More on Charlie Wilson’s War

COMMENT BY LARRY JOHNSON.  I have received some back channel emails from several friends–retired military and intelligence officers–who knew Charlie Wilson or worked on the Afghan Task Force in some form or fashion.  Folks have different views and thoughts.  Here’s a great piece from a dear friend who served with U.S. special operations forces and had a distinguished military career. This is his take.

Larry,  OK, I’ve seen the film and the History Channel documentary, and I’ve read the Criles book, and as mentioned earlier I was involved in part of this.

As far as the movie goes, I liked it very much.   It’s very well done and nicely captured the feeling of that period in time and the politics of the situation.   I think there are some time compressions, and some things were deleted, but it’s still worthwhile.  I particularly liked Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson, except he made him smarter, funnier and more sympathetic than he actually was.  

Now to the grisly details.   After FBNC I finagled a job on the Army Staff.   I’d been operating off the books for almost five years and with a new wife and two children, I needed to get back into the mainstream of the Army.   Regreening it was called, and for those who’d served at FBNC for any length of time, at that time it was mandatory if you ever wanted to be promoted again.   And I had decided I did.   I was assigned to Strategy, Plans and Policy Division (or Directorate) as the Africa guy, but at that time I had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan, Pakistan or anything else in Central Asia.   I’d been there about four or five months when the XO came in my office and dropped the file on my desk.   Until I opened it I had no idea anything of that nature was going on.   The file dealt primarily with the STINGER xfers.   Until I saw the documentary I had no knowledge of the arms buys from Egypt or how we’d been supporting the Muj to that point.

Within a week, ten days at most, the first major problem appeared.  We had already sold STINGER Basic to the Pakistanis and they were having trouble with it.  Soviet acft were crossing into Pakistani airspace in pursuit of the Muj and the Paks couldn’t hit them.   Since STINGER was in the process of being fielded in our Army, and had never been tried in combat before the Paks started firing at Soviet border crossers, the credibility of the whole program was at stake and the Army had to respond to the Pak’s concerns.

A friend of mine named Jerry Fry, also on the Army Staff, was the Pakistan desk officer.   Jerry had been Chief of the Army Section in the ODRP (the MILGROUP).   He had some of the languages, knew the organization and personalities of the Pakistani Army, and because of his assignment on the ARSTAFF was the logical guy to pull together the response.  He quickly put together what amounted to a STINGER MTT and flew to Pakistan to see what was wrong.   He took with him several drones, a REDEYE, one or more STINGERs and a trained gunner.   A demo was arranged at their air defense school (if memory serves it was on the coast~on the Arabian Sea) and in the hands of a competent operator it was quickly shown that there was nothing wrong with the missile.   Subsequent investigation showed the problem was lack of training and maintenance, and an organizational problem in that the missiles (MANPADS-Man Portable Air Defense Systems) had been taken away from the Chief of Air Defense and given to the frontline corps commanders.  Without a proponent the missiles quickly deteriorated and the gunners lost proficiency.   The Pakistanis had just absorbed this lesson when the first shootdown in Afghanistan occurred.   Engineer Captain somebody (I remembered his name as Abdullah, but in the documentary your friend Milt Bearden says his name was Jaffer or Gaffer.  I’d go with Bearden.   I wasn’t in theater at the time and didn’t hear about it for at least two days after it happened).  At any rate he crept out into the airfield at Jalalabad (as I recall) and torched at least two Hinds.   The movie shows three.   I’m fine with that too.   Any whole number is fine with me, but that shootdown demonstrated to our Congressional critics the system worked and had utility in that tactical environment, and I think it showed the Muj that we had given them a good weapons system.  It also embarrassed the Pakistanis in that the Afghans could shoot down a Soviet plane, but they couldn’t.

Inspite of the positive jolt the first shootdowns gave all of us, there were still problems.   The Muj hadn’t really mastered the system yet, and were very much inclined to fire out of range.   In the early days if they could see it they’d shoot at it.  The missile only had a slant range of 5-8 miles, and could be tricked by a snowbank or a brushfire. The solution to the first problem was provided by MG Donald Infante, then the boss at our Air Defense Center and School.   Within a week or two he and his staff developed a simple template affair to be worn around the neck on a lanyard.   It looked like a short ruler and had three or four different sized holes in it. When held at arms length each hole corresponded to one of the Soviet frontline acft.   If the gunner could identify the type of acft he was looking at all he had to do was hold the template up to the sky and when the wings or the rotor blades touched both sides of the MiG-21 hole or the Hind hole it was in range.

The solution to the other problem(s) involved better training for the trainers.   The facility designed to train MANPADS gunners was called a Moving Target Simulator, an instrumented dome-like affair that simulated various engagement scenarios likely to be faced by a gunner in a NATO environment.   They cost about $1M apiece in 1985 dollars, and at the time I believe there were only three in the World, one in Germany, one somewhere in PACOM(?), and the one at Fort Bliss.   Infante made the one at Bliss available to us to train the trainers.   By day it was used by US students, but at night it was used by 5th Group and Agency guys to perfect their skills so they could train the Afghans.

I had to laugh when they introduced the Vickers character as their weapons expert.   I frankly didn’t know there was an Afghan Working Group at Langley.   I assumed somebody was managing it, but until I saw the documentary and read the Criles book I had no idea who.   The way it really worked, we didn’t hear a squeak from them until they got in a jam and or didn’t know what they were doing.   The Oerlikon business was a prime example.   They didn’t know an Oerlikon from a Krupp coffee maker.  All they knew about Oerlikons was what they read in the manufacturer’s manual, and it was our guys who had to try and convince them, and Wilson, that the Oerlikon was not the answer to their problem.   The same kind of problems occurred with the STINGERs.   Once they got over there someone figured out they knew how to fire them but didn’t know how to use them.   Over a long weekend I sat down and wrote tactical manuals for the employment of STINGER in Afghanistan and Angola.   I’d been to Angola during the war for independence and knew the area where they would be used rather well, but I’d never been to Afghanistan and had to rely on two officers who had, the Army Library, and the two relevant field manuals to come up with an abbreviated field manual for use in the high altitude, cross-compartmented terrain typical of that environment.   The combination of improved training, Infante’s target acquisition template, and the tactical manuals seemed to work.   Planes started falling out of the sky.

The other guy who should have received credit in the documentary but didn’t was MG Charles W. Brown.   Charlie Brown.   For some reason our whole branch got transferred from DCSOPS to DCSLOG, and when it did Charlie became our boss.  In the Criles book he makes the point that Wilson couldn’t have gotten away with what he did without Tip O’Neill’s tacit consent.   Charlie was my Tip O’Neill.   The Vice Chief of Staff of the Army at the time was Max Thurman.   One of the Vice’s primary responsibilities, over and beyond running the staff, is to husband the Army’s resources and I was in the process of stealing a large number of his STINGERS for something he most emphatically did not approve of.   Charlie was a barely reformed Nebraska cowboy.   As he once laughingly explained, he was the only man he’d ever met who’d gone to college on a polo scholarship. Almost thirty years of service hadn’t taken the ranch twang out of his voice, but he did not look healthy even 21 years ago.   He had a smoker’s cough (that later developed into cancer) and a perpetual prison pallor brought on by too many days and nights in the Pentagon.   He’d made a career out of letting people underestimate him,  but he was wonderfully personable and insightful, a truly honorable man, and extraordinarily shrewd and capable.   Also, one of the most skillful bureaucratic infighters I’ve ever known.   Thurman wasn’t too hard on lieutenant colonels and majors, but he was death on colonels and general officers, and in addition to carrying our mail on the Hill, I suspect Charlie took most of the tongue-lashings and abuse meant for me.   I owe him a great deal, for this and many other things, and will always think of him with profound respect and gratitude.   As an afterthought, it was Charlie Brown who first called my attention to the Criles book.

My part in all this was to provide the missiles, train and coordinate training for the trainers, develop the tactical manuals for the Muj and UNITA, and address problems, political and military, that impacted on the use of the weapons in-country.   One part of that involved symplifying the Program of Instruction for STINGER gunners.   Early on I discovered about a third of the POI was diagnostics and maintenance.   I suspected neither the Muj or UNITA would waste much time on that so threw it out and rewrote the whole thing to emphasize target identification, acquisition and training.   One of the 5th Group NCOs who actually trained the Muj later told me they took care of their missiles like they were camels.   If the weapon whistled or gurgled, or lit up when they twisted this or that nob they knew the missile was feeling well and would engage.   If it didn’t the missile was sick and needed attention from the Americans.   Usually just a battery swap, but everyone likes to feel useful.

Since there were no moving target simulators where the training was being done, at one point the UNITA trainees were using the resupply acft to practice target acquisition.   I don’t imagine the pilots would have been particularly pleased if someone had told them, but nobody got shot down who wasn’t supposed to so I guess it worked out.

When I left the program the Muj and UNITA between them had shot down 77 Soviet/Cuban acft.   The piece de resistance was an IL-76 shot down in Angola with a full load of Cubans aboard.    I’ve forgotten the body count but it was most gratifying.

Other odds and ends:

1.  The documentary makes the point that the Army was opposed to turning over STINGER to UNITA and the Muj.   This is true.

~   We were just fielding STINGER and hadn’t yet fully equipped the Regular Army with the new MANPADS.   Some frontline units committed to NATO were still using REDEYE, a first generation system of considerably less capability.

~   We’d invested millions in the technology and were probably a full generation ahead of the Soviets at that point.   There was a fear the missile would fall into Soviet hands and they would reverse engineer it, to our detriment.   And something like that did in fact happen.

~   We understood the potential benefits of introducing STINGER into Afghanistan as well as anyone, but by this time we’d also heard about Charlie Wilson.   Legislative Liaison had told us about his alleged drug use, his drinking, his hit and run, and his lack of discretion, and we didn’t want a program we’d spent millions on held hostage by someone we didn’t trust.

~  There was also the fear some of these missiles would subsequently be used against us or our partners in Western Europe.

~   By the same token we were also aware that this represented, to a degree, payback for Vietnam.   A mildly funny story related to that point.  During the period of the STINGERs greatest success our DATT in Moscow was invited to the Frunze Military Academy to make a presentation to the students and faculty.   During the Q and A the bright young Popovs got on him about  US assistance to Afghanistan and Angola.   He listened for awhile then said, “I’ll make a deal with you.   We’ll provide exactly as much assistance to the Mujahadin as you did to the North Vietnamese.    How will that be?”   That pretty much ended the Afghan discussion, but it’s fair and accurate to say the Army and the program manager were conflicted over the xfer of these missiles to guerrillas.

2.   In the documentary Charlie Wilson, the real one, says the Chief of Staff of the Army came to see him to explain why we shouldn’t give STINGER to anyone outside NATO.    Maybe, but I doubt it.   The Chief was John Wickham, and he was the last senior officer to find out about it.   When I briefed Vuono, then the DCSOPS, he asked me if the Chief had been briefed and I responded, “Everybody but him.”  If Wickham had gone up the Hill I would have had to do a briefing book and I was never asked to do that.    I don’t think the real Wilson would know the Chief of Staff if he tripped over him.   I suspect the man he saw was Charlie Brown; I know he was up there to see Wilson on one or more occasions.  At least once I was with him.

3.   Clarence (Doc) Long was exactly as depicted in the film and documentary.

He represented a working class district in Baltimore~Bethlehem Steel and the shipyards were in his district~and he was virtually impregnable.   Primarily because he had the largest admin support staff in Congress.   Twenty or thirty people working on nothing but constituent complaints.   Long’s district got the best service he could provide and they loved him for it, but he was not the brightest light in Baltimore Harbor and held his chairmanship only by reason of seniority.   In 1980 I heard him make the exact same speech he made in the film~ several times.   They captured it perfectly.

4.   Mike Vickers:  Inspite of my snide comment about his bona fides as a ”weapons expert” I suspect he was a good guy.   I’ve looked at his picture and I don’t recognize him, but that doesn’t mean anything.   I imagine he spent most of his time at Langley beavering away on the project.  Like everyone else, trying to make chicken salad out of pig’s knuckles, and gradually becoming invested in its success or failure.   Hats off to  him.  May he live forever.

5.   Same general comment on Gust.   I’ve looked at the pictures of him until my eyes cross and he doesn’t look familiar.   If he dressed the way he looks in the still photos I’ve seen, I probably thought he was someone’s bodyguard.   I’m kind of sorry I didn’t know him.   I have a feeling it would have cheered me up considerably.

6.   As for Milt Bearden, he does look familiar.   Can’t say where, but it wasn’t the Embassy.   I’ve never been there.   Possibly in the north, but more likely in Washington DC.   I understand he’s a fine man.   Give him my respectful best wishes and congratulations on the recognition he’s received.   Anybody who can wetnurse Charlie Wilson for that long and to that effect deserves at least the Order of Bombas y Cuerpos, with a Gold Liver Clasp and diamond studded hernia belt.

7.   Wilson did have a STINGER launcher mounted over the door in his office.   Until I saw the History Channel documentary I didn’t realize it was the one used to shoot down the first Hind, but it was there.

8.  One of the other players in this melodrama was Jay Garner, later appointed by the Bush Administration to be the first political czar in Iraq.   As a colonel he was running Artillery Branch in Force Development, the guys who decide how much of something the Army needs, and the STINGERS came out of his procurements.   He was the same fine man then he is now.  And reasonably good-humored about it.

9.   And finally the matter of Chuckie himself.

~  I freely admit I wasn’t around him much, but much of that was by design.  From what I’d heard about him and his antics I knew we weren’t going to be exchanging Christmas cards, and after the program achieved critical mass I didn’t want to screw it up by some untoward remark.   Particularly if it embarrassed Charlie Brown or the Army~or got me fired.

~  But, having said that he was an unlikable son-of-a-bitch, arrogant in an infantile sort of way and convinced of his superior insight and moral superiority.

~  The Defense Attache used his C-12 (a militarized version of the Beechcraft Super Kingair 200)   to haul Wilson around in-country.   On one of his trips to the north (probably Peshawar) Charlie had one of his girlfriends along and the pilot wouldn’t let her on government transport for the return trip to Karachi or Islamabad, or wherever he was going.   As I heard it the pilot wasn’t being difficult, that was just the rules.   Probably Congressionally mandated.   Congressmen’s wives were no problem, Embassy staffers and wives no problem, but girlfriends weren’t supposed to fly at government expense and the pilot stuck to his guns.  I’m told that in the next budget cycle Wilson struck the C-12 flying hour program out of the appropriations bill.   The Air Force provided some training money from other funds, but there was turbulence in the C-12 program for the next several years.  Two acft were taken out of service altogether and there were at least two crashes, both attributed to pilot error.    As I said, I cannot confirm from my own knowledge that Wilson did it, but I was told he did by Legislative Liasion and the Air Staff, and a couple years later by someone in Attache Affairs.   If he did I think that speaks volumes about his capacity for pettiness and his sense of entitlement.   (If provoked I’ll put in a request under the FOIA and see what turns up.   Also have several friends who were C-12 pilots in that era, and I’ll ask them about it.)

~  I also have heartburn with his abortive little flutter into Afghanistan.   What purpose did that serve?  As a soldier I hate to see soldier’s lives put at risk to gratify the childish impulses of

an egomaniacal jerk.   If the Soviets had known he was in Afghanistan, and God forbid they’d captured him, how would that have played out?   Bearden would have had to commit everything he had in the area to save or rescue him, with what result?   I wasn’t anywhere close by when he did it, but I suspect Bearden was.   (I can’t imagine anyone would let Wilson go north without adult supervision.)  I’d be interested in hearing what he has to say about it.

~  And finally, I’m irritated that a man like that receives so much credit for the efforts of the 200-300 Americans who actually made it happen.   The Mike Vickers, Gusts, Infantes, Browns, Beardens, above all the 5th Group trainers and Agency pogues who were the interface between the Muj and America, and all the others who actually made Wilson’s one unquestioned moment of inspiration and clarity a reality.  With a nod from the White House they could have done it without him, but he couldn’t have done it without us.

I understand since his retirement from public life he’s become a lobbyist.   That sounds about right.

In short, I liked the movie but I’m still comfortable with my original impressions of Cocaine Charlie, the man voted one of the twenty least effective legislators in the House of Representatives by House staffers.  I cannot begin to explain the pivotal role he played in all this, and the fact so much good came from the conscience-striken efforts of such a trivial man.   But it did.   He was the maypole we all danced around.   Perhaps the best way  to rationalize him is to characterize him as one of Lenin’s useful idiots.   I doubt Lenin would appreciate the irony, but nothing else makes sense.    If I’m ever near the Reagan Library I plan to stop by and see if there is some kind of PDM or presidential finding authorizing all of this.   I can’t believe Reagan or one of his senior staffers didn’t know about or authorize it.   I’m reinforced in my beliefs by the spate of recent articles about him by others who knew him back then, most recently Robert Scheer, of Creative Syndications, last Monday.

I should also mention in fairness that some of those closest to him still think he’s a prince.   Tomorrow I’ll send along a msg from one of his former staffers who thinks he’s wonderful.   WTFO.  Further deponent sayeth not.