Joanne Herring President of Pakistan Gen Zia Ul Haq Girl Friend

Joanne Herring in Afghanistan with the mujahideen

By Philip Sherwell

12:01AM GMT 02 Dec 2007 

Joan Herring was Girls Friend of Genereal  ZIA ul Haq of Pakistan Army and Dictor President of Pakistan and Murderer of Zufiqar ali Bhutto .

Gen Zia ul Haq Befriended Joanne Herring when he was in Jordon Killing Palestenains when he was a  Brigadiar in Jordon .

Leter when he Killed the First Elected PM of Pakistan Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and became a Doctayor and President of Pakistan , he Appointed Joanne Herring wife of Oil Magnet and Bussiness man Mr Herring as  Ambassdor of Islamic republic of Pakistan as he called Paistan then in Texas in Pakistani Embassy in  USA ,

She was Party Animal and Orgy Doer and had links with Influential Congress and Sentors in USA including the President Ronald Reagan , Isreal and also Middle East Dictators like King of Jordon and also Egyptian and Israeli's, with Parties of Sex , booze and orgies.

Gen Zia ul Haq had been Picked up in Favour with Israel and USA , after Operation Black Friday when he Killed a Lot of Palestenians attacking Israel from Jordon and he Killed 10,000 Under his Tanks as Brigadiar incharge of 2nd Armoured Brigade ,  to stop Palestenains from attacking Isreal and also Protect King Hussain of Jordon with whoem he has good Friendship and Loyality of King Hussian

As Persoanl Friend of King Hussain Joanne Herring also got acquainted  and Befriended Gen Zia Ul Haq Army Chief of Pakistan Army.

Gen Zia would Interrupt his cabinet meeting to just Take her call as People in his Cabinet like Sahibzada Yaqub Khan had noted in his Memoirs . She has relationship with Senator Texas Charlie Wilson , the Father of "Charlie Wilson war " , or Operation Cyclone , th iat Started as revenge for Vietnam but ended up Defeat of Soviet USSR Russian Empire  . 

Film trailer: Charlie Wilson's War
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Joanne Herring was a pampered Texan until she took to the mountains of Afghanistan to fight the Red Menace. As her astonishing story comes to the big screen, she talks to Philip Sherwell


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.

Joanne Herring and Gen Zia President of Pakistan  

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.

Joanne Herring adn Sentor Charlie Willson 

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.

Joanne Herring with King Shah Hussain of Jordon Friend of Zia 

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."

Mrs Herring will be given the red-carpet treatment at the film's premiere in Los Angeles and feted at a slew of parties next week, and she is delighted that their battle to halt the spread of communism is receiving the celluloid treatment.

"I am very proud of what we did. We were a tight-knit network of anti-communists who loved our country and loved freedom," she says. "I hope people who come to watch this movie will leave with an appreciation of what we achieved."

She is also braced for her "tarty" depiction on the big screen. "It's not the real me, but Hollywood is Hollywood and I accept that. I love Julia Roberts, she's gorgeous and I'm sure she plays the part wonderfully."

Is she worried about her reputation? "I've had a lot of bullets shot at me in my life, metaphorically and literally," she says, laughing again. "Nobody likes it, but I'm not worried about it."

In fact, Mrs Herring won what she sees as a major victory earlier this year when she first saw the script. "I don't curse, I don't drink double Martinis and I don't jump in and out of hot-tubs with men," she insists. "I'm not that kind of girl. I'm a Christian."

Mrs Herring deployed a high-powered Texan lawyer to argue her corner and Nichols agreed to cut the bad language, although the Martinis and the raciness are still there. But the frostiness has healed and Mrs Herring was charmed when she visited the set and met Roberts ("so sweet") and Hanks ("a real gentleman and a patriot, I hear").

She entertains visitors with her easy-going charm in a condominium in the same affluent River Oaks district where she grew up as an only child. A lift takes guests straight into an elegant living-room decorated in French style, although it is a step down from the colonnaded mansions she once occupied.

The "party girl" label has stuck with her, to her dismay. She dropped out of the University of Texas at age 20 to marry her first husband, the property developer Robert King, who she met at a debutante's ball.

For her 30th birthday party, he threw a "Roman orgy" costume extravaganza, complete with a mock slave auction, that remains the stuff of Texas legend half a century later. It was captured for posterity by a photographer from Life magazine. The then Mrs King was the first of many to be thrown into the swimming pool during the celebrations.

She became a Houston institution as host of the daytime Joanne King Show on local television but she and Mr King parted company - he liked the quiet life and she craved excitement. Soon after her divorce, she met and won the heart of the oil tycoon Robert Herring - a relationship that was to change not just her life but the fate of the world.

For, in the course of his international business travels, Mr Herring was offered the post of roving honorary consul representing Pakistan in America. He declined politely, but suggested his wife in his place.

"I was a woman, of course, but they still wanted to get Bob to build his pipelines," she says. "They didn't really know what to do, but they ended up saying yes."

Mrs Herring threw herself into the role, learning about the culture of Pakistan and teaching villagers how to establish cottage industries for rugs and textiles. She also become a confidante of President Zia-ul-Haq, who brought the "red menace" threat to Mrs Herring's attention after the Soviet invasion. And so, with Mr Fawcett and her son, Robin, she ventured into Afghanistan on her fateful trip in 1980.

She lays out the geopolitical realities of the time, lacing her analysis with her personal political loathing of communism. "I looked at the map and I saw that after Afghanistan, the Russians would want the warm-water ports of Pakistan," she explains. "And then it was just a short distance to the Straits of Hormuz. If they had managed to sink a couple of tankers there, they could have crippled the US economy.

"But, at that time, people didn't want to know about it in America. No one cared about Afghanistan. It was just some rocky mountains to the folks in Washington."

Shortly after her return to the US, another twist of fate intervened. Her beloved husband died of lung cancer and, after a period of mourning, she struck up a relationship with Mr Wilson, a fellow Texan, nicknamed "Good Time Charlie" for his partying lifestyle.

Even under President Reagan, the US did not at this stage want an open confrontation with Moscow, so the congressman, the socialite and the CIA chief developed their own clandestine network.

"The Americans, the British, the French and Middle Eastern governments were all involved, but surreptitiously," says Mrs Herring. "We even cornered the market on mules along the Pakistani-Afghan border to take the weapons in."

The operation helped turn the tide of the war as the mujahideen could then bring down Hind choppers with their shoulder-held missiles, depriving the Russians of the air invincibility that was so crucial in the mountainous country.

It was these anti-Soviet Islamic forces, with their foreign volunteers, such as Osama bin Laden, that later turned into al-Qaeda, the fanatical organisation responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. But Mrs Herring is dismissive of the suggestion that her actions helped create a "terrorist Frankenstein", as some have argued.

"It's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Why were we there? Who were we fighting? We were fighting the Russians and we beat the Russians. You cannot predict the future but we won the war we went to fight.

"We did not make al-Qaeda. But we abandoned the Afghans and we've betrayed the Palestinians, and some extremists have exploited that. Certain so-called holy men - and that's spelt t-h-u-g-s - exploited this issue because they want power and money."

Mrs Herring and Mr Wilson split up but remain friendly. The former congressman, now 74, who was a consultant on the film and had a heart transplant in September, recently told an interviewer: "Joanne is a very difficult woman to say no to." She, meanwhile, married her third husband, the millionaire businessman Lloyd Davis, but they divorced in 2005.

Joanne Herring is still excited by the memories of those daring days and fascinated by the intrigues of international affairs. "It's such a tragedy that women cannot talk about politics in an intellectual way without people suspecting they have some other agenda," she laments.

Their story remained largely unknown until the publication in 2003 of the book Charlie Wilson's War by the late George Crile, an American television news producer. Mrs Herring is enjoying her time in the spotlight and it may not be over yet. She is writing her memoirs and Universal Studios is considering turning her astonishing life into a sequel. As they say, you couldn't make it up.

source : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1571233/How-Joanne-Herring-won-Charlie-Wilsons-War.html