Siro

by David Ignatius

  “We Turks have a saying,” admonished Serif. “If you don’t beat your children, you will end up beating yourself.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” said Taylor. “Listen, before I go there’s something I want to ask you about.”

  “Oh?” said Serif. “What is that?”

  “Have you ever heard the slogan ‘Free Turkestan’?”

  Serif squinted his eyes. “Say it again.”

  “ ‘Free Turkestan.’ Have you ever heard of an émigré group that uses a slogan like that?”

  “Of course. Dozens of groups. Once upon a time, every waiter at Rejans restaurant had his own group. Not so many nowadays.”

  “Do Turks still care about Turkestan?”

  “Of course we do!” said Serif. His dignity had been offended. “My own family came from the Crimea. From Bakhchisarai.”

  “No kidding.”

  “There is no kidding at all about this. Every Turk remembers our lost empire. We have a saying.”

  “And what is that?”

  “We say: A man can travel from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean and speak only Turkish.”

  “And eat only kebabs.”

  “Excuse me, please?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why do you ask me about Turkestan?”

  “Just curious. I heard the slogan the other day—‘Free Turkestan’—and I wondered whether it was anything serious.”

  “For us? For MIT?”

  Taylor nodded.

  “I cannot tell you, of course.”

  “Of course not,” said Taylor. “But if you could tell me, what would you say?”

  “Hmmm,” said the Turk. The corners of his mouth were turned up. It wasn’t a smile, but it was close. “I would say that it is not serious. This is a game for old men and waiters from Rejans. We have nothing to do with it anymore.”

  In early April, amidst this routine busywork of intelligence, the return mail Taylor had been waiting for finally arrived. He received a unusual cable from headquarters. It was sent on the “Restricted Handling” channel, which meant that it was especially sensitive and treated separately from the agency’s normal, top-secret cable traffic. The message was from Edward Stone. Stone advised that he would be arriving in Istanbul in one week for an overnight stop and wished to visit with Taylor. They would need somewhere secure to talk, Stone said.

  19

  Every agency of the United States government had a few people like Edward Stone. They were the permanent under secretaries, the master bureaucrats who survived each wave of enthusiastic politicians and kept the agency focused on its historical mission. Part of what gave the Stones their power was that they were living monuments to the world in which their agencies had been created, embodying each one’s bureaucratic culture, its myths and traditions.

  For most federal agencies, that time had been the 1930s and the culture was New Deal liberalism. Visit the great domestic departments in Washington even now—Agriculture, Interior, Justice—and you will see the physical remnants: vast murals depicting ordinary Americans, workers and farmers, cops and shopkeepers, engaged in the pageant of American social democracy. If America ever finally decided to abandon the ethos of Walt Whitman and Felix Frankfurter and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, someone would have to paint the New Deal murals over.

  The Central Intelligence Agency was the product of a subtly different time and ethos. Its founding myths dated to the 1940s—the years of World War II and its immediate aftermath—and its traditions were patrician, not proletarian. When the CIA mandarins built their headquarters up the river in Virginia, they decided it should look like an Ivy League campus—cool and austere, like one of the modern buildings at Yale or Harvard. No one at CIA would ever have thought of commissioning a mural of some sweaty laborer in the vineyard of intelligence. Too vulgar. Too public. If the agency wanted to honor its traditions, then have Tiffany’s engrave a nice silver plate. The CIA was different. It was the product of an America that had grown up in a hurry, that had left behind the idealism and confusion of the 1930s and become, in the space of a few years, tough and confident and cynical. It had come into being to save America, not from the nebulous problems of poverty and injustice, but from Germans and Japanese. And then, everlastingly, from the Russians.

  That explained Edward Stone’s special status in the agency. By 1979, he was one of the last remaining veterans of the founder generation still at Langley. He was one of the few people who could still remember that “Q clearance” originally meant you had access to Building Q, one of the temporary buildings scattered around Foggy Bottom in which the agency was first housed: one of the few who could remember shuttling among those buildings in the little buses known as “green beetles.” And what mattered most, he was one of the few left who remembered just how ragged things had been in those days, when there weren’t any rules and you had to make things up as you went along.

  Stone’s lineage, in agency terms, was part British and part German. That was the very best pedigree to have. He had come to London at the beginning of the war as a young army officer assigned to OSS and begun working with the British to unravel Nazi intelligence networks. When the war ended, he went to Germany and continued the work—looking now at the Nazi networks that ran east, toward the Soviet Union, rather than west toward Britain and America. From those two spent empires, Britain and Germany, Stone and his colleagues built an American intelligence agency. From the British they drew the tradecraft and the élan; from the Germans they drew many of their agents. It was an awkward mix, but there hadn’t been time, back then, to worry about it.

  The lessons of that time were hard-wired on Stone’s brain: the Soviets were reckless and duplicitous adversaries; the Europeans were gutless accommodationists; the Americans and British were the world’s last and best hope—not all of them, mind you, but the right kind, the tough-minded ones. By 1979, Stone had been out of the military for more than three decades, but he still wore a kind of Anglo-American civil servant’s uniform: neat English suits of tweed and flannel: sturdy shoes with waxed laces; a brown homburg hat for ordinary occasions and, for special events, a stiff-brimmed gray one. He was utterly uninterested in change: When one of his suits became so threadbare and shiny it couldn’t be worn anymore, he had his tailor make an identical one, same style, same color. He felt the same way about the agency.

  Stone had not made the “transition” during the great American cultural revolution of the 1970s. Indeed, he hated what the agency had become by the end of the decade. It seemed to him cheap and undignified—all those congressmen running around holding hearings and the agency people meekly complying—quite apart from the dangers it caused to the craft of intelligence. “Oversight” was the new cure-all. Perhaps the congressmen thought that if clean people, such as themselves, had their hands in a dirty business, it would perforce become clean. A charming idea. But it seemed evident to Stone, after thirty-five years, that the only way intelligence work would ever become clean was if people stopped doing it.

  What Stone truly couldn’t understand was why the agency went along with this preposterous charade. Of course, members of Congress would talk about oversight committees and legal charters and American values. That was what congressmen did. But why had the agency signed onto this sort of Fourth of July nonsense? Had people lost their minds? Every time Stone saw Charles (Chuck) Hinkle leading a new group of congressmen on a tour of the agency, he felt a knot in his stomach. The barbarians were at the gate. The walls of the temple had been breached.

  Stone had decided in the mid-1970s, as the onslaught gathered momentum, that it was a good time to disappear. The great purge of the clandestine service was already beginning; scores of covert bureaucrats with names like Evan and Nevin were being fired every few months. The auditors and nannies all agreed that the Directorate of Operations had too many bodies, and in a sense they were right. The clandestine service, like any well-fed animal, had built up layers of protective fat over three decades,
and there were too many aging, wellborn spies on the payroll, thinking up dubious schemes to keep themselves occupied. But that wasn’t really what the great purge was about. It was about power—about a secret arm of the government that had run its own affairs (and those of a good many other people) unhindered for thirty years and in the process made too many mistakes and too many enemies. And now it was at the mercy of the very people it had kept at bay all those years. Congressmen, journalists, bureaucrats—all looking for scalps.

  Edward Stone, who had headed the Near East Division for more than a decade and was a sort of dean of the old boys’ lobby, was an especially obvious target. Better to get out of the way, he had decided. Better to lie low for a while and see if people came to their senses.

  And so he did—vanished one day from his spacious office with the maps and safes and went somewhere else, most people weren’t sure where. As Hinkle’s purge of the old boys increased, it was rumored for a time that Stone had been fired, too. But that was wrong. Some of his friends imagined that, like the old stag in the forest. Stone had concluded that his time had come and had gone off to some bureaucratic mountaintop to die a noble death. But that wasn’t quite right either. Stone hadn’t died and he hadn’t gone up to any mountaintop. It would be more accurate to say that he had gone underground, which in a secret agency like the CIA amounted to a kind of double negative.

  Taylor’s initial reaction when he received Stone’s message was that he had made the biggest mistake of his career. He didn’t know why his request for traces had come to Stone’s attention or what Stone would do about it. But he had the feeling that he had unwittingly picked a fight with the wrong man. His immediate problem was finding a secure place to meet. The Istanbul base had a secure conference room, the infamous “bubble,” but it was hot and cramped and utterly uninteresting. So Taylor ruled out the bubble. There were restaurants aplenty, but they were too easy to bug. So forget restaurants.

  A boat, Taylor decided. A boat trip up the Bosporus appealed to his sense of the dramatic. If his career was about to collapse, then he would go out in style. But what boat? The ambassador had a magnificent yacht, the Hiawatha, which he kept moored in Istanbul. But he was so paranoid that some congressional investigator would find out about it and take it away that he never let anyone use it. So that was out, too. Taylor paid a visit to a navy chief petty officer, who was nominally part of the Turkish-U.S. Logistical command, TUSLOG, but whose real job was taking care of the ambassador’s boat.

  “Ali Kaptan’s boat,” advised the navy man.

  “Who the hell is Ali Kaptan?”

  “He skippers the Hiawatha when the ambassador’s in town, which isn’t too often. But he has a little boat of his own, the Teodora. Maybe he’ll take you out.”

  “Is he trustworthy?”

  “Better than that. He doesn’t speak English.”

  “Sounds like my man,” said Taylor. And a few hours later, he had engaged the services of the good ship Teodora and its skipper.

  Taylor picked up Stone at the airport late one afternoon. Stone had arrived on a commercial flight from Frankfurt, and he was carrying his own suitcase. That was Taylor’s first surprise. Senior CIA officers usually toured the empire like kings, flying in private jets and arriving with little armies of bag carriers and door openers. Local station chiefs competed to find the most exotic restaurants and nightclubs for their royal visitors. Careers had been made finding the right fish restaurant in Piraeus, or the best dim sum in Hong Kong, or the raunchiest strip show in Bangkok. But one look at Stone told Taylor to forget about strip shows. The old man was dressed in his habitual winter costume: a three-piece wool suit and a brown homburg hat. As Taylor greeted him, he studied Stone’s face for a hint of the purpose that had brought him to Istanbul. But Stone’s face was a pleasant, impassive mask.

  “So you’re Taylor” was all he said. Taylor took his bag and led him to a waiting limousine, which took them directly to the pier by the Dolmabahce mosque. Stone seemed pleased by the idea of a boat ride. He was coming from Berlin, he said, where it had been bitterly cold.

  It was, for Istanbul, a pleasant early-spring evening. The sun had burned through much of the haze, and as it set, the sky took on a pinkish glow. Up the Bosporus, to the left of the dock, stretched the white marble of Dolmabahce, a palace so grand it had nearly bankrupted the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Abdul-Aziz had spent two million pounds a year running the palace and its staff of five thousand. It was said, apocryphally perhaps, that he had strapped pianos to the backs of his servants, so that music could follow him around his gardens. Like so much of Istanbul, Dolmabahce stood as a warning of the folly of trying to bridge East and West.

  Ali Kaptan was waiting at the dock with his boat. He was a Laz, it turned out, from a village on the Black Sea, and like so many poor Laz boys, he had made his way in life as a boatman. As Taylor and Stone climbed aboard. Ali Kaptan gave them a firm salute.

  “The Teodora,” said Stone, admiring the boat as he climbed aboard. “What a lovely name. Did the good captain name her after his daughter perhaps?”

  Taylor translated Stone’s query for Ali Kaptan.

  “Hayir!” snarled Ali Kaptan. No! He seemed offended at the thought.

  “He says ‘no,’ ” said Taylor.

  “Who is your boat named after?” asked Stone amiably. Taylor duly translated.

  “The Empress Teodora,” said the Turk, wagging his finger at Stone. Taylor rolled his eyes. He explained to Stone that the Empress Teodora was a notorious libertine who, in Byzantine times, had reputedly fornicated with a dozen men at a sitting, occasionally with three at one time.

  “How charming,” said Stone. “I hope her holes are all plugged this time.” And with that, they cast off and headed up the Bosporus in the soft glow of the dusk.

  Stone didn’t waste any time. “Tell me about your contact with Mr. Rawls,” he said when the boat was under way.

  Taylor repeated the story much as he had for Timmons. He explained how he and George had encountered Rawls at Omar’s place; how he had followed him home; how he had bugged the apartment and what he had found on the tape. Stone nodded and stroked his chin throughout the recital. When Taylor finished, he sat silent for a moment. It was the evening rush hour, and the Bosporus was packed with boats—large ferries and tiny dinghies skittering across the water.

  “From what you’ve heard and observed, what would you guess Mr. Rawls is doing?” asked Stone.

  “Trying to organize a Russian émigré network.”

  “Um-hum. And to do what?”

  Taylor thought a moment. “I suppose to make trouble for the Russians.”

  “Yes. Certainly that. But to what end?”

  “He claims that the goal is to liberate Turkestan.”

  “Yes, but obviously that’s balderdash.”

  “I agree. So what’s the point?”

  “The point is simple,” said Stone. “Assess the anti-Soviet underground. Test its strength and conviction. Develop contacts.”

  Taylor nodded. “Okay. Understood.” He noticed that as Stone ran through this explanation, he had a trace of a smile on his face, though Taylor couldn’t imagine why.

  “It’s always good to have contacts in our line of work,” continued Stone. “You never know how you might be able to use them.”

  “I know this is none of my business,” said Taylor. “But isn’t there a danger the operation could get out of control? Some of these Uzbeks and Kazakhs are nuts.”

  “A modest danger,” said Stone. “But certainly a risk worth running.” He was smiling again.

  Taylor nodded. All this fencing was making him edgy. When was Stone going to tip his hand and explain what he was up to?

  Ali Kaptan bellowed something from the bridge. The Teodora was making its way past the twin fortresses—Rumeli Hisar and Anadolu Hisar—that guarded opposite banks of the Bosporus at its narrowest point.

  Taylor pointed out the landmark. “Europe and Asia are closest toget
her right here,” he explained.

  “Not very close, is it?” said Stone. He studied the landscape for a moment and then resumed his interrogation.

  “Did you follow Mr. Rawls again, after you had listened to the tape?”

  “No,” answered Taylor.

  “Did you replenish the tape?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the obvious reason.”

  “What was that?”

  “Because I assumed I had stepped into something I shouldn’t have. Something I wasn’t supposed to know about, even though it was on my turf.”

  Stone cocked his ear. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Because I assumed,” said Taylor with an edge of anger in his voice, “that I had stumbled into one of our operations.”

  Stone chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Stone fumbled with something in his pocket, shifted his feet, stared into the distance.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” said Taylor, more loudly. He had a momentary desire to punch Stone in his wise, well-groomed face.

  “You needn’t shout.”

  “Isn’t it?” repeated Taylor. “Rawls is a NOC, right?”

  “Rawls?”

  “Yes, Rawls, goddammit.”

  “No, actually. He’s not.”

  “He’s not?”

  “No,” said Stone, finally laughing out loud. “That’s the interesting thing. It’s not our operation at all. I have made a very thorough check, and I can assure you categorically that we have no such operation on the books.”

  “What about the Canadians? Or the Brits?”

  “He’s not their man either. I’ve checked.”

  Taylor drew a breath. He felt as if he had been slapped. “Rawls isn’t our man?”