Siro

by David Ignatius

  DAVID IGNATIUS

  SIRO

  A NOVEL

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Dedication

  For the memory of my grandparents

  And for Eve, Elisa, Alexandra and Sarah

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  OUR GODS

  I: AMY L. GUNDERSON: WASHINGTON / SAMARKAND (JANUARY 1979)

  1

  2

  3

  II: AMOS B. GARRETT: ISTANBUL / WASHINGTON (JANUARY 23–26, 1979)

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  III: SDROTTEN: LONDON / ISTANBUL (FEBRUARY–MARCH 1979)

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  IV: RTACTION: ISTANBUL (MARCH–MAY 1979)

  17

  18

  19

  20

  V: KARPETLAND: WASHINGTON / BROOKLYN (MAY 1979)

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  VI: WILLIAM GOODE: WASHINGTON / ATHENS ISTANBUL / TASHKENT (JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1979)

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  VII: LUCY MORGAN: WASHINGTON / PARIS ISTANBUL (SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1979)

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  VIII: ANNA BARNES: WASHINGTON / ISTANBUL YEREVAN / BOSTON (OCTOBER 1979–DECEMBER 1980)

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Author’s Note

  Praise

  Copyright

  Also by David Ignatius

  OUR GODS

  Older than us, but not by that much, men

  Just old enough to be uncircumcised,

  Episcopalians from the Golden Age

  Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead—

  Always there before us like a mirage,

  Until we tried to get closer, when they vanished,

  Always there until they disappeared.

  They were the last of a race, that was their cover—

  The baggy tweeds. Exposed in the Racquet Club

  Dressing room, they were invisible,

  Present purely in outline like the head

  And torso targets at the police firing

  Range, hairless bodies and full heads of hair,

  Painted neatly combed, of the last WASPs.

  They walked like boys, talked like their grandfathers—

  Public servants in secret, and the last

  Generation of men to prefer baths.

  These were the CIA boys with EYES

  ONLY clearance and profiles like arrowheads.

  A fireside frost bloomed on the silver martini

  Shaker the magic evenings they could be home.

  They were never home, even when they were there.

  Public servants in secret are not servants,

  Either. They were our gods working all night

  To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up

  The House of Priam, who just by pointing sent

  A shark fin gliding down a corridor,

  Almost transparent, like a watermark.

  —FREDERICK SEIDEL, FROM THESE DAYS

  I

  AMY L. GUNDERSON

  WASHINGTON / SAMARKAND

  JANUARY 1979

  1

  Anna Barnes completed her training on the third Wednesday of January 1979, a day after the Shah left Iran. It was not an auspicious moment to sign on as an American intelligence officer. The CIA was scrambling all over Europe and the Middle East that week, trying to save the thousands of Iranians who had been foolish enough to believe that the Imperium Americanum in that part of the world would last more than a few haphazard decades. And the agency was failing. America’s friends (many of them less than admirable characters, it must be said) were being rounded up in Tehran a few had already been killed.

  That January was the sort of moment that intelligence agencies dread, for it seemed to call the entire enterprise into question. An intelligence agency is built around an implicit promise: We will keep faith with you. We will never betray you, or leave you to the mercy of your enemies. But who could believe such a promise from America now? It was always a lie, even in the best of times. Intelligence agencies betray people every day. But they don’t like it to be quite so obvious as it was in those frantic weeks of early 1979, when the United States was on the run and its friends were being pursued like pigs in an abattoir. It looked bad. It frightened the new recruits.

  Anna Barnes didn’t have much of a graduation, as it happened. Late that Wednesday afternoon her instructor finished a lecture on agent development and said: “I guess that’s it.” He shook her hand and walked out the door of the motel room in Arlington where he had been holding classes for the past two weeks. And that was it. There was no diploma, no shaking hands with the director, no fond farewells to classmates, no plans to meet for drinks next summer in Vienna or Peshawar. Anna’s only formal notice that she had completed her training came when she received a letter several days later, officially granting her a pseudonym—Amy L. Gunderson—which she would use forever after in agency cable traffic.

  This can’t be all there is to it, Anna told herself. But in her case, it was. She hadn’t gone to “the farm” for training. She hadn’t been near headquarters. She had not, in fact, attended a single lecture, briefing or orientation session that included any other recruit. Her training had consisted entirely of one-on-one meetings in motel rooms and safe houses around the Washington area. These sessions had covered the standard curriculum in tradecraft: the “flaps and seals” course in opening mail; the “crash-bang” course in high-speed driving and self-defense; the various lessons in recruitment and development of agents. But in every instance, she was the only student.

  It was all very flattering. But for Anna, who a year before had been a doctoral candidate in Ottoman history, it was also a bit lonely. “You’re special,” an instructor had told her early on. That made it sound like a program for children with learning disabilities. But the mandarins knew what they were doing. Anna was in a kind of quarantine, whose purpose was to keep her work as close to secret as possible, even from most of her colleagues. That was because Anna Barnes was about to become a case officer under non-official cover, known in the secret language of the club as a NOC.

  The closest thing Anna had to a real graduation was a meeting in late January with a senior member of the clandestine service named Edward Stone. He had been chief of the Near East Division for more than a decade, but Anna gathered from the person who set up the meeting that Stone was doing something different now, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that was. All they told Anna was that Mr. Stone had heard about her unusual language skills—she had studied French, Turkish, Persian and German at various points during her training as an Ottomanist—and had asked especially to see her before she headed overseas.

  Once upon a time, in the bad-old good-old days, such a meeting would have taken place in a suite at the Madison Hotel, or a private dining room at Rive Gauche, or the drawing room of a retired ambassador in Georgetown. But this was 1979 and the rendezvous took place at a Holiday Inn off Interstate 270, next to a suburban office park and alongside one of those restaurants made out of derelict freight cars. It wasn’t Stone’s fault. That was the way they did things now. So
me congressman might raise hell if word got out that senior CIA officers were meeting young recruits at French restaurants.

  Anna wanted to make a good impression on Stone, but she was still not clear, after all the months of training, just what a woman intelligence officer was supposed to look like. Was she supposed to be sleek or bulky? Plain or pretty? Hard or soft? Anna wasn’t sure, and she suspected that nobody else quite knew either. Women case officers in those days were still rather rare, and women NOCs were almost nonexistent. Which meant, Anna decided, that she could look however she pleased. She chose a sober outfit: blue suit and white cotton blouse. Almost a uniform. Even in this dull garb, she was an attractive woman, with luminous blue-green eyes and shoulder-length black hair, whose dark color was accented by a few strands in the middle that were prematurely turning gray. She had the look of a sleek animal: well bred, but with a distant memory of life in the wild.

  Anna arrived first at the Holiday Inn and went straight to the room. It was as tacky and depressing as only a motel room on an interstate highway can be. She closed the drapes, then sat on the bed and looked around. It seemed possible that in the entire room there was not a single object made of a natural substance. Certainly not the brown fire-retardant drapes; not the green, fringed polyester bedspread; not the wood-grain plastic of the desk and bed tables; not the sooty tan rug; not the grainy bedsheets. Anna was gazing at this artificial landscape when there was a knock at the door and into the room walked a man who was all leather and wool and starched cotton.

  “Hello, my dear,” said Edward Stone, extending his hand. He was a courtly man in his early sixties, well groomed and well spoken.

  “How do you do, sir,” said Anna. She wanted to sound like a military officer, which in a sense was what she was.

  “I do fine. But don’t call me sir. It makes me feel old.”

  So he’s a flirt, thought Anna.

  “I brought you a little something,” said Stone. He walked over to the bed, sat down, and opened a brown shopping bag. Inside was a bottle of French champagne. He forced the cork, which exploded noisily and hit the ceiling, just missing the automatic sprinkler.

  “I didn’t bring any glasses, I’m afraid,” said Stone. He went to the bathroom and retrieved two squat motel-issue tumblers, into which he poured champagne up to the rim.

  “Welcome to the club,” he said, raising his glass.

  Anna lifted her glass and took a long drink. The fizz of the champagne tickled her nose and throat.

  “To success,” said Stone.

  “To not screwing up,” replied Anna.

  Stone smiled. “Don’t worry. You’ll find that the job is actually very easy. Absurdly easy, when things are going right.”

  They sat down in two Holiday Inn chairs by the window. Anna had pulled the drapes for security, but Stone opened them again. The winter sun was shining, glinting off the tile at the bottom of the empty pool. Stone took off the jacket of his gray pinstripe suit and unbuttoned his vest. He looked at once elegant and weary.

  “Always close the drapes,” said Anna, repeating a nugget of tradecraft that one of her instructors had dispensed several months before.

  “We’re in Rockville,” said Stone. “Nobody cares.”

  Anna nodded. She felt like a greenhorn.

  Stone had another drink of champagne and turned to his young companion. “Tell me a bit about yourself,” he said. “I gather you were studying Ottoman history. That sounds exciting.”

  “Not to most people,” said Anna. “My dissertation topic was ‘Administrative Practices in the Late Ottoman Empire.’ ”

  “And what was it about?”

  “It was about how empires try to save themselves in their declining years.”

  “How timely,” said Stone. “And how did the Ottomans try to save themselves, if I may ask?”

  “By keeping their subjects at each other’s throats. The Ottomans were masters at sowing dissension. It was one of the few things they were good at, actually.”

  “Not really an option for us, is it?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Why did you leave this sublime work and decide to be an intelligence officer?”

  “I was bored,” said Anna. It was the truth, or at least part of it. After her third year of work on her dissertation, she had felt as dead as the Ottoman texts she was studying. She was falling out of love with an associate professor of English whose idea of a big time was buying an ice-cream cone at Steve’s, and she wanted a change. She had delivered a paper on the Ottomans at an agency-sponsored conference, been approached afterward by a recruiter, and never looked back.

  “Dubious motivation,” said Stone.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll find that the work of an intelligence officer, when performed competently, is also extremely boring.”

  Anna studied Stone’s face. He didn’t look bored. He just looked tired.

  “More champagne?”

  “Definitely,” said Anna. He filled both glasses.

  “And how did you learn all those languages?” asked Stone.

  “I had to,” said Anna. “It’s sort of a union card for Ottomanists.”

  “Is it?”

  “The Ottoman historians have a joke,” she explained. “A young graduate student goes to the professor and says he wants to be an Ottomanist. ‘Do you read Turkish?’ asks the professor. Yes. ‘Do you read Arabic?’ Yes. ‘Do you read Persian?’ Yes. ‘Do you read German?’ Yes. ‘Do you read Russian?’ No. ‘Well, come back when you learn to read Russian.’ ”

  Stone laughed. “That’s very funny,” he said.

  “I used to think so, too,” said Anna. “Until I tried to study Russian.”

  “Well now,” said Stone genially, finally getting around to the point. “You’re probably wondering what this meeting is all about.”

  “Actually, yes. I was wondering that.”

  “If it’s any relief, I don’t intend to give you a lecture about how hard it is for a woman to be a case officer.”

  “Good,” said Anna. “I’ve already had that lecture. Several times.”

  “And you shouldn’t take any of what I’m going to tell you too seriously, because you won’t be working for me. You’ll be working for the chief of the London station, and through him for the chief of the European Division. Nonetheless, I did want to meet you myself before you headed out because, from your résumé, you appear to be a promising young officer.”

  Anna narrowed her eyes. “What are you chief of, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Good question,” he said. Anna waited for a response, but it didn’t come. Apparently it was not such a good question, or at least not one that Stone intended to answer. He sat in his chair, holding his champagne glass up to the light and watching the bubbles.

  “This is not a very happy time for the United States,” Stone continued after a few moments. “And it is an especially unhappy time for the organization you are joining. We’re not supposed to say that. But it should be obvious to any intelligent person.”

  “I don’t have much to compare it with,” said Anna.

  “Of course you don’t. But take my word for it. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine. Next month.”

  Stone sighed and shook his head. “As you’ll soon discover,” he said, “it’s not much fun to operate in this sort of environment. It’s much easier when you’re on top of the hill and everybody wants to be your friend. When you’re king of the hill, you don’t have to recruit agents. They recruit themselves. They think that helping the United States will make them rich or powerful. Nowadays, people must worry that it will get them killed.”

  “Come now,” said Anna. “Things can’t be that bad.”

  Stone gave a thin smile. He looked so tired and gloomy that Anna felt she should try to cheer him up. He reminded her slightly of a philosophy professor she’d had at Harvard, a man who had concluded late in life that the world was such a mess that intellectu
al work was pointless. Anna had tried to cheer him up too, to encourage him to return to teaching and writing, until she realized one day that the despairing old professor was actually trying to seduce her. That made his angst somewhat less compelling, and she snubbed him. Stone couldn’t be that demoralized.

  “Personally, I can’t wait to get started,” she said cheerily.

  “Glad to hear it,” said Stone. “Glad to hear it. And you’ll be going to London as a NOC, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your cover will be as a banker with a firm called Halcyon Ltd.?”

  “Yes.” Anna wondered how Stone knew these details. They were supposed to be closely held secrets.

  “And who are you supposed to handle, exactly?”

  Anna thought a moment. “I’m not sure. People passing through London, Iranians, Arabs, Turks. They weren’t very specific.”

  “Quite a handful.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What about Uzbeks?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What about people from the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan? Did anyone suggest that you should try to make contact with them?”

  “No.”

  “Or Azeris. Or Armenians. Or Abkhazians. Or Kazakhs? With your language skills, you would be an ideal person to work with such people. Anybody mention them?”

  “Nope.”

  Stone nodded. “Of course they didn’t. Why should they? People from the Caucasus and Central Asia don’t travel much to London. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Which is a shame.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my dear, they are the key to the puzzle.”

  Anna studied him, trying to figure out what he was talking about. what key? What puzzle?

  “We have a problem with the Soviet Union, as you have undoubtedly noticed from reading the newspapers,” continued Stone. “But what, exactly, is this problem?”

  Anna shrugged her shoulders.

  “The problem is that the Russians appear to be strong and confident, while the United States appears to be confused and weak. And that seems to be especially true in the great disaster area that stretches from Turkey to Afghanistan, which the newsmagazines lately have taken to calling ‘the crescent of crisis.’ That is what most people perceive, is it not?”