Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Sensible colleagues agree. Foolish ones do not. But I really cannot discuss this issue with you any further.” Stone turned away from Anna and toward Taylor, who was clapping his hands silently.

  “Mr. Stone,” he said. “As I told you once before, you are a devious son of a gun.”

  “Son of a bitch, I think you said. But save your applause, please. I’m just getting to what matters most for our purposes. About a year ago, it occurred to me that we could use the various language services of Radio Liberty to reinforce this pattern of shadows and feints. So with the help of an old chum in Munich I arranged to put a few odd things on the air.”

  “Like what?” asked Taylor.

  “Curiosities. Variations in the normal pattern of operations. Things that a trained analyst might conclude were messages to one of these invisible spies we appear to be servicing in Moscow. For example, if you play the same musical theme to introduce the news every morning at nine, change it once—just once—and the clever analyst will be convinced it’s a signal. Or you put nonsensical messages on the air. “The sky is green.” “Tolstoy is alive.” Or you have the announcer deliberately give the wrong time one afternoon. Whatever strikes your fancy. No matter how silly it is, you can be reasonably sure that it will have them scratching their heads back at Moscow Center. And that’s when I got to thinking,” said Stone, his voice trailing off.

  “Thinking about what?” asked Anna.

  “About Soviet nationalities, which are the rawest nerve of all in Moscow. I began wondering whether we might in some way play upon the KGB’s abiding fear that the peoples at the extremities of the empire—the Uzbeks and Tajiks and Georgians and Armenians—despise the Soviet state, and that the United States may be prepared to help them gain their freedom.”

  Anna looked at him warily, remembering her first conversation with Stone a few months before. “How did you do that?”

  “At first, simply by using the radios. My friend in Munich agreed to introduce some small changes in the format. Very small to us, but quite worrying to the Soviets. The reading of a prerevolutionary essay on the Uzbek service. An item on the Chechen-Ingush service commemorating the birthday of Najmuddin of Hotso, who fought the Red Army almost single-handedly in the North Caucasus during the early 1920s. That sort of thing. Little needles. Pinpricks that might, over time, bother Moscow enough that it might cut back on foreign adventures and spend more time minding its own backyard. There were a few other things as well.”

  “What other things?” asked Taylor.

  “Oh, I mentioned to a senator I know how pleased I was that the agency was looking at the nationalities problem again. I’m sure he gossiped about it. As a matter of fact, there is no better channel for false information about CIA operations than conservative members of Congress. They’re so eager, and so gullible.”

  Taylor closed his eyes. “So that’s what you were talking about in Istanbul,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “When I asked you why the Soviets would ever think the United States might get involved with a bunch of crazy Uzbeks, you said there had been a few hints to make Moscow nervous.”

  “Did I say that in Istanbul? I shouldn’t have. But yes, there were hints of new American interest in Soviet nationalities, and yes, the hints came from me. The odd thing is, I didn’t really think it was possible to follow through on this project in any meaningful way. Not until I learned of your little encounter in Istanbul with this man Rawls. After that, of course, the rest was fairly obvious.”

  “Who’s Rawls?” asked Anna.

  “A KGB man,” said Taylor. “Who I initially mistook for a CIA man.”

  “Oh,” said Anna.

  “Which brings us to where we are now,” said Stone.

  “Which is where, exactly?” queried Taylor. “This is all fascinating, Mr. Stone, and I’m definitely a member of your fan club. But I still don’t understand what we’re doing here in Rockville.”

  “You are an impatient fellow,” said Stone. “That’s what I like about you. But before proceeding, we have another important item of business.” He looked at his watch.

  “What’s that?” queried Taylor.

  “Lunch.”

  “Who’s catering?”

  “You are, I believe,” said Stone. He reached into the pocket of his khaki work pants and removed a chain with two silver keys. “The motor pool is outside in the parking lot. It’s a white panel truck with the word ‘Karpetland’ on the side. Here’s a key to the truck, and one for the front door.”

  “So what’ll it be, food-wise?”

  “There’s a wide range of options in the neighborhood,” said Stone. “McDonald’s. Burger King. Wendy’s. Hardee’s.”

  “I vote for Burger King,” said Anna.

  “That’s quite acceptable to me,” said Stone.

  “Burger King it is,” said Taylor. “Who wants what?”

  “Whopper with cheese, no pickle, no onion. Small fries. Diet Coke,” said Anna.

  “A hamburger of some sort, with whatever condiments they have,” said Stone.

  “How about a beer? It’s good for cover.”

  “Fine idea,” said Stone. And so Taylor was off, cruising suburbia in his white panel truck, stopping to chat with the pretty woman in the parking lot at Burger King, shopping for beer at the 7-Eleven with the practiced eye of Joe Six-Pack himself.

  22

  “Don’t ever be a spy,” Anna’s father had told her a few months before he died. It was on a Sunday afternoon, not long before his second and final heart attack, and she was reading to him from a book she thought he would like, called Ottoman Statecraft. It was a sort of Levantine version of Machiavelli, written in the seventeenth century by a man named Sari Mehmed Pasha. Anna was showing off, translating from Turkish.

  “In the matter of spies,” Anna had read, “perfect watchfulness and caution are essential. Rewards should be given both to the spy who comes with joy-giving news and to the spy who comes with information that excites anxiety. He must not be harmed because of news that brings gloom, for it is essential that spies have no fear of reporting their news correctly and truly.”

  “Don’t ever do it!” her father had said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Don’t ever be a spy.” His tone was so sharp and emphatic that it puzzled Anna.

  “Why not?”

  “Trust me,” Ambassador Barnes had said. “If you’re interested in the world, try diplomacy.” The conversation had seemed strange to Anna at the time. What in her father’s long and seemingly charmed career as a diplomat had made him so wary of espionage? And why on earth did he think that Anna would ever want to be a spy? She was an intellectual; she wanted to be a professor, not an intelligence officer.

  “Why don’t you take the foreign service exam,” Anna’s father had suggested that evening.

  Anna had been flattered. But as she thought about her father’s remark, she concluded that it probably just meant he had given up on her brother as the family standard-bearer. Anna’s older brother was, in fact, a walking illustration of how the male line of the Establishment was self-destructing during the 1970s. He lived in New Mexico, getting by as a part-time artist and full-time guru to a string of New Age women who somehow found him irresistible. On the rare occasions when he came home, before his father died, he would make a point of doing something obnoxious, like throwing the I Ching on the living-room floor while everyone was having cocktails, or doing the family’s astrology charts yet again, just to show everyone he hadn’t mended his ways. Clearly her brother was not a suitable candidate for the foreign service, much less the CIA.

  Which left Anna. But she was, at that time, determined to pursue what she regarded as her father’s lost vocation—the life of the mind. She had loved browsing among his books, especially the ones he had taken with him on his destroyer during the war: the collected plays of Shakespeare, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a very dog-eared
copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, the collected poems of T. S. Eliot. The modernist canon, in short. The young naval officer had carefully annotated each one, as if cramming for the great exam of life that might come with the next wave of Japanese planes. “Contrast this with Jung’s theory of archetypes,” he had written in the Freud book. “But must the modern Prince be so cynical?” he ruminated in the margins of Machiavelli. And in the pages of King Lear: “Yes! Ripeness is all.”

  Every young woman, at some level, spends a part of her adolescence looking for her father and trying to connect with his world. But in Anna’s case, that was especially true. All she had wanted, back then, was to browse in his library forever. It was only after her father died that Anna learned from a family friend that he had begun his government career, not as a diplomat, but as something else. Some sort of civil servant in Germany. The lost vocation, it appeared, had been something entirely different.

  Anna thought of her father, the ambassador who didn’t trust spies, as she sat under the harsh fluorescent lights waiting for Taylor to return with lunch. Stone had excused himself and gone to the bathroom, and Anna was sitting at one of the gray metal desks trying to sort out what was troubling her. She felt disoriented, though she wasn’t sure whether it was because of what Stone had said that morning or the long-buried memory of her father it had provoked. She busied herself tidying the desk, rearranging the black telephone, putting the Karpetland stationery in a neat pile.

  Eventually Stone emerged from the bathroom. He had combed his gray hair back slick against his head, as was his normal style. The combination of his blue-collar getup of lumberjack shirt and work pants and the patrician hairstyle was jarring.

  “You shouldn’t wear that outfit,” said Anna.

  “Why not?” said Stone. “I rather like it.”

  “Do you want a frank opinion?”

  “Yes, indeed. Of course I do.”

  “It looks silly.”

  “How so?”

  “Men’s clothes are like uniforms. When a man is out of uniform—or wearing someone else’s—he looks silly.”

  “Very well. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Anna returned to her busywork. Her face was downturned. Stone watched her for a moment and then spoke up, as if he sensed that something was bothering her.

  “What did you make of my little lecture this morning? I hope it wasn’t too tedious.”

  “Not at all. It was fascinating. I just have a lot to learn, that’s all.”

  “Did you hear anything that surprised you?”

  Anna thought a moment. If ever there was a time to be honest, this was it. “Yes,” she said. “There was something that didn’t make sense to me.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I know this will probably sound stupid, but I don’t understand why it’s so important that the CIA look more aggressive than it really is. Won’t that just make the Soviets even harder to deal with?”

  “Ah, Anna, I knew you were my sort of person,” said Stone. “That’s a very wise and subtle question. The answer is that in the short run, yes, it probably will make them more truculent. But in the long run, it will lead to their undoing.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m not sure, in the sense that I can prove it. It’s more a matter of conviction. I believe that, among nations, weakness brings disaster and strength yields success. That is the intellectual bedrock of my life. I could no more doubt it than doubt the rising of the sun. So, inevitably, I believe that if we cannot actually be strong at present, we should at least appear so.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But it still sounds like kicking a hornets’ nest. Why make the Soviets anxious? Why not just walk away?”

  “How can I make you see? Let me try a historical analogy, one that will probably be familiar to you. I’ve been doing a bit of reading in your area of specialization these last few weeks, and I have been pondering a question that strikes me as especially interesting—and relevant to our conversation.”

  “Fire away.”

  “My question is this: Why did the Ottoman Empire decline so rapidly in the seventeenth century?”

  “Let me think,” said Anna, suddenly drawn back toward the world of the library. “Various reasons. The sultans became weaker and less competent. The European nations became stronger. The janissaries became corrupt bureaucrats, rather than warriors. Tax revenues weren’t sufficient to support the administrative apparatus of the empire. Take your pick.”

  Stone shook his head. “All part of the story, no doubt. But the answer I had in mind is much simpler. It can be summed up in just three words. ‘The Prince’s Cage.’ ”

  “Go on,” said Anna, curious to see where Stone’s argument might lead.

  “Now correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, the Prince’s Cage began as an instrument of enlightenment and progress. Until the early seventeenth century, each new sultan had made it a practice to have all of his brothers strangled—with a bowstring, was it not?—so they couldn’t challenge his rule. By our modern lights it sounds horribly cruel. Yet it was actually quite an efficient means of checking the sort of rivalry and intrigue that has brought many an empire to its knees.”

  “It was outmoded,” said Anna. “And that was also part of the Ottoman problem in the seventeenth century. They were still following their old practices, and Europe was becoming modern.”

  “Quite so. Fratricide was old-fashioned. So the enlightened modern sultans stopped strangling their brothers and put them in what amounted to a glorified prison in the grand seraglio. The Prince’s Cage.”

  “Correct,” said Anna. “They called it the ‘Kafes.’ ”

  “A civilized approach. The sort of thing that would have appealed to a member of Congress, had such people existed in those days. But what was the cost of enlightenment? Rather than knock around the empire learning to be warriors, as their forebears had done, the Ottoman princes now stayed out of harm’s way in the cage. Osman III was in the cage for fifty years before becoming sultan, was he not? And didn’t Suleyman II spend thirty-nine years in the cage, much of it copying the Koran over and over? When these poor fellows finally emerged, they knew absolutely nothing about the world. They were pathetic. But it wasn’t their fault. The system virtually guaranteed incompetent rulers.”

  “You’ve been reading Lord Kinross, I see,” said Anna.

  Stone smiled sheepishly, like a schoolboy who has been caught with his crib sheet. “Well, he’s right, isn’t he?”

  “Kinross is right as far as he goes, although the reasons for the Ottoman decline were much more complicated than he says. But let’s assume that you and Kinross are right. What on earth does this have to do with what I was asking you about Karpetland?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Stone. “The forces of enlightenment have decided that the CIA is an outmoded and inefficient relic of the past, so they have placed us in a modern equivalent of the Prince’s Cage. And I am trying to find a way for you—for all of us—to get out of the cage before it’s too late.”

  Anna nodded, if not in assent at least in deference to the power of Stone’s vision. But she wondered to herself whether he could really mean what he had said. Did he truly believe that the world would be a better place if the princes of the CIA were freed from the “cage” to do whatever they wished—make the decisions, call the shots—without interference from people like judges and senators and presidents? He can’t be serious, she decided. It was a crazy thought, and Stone wasn’t crazy.

  “Lunchtime,” said Taylor. He had returned with the food and a six-pack of Iron City beer. Anna and Stone were silent, still holding in their minds the threads of the earlier conversation. An aura of earnest concentration hung over the room. Taylor wanted none of it.

  “C’mon, gang, let’s eat!” he said loudly, depositing the food on one of the desks. He popped the tab on a can of Iron City and handed it to Stone. “Hey, lady,” he called to Anna. “How about you?”

&
nbsp; “I ordered a Diet Coke.”

  “They didn’t have any. Want a beer?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not.”

  Taylor handed her a beer and opened one for himself. “Serefe!” he said.

  “What does that mean?” asked Stone.

  “ ‘Kiss my ass,’ in Turkish.”

  “What?”

  “I’m kidding. It means ‘cheers.’ ”

  “Cheers,” said Stone, raising his beer can.

  “Cheers,” said Anna.

  When the squeezed-out ketchup packets and the french-fry and hamburger boxes had been cleared away, Stone took center stage once again. The food seemed to have focused his mind. He was no longer the meandering dialectician, tacking back and forth toward a glimmering goal in the distance. His tone was now that of an operational planner, moving straight ahead toward a set of specific objectives.

  “We’d better get going,” he said. “Marjorie will be back in just over an hour, and I want to give you some specific assignments.”

  Anna took out a pad to make notes. Taylor put his feet up.

  “The basic elements of this operation should already be obvious to you. Because the fact is, the two of you were the ones who discovered them. My only contribution has been to suggest a creative way in which these elements can be used. That’s the easy part. Now you two will have to go out and actually do it—invest this imaginary scenario of mine with real people, real flesh and blood, so that it lives and breathes.”

  “You’re not checking out, I hope,” said Taylor.

  “Absolutely not. But I’m not an operator anymore. At best, I’m a planner.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “The operation, as I envision it, will have two interwoven strands. First, we will seek to create the illusion of an independence movement in Central Asia; second, we will attempt to place this illusion before the Soviets in a way that they will find credible. We will be aided in these endeavors by two blessed accidents: Alan’s discovery of a Soviet false-flag operation that is seeking to penetrate a Central Asian underground movement that they suspect already exists; and then, Anna’s discovery of an Iranian from Azerbaijan who claims to be part of just such an underground. We have the instruments. Now we must play them. Or more appropriately, we must find people who can play them for us.