Siro

by David Ignatius

  The African’s instructions were to leave the travel bag in the bushes directly behind the marble reviewing stand that stood on either side of the statue. He was ambling in that direction when a jeep carrying two militiamen stopped directly in front of the statue. The officers got out and surveyed the boulevard with hawks’ eyes. One of them said something into his walkie-talkie. That was a bad sign, one that would rattle most people—certainly the Indian businessman—and cause them to abort the mission, run away and hide.

  But the young African was a different cut entirely. He knew that his problem was plainclothes KGB surveillance, not the blue shirts. Without looking at the militiamen, he strolled casually down the boulevard, past the party administration building displaying the huge portraits of Marx and Engels, and down a long row of steps to a park below.

  Mbane saw a park bench, set against a row of bushes, and settled his long body onto the seat. And without thinking about it very much, with the pure instinct that is a kind of genius, he swung the travel bag behind him, over the rail of the bench, and let it slide off his shoulder into the evergreen bushes. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and contemplated the situation.

  The bench was a few dozen yards from the entrance to the Lenin subway station. From where he sat, the Tanzanian could see the large bas-relief mural gracing the station entrance. It showed Lenin leading the peoples of the East out of bondage. The figures beneath the great liberator were all Oriental—a team of Turkic men in four-cornered hats pounding metal and threshing wheat; Moslem women arrayed like the three Graces, holding aloft brooms!

  This is close enough, thought the young Tanzanian. If you can’t hit the Lenin statue, hit the Lenin subway station. He finished one cigarette, lazily smoked another to let the early-evening sky darken a bit more, and then rose from the bench—checking to make sure that the bag was concealed by the overhanging branches of the bushes. Then Vladimir Ilyich Mbane, cool and calm, strode off into the subway station, five-kopeck piece in hand, disappearing into the summer evening.

  And so it was that the first act of sabotage inside the Soviet Union by an agent of the West in many years blew up much shrubbery, a few dozen rose bushes, four park benches, a concrete walkway, and the coolie hat of a figure on a bas-relief sculpture. It happened in the middle of the night, hours after Tashkent had gone to bed, and many hours after the Indian businessman had landed in Kabul. The KGB let it be known that a gas line had ruptured. When KGB officers began questioning black men at the university, for several blacks had been seen in the area where the bomb was placed the day before, the young Tanzanian sent an anonymous tip implicating a suspicious fellow from Kampala who lived in an adjoining dormitory.

  Taylor’s mission to Athens was considerably less dangerous than the Tashkent affair. He took the morning flight from Istanbul, checking the bag Stone had sent him containing the plastic explosive. Nobody gave him any trouble at either the Istanbul or the Athens airport—he certainly didn’t look like a bomb carrier—and he went directly to Hoffman’s apartment at the foot of Lykabettos Hill. Taylor assumed that he would be expected, since he had asked Marjorie, back in Rockville, to let Hoffman know he was coming. He rang the doorbell, holding the bag full of explosive in his hand.

  “Who the fuck are you?” asked Hoffman when he opened the door. He was unshaven, and dressed in a blue silk bathrobe trimmed in black satin that looked as if it might have once belonged to a professional wrestler.

  “William Goode,” said Taylor.

  “Oh yeah?” said Hoffman, looking Taylor up and down. “So what?”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you I was coming?” asked Taylor.

  “No,” said Hoffman. He looked as if he were about to close the door.

  “They were supposed to call you.”

  “Who?”

  “Stone’s people.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. Really.”

  Hoffman squinted his eye. He didn’t like the looks of Taylor. He was too handsome. “Bullshit,” he said again.

  “Fuck you,” said Taylor. “Let me in the goddam door.”

  Hoffman liked that a little better. “Who sent you?”

  “Stone, for chrissake. Edward Stone.”

  Hoffman considered the situation and began to relent. “Maybe they tried to call,” he said. “I left the phone off the hook for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “I dunno. A couple of days. What does it matter? You’re here now. You might as well come in.”

  “Thanks,” said Taylor. He carried the suitcase in with him and set it gently atop the coffee table in Hoffman’s living room.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Hoffman, pointing to the suitcase.

  “Stone told me to deliver it to you. There’s a letter inside that explains everything.”

  “Cut the crap, sonny boy. What’s your real name anyway?”

  “Taylor.”

  “Well, cut the crap, Taylor. What’s in the fucking suitcase?”

  “Explosives.”

  “Say what?”

  “Explosives. You know. Boom!”

  “Jesus Chriminy. Explosives! Has Stone lost his mind? What does he think he’s doing anyway? Starting a world war?”

  “Read the letter,” said Taylor. “Maybe that will explain.”

  “I don’t have to read the goddam letter. I know what it says. He wants me to give this portable nuclear weapon, or whatever it is, to a crazy Iranian asshole by the name of Ascari, and have him transport it to some fleabag town somewhere in the middle of the Caucasus or Central Asia—so that Big Ivan back in Moscow will think that Uncle Sam is still a tough guy. Is that the general picture, more or less?”

  “Probably. I haven’t read the letter. But that sounds about right.”

  “Sure it does. Of course it does. That’s the basic play book. Think of ways to scare the shit out of the Russkies. And here’s a new way. Bombs!”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No. I do like it. I just think it’s a little nuts. What’s gotten into Stone anyway? He used to be so conservative.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Taylor. “I think he got fed up with all the bullshit and decided to wing it for a while. He’s got a strategy.”

  “Does he, now? And what might that be?”

  “He thinks that if we give the Soviets a good hard push, they’ll fall over.”

  “Well, I certainly do hope he’s right. Yes, indeed. Because if he isn’t, we’re all in deep shit.”

  “What do you mean? War?”

  “Fuck no. Nothing as trivial as that. I’m talking about legal trouble.”

  “What legal trouble?”

  “Someone from the Athens station came to see me a few days ago asking a lot of questions. Did I know Edward Stone? What was he doing? Did I know a woman named Anna Barnes? They may even have asked me about you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them to fuck off. I don’t work for the agency anymore. I told them that if they wanted to talk to me, they should get a subpoena.”

  “What happened? Did they get back to you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I took the phone off the hook. I didn’t want to hear any more of their bullshit. When you showed up, I thought you were a process server.”

  Taylor laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I’m a co-conspirator.”

  “That sounds neighborly,” said Hoffman. “Let’s have a drink.”

  Hoffman made sure the phone was still off the hook and opened a new bottle of scotch. By the time the bottle was finished, late that evening, they had drunk many toasts to the estimable Edward Stone, pledged unshakable loyalty to each other and to the cause, whatever that might be. Hoffman had even offered Taylor a job with Arab-American Security Consultants, should he ever find himself in difficulty with his present employer.

  The second bomb exploded in the Uzbek city of Samarkand. It arrived there in the luggage of an Iranian architect. Or at least that wa
s what he claimed to be. He certainly had a big Persian nose and spoke a sweet, musical-sounding Farsi. He liked to tell Uzbeks that he was a descendant of the Persian architect who built the Bibi Khanum mosque in Samarkand—an immense, crumbling wreck next to the bazaar that had collapsed of its own weight centuries ago. The Uzbeks would laugh when he said that and ask if he knew the tale of what happened to the architect.

  Oh yes, said the Iranian, he knew the story. Tamerlane hired the architect to build a mosque in honor of his beautiful Chinese wife, Saray Mulk Khanum. Then he went away on one of his conquests. The wife wanted to surprise him with the completed mosque by the time he returned, and urged the Persian to hurry his work. The architect agreed, on one condition. He wanted to kiss the lovely queen on her cheek. She consented. But when the Persian planted his lips on the woman’s veiled cheek, they burned through the material and left a red mark of shame upon the lady’s face. Tamerlane, needless to say, was not amused when he returned. He had his faithless consort thrown from the highest tower of the new mosque and was going to do the same to the Persian architect. But when the architect reached the top of the minaret, the legend had it, he sprouted wings and flew home to Persia.

  The Iranian loved retelling the story of his putative kinsman. He shared it at several places in the bazaar. He even went through all the details in the little bookstore on Akhunbabayev Street, across from the university dormitory and next to the militia barracks. They interrogated the manager of the bookstore at length the next day, and he remembered it clearly. The man was an Iranian, an architect. He came into the shop and asked to look at an engineering textbook, a standard one for sale in nearly every bookstore in the Soviet Union. He looked at the book and then said no, he already had that one, and pulled an identical book out of his bag to show that it was so.

  No, the bookstore manager didn’t think the Iranian could have switched the two books. He had watched so carefully, the man being a foreigner. But perhaps it was possible. There were other customers in the shop. And yes, the manager had put the engineering book back on the wall, on the side of the shop that adjoined the militia barracks. Of course it hadn’t felt strange, he told the comrade inspector. It was the same engineering textbook. Otherwise the bookstore manager wouldn’t have put it back on the shelf.

  The bomb wrecked the bookstore. But what made a considerable impression on the local people was that it also blew a sizable hole in the wall of the militia barracks. The militiamen like to imagine that they are invulnerable—strutting about in their high leather boots—and they are widely disliked, especially in a simple out-of-the-way place like Samarkand. So the local residents were almost glad it happened, and more than a little admiring of the Persian architect who had done the dirty deed and then—as it were—flown away.

  The Persian architect had most certainly disappeared—vanished into thin air despite an elaborate search. But as the authorities checked their records, they discovered, to their chagrin, that they had no record of any such person entering or leaving Uzbekistan. The Persian identity, it seemed, had been a ruse.

  Despite these setbacks, the KGB knew what to do. A new rumor began making the rounds in the bazaar. The bombings in Uzbekistan—for everyone knew there had been another, in Tashkent—were the work of an Armenian terrorist organization based in Yerevan. The Armenian merchants in the bazaar wanted more money, and they were trying to frighten honest Uzbeks with their bombs. That made perfect sense. It was the Armenians’ fault.

  VII

  LUCY MORGAN

  WASHINGTON / PARIS ISTANBUL

  SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1979

  35

  “Hullo, Mr. Antaramian.”

  “Hullo, hullo! How glad I am to meet you. I have not seen you for a long time.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I am going into Henry Seigle’s new store to buy a suit of clothes to wear in my work. Won’t you come with me?”

  “Yes, I think I will. I have not seen that store yet.”

  “It is a magnificent building—the largest in Boston.”

  “Here it is, let us go in.”

  Anna Barnes read the dialogue in her Armenian-English grammar, trying to follow the Armenian version that was printed alongside the English. She had bought the book years ago at a rummage sale in Somerville and had kept it as a curiosity, a charming piece of flotsam that had washed up from a distant shore, never imagining that she would have any practical use for it. Now, as she searched for a possible Armenian recruit among the dozens of names in 201 files and spotters’ reports that Marjorie was stacking on her desk, it seemed possible that she might actually find some use for the old grammar. She turned to a passage marked “Meeting a Lady Friend on the Street.”

  “Hullo, Agnes, where are you going?”

  “Hullo, Mr. Giragosian, I am going to church. Won’t you accompany me?”

  “No, thank you. I am going to the beach.”

  “Oh, please, do come with me. There is nice singing in our church, and the pastor will speak on the subject of ‘The Wages of Sin Is Death.’ He is an elegant young man and an elaborate speaker. Come, I will introduce you to him.”

  “Yes, but I am not a Protestant, I am a Grigorian.”

  “It makes no difference, we are all Christians. Come for my sake.”

  The dialogues went on like this for many pages, with advice on every facet of life for the new arrival in America. The author, one E. A. Yeran, had provided suggestions for what to say to the immigration officer (“Are you going to any address in particular?” “Yes, sir, I am going directly to my uncle”), how to rent a furnished room (three dollars a month is too much, even for a room with three windows, steam heat and electric lights), how to buy a suit for under ten dollars (tell the salesman: “I want a dark color, so that it will not show the dirt, as I will wear it in my work”) and even a sample dialogue for use in the Chinese laundry:

  “Hello, John. Give me my laundry.”

  “You got checkee?”

  “Oh, say, I have lost my check. It is not in my pocket.”

  “No checkee, no shirtee. You ’Melican man loozee checkee oli time.”

  Anna combed the files, looking for a modern-day Mr. Antaramian or Mr. Giragosian who could be drawn into the operation. Each morning Marjorie arrived with a new collection of paperwork from the registry, to be returned to Langley that afternoon before four-thirty. Anna was curious how Stone had arranged this flow of material. The files, bearing the true names and histories of agents, were among the most sensitive documents the agency maintained; their removal, even if only for a few hours, could have been done only with the connivance of the most senior people in the Records Division.

  The Karpetland office was empty these days, except for Marjorie. The boxes were all gone, shipped to Istanbul and Peshawar and Dubai, and from there to still more mysterious places. Taylor was gone, too, and that, for Anna, was a more serious problem. She missed him. She had forgotten that unreasonable aspect of love, the change in your body chemistry that made you ache when the connection was lost. It offended Anna. How could a feminist daughter of the 1960s feel this way—like an empty glove, limp and useless when it wasn’t filled up with someone else’s flesh and bone and life? How absurd.

  After several weeks the emptiness became a dull ache, which was better but also worse, because it felt less like love. And into this new valley of lovelessness fell questions about Taylor. Why didn’t he call or write? Why didn’t he send a silly message, like the NOC from San Francisco who translated songs from My Fair Lady into Chinese and sent them home by mail during a long TDY stint in Beijing, to amuse his beloved and perplex the Chinese authorities. And then: Who was he sleeping with? Anna believed in trusting people, especially people she loved, but in Taylor’s case, that emotion seemed almost beside the point. To kill the questions, there was work—the narcotic of choice for modern career women—and it became Anna’s protest against the unfairness of having to care so much about someone else.

 
In her self-created post as head of the Armenia desk, Anna had to decide what she was looking for. Her first thought had been to find an Armenian equivalent of Munzer Ahmedov—an émigré who was living in the West but was in touch with nationalist sentiment back home in his native republic. But that proved harder than she had expected. Most sensible Armenian émigrés in the West were devoting themselves to the rational pursuits of making and spending money.

  Anna sampled the various outposts of the Armenian diaspora, looking for plausible candidates. The agency had records on a handful of Lebanese Armenians who had worked with the Beirut station in the 1950s and 1960s as contract agents. One of them, a gold merchant on Hamra Street, had even been recruited in the 1950s to try to set up a network in Soviet Armenia. He claimed that he traveled there once a year to visit members of his family, and had apparently promised a case officer from the SB Division that he could recruit his cousins—who were party members—to spy for America. But nothing ever came of it. The gold merchant, like many of the Armenians in the agency files, proved to be a better talker than a spy. When he returned from Yerevan to Beirut, he was full of apologies. One cousin had moved to Novosibirsk; another was sick. Very sorry. Maybe he would try again next year.

  But the agency lost interest. The Lebanese Armenians didn’t seem worth the trouble. Their ranks were undoubtedly penetrated by the KGB; worse, many of them actually seemed to sympathize with the Soviet Union—which after all had sustained an Armenian homeland of sorts since 1920. Moreover, since the early 1970s, many of the younger Lebanese Armenians had been following their Palestinian neighbors into the netherworld of terrorism. The Lebanese émigrés were best left alone, Anna concluded.

  Then there were the American Armenians. Unlike the Lebanese variety, they tended to be conservative people—Republicans, most of them—whose chief ambition was to assimilate successfully in the life of America. A few Armenians had worked for the agency as case officers, some of them highly respected, but Stone had ruled out using any additional CIA people. The main Armenian-American organizations were out, too, for much the same reason. Their leadership had been close enough to the government over the years so that the first thing any of them would do, on being contacted, would be to call someone in the front office and ask what was going on.