Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Positive control,” said Hoffman. He reached over to one of the beer bottles and drained the last few drops. That seemed to refresh him.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that when you’re trying to recruit someone, you want him to do things because he’s going to benefit from the relationship, not because you’re about to bust his balls. Except in the case of someone like this guy Ascari, who’s just an asshole and only wants money.”

  “It’s funny. But you sound like a woman case officer I know. She tried to tell me the same thing a few months ago.”

  Hoffman smiled. “Margaret Houghton,” he said.

  “That’s right. How did you guess?”

  “Because there ain’t that many woman case officers, sweetheart. At least not ones that know the business. How do you know Margaret anyway?”

  “She’s an old family friend. She knew my father years ago, when he was starting out in the foreign service. I’ve known her all my life.”

  Hoffman thought to himself a long moment. “Remind me what your real name is. I have trouble remembering real names.”

  “Barnes. Anna Barnes.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I knew a guy in the agency with that last name once, in Germany. I can’t exactly remember his first name. Frederick. I think, or Philip.”

  “My father’s name was Philip.”

  “Maybe it was the same guy.”

  “Probably not. My father spent most of his career in the State Department.”

  “He became an ambassador, right?”

  “Yes. To Kuala Lumpur, then to Helsinki.”

  “Same guy. He worked with me in OPC, right after the agency was formed, in 1948 or ’49. Then he joined the striped-pants set.”

  Anna shook her head. She had suspected it, imagined it. But still, it was a shock to hear someone say it. “My father was in the CIA?”

  “Yup!”

  “What did he do?”

  “A shit job. That’s why he left.”

  “What was it? I’ve always wanted to know what my father did after the war. He never talked about it.”

  “I’m not surprised. What he did was send a lot of poor Russian sons of bitches off to get killed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It wasn’t his fault. That was the job. We were prospecting for Russian agents in the DP camps, looking for people we could play back into the Soviet Union. The Russians were terrified. They had fought with the Germans in Vlasov’s army, a lot of them. Or they had just deserted. Stalin wanted them back. Your dad’s job, if I remember rightly, was to decide which ones were usable.”

  “What did he do with the rest?”

  “He sent them back to Russia.”

  “To get killed?”

  “Most of them. It was a bad scene. These poor guys would hang on to us, pleading, sobbing. Anything to keep from getting on that train. A lot of them would throw themselves under the wheels rather than go back to the Soviet Union. It was an awful job.”

  “What did my father do about it?”

  “After a while, he decided it was all bullshit. The agency, I mean. So he left. Didn’t he ever tell you about it?”

  “Just once, sort of,” said Anna. “Before he died.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me never to be a spy, but I couldn’t figure out why.”

  “So why the hell did you join up? You should have known better.”

  Anna thought a minute. “I wanted to do something that would make a difference.”

  “Make the world a better and safer place?”

  “I guess that’s right. I know it probably sounds ridiculous.”

  “No, it doesn’t sound ridiculous,” said Hoffman. “It sounds dangerous.”

  33

  Back in Istanbul, Taylor was running out of bait. He continued to meet Munzer at least once a week, feeding him pamphlets and leaflets from his dwindling supply and waiting for the Soviets to surface. A new box arrived from Washington in mid-July, shipped via ordinary parcel post. It contained copies of another reprint from Stone’s Central Asian library, this one titled “Dar ul-Rahat Musulmanlari,” or “The Moslem’s Land of Happiness,” by the Crimean Tatar writer Ismail bey Gaspraly. First published in Bakhchisarai in 1891, it was a sort of Moslem science-fiction story, outlining life in a perfect Islamic state of the future. Munzer was delighted with this new piece of subversive literature and proudly distributed copies among his friends. But “The Moslem’s Land of Happiness” failed to draw even a nibble.

  The date of the Tashkent demonstration came and went. Munzer was curious about what had happened there. So, for that matter, was Taylor. He sent a query to Stone. Because of the old man’s ban on using cables, he sent it by ordinary airmail—what used to be known in the old days, before international postage rates increased, as the “ten-cent pouch.” According to Stone, it was still the most secure method for international communication. A week later Taylor received a reply. Stone didn’t explain how he had obtained his information, but Taylor suspected from the wealth of detail that the old man had somehow gotten an agent into Tashkent at the time of the protest. Either that or he was making it up.

  According to Stone’s account, a small group of perhaps twenty people had gathered after Friday prayers in front of the Moslem Religious Board of Central Asia, near Chorsu Square in the old Islamic quarter of the city. The board was a Soviet-sponsored operation, and for that reason ordinary people were generally suspicious of it. A few leaflets announcing the demonstration had circulated in the bazaar the previous week, but most of the people gathered outside the gates appeared to be curious onlookers, rather than actual demonstrators. Apparently the local KGB office and the militia had also seen copies of the leaflet, for they were waiting nearby in large numbers.

  The motley group of demonstrators then marched from the gates of the board to the ramshackle ruins of a mosque about a hundred yards away. The mosque was a shrine to Abu Bakr Mohammed Khafal Shasti, and to members of the Qadiri brotherhood it was a sacred place. As the little group reached the shrine, overgrown with weeds, one man—perhaps a provocateur—unfurled a simple banner proclaiming in Arabic the Koranic invocation: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet.” The protester was promptly arrested—along with at least ten others. The party newspaper in Tashkent made no mention of the demonstration or the arrests in the days that followed, Stone advised, and the poor Uzbeks were still languishing in jail while the local KGB tried to figure out what was going on.

  At his next meeting with Munzer, Taylor summarized the events at the Qadiri shrine, embellishing Stone’s account only slightly. He urged Munzer to have his friend Khojaev, the émigré journalist, investigate the story and publish an account in Great Turkestan. If that could be done, Taylor said, he might be able to help smuggle copies of the magazine into the Soviet Union. That seemed to rouse Munzer’s curiosity.

  “How you do that, my friend?” asked the Uzbek. “Soviet border not New Jersey Turnpike.”

  “No. But it’s not the Berlin Wall either. There are ways of getting across.”

  “Yeah, sure. What ways?”

  “Pakistan.”

  “What Pakistan, please?”

  “Peshawar,” confided Taylor. “You can buy anything in Peshawar, anything at all.”

  “And then over borders?”

  “Yes. By truck. By horseback. By foot.”

  “Munzer understands. No more question.”

  Taylor was going to leave it there. But it occurred to him that it was odd, really, for Munzer to be asking such a specific question about operations. That wasn’t his style. Taylor suspected that he was repeating a question someone else had put to him. Which might mean that someone, somewhere, was finally getting nervous.

  “Why did you ask me about border crossing anyway?” pressed Taylor. “Has anybody been asking you for information about that?”


  “Oh, you know. Is many questions.”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Khojaev ask me. He say his friend Abdallah from Tashkent want to know about these pamphlets we getting.”

  “Oh, really? Why did Abdallah want to know? Did someone ask him, like our other American friend?”

  “Maybe. But Munzer think that don’t make no sense. Why would American man ask Abdallah from Tashkent to ask Khojaev to ask American?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Munzer,” said Taylor with a thin smile. “It makes sense.”

  Munzer was the toast of Omar’s. He arrived one Thursday night, the night before the Sabbath, when Moslem men like to go out on the town. Sonia noticed him right away, a cute, round-faced man sitting in the corner, nursing a Coca-Cola.

  “You are Mr. Munzer?” she asked.

  Munzer nodded shyly. Even after twenty-five years in Brooklyn, he still wasn’t fully accustomed to strange women introducing themselves in bars. But when she mentioned that she had heard of Munzer’s exploits as a freedom fighter, and asked if she could sit down for a few minutes with him and hear stories about the old country, Munzer felt entirely at ease. He ordered a beer, and then another, and when Khojaev showed up an hour later, a bottle of champagne. Sonia introduced Munzer to Omar and to some of the regulars—a few Kazakhs and Turkmen and a dark-eyed Chechen who looked ready to slit someone’s throat. And they had a grand time, talking and singing. The older men sat against the wall, holding hands and popping worry beads and talking politics. Just after midnight, Sonia led them all in a chorus of Turkestani songs. It was a glorious evening. Everyone seemed to be there, except the tall blond filmmaker from British Columbia.

  Jack Rawls had returned to Istanbul in late July. It was almost by accident that Taylor learned for sure he was back in town. During the weeks of trolling and waiting, Taylor had asked the Turks to put a light surveillance on Silvana Kunayeva, the wife of the Soviet consul general. She didn’t lead them directly to Rawls; she was too careful for that. But she did pay a visit one morning to a businessman in Beyoglu, a certain Mr. Guztepe, who had a prosperous import-export business with the Eastern bloc. This worthy gentleman made a trip the next day to a real estate office near Taksim Square. And the proprietor of the real estate concern, after much bullying from one of Serif Osman’s Turkish agents, disclosed that one of his salesmen had just rented out an apartment in the district of Zeytinburnu, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. It was, if nothing else, a good place to hide. The city’s leather tanneries were located there, and the district was permeated with the smell of chemicals and animal carcasses.

  Once Taylor had the address, it was relatively easy to maintain a fixed surveillance of the apartment. And eventually, one morning, the camera recorded a tall blond man putting his key in the lock and letting himself in the door. So they finally had a fix on Rawls. But Rawls, alas, still did not have a fix on them.

  Taylor’s next move was to try to wire Rawls’s new safe house in Zeytinburnu. He first attempted to do it the easy way—by renting an adjacent apartment and running in a probe microphone. But that proved impossible. The apartments above, below and on either side were already rented, and trying to bribe the sitting tenants or have them evicted seemed too risky. Taylor did find an empty apartment across the street—with a direct, line-of-sight view of Rawls’s living-room window—and he had his deputy rent the place immediately, through a Turkish cutout.

  Now Taylor needed a wireman. Stone had forbidden any use of regular agency personnel, but surely this was different—especially when Taylor had a friend who could solve technical problems and also keep his mouth shut. So he had his secretary call George Trumbo in Athens with the message that Sonia from Omar’s place wanted to see him urgently. George suspected that his leg was being pulled, but he agreed to come anyway. When he arrived the next day, Taylor took him the short distance from the airport to Zeytinburnu and showed him the layout of the two apartments.

  “This place smells like dog shit” was George’s first comment.

  “Forget how it smells,” said Taylor. “Just tell me how to bug it.”

  “It’s easy, if you’ve got the hardware,” said the lumbering technician.

  “Explain it for your dumb friend, please,” said Taylor.

  “You just use this guy’s window as a microphone. Bounce an infrared laser off it from your apartment, pick it up with the right kind of optical gizmo, and feed the signals into an audio receiver. Bingo! You can read the vibrations of the windowpane as easy as if you had a needle in the groove of a phonograph record.”

  “Great,” said Taylor. “So do it.”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t have that kind of gear.”

  “So go back to Athens and get it.”

  “Al, you don’t understand. I don’t have it back in Athens either. They don’t give that stuff to field engineers. They keep it back at headquarters. It’s classified so secret you can’t even be in the same room with it alone. I couldn’t get hold of it without a lot of paperwork.”

  “Haven’t you got friends back at the TSD front office who could help you get it without all the bullshit?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not sure I want to ask for this stuff on the sly. Maybe you hadn’t realized, but I’m still in hot water for fucking around with you a couple of months ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that someone from the Inspector General’s office came by a couple of weeks ago asking questions about you, and what were you up to, and had I done any work for you recently, and how did I like having a regular paycheck?”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing, except for stuff he already knew.”

  “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “Forget it. What are you up to anyway that makes the IG’s office so interested in you? Those guys are bad news.”

  “You don’t want to know, Georgie. Believe me.”

  “Why don’t you just go through channels and have someone from headquarters come out and install the hardware? They’ll have it done in a day. What’s the problem with that?”

  “That’s what you don’t want to know.”

  “Okay, Al. Sorry I asked. But a word to the wise: Watch your ass. Somebody back home is mighty curious about what you’re doing.”

  Taylor thanked his friend for the warning. He wasn’t sure what was going on—what was prompting the IG’s office to ask questions—but fundamentally he didn’t care. The salient point, for the moment, was that wiring Rawls’s apartment wasn’t worth the hassle. Taylor would just have to wait a bit longer for the Russian from Vancouver to show his hand.

  Munzer reported at his next meeting that Khojaev had finally introduced him to the mysterious Mr. Abdallah from Tashkent. Taylor had been hoping for several weeks that such a meeting would take place, but Abdallah wouldn’t be rushed. Evidently he had been admonished by someone or other to be very careful about talking to people. Munzer had a twinkle in his eye as he described the encounter.

  “Abdallah ask me for literatures,” he said.

  “So you gave it to him?”

  “Yes, I give to him, like you tell me. I say to him: You are patriotic Uzbek man. You want to see what Munzer doing, so I show you. We all working together for same cause.”

  “What did you give him, exactly?”

  “I give him ‘Turkestan Under Soviet Yoke.’ I give him ‘Moslem Land of Happiness.’ I give him ‘Siberian Folk Chorus,’ which is really Naqshbandi sheikh. I give him special Pakistan Koran, small size, very nice.”

  “What else? Did you show him the leaflet from Tashkent and tell him what happened there?”

  “Yes. Abdallah very sad with me.”

  “Did you give him the new leaflet we got about the demonstration in Baku?”

  “No. Munzer not give this one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Abdallah not Azeri man. Munzer not Azeri man. What do we care? You leave this thing for Azeri men.”

/>   “You’re all working together, for chrissake. Abdallah and Khojaev and your other friends should realize that this movement is bigger than just Turkestan. Other Soviet nationalities want their freedom, too. The Azeris, the Armenians, the Latvians, the Ukrainians.”

  “Who cares about Armenians and Azeris?”

  “We do. The next time you see Khojaev, show him the Baku leaflet and tell him it’s all right for him to give it to Abdallah. Okay?”

  Munzer nodded, not entirely happy at the thought that the independence movement of Turkestan would have to coexist, even momentarily, with the desires of any other people on the planet.

  A courier arrived at the consulate the first Tuesday in August with an entirely new sort of cargo. The man wasn’t from the regular diplomatic courier service, based in Frankfurt, which carried sensitive material to and from Moscow and other hot spots. In fact, he didn’t identify himself as a U.S. government employee at all when he checked in at the main gate. He just said that he had an important package to deliver personally to Alan Taylor. The Marine guards were about to send him packing when he handed them a sealed envelope with Taylor’s name typed on it and asked that they deliver it to him immediately.

  When Taylor opened the envelope a few minutes later, he found inside one of his own Karpetland business cards. “Send him up, with whatever he wants to deliver,” he said. “And don’t examine the box.”

  The courier, accompanied by a Marine, carried his cargo across the courtyard and upstairs to Taylor’s office in the annex. It was a large box. The courier had carried it all the way on the Pan Am flight from New York on a reserved seat next to him. Taylor dismissed the Marine guard and closed the door. The courier, meanwhile, was studying Taylor’s face, checking it against a photograph he had been shown. When he was convinced he had the right man, he placed the box on Taylor’s desk.

  “This is for you,” he said. He was a tough little man, with the body of a circus roustabout and a manner that suggested he could keep his brain idling in neutral for indefinite periods.