Read Online Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile - Free Book Online Page A

the West Point flag in the bunker, the dictator’s easy American slang, his friendship with General Alexander Haig, and his bravado. Beyond that, they shared a common bond over Israel. Wilson’s Israeli friends had spoken glowingly about Tacho’s father, who had opened up Nicaragua for European Jews before World War II and voted for Israel’s entry into the United Nations. “He was a soul brother to the Israelis,” Wilson explains, someone they owed and supported to the very end. (There was even a shipload of Israeli weapons on its way when Somoza fell.) And Wilson was particularly swayed by the Israelis’ insistence that Jimmy Carter’s human-rights policy was shortsighted and that Tacho was by far less evil than anything that might follow.
    Most of Wilson’s Democratic colleagues, certainly most of the American press corps, and eventually most of the Nicaraguan people came to view Somoza as a corrupt dictator guilty of ruthless force against his own people. But Wilson saw him through his own peculiar lens as an abandoned and betrayed U.S. ally threatened by every Russian-backed leftist in the hemisphere. He was running a rearguard action from the Appropriations Committee to save Somoza, even threatening to torpedo the president’s highest priority, the Panama Canal Treaty. But the tide in America had turned against such indiscriminate anti-Communism, and Wilson thought he had used up all his options to rescue Somoza. That is, until he found himself face-to-face with the renegade ex-CIA operative Ed Wilson.
    The congressman’s encounter with this outlaw came about by chance because of one of those peculiar problems that seem to beset Charlie Wilson. He had fallen hopelessly in lust with his confidential secretary, Tina Simons. Like many of the women in the office, Tina was curvaceous, up-beat, and available, but Wilson had imposed a most unfortunate discipline on himself when it came to romance: he would not woo any of the women on his staff. The smitten congressman decided there was only one thing to do: he asked a mutual friend to get her a job. As chance would have it, she ended up as the all-purpose office manager, decorator, and social secretary for Ed Wilson.
    Memories fade, and the name Ed Wilson may no longer strike a chord, but in his day he came to represent something new and evil in the American experience. He was a former CIA agent who, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, had taken to serving the interests of dark forces. By the time the congressman met Ed Wilson, a Washington Post article had accused him of working for Muammar Qaddafi. But no formal charges had been brought, and the renegade managed to make many influential Washingtonians believe that he was, perhaps, operating under very deep cover on some convoluted mission.
    The former CIA operative would later be indicted for selling sophisticated explosives to Qaddafi, or for recruiting hit squads to dispose of the Libyan leader’s political enemies, but when Charlie Wilson met him, Ed Wilson presented himself as a multimillionaire with a sprawling horse farm in the hunt country of Virginia and a lavish town house in the capital where he held court with a daring collection of former and present CIA men and other mysterious characters.
    Charlie had never met a full-fledged CIA operative before, and Ed Wilson appealed to his sense of what a CIA agent should look like. “He was taller than me, weighed about two fifty, just a very lethal-looking person, dark, ominous, but a good sense of humor and a good guy to drink with.”
    The congressman took to meeting his former secretary at this exotic town house, where, accompanied by much alcohol, Ed Wilson began telling Charlie how things really worked in the CIA. “Ed had convinced me that he personally killed Che Guevara and I thought, Shit, if he got Che, he can sure get that little turd Ortega,” Wilson said, referring to the Sandinista guerrilla leader. This ex-CIA thug set off a lightbulb in Charlie