Crile, George. Charlie Wilson's War. New York: Grove Press, 2003. 550 pages.

George Crile spent fifteen years collecting the material in this book. He chronicles how a minor Congressman from east Texas, Charlie Wilson, became the secret sponsor of "the biggest operation in the CIA's history," the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Crile adds that "it remains one of the great mysteries of this entire history that virtually no one in the press -- or Congress, for that matter -- seemed to care." (page 423)

Crile falls in love with several of his characters, and avoids boring topics such as morality. When describing the background of Gust Avrakotos, a major CIA player in Afghanistan's dirty war, it's merely another colorful detail that Avrakotos was one of the key CIA officers behind the military junta in Greece that seized power in 1967. The fact that this brutal junta tortured many political prisoners is inconvenient, and unimportant for Crile, as it's all part of Gust's war on terrorists. Likewise, only one sentence in the book brings up drug trafficking by the CIA's proxies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, because this messy detail gets in the way of a good yarn. Crile's book could be made into an old-style Western movie: eccentric lone cowboy from Texas rides into Afghanistan on a mule wearing a white hat, and chases out the bad, ugly Soviets in black hats. The only problem with Crile's narrative is that by now it's difficult to tell, with historical hindsight, who was really good and who was bad.
ISBN 0-8021-4124-2

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