Siro

by David Ignatius

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “They were spies. They were in a battle with Abdul-Hamid’s secret police. They did secret things.”

  “I know what spies are, Mr. Papadapoulos.”

  “Well, these Young Turk spies would do strange things. They would start a newspaper in Paris or London, in the expectation that Abdul-Hamid’s agents would bribe them to close the paper. They got 10,000 francs to close one newspaper in Paris. Then they would take the money and start another newspaper. They bribed the big European newspapers, too—Figaro, Le Matin—to write nasty stories about the sultan. They would deliberately plant false information in one capital of Europe, to make Abdul-Hamid’s men chase after it, and plant different information in another capital. They were very clever, these Young Turk spies.”

  “But what about the network? You said the committee on one level supported equality among Armenians and Turks, Christians and Moslems, and all that. Was there another level?”

  “Ah, I am sorry. That is the heart of my dissertation. I really cannot discuss it.”

  “Please,” said Anna, touching the Greek man’s hand. “The documents are all yours. I won’t do anything with them. Honest. I’m just very curious.”

  “I really should not discuss this, you know.” He was softening. It was not in the nature of a Greek man, even a library dweller, to refuse the plea of a woman.

  “Please,” said Anna again.

  “I will tell you, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else.”

  “I promise.” She held up her hand, as if swearing an oath.

  “Very well. The truth is that the Union and Progress Committee was a trick. They talked about equality, but it was not true. They had members—whole branches—that were Greek and Armenian and Coptic and Bulgarian. But from the beginning, there was an inner circle, controlled by Moslems. It was called the Merkezi Umumi. The Central Committee.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because, Miss Morgan, it is in the papers of Ibrahim Temo.”

  “How? Did they describe two levels?”

  “Not in so many words. But they did not have to. They did everything in code, these people. What I found was that they had two codes. One for everyone, including Christians. And one for the core group, which was Moslem only. I have found a letter, for example, that was sent in code to the Cairo branch. It warned the leaders—who were Moslems—not to share any secret documents with Copts.”

  “Why were the Moslems so suspicious?”

  “Because they simply did not trust the others. They did not believe that the non-Moslem subjects of the empire truly wanted a modern and progressive Ottoman state. They suspected that the Greeks were really fighting for an independent Greece, the Armenians were really fighting for an independent Armenia, the Bulgars for Bulgaria, and so on.”

  “And they were right.”

  “Yes, of course. They were right.”

  “And did the Armenians and Greeks know that they were being treated differently within the committee?”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “So what you are telling me is that, from the beginning, the members of this noble revolutionary network were at each other’s throats.”

  “Not quite at each other’s throats. But the seeds of hatred were there, ‘from the Adriatic Sea to the Chinese Sea,’ as they liked to say. Now you must remember your promise to me, Miss Morgan. You will not tell anyone about what is in these documents.”

  “My dear Mr. Papadapoulos, I promise you with all my heart that I will not tell anyone what you have found. My interest is in the present, not in the past. What I would like is to find a way to avoid reliving this history—not to retell it.”

  VI

  WILLIAM GOODE

  WASHINGTON / ATHENS ISTANBUL / TASHKENT

  JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1979

  28

  A real war was beginning that summer, in a place where the national sport was playing polo with a sheep’s head. The place was Afghanistan, and like Vietnam and Algeria, it would soon become famous not so much for itself as for the folly into which it tempted a larger power. There was something about such places that subverted normal logic and common sense, that inspired the would-be conqueror to make an initial bold and foolhardy move, which soon would be lost without another such move, and then another, until the reputation and treasure of the giant power had been staked on swatting the geopolitical equivalent of a horsefly.

  For decades Afghanistan had been a matter of pure indifference to the rest of the world, including the Soviets. The Peace Corps spent more time and effort there in the 1960s than the KGB. Even the British, who had once imagined Afghanistan as the fulcrum on which were balanced the Russian Empire and the British Raj in India, no longer paid much attention. But by the late 1970s, the Soviets had finally caught the virus that occasionally infects great nations and weakens their normal protection against stupidity and unreason. The Soviet media ruminated darkly about American meddling in that part of the world, which required a decisive Soviet response. “Sinister plots” by “certain Western agencies” were invoked.

  The march of folly seemed inexorable. Moscow had installed a Communist government in Kabul in 1978, hoping to break the Islamic movement that was developing in the rural areas of the country. But the Afghan Communists only inflamed the Moslem resistance, leaving Moscow the unpleasant choice of intervening more decisively or admitting defeat. How familiar that sounded to the generation of CIA men who had watched the unfolding of Vietnam. Through the spring of 1979, the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan increased. Soviet military advisers, dressed in Afghan Army uniforms, were spotted throughout the country. One summer day the CIA station in Kabul sent an agent out to count the number of light-skinned men playing volleyball in the military compound at Bagram Air Base. The agent stopped counting at 400.

  To a student of human folly, which Anna Barnes had considered herself for nearly a decade, the nature of the coming war in Afghanistan was obvious, without reading any intelligence reports. The essential facts were contained in a short newspaper story she read on the plane back from Athens. It described the fate of several Soviet advisers who had been captured by the mujaheddin. The Afghan rebels boasted that they had cut the ears and testicles off their Russian prisoners and then peeled off their skin, a strip at a time.

  What struck Anna about this account wasn’t the unusual barbarism of the incident, but its ordinariness. It might have been written about any war in that part of the world during the past millennium. For the history of that region was, on the simplest level, a theater of pain. The unlucky Russian soldier in Afghanistan, screaming in agony as another strip of pulpy white skin was torn from his body, might recognize in his tormentor the face of the Ottoman general Lala Mustafa. After the battle of Famagusta in 1570, the great Mustafa captured his Venetian opponent, cut off his right ear and nose, flayed and dismembered him alive, and then cured the empty skin, stuffed it with straw, and carried it about the city. Pain is timeless. Perhaps the Moslem mujahed recognized in his Russian adversary the face of the crusader Richard the Lionhearted, who put to death the entire population of Acre—2,700 men, women and children—after the town surrendered in 1191.

  There had been times, reading her history books, when Anna had suspected that torture was the very essence of power in the Near East and Central Asia. The ability to inflict pain was what made a sultan a strong leader, and failure to do so marked him as a weak man. That was the tragedy of Ottoman history, that this noble and civilized people could also be so cruel. It was the same wretched story, from sultan to sultan, as if the heirs of Osman were all reliving the same bloody nightmare. The fourteenth-century sultan Murad I became so angry at his rebellious son Gunduz that he put out his eyes and cut off his head; then, as a test of loyalty, he ordered his lieutenants to blind and behead their own sons. Nearly all of them obeyed. A century later Mehmed II took a fancy to the handsome fourteen-year-old son of one of his ministers and demanded that the bo
y be brought to him; when the minister refused, Mehmed decapitated both father and son and had their heads carried to his dinner table. When Selim I took power in 1512, his first act was to have his two brothers strangled—an ordinary enough act by Ottoman standards—and also their five sons, some as young as five, while he listened to their screams from the next room. His successor, the peerless Suleyman the Magnificent, recorded in his diary that he routinely ordered his own troops beheaded for such offenses as “pasturing horses in unharvested fields.” Calculated cruelty was the very essence of leadership. Murad IV, for example, was generally reckoned a strong and successful sultan. When he was bothered one day by a party of women dancing near the water, he had them all drowned; when his chief musician made the mistake of playing a Persian song, he was beheaded. And so history continued in the Near East and Central Asia, from massacre to massacre, from flaying to flaying. Periodically the “enlightened” forces of the West weighed in—from the Crusaders to the Red Army. They generally preferred to do their killing at a distance, with a longbow, or a rifle, or from an airplane. But they, too, were caught in the bloody chain.

  29

  Anna Barnes returned to her motel room in Bethesda to find two messages waiting for her at the front desk. Both said the same thing: “Please call ASAP.” One was from Alan Taylor. The other was from Margaret Houghton. Anna wondered how Margaret could possibly have discovered where she was staying, or even the fact that she was in Washington on temporary assignment. But her curiosity about Margaret was overcome by a longing to see Taylor, so it was his message that she answered first. She reached him at the office in Rockville and thirty minutes later he was in bed beside her.

  “I missed you too much,” said Anna after they had finished making love. She stroked the hair on his chest as she spoke.

  “Impossible,” said Taylor. “You can’t miss someone too much.”

  “Yes, you can. A woman can.”

  “Not me. I missed you just enough.”

  “Just enough that you didn’t sleep with someone else while I was gone?”

  “Exactly.”

  Anna looked at his body, naked on the bed. “Did you know that the Arabs had thirty-seven names for it?”

  “For what?”

  “For the penis.”

  “Typical. The Eskimos have fifty words for snow. The Arabs have thirty-seven words for penis.”

  “Seriously. I read it once in a book written in the sixteenth century by Sheikh Nefzawi of Tunis.”

  “Christ! Where did you find all these bizarre books?”

  “In the X cage.”

  “That sounds exciting.”

  “Not so exciting. It’s the section of the Widener stacks where they hid all the dirty books. You needed a key, and permission from the Director of Library Services.”

  “Typical Harvard. So what were some of the fifty-seven varieties? Do you remember any?”

  “Thirty-seven. And yes, I remember some of them. But they’re pretty ridiculous.”

  “C’mon. Let’s hear some.”

  “Okay. The bellows, because it inflates and deflates. The one-eyed man, for obvious reasons. The bald-headed man, also for obvious reasons. The sleeper. The knocker. The breaker. The weeper. The deceiver. The names go on and on.”

  “Which one am I?”

  “I’m not sure yet. As we say in the library, it needs more research.”

  “What would Sheikh Nefzawi suggest?”

  “He would say that a woman is like a flower that gives up its fragrance only when it is touched by gentle hands. He said that women are particularly like basil leaves in that respect, but that doesn’t sound as sexy.”

  “I’m a willing pupil,” said Taylor. Anna smiled and took his hand.

  And so they gave it more research, spending most of the night making love, or drifting off to sleep after it, or waking up and wanting to do it again. It was a long night of love, in which these two strange bodies gradually became intimate. They would brush naked against each other, half asleep, until one or the other would reach out and caress the not quite familiar person sharing the bed, or blow a kiss in the ear, or tell a silly joke. They both woke up bleary-eyed, with the special feeling of exhaustion and bliss that is part of falling in love. They ordered breakfast from room service, ate heartily, and promptly fell asleep again.

  Toward noon, Anna awoke and wondered aloud, “Should we go to work?”

  “Fuck it,” said Taylor.

  That sounded exactly right to Anna. She slept for another two hours and was awakened by the sound of Taylor turning the crinkly pages of The New York Times.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Anna after she had brushed her teeth, taken a shower, and gotten back in bed. “How many women have you slept with in your life?”

  “I dunno. Fifty. Maybe a hundred. Do you care?”

  “No. But that’s a lot.”

  “Not when you think about it.”

  Anna pondered it for a while. It still seemed like a lot. Anna had slept with eight men in her life. She could remember each one, each detail. They all seemed like boys, looking back. It occurred to her that Taylor might be the first man—real, grown-up man—she had ever slept with. She felt an immense curiosity about him, wanting to know the secret history and geography of his life in the same way that she was discovering his body. She knew he didn’t like talking about himself, but she couldn’t help wondering.

  “Why did you join the CIA?” she asked after a while.

  “Because it sounded like fun, and because I couldn’t think what else to do.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly. I’m a nihilist at heart. A sentimental nihilist. I liked the agency because it sounded romantic, but it didn’t really stand for anything. And I thought it would beat going to Vietnam.”

  “What was your first assignment?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Oops. What did you do there?”

  “I was a counterintelligence officer in Saigon. I worked my ass off looking for North Vietnamese spies. But it was a joke, as it turned out. We didn’t know it at the time, but most of the country was working for the NLF, including a lot of our so-called agents.”

  “And then?”

  “Then Saudi Arabia, then Somalia, then Turkey. Then Rockville. Then in bed with you.”

  “Did you like the work?” pressed Anna. She didn’t want to let Taylor change the subject yet.

  “Less and less. It began to bore me, to be honest. And I was married to someone I didn’t like, which made things worse.”

  “Dr. Marcus says people like you are the easiest for the KGB to recruit.”

  “Who’s Dr. Marcus?”

  “An agency shrink. He was one of my instructors.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, he’s full of shit.”

  “What about now? Do you like your job better?”

  “Until a few weeks ago I was ready to quit. Now, I like it. It gets the blood moving in the morning.”

  “Why? What’s different? The work hasn’t changed.”

  “I feel like I’ve finally found the inner chamber—the real CIA that’s beneath all the layers of junk. You have to have watched things fall apart to understand what it means to find out that the core is still there. I thought it was dead.”

  “So what do you want to do next, after this Karpetland thing? Do you want to stay in Istanbul?”

  “Stop asking so many questions. You’re reminding me of my ex-wife.” Taylor leaned over and grabbed the elastic waistband of Anna’s panties, which she had only recently put on. “Let’s make love,” he said.

  “I’m sore.”

  “Only one cure for that,” said Taylor, pulling off her panties. And he was right. He was so gentle and so loving that it frightened Anna, momentarily, to think what it would be like without him.

  Margaret called the next morning at the Karpetland office. Anna was embarrassed. In the thirty-six hours since first receiving Margaret’s message, she had forgotten entirely about it. Ma
rgaret’s voice was flat, noncommittal, as if there was something on her mind that she wanted very much to talk about, but not on the telephone. The older woman proposed that they have dinner that night. Anna said yes, even though she had been looking forward to another evening alone in bed with Taylor. They settled on a modest Italian restaurant in Bethesda, the kind that had an indoor fountain decorated with plaster cherubs, where the owner sang “That’s Amore,” on request.

  Anna was glad to see Margaret, and more than a little curious. How had Aunt Margaret, the genteel spinster of the clandestine service, discovered that Anna was in Washington? And who on earth had given her the telephone number of the office in Rockville, which was supposedly under such deep cover? She wanted to ask Margaret who had spilled the beans, but was half afraid to find out. She tried instead to make small talk about London. Margaret didn’t put up with that for very long.

  “I’m worried about you,” said Margaret after the waiter had brought them a bottle of cheap Italian white wine. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I can’t really talk about it,” said Anna. “It’s code word.”

  “Oh, is it now? My, my! How quickly the little ones grow up.”

  “Come on, Auntie. That’s not fair. You’ve been keeping secrets your whole life.”

  “I’m not prying. But I must tell you that what I’ve heard about your activities disturbs me.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “That you’ve fallen into some scheme of Edward Stone’s.”

  “How can you possibly have heard that? What I’m doing is supposed to be secret.”

  “Don’t be silly, dear. There are no real secrets in the agency. In our line of work, secrets are a commodity. We produce them, we consume them, sometimes we trade them for something else.”

  Anna lit a cigarette. “So what do you know? Or think you know?”

  “That you’re working on a project for Stone that involves Soviet nationalities.”