Siro

by David Ignatius

  Two possibilities surfaced in the files of the Domestic Contacts Division. One was a second-generation Armenian physicist from Stanford who traveled often to international scientific conferences and provided regular reports on what his Soviet colleagues had to say. But according to the file, he spoke no Armenian and had no strong interest in Armenian causes. He hardly seemed the man to organize an underground movement. The other was a journalist with one of the newsmagazines. The agency had opened a 201 file on him because once, during the early 1970s, he had agreed to take a close look at a Soviet COMINT facility outside Budapest during a reporting trip to Hungary. He had performed a few other one-shot assignments over the next several years and then had gone inactive. He spoke good Armenian and was described by his former case officer as something of a hothead when he had a few drinks. In short, he sounded perfect. But there was one insurmountable problem. The agency had been banned, ever since the great flap of the mid-1970s, from recruiting American journalists as agents. The same rules must surely apply to Stone’s operation, Anna reasoned.

  That left a final capital of the diaspora, the Armenian exile community in France. And it was there—amid the Armenian booksellers and jewelers and travel agents—that Anna at last found someone who sounded like a good candidate—almost ideal, in fact, except for one rather serious flaw. The man in question wasn’t an émigré. He was an actual Soviet citizen, a doctor who had been doing postgraduate research at the Sorbonne medical school for the past two years and was due to return home to Yerevan in the fall.

  His name was Aram Antoyan, and he had entered the CIA computer files a year before, as a result of a rather silly mistake. The French counterintelligence agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, had routinely informed the CIA station in Paris of his arrival in 1977 to study “nuclear medicine,” which sounded exciting but simply meant using radioactive dyes as a diagnostic tool to monitor the functions of the kidney, bladder and other internal organs. Some idiot in the Paris station, however, had assumed that “nuclear medicine” must have something to do with bombs. A false-flag operation was duly approved to find out more details and see if Dr. Antoyan could be recruited. A NOC made a pass at him in Paris, posing as a Belgian anesthesiologist, but he came away convinced that the Soviet doctor was just that—a medical researcher, with no apparent knowledge of military matters.

  The only unusual thing about young Dr. Antoyan, reported the NOC, was that he talked fervently about Armenian issues—to the point of criticizing official Soviet nationalities policy. The file concluded with a brief exchange of cables between Paris and headquarters on the advisability of further development of the case. The anti-Moscow talk was encouraging, but headquarters concluded that Dr. Antoyan’s likely access to classified information when he returned home would be close to zero, and that recruiting him wouldn’t be worth the time and effort.

  “I think I’ve found my man,” Anna told Stone three days later at the office in Rockville. Stone had tried to put off the meeting, and had agreed to come only when Anna threatened that otherwise she would pay him a visit at Langley.

  “What man are you talking about, my dear?” he asked. Stone was wearing a striped bow tie that day, which made him look especially clipped and precise.

  “My Armenian agent. I’ve found someone in Paris who would be perfect for the part.”

  “That’s nice. But I still haven’t decided to add another body. We’re having enough trouble with logistics as it is.”

  “This person wouldn’t present any logistical problems. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’d be self-contained.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because he’s a Soviet citizen, not an émigré. And he’s on his way back to Yerevan soon, so we won’t need any extra plumbing.”

  “Sorry. Out of the question.”

  “Why, dammit?” She was peeved. The Armenian project was her own small piece of ground, and Stone was cutting it out from under her.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “For whom? Him or us?”

  “Both, but especially for him.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Anna.

  Stone bristled. He wasn’t used to having his judgment questioned.

  “He’ll know how to take care of himself,” she explained. “And we’re not asking him to do anything very risky. According to the file, he’s already quite outspoken about his Armenian sympathies, so he may be in hot water anyway.”

  “I’ll think about it. But my initial response is no.”

  “There isn’t time to think about it, Mr. Stone. He’s going home soon. All I’m asking is that you let me check him out.”

  “What makes you think you can recruit him?”

  “Intuition.”

  “That’s bullshit, my dear, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I don’t mind, so long as you let me give it a try.”

  “I’d like to, honestly. But it’s a delicate time, more than you realize. I won’t bore you with the details, but we’re having some difficulties with the front office. We don’t need any more baggage.”

  “I’m not baggage,” said Anna. Her voice had a tremor of anger.

  “I’m not talking about you, Anna. I’m talking about the Armenian.”

  “Alan will back me up. So will Frank Hoffman, if I ask him.”

  “How stubborn you are. I must say.”

  “You gave me your word that you would let me explore this, Mr. Stone. If you back out now, it’s going to make me reevaluate a lot of other things.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I want to go to Paris.”

  “I see.” Stone thought about it a good long while, long enough for Anna’s resolve to crack, if it was crackable. But she sat there nearly motionless, convinced of the righteousness and good sense of what she was proposing. And Stone, it must be said, knew when to fold a weak hand.

  “Very well,” he said. “Before you go, I will insist on a plausible scenario for recruitment and termination. I’ll want all the usual paperwork and then some. After that, you’ll be on your own.”

  Anna nodded, and allowed herself a modest, chaste smile of triumph. Stone studied her handsome face. There was a fierce look in her eye that Stone, had he been feeling less harassed, would surely have recognized as the product of his own tutelage. It was, in a way, a victory for his methodology, another triumph for the old boys.

  36

  The Armenian doctor lived in the southern suburbs of Paris, in one of the dormitories for foreign students known as the Cité Universitaire. He worked during the day at the Faculty of Medicine of the Sorbonne, just off the Boulevard St.-Germain. Young Dr. Antoyan was a creature of habit: He caught the Métro each morning at eight-thirty, changed at Denfert-Rochereau, got out at St.-Germain-des-Prés, and walked the four short blocks to the Rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine. The best thing about him, from Anna’s standpoint, was that the files showed no trace of any KGB connections. He was, quite simply, a young research doctor—a very bright one, apparently—who had been sent abroad for advanced training.

  Anna had decided that the best recruitment scenario was the simplest and closest to life. She would present herself to the Armenian doctor as a former Harvard graduate student in Ottoman history, now working with a foundation that supported cultural and historical research on the Near East and Central Asia. She would informally solicit his views on Armenian issues, ask him to do a short research paper (for which she would pay him handsomely), then ask him if he might be willing to do additional research when he returned home to Yerevan. And then—if all had gone well up to that point, she would pop the question. Stone couldn’t really argue with what she proposed. It was a standard recruitment scenario—used with minor variations on hundreds of Eastern bloc and Third World students over the years.

  As an intermediary in setting up the rendezvous, Anna chose a young French journalist named Danielle Marton. She found Marton’s name in the files summarizing the develop
ment work that had been done two years before. Marton was a perfect access agent. She was a more or less witting asset of the Paris station, carrying the cryptonym UNWILLOW, who had met Antoyan through her husband, a doctor, when the Armenian first arrived in Paris in 1977.

  Anna, banned by Stone from working through the local station, simply called Danielle Marton on the telephone and invited her to lunch. She never quite explained how she had gotten Marton’s name—and certainly never said she worked for the agency—leaving all that to the French journalist’s imagination, which was much more powerful and persuasive than anything Anna could have said. Anna dropped a few leading questions about the Soviet Armenian doctor; by the end of the lunch, Marton was volunteering to arrange a meeting.

  They met at five-thirty one afternoon in a quiet café several blocks from the Boulevard St.-Germain. Anna and Danielle had arrived early and were animatedly discussing one of the great questions of the twentieth century—why had the feminist Simone de Beauvoir fallen so slavishly in love with Jean-Paul Sartre?—when up walked Dr. Aram Antoyan. He was a handsome man in his early thirties—medium height, with dark features, jet-black hair and a thick black beard. He was wearing blue jeans and a tweed sports coat over his blue linen doctor’s tunic. He might have been a resident at an American hospital, except for one unmistakably Armenian feature—the large black eyes that appeared to be deep pools of memory and sorrow, even when he was smiling.

  Danielle made the introductions. The young Armenian doctor, though obviously tired from a day at work, tried his best to be charming. He flirted with his friend Danielle, complimented her on her dress, asked her about her latest article. He was more reserved with Anna, obviously curious about what she wanted but waiting for her to take the lead. They conversed in French, but even in that sometimes mannered language, he spoke with a directness and clarity that was almost like English. Danielle excused herself after a few minutes, saying that she had to make dinner for her husband, the doctor. Anna let the conversation meander for another twenty minutes before making a move.

  “I’m interested in the Armenian question,” she said eventually, by way of explaining why she had arranged the meeting.

  “La question arménienne,” repeated Antoyan, turning the French words over in his mouth. “A ruinous topic. I suppose it is our fate, we Armenians, to be not a people, but a question. Why are you interested in this sad subject?”

  “I work for a foundation,” said Anna.

  Antoyan looked at her skeptically, his thick black eyebrows arching upward.

  “My foundation studies contemporary issues in the Near East and Central Asia. We work with universities, American corporations. That sort of thing.”

  “May I please ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” said Anna, hoping that her face didn’t betray the anxiety she felt.

  “Do you work for the Turks?”

  “No,” said Anna, relieved that this was his principal concern.

  “Good,” he said with a trace of a smile. “I would be concerned if you were working for the Turks. But if you’re not a Turk, and not an Armenian, I must ask you again, why are you interested in the Armenian question?”

  Anna spoke from the heart. She told Dr. Antoyan about her freshman roommate at Radcliffe, Ruth Mugrditchian, with her stories about a great-aunt who crawled across the Syrian desert with a Bible in her hand and another relative who survived because he was hidden at the bottom of a well. Those stories, she explained, had gotten her interested in Ottoman history.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Armenian doctor. “That is why everyone becomes interested in the Armenians. We are such perfect victims.” He closed his eyes. Like every Armenian child, he had grown up hearing similar stories of the genocide. But that evening, sitting in a café in St.-Germain, talking with an attractive American woman, it was obvious that he did not want to hear them all over again.

  “I’m sorry,” said Anna. “I’m not interested in Armenians only as victims.”

  She was angry at herself for being too direct, too clumsy in her opening. She tried to remember the advice of her instructors, so many months ago. Go slow, let your quarry set the pace of the conversation. Let him tell you, in his way, what matters to him. But Aram didn’t seem to mind her clumsiness. He had a wry smile on his face, the look of a man determined to make merry at a wake.

  “If you really want to know about the Armenian question,” he said, “you must listen to Armenian Radio. They have the answer to everything.”

  “Glad to, but what’s Armenian Radio?”

  “Impossible! You mean you have never heard of the famous Armenian Radio and its answers to listeners’ questions?”

  “Sorry, but I haven’t.”

  “This Armenian Radio distills the ancient wisdom of our people. I will give you an example. Armenian Radio is asked: What is the most ancient and beautiful city in the U.S.S.R.? Armenian Radio answers: Yerevan is the most ancient and beautiful city in the U.S.S.R.

  “And how long would it take a nuclear bomb to destroy Yerevan? the radio is asked. Armenian Radio answers: Tbilisi is also a very ancient and beautiful city.”

  Anna realized that her leg was being pulled. “So what does Armenian Radio say about the Armenian question?” she asked.

  “Armenian Radio answers that the Georgian question is also very important.”

  It was a soft September evening, and Dr. Antoyan didn’t seem in any rush, so they ordered another round of drinks and talked about America, the movies, modern medicine, the writings of Solzhenitsyn. There was no topic, it seemed, that Dr. Antoyan wasn’t willing to discuss. He was in that respect typical of the new generation of Soviets that was beginning to travel overseas in the late 1970s. They were curious and surprisingly self-assured—especially the scientists and research doctors, who like their Western colleagues considered themselves members of the international republic of the intellect and disdained petty rules. After two hours of this charming conversation, Anna felt that she really ought to get back to the subject at hand. She tried to think of an artful transition, but couldn’t.

  “Tell me about Armenia,” she said. “What is it like?”

  Aram smiled. “It is simply a place, with the ordinary pleasures and problems of any other place. Plays, restaurants, theaters, parks. To me, that is its triumph. Armenia is ordinary and alive, rather than special and dead.”

  “But what makes it different from Moscow or Kiev? Or Paris?”

  “It is more corrupt.”

  “But corruption is everywhere in the Soviet Union these days, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but that is workmanlike Slavic corruption. In Armenia it is an art form. It is the soul of the economy.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Anna. “Can you give me an example?” She hoped she wasn’t sounding too eager, too hungry for information. But the Armenian doctor seemed happy enough to talk.

  “Take the cognac factory in Yerevan,” he said. “It is one of our greatest economic enterprises, located in a great stone building atop a big hill as you enter the city. Some people assume it must be the parliament building! Now you might think that the goal of this enterprise would simply be to produce fine cognac, since ours is renowned throughout the Soviet Union. But that is not quite right.”

  “What is it really there for?”

  “To create surplus production, which can be sold illegally for private benefit. Let’s say the monthly production quota is five thousand bottles of cognac. The factory will claim to make six thousand bottles, to overfulfill the quota and receive its bonuses. But in fact, the factory has really made seven thousand bottles.”

  “What happens to the extra thousand bottles?”

  “Precisely the question! What happens to the extra thousand bottles? Let us assume that I am one of the managers. I send a hundred and ten bottles to my Armenian friend in Leningrad. He signs for receiving a hundred bottles, the amount he actually ordered. He sends me money for the extra ten bottles and sells them
. Or maybe he and I develop a swap system. I send him cognac; he sends me leather. And maybe I swap some of the leather with another Armenian friend in Tashkent, who has some cotton. The thousand extra bottles are all disposed of in a similar way. You understand?”

  Anna nodded. She thought of all those vanishing bottles, and of the difficulty of managing an entire economy that ran on two sets of books.

  “The system is rotten at every point,” said Antoyan. “The only thing that is alive is the rot.”

  “That’s fascinating,” said Anna, “and very helpful to my foundation.” The Armenian seemed almost recklessly frank in his description of how the system worked. She wondered to herself whether she should make her move, push him to venture across the invisible line, toward cooperation. But Dr. Antoyan was smiling again.

  “You know what Armenian Radio says on this subject?” he said.

  “No, what?”

  “Armenian Radio is asked: Is it possible to build Communism in Armenia? Armenian Radio answers: Yes, but we would prefer that you build it in Georgia.”

  Anna laughed, but in truth her mind was somewhere else. She felt like a salesman, trying to get that first toe in the door. Being friendly and polite wasn’t enough; in the end, you had to push your way in.

  “Listen, Dr. Antoyan,” she said. “My foundation is very interested in this subject.”

  “What subject?”

  “Corruption in the Soviet Union.”

  “I see.”

  “And we would love to know more about it. Maybe you could write a brief paper for us about the economic situation, summarizing what you have told me. Just a few pages. We would offer you a small research stipend, of course, if you could accept it.”