She emphasised how few weapons they had and described how the Afghans treated their guns like library books as soon as one warrior crossed the border, he would turn in his gun, handing it over to another man going off to face death. She described how these primitive tribesmen would bow to Mecca in prayer five times a day.
I was so cold, it was horrible, but it was the most exciting thing in my life."Īs she told this story to Wilson, she played on themes she knew would move his Texan spirit. But it was like sleeping under a dead hippo. "It was so cold that all the men gave me their blankets. I had a bodyguard who was seven feet tall with a handlebar mustache and an Enfield rifle." At one point, Joanne told Wilson, this giant moved her about in a barrel to hide her. In the pivotal first years of the jihad, she became both matchmaker and muse to Pakistan's Muslim fundamentalist military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, as well as to Charlie Wilson. When almost everyone had written off the Afghans as a lost cause, she saw potential for greatness in the most unlikely characters. At the time nobody imagined that, in addition to her role as a social lioness and hostess to the powerful, she was simultaneously responsible for setting in motion a process that would profoundly impact the outcome of the Afghan war. She's the one who got him interested." Joanne Harring (played by Julia Roberts) was a glamorous and exotic figure from the oil-rich world of Texas in the 1970s and 1980s. "It began with a Texas woman, one of Wilson's contributors. Years later, as he tried to explain how the CIA ended up with a billion dollars a year to kill Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, Wilson's CIA co-conspirator Gust Avrakotos (played in the new film by Philip Seymour Hoffman) would offer a curious explanation. But this is where he first demonstrated that there could be another power centre in the American government, one that could act in a way that was totally unpredictable to drive a US covert policy. It would be another two years before he would return to put this precedent to the test. Wilson so easily crossed the line into this covert arena that no one stopped to question his right to be there or worry about the precedent he might be setting. It was an impulsive action, a personal gesture to bolster a painfully inadequate US programme. Wilson's intervention had not cost the congressman much more than a telephone call to a key staffer and a few additional minutes when the subcommittee met to appropriate the nation's secret intelligence budget.
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