If Charlie Wilson were not a real person, his story would be deemed far too improbable and outrageous for even Hollywood to have invented. Wilson, now 74, was a long-serving Democrat congressman from Texas, known for his maverick liberal political positions and astonishingly louche private life. Nicknamed “Good Time Charlie”, the tall, charming Wilson, a former naval officer, was a heavy whisky drinker, a cocaine user and a notorious philanderer. His congressional office was staffed with an astonishing cluster of young and remarkably comely female assistants, inevitably known in Washington circles as “Charlie’s Angels”. But his often scandalous private life hid an astute and ambitious political animal. Wilson, first elected to Congress in 1972, worked his way to a position of real political influence on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which was responsible for financing the CIA.

In 1980, Wilson became deeply troubled by what he felt was the inadequate American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the year before. It’s hard now to recall just how threatening and aggressive the Soviet move was at a time when cold-war tensions were running high. Wilson was appalled by the brutality of the Soviet occupation, which led to millions of refugees fleeing to Pakistan. He was amazed that the CIA seemed to be doing so little to back the mujaheddin, the Afghan resistance fighters. They were using 19th-century British rifles to try to defeat Soviet tanks and fighter planes.

Through his position on the subcommittee, Wilson began pushing for secret increases in CIA funding for the mujaheddin, from just a few million dollars a year to $750m a year by the end of the decade. Wilson (played in the film by Tom Hanks) was aided by Joanne Herring, a glamorous, very right-wing Texan socialite (played by Julia Roberts) who was able to pull strings behind the scenes with recalcitrant Republicans. He also received help from Gust Avrakotos, a misfit CIA officer (wonderfully played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who supervised the secret operation.

Wilson scoured the Middle East for weapons, especially shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles capable of bringing down the fearsome Mi-24 Hind helicopter gun-ships. He took girlfriends – former Texas beauty queens who favoured extremely risqué outfits – on these jaunts. On one trip to Cairo, he brought his own belly dancer to persuade the Egyptian defence minister to give him ammunition for AK47s. Her dancing went far beyond modest Cairo standards, and the defence minister duly ensured Wilson’s guns were stocked with the right bullets.

The secret CIA backing of the mujaheddin was so successful that the Russians withdrew their army in February 1989. This was such a devastating blow to their morale that many consider it the critical defeat that led, not long after, to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. But it was only when the book Charlie Wilson’s War, written by the veteran journalist George Crile, was published in 2003 that most people discovered what a bunch of mavericks and misfits had helped defeat that empire.

Some conservatives have taken issue with Hollywood’s perhaps fanciful contention that it was Wilson – rather than their hero, Ronald Reagan – who was chiefly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the then Pakistani president, Zia ul-Haq, who made Wilson an honorary general in his country’s army – although he was asked not to wear his uniform in Pakistan – was in no doubt as to who deserved the credit. When the CIA held a party to celebrate the defeat, a message from ul-Haq flashed across a movie screen: “Charlie Did It.”

Of course, the Islamic resurgence sparked by the Soviet defeat, and America’s subsequent abandonment of Afghanistan, which enabled Osama Bin Laden to set up a base there from which to launch the September 11 attacks, plays as a dissonant chord behind the main action of Charlie Wilson’s War.

But you won’t find any explicit references to Al-Qaeda or the World Trade Center in the film. To avoid the dire box-office fate of other post9/11 movies, it has been fashioned and is being carefully sold by the studio as a bubbly, sophisticated comedy. Which it is; but, as its director, Mike Nichols, rightly points out, while we’re laughing when Charlie Wilson frolics in the bath with Playboy Bunnies as he engineers the downfall of the Soviet empire, it’s important to remember that “millions died”. War is a nasty business, as much as Hollywood would prefer us to forget that these days.

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