Dicks played role as backer of Wilson's crusade

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks never served in the military. But he was a bona fide lieutenant in "Charlie Wilson's War."

The new movie about Wilson's crusade to save Afghanistan from the Soviet Union in the 1980s includes manic tribal warriors; obstinate CIA officials; seductively beautiful women; and Wilson, the charming, carousing, conniving congressman from Texas.

Wild as it seems, Dicks said, it's all true.

Behind the scenes, Dicks, D-Bremerton, was one of the players on Capitol Hill who backed Wilson's scheme to funnel more than a half-billion dollars a year in money and weapons to Afghan mountain warlords to fight the Soviet army.

As a member of the House Defense Appropriations Committee, Dicks sat on the elite panel that funded top secret operations.

During the closed markups on the classified budget, Wilson, an imposing 6 feet 4 inches, not counting his cowboy boots, would flamboyantly sweep in with photos of himself firing a machine gun or riding a white steed in the Khyber Pass.

"We'd be sitting around the table. Charlie was a Naval Academy graduate, so when he wanted to make his case, he always stood up," said Dicks. "He'd make an impassioned speech about what he'd seen in Afghanistan, the refugee camps, and he got us all on board."

Dicks voted along with other Democrats and Republicans to send money for Stinger missiles, helicopters and rifles to rebels, without having to debate it publicly.

He was a junior congressman when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979. "There was pandemonium," Dicks recalled.

Wilson's outrage was inflamed by his new girlfriend, Joanne Herring, played by Julia Roberts in the film. The Houston socialite had a Texas twang, industrial quantities of hair spray and a membership in the Minutewomen, an offshoot of the anti-communist Minutemen.

Herring was a stunner who knew how to make an entrance, said Dicks' wife, Suzie.

In the mid-1980s, Norm and Suzie Dicks, attending the Paris Air Show, were invited with another couple by Wilson and Herring to a private party.

Wilson whisked them off in a limo to pick up Herring at her house in a ritzy area near the Arc de Triomphe.

The mansion was surrounded by a stone wall with a high wrought-iron gate. When Wilson couldn't get Herring's intercom to work, Suzie Dicks said, the tuxedoed Texan climbed over the iron fence, "spikes and all."

At the dinner, Wilson presented the hostess — a countess with "old Paris money," according to Suzie Dicks — with a piece of gold jewelry, a cartouche inscribed with ancient symbols that Wilson told the woman represented her name.

"But Charlie actually bought several of them for different women, and they were all the same symbols," Suzie Dicks said.

Wilson's untamed nature was a little unsettling, Dicks admits. There was a federal investigation in 1980 into Wilson's alleged snorting of a large amount of cocaine while in a hot tub in Las Vegas, but owing to a lack of witnesses he was cleared. Wilson preached to Dicks and others that the Soviets had fallen into their own Vietnam by invading Afghanistan.

"Charlie was passionate about stopping the Soviets and had better ideas than the CIA had," Dicks said. The CIA vehemently opposed Wilson's plan — "until it started working," Dicks said. The Soviets began losing soldiers and helicopters.

"Then Casey [Bill Casey, the director of the CIA under President Reagan], tried to take credit for it," Dicks said.

Once the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989, the power vacuum among Afghanistan's mujahedeen created an opening for the Taliban's rise, Dicks acknowledged. He is concerned that Osama bin Laden's forces may be shooting at Americans with some of the old weapons sent by Wilson and OK'd by Dicks' committee.

He faults the U.S. for not sending resources to Afghanistan to create a sounder economy or democratic institutions in its towns. "We dropped the ball," he said, adding that the U.S. is making the same mistake with Afghanistan now.

It's a different era in Congress, with few opportunities for a maverick to run an operation like Wilson's, and pressure on politicians to conform in order to survive, he said. Wilson, now 74, retired in 1996.

"There will never be another Charlie. No one comes close," Dicks said.

Alicia Mundy: 202-662-7457 or amundy@seattletimes.com