Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Yes,” said Anna. Why, she wondered to herself, is he telling me all this?

  “But the reality is quite different, if only we had enough sense to see it.” Stone raised his index finger, as if he had just come to this conclusion. “It is the Soviet Union that is weak in that part of the world. Fatally weak. And it is the United States that has the leverage, if we would only use it. For the Soviet Union is, to put it bluntly, a vast house of cards waiting for a strong breeze.”

  “It looks pretty solid to me.”

  “Of course it does—at the center. It’s all too solid there. But at the edges, it’s falling apart. It’s a mess. All anyone has to do is blow hard and the entire country is going to fall over. Just ask an Armenian, or a Georgian, or an Uzbek. He’ll tell you.”

  Anna eyed him curiously. She thought she was beginning to get the point. “How am I going to meet any Uzbeks?” she said. “As you were saying, they don’t pass through London much.”

  “Keep your eyes open.”

  “Is that an assignment?”

  “Of course not,” said Stone, drawing back in his chair. “I have no authority to give you assignments. Moreover, it would be against official policy.”

  “What policy?”

  “The United States has a strict policy against encouraging secessionist feelings in any of the Soviet republics.”

  “Why? If I’m allowed to ask.”

  “Because it is thought to be too dangerous. It looks too much like going for the jugular. I rather like that aspect, myself. But our friends at the State Department seem to think it could lead to nuclear war.”

  “Oh.”

  “So it would be wrong of me to encourage you to do any such thing.”

  “Um-hum,” said Anna. She couldn’t help smiling.

  “Quite wrong,” repeated Stone. He smiled back at her.

  “And in the unlikely event that I should ever meet one of these untouchable characters, who should I tell about it?”

  “Oh, I’m probably as good a person to contact as anyone,” said Stone, still smiling. He didn’t look quite so tired anymore.

  Stone drained his glass of champagne and glanced at his watch.

  “Alas,” he said, “I must attend a meeting back at headquarters. How much nicer it would be to spend the afternoon talking with you about the real work of intelligence. But that would offend the paper pushers, I’m afraid.”

  He rose from his chair and shook her hand. “You are a person of considerable talent. I expect great things from you.”

  “Thanks,” said Anna.

  “You must come see me on your next trip home.”

  “I’d like to,” said Anna. “Very much.”

  She was going to ask Stone how she could contact him, just in case she ever needed to reach him in a hurry. But he was out the door and gone.

  2

  The night before Anna Barnes left for London, she had dinner with her mentor, Margaret Houghton. It was a fitting send-off, since it was Margaret who in a sense had gotten the whole thing started. “Aunt Margaret,” though not actually an aunt, was an old friend of the family, a slender, soft-spoken woman who came to dinner on Christmas and Easter and brought the children exotic gifts from around the world.

  Anna had known for years, in the way that one knows something mildly scandalous about a relative, that Margaret Houghton did something mysterious for a living. No one would ever say what; apparently it was too awful to be discussed. Anna had forced the issue one Christmas and asked her father where Margaret worked. He had rolled his eyes and said: “You know … up the river.” He might have been talking about the Amazon, for all Anna knew. But when she finally caught on, she found the idea quite titillating. Aunt Margaret worked at the CIA!

  Margaret’s cover had always been her gentility. She was a slight woman now in her early sixties, who wore her hair in a neat bun, and would occasionally brush an invisible wisp of it off her scarcely lined forehead. She had a fine, long neck and a graceful carriage, and a trace of an old southern accent in her voice. But there was something about her that hinted that she was a woman who at some point had lived a great adventure. A tragic romance, perhaps, or a fortune squandered. A hundred years ago, people would have described her as “European,” and not meant it entirely as a compliment.

  The two of them seemed an innocent enough pair as they entered Jean-Pierre restaurant on K Street: Margaret dressed in a brown tweed suit that hid her figure; Anna in a gray cashmere dress that flattered hers. Two generations of handsome, well-educated women. Mother and daughter, perhaps; or, more likely, a stylish maiden aunt taking her favorite niece out for dinner. A fellow diner would have taken them for anything but what they were. And that, as Margaret liked to say, was only one of the advantages that women had in the intelligence business.

  Anna let the maître d’ remove her coat. It had been chilly outside. She tilted her head forward to remove a silk scarf, and back, so that her long black hair fell free. She followed the maître d’ and Margaret to a quiet table in the rear. Anna’s movements were easy and uncontrived, but she caught the attention of several male diners in the restaurant.

  “I still have one reservation about you,” said Margaret when they were seated. “You may be too attractive for this line of work.”

  Margaret had made a similar observation a year before, when Anna first expressed an interest in joining the clandestine service. She was still a graduate student then, writing the dissertation that she couldn’t seem to finish, living with the man she didn’t quite love, and feeling ready to explode. Initially, Margaret had discouraged her from joining the agency. “If you have something to prove, stay away,” Margaret had said. “We don’t need women with chips on their shoulders, or slits in their skirts.” Margaret’s remark had seemed unfair to Anna then, but the point had been made. Beauty was insecure. It called attention to itself.

  “I’m celebrating!” said Anna. She lit a cigarette.

  Beauty aside, Anna had struck everyone as a natural for the CIA. Her father had been a foreign service officer, so she had traveled the world as a girl, learning languages and studying strange cultures. Her mother had died of cancer when Anna was in her early teens, so she had drawn even closer to her father. She was still the ambassador’s daughter—still fascinated by his world, still peering through the door of his study to the smoke-filled room where he read his books and drafted his cables. Except now the door was wide open, and she could walk through. In that sense, Anna was part of the new line of succession that had begun to develop in the 1970s among children of the Establishment. The sons might be living at the summer house in Maine year-round, or studying astrology in New Mexico. But the daughters were there, waiting to take their places at the great law firms and banking houses. And yes, even at the CIA.

  “Who’s Edward Stone?” asked Anna, exhaling a big puff of smoke.

  “Why on earth do you want to know that?”

  “I met him a few days ago. He seemed like an awfully nice man, but I couldn’t tell what he wanted.”

  “That’s his style,” said Margaret. “He never says what he wants. He lets you figure it out.”

  “So you know him.”

  “Of course I know him. You forget. I know everybody.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. He used to run the Near East Division. But I gather he has his own compartment now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I don’t know.”

  “Does he have anything to do with the Soviet Union?”

  “Shhh.”

  The waiter arrived. Margaret ordered a Tanqueray martini, straight up, with a twist of lemon. Anna ordered the same thing. It was a celebration, after all. The waiter looked surprised. In the fraternity of waiters, women dining together are regarded as cheapskates. They don’t drink, they order salads, and they tip ten percent. Spending money in restaurants does not ordinarily give them the same rosy glow of substantiality it d
oes men. Margaret had discovered some years ago that if she ordered food and drink like a man, she would be treated like one, at least by waiters.

  “What’s he like?” asked Anna.

  “Who?”

  “Stone.”

  “He’s one of the old boys. I suppose he’s like the rest of them, only a bit smarter. To be honest, when you’ve been around them as long as I have, their personalities begin to blur a bit.”

  “What are they like then, the old boys?”

  “You know very well what they’re like,” said Margaret. “They drink too much. They screw too much. They’re smooth and confident and they like to talk loud in restaurants.”

  “Stone wasn’t loud.”

  “He’s quieter. But he’s still one of the boys. You have to remember that I have spent a lifetime watching these men, usually from a quite subordinate position. So I know the sorts of things about them that they don’t know about each other.”

  “Like what?”

  “Their vanity. Their anxieties. Their weaknesses. The things that women know about men. Although in Stone’s case, I must admit I’ve never heard him express a moment’s anxiety or doubt about anything.”

  The waiter returned with the drinks.

  “To London!” said Margaret, clinking her glass.

  “To success!” responded Anna. She was beginning to like this idea of a secret club whose mission was to travel abroad, eat in good restaurants and save the world.

  “He seemed sort of sexy,” continued Anna. “For a man in his sixties.”

  “Who?”

  “Stone.”

  Margaret laughed. “Of course he does,” she said. “They all do. That’s the thing about secrets. They give a man a certain air of knowing what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t have a clue. I think that’s why they all stayed in so long, actually.”

  “To get laid?”

  “Really, Anna!” Margaret looked at the younger woman in mock horror. But of course that was exactly what she meant.

  “What would he be like to work for?”

  “Why? Did he offer you a job?”

  “No,” said Anna. “I was just curious.”

  “He’d be fine, up to a point. But what you have to understand about the old boys is that it is hard for them to imagine women as colleagues. They think of us the way adults think of children. They like us, enjoy us. Respect us, even. But we are in a different category.”

  “Stone looked tired.”

  “They all look tired,” said Margaret. “And no wonder. They are tired. Exhausted. Things haven’t been going too well for the old boys, if you hadn’t noticed. Their world is collapsing, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

  “What about the younger ones?”

  “They’re a mess.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They would like to be like the old boys, but they can’t because the world has changed. The dumb ones still try. But the smart ones know it’s impossible.”

  “So what do they do, the smart ones?”

  “They get flaky. Or they quit.”

  The waiter approached again and recited the evening’s specials.

  “I’ll have the string-bean salad,” said Anna, “and the grilled sole, with no sauce.” The waiter frowned.

  “That’s not much of a meal,” said Margaret. She turned to the waiter. “I’ll have oysters. And a rib-eye steak.” Her tone conveyed the authority of the carnivore.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Anna. “I’ll have the same thing. The oysters and the steak.”

  “Yes, madam,” said the waiter, radiating the glow of his now quite substantial customers. “Would you like to see the wine list?”

  “Of course,” said Anna. And she picked out a quite respectable red Burgundy.

  Anna had not been entirely honest with Stone, or with Margaret, for that matter. The factors that had drawn her toward working for the CIA were more complicated than simple boredom. She was afflicted with the disease, common and occasionally fatal among intelligence officers, of wanting to make the world better. She had, in that sense, a deadly ambition to do good. What had pushed her toward leaving Harvard was a growing sense of the disarray and misery in the world. She read about Lebanese being slaughtered on the streets of Beirut or the massacres by the Khmer Rouge and she wanted to do something about it. When people experience such feelings in their late teens, they join protest marches; when it happens in their late twenties, they—on occasion—join the CIA.

  Anna had not been completely honest about her research either. Far from the dry investigation she had described to Stone, it was wet with the blood of generations of Ottoman victims. Her dissertation had brought her to the edge of one of the world’s great calamities—the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the slaughter of Armenians and Turks in eastern Anatolia. She had become interested in the subject initially through her freshman roommate at Radcliffe, an Armenian-American named Ruth Mugrditchian. Poor Ruth, with the unpronounceable name and the large, sad eyes. Her family lived in Worcester, and Anna—the Wasp princess from boarding school—had not been sure at first whether to accept when Ruth invited her home for Thanksgiving. But she said yes, and the tales she heard over those four days about the massacres of 1915 left a lasting impression. She heard how Ruth’s great-aunt Ahvanie had staggered across the Syrian desert with a Bible in her hand, collapsed in a ditch exhausted and starving, and been left for dead—yet somehow summoned enough strength from her Bible to make it to Aleppo, and then America. She heard the story of Suren, the grandfather of Ruth’s cousin, whose dying mother had bribed an Arab to take her little son and hide him in a well until the Turks were gone. Suren, too, eventually made it to America. It was like joining a private conspiracy, hearing these tales of suffering and redemption, and to a Radcliffe freshman from an old Yankee family, they left a taste as sharp as a ripe fig.

  Anna’s problem was that in addition to liking Armenians, she also liked Turks. She found them, on the whole, a rather attractive and disciplined people. That deepened for her the mystery of what had happened in Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would have been simpler if the massacres had been conducted by utterly despicable people. But that would have made the moral dilemma too easy. What interested her, Anna decided, was when civilized people did monstrous things. Those were the events worth studying.

  Once Anna became an Ottoman historian in earnest, her studies evolved into a search for the moment at which the world had jumped the tracks and the horrific history of the twentieth century—the two world wars, the slaughter of six million Jews, the death of twenty million Soviets during World War II and a like number in Stalin’s gulags—could be said to have begun. Anna suspected that it was Ruth Mugrditchian who knew the true answer. The world went mad on April 8, 1915, the day Ottoman Turks began to march the Armenian population of Anatolia, more than a million people, across the deserts to their death. Like a good scholar, Anna began to look for the roots of that madness. And the search carried her toward the secret world where all great tragedies begin. Eventually, one of her professors approached her and made the necessary introductions. He saw in Anna the ability to work alone, which every scholar must have, and also an idealism and a need to act that could be harnessed to the purposes of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Anna took a big drink of her gin martini. “Here’s to women in the business!” Her bravado didn’t quite conceal the edge of anxiety in her voice.

  “Shhh,” said Margaret, clinking her glass.

  “I probably shouldn’t say this,” said Anna, “but I’m a little nervous.”

  “Of course you are,” answered Margaret. “I’d be worried if you weren’t.”

  “Tell me something honestly,” said Anna. “Can a woman really do this job as well as a man?”

  “Absolutely,” said Margaret. “I am living proof of it.”

  Anna smiled. She knew enough, by this time, to understand the limits of M
argaret’s experience and accomplishments. Margaret was a trailblazer, yes. But she had worked mostly at headquarters, mostly in administration. Her recruitments had largely been of American professors and businessmen, nice, gentle, patriotic fellows who traveled to conferences in the Eastern bloc. When she finally made station chief, it was in one of those nondescript little countries of Western Europe where the biggest threat to national security was that somebody might steal the secret recipe for making the national brand of cheese.

  “I guess I need a little handholding,” said Anna.

  Margaret took Anna’s hand in hers.

  “I didn’t mean literally,” said Anna. But she left her hand in Margaret’s for a moment.

  “You must remember that women have some big advantages in our line of work,” said the older woman.

  “Name one.”

  “I’ll name several. We can control our emotions better than men. We can be braver, more disciplined, more discreet. And we can be invisible where a man would immediately be suspect.”

  “How can a woman be invisible?”

  “What is ordinary is invisible. And there is nothing on earth more ordinary than a woman meeting with a man. That’s why an American woman can go to dinner with a foreign man, even in Moscow, without arousing suspicion. People will look at them drinking and talking, and assume they know what’s going on.”

  Anna looked around the restaurant, at the tables of men and women talking. It was true. There was no better cover.

  “But women do have one great disadvantage,” said Margaret.

  “What’s that?”

  “They must deal with men.”

  Anna laughed.

  “It is a sad fact of life.” Margaret continued, “that the people with secrets are likely to be men. And it is another fact that most men don’t regard women as equals. Consequently, they don’t trust women, and that means they don’t feel comfortable putting their lives in the hands of a woman.”

  “They would rather hit on women.”

  “Excuse me?”