Joanne Herring doesn't look like a spy. The diminutive Texan socialite with the curly blonde locks and gold lame jacket is shooing her two fluffy black poodles out of the living room. But then, how to explain the grainy footage on her television set of Afghan mountain men blowing up a Soviet tank?
Ms Herring claims to have shot the film with her son Robin on a secret mission into the mountains of Hindu Kush shortly after the 1979 Soviet invasion. It's a tale that some on the Houston social circuit have been quick to dismiss as Texan-style exaggeration. 'People don't believe that really happened,' says Ms Herring, who won't reveal her age but must be heading for 70. 'They can't imagine me doing that and not telling them.'
What they don't know is that for a time in the 1980s, the heiress, a former beauty queen and television talk-show host, put her formidable social wiles to work fighting communism, came under helicopter assault on a sunny morning in a war zone she had no business entering, and, in the end, helped bring down the Soviet empire.
The world will know the truth soon enough. Julia Roberts plays Ms Herring in Charlie Wilson's War, opposite Tom Hanks. Based on the best-selling book by former 60 Minutes producer George Crile, it will detail how Texas congressman Charlie Wilson almost single-handedly pushed the US to fund the mujahedeen in its fight against the Soviet Union. The production recently finished filming and is due out on Christmas Day.
It was Ms Herring who introduced the gregarious, hard-drinking politician to the cause and initially travelled around the world with him arm-twisting and cutting the backroom deals that helped create the Soviet Union's Vietnam and break its aura of invincibility.
It's a fascinating tale about the dealing, scheming and negotiations that went on before the weapons reached the battlefield. The story is extremely relevant to Afghanistan today, given that many Taleban commanders and Osama bin Laden himself are former members of the Afghan resistance.