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

wasn’t long lines at the gas pumps. Much of the time, as the winter progressed, there simply wasn’t any gas to be had. Oil prices increased eighty percent at the start of the year and kept climbing. There were daily power cuts in Istanbul and bare shelves in the stores. The Turks were responding to these dark forces by doing the one thing that still seemed within their power—killing each other.

The Turkish winter had begun with a massacre at a place called Kahramanmaras, in eastern Turkey. The trouble there had started a few days before Christmas, with a march by local leftists to protest the death of two schoolteachers. The leftists painted slogans on the walls, shouted epithets against the regime, and began throwing rocks. The army opened fire. By Christmas Day, 109 people had died at Kahramanmaras, more than 1,000 had been wounded, and over 500 shops had been destroyed. The violence soon spread to other cities, and on December 26 martial law had been declared in thirteen provinces. The murder rate from terrorism was climbing into double digits, and it seemed entirely possible in early 1979 that Turkey was heading the way of Iran.

Why was America letting the string unravel? That was what the Turks wanted to know. Why couldn’t somebody do something? The American ambassador in Ankara sent home a tart cable: “Turkish concerns about U.S. reliability as an alliance partner have deepened as a result of our inability to prevent the fall of the Shah of Iran and the perception that the U.S. is losing strength in relation to the Russians.” That was about as blunt as they got in the striped-pants set, but it didn’t do any good. When the subject of Turkey came up back home, the only thing anybody seemed to want to talk about was human rights.

Taylor didn’t know what to tell his Turkish friends, so generally he didn’t say anything. The chief of staff of the Turkish Air Force sought him out at a party in Istanbul in late January and warned him that the Iranian situation was a strategic disaster. Why wasn’t America doing anything about it? “I can’t talk about it,” said Taylor. The general looked relieved. Of course the Americans were doing something about it; they just couldn’t talk about it.

Taylor liked opening the pouch every morning. It was a gesture of optimism, an expression of hope that among the endless sequence of bureaucratic directives and memos from headquarters might lie a rough gem of insight, a new plan of action, a sense that somebody back at the central cortex had a clue about what was happening out in the elbows and kneecaps of the world. He was nearly always disappointed, but he came back again each morning with, if not always hope, at least curiosity. He was waiting for something to happen, something that would force the issue, something that would order the puzzle of his life. And it finally did, one day in late January.

The day began badly, when the code clerk brought Taylor the latest missive from headquarters. At first he thought it was a joke, an elaborate parody of the bureaucratic morass into which the agency had been sinking in recent years. It was a lengthy dispatch from “Edward J. Ganin,” the pseudonym of the new director of central intelligence, Charles (Chuck) Hinkle. It had been sent via the director’s special communication channel, whose messages carried the cryptonym LWSURF but were known informally as “Chuckgrams.”

“Management by Objectives” read the heading. Taylor leafed through the long memo. It was written in the earnest gibberish of a Dale Carnegie seminar, with a list of ten rules for better management (“No. 6: Dare to Delegate!”) and a brightly colored poster-size sheet that said: tough but fair—the manager’s credo! Taylor skimmed the document and got to the “action plan” on the last page. It mandated every CIA station and base around the world to draw up a detailed list of its current intelligence “objectives” and confirm that they accorded with the master list back at headquarters. If taken seriously it meant days of drudge work. Taylor decided he had better call his boss, Stanley Timmons, the station chief in Ankara.

“Has someone back home gone crazy?” asked Taylor.

“I beg your pardon,” said the station chief, a gentle man who was nearing retirement and had every reason not to rock the boat. Timmons spent most of his time worrying about the agency’s listening posts on the Black Sea and playing golf.

“What the hell is ‘Management by Objectives’?”

“Read it yourself,” said Timmons.

“I read it. But I don’t believe that anyone could take it seriously.”

“Believe it. I need your list in a week.”

Taylor groaned. “Where did Hinkle get this silly idea?”

“From the President.”

“That’s reassuring. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

“Maybe you are,” said Timmons. “By the way, don’t forget about the Bulgarians.”

“I’m working on it. But I’m not sure it’s there.”

“Work harder. The White House is convinced the Bulgarians are sending weapons into Turkey. They want evidence.”

“Who told them?”

“The Romanians. The French. How should I know? Just do it.”

Taylor was going to say “Fuck the White House,” but Timmons had hung up. Taylor put down the phone and looked at the “Management by Objectives” directive. He read a passage at random: “The way to stay ahead of the competition is to think smart, and the way to think smart is to avoid making the same mistakes, which create a negative feedback situation that prevents you from realizing your objectives!”

“What an asshole,” muttered Taylor. He looked at the memo and gave it the finger. It was a childish gesture, but there was a part of Taylor that had never quite graduated from high school. He was the sort of man whose moral code had not progressed too far beyond the conviction that rules were a bad idea and that people, in general, should do what made them feel good.

“Alan, you have a call,” shouted Taylor’s secretary through the door. Taylor insisted on