The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

of the president added a special texture to the problem. I could only imagine the discussion Akhtar and Zia might have had about Charlie’s disappointment.

“Why not arrange a trip for Charlie and his friends?” I said. “Exciting and safe.”

“Arrange?” Akhtar pondered.

“Yes. You make sure that everything goes according to a script and that everybody walks away a winner, especially Charlie.”

“You’ll clear this with your headquarters?” Akhtar asked tentatively.

“Not a chance. This is your show, but I’ll be happy to help out in the background.”

“You won’t tell Washington?” Akhtar seemed incredulous over what he must have thought was a total breach of discipline on my part.

“I can’t think of anyone at my headquarters who would want to know in advance about Charlie Wilson going off to war.”

Akhtar shrugged. “I think he wants to fire a Stinger.”

Jesus, I thought. We’ve just gone from a grade B movie script to a Cecil B. De Mille production.

“Maybe there could be some Soviet or DRA aircraft activity in the area when Charlie goes in,” I said. “With all the talk on the frontier about him going into Paktia, the Soviets will surely hear about it. Maybe they’d like to drop a little ordnance to welcome him.”

Akhtar grimaced. “That’s precisely why I stopped him last time.”

“But there ought to be a few real Stinger teams in the area. Not just Charlie and a Stinger.” I ignored Akhtar’s temporary retreat.

“And you don’t think your headquarters would want to know about this?”

“General,” I said, “there’s no one at Langley who’d want to have anything to do with this one way or another. Nobody would want to tell me to support it or to prevent it. And I won’t burden them with our little problem.”

Akhtar just shook his head in resignation. “I’ll get my people working on it and get back with you,” he said. Then he abruptly changed the subject. “Milton, we have to do something about the MiG-21 pilot.”

“Do something?” I asked, taken aback by the change of course in the conversation.

“He’s not adjusting well,” Akhtar said somewhat cryptically.

The MiG-21 pilot to which the general was referring was a young DRA fighter pilot who had flown his jet into Pakistan a few months earlier to accept a standing offer of a cash bounty to any Afghan Air Force pilot who defected with his aircraft. The CIA had standing orders for any and all Soviet aircraft, and my predecessor, Bill Piekney, had been successful in acquiring a flyable MI-25 attack helicopter two years earlier. The jet fighter had been a welcome addition to the growing USAF inventory of Soviet warplanes.

“What do you mean, he’s not adjusting well?”

Akhtar fidgeted. “He thought things would be different here. He’d been fed up with the closed-in life in Afghanistan and thought he’d get to celebrate a little more here.”

“Celebrate?”

“You know how these young guys are. They want to get leaked.” Now Akhtar was actually squirming.

“Leaked?” I asked, thoroughly enjoying the general’s discomfort.

“Yes. Maybe you can have your people take the young man to Bangkok or somewhere. It’s hard to get a young man leaked here in Islamabad.” Akhtar rolled his eyes a little, as if sharing a personal confidence.

“I understand, General. You want us to take this fighter pilot somewhere and get him laid?”

A light went on. “Yes, laid! That’s what he needs,” Akhtar declared.

So I left ISI headquarters with the dual problems of a Texas congressman who, legend had it, never had trouble getting laid and who more than anything else wanted to go to war, and an Afghan fighter pilot who wanted out of his war and more than anything else to go to Bangkok to get laid.

In the end, we’d take care of them both.

Paktia Province, Afghanistan, May 1987

Several weeks later, Charlie Wilson was back in Pakistan. This time he crossed over zero line without mishap. He was accompanied by the Gucci commander, Rahim Wardak, and some very tough fighters from Jalaluddin Haqqani’s militias in Paktia Province. The group, with Charlie riding a white stallion, traveled into the Khowst region, mounted a few attacks on the Soviet and DRA garrisons there, and marauded the countryside. Though he never got to fire his Stinger—Haqqani’s people had actually dragged chains and tires on the dirt roads in a futile attempt to attract enemy fighter aircraft to the clouds of dust—he did manage to have a memorable combat tour at the front. I stayed hidden in the “long grass” throughout, coordinating as best I could with Akhtar to make sure all went well and all our friends returned home safely.

Charlie would make yet another trip into Afghanistan as the Soviets were in full retreat. But for that visit he would bring a CBS 60 Minutes crew led by Harry Reasoner and producer George Crile. The whole team—producer, correspondent, rock star Charlie Wilson on a new white stallion, camera- and soundmen, and a gaggle of mujahideen—went off to celebrate the victory over the Soviet garrison at Ali Khel. The CBS show that finally aired ended with Mohammed Zia ul-Haq’s lasting three-word assessment of how the war in Afghanistan had been won:

“Charlie did it.”

Paul Stombaugh and his son in Moscow, 1985.

The “taxi phone” on Kastanayevskaya Street in the Moscow suburbs where Paul Stombaugh was ambushed in June 1985.

Vladimir Sharavatov, the Seventh Directorate surveillance supervisor who was involved in most of the KGB arrests of American spies depicted in this book.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow (center foreground), with the spires of Adolf Tolkachev’s apartment building in the background.

Viktor I. Cherkashin, the Line KR chief in Washington who handled Aldrich Ames’s walk-in and the letter in which Robert Hanssen volunteered to spy for the KGB. (Courtesy of Jacqueline Mia Foster, Contact Press Images)

Major General Rem S. Krassilnikov, chief of the First Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate, 1985.

Krassilnikov in 1999, at the site where Leonid Polyshchuk (GTWEIGH) was ambushed in August 1985. (Courtesy of Jacqueline Mia Foster, Contact Press Images)