How Houston socialite brought down the Soviet Union, really

Sunday Telegraph:

Joanne Herring speaks in the slow, refined drawl of a Southern belle. With her svelte figure, surgeon-assisted features, dyed blonde hair and obligatory sunglasses, she looks far younger than her 78 years, as she drives around Houston's ritzy suburbs in a red Jaguar convertible, accompanied by her two bandana0wearing black poodles.

Thrice-married socialite, hostess, philanthropist, businesswoman, diplomat, television chat-show presenter and God-fearing ultra-conservative, Mrs Herring has been compared to a cross between Scarlett O'Hara and Dolly Parton in her various incarnations of Texan royalty.

But the most extraordinary role in her remarkable life is about to be portrayed by Julia Roberts in a new Hollywood blockbuster, Charlie Wilson's War, to be released in America on December 21. For Mrs Herring also changed the course of history.

A few months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, she smuggled herself into that mountainous land to film the atrocities that the Russian forces were inflicting as they strafed villages from helicopter gunships.

Mrs Herring nearly became a casualty of those same tactics, surviving a helicopter attack by Soviet forces on their mujahideen foes while she was filming the battle with her combat photographer son, Robin King, and Charles Fawcett, an adventurer and movie-maker.

The footage they brought back was pivotal in persuading America to arm secretly and fund the tribal warriors fighting the Red Army. The biggest covert war in history turned Afghanistan into Moscow's "Vietnam", culminating in humiliating defeat for the Kremlin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Many times I wondered what a nice girl from Texas was doing in a place like that," she told The Sunday Telegraph last week. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I would have ended up in the underbelly of the world fighting the demons of communism."

She treasures a fading photograph that captures the bizarre incongruity of her mission. It shows her sitting demurely, looking as if she were dressed for a light lunch at the country club, with her coiffed hair, big glasses and neat cardigan and blouse, but she is surrounded by bearded, turbaned warriors toting automatic rifles in the bleak rocky terrain of Afghanistan.

On her return, she showed the film to Republican friends and political grandees, such as George Bush senior, the new vice-president under Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and CIA chief William Casey.

Perhaps most significantly, she was dating Charlie Wilson, a flamboyant Texan congressman with a reputation as a hard-drinking playboy who was also a consummate Washington wheeler-dealer and influential member of the defence appropriations committee.

Mrs Herring and Mr Wilson (played by Tom Hanks in the film) forged an alliance with a rule-bending CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to launch a clandestine international operation to back the mujahideen.

The maverick triumvirate secured Israeli and Swiss arms, paid for by US and Saudi money, and smuggled them through Egypt, in deals struck while belly dancers deployed their seductive talents on visiting dignitaries in Arab capitals.

It is little wonder that the film by veteran director Mike Nichols, who won an Oscar for The Graduate in 1968, begins with the declaration: "Based on a true story. You think we could make this up?" The trailer tempts cinema-goers with the message: "A stiff drink. A little mascara. A lot of nerve. Who said they couldn't bring down the Soviet Empire."

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There is much more. This sounds more upbeat than most of Hollywood's recent war movies. I give it a chance of success if Mike Nichols has as much flair as Herring and Wilson. I wonder if Osama ever thanked her for driving out the Soviets or is he still trying to claim all the credit for himself.