Charlie Wilson's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

discipline the Agency, coming close to suggesting that it was time to stop conducting covert operations altogether. His handpicked CIA chief, Admiral Stansfield Turner, went a step further and with great fanfare carried out a purge of the Agency’s so-called rogue operatives. By the end of 1979, the new ground rules put down by the president and Congress had gone a long way toward altering the very culture of this embattled Agency. Even the CIA’s most daring operatives had come to dread the prospect of having their careers destroyed for carrying out missions that Congress might later deem illegal. By Christmas 1979, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations had voluntarily all but taken itself out of the dirty-tricks business.
    What none of the CIA’s leaders could have foreseen was that Jimmy Carter, the president who had gone to such lengths to tame them, was about to be reborn as a Cold War hawk. To say that Jimmy Carter was surprised by the Soviets’ Christmas invasion of Afghanistan would be a gross under-statement. It radicalized him. It made him suddenly believe that the Soviets might be truly evil and that the only way to deal with them was with force. “I don’t know if fear is the right word to describe our reaction,” recalls Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. “But what unnerved everyone was the suspicion that [Soviet president] Brezhnev’s inner circle might not be rational. They must have known the invasion would poison everything dealing with the West—from SALT to the deployment of nuclear weapons in western Europe.”
    Declaring Afghanistan “the greatest foreign policy crisis confronting the United States since World War II,” Carter ordered a boycott of the Olympics scheduled for Moscow that summer. He embargoed grain sales to the Soviets and called for a massive defense buildup, including the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force. Reflecting fears about further Russian aggression, he unveiled the Carter Doctrine, committing America to war in the event of any threat to the strategic oil fields of the Middle East. His most radical departure, however, came when he signed a series of secret legal documents, known as Presidential Findings, authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to go into action against the Red Army.
    The CIA’s time-honored practice was never to introduce into a conflict weapons that could be traced back to the United States. And so the spy agency’s first shipment to the scattered Afghan rebels—enough small arms and ammunition to equip a thousand men—consisted of weapons made by the Soviets themselves that had been stockpiled by the CIA for just such a moment. Within days of the invasion containers from a secretive San Antonio facility were flown to Islamabad, Pakistan, where they were turned over to President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s intelligence service for distribution to the Afghan rebels. It hadn’t been easy for Carter to get Zia to cooperate. Carter had targeted Zia—along with Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza of Nicaragua—in his high-profile human-rights campaign, and had cut off all U.S. aid to and military cooperation with Pakistan. Now, with the Red Army sweeping into Afghanistan, Carter had to do a 180-degree turn to win Zia’s approval to use Pakistan as a base of his operations. Zia drove a hard bargain: the CIA could provide the weapons, but they would have to hand them over to his intelligence service for distribution. America’s spies would have to operate exclusively through Zia’s men.
    Along with the first U.S. shipment, the Afghans soon began receiving arms and money from the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Saudis, and other Muslim nations. That response might have sounded impressive in a news dispatch, but the reality on the ground was that a bizarre mix of unsophisticated weapons was being handed over to tribesmen in sandals with no formal military training.
    No one in the CIA during those early months had any illusions about the mujahideen’s