Diplomacy and Diamonds

by Joanne King Herring

  George Crile wrote in his book, Charlie Wilson’s War: “[President Zia] was so spellbound by Herring, and took her so seriously, that to the utter dismay of his entire foreign office, he made her Pakistan’s roving ambassador to the world and even awarded her his country’s highest civilian honor, the title of Quaid-e-Azam, or ‘Great Leader.’ Charlie Wilson says that Zia would leave cabinet meetings just to take Joanne’s calls. ‘There was no affair with Zia,’ Wilson recalls, ‘but it’s impossible to deal with Joanne and not deal with her on a sexual basis. No matter who you are, you take those phone calls.’ ”

  Actually, our relationship was a meeting of the minds and a similarity of objectives—nothing more. Still, because I admired his courage so much, I had a deep affection for Zia and what he stood for.

  For example, Zia told me that President Jimmy Carter had offered him five million dollars in aid. Zia shocked the world when he responded, “Mr. President, that’s peanuts!”

  “Why didn’t you take it?” I asked. “Any money is better than no money.”

  “If I took it,” said Zia, “it would not be enough to save my country, but it is enough to trigger a Soviet invasion. They would call me an American puppet and take my country in five days.” He bowed his head. “I cannot retaliate because they would accuse me of invading them. Their excuse for expansion has always been that they are protecting their borders and are frightened of U.S. incursions.”

  “Oh,” I said, “really, ‘protecting their borders’… Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador—those are pretty far-flung borders.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s obvious that they are starting empires in every corner of the world. I ache with despair for my people. I have three million Afghan refugees in Peshawar. We have opened our borders to them and we have been giving them the best we can. My people are hungry. But they are sharing with the Afghans, who have nothing.”

  Pakistan was not in favor in Washington at the time. President Carter was calling the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a “tribal war,” as if the locals were peevishly killing each other and asking the friendly communists to come settle their village spat.

  “We cannot hold out against the Russians when they come—and they will,” Zia said.

  “You have a great army,” I said.

  “But no arms,” he replied. “Your president Carter refuses to believe that the Soviets have any intentions of capturing Afghanistan or Pakistan. He actually thinks he can talk to them and they will pull out. Right now their planes are overflying my borders, bombing my villages, and killing my people. I cannot retaliate because that will give them an excuse to invade us, saying we attacked first and that they had to defend themselves. That is always their answer and excuse.”

  In fact, the Soviets were unloading cargo planes full of tanks and Hind helicopters and weaponry every forty-eight minutes.

  Russian Hind helicopters hovered over helpless Afghan villagers, shooting anything that moved: men, women, children, babies in their mothers’ arms, sheep and goats. Soviet planes dropped small, shiny butterfly bombs that looked like toys… and when children would run to pick them up, the explosives would blow off their hands, condemning them to an agonizing death by infection and gangrene. By killing children slowly and painfully, they hoped to break the will of the Afghan people as the Communists had in Vietnam.

  This was no tribal war. It was the domination of a proud people by a cold, voracious empire that would stop at nothing in its quest for global domination and a warm-water port in the Arabian Sea.

  Earlier, I had asked myself why any country would take the trouble to invade Afghanistan. There was nothing there. No oil, no industry, few raw materials. Just stubborn, ragged tribesmen who wanted to be left alone. And why Pakistan? They had nothing either.

  I looked at the map, and there was the answer: the Strait of Hormuz, the enormously strategic, improbably constricted waterway between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf.

  The strait is thirty-five miles wide at its narrowest point. It is bordered by Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. The only passage to the open ocean for large parts of the Persian Gulf, it is the world’s most critical choke point for the millions and millions of barrels of crude oil that pass through it on their way to fuel the world—every day.

  If the Strait of Hormuz was controlled by the Russians, they could cut off U.S. tankers. It wouldn’t be our cars and our air conditioners that would be threatened. It would be our factories, our chemical plants, our building industry—the lifestyle and jobs of every American. The Soviets could take down the entire economy of the United States.

  I read later that President Richard Nixon said in a conversation with the president of Somalia, “The Soviet aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends—the energy treasure of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.”

  I had been spouting anticommunism for years. But when I went to Washington with this little message about the potential for the economic destruction of the United States at the hands of the Soviets and repeated it to any member of Congress who would listen, I saw some interesting changes in how powerful people reacted. The glazed expression on their faces that always appeared when Afghanistan was mentioned suddenly changed. A new understanding dawned. A new urgency emerged. Afghanistan mattered after all.

  And now I was sitting with the president of Pakistan on a summer night with waves of geostrategic conflict washing over our thoughts. I felt the horrors of the human tragedy unfolding on his border. I knew the political importance of this moment in history.

  But what could I do? I was of no importance on the world scene. But I remembered that in a toolbox even small tools can be useful.

  “Mr. President,” I said, “I have a thought. I don’t have much to offer, but I do have one thing. A widow’s mite, so to speak.”

  I wasn’t sure if Muslim presidents of Muslim nations knew much about Jesus’s remarks in the New Testament about the widow’s mite, but I pressed on.

  “I had a television show for fifteen years. I know how to interview people. My son Robin seems to think if we make a film showing exactly what the Russians are doing, the people of the West might listen. What if we showed what is going on in the refugee camps and the atrocities that the Soviets are committing against women and children? A picture really is worth a thousand words. People can argue politics and policies all day long… but if they see suffering with their own eyes, they can’t deny it.”

  “How do you propose to do it?” he asked thoughtfully. “And how will you get it shown?”

  “You have a television station,” I said. “Can’t we get what we need from your people?”

  “I can send you to the refugee camps in Pakistan with my men,” he said. “I can get you that far to film what is happening with the refugees. But I cannot be involved in Afghanistan.

  “If you go into Afghanistan,” he continued, “I will not know it. I will not know where you go, who you go with, or what happens to you. I cannot rescue you or help you in any way if you encounter trouble… which you will.

  “If you do not return, I will not know that you ever went or what happened to you, because if I did the Soviets can accuse me of sending American filmmakers into Afghanistan. I will again be compromised as an American puppet. The least little thing I do will be exactly what they are looking for as a reason to invade Pakistan. I cannot risk my country in any way. You will be entirely on your own.”

  Fortunately, I was never on my own. Robin and Charles Fawcett were there. And God was certainly with all of us, or we would never have made it. We believed that He wanted us to help the Afghan people and also help our own country, which seemed oblivious to the gathering Soviet storm.

  “Do you have any access to Afghan leaders or anyone else who can help you there?” President Zia asked.

  “Strangely enough, I do,” I said. “He’s an American, but he’s been living among the Afghans. He’s
one of the most remarkable men in the world. His name is Charles Fawcett.” Galvanized by the Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, my friend Charles had lived with the mujahideen (Afghan freedom fighters) already, fighting beside them. Their leaders trusted and loved him.

  Zia was as good as his word. I returned to Houston and laid my plans. Charles was excited about making our movie, and since no Pakistani cameraman could accompany us, my son Robin King volunteered. Robin was only seventeen, but he had an adventurous streak, and he already had experience beyond his years and multiple film credits under his belt, having been around the world four times working for different film companies. He was making progress on his career, but as he did many times, he gave it all up to serve his country.

  Robin and I traveled to Pakistan, where we met up with Charles, and the three of us set off for Afghanistan—alone, unarmed, and with very little money—in December of 1979, the dead of winter.

  The wind cut like a knife, but we arrived safely at the refugee camp at the Pakistani-Afghan border. I slept under about eighteen blankets and my sable coat. It was like lying under a dead hippo, yet I was still so cold, I could not sleep. Meanwhile, the refugees, some three million of them, stretching as far as you could see, were sleeping on the ground with no blankets, no tents, no shoes, in layers of thin, ragged clothing. At night, I could hear the children coughing. They sounded like little foxes.

  The hard, brown soil was carved in grooves from wind erosion. There were no trees. The refugees had uprooted the small, dry bushes that had been there to serve as fuel for their small cooking fires. There was little water, and what water there was, was so polluted that it sickened and killed many. For people who must wash five times a day to prepare for their prayers, this situation was painful and dangerous.

  Little canals were cut through the surface of this parched earth, so dry that it was as hard as iron. People washed their utensils in it, bathed in it, and drank from it. In warmer climates, cholera would probably have been rampant. Due to the extreme cold, there was none in the camp at the time, but many other preventable illnesses were rampant. There was no medicine.

  The Afghan children were so thin, they looked as if they had matchsticks for limbs. Most were sick, their bellies inflated from starvation. Patient and listless, they had no energy to move. Some of the children tried to play with little stones.

  I interviewed a widow who had had five children. Her three living children were all maimed, with stumps for limbs and empty sockets where their eyes should have been. Like many other little ones, they had excitedly run to pick up the brightly colored Soviet “toys.” Their mother had shouted for them to stop, stop—there was death in the toys. Like kids everywhere, they had scampered ahead anyway and picked them up, only to fall, screaming, in an explosion of blood and bone.

  In spite of their suffering, they were beautiful people, with skin the color of coffee with lots of cream, aquiline features, and green eyes. They weren’t pitiful or defeated. They did not weep in public for their dead. They asked for nothing.

  When we told them how we were going to use this film to get them medicine and food, they would shake their fists and say, “Don’t send us food. Don’t send us medicine. We can live without food and medicine. But we cannot live without freedom. Send us guns!”

  They needed them—big ones. Their stories told us why. The Soviet Hind helicopters, flying just thirty feet above the helpless people, were shooting and shredding everything that moved. It had become a game for the pilots.

  The Hinds, heavily armored gunships with titanium rotors, were fifty-five feet long and twenty feet high, with thirty-millimeter cannons, rockets, machine guns, and antitank missiles. The Hind was impregnable against anything the mujahideen could throw at it. The Russians called it the Crocodile. The Afghans called it Shaitan-Arba: Satan’s Chariot.

  On the ground, the Russians were using terror tactics and KGB-perfected torture, impaling the Afghan people and cutting off their arms and legs. They assaulted pregnant women with cattle prods until milk poured from the women’s breasts. Gangs of soldiers raped women until their bladders burst.

  They would take the children from a village, hold them in front of their parents and slowly, slowly cut their throats. They would pile dissenters on the ground like firewood. Then they would drive their sixty-ton tanks over them or set them on fire. I could not conceive of such cruelty. I felt helpless and sick, so inadequate in the face of such need.

  We packed up our gear. It was time to leave the camp and go to the tribal area buffer zone on our way into Afghanistan.

  This buffer zone had been created by the British in 1893 as a bulwark between Afghanistan and Pakistan while the latter was still part of India. The British had tried to conquer Afghanistan and met with decisive, violent failure… and this tribal area was still one of the most dangerous places on earth. There was no law. It was populated by various tribal groups, thieves, and bands of outlaws. They fought over turf and stole from travelers to support themselves. Drug dealers, outlaws, and fugitives were everywhere. There was no border control. The area belonged to no one and no government.

  This would later be rumored to be the impenetrable hiding place of Osama bin Laden, but at that time it was simply a place where no one in their right mind would go. And there we were—Charles Fawcett, Robin, and I.

  Charles led us to a small village from which a bus crossed into Afghanistan. He gave me some ragged Afghan clothes: a coat that came to my knees, baggy trousers, and a pie-plate hat covered in lambs’ wool that almost covered my eyes. I pushed my hair up into my hat and wrapped a scarf around my face and neck. Robin and Charles wore similar clothes.

  I had no idea where we were going or where we went. We simply followed Charles who said we were heading to a mujahideen outpost in Afghanistan, but he said he deliberately kept us in the dark about our location because if word leaked out about our visit, the Soviets would wipe out the camp.

  We trudged. We rode in the backs of trucks and oxcarts. At dangerous checkpoints my comrades actually stuffed me into a big oil barrel and nailed down the lid. A woman—a white Western woman—was more dangerous contraband than heroin or weapons.

  Tiny snowflakes swirled around us like lacy ash. The cold wind penetrated to our bones. But I was beyond caring.

  At last, our truck arrived at the warriors’ desolate outpost. I was suddenly more frightened than I had ever been in my life. I thought, “I have broken all their rules.” Here I was, a woman, face uncovered, dressed as a man, walking among men. I began to understand what I had done. What had seemed a great adventure was suddenly a death trap. I had never experienced real war or suffering. I had led my son into this morass of danger where death was as close as a shadow.

  I knew how the mujahideen treated infidels. Whenever they caught a Russian soldier, they’d give him over to their women to skin him alive. The women would skin him slowly, starting at the testicles, moving toward the eyeballs… and then they would take the body to a road, to send a clear, grisly message to the Soviets. Retaliation was their only defense against the Russian atrocities. They had to at least frighten the Russians, as they had no way to kill them. This was war, a brutal one-sided war, and the victims were striking back in the only ways they could.

  At one time Afghanistan was the fruit basket of the Middle East, poor but viable. Women were not forced to wear burkas and were encouraged to go to school. The horrors of war had forced them to depend on their religion to unite the many tribes to fight together. They fought under the banner of Islam, and now they regarded anyone who violated it as worse than animals.

  These fighters would think nothing of killing me—and Charles and Robin for good measure—and leaving our bleeding bodies in the snow. I had never felt such cold, heart-stopping fear for myself, my friend, and especially my son.

  When we arrived at the outpost, Charles and Robin got out of the truck with their camera equipment, and I emerged from my barrel. Thousands and thousands of mujahideen sat on t
he cold ground before us, fanned out on the hills of a natural amphitheater, as far as I could see. We stood there like a sacrifice.

  The men began to stir. I braced myself. They leapt to their feet, and all I could see were what seemed to be thousands upon thousands of ragged fighters, their faces streaked with dirt, raising their World War I rifles in the air, shouting and screaming.

  “They’re going to kill me,” I thought.

  They were not going to kill me. They were welcoming us. Cheering with gratitude, overwhelmed that someone had actually come to help them.

  They had felt that no one in the whole world cared… and now our little trio represented hope.

  From that point on, I never questioned why I was there with war-hardened Muslim men who waved captured Russian testicles at their enemies.

  They had so little, but they had killed their only sheep, used all their flour, and made us a meal I will never forget. They found a table and provided wooden chairs. Where they got them I had no idea. There were even forks and knives for the three of us. As we prepared to eat, my Afghan guide whispered in my ear, “Do not eat it.”

  “I must!” I whispered back to him. “They’ve given us everything they have!”

  “You cannot eat it,” he said. “Push it around your plate. Eat a bit of bread. But don’t eat anything else. It will make you sick.” He was sure our Western constitutions would not be able to handle the nearly raw wartime food-preparation techniques of these warriors.

  I swallowed my tears and did as he said, my heart aching over it. Hungry men crowded three deep around the table, watching us eat, so proud to offer us this glorious feast. It was an expression of gratitude, and it affected me almost more than any experience in my life.

  It was decided that I needed a bodyguard. Our hosts chose a seven-foot Pashtun with a long handlebar mustache and a turban that made him seem even taller. He was straight out of central casting. His only weapon was a scimitar stuck in his belt. It was thought that he was strong enough to defend himself without a gun. Guns were scarce. We heard stories of how the Afghan men checked them out like library books and went out in groups with their treasured firearms. They survived on leaves, berries, and bits of dry bread. They fought as long as they could, and then returned to camp, and the next group went out. The guns were 1914 Enfield rifles, state-of-the-art during the First World War… more than sixty years before. That was all they had.