Books into Movies:

Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are on the promotion circuit touting their new movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. But, if you’re like me, you might be wondering about the book that this drama is based on. In this particular instance, you’ll be happily surprised by the richness and poignancy of the extraordinary story of the largest covert operation in history. At least that’s what the subtitle on the cover of “Charlie Wilson’s War” suggests.

George Crile, the author, is a veteran producer for the 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II news shows. He lives in New York with his wife and four daughters.

In a little over a decade, two events have transformed the world we live in: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the militant Islam. “Charlie Wilson’s War” is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the new jihad. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson,(the Tom Hanks character) a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the Agency’s history.

In the early 1980’s, after a Houston socialite (Julia Roberts in the movie version),turned Wilson’s attention to the ragged band of Afghan “freedom fighters” who continued, despite overwhelming odds, to fight the Soviet invaders, the congressman became passionate about their cause. At a time when Ronald Reagan faced a total cutoff of funding for the Contra war, Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen. The arms were secretly procured and distributed with the aid of an out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrakotos, whose working-class Greek American background made him an anomaly among the Ivy League world of American spies. Nicknamed “Dr. Dirty,” the blue-collar James Bond was an aggressive agent who served on the front lines of the Cold War where he learned how to stretch the Agency’s rules to the breaking point.
Avrakotos handpicked a staff of CIA outcasts to run his operation: “Hilly Billy,” the logistics wizard who could open an unnumbered Swiss bank account for the U.S. government in twelve hours when others took months; Art Alper, the grandfatherly demolitions expert from the Technical Services Division who passed on his dark arts to the Afghans; Mike Vickers, the former Green Beret who created a systematic plan to turn a rabble of shepherds into an army of techno holy terrors.

Moving from the back rooms of the Capitol, to secret chambers at Langley, to arms-dealers conventions, to the Khyber Pass, “Charlie Wilson’s War” is brilliantly reported and one of the most detailed and compulsively readable accounts of the inside workings of the CIA that’s ever been written.

Columbus Public Library has this very readable account of the biggest and most successful CIA campaign in history. This is a wonderful 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.

It needs to be underscored that this is a true story. It’s purely by co-incidence that, as in any good spy novel, we happen to come upon the leading man in the beginning of this account surrounded by beautiful women.

I highly recommend this untold story of a whiskey-swilling, skirt-chasing, scandal-prone congressman from Texas, and how he conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest and most successful covert operation in U.S. History.