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2 Second thoughts on
Charlie Wilson's War By Chalmers Johnson
I have some
personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie
Wilson (Democrat - 2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996)
because, for close to 20 years, my representative
in the 50th Congressional District of California
was Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now
serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence
for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense
contractors.
Wilson and Cunningham held
exactly the same plummy committee assignments in
the House of Representatives - the Defense
Appropriations Sub-committee plus the Intelligence
Oversight Committee - from which they could dole
out large sums
of
public money with little or no input from their
colleagues or constituents.
Both
men flagrantly abused their positions - but with
radically different consequences. Cunningham went
to jail because he was too stupid to know how to
game the system - retire and become a lobbyist -
whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) Clandestine Service's first "honored
colleague"
award ever given to an outsider and
went on to become a US$360,000 per annum lobbyist
for Pakistan.
In a secret ceremony at CIA
headquarters on June 9, 1993, James Woolsey, Bill
Clinton's first Director of Central Intelligence
and one of the agency's least competent chiefs in
its checkered history, said: "The defeat and
breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great
events of world history. There were many heroes in
this battle, but to Charlie Wilson must go a
special recognition." One important part of that
recognition, studiously avoided by the CIA and
most subsequent American writers on the subject,
is that Wilson's activities in Afghanistan led
directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in
the attacks of September 11, 2001, and led to the
United States' current status as the most hated
nation on Earth.
On May 25, 2003, (the
same month George W Bush stood on the flight deck
of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a
White-House-prepared "Mission Accomplished" banner
and proclaimed "major combat operations" at an end
in Iraq), I published a review in the Los Angeles
Times of the book that provides the data for the
film Charlie Wilson's War. The original
edition of the book carried the subtitle, "The
Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert
Operation in History - the Arming of the
Mujahideen." [1] The 2007 paperbound edition was
subtitled, "The Extraordinary Story of How the
Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent
Changed the History of Our Times." Neither the
claim that the Afghan operations were covert nor
that they changed history is precisely true.
In my review of the book, I wrote,
The Central Intelligence Agency has
an almost unblemished record of screwing up
every "secret" armed intervention it ever
undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian
government in 1953 through the rape of Guatemala
in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to
assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice
Lumumba of the Congo, the Phoenix Program in
Vietnam, the "secret war" in Laos, aid to the
Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the
1973 killing of president Allende in Chile, and
Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra war against
Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in
which the agency's activities did not prove
acutely embarrassing to the United States and
devastating to the people being "liberated". The
CIA continues to get away with this bungling
primarily because its budget and operations have
always been secret and Congress is normally too
indifferent to its constitutional functions to
rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale
of a purported CIA success story should be of
some interest.
According to the author
of Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to
CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and
1988 of thousands of Afghan mujahideen ("freedom
fighters"). The agency flooded Afghanistan with
an incredible array of extremely dangerous
weapons and "unapologetically mov[ed] to equip
and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in
the art of waging a war of urban terror against
a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].
The author of this glowing account, [the
late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for
the CBS television news show 60 Minutes
and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for
the Afghan caper. He argues that the US's
clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was "the
largest and most successful CIA operation in
history", "the one morally unambiguous crusade
of our time", and that "there was nothing so
romantic and exciting as this war against the
Evil Empire". Crile's sole measure of success is
killed Soviet soldiers (about 15,000), which
undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period
1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.
However, he never once mentions that the
"tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim
fundamentalists" the CIA armed are the same
people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the
side of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and
on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners
into New York's World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.
Where did the 'freedom
fighters' go? When I wrote those words
I did not know (and could not have imagined) that
the actor Tom Hanks had already purchased the
rights to the book to make into a film in which he
would star as Charlie Wilson, with Julia Roberts
as his right-wing Texas girlfriend Joanne Herring,
and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust Avrakotos, the
thuggish CIA operative who helped pull off this
caper.
What to make of the film (which I
found rather boring and old-fashioned)? It makes
the US government look like it is populated by a
bunch of whoring, drunken sleazebags, so in that
sense it's accurate enough. But there are a number
of things both the book and the film are
suppressing. As I noted in 2003:
For the CIA legally to carry out a
covert action, the president must sign off on -
that is, authorize - a document called a
"finding". Crile repeatedly says that president
Jimmy Carter signed such a finding ordering the
CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen
after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on
December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is
that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979,
six months before the Soviet invasion, and he
did so on the advice of his national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to
provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has
confirmed this sequence of events in an
interview with a French newspaper, and former
CIA director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert
Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It
may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his
heroic mujahideen were manipulated by Washington
like so much cannon fodder in order to give the
USSR its own Vietnam. The mujahideen did the job
but as subsequent events have made clear, they
may not be all that grateful to the United
States.
In the bound galleys of
Crile's book, which his publisher sent to
reviewers before publication, there was no mention
of any qualifications to his portrait of Wilson as
a hero and a patriot. Only in an "epilogue" added
to the printed book did Crile quote Wilson as
saying, "These things happened. They were glorious
and they changed the world. And the people who
deserved the credit are the ones who made the
sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame."
That's it. Full stop. Director Mike Nichols, too,
ends his movie with Wilson's final sentence
emblazoned across the screen. And then the credits
roll.
Neither a reader of Crile, nor a
viewer of the film based on his book would know
that, in talking about the Afghan freedom
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
award ever given to an outsider and
went on to become a US$360,000 per annum lobbyist
for Pakistan. 
