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

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