
From booze-guzzling, skirt-chasing, check-kiting Congressman to American hero in—you guessed it—twelve steps.
tsumbra says: ’Good time Charlie’ will be missed. As a fun-loving east Texan partying in west Texas, he would have enjoyed this! "Lusting for Pinkie’s" http://www.voicesnet.org/displayonepoem.aspx?poemid=156108 (February 11th, 2010 at 10:12am)
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His work for Kenyon has been more tedious than tough. He spent the better part of February making calls to D.C. and Baghdad, trying to find the parties responsible for doling out the $7 million earmarked for mass graves within the $87 billion appropriated to rebuild Iraq. He had no luck. “That’s not unusual,” he says. “One of those big umbrella companies in Iraq—Halliburton, DynCorp, Bechtel—may have the money, but they ain’t going to dig up the graves. They are going to sub it out.” He had an assurance for Jensen, though, who was preparing a trip to Iraq to suss out the situation. “We will find the money, unless some bastard has already spent it,” he said. “In the meantime, you come back from Iraq with a specific two or three million dollars to spend on a specific mass grave, and I feel sure I can get that appropriated in the next fiscal year.” Having read the book on Charlie, Jensen was pleased.
Step Nine: Become the Subject of A Best-selling Book
Although a 1989 60 Minutes segment on the Soviet-Afghan War took its title, “Charlie Did It,” from a quote by Pakistan’s late president Zia ul-Haq, Crile thought he had merely reported a conventional story about a backroom operator. It was good TV but not quite a book. A year later he was back in Asia, traveling as Charlie’s guest on a tour of the Middle East. With them was Gust Avrakotos, a tough son of Greek immigrants and a former CIA agent who had spent his career at odds with the agency’s Ivy League leadership. When their plane broke down in Basra, Crile watched Avrakotos persuade local officials to get them on another plane. “He told them who Charlie was and convinced them that they could win points with Allah if they got us to Baghdad,” says Crile. “Then, on the flight, Gust explained how Charlie had terrorized the senior leadership of the CIA. Gust himself was an intimidating figure, and I came to realize that something had gone on between the two of them, that together they had hijacked foreign policy and this covert war and that they had made it work.”
That relationship became the heart of the book, which took Crile thirteen years of stops and starts to complete. “The big problem was believing that any of this was true,” he says. “Most of my time was spent checking out each unlikely story, following it down a path that always led to something even more bizarre.” According to Crile, the decisive battle of the Soviet-Afghan War was the victory of the two zealous black sheep over reluctant CIA blue bloods. It’s a romantic premise, although some in the CIA are unhappy with the way they are cast in the book. “It’s a funny thing,” says Charlie, “to be hated by people who can kill you with one hand.”
The publication of the book has redefined the autumn of Charlie’s years. “Before the book and Barbara,” he says, “I’d probably have retired to South Beach and watched the Rollerbladers.” Instead, he’s now in greater demand than ever, as a lobbyist and a lecturer. The crowds come because of his experience; they leave talking about how well he tells a story.
Step Ten: Don’t Put It All in the Book; Save Something for Your Stump Speech
“I was in a cave one night in Afghanistan—and I love being able to say, ‘I was in a cave one night’—with a warrior named Hagani,” says Charlie. “He was telling me, through an interpreter, ‘Mr. Wilson, I am humiliated because it is custom in my country to give a visitor a gift, and I have no gift to give you. And you are the most important guest we will ever have.’ I of course explained to him that no gift was expected nor appropriate. But he continued to insist, and so I said, ‘Well, it would really mean a lot for me to go back to Washington and tell my colleagues that I had interviewed some captured Russian helicopter pilots.’
“About forty-five minutes later they brought in a couple of twenty-year-olds who looked absolutely terrified. But I soon learned that they were not Russians; they were Afghans that had been recruited in Kabul by the Soviets’ puppet government.
“So I said, ‘Tell the commander that I am very grateful, but that what I would really like to do is talk to a couple of captured Russians.’ And there was a lot of talk before the interpreter looked at me, and, I’ll never forget it, he said, ‘Commander Hagani is further humiliated because you have made a simple request and he cannot honor it. But he says that if you will give him two weeks’ notice before your next visit, he will save you two or three Russians.’ That was pretty striking; I knew not to ask where the Russian pilots had gone. They’d been carved up. That’s where they’d gone, into little pieces.”
Step Eleven: Make Your Apologies But Only Where Warranted
On the matter of his personal failings, Charlie has always been appropriately, honestly regretful. “Anything that failed in my marriage was one hundred percent my fault, and I’ve always felt extremely bad about that,” he says. It’s a measure of his sincerity that he’s still friendly with Goose.
But there are people who question the wisdom of his war. Crile’s book chronicled a secret history, but the developments in Afghanistan in the nineties and now are all too familiar after September 11. The U.S. snuck out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left, and in the ensuing chaos emerged the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden, holy warriors who thought they’d just defeated a superpower on their own. Critics add that not only did we arm them with confidence, we armed them with arms. Now we’re at war against them.
Charlie doesn’t second-guess himself. For one thing, he says, the most significant weapons we left over there, the Stingers, no longer work. “The batteries are all dead,” he says. It sounds ridiculously simple, but according to Charles Heyman, a senior military expert with the highly respected intelligence magazine Jane’s, Charlie’s right. “Think of a high-tech weapon as being like an ice sculpture,” says Heyman. “As soon as it’s delivered, it starts to melt, because of the growth of more technology and because of what is required to keep it operational.” There is no evidence of any of those Stingers being used outside of the Soviet-Afghan War.
And according to Charlie, today’s emboldened Muslim terrorists are not yesterday’s Afghan rebels but Arabs who came late to the fray: “The Arabs did not fight the Russians. They wrote checks and got their passports stamped so they could say they were part of the muj. I was with the warriors four times a year, and there was never a f—ing Arab anywhere near where the bullets were flying.” The oft-cited vacuum that America left for the Taliban to fill was unavoidable, as one former CIA agent put it, once “the Afghans went back to being Afghans.” Amid the resumption of the historical tribal fighting, rebuilding the country was impossible. “I had used up every political card I had, and they were tired of listening to me,” says Charlie on trying to keep Congress engaged in Afghanistan while the U.S. was basking in its cold war victory.
On a day in late March when the news was filled with reports that al Qaeda mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri was encircled in Pakistan, Charlie had a reminder for the critics: “You think this f—er they’re chasing around now in the tribal areas of Pakistan is terrifying? Well, what was terrifying was a nuclear exchange between us and the Russians. What was terrifying was the idea of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and what we would have had to do about that. I have absolutely zero regrets.”
Step Twelve: Have Tom Hanks Play You in the Movie
Once you’ve been immortalized by the man who saved Private Ryan, you can endure a lot of backsliding on the other eleven steps. But this may be the one that causes Charlie the most trouble. Although Hanks’s production company, Playtone, paid $1.1 million for the rights to Charlie Wilson’s War, speculation is the title role will go to someone other than Hanks. Charlie’s friends say it only makes sense; even in Hanks’s most charged moments on-screen, his language has never approached the shades of blue that perpetually color Charlie’s. Hanks is said to favor John Corbett, the dreamy but insufficiently Greek bridegroom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Charlie has no opinion on Corbett, but he did enjoy having lunch in D.C. late last year with Corbett’s girlfriend, Bo Derek. “You know, Bo still looks exactly like she did in 10,” says Charlie.
Therein lies the pitfall of the gains Charlie has made. The perks of his new life—the TV appearances, the adoring fans at the book fairs, the meetings with Hanks, the lunches with starlets—make all his old vices that much more available. It’s like beating the bottle and being rewarded with a bar. But Charlie’s having too much fun taking his hero’s ride into the sunset, his pretty bride by his side, to mess it up now. He enjoys being a hero, but he knows he’ll always be a scoundrel. Make that a recovering scoundrel.
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