The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  “But what do they do?” I asked. I was not going to let her off the hook on this one. Not everyone in Damascus has his own security detail.

  She told me the man was a poet, but didn’t really work.

  I interrupted her. “And the wife?”

  “Oh, she works for the president. She’s one of his secretaries.”

  First, let me say that Syria’s president is as remote and mysterious as a Ming emperor. Second, the main reason the United States had an official mission in Damascus was to try to crawl into his head. Since I’d arrived in Damascus, the closest I’d come to the presidency was walking by the front gate of the palace’s compound.

  I should have known that the moment I signed up for Tajikistan, my mother would show up. I’m her only child, and traveling is all that she has in life. I can even mark the day she became a traveler: the day my father left us. I was nine, she just short of thirty. She dropped out of graduate school, grabbed me, and the two of us headed to the airport to catch a flight to Europe—duration and final destination uncertain.

  Years later, when I started to understand a little about marriage, I wondered whether my father, a Los Angeles businessman who’d never wanted to leave California, had held her back from the life she really wanted. Or maybe it was that his leaving had just snapped something inside my mother. I don’t know because we never talked about it.

  The trip to Europe was supposed to be a few months, but turned into something like three years. The only things I knew about friends, family, and home were written on the backs of postcards. My father never wrote, but I don’t know whether it was because he didn’t have our address or because he couldn’t be bothered. And the longer we stayed away, the farther off the beaten path we got.

  During the October 1962 missile crisis, when Kennedy put an embargo on Cuba, we were in Berlin. One day the owner of the little pension we were staying in advised us to leave right away because the Soviets were about to blockade Berlin in retaliation. I was convinced, but my mother scoffed at the idea that anything would happen to us. That same morning we crossed over into the East and spent the day touring its monuments to socialism. Crossing back through Checkpoint Charlie, my mother spotted an East German soldier’s helmet sitting on a wall, untended. She offered me five dollars to grab it and run back into the West with it. I was stung when she called me a bore for refusing.

  My mother picked up friends on our travels, odd ones, from ski bums in Switzerland to poets in Paris. One snowy Christmas Eve in Rome, while, touring the catacombs, she attached herself to a couple of American priests who also happened to be archaeologists. She badgered them into Christmas dinner in order to interrogate them about some new dig she’d read about.

  I have no idea if she missed my father through any of this. As I’ve said, she never talked about the man, and he dropped out of my life like a pebble into the abyss. I would see him once in 1990, but just for a day. She never asked how it went or what we talked about—which, as it turned out, wasn’t much.

  I didn’t lure my mother to Tajikistan to do my dirty work, troll for sources, or make friends for me. I didn’t even want her to come. But as long as she’s here, insisting on socializing with the locals, can I pass up the opportunity?

  Yuri is of course delighted when he hears my mother is visiting, and immediately invites us for dinner at his house. As I counted on, my mother is completely in character, instantly charming Yuri and his wife. They both roar with laughter when she recounts our night at the Tajikistan Hotel.

  I let my mother monopolize the conversation over dinner, dazzled by how Yuri opens up to her. She’s like a seasoned spy, asking why the Soviet Union collapsed, what’s going to happen next, will Russia break up. Yuri is disarmed and amused, completely unable to fend off her questions as he does with me. He tells stories about the worst days of the civil war here. I wish I had mentioned Kulyab to my mother.

  “You will of course come see me in Los Angeles,” my mother says as we stand at the door to say good-bye. She looks at me and says to Yuri, “And don’t bother bringing him. He’s such a bore.”

  Yuri hugs her and promises that if he ever does visit the United States, he wouldn’t consider not stopping by.

  There’s nothing like a mother to close the distance between you and your quarry.

  TWELVE

  I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

  —Casanova

  Washington, D.C.: BOB

  I easily pick out Yuri in the flow of international passengers at Dulles. In his still-crisp, slate-blue suit, with a solid maroon tie, he’s better dressed than anyone else.

  “It’s amazing,” he says as he walks up to me. “They served meals on the airplane. Three of them!” He’s like a child in an amusement park.

  The first night we stay in Washington, but the next morning we fly to South Carolina, where I have a friend who’s arranged two tickets in the president’s box for Clemson University’s homecoming game. I’ve already primed Yuri that my friend, a prominent Clemson alumnus, could get his daughters into the school.

  In the morning, before the game, we walk around campus. There’s a slight chill in the air, and the trees have just started to turn. I ask him if it wouldn’t be wonderful for his daughters to go to school here, reminding him that this is something I could take care of.

  We stop at a table where half a dozen coeds are painting Clemson Tiger paws on fans’ cheeks. I persuade Yuri to get one. As a giggling belle paints one on, I take his picture, telling him it will look good on the Wall of Heroes at Lubyanka, the KGB’s old headquarters.

  Yuri watches the football game without saying a word, sipping a beer and eating popcorn. Every once in a while, after a big play, he asks me what just happened. At halftime, Clemson’s chancellor comes over to introduce himself. He and Yuri talk for a couple of minutes, and the chancellor takes him around to meet some alumni. I wonder what Yuri thinks about all the pastels and plaids, and the easy, uncomplicated lives these people must lead.

  By the second half, Yuri seems convinced he’s stumbled on an American ritual he’ll never understand. The game is lopsided in Clemson’s favor. As the players walk off the field, Yuri asks me who won.

  The next morning we fly to Los Angeles. Yuri thinks it’s to see a different slice of American life, but what I really want is for him to spend more time with my mother.

  We stay at the new Loews in Santa Monica. Five minutes after we separate to go to our rooms, Yuri is knocking at my door. “Can you believe it? There’s a TV in my bathroom.” I remind him not to be shy about sending down his laundry, not mentioning that it will cost more than he makes in a week.

  After dinner we sit on the Loews terrace, drinking margaritas, gazing out at the Pacific. Toward the north, above Malibu, a faint reddish glow marks an out-of-control fire that has been all over the news. “Should we be sitting here?” Yuri asks. “Maybe we should drive there and help.” I tell him there are fires like this all the time around L.A. “What about the people’s houses?” he asks. He listens incredulously as I tell him that they will burn, and the owners will rebuild them with insurance money.

  The next morning I take Yuri to see my mother, who lives in a one-story stucco house in Venice. She pulls him into the house with a hug. “I know you made my bad son keep your promise.” As my mother and I catch up, Yuri looks around the house. He takes a picture off the shelf. It’s my cousin Karen visiting us in Europe when my mother and I lived there in the early sixties. Karen, thirteen, is running down a flight of steps in old Geneva.

  I pick up a framed photo of my maternal grandfather. I tell Yuri about him, how he lived until he was almost a hundred and how he helped raise me when my father left, and how he left small trust funds to his four children. Yuri takes the picture to get a better look. “He looks like a strong man,” he says. I see it too. He died while I was in Beirut. I didn’t attend hi
s funeral. Whatever I was doing seemed too important to take the time to come home.

  We go out back to sit in the bricked-in patio and drink tea. My mother quizzes Yuri about the latest news from Tajikistan. He’s amused all over again by her rapid-fire questions, the way she keeps probing until she gets an answer that satisfies her.

  I have to make a decision before it’s too late. In the back there’s a small guesthouse where Roy and Matt live. Roy is an artist, Matt an attorney for the City of Los Angeles. They are not so much renters as my mother’s friends. I have no idea whether Yuri is offended by homosexuality.

  I’m still pondering it when Roy lets himself in through the side garden gate. As soon as he sees Yuri, Roy puts his thumbs in his belt as if he’s going for his six-shooters and challenges Yuri to a draw in a long-practiced, very good John Wayne imitation. Yuri loves it.

  Roy grabs Yuri to show him his enormous train set, which occupies my mother’s entire garage. I follow them in, watching as Roy points out the balsa-wood town he’s made by hand, and the lakes and snow-covered mountains he spent months painting.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon drinking wine in the garden.

  Early the next morning I go back to see my mother. It’s only today that I notice how much she’s aged since she visited me in Dushanbe. She walks a little more slowly. There are more liver spots on her hands.

  She lights a cigarette, coughing. “Is Yuri your friend?” she asks.

  I don’t answer because I don’t know the answer. Where does my personal life end and my professional one begin?

  I watch as she wipes down the kitchen counter. I suspect that she understands by now that I brought Yuri to the United States to try to recruit him. She must resent being used in this way.

  When my mother goes out to the garden, I follow her. She fills up a water bucket at the faucet. I would help, but her garden is her only occupation other than reading and traveling. “I’m going to move to an apartment,” she says, her back to me. “This place is too difficult to clean.”

  I can’t remember how long ago she started complaining that her house is too large, or why. The place only has four rooms, and they’re small. “I’m thinking about giving it to Roy,” she says. She bends down and pulls out a dead geranium.

  I’ve never imagined living in this house, or really thought much about inheriting anything from her. I think about asking why she wouldn’t give the house to me, her only child, but we never discuss money. I’ve never really talked to her about Roy, either. I’ve just accepted that he’s a friend. Now I wonder what exactly the relationship is.

  But it’s more than that. A couple of months earlier, my mother opened trust accounts for my children’s college education. But rather than make me the trustee, she put them in my wife’s name. She apparently didn’t think I could handle the responsibility. I never could bring myself to ask her about this, either.

  I hope she’s at the end of the bloodletting. But she isn’t. “Is your marriage really falling apart?”

  The abruptness of the question surprises me. I wonder what I can say to make her stop. She looks at me, waiting for an answer.

  “When has it never been falling apart?” I say.

  A month ago I wrote her a letter telling her I intended to divorce. She wrote back a mortifying letter I couldn’t finish.

  She takes a step closer to me. She’s angry now. “You will not divorce, and you will not abandon those children.”

  I think about telling her one more time that my marriage is a façade, empty, doomed. There’s no intimacy between us, none. The French house did nothing for the marriage. My wife only lasted there six months before she packed up and moved to Paris with the kids, taking a temporary job at the embassy. But the real point is that I’ve now been away so long that the children consider me a stranger, unwelcome in the autonomous republic they live in with their mother. I don’t say it, though. The words won’t make the hopelessness of the situation any truer in my mother’s mind.

  I want to ask her why it was okay for her to divorce, leaving me without a father. Or why she never tried to put us together, even for short visits. She never even asked whether I wanted to see him. Why is not having a father unacceptable for her grandchildren, but all right for her son?

  As I stand there watching her pick through her garden, I think about her running away to Europe when I was ten, and then dropping out in Aspen, Colorado, leaving me to conclude that it was acceptable to abandon people, sever bonds for no other reason than to make life more palatable. I don’t know why she didn’t think I’d do the same.

  “I have to go pick up Yuri. I’m already late,” I say. I turn to look at her before I leave, but she’s pruning a bush, her back to me.

  Yuri and I drive to Compton, a rough Los Angeles suburb, where I’ve arranged to spend a day with a police task force that tracks violent felons and gangs. (I’ve told the task force that Yuri is a Russian policeman on a courtesy visit to the United States.) I don’t expect that any tricks our police know will be more sophisticated than the KGB’s, but still he might find it interesting.

  We sit at a wobbly wooden table across from two L.A. sheriff’s deputies who tell us how they monitor released felons. One explains how each of their unmarked patrol cars is linked to the task force’s computer. Units check it for locations they have under watch, trace telephone numbers and license plates, and track outstanding warrants. For instance, if a recently released felon enters a house where they think he’s going to pick up a gun or reconnect with his gang, they can instantly pull up everything they need on the house and its occupants.

  As the deputy is talking, one of the units comes on the air. A just-released gang member has entered a house and come out with a gym bag. “Should we pick him up?” the unit asks. Their suspicion is that the felon has collected a gun. The deputy radios back. No, wait. The unit calls out its locations as it crosses South Central L.A.

  Several cars suddenly come up on the net. “We have an incident,” the patrol car comes up. “We need backup right now.”

  Five minutes later a unit’s on the net again to report that the just-released felon pulled up next to two men standing on the corner. Without warning, he fired out the window at them, missing both. The felon gunned his car, but it stalled. Half a dozen people ran out of a house with guns, firing at the stalled car, killing the felon.

  “It sounds like Tajikistan,” Yuri says.

  I have to wonder if it is a good idea to expose Yuri to my life and a Los Angeles ghetto shoot-out. But my read of Yuri is that if money doesn’t interest him, then the truth does. And the truth I’m trying to convince him of is that he can’t risk letting his daughters grow up in Tajikistan’s violence and corruption. I want him to come to the conclusion that he needs to make a bargain with the devil, spy for the CIA to pay for Clemson. I’m counting on the briefings in Washington to push him over the edge.

  Yuri isn’t allowed in CIA buildings, so I rent two suites at the Sheraton at Tysons Corner. There, over the next two days, headquarters parades through a dozen specialists on Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran. It’s a chorus of grim news. The Taliban’s about to take over Afghanistan, chaos will migrate across the border into Tajikistan, Russia’s too weak to hold it back, Iran’s on the rise.

  I’ve arranged the crucial briefing for last, about heroin smuggling. I already know the analyst will tell Yuri that commerce in the drug could very well bring Tajikistan down. I also know it’s a message Yuri will listen to. He’s told me before how heroin smugglers torture KGB officers by cutting off the tips of their fingers, and then keep cutting until they die from a loss of blood. Afterward, the smugglers throw the corpses, chopped up in a grain sack, on their families’ front steps. Fear, I hope, will drive Yuri into the CIA’s arms.

  There’s a knock at the door, the narcotics briefer. I let him in. He’s a man I’ve seen around headquarters, but I can’t remember his name. The man walks across the room to shake Yuri’s hand. “Hi, I’m Rick Am
es.”

  I go downstairs to make a call, while Ames gives Yuri the bad news about heroin.

  Several months after I’m back in Dushanbe, my communicator hands me a cable from headquarters: The FBI’s just arrested Aldrich “Rick” Ames for spying for Russia, betraying a dozen sources in Moscow, including KGB officers.

  Yuri calls the same day the Ames arrest is reported in Moscow newspapers. “Did you hear?”

  I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “The CIA man arrested,” he says. I can hear the strain in his voice. “I know him.”

  “It’s very unfortunate.”

  “Isn’t he the one I met?” Yuri asks.

  “Yes,” I answer, with my head in my hands. If there were a hole nearby, I might climb in it and pull the dirt on top of me.

  Yuri hangs up.

  Shortly after Ames saw Yuri, Ames went to his last meeting with his Russian KGB handlers. Ames told them about Yuri, and about my intention to recruit him, and the KGB decided it couldn’t take any chances. Although Yuri never betrayed a secret or ever intimated he would, he was recalled to Moscow and lost his job the following week. Langley knew about Ames and must have suspected he’d burn Yuri, but they never told me about the Ames mole hunt before his arrest, or tried to wave me away from having Ames and Yuri meet. Yuri was just a throwaway in the deal, but I suppose I should talk. I’d used my own mother to try to recruit someone who might have been a friend—if I knew for certain what that means.

  THIRTEEN

  The mandate of the Committee on Missing Persons is to establish the fate of missing persons: “The Committee shall look only into cases of persons reported missing in the inter-communal fighting as well as in the events of July 1974 and afterwards.”

  As a result of the violence generated during those times, a total of 502 Turkish Cypriots and 1,493 Greek Cypriots were officially reported as missing by both communities to the CMP. Following a number of recent identifications in the early 2000s, the total number of missing Greek Cypriots actually stands at 1,468.