George Crile > Quotes

“Operating in the black market is like trying to get laid in a city you don't know. In a strange city, if you have enough money, you're bound to find something, but there might be a disease contracted, you might get rolled or arrested, and there's no telling how much it will cost. With you wife, its predictable and in a steady quantity.”
― George Crile III, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of our Times

“But the terrible truth is that the group of sleeping lions that the United States roused may well have inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to believe that the moment is theirs.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“On every front, the CIA was turning its guerrillas into a far smarter and more lethal fighting force.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Charlie had not hesitated to throw himself into the defense of the program. Still, for just a moment, he did find himself first perplexed, then furious at the idea that the CIA had been helping Khomeini.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“His model for enlightened leadership had always been the men who led America during and after World War II, when the United States defeated and then rebuilt Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“He was the only congressman I ever met who used the word ‘fuck’ in the first forty-five seconds.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Once the accord was signed, both superpowers would be prohibited from any further arms shipments. Zia wanted to make sure that his (and the CIA’s) Afghans were in a position to do in the Russian Afghan surrogates. But that morning the mujahideen’s secret stash at Ojhiri was wiped out—thirty thousand rockets, millions of rounds of ammunition, vast numbers of mines, Stingers, SA-7s, Blowpipes, Milan antitank missiles, multiple-barrel rocket launchers, mortars.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Charlie would come to hold him personally responsible for the slaughter that continued in the mountains. “The only thing I care about”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Avrakotos knew too much about Israel’s complicated relationship with Iran—how the Mossad had “had half of the mullahs on its payroll” before the revolution.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“For anyone trying to make sense of this new enemy, it would seem relevant that for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government sponsored the largest and most successful jihad in modern history; that the CIA secretly armed and trained several hundred thousand fundamentalist warriors to fight against our common Soviet enemy; and that many of those who now targeted America were veterans of that earlier CIA-sponsored jihad.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Gust took him to dinner and offered a toast to him. And then Mike left the Agency for the Wharton business school.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“He said he had gone into politics because he wanted to make the country a better place for everyone and he really wanted to see peace in the world. There were tears in his eyes,” she recalls.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“He didn’t like that comment,” Gust remarked years later”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would not only provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Gust was still in charge of Iran then, so he was one of the first to be told of the White House’s idea that it was time to try to cut a deal with Khomeini’s Iran.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“United States roused may well have inspired an entire generation of militant young Muslims to believe that the moment is theirs.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“it would not only lead to the release of the hostages but to the beginning of a new strategic alliance that would prevent the Soviets from getting a foothold in Iran.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“The justification for the huge CIA operation had been to halt Soviet aggression, not to take sides in a tribal war—certainly not to transform the killing capacity of these warriors.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Varennikov had been incensed that month to discover that Reagan had just sent a guided missile, a smart bomb, into Qaddafi’s tent.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“In his typical compulsion to reduce human truths to a sexual analogy”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Never in history had a nation accumulated such dominance over the rest of the world as the United States had in the decade following the Soviet collapse.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Charlie wasn’t exactly a conservative. He was, in fact, a liberal when it came to domestic matters—civil rights, women’s issues. But on gun control, anti-Communism, and defense, he was a hard-liner second to none.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“For one thing, India had the bomb. It had exploded a nuclear device back in 1974, and no one doubted that it had the ability to wipe out Pakistan.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“it is our sacred duty to make valuable the lives that these people are laying down.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“At Friday prayers, the mullahs were inflaming their followers with accounts of Western NGO volunteers teaching Afghan women to wash with soap.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“The source of the disaster was a stockpile of some ten thousand tons of ordnance haphazardly stored at the Ojhiri military camp, just between the capital and Rawalpindi.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“But early that morning, when Sweetums called Charlie’s hotel room, Snowflake answered the phone.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“In stark contrast, the Soviet veterans of the Afghan war did not exist.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“Juchniewicz silenced Cogan with a communiqué of unusual clarity: “Higher authority wants a mean fucker in the job.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War

“He’d even consulted the Agency’s great expert on Saudi Arabia and Iran, George Cave, who’d advised that because of Muslim prohibitions on usury, the Agency probably should not put the money in an interest-bearing account.”
― George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War