Reviews for Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History

The average rating for Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-29 00:00:00 Jose Gutierrez Charlie Wilson's War is a chilling tale of how a few determined people can undermine all existing law, use their positions of power and influence to get unseen funds allocated, and pursue a major war without the approval of the American people. Crile was clearly enamored of Wilson, regarding him as a charismatic, larger-than-life figure, who performed a major service to the West by tipping the Soviet Union over the edge. Crile (foreground) with Wilson (suspenders) and an unnamed ISI agent (shades) in Afghanistan - from Wiki media There is some consciousness here of some of the blowback that resulted from this work, the resources now used by Islamic extremists to attack the West, but I doubt that Wilson or any of his cohorts will ever accept any real responsibility for that. A must read for anyone interested in how foreign policy can be driven by committed individuals. The film that was based on the book is definitely worth a look. =============================EXTRA STUFF Crile, a long-time producer and reporter for CBS news, a two-time winner of the Edward R Murrow Award for his outstanding foreign policy reporting, passed away at age 61 in 2006. There are many links to reports Crile made on this wiki page Charlie Wilson passed away in 2010. Wikipedia has a bit more information on him.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-02 00:00:00 Lori Anastasio ... creating along the ISIS and probably the rest of forces behind the 9/11 horror... Niiice. How to you really manage to get over people spending billions of tax-payers' money to promote terrorism shit? Read this and see how the author manages to endorse these actions in this research. Q: 9/11 was a watershed, as stunning in its boldness as it was frightening in its message. ... The fact that Afghanistan was the cradle of the attack should not have come as a surprise, for both the territory and the Islamic warriors who gather there are familiar to our government. Throughout the 1980s the Afghan mujahideen were, in effect, America's surrogate soldiers in the brutal guerrilla war that became the Soviet Union's Vietnam, a defeat that helped trigger the subsequent collapse of the Communist empire. (c) Uh-huh, you fund mujaheeden and then you are surprised when they organise the 9 11. What, someone forgot to disband them after the USSR? Q: Afghanistan was a secret war that the CIA fought and won without debates in Congress or protests in the street. It was not just the CIA's biggest operation, it was the biggest secret war in history, but somehow it never registered on the American consciousness. When viewed through the prism of 9/11, the scale of that U.S. support for an army of Muslim fundamentalists seems almost incomprehensible. In the course of a decade, billions of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of thousands of weapons were smuggled across the border on the backs of camels, mules, and donkeys. At one point over three hundred thousand fundamentalist Afghan warriors carried weapons provided by the CIA; thousands were trained in the art of urban terror. Before it was over, some 28,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. At the time, it was viewed as a noble cause, and when the last Soviet soldier walked out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, the leaders of the CIA celebrated what they hailed as the Agency's greatest victory. The cable from the CIA station in Islamabad that day read simply: "We won." But the billions spent arming and training the primitive tribesmen of Afghanistan turned out to have an unintended consequence. In a secret war, the funders take no credit'and no doubt that's why the mujahideen and their Muslim admirers around the world never viewed U.S. support as a decisive factor in their victory. As they saw it, that honor went to Allah, the only superpower they acknowledge. But for the few who know the extent of the CIA's involvement, it's impossible to ignore the central role that America played in this great modern jihad, one that continues to this day. This book tells the story of the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan, of the men who dreamed it, and of the journey they took to see it through. If the campaign had different authors, men more associated with shaping foreign policy or waging wars, it might have surfaced earlier or been the subject of debate. But the unorthodox alliance'of a scandal-prone Texas congressman and an out-of-favor CIA operative'that gave birth to the Afghan jihad kept this history under the radar. It is the missing chapter in the politics of our time, a rousing good story that is also a cautionary tale. (c) Q: None of the other men or women in the bus looked terribly important. Generally speaking, no one ever looks impressive in a bus. (c) Q: Wheels within wheels moved in his brain as he thought of the incredible irony of this ceremony. (c) Q: It was his great good fortune to have been in charge of the South Asia task force in the final years when his men, funneling billions of dollars' worth of weapons to the mujahideen, ... (c) Q: It's the story of how the United States turned the tables on the Soviet Union and did to them in Afghanistan what they had done to the U.S. in Vietnam. (c) Only without 'funnelling billions... and creating ISIS along the way... Q: Along the way, however, Wilson had discovered that he didn't need money of his own to lead a big, glamorous life. The rules governing Congress were far looser in those days, and he'd become a master at getting others to pick up the tab: junkets to exotic foreign lands at government expense, campaign chests that could be tapped to underwrite all manner of entertainments, and, of course, the boundless generosity of friendly lobbyists, quick to provide the best seats at his favorite Broadway musicals, dinners at the finest Parisian restaurants, and romantic late-night boat parties on the Potomac. (c) Q: Charles Nesbitt Wilson comes from a part of the country very familiar with Satan. (c) Probably way too familiar. Q: "It was an enormous Jacuzzi," he recalled. "I was in a robe at first because, after all, I was a congressman. And then everyone disappeared except for two beautiful, long-legged showgirls with high heels. They were a bit drunk and flirtatious and they walked right into the water with their high heels on…. The girls had cocaine and the music was loud'Sinatra, 'My Kind of Town.' We all mellowed out, saying outrageous things to each other. It was total happiness. And both of them had ten long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder. It was just tremendous fun'better than anything you've ever seen in the movies." As Wilson later framed the episode that almost brought him down, "the Feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I inhale or exhale'and I ain't telling." (c) Of course, that's all perfectly ok, since it's all on the taxpayers' dime. Q: Charlie Wilson, however, had a genius for getting people to judge him not as a middle-aged scoundrel but instead as if he were a good-hearted adolescent, guilty of little more than youthful excess. This survival skill permitted him to routinely do things that no one else in Congress could have gotten away with. (c) I'm sure he was good at it. Q: "He had an uncanny ability to take a complex issue, break it down, get all the bullshit out, and deliver the heart of it. There's no question he could have been anything he wanted to be. His goal was to become secretary of defense. Certainly he intended to run for the Senate." (c) Q: That failing was perfectly summed up in a fitness report written by Wilson's commanding officer in the navy in the late 1950s: "Charlie Wilson is the best officer who ever served under me at sea and undoubtedly the worst in port." (c) Q: Wilson had an uncanny ability to consume enormous quantities of Scotch and seem unaffected. Also, he was a happy drunk who told wonderful stories and made everyone laugh. On the occasions when drinking would get to him, Simpson says, "Wilson would simply lie down on the floor for an hour, wake up, and act as if he had just had twelve hours of sleep. It was the most unreal thing I'd ever seen. He'd do this at his own parties'just sleep for an hour with everything going on around him, then get up and start again." (c) Q: Wilson himself would later say, "I was caught up in the longest midlife crisis in history. I wasn't hurting anybody, but I sure was aimless." (c) Q: Never before had the CIA had such a powerful vehicle for blackening the image of the Soviet Union. The Agency began placing heartrending articles in foreign newspapers and magazines; academic studies and books were underwritten. (c) Q: "I would be sitting there where the button is, and if you're twenty-seven, it makes you feel very cocky knowing that here's Moscow, and here's Kiev, and if they fuck with us I'll just hit all these buttons." (c) Q: It's not legal for active-duty servicemen to campaign for public office, but Wilson decided to disregard that detail. He took thirty days' leave from the navy and entered his name in the race for Texas state representative. … He won and managed to complete his Pentagon tour without anyone noticing his entry into the political arena. In 1961, at twenty-seven, he was sworn in to office in Austin, Texas, the same month his political role model became the thirty-fifth president of the United States. (c) Q: "Always," she told her young son and his kid sister… always stand up for the underdog. If you're ever in doubt, back the underdog." Q: He discovered that the authorizing committees, like Foreign Affairs, were little more than debating societies. He now served on a committee that doled out the nation's money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year. He watched and saw how one man, if he's on the right subcommittee and knows how to play the system, can move the entire nation to fund a program or cause of his choice. (c) Q: The truth is, there were always two Charlie Wilsons at work in Washington. But he was moving heaven and earth in those days to allow only one image to surface, and to promote that image so loudly that no one would go looking for the other. To begin with, he staffed his office almost exclusively with tall, startlingly beautiful women. They were famous on the Hill, known to all as "Charlie's Angels." And to his colleagues' amazement, whenever questioned about this practice, Wilson invariably responded with one of his favorite lines: "You can teach them how to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits." That was the way he tended to present himself in public, which was tame compared to the way he decorated his condo. (c) Q: "How much are we giving the Afghans?" he asked Van Wagenen. "Five million," said the staffer. There was a moment's silence. "Double it," said the Texan. … But as dramatic as the doubling might sound, it had no visible impact on the war. It wasn't reported or debated, and it never even registered on the KGB's radar screen in Russia. At best, all it did was provide the mujahideen with a few thousand more Enfield rifles and perhaps some machine guns, so that they could go out and die for their faith in greater numbers. (c) Q: But at twenty-five, as a gunnery officer on a destroyer sailing the world with the American fleet at the height of the Cold War, he felt that he was at last coming into his own. He was in command of the warship's weapons, and his gunnery teams almost always won the mock battles, in part because he had his men practice more than anyone else. They always ran out of ammunition long before they could get back to their home port to be resupplied. Wilson did this to sharpen his men's skills, but also to empty the ammo boxes so that he could fill them with cheap alcohol bought on shore leave in Gibraltar to smuggle back to the States. Wilson's training style was unconventional, but he ended up with the happiest men and the best shots in the fleet. (c) Q: "Each new language gives you a new set of eyes and ears, a new window on the world," (c) Q: As diplomat Janet Bogue told us, "The U.S. government now finds itself giving guns to a friend who shells civilian populations, and then we turn around and send in a humanitarian mission to deal with the refugees created by our own investment." (c) Q: For all practical purposes, the Cold War was over, and it seemed as if the United States and Russia had come to share roughly the same long-term goals in Afghanistan. The only logical explanation for why the two superpowers were now funding this mysterious war of the tribes was the force of inertia. Simply put, neither side wanted to be the first to pull back. (c) Q: The secret appropriation was hidden in the $298 billion Defense bill for fiscal year 1992. When it was presented for a vote, no one but the interested few noticed the $200 million earmarked for the Afghans. (c) Q: There were many early warnings well before Charlie's award at Langley. In January of that year, a young Pakistani, Mir Aimal Kasi, walked down the line of cars at the gates of the CIA and calmly murdered two officers before escaping to Pakistan where he was embraced as a folk hero. The month after Kasi's shooting spree at the CIA in February 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed. (c) Q: While news reports explored every possible avenue that might explain America's new enemy, there was curiously little commentary on the role the United States had played in Afghanistan's recent past. The fact that the CIA had supported the Afghans in their guerrilla war against the Soviet Union was mentioned. But the impression left was of a nuisance campaign, like the one the Agency ran with the Nicaraguan Contras. And it was perhaps to be expected that no one from the administration chose to spell out the scope and nature of the CIA's role in the Afghan jihad. It would have been embarrassing at best. (c)