> Here, the story takes an even more dystopian turn. John Arnold, “a media-shy billionaire”, uses his own money to help secretly deploy a WAMI system to assist the police in tracking suspects in crime-ridden Baltimore, Maryland. Arnold, who has funded other “new crime-fighting technologies”, first learnt about WAMI’s use overseas from a podcast, and decided to debut it stateside. “Even the mayor was kept in the dark,” Holland Michel writes.

US history is filled with bizarre moments where rich, well-connected individuals have charted the ship towards dangerous shores (or away from them, once in a blue moon). I am currently reading "Charlie Wilson's War" by the reporter George Crile III - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Crile_III - on how the US ended up getting entangled in Afghanistan, and how it eventually led to the formation of Al Qaeda and 9/11. (here's The Economist's review, https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2003/04/24/horseman... and their obituary for Charlie Wilson, https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/02/18/charlie-wilson )

There is a movie on the topic, but I do not recommend it as the tale is far too bizarre to be told in any other way.

The chain of events that ended with the most horrific terror attack in American history started out with a wealthy socialite and debutante, Joanne Herring, who conducted her own shadow foreign policy and convinced Representative Charlie Wilson to intervene by casting aspersions on his manhood. Yes, you read that right. It keeps getting "better,"

> To the uninitiated, Joanne and the baroness appeared to be typical social butterflies, but they actually shared a conspiratorial past. As young debutantes, both had been inducted into the Minutewomen, an offshoot of the ultraright, paramilitary Minutemen. While other debutantes across the country were tittering and talking about boys, Joanne and Buckets were sitting at high tea listening to “patriotic women who cared about their country. They opened my eyes to the conspiracy that threatened our way of life,” remembers Joanne. By the time the two girls were eighteen they had become part of a semisecret national organization of right-wing patriots so convinced of the possibility of a Communist takeover that they were organizing for guerrilla warfare. And like all good Texas girls, Joanne and Buckets had learned to ride and shoot from the earliest age.

I couldn't believe this detail so I fact checked it, and apparently this was all true, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute_Women_of_the_U.S.A.?x The Minute Women of the USA were a McCarthy supporting quasi-paramilitary group of women convinced that a communist takeover of America was imminent. They naturally planned for a guerrilla war.

> “It is difficult talking about this now,” says Herring. “You can easily be thought of as a nut or a nutty hawk.” Nevertheless, she remains deeply proud of her involvement in the arch-conservative organization. That’s where she acquired a “sense of obligation to act like a lady,” which included a commitment to fight Communism. “I decided back then that I would dedicate my life to making the free-enterprise society survive for my children.”

As she was wealthy and had political contacts, she was asked by the State Department to throw parties to entertain visiting dignitaries,

> Houston was a boomtown back then, and when kings and foreign leaders asked to visit, the State Department found it helpful to enlist the ever enthusiastic Herring to entertain. Her parties were always magnificently overdone. For the king of Sweden, there was a sheikh’s-tent discotheque, complete with zebra rugs, stuffed tigers, and belly dancers. She so charmed Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos that when she and her husband visited the Philippines, the Marcoses reciprocated by meeting them with a brass band and an honor guard. Herring soon added Anwar Sadat, King Hussein, Princess Grace, the Shah of Iran, and Adnan Khashoggi to her list of intimate new friends, all of whom were extravagantly entertained at the Herrings’ twenty-two-room River Oaks mansion.

Eventually this led her to become an envoy for Pakistan's democratic government, and an "honorary man" so that she could move freely in the islamic society,

> There was no precedent for an American woman playing such a role on behalf of the Pakistani government, so Pakistan honored Herring with the official status of “honorary man”; she was addressed as “sir.”

But the good times didn't last,

> It was all going very well until the military seized power and hung President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, perhaps best known today as the father of Benazir Bhutto. President Jimmy Carter led the charge in condemning the new dictator, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, accusing him of killing democracy in Pakistan as well as of building an Islamic atomic bomb. Carter cut off all military and economic assistance, declaring Pakistan unworthy of further U.S. aid.

The story keeps getting murkier, as instead of turning away from the new fundamentalist islamic government, she ended up meeting with the dictator, Mr. Zia, and well, it's hard to describe,

> ... explaining that he would never move into Bhutto’s palace as long as his people were starving. The unexpected surprise of this visit was the astonishing impact Herring had on Zia. He was a fundamentalist Muslim and she a born-again Christian. Yet by all accounts, their bond grew so strong that, for a time, she is said to have been Zia’s most trusted American adviser, a development that Foreign Minister Yaqub Khan found alarming. “She absolutely had his ear, it was terrible,” he said.

It is hard to remove the salacious context, but it is unclear whether Ms. Herring and Pakistan's new dictator had an affair. However, their relationship became extremely unusual from almost every perspective,

> It was all the more unusual given that Zia was in the process of reimposing fundamentalist restrictions on women. But he 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.”

And this is what Rep. Wilson said about her bond with the dictator,

> 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.”

To appreciate how bizarre this is, I think it's helpful to zoom out; An American, born-again christian socialite became the trusted advisor to a fundamentalist islamist dictator who gave her honors and declared her to be a "Great Leader."

This private citizen became so close with the person credited for proliferating nuclear weapons technology to Iran, that he would leave cabinet meetings to talk to her.

It's fair to say that's astounding.

This might not have mattered much to American history, if the USSr hadn't been flexing its power in Afghanistan. The US Government's intelligence apparatus believed, correctly, that intervening at too large a scale might blow back on their faces.

However, Ms. Herring did not get the memo. She crossed into Afghanistan in private sorties organized by her friends: the military junta and, their version of the CIA, the ISI (they come up later).

A series of improbably events occur and she comes back after witnessing the atrocities committed by the USSR. These facts were checked by the author, Mr. Crile, across multiple sources,

> there are times when Joanne Herring sounds quite detached from reality. But the stories she told about Fawcett turn out to be largely true, including her account of how he had recently lured her into Afghanistan.

She funded Rep. Wilson's campaigns and had a close relationship with him and emphasized to him how important it was for the "brave fighters" to get weapons,

> “I really gave Zia a story on Charlie,” she recalls, “because I was scared someone could do an investigation of Charlie and write him off. I told Zia, ‘This is the man who can really do it for you.’ You see, they were very frightened of America.” Joanne also began to use all of her wiles to pull Wilson into the Afghan war. “I knew that if he was serious about something, he went all out. I’d say to Charlie, ‘You are powerful, you are wonderful, just think what you can do.’ It had to be a sort of brainwashing,” she explained. “But it was very easy, because Charlie thought in those terms too. You can raise that spirit in a Texan. It’s there.”

> She emphasized how few weapons they had and described how the Afghans treated their guns like library books—as soon as one warrior crossed the border, he would turn in his gun, handing it over to another man going off to face death. “It was so humbling,” she went on. “Nothing ever affected me like seeing those twenty thousand men raising their guns and shouting to fight to the last drop of their blood.”

And that's how we ended up with a single Congressman from Texas and a CIA agent waging the largest covert war in American history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone#Program

It just happened that the people they gave the guns to, those brave fighters... They had always intended to turn on the US. Except now they'd been handed cash, weapons, trained operatives in paramilitary operations, and infrastructure by a tangled spaghetti of resources set up by Operation Cycle, the ISI, and - in a small, initial capacity - Ms. Herring;

> However, Sir Martin Ewans noted that the Afghan Arabs "benefited indirectly from the CIA's funding, through the ISI and resistance organizations,"[69] and that "it has been reckoned that as many as 35,000 'Arab-Afghans' may have received military training in Pakistan at an estimated cost of $800 million in the years up to and including 1988."[70] Some of the CIA's greatest Afghan beneficiaries were Arabist commanders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar who were key allies of bin Laden over many years.[71][72] Haqqani—one of bin Laden's closest associates in the 1980s—received direct cash payments from CIA agents, without the mediation of the ISI. This independent source of funding gave Haqqani disproportionate influence over the mujahideen.[48] Haqqani and his network played an important role in the formation and growth of al Qaeda, with Jalalhuddin Haqqani allowing bin Laden to train mujahideen volunteers in Haqqani territory and build extensive infrastructure there.[73]

There were people at the CIA who protested, but it's a large organization. The right and left hand didn't know what the middle one was doing.

The book is on my list for Project Karl - the modern canon I'm making, https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-George-Crile-eboo... , because it's one thing to know that things are messed up and that no one knows what they're doing, but it's another to take a look behind the curtain and see how things are actually done. The incestuous relationships, the back scratching, and the brownian motion of random actors that can be altered by the most unlikely outsiders (provided they're well connected and rich).

I am worried that something like this might have happened here. That decades from now, we'll identify Mr. Arnold as the new Ms. Herring - a singular person who unleashed a calamity on their fellow citizens. There needs to be a book written about precisely how a "media-shy" man managed get his hands on military tech and turned it on the civilian population.