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

A week later, the CIA station chief in Moscow called his KGB liaison and requested an urgent meeting. At that hour in New York, he said, the FBI was arresting a Soviet citizen who worked for Aeroflot in New York. The man would be charged with espionage, the station chief advised, and since he lacked diplomatic immunity, he would be tried in federal court—unless the Soviets were prepared to negotiate a swap. It took just three days to work out the details. The Soviets were eager to strike a deal. The Barnes case was a nuisance, even for them.

Anna Barnes was released in February 1980. Her case received no further publicity in the Soviet press. The State Department issued a short statement noting that the American woman—still unnamed—who had been accused of border violations in November had been released. In the continuing commotion over Iran, the press ignored the story. It rated one paragraph in the “World News” roundup in The Washington Post.

Anna returned home to Washington via Frankfurt. A DDO officer met the plane there and accompanied her back to Dulles, and from there to another crummy motel room in the Washington suburbs for debriefing. The motel was only marginally better than Anna’s prison cell in the Moscow suburbs. It had a telephone, but Anna assumed it was tapped and didn’t call anyone. She ordered fattening food from room service, drank all the little bottles in the mini-bar, and, her second night there, picked up a nineteen-year-old college student who was working as a bellhop and sent him home exhausted early the next morning.

The debriefing was desultory, as if the agency didn’t really want to know the details. It became evident to Anna that her case was an embarrassment. That was fine with her. She had no interest in reliving it. They asked whether she had disclosed classified information to the Soviets during the interrogation. When she said no, they nodded and smiled. She was a woman. Of course she had cracked. A senior DDO officer arrived at the last session and presented her with a medal. Actually, he only showed it to her—a fat bronze medallion, embossed with the CIA eagle, encased in a rosewood box.

“We can’t let you keep the medal,” apologized the DDO man. It might reveal to unauthorized persons that she had been a CIA officer under non-official cover, he explained. So they would keep the medal for her in a box at Langley, and if she ever wanted to see it, all she had to do was send a letter to a postal box in Arlington asking for an appointment.

The DDO man then turned to the awkward question of Anna’s career, or what was left of it. She was no longer useful as an operations officer overseas, he said, since her cover had been blown to the Soviets. The Office of Personnel could try to arrange something for her in the Domestic Contacts Division, in a pleasant spot like Boston or San Francisco, if she wanted to stay in the clandestine service. Or perhaps Anna would like to work as an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. That could also be arranged. But if she was prepared to leave the agency immediately, a special one-time settlement would be provided, augmented by a generous contribution from the director’s contingency fund. All she would have to do was sign a quitclaim, promising never to sue the agency or any of its officials, along with a supplementary secrecy agreement and various other waivers and indemnities.

Anna signed the paperwork. It had never occurred to her to stay on with the agency. Her plan for the moment, she said, was to go back to Harvard and finish her dissertation. The DDO bureaucrat opened the rosewood box to give her one last peek at her medal, and then departed. Anna checked out of the motel an hour later and caught the first shuttle to Boston.

47

Anna’s days began as before, with a slow climb up the steps of Widener Library. Little seemed to have changed in the two years she had been away. The course catalogue was virtually identical. “The Bildungsroman: The Novel of Education, from Fielding to Joyce.” “The Theory of Interpersonal Relations.” “The Making of Modern Europe.” That was the virtue of places like Harvard, and also the curse. They were impervious to the passage of time.

The stone steps up to the reading room still passed beneath the same bizarre mural, commemorating the death of the benefactor’s son, Harry Elkins Widener, during World War I. The mural showed an impossibly voluptuous woman sticking her breast in the face of a dead soldier. “Happy those who with a glowing faith, In one embrace clasped death and victory,” said the inscription underneath. Anna had read those words several thousand times, trudging to and from the stacks in the old days, without ever being clear what they meant. She had a faint notion now, when she thought of Aram in Kiarki, of what the epigrammist must have had in mind. But it still seemed like nonsense. The dead weren’t happy. They were simply dead.

The Director of Library Services, one Joseph S. Mellanzana, assigned Anna a new stall, this time on 4E, near Numismatics, Heraldry and Graphology. Her desk looked out through a small window at Harvard Yard, and she could watch the undergraduates throwing Frisbees and dry-humping their girlfriends on the grass. It was early summer by the time she settled in, and the stacks were sweltering. Anna cracked open her small window, but it made no difference. Even the books seemed to be sweating in their bindings. She filled up her shelves with the same tomes as before. Jon Turklerin Siyasi Fikrleri 1895–1908. Turkiye Tarih Yayinlari Bibliografyasi, 1729–1955. Al-Arab wal-Turk fi al-Ahd al-Dustur al-Uthmani, 1908–1914. Deutschland und der Islam. Mr. Mellanzana sent her the same timely reminders: Handle older books carefully, lest you break the