Siro

by David Ignatius

  “No. Of course not. We haven’t done that sort of thing for years.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Stone chortled again. He thought it was all very funny.

  “If Rawls isn’t ours, or the Canadians’ or the Brits’, then whose man is he?”

  “The Russians’, I suspect.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I assure you that I am not. I would wager a substantial amount that the Soviets are running a false-flag operation. And the flag in question is our own Stars and Stripes, with a bit of Maple Leaf for camouflage.”

  “Why are they doing it, for chrissake?”

  “I already explained it to you, but you weren’t listening. Or rather, you weren’t hearing what I was saying.”

  “Tell me again. I’m dumb.”

  “They are doing it for the same reasons we would, only in reverse. They want to develop contacts, test the waters, get to know the breadth and strength of the anti-Soviet underground. And then, of course, they want to control and manipulate it. They’re really quite paranoid on this subject.”

  “But why the false flag?”

  “How else would the Soviets penetrate an anti-Soviet underground? They certainly wouldn’t announce they were the KGB. It’s standard procedure. The Israelis want to recruit a spy in the Syrian Army, so the recruiter pretends to be a Russian military officer. The target will spill his guts; he may even feel patriotic about it. Same thing here.”

  Taylor shook his head. He was embarrassed. “Rawls is a Russian?”

  “Probably, yes,” said Stone. “A very well-trained one, it appears. North Americans are the hardest people to imitate. You can get the accent right, with enough practice, but we have so many nuances, and the whole world knows them by heart. They’ve grown up watching our movies and television shows. They know how we talk and walk, how we light cigarettes, how we laugh. But it sounds as if your Mr. Rawls did a creditable job.”

  “Crackerjack.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. With a few more minutes—or a bit less booze—I’m sure you and your friend would have gotten suspicious. A word or a gesture not quite right. Rawls was very lucky. He thought he would only need to convince Uzbeks and Tatars.”

  “But why would the Russians go to all the trouble?”

  “My dear boy, they are secret policemen. This is what secret policemen do. They go looking for enemies. In this case, they have some reason to be nervous. They understand that the only real threat to the survival of the Soviet Union is the stability of its ethnic republics.”

  “They can’t be that frightened of a bunch of Uzbeks.”

  “It’s not just the Uzbeks they fear, but what might lie behind them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the United States.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Oh, there have been a few little hints from Washington over the past year. A few straws in the wind. Just enough to worry a sensible KGB man.”

  “And what might those hints have been?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Stone sweetly. “Not for now, at least. Perhaps another time.”

  Taylor looked at Stone with a growing sense of astonishment. He seemed to be holding a hand that contained nothing but wild cards.

  “The Soviets are prudent,” Stone continued. “When they decide they have a problem, they look for a way to control and destroy it. And they have been playing this particular game of émigré politics since the 1920s. Have you heard of the Trust?”

  “Of course,” said Taylor. He wanted to say: Ad nauseam. It was the one Soviet counterintelligence operation that everyone in the agency had heard of. The research director of the counterintelligence staff had spent the better part of thirty years studying it. In the Trust, the Soviets had created an anti-Soviet underground network during the 1920s and through it fed false information to every intelligence service in Europe. The Soviets, in effect, had created their own opposition. And they had done the same thing again in the early 1950s, creating a phony liberation movement in the Baltic states that Britain and America both embraced.

  “It’s quite a sophisticated little operation,” said Stone. “Rawls undoubtedly reports to a case officer, someone unobtrusive who can maintain contact with him and send his reports back to Yasenevo. Probably someone we would never think to look for.”

  “Oh shit,” said Taylor, shaking his head.

  “What is it?”

  “I have a feeling I know who the Russians are using as Rawls’s contact.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “A nice Lithuanian lady who’s married to the Soviet consul general and spends all her time studying Central Asia.”

  “Touching,” said Stone.

  “Very. She had a habit of disappearing on us, but we could never figure out where.”

  “Perhaps now you have the answer.”

  Taylor shook his head again. He rose and walked unsteadily to the gunnels of the little boat. “I feel like shit,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t,” said Stone. “The fact is that you have given us a rather extraordinary opportunity.”

  The sun had set and a light fog had settled over the black waters. The Bosporus was quieter now, with only a few small boats—water taxis—shuttling back and forth between Yenikoy and Beykoz. There was a chill in the air. In the distance, there was the horn of a big boat moving into the Bosporus from the Black Sea.

  “Time for a drink,” said Stone. Taylor brought out a bottle of whiskey and proposed a toast to their fictive colleague, Mr. Jack Rawls.

  “By the way,” said Stone when they had settled into their second whiskey. “Why did you do a damn-fool thing like bug Rawls?”

  “Because I was curious. And because he pissed me off.”

  “But it was against the rules. You didn’t have authorization.”

  “That’s true,” said Taylor. “But I have learned over the years that by the time you get authorization to do something, the something in question is probably not worth doing.”

  “You had better explain that to me,” said Stone, eyeing the younger man. Taylor looked at him and wondered whether to be honest.

  “I’m going to pretend that you and I are friends,” said Taylor.

  “No need to pretend.”

  “I’ll tell you a story that will help explain what I mean. When I was in Somalia, before coming to Istanbul, I had an agent high up in the government. At the top, actually. He was the foreign minister.”

  Stone nodded.

  “We had all kinds of information that would have been useful to him about the Ethiopians and the Sudanese and the internal opposition in his own country. But technically I wasn’t supposed to share any of it with him. It was all marked ORCON or NOFORN. That seemed ridiculous. So I just told him. It saved his ass a couple of times.”

  Stone remained impassive.

  “Sometimes the case officer in the field just has to trust his judgment,” continued Taylor. “Otherwise, what’s the point of having us out here? You might as well run everything from the front office. Although I gather that sort of thinking doesn’t sit too well with Mr. Hinkle.”

  Stone took a long sip of his drink. “I loathe Hinkle,” he said after a few moments. “As for the Somali case, I read about it in the files before coming here. I think you handled it appropriately. Better than appropriately. You handled it the same way I would have.”

  Taylor was surprised, not for the first time that evening, or the last.

  “I am tempted to pay you a vain compliment,” said Stone. “Which is to say that you remind me of myself when I was younger. But it was easier in those days to trust your own judgment. You didn’t really have any other choice.”

  Taylor looked at the old man: the smooth, impassive face, the tired eyes, the look of a man who had so thoroughly immersed himself in his work that he had, in some sense, become that work. He tried to imagine himself as a man in his sixties and his mind went fuzzy, and then blank.

>   “I’ll tell you a little story of my own,” said Stone. “Would you like to hear an old war story?”

  Taylor nodded.

  “When the war ended in 1945, I was twenty-seven years old. What a heady time that was. We were barely out of college, and we had the world at our feet. I was still in the army, working as an intelligence officer at the U.S. headquarters in Heidelberg. By that time we had already made contact with General Gehlen, and we had decided that we would try to maintain his network of agents in Eastern Europe. The funny thing was, we didn’t ask anybody’s permission to do it. Who could we ask? The war was over. Nobody back home really cared. So we just did it, on our own authority. But we had one problem.”

  “What was that?”

  “How to pay Gehlen’s agents. Since we had no formal authority, we had no money.”

  “So where did you find the money?”

  “The black market,” answered Stone. He was beaming at the recollection of his sweet and reckless youth. “We had whole trainloads of coffee beans and cigarettes coming into Germany for the use of the U.S. troops there, you see. So we diverted just enough to sell on the black market and pay stipends for Gehlen’s agents. That way, we didn’t have to ask anybody for funds. It was the right thing to do, obviously, but it would have taken too much time to get all the necessary permissions. And I hated bureaucracy, even back then. So we just did it.”

  “What if you had gotten caught?”

  “We would have been court-martialed probably. Or maybe not. It was a different time.”

  “When did you stop using the funny money?”

  “Not until 1948, after the CIA was created,” said Stone. “They sent out a lawyer and made us sign a lot of paperwork. That should have been a warning, I suppose.”

  Taylor poured another drink for Stone and for himself. Patches of fog were gathering over the water and then dissipating, so that the shoreline came in and out of view every few seconds.

  “So what do you do now?” asked Taylor.

  “Ah. What do I do now?”

  “Yeah. If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “What have you heard on the rumor mill?”

  “Not much. One version had it that you got canned.”

  “Not true, obviously.”

  “Another version says you’re doing something very strange and secretive somewhere in the DDO.”

  “That is closer to the truth.”

  “Mr. Stone, do me a favor. Either give me a straight answer or tell me to fuck off.”

  Stone laughed. “I am attached to the Soviet Bloc Division. My title is Director of Special Projects.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means absolutely nothing. I report to the deputy director for operations, and with his blessing, I have access to cable traffic in areas that interest me. It makes me a sort of free-lance troublemaker.”

  “What trouble are you planning to make in Istanbul?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” said Stone. “I’d like to think about it overnight. Do you have anything planned for tomorrow morning?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  “Let’s get together then and discuss it, shall we?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Taylor. Which was unusual, because Taylor never called anybody “sir.”

  They heard the sound of the horn again, much closer. Ali Kaptan revved the engine and steered the boat toward a cove on the Asian side. “Russian!” he shouted over the sound of the motor. Taylor and Stone looked up the Bosporus and saw a stunning sight. A Soviet cruiser was making her way down the straits from the Black Sea, flags flying, crew on deck. A small white boat from Turkish military intelligence was accompanying her, snapping pictures and taking measurements.

  In the half-light, from the vantage of little Teodora, the Soviet ship looked even bigger and more menacing than normal. It was an immense and awesome machine—every cleat and turret ready for battle, every inch of space devoted in some way to the modern Soviet ambition of challenging the United States. The horn sounded again, deafening this time, as the cruiser made its way past them toward the Mediterranean. In the wake of this giant vessel, the Teodora and its passengers bobbed like a cork.

  20

  They met at the consulate the next morning at eight, which was the earliest Taylor had ever been seen at work. Stone was waiting in the main salon of the Palazzo Corpi, which was known as the “Missouri Room” to commemorate a visit to Turkey in 1946 by the battleship USS Missouri. Stalin had been threatening Turkey at the time, and it was said that when the great ship steamed into port, its massive guns pointing toward Odessa, the Turks had broken into cheers. Another age entirely.

  Stone, himself a sort of monument to that lost age, was sitting on a couch reading a book about Byzantine architecture that he had pulled off a dusty bookshelf. He looked older and frailer in the morning light. He was so engrossed in the book that he didn’t notice Taylor at first. The younger man led him upstairs, past the wrought-iron satyrs and nymphs that decorated the stairway, to the gray stucco of the communications room, and from there into the bland translucent whiteness of the secure conference room. Waiting on the table was a pot of coffee and a plate of sweet rolls wrapped in cellophane.

  “Are you married?” asked Stone as he unwrapped his pastry.

  “No,” said Taylor. “Not anymore.”

  Stone nodded. That apparently was the answer he had hoped for. “And do you like your present assignment here in Istanbul?”

  “I’m not wild about it. I like it when it’s interesting.”

  “And how often is that?”

  “Not very often.”

  Stone nodded again. “I take it from what you say that you would be interested in something more challenging.”

  “You bet.”

  “Hmmm. And do you have a competent deputy who can manage the administrative details in your absence?”

  “I think so. He likes that sort of thing. Paperwork, renting safe houses.”

  “Are you as restless as you seem?”

  Taylor turned his eyes to the blank white wall of the bubble and thought of the useless secrets it normally contained. He thought of how he had been spending his days and weeks of late, planting bugs and meeting with agents like EXCHASE. “Yes, I’m as restless as I seem. Maybe more so.”

  That, too, seemed to be the correct answer, for Stone turned toward Taylor and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry to ask you these questions. But I don’t want to discuss this Rawls business with you unless I’m fairly sure that you would be an appropriate person to pursue it with me. I take it that you would be interested.”

  Taylor made a mental inventory. He had a reasonably solid career that was leading up the ladder. But it was becoming increasingly obvious to him that it was a ladder to nowhere.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

  “Then I think you’re my man.”

  “For what?”

  “For the operation I have in mind. I’ve been doing some thinking overnight, and the more I think about your Mr. Rawls, the more convinced I am that we have been presented with an unusual opportunity. An almost irresistible opportunity, I would say.”

  “To do what?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? To do what? Now what do you think we should do with Mr. Rawls?”

  “You’re asking the wrong man. Until last night, I thought he was working for you.”

  “Come now. Surely you have a suggestion.”

  Taylor thought a moment. The answer seemed obvious. “Burn him,” he said. “Expose him to the Turks as a Soviet illegal. Have the Turks PNG him and his lady case officer and the consul general and anybody else they feel like.”

  “Well, of course. That’s always the right answer, isn’t it? Burn someone. Put him out of business. But what would that get you in this case?”

  “It would embarrass the hell out of the Soviets, in addition to breaking up their little network.”

  “Tempting. But wouldn’t they sim
ply do it again? Not in Turkey perhaps, but somewhere else. And we’d have to start all over again, assuming we were lucky enough to find out.”

  “So what’s the correct answer?”

  Stone looked at his coffee cup, which was empty. “Is there any more coffee, do you suppose?” Taylor summoned the code clerk, who returned with another cup of coffee for Stone.

  “What’s the correct answer?” repeated Taylor.

  “Do you mind if I answer you in a somewhat roundabout way?”

  “No. I’m getting used to it.”

  “I’ll begin with a question. Don’t you find it troubling that the Soviets are so aggressive in this part of the world? In Iran, and Afghanistan, and even here in Turkey?”

  “Of course I do. It drives me nuts.”

  “And haven’t you wondered how we might be able to tilt the balance the other way? How we might be able to undermine the Soviets, and create a measure of strength out of our present weakness?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t come up with much, other than bugging Soviet diplomats.”

  “Well now,” said Stone, banging the table lightly for emphasis. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could, in fact, do what your Mr. Rawls is pretending to do? If we could organize a true CIA-sponsored network in Central Asia?”

  “Sure, if it would work.”

  “A network of agents that could organize clandestine cells inside the Asian republics, distribute subversive literature, smuggle guns across the border.”

  “Great,” said Taylor. He still looked dubious.

  “An underground that could put the fear of God into the Kremlin. Better than that, the fear of Allah. An underground network that would absolutely terrify the Soviets and make them worry that their country was in danger of unraveling. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  “Lovely.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Stone, “we can’t do it.”

  “Because it’s illegal, I suppose.” Taylor was getting exasperated.

  “Not illegal, technically. But any such operation would require a finding by the President. In the unlikely event that he agreed, it would also require notification of Congress. And even if they agreed, we still couldn’t do it.”