Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

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.

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.