Siro

by David Ignatius

  “Please, my friend. This man is telling so many lies about you. Big lies. You must tell him he is wrong.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Yesterday he come here to my house and says he is your friend, so I tell him some things. But today he begin to say lies about you. He says your name not Mr. Goode but Mr. Taylor. Okay. No problem. That is spy business. Then he say you not really working for agency at all and you make up whole story about big American plan to liberate Turkestan. He say nobody is doing nothing for Turkestan, so forget about all that. But I tell him no. This is big lie. My friend Mr. Goode promise me. CIA not break promise to Turkestani people again. This is impossible.”

  “You come with me, Munzer,” said Taylor, taking him by the arm. “I’ll explain everything to you. Pack some clothes in a suitcase, and I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.”

  “Not so fast, asshole,” said the security man, withdrawing his revolver from the shoulder holster. “Neither of you is going anywhere.”

  “Put that gun away,” said Taylor, who hadn’t thought to bring one of his own. “Do you know who you’re talking to? I’m the Istanbul base chief. You’re on my territory.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “As of yesterday, your deputy is chief of base. I’m operating under his authorization.”

  “That little shit,” said Taylor.

  Munzer, who was beginning to get the picture, let out a low moan. “What about Turkestan?” he said. “What about my dear Turkestani peoples?”

  “Shut up, gramps!” said the security man.

  Munzer’s round face reddened, and his almond eyes narrowed to slivers: It is a cardinal principle among Uzbeks always to treat elders with respect. This ill-mannered young American had insulted not just Munzer Ahmedov but the soul of Uzbekistan. The old man tightened his hand into a fist, and he looked for a moment as if he might throw a wild punch at the security man.

  “Calm down, Munzer,” said Taylor.

  The Uzbek turned to Taylor with an imploring look in his eyes. “Tell me this man is lying. Tell him Turkestani Liberation Movement is real thing.”

  Taylor said nothing. He could not bear to lie to the old man anymore.

  “Tell him, please.” Munzer’s large round head was wobbling like a ball knocked off center. “Do not break the heart of Munzer twice in one life.”

  Still Taylor was silent. Munzer looked at him imploringly, then warily, then angrily. His face grew redder and he began to curse bitterly in Uzbek.

  “Listen to me, Munzer,” said Taylor. “Don’t fight with this security guy anymore. It’s not his fault. Just be honest with him. Answer the questions he and his friends put to you, and everything will come out fine. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  But Munzer barely heard him. He was still muttering Uzbek curses.

  Taylor was formally placed on administrative leave the next day and ordered to return to Washington. Before he left the consulate for the last time, his deputy asked to speak with him. He was elaborately apologetic, in a way that only highlighted his pleasure at the prospect of replacing Taylor. Still, something impelled the deputy—whether genuine concern for Taylor’s operation or a desire to hedge his bets back home—to confide a final bit of intelligence. There was one thing, he said, that Taylor and his friends should probably know. The Soviet consul general and his wife had been called home suddenly to Moscow, and a special team of KGB headhunters had set up shop in the salmon-pink palace on Istiklal Avenue. Taylor nodded. Stone had evidently played his last card.

  Stone’s other calls that day proved no more successful than the one to Taylor. He tried Anna, but she had left her hotel in Paris a week before. The assistant manager there said she had gone to Deauville for a brief holiday. The assistant manager thought that was very strange—going to the Normandy coast in October—but yes, the American woman had left the address and telephone number of the hotel where she would be staying. Stone tried the number and asked for a Miss Morgan. Nobody by that name was registered. He asked for Anna Barnes. Yes, said the desk clerk, a woman by that name was staying in the hotel, but she was out. Stone left his name and said he would call back.

  Stone’s final call that day was to Frank Hoffman in Athens. A tape-recorded message said that all calls were being handled by Hoffman’s administrative assistant, a certain Mr. Panos. Stone telephoned this gentleman and demanded, in his most authoritative tone, to know where Hoffman was.

  “Are you from the embassy?” asked Mr. Panos.

  “I’m from higher up, in Washington,” answered Stone.

  “I tell you same thing I tell embassy man today,” said the Greek. “Mr. Hoffman is not here. He is gone. Traveling.”

  “Where?”

  “He is gone traveling to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Hoffman has a Saudi diplomatic passport, you know.”

  “Remind me of the name on that passport.”

  “Rashid al-Fazooli.”

  “What about the Iranian gentleman who has been working with Mr. Hoffman. His name is Mr. Ascari. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  “He is gone, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Tehran.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Mr. Hoffman fired him. He got very angry, Mr. Hoffman.”

  “Why?”

  “I am not sure I should tell you,” said the Greek.

  “Yes,” said Stone crisply. “You should tell me. Mr. Hoffman would be angry with you if you didn’t.” There was something hypnotic about Stone’s voice that commanded respect, even from strangers.

  “Mr. Ascari wanted more money,” explained Mr. Panos, lowering his voice even on the phone. “He want to be vice president of Arab-American Security Consultants. Open Tehran office. But Mr. Hoffman said no.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Ascari try to get even, and Greeks find out. They tell Mr. Hoffman that Ascari no good.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Ascari no good. Rotten apple.”

  “How did they know? Did he do something?”

  “They photograph him going into Russian embassy in Athens, and they tell Mr. Hoffman. That’s why he fire him. Then Mr. Hoffman leave real quick. He decide this is good time to go to Saudi Arabia, visit clients. You got any message?”

  “No. No message. I’m sure Mr. Hoffman can fend for himself quite adequately.”

  41

  Stone continued to come to work each morning, repairing to his small office hidden amid the maze of Langley. The day after the big raid, several people from the Office of Security stopped by to ask about the missing Karpetland files. Stone said he didn’t know what they were talking about. He retained a lawyer later that afternoon, from a Washington law firm whose leading partners were, like Stone, fanatical tennis and squash players and, perhaps as a consequence, had a reputation as especially fierce negotiators. Stone’s lawyer advised him to say nothing to anyone. Everything would work out. That advice cost $250 an hour, a reduced rate since Stone was a friend.

  The Inspector General himself paid a visit after several days, looking very embarrassed. He said he had recused himself from the case, owing to his long-standing friendship with Stone, but he wanted to ask one favor. The director was planning to request the French police to issue an arrest warrant later that day for Anna Barnes, unless Stone agreed to help find her.

  “How unpleasant,” said Stone. Of course he would help. He wrote out the address and telephone number of Anna’s hotel in Deauville, and by the next morning she was on her way back to Paris, accompanied by a woman case officer from the Paris station.

  Then things were quiet for several days. It was as if the solons of the seventh floor, having come this far, were unsure what to do next—unsure what might come unraveled if they began pulling hard on this particular string. A few of Stone’s most loyal friends took to calling him at home in the evenings and meeting him in parking lots to pass along
whatever rustlings of gossip they had heard.

  As best Stone could piece it together, the operation had been compromised not so much by one sudden leak as by a long, steady drip of information. In midsummer, the director’s office had instructed the Inspector General to investigate rumors from Radio Liberty’s headquarters in Munich of an unauthorized CIA operation involving Soviet Central Asia. The investigation had been perfunctory at first—people going through the motions, building the necessary alibi files, but not really digging for the truth. At some point, it had become more serious. Apparently, an ambitious young officer in his early forties, who had recently been transferred to the IG’s office after a disappointing tour in Latin America, had heard about the investigation, begun asking questions—and gotten what he correctly perceived as a runaround. Sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the seventh floor, he had mentioned the investigation to one of Hinkle’s beady-eyed special assistants.

  The probe might still have been contained had the special assistant not mentioned it to his girlfriend, who worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee. She told her boss, who asked the director during his September testimony on the FY 80 supplemental budget whether the agency was conducting a rogue operation in Soviet Central Asia. That did it. From that moment on, the machinery of official investigation was fully engaged and ground inexorably forward.

  Taylor returned home from Istanbul a week after the big bust. He felt an enormous indifference toward the agency—past, present and future—and was already beginning to think about a new career. None of his ideas went much beyond the standard fantasies of the CIA burnout: becoming a free-lance writer; starting a restaurant in Northern California; becoming a risk arbitrageur on Wall Street and making a bundle of money. The clearest measure of his lassitude was that he thought seriously, on the plane back to Washington, of calling his ex-wife. As for Anna, he tried not to think about her. He had a sense that he had done her a great injury, but he had no idea what to do about it.

  Taylor didn’t want to see Stone, but he knew he must, if only to pass along the information from his deputy about the sudden withdrawal from Istanbul of Kunayev, the Soviet consul general, and his wife, Silvana. He called Stone at home the night he arrived and made a date to have breakfast with him the next day at his house in Georgetown.

  Stone received Taylor with his customary courtliness the next morning. It was one of those perfect Washington fall days, like spring except that the air was crisper and the sky a sharper blue. Stone’s wife had set breakfast in the garden, which was bounded by neatly trimmed evergreens and enclosed by an old brick wall that seemed to have stood there since Federal days. The garden was a place out of time, removed from the noise and commerce of Georgetown.

  Stone appeared not simply unfazed by recent events but, in a strange way, buoyed by them. He saw himself, in the twilight of his career, as a relic of what was best and most enduring about the America that had grown up so quickly during and after World War II—namely, the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that he was under attack from the agency’s current management—people he considered amateurs and dolts—only confirmed his sense of rightness and well-being. It bothered him not at all that he was accused, in effect, of subverting the values and institutions the agency had been created to protect. Those were legalisms, in Stone’s mind. They were drawn on a different template from the one that had guided Stone’s life and work.

  Taylor accepted Stone’s hearty greeting, but found it impossible to reciprocate with his usual bravado. He had spent much of his career wanting to be one of the Stones, but he wasn’t sure that morning that it was any longer possible, or desirable.

  “How are you holding up?” asked the old man.

  “Adequately,” said Taylor. He made no effort to disguise his unhappiness. He had resolved, in general, to stop pretending.

  “Suck it up, my boy!” admonished Stone. Taylor wasn’t sure what he was supposed to suck up, so he didn’t respond. He wanted to do his business and leave.

  “I have something important to tell you,” he said.

  “How do you like your eggs?” asked Stone, as if he hadn’t heard.

  “I don’t eat eggs. Cereal would be fine.”

  “Cereal?” answered Stone. “I’m not sure we have any, but I’ll check with my wife.” He padded inside and conferred with his gracious spouse.

  “She says we have something called Cheerios, but that they’re very old. Is that all right?”

  Taylor nodded. “I have something important to tell you,” he began again.

  This time Stone managed to hear him. “Good news, I hope,” he said.

  “I guess so. You predicted it, so I suppose it’s your doing.”

  “Sorry, but I’m drawing a blank. What are you talking about? Here. Have some fruit.” He ladled some berries into Taylor’s bowl.

  “Remember Kunayev?” asked Taylor. “The Soviet consul general in Istanbul and his wife. The fun couple.”

  “Yes, indeed. The elusive Madame Kunayeva.”

  “They’ve been called home. I assume the Soviets have also pulled out Rawls, but I couldn’t check it before I left. A KGB team has flown into town to sort things out. Evidently they realize we’ve been diddling them and they’re trying to figure out how. Like I said, it’s just what you predicted.”

  Taylor had expected to see the usual look of genteel self-satisfaction on Stone’s face. Instead, it was a blank, as he struggled to make sense of what he had just heard. Taylor wondered if perhaps the old man was becoming forgetful, and needed a prompt.

  “The KGB must have found the bug in the Ottoman chair, in Alma-Ata,” Taylor said. “How did you arrange that anyway? I’m curious.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How did you tip the Russians off? You said a few months ago that this was how you wanted to finish off the operation. You were going to help Moscow Center discover that the CIA had bugged a chair belonging to the party first secretary of Kazakhstan, and let them figure out how it got there. So how did you do it? How did you pass the message?”

  Stone was shaking his head. “That’s just it,” he said. “I didn’t tip them off. I never played that card. I didn’t have time.”

  “Then who pulled the plug?” asked Taylor, beginning to realize that this was not, apparently, Stone’s last triumph. “How did the Russians find out that something fishy was going on in Istanbul?”

  Stone poured himself a cup of coffee. He wasn’t about to get frazzled at this late stage. “I suspect that they discovered the nature of our game the same way half of Washington seems to have found out—as a result of gossip among people who are supposed to keep secrets, but don’t; and through cable traffic that is supposed to be secret, but isn’t. They may also have had a bit of help.”

  “From whom?”

  “From that appalling fellow Ascari, the Iranian.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The Greeks apparently photographed him entering the Soviet embassy in Athens. He was mad at Hoffman.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Taylor. “How much do you think he told the Russians?”

  “Quite a lot, I suspect. Though he may not have told them all the details about his cousins, the smugglers. For business reasons.”

  “Where’s Hoffman?”

  “He’s gone to ground. I suspect that he’s angry at me again.”

  Stone took a sip of his coffee and dropped in another lump of sugar. It disappeared with a kerplunk.

  “Bad news,” said Taylor.

  “I suppose so,” said Stone, determined to regain his happy equilibrium. “Although I’m not sure it really matters all that much. If Congress knows, why shouldn’t the KGB? Anyway, I believe we’ve got our people out of harm’s way.”

  “Not all of them,” said Taylor. “You’re forgetting Anna’s man. The Armenian.”

  “So I am.”

  “He’s got problems. When he goes to pick up that package in a couple of weeks—with your ex
tra goodies thrown in—he’s going to get nailed.”

  “Quite likely. I agree.”

  “So shouldn’t we try to call off Ascari’s delivery service?”

  “I suspect that’s impossible. Ascari’s friends and relations are probably already on their way. I doubt we could call them back now even if we tried.”

  “We could at least send a message to the Armenian, warning him to stay away from the drop site.”

  “Dreadful idea. Any message would be insecure. It would almost guarantee that he would get caught. This way, he at least has a chance.”

  “You had better tell Anna. This means a lot to her. She’s going to be upset.”

  Stone looked at Taylor with that blank, affectless gaze that most people regarded as a mark of professionalism.

  “Why do we have to tell her?” he said. “It doesn’t matter, and she would only be tempted to do something silly.”

  Stone buttered a piece of toast.

  Taylor stared at him. “I must not have heard you right,” he said.

  “You heard me fine. You’re just getting sentimental.”

  “Fuck you,” said Taylor. With this last, cold-blooded exchange, something had snapped in him.

  “Worse than sentimental,” said Stone. “You’re becoming rude. And disloyal.”

  “Fuck you,” Taylor said again. For him, the long seduction was over. He was, in that moment, sick to death of Stone and his fellow conspirators—people who, for all their noble pretenses, had their thumbs pressed permanently on the moral balance. He stood up from Stone’s finely laid breakfast table, rattling the china cups and saucers.

  “Sit down,” said Stone.

  “I’m sorry,” said Taylor. “But I’ve had it. Find somebody else.”

  “Sit down,” he said again, in that resonant voice that had parted the waters of life for so many years. Taylor ignored him.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “You tell Anna about the problem with the Armenian, or you can count me as an enemy from here on out. And I warn you, I’m the wrong person to have as an enemy. I’m no pushover, like your country-club friends. I’m as devious as you are, and I don’t give a shit what happens to me. Or you. So you tell Anna. Got it?”