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

leaned out the window and shouted at a man driving a vegetable cart, then pulled his head back in. His eyes were stinging from the winter smog, which settled over the city in November, when Istanbulis began lighting their dirty coal fires to stay warm, and hung on until April. Taylor looked across the waters of the Golden Horn, toward the old city. He could barely glimpse the spires of the mosques through the haze—Aya Sofia and Sultanahmet and Suleymaniye—a forest of stone, lost in the fog.

Byzantium. The city where spying was invented, whose very name had become over the ages a synonym for deceit and double-dealing—for what Yeats delicately called “the artifice of eternity”; the city where, in Ottoman times, the very functioning of the realm had been secret, hidden behind the gates of the “Sublime Porte”; the city where, in the time of the penultimate sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, half the population was said to be employed spying on the other half; an infinitely exotic realm of janissaries and concubines and black eunuchs—and come to what? To monstrous traffic jams and a haze of sulfurous smog.

That was the shock of places like Istanbul. They were so ordinary. The land of the seraglio had become a typical Third World country, struggling to stay afloat politically and economically. It had a moderately left-wing prime minister, a mountain of foreign debt, a population so sharply split on politics that left and right were becoming two separate cultures. Turkey, in short, was like too many other friends and clients of the United States in the late 1970s. It was an in-between country: between Europe and Asia; between capitalism and socialism; between the Third World and the First. The prime minister typified the national schizophrenia. An amateur poet, he had translated T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound into Turkish and was said to love “modernism.” Yet somehow he did not love America.

When Taylor finally got back to the consulate, he tried to reach Timmons in Ankara. Timmons had left the office. His secretary thought he had gone to play golf. Just as well, Taylor decided. Timmons would have gotten in the way. Taylor knew what he wanted to do and—more important—whom he wanted to do it. He drafted a cable requesting the immediate dispatch of George Trumbo from the Athens field office of the Technical Services Division. He sent headquarters and Timmons an information copy, to cover his ass. If they didn’t like what he was doing, they still had a few hours to complain. It was now well after four; the antique shop would open the next morning at eight. Fortunately, George Trumbo was in the office when Taylor’s cable arrived. More fortunately, there was still time for him to catch the last commercial flight of the day from Athens to Istanbul. And most fortunately of all, George was not drunk.

George was a technical genius who, by any reasonable measure, had wasted his life in the agency. His specialty was electronic surveillance. He believed, as a matter of professional pride, that there was no such thing as a conversation that could not be overheard—in the same way that a Broadway ticket agent might insist that there was no such thing as a sold-out play. George had proved the point many times over. The agency liked to place technicians like George in big stations around the world—London, Rome, Athens, Bangkok, Hong Kong—to be ready for emergencies. It was a good idea, except the TSD men tended to go to seed. Out in the field there were too few technical operations and too many bars.

George had most definitely gone to seed. That was part of why Taylor liked him. He had stopped taking seriously the things in life that are not serious. George was a big, friendly man—a former jock who had been recruited by the agency in the mid-1960s after a knee injury ended his athletic career at a Catholic college in the Midwest—who had become interested in electrical engineering as a sort of hobby, like fixing cars. In agency parlance, he was a “knuckle dragger,” a term that ascribed apelike characteristics to anyone who did “manual” work, like installing bugs or running paramilitary operations. George did indeed look dumb—until he began taking apart a piece of electrical equipment; then, unless he was very drunk, he looked like a genius.

Taylor liked him. But then Taylor liked everybody, at least until they proved themselves incompetent or hopelessly dull. That was why he was a natural recruiter. He called George “Georgie,” the wireman called him “Al,” and together they burgled people’s apartments and bugged their telephones.

Taylor passed the next few hours in a blur. He first arranged a support team of two Turkish agents and drove them to Horhor to case the site. Then he returned to the consulate and sent a second cable to Timmons and headquarters. The cable assessed in more detail the possibility that Kunayev was a KGB officer and stressed again the time constraints that had made it impossible to obtain normal operational approval. Taylor even threw in a reference to potential intelligence about Bulgarian weapons shipments into Turkey. He signed the cable with his pseudonym—Amos B. Garrett—and then drove to the airport to pick up George.

It was almost nine o’clock when the big, smiling American emerged in the arrival hall carrying the canvas overnight bag that contained his tools.

“You fucker,” said George loudly as he shook Taylor’s hand. “I had a date tonight. This better be good.” Several Turks turned and stared at them.

“It is,” said Taylor, holding his finger to his lips.

“As good as the last one?” He was still nearly shouting.

“Screw you,” said Taylor. “And be quiet.”

“The last one was a beaut!” said George, a little less loudly. “All my work, up in smoke.”

It was true, quite literally. The last time Taylor had called on George’s technical services, it had been to install a hidden microphone in an Ottoman dueling pistol. Taylor had arranged for a Turkish