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

knocking him aside, forcing the other officers to raise their guns in self-protection. Aram kept running. A second shot echoed across the little village, and a moment later, a third. Anna took cover behind a stone wall when she heard the shots. She was at midpoint between the car and the house—unable to save Aram, unable to save herself.

Aram’s right leg, torn by a bullet, gave way under him and he fell to the ground. As the officers converged toward him to make their arrest, the Armenian doctor summoned a last measure of will and threw himself toward one of his would-be captors, flailing his arm toward the gun. When the final shot rang out in the village of Kiarki, it released Dr. Aram Antoyan from the danger of compromising himself or anyone he loved. It was an Armenian death. He had sought it, embraced it, added his name to the roster of victims.

45

Anna Barnes was taken into custody in the village of Kiarki on the morning of November 10, along with her driver, Samvel Sarkisian. She protested that she was an American citizen, traveling in Armenia on a tourist visa, and innocent of any crime. The KGB major who arrested her spoke no English, so her protest was of little use. He took her to Yerevan, where she was held at the local KGB headquarters on Nalbandian Street while the higher-ups in Moscow tried to figure out what to do with her.

The next day, she was flown to Moscow and taken to a suburban KGB office in Yasenevo for interrogation. When she refused to answer questions, she was formally accused of violating Soviet border restrictions, a potentially serious charge for anyone lacking diplomatic immunity, since it carried a lengthy prison sentence. The Soviet Foreign Ministry notified the U.S. embassy that afternoon that an American citizen named Anna Barnes, passport number A2701332, had been arrested in the republic of Armenia and brought to Moscow. The Soviets did not make any public statement of the charges, however. Silence ensued on both sides, as Soviets and Americans tried to figure out what had happened in Kiarki.

Four days after Anna’s arrest, a KGB colonel who maintained an informal, back-channel liaison with the CIA station chief sought out his American counterpart at a diplomatic reception. He remarked that the Barnes case was regarded as extremely serious by the Soviet Union, and one that could be very embarrassing for the United States. The investigation was continuing, he said, and the Soviet government would undoubtedly publicize the case soon unless it was resolved through diplomatic channels. The KGB colonel seemed to be inviting the American side to propose a deal—a swap of prisoners perhaps—but the Americans didn’t respond, that night or during the week that followed.

The prevailing sentiment in Washington, among the few people who knew about the Barnes case, was a desire that it go away. Despite the official American silence, however, there was a steady patter of cable traffic with Washington and discussion within the embassy. The Soviets, listening in clandestinely to much of this debate, rapidly began filling in the missing pieces of the puzzle.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry finally issued a brief public statement eight days after the debacle in Kiarki. It said that an unnamed American woman had been arrested in a restricted border area of Soviet Armenia and would be tried under Soviet law. The State Department immediately protested. At the daily noon briefing, a spokesman called the Soviet charges “ludicrous” and said the American in question was a businesswoman who had been visiting the Soviet Union as a tourist. The spokesman demanded that the Soviets release her without delay. An article in The New York Times the next day quoted unnamed “administration officials” explaining that the unfortunate woman had been involved in a “close personal relationship” with a Soviet Armenian dissident she had met during a business trip to Paris and might have been lured unwittingly into the forbidden border zone. Press coverage of the incident lasted just two days. With no name or other identifying details about the woman, the media lost interest.

It was, for the moment, a standoff. The Soviets had no interest, at that point, in publicizing details of a case that raised the sensitive issue of Western contact with dissident Soviet nationalities. The American side was also happy to keep the lid on a case that, if it should be disclosed in detail, would cause an uproar—embarrassing the CIA and the White House—and almost certainly trigger a congressional investigation. Besides, both sides had bigger things to worry about at that moment. Soviet troops in the Central Asian military district were beginning to assemble around Samarkand for a possible move south across the Uzbek border into Afghanistan. And for the Americans, the only hostage problem that mattered that month was in Tehran, where radical students had seized the American embassy. So a lone American woman sat in a prison cell in Moscow, waiting for trial.

Anna’s cell was small, but neat and relatively comfortable. She had better food and toilet facilities in prison than the average Soviet citizen had outside, the guards regularly reminded her. The interrogation was correct and controlled; it was not the KGB’s style to use harsh methods on American prisoners. The interrogators visited her every day, sometimes for hours, sometimes for a few minutes. But they seemed only marginally interested in the actual facts of the case. Instead they quizzed her again and again about small details in her résumé.

The questions were clever probes, designed to elicit particular bits of information that could be matched with other facts already known. Who had Anna studied with in graduate school? Why had she left Harvard before completing her dissertation? What had her father done in the foreign service? Was she aware that he had previously worked for the CIA? How had she spent the year between leaving graduate school and joining the investment bank in London? Who