He is a man who has completely changed the political landscape of our times and very few Americans are aware of it, of how it happened and how it could possibly have come from such a character. He was clearly the wildest man in Congress and year in year out, I suppose there were other members of Congress who drank as much or chased as many women but nobody sustained such a libertine life. It would have thrown anybody else right out of political office. You know I think most people who were following events of the 1980s were well aware of the fact that there was support for anti-communist guerillas in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan. A new term of war came in - the "overt-covert war" of Ronald Reagan.

No one really paid any attention to Afghanistan in the early year because they thought it was a lost cause. The Soviet army had invaded the country, occupied it -- there were over a 100,000 troops there and they were beginning what was termed a "genocidal war". So the idea of a CIA operation to counter this just didn't seem to have much of a chance of going anywhere and no expert in the West gave it even half a chance. So nobody really paid attention to the CIA's activities there. Reagan didn't push it in the beginning and reporters, and the normal voices of opposition in the House and Senate just didn't exist.

And into that mix came this most unlikely champion of the Afghans, this hell-raising, libertine, tall, Texas Congressman from the Appropriations Sub-Committee on Defense - it just happened to fund the Pentagon and the CIA.

What makes this story amazing is that Charlie Wilson did what he did, and he got away with it.

It's incredible...

What exactly did he get away with?

He got away with forcing the CIA to wage an all-out battle against the "Red Army" in Afghanistan that the CIA did not want to fight. It was a knock-down drag-out fight in which all of our normal sense of what the CIA is all about is upside down. This was a moment where nobody at Langley wanted anything to do with a provocative attempt to wage a secret war to up-end the "Red Army".

The CIA did not want to do this?

Absolutely not. The idea of a Congressman or any outsider coming in trying to tell them what kind of weapons to use, what sort of funding they should have... Put yourself in the position of the leaders of the CIA. They're used to a number of things. They're used to Congressmen attacking them, fairly or unfairly, nevertheless always attacking them. They used to Congress always saying, ‘No, you can't have money for this and we want to investigate you and bring you up on the Hill'.

In this case they woke up one morning to find that they had been given $40 million to escalate the secret war in Afghanistan and to put weapons into it that they didn't think should go there.

Who gave them the $40 million?

Well they had to try and figure it out. It came from the Appropriations Sub-Committee on Defense, caused by one of its members, Charlie Wilson, this Texas Congressman. The President hadn't asked for the money. The CIA didn't know it was coming and all of a sudden it was being told it was supposed to escalate the war in Afghanistan because the House of Representatives Sub-Committee wanted to do it. This was the last thing they wanted to do. So what unfolded for the next, oh a little over a year, was a behind-the-scenes, knock-down, drag-out fight in which they did everything possible to keep this Charlie Wilson from being able to have his way.

What was the year that the funding actually began?

The whole Afghan war began on Christmas day of 1979. That's when Jimmy Carter, then the president, woke up. Well he went to bed really as a very reasonable Cold War dove attempting to try to find some way to reach accommodations and end what he called "the irrational fear of Communism. " But he woke up the next day having become an authentic Cold War hawk. Most people only remember it because of the Olympics when our athletes couldn't go. But it was also a moment where it was Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan who began this monster defense buildup and he put down the line in the sand in the Middle East, the rapid deployment forces and all the rest. But what he also did in the immediate aftermath, was to sign into law four findings which included lethal findings, which for the first time in the Cold War allowed the CIA to support operations to kill Soviet soldiers. Oddly never before in the Cold War had the US government engaged in any direct effort to kill America's principal enemy, the soldiers of the enemy. Before it was always surrogates. They had their Sandanistas, we had our Contras, their Cubans and we had our Cubans, and this sort of thing. But this time it was a different idea. It was what the Soviets had done in Vietnam to support the Viet Cong, North Vietnamese and it was turnaround. But that was what Jimmy Carter set into motion or created as an authorizing instrument but it was never used in the way that Charlie Wilson later called on the CIA to engage.

Talk about the CIA's specific objective and some of the tactics and training that the Afghan Mujahadeen and then all the other Arab fighters who were brought into the region were given.

The fascinating thing about this is that we're talking about a CIA operation that dwarfs anything that was ever undertaken or imagined before that. Not just in size but in ruthlessness and it's fascinating: not one voice out of the left complaining about it. Not once, no where will you find it. And you won't find it from Congress and all of the people that normally are watching over these things. Nothing. Now the reason I think is what I said before which is that here was the vision of a primitive people but it was all in their own world and they had their warriors code and for most Americans during that time, they really qualified for being freedom fighters. They qualified for simply trying to throw out a ruthless army that had come in and was just murdering at will and doing astonishing destructiveness. So during that whole ten year war the only real criticism that ever came from the left was that you're fighting this war, this is a cynical exercise in which the US government is just fighting to the last Afghan without any hope of victory. The only real voices of restraint, of saying ‘Wait a second, this is dangerous to set in motion all of this -- because after all, we ended up by funding the Jihad -- this is the heart and soul of this is that the US government was the sponsor of the greatest Jihad in modern history -- and the only restraints came from within the CIA trying not to fight this one. But they lost...

Because Charlie Wilson pushed them...?

Well they lost because in fact it was a cause that in Congress no one found any reason to oppose. One of the things that you have to figure out and think about anytime you move to rearrange the political realities of a region or a country, is, aside from your immediate objectives, what are the long-term consequences? What are the unintended consequences that might come your way? And that certainly was never plotted out and part of the reason I think is that nobody ever imagined that it could happen, that a CIA operation could succeed. When can you think of a secret war the CIA was engaged in that didn't end badly? This one ended with a clear cut victory, the last campaign of the Cold War in forcing an invading, pillaging and raping army to retreat.

But was it really a victory?

It was a victory in terms of the Afghan people and it was a victory in terms of a principle that I think most everyone agreed with -- you shouldn't have countries invading another country for no reason and just destroying their people and the very life of the country.

That statement is very appropriate of course to the war in Iraq today, but we won't go there for now.... With respect to this particular issue that you just said, in terms of the victory that the CIA's operation resulted in the Soviet Union withdrawing -- can you make any connections between this incredible operation -- the largest covert operation in history -- and the events of September 11th? We have seen very clearly that those being called terrorists can trace their training their weaponry back to the situation in Afghanistan, such as Abu-Sayyaf in the Phillipines to training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan...

In my epilogue I go into that and I believe there is no way to dissociate 9/11 from this campaign. I think there has been no awareness in this country, no recognition that we were engaged in sponsoring a Jihad, the greatest of all Jihads in modern history, the only one that actually ended up in a victory. The truth is, and there's no way to dispute it -- militant Islam was our ally in the Cold War and it gave the United States its one clear-cut victory in this kind of covert warfare.

Didn't it also boost militant Islam?

Well of course! That's the point. For once, here was the CIA, tasked to do something it didn't even want to do, but once it got into it, it loved it, and then it felt proud about what it had done. Because it was a secret, because the United States and the American people didn't really know that we were involved in it in any way, people didn't feel proud of it and they didn't feel accountable. They didn't feel responsible for what had happened there or that they owed the Afghans anything. What was left in the aftermath was anarchy, ruin, and the sense in the minds of most of those people that the United States in fact really didn't care much about them. They liked them because they killed Russians but they didn't really care what happened afterward.

And you know your point about the Arabs and the Muslim volunteers is a critically important one but it's really useful to understand how it happened. Because some things are real and other things are not. And it's unnecessary to embellish it because it's bad enough as it is.

What happened during the war is that the CIA didn't need Arab and Muslim volunteers, there were so many Afghan warriors that a half million fundamentalist Muslims from Afghanistan had weapons from the CIA. At the height there were approximately a 150,000 shepherds and tribesmen that had been turned into what the agency called "techno-Holy Warriors". You didn't need Osama bin Ladens to help. In fact bin Laden didn't have anything to do with the fighting really -- he had a little bit -- but none of those people were front line warriors. But there were a lot of them and they came from all over and before it was through, maybe 30,00 came in. Some of them were a little bit like groupies at a rock concert and the Afghan warriors were swaggering about and they loved just to be there and to do what they could and when they could fight a bit it was something special for them. But it was a parallel existence -- it was almost like two wars taking place at the same time. And these religious forces and funding from Saudi Arabia and all over, created indoctrination camps and all of these people for the first time were able to come to one spot and to meet and to network and to think.

And this was where we really caused ourselves fantastic problems because it was a secret war and America's role in making the jihad effective and victorious was never revealed. All of these Arabs and Muslim volunteers as well as Afghans, but mainly the Arab and Muslim volunteers, came to think it was all Allah and the faithful that were responsible for rolling back the army of a modern superpower. And if we can do it there we can do it other places as well.

So you're saying they weren't as much aware of the US contribution?

I'm saying that the secrecy did not allow the reality factor to creep into anybody's thinking and it fed a kind of a notion that it is Islams moment. It is now the time for the jihad to go elsewhere for these people who sat on the sidelines during the Afghan war.

Let's talk about some of the Afghan warriors, the Mujahadeen that were supported by the United States. We know today the man who is a thorn in the side of US forces in Afghanistan is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was known by the CIA in terms of his anti-American position -- he was a fanatic and very misogynist and yet he received a huge portion of the funding. Why did the CIA choose to fund the most extreme elements in Afghanistan instead of the slightly more moderate factions that opposed the occupation?.

Every other great power that's tried to do this manipulation of Afghans has gotten their head handed to them whether it's the Russians or the English before them.

But there was an intellectual class in Kabul that was very much critical of the Soviet invasion. There were people especially in the cities who were not subscribing to an extremist version of fundamentalist Islam.

Remember we're not talking about a debating society. This was a war in which you had to be crazy to fight it -- you had to be an Afghan to go in against these flying gun-ships and tanks, and for better or for worse, the CIA applied one simple formula. That is: anybody who is good at killing Russians and wants to go risk it all, gets our support.

Now Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - what a monstrous figure... And the idea that the United States continued to provide support after the Soviets left is just unspeakable and it happened. And I don't know how you go about justifying that. But up until that point, nobody was attempting to say, 'well that's not a proper, thinking Afghan so we're not going to give him weapons to go attack the flying gun-ships and die -- we're going to give it to the good people who can go die and leave Hekmatyar to rule after it's all over'. It wasn't that way! This was a lost cause. The whole thing never made sense to anyone as being possible to end in a victory. It just came out of nowhere around year 7 of the war.

The issue for us to look at is what in the world happened afterward? How when the Soviets left, could we possibly continue to fund the Afghans in what was no longer a war against the Soviet empire, against a ruthless occupying force? It was now intervening into a civil war. And we were at that point starting to be on the side of people that started to look a little worse than the puppet government in Kabul. And then after we looked at this horror that we had helped set in motion -- and these hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons that are still there and they're all being used to blast each other -- we're ostensibly saying that it's right to support them because they're getting rid of the puppet government!

Let's talk about today because your book, "Charlie Wilson's War", and what we're talking about becomes incredibly relevant in the aftermath of September 11th and the bombing campaign to oust the Taliban. The United States has gone back and openly supported some warlords, some of whom were the very same ones that were being supported in the 80s and this time it's very clear that they're choosing to support one group over another, for example Dostum, etc.

This is a really difficult situation because it's hard to find a good Afghan here versus a bad one, if you look at who the United States is supporting based on their histories. For example, how do you possibly justify suggesting that Dostum is an honorable ally when he was the great butcher of the Soviets? And some of the stories that Roy Gutman did of Dostum's forces putting all these Pashtuns in tractor trailers and suffocating them on their way up to the North with the special forces people all around Dostum. These are very disturbing things and we don't seem to have any shock value, we don't seem to look at anything.

The United States very opportunistically sided with the Northern Tajiks. Now they were dealing with the Russians and with Massoud. [Massoud's] fascination was that he was always so supple, he was constantly changing sides and brokering everything. But when he was in power in Kabul, 40% of the city was destroyed and just terrible massacres between him and Gulbuddin [took place]. This does not have the capacity for a national leadership and we chose to run with them because they were the available force that would go in and help paint the targets with lasers and do the dying instead of us. But now you've got basically a Tajik power center in the government with the Pashtuns -- who are the great warrior class and the majority -- the odd man out and it doesn't look good.

I don't know what we do at this point. Particularly because at the moment in spite of all of the commitments, the President has made, there is just no real sense that there is a good faith effort for long-term reconstruction [in Afghanistan].

In addition to Charlie Wilson, there were a few other US figures involved. We are near Orange County, California whose Congressional representative, Dana Rohrabacher was also somebody who went to Afghanistan like Charlie Wilson, dressed in the garb, fought the war, did the macho thing. And before September 11th, he was calling upon the US to support the Northern Alliance. What do you know about Rohrabacher?

He was a friend of Charlie Wilson's very exotic and astonishing administrative assistant, Charlie Schnabel who was another Texas character, who loved the Mujahadeen and loved guns and hunting and loved to go off and blast away with all these CIA weapons at Soviet forts in the latter months of the war. And Dana Rohrabacher went on one of those trips with him, all dressed up with the "Muj" and having the opportunity to actually shell the great enemy.

What makes this story more fascinating is that it is so underreported. Why is this story which is so connected to the events of September 11th, 2001, so much under the radar?

That's a good question and part of it is hard for me to answer because enough of the story at different times was available to people to at least register the fact that we were deeply involved in funding a jihad. I think that part of the problem is that people didn't quite know how to use the language correctly. In other words, you have got to get away from the euphemisms and get back to what it is today. This is shocking when you think about it, that it's a mystery to people. If you go to the American public and ask them 'Who is the sponsor of the greatest of all modern Jihads? We've got 'em, we're going to expose 'em tonight.' If you said that they'd all be probably interested, particularly if it was France. If the French had gone out and spent billions of dollars to fund a jihad in Afghanistan, if they had been putting weapons in the hands of half a million fundamentalist Muslims, trained a lot of them to be 'techno-holy warriors' and trained them in urban guerilla warfare activities and allowed big cadres, maybe 30,000 of them, from all of these Arab and Muslim volunteers pouring in from all over the world for many years. They had done this for whatever reason, but then we suddenly discovered it at 9/11. Well probably would be mad as hell! We probably would go after the French and say 'My god, they're essentially responsible for our problems'.

If you can tell, I thought for once the CIA was doing the right thing, up until the time the Soviets were pushed out. At which point I think everything to do with the US effort was the wrong thing and really was responsible in large measure for guaranteeing that we were going to have a price to pay. Unintended consequences, which no one was counting on and everyone just put their head in the sand.

And you know the odd thing today is there are two groups of people who would not prefer to have the US role known. I think our current government hasn't acknowledged it and it seems more convenient to say 'they're crazy, they're fanatical, we don't know anything about them, other than we have to find them somehow and cut their heads off'. And the others are the militant Muslims themselves. They prefer to maintain the idea that it was all the work of Allah, all the work of those with true faith and that that power still exists to move the world. It is the moment of Islam. And the truth is much more effective - it will make everybody more realistic.