Siro

by David Ignatius

  “No. But NOCs don’t hang out together. We’re supposed to be anonymous. Who’s Jack Rawls anyway?”

  “Probably nobody,” said Taylor. “I saw him in a bar a few weeks ago. He’s another Central Asia junkie. I thought maybe he might be a member of the brethren.”

  “Beats me. But I’m a new kid.”

  Taylor kept his eyes on the road as it wound along the Bosporus, still thinking about Rawls. No, he decided. It couldn’t be. They weren’t that smart back at headquarters.

  “Forget Rawls,” he said. “This crowd doesn’t want to make trouble in Tashkent. They just want to stay afloat. Anyway, Central Asia is off-limits.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Anna. “But I’m not so sure everybody follows the rules.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Anna didn’t answer at first. Then she turned to Taylor.

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Have you ever met Edward Stone?”

  “The big shot, back at headquarters?”

  Anna nodded.

  “Nope. Heard about him, but never met him. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he’s interested in Central Asia, too.”

  “Is that so?” said Taylor, enunciating each word. “Is that so? Tell me more.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know any more.”

  “Son of a gun,” said Taylor, shaking his head. Maybe there was life in the old corpse yet.

  “I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” said Anna. She made a mental note to send a message to Stone, when she returned to London, summarizing what Ali Ascari had said about the shipment of guns across the Soviet border. It would be a way of making amends for her indiscretion.

  “No,” said Taylor. “You probably shouldn’t have. But that’s what I like about you.” Taylor made a mental note, too. There was a certain item he should retrieve from an apartment off Yeniceriler Street.

  They returned to Istanbul just after eight and had another drink in the hotel bar. Taylor leaned close to Anna and talked almost in a whisper. It was bedroom talk, but it never got to the bedroom. Anna said good night just before ten. She had a plane to catch the next morning, and the somewhat tangled strands of a new career to pick up back in London. It wouldn’t do to fall for an outrageous character like Taylor on a one-night stand in Istanbul.

  IV

  RTACTION

  ISTANBUL

  MARCH–MAY 1979

  17

  Taylor retrieved the Rawls tape the day after Anna Barnes left Istanbul. He had no idea what it might contain, much less what he would do with it. The recorder was still operating after more than a month, just as George Trumbo had said it would be. But transcribing the tape was a bit awkward. Taylor didn’t want to give it to one of Timmons’s technicians in Ankara, who might begin asking questions. He decided against having his own secretary transcribe it, for the same reason. So with some cryptic telephonic advice from George in Athens, he struggled himself through the many hours of conversation recorded over the past month.

  Once Taylor began reviewing the Rawls tape, he couldn’t stop. He stayed up all one night and into the next morning, listening and transcribing in longhand the parts that interested him most. What he heard, as he sat listening on the floor of his apartment in Arnavutkoy, surprised even a career neggo who had made it a practice never to be surprised by anything: Mr. Jack Rawls, the putative film producer from British Columbia, was organizing what sounded like a private army of Central Asian émigrés.

  Rawls began each conversation the same way: He would thank the visitor for coming, talk a little nonsense about his documentary film on Soviet émigrés, and then move gradually into a discussion of the history and politics of Central Asia. He seemed to be trying to gauge the intensity and commitment of each of his visitors. As Rawls talked passionately in his TV preacher’s voice and the visitors responded in kind, the sessions took on the air of a revival meeting.

  The first meeting was with a man who called himself Abdallah. Taylor imagined him to be a short dark man with broad cheekbones and hollow eyes. Rawls began with pleasantries, invocations of Allah and talk about his movie. Then, when he had established that his visitor’s family was from Tashkent, at the center of the vast expanse of Central Asia once known as Turkestan, Rawls began turning the crank.

  “The Russians have dismembered Turkestan,” said Rawls, speaking in his language-school Turkish. Taylor clasped the earphones tight, trying to hear every word above the hiss of the tape. “The Russians in Moscow took the great land of Turkestan, which stretches from the Black Sea to China, and what did they do with it? They colonized it!”

  “Oh yes!” chimed in Abdallah.

  “Yes, my friend,” returned Rawls. “The Russians cut great Turkestan into little pieces. They took the vast and noble empire of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and divided it into five little pieces they could swallow. Uzbekistan. Tajikistan. Kazakhstan. Turkmenistan. Kirgizia. Little lands, too small to fight. And then, when great Turkestan was weakened, the Russians destroyed the mosques! Stalin tried to keep his crime secret, but I have the numbers.”

  “You do?”

  “Listen! In 1917, there were 26,000 mosques across Turkestan and the Caucasus. By 1942, only 1,312 remained!”

  “Shame!” said Abdallah. His voice was trembling.

  “And do you know what the Russians call the sons of noble Turkestan today? They call them chernozhopy, which means ‘black bottoms.’ ”

  “No!”

  “Or they call them churka, which means ‘wood chips’! Do you understand me? The Russians think your boys are as dumb as chips of wood.”

  “Allah!”

  “The sons of your land! Black bottoms and wood chips!”

  “Yok! We must teach them a lesson!”

  “Yes. But we must be careful.”

  “What should we do?” The émigré’s voice had the eager sound of a believer waiting for the good news.

  “Perhaps my friends can help,” said Rawls slowly.

  “Who are your friends?”

  “My friends in America.”

  “The CIA?”

  “Do not mention that name, ever. I told you that you must be careful.”

  “Am I dreaming?” cried Abdallah. “Do you mean that you are ready to help us at last? I have waited my lifetime for this!”

  “My friend, great Turkestan is the last colony on earth. When was Algeria freed? Twenty years ago. And Kenya and the Congo and all those little black African lands. Great Turkestan is still waiting, but its time will come.”

  “Allah!” thundered Abdallah. “You will help us at last!”

  Rawls spent the remainder of that conversation swearing Abdallah to secrecy and warning him to tell no one—absolutely no one—about their contact. “Free Turkestan!” said Rawls as they parted.

  “Free Turkestan!” repeated Abdallah.

  Taylor moved the tape forward to another session. This time Rawls’s visitor refused to give his name. But as the conversation progressed, it became clear that he was one of the so-called Meshki Turks, whose families had been deported from Georgia to Uzbekistan in 1944. Rawls played him like a virtuoso. Taylor listened to the tape with a mounting sense of Rawls’s skill as an intelligence officer.

  “Where was your family from, my friend?” Rawls began, oh so gently.

  “From Akhalkali district, in southern Georgia.”

  “And you spoke Turkish there?”

  “Yes. Turkish. Always Turkish. Until 1935, when they told us we were Azeris and made us learn the Azeri language. No one knew why. In those days, you did not ask.”

  “And what happened in 1944?”

  “My family was sent away.”

  “And where were they sent?”

  “To Uzbekistan, near Ferghana. They went by wagon.”

  “And many died?”

  “Yes, very many. My aunt died. My brother died.” He paused and took a breath. “My mother died. And for no reason. What had she done?
What had any of us done? Why did they move us like that in the middle of the night, and take us a thousand miles away from our homes, for no reason?”

  “It was genocide.”

  “Yes, it was,” said the visitor. “But the world knows nothing of it.”

  “You are wrong,” said Rawls. “We know, and we have not forgotten.”

  “Who?”

  “My friends in America. We have kept records. We know that 200,000 people were deported from Meshketia on the night of November 15, 1944. We know that at least 50,000 people died on their way to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And we know why.”

  “You do?” He sounded dazed, as if the American were suddenly offering to solve the riddle of his life.

  “Your family and the thousands of other Moslem Turks of Meshketia were deported because Stalin was preparing to seize the provinces of eastern Turkey—Kars and Ardahan—that he claimed belonged to the Soviet Union. And he did not want your people, ethnic Turks, to cause trouble. So you were moved. Overnight. And if 50,000 of you died on the way, what did it matter to Stalin? You were just poor Turks! You were expendable.”

  “What a monster! What a crime!”

  “My friends say there is an answer.”

  “What is that?”

  “Free Turkestan!”

  The Meshki Turk inhaled sharply, as if the idea were too dangerous and intoxicating to be breathed in normally. “Free Turkestan!” he said, repeating the two words as if they were the very essence of life.

  “Perhaps that is the way to avenge the genocide of the Meshki Turks and protect their rights.”

  “Free Turkestan!” said the man once more.

  “But only a powerful movement can free Turkestan from its Russian masters and provide safety for its people, from the Black Sea to Sinkiang!”

  “Is such a thing possible?”

  “I don’t know. But perhaps my friends in America can help.”

  And so it went with each of the half dozen visitors to Rawls’s safe house in Bayezit. He altered his pitch slightly for each one. He told the Crimean Tatar about Stalin’s folly in branding a whole race—the sons and daughters of the Crimea—as traitors to the Soviet Union. He wept with a Chechen for the tragedy of their lost and plundered homeland. He raged with an Uzbek about the way that Russians from Moscow had plundered and destroyed the beautiful Aral Sea, the jewel of Central Asia.

  One consistent theme, in each of the conversations, was that at some point Rawls would ask the same question: Are you a member of one of the Sufi brotherhoods? Are you a Naqshbandi, or a Qadiri, or a Yasawi, or a Kubrawi? Have you visited the holy places? Shah-i-Zindeh in Samarkand, the burial place of Qutham Ibn Abbas, the “living saint,” who was decapitated in battle and carried his head with him into a well, from which he performs miracles for the faithful? Or the shrine in Kazakhstan of Ahmad Yasawi, the founder of the brotherhood that bears his name? Or the tomb of Ali at Shah-i-Mardan in the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan? Or the tombs of the great Bahaeddin Naqshband, near Bukhara, and Yaqub Charki near Daghestan? They always said no, Rawls’s visitors, but that didn’t mean much. Sufis always denied that they were members of any brotherhood. What mattered was that Rawls asked the question.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” said Taylor aloud when he finished reviewing the tapes. He went first to Stanley Timmons. The station chief had scheduled a golf game that afternoon, but at Taylor’s insistence he postponed it. Taylor flew to Ankara with the Rawls tape in his briefcase. Timmons was waiting in his office with his deputy.

  “Can I see you privately?” asked Taylor.

  “Gee, I guess so,” said Timmons, apologizing to his deputy and escorting him to the door. He turned to Taylor. “What’s the big deal? Why the crash meeting?”

  “Stanley,” said Taylor. “I want you to be honest with me about something.”

  “Sure,” said Timmons. “If I can be.”

  “Are you running a NOC operation in Istanbul I don’t know about? One involving a guy whose cover name is Rawls and who is pretending to be a Canadian filmmaker from Vancouver?”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Hmmm,” said Timmons. “No. I don’t think so. At least not so far as I can recollect. Of course, I probably couldn’t tell you if we did have such an operation going. Because if you were supposed to know about it, you already would. But no, actually, it doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Then I have some bad news for you. I think someone is running an operation behind your back.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Are you sure?” Taylor’s tone was sharp and skeptical.

  Timmons scratched his head. “Well, no. Not completely. On rare occasions, I suppose I might not be informed.”

  “Such as?”

  “Cover problems. If headquarters sent a NOC to do something extra sensitive, they might want to keep it away from the embassy. They might even want to keep it away from the station chief. That’s possible. Or sometimes headquarters might want to send someone into the embassy under deep cover, as an admin officer or USIA man, and for security reasons, that person would have no contact with the station whatsoever. That happens.”

  Timmons coughed nervously and lit a cigarette. He was working himself into a state of some anxiety as he imagined the various scenarios in which he might be left in the dark.

  “Perhaps,” said Timmons, “you had better give me some details about this operation that you claim is being run behind my back.”

  “Gladly. But I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “That you won’t tell headquarters how I found out.”

  “How can I promise that? Maybe you did something unethical.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Okay, fine. I promise. Now tell me the story about … what did you say his name was?”

  “Rawls. That’s his work name at least. I first saw him a month ago in Omar Gaspraly’s bar in Bayezit.”

  “Who’s Omar Gaspraly, for crying out loud?”

  “He’s a Tatar whose family ran away from the Crimea a long time ago. His place is kind of a hangout for émigrés from Central Asia. They all go there and get smashed and pretend they’re going to liberate the motherland.”

  “Go on, go on.” Timmons, his curiosity aroused, was now eager for details. He was like a cuckolded husband determined to know precisely what his wife had done to him.

  “I’m there late one evening with George Trumbo from Athens, who had come in to help me with the Kunayev operation.”

  “I remember,” said Timmons dubiously.

  “I’m trying to find George a girl when Omar tells me there’s another American in the bar. And it’s this guy Rawls, talking to a couple of wild-eyed Uzbeks. I’m kind of curious, so I send George over to check him out. He says he’s a filmmaker from British Columbia, doing a documentary on Soviet émigrés, and gives George his card.”

  “Sounds like a company man. The Canadians don’t have anything going in Turkey.”

  “That’s what I thought. And it pissed me off. So I decided to find out what was going on. I was slightly drunk at the time, to be honest, so maybe that’s why I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I followed him home and had George bug his apartment. It was a stupid thing to do.” Taylor tried to sound contrite.

  “Is that all? Is that what I had to promise not to tell anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Forget it. Who cares. Get to the good part. What’s on the tape?”

  “Some strange stuff. Rawls meets every few days with one of these émigrés—Uzbeks and Kazakhs and God knows what else—and jerks them off about liberating their homeland. He tells them how nasty the Russians are to Soviet Moslems, as if they needed to be reminded of that. And then he suggests, without quite saying so, that Uncle Sam may be able to help them.”

  “Help them do what?”

  “He doesn’t ever say, exactly. B
ut tells them: ‘Free Turkestan!’ as if it’s the slogan of some sort of underground movement.”

  “Forget it,” said Timmons, shaking his head. “We don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Strictly forbidden.”

  “That’s what I thought. But listen to the tape.”

  “No way.”

  “Listen to the goddam tape!”

  And he did. Timmon’s plans for a golf game were abandoned, as he sat numbly listening to selected passages from the tape. Abdallah from Tashkent. The Meshki Turk. The Uzbek. The Tatar. Every time Rawls mentioned “my friends in America,” Timmons would grumble, “Aw, shit!” When Taylor finished his excerpts, Timmons put his head in his hands. He looked crushed.

  “I don’t know what this is all about,” said Timmons. “But it goes without saying that it’s very sensitive. Whatever it is.”

  “Right.”

  “To be blunt,” continued Timmons, “I don’t really want to get involved in it. If someone had thought I needed to know, then I would know. But since I don’t, it’s obviously none of my business.”

  “But you do know, now.”

  “I don’t need this aggravation,” said Timmons evenly. “I’m due to retire next year and I intend to do so quietly and happily. If you want to make a fuss, that is obviously within your power. But I am staying out of it. It isn’t my case. So it’s all yours. Be my guest.”

  “Thanks,” said Taylor. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for Timmons, old and tired and afraid of anything that might rock the boat.

  “Copy me on any cables, if you would,” said Timmons. “Just so you’ll know, I will be sending a cable of my own tonight informing headquarters that you have briefed me about a sensitive matter you appear to have stumbled across and that I have advised you not to pursue it.”

  Taylor thanked Timmons and shook his hand. He felt like he had been watching someone die of self-strangulation.

  The urge to make trouble was for Taylor something akin to a biological instinct. And so, with a dim sense that the trouble he was making might be chiefly for himself, he drafted a cable that night for headquarters. His first thought had been to send an LWSURF message straight to the director, as a way of pulling the highest possible chain. But that was stupid. Hinkle would probably ignore it, or worse, give it to one of the congressional intelligence committees. Taylor’s next thought was to send a message directly to the deputy director for operations. But that was stupid, too. It would look like he was picking a fight. And Taylor had a long-standing rule never to pick a fight when you didn’t know who your adversary was.