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

basement of the Soviet consulate, where it transmitted the sound of rodents and blackbeetles, it was moved to Kunayev’s residence in Bebek, a suburb of Istanbul just up the Bosporus. Taylor took the news stoically. The operation wasn’t a total loss. Kunayev seemed an interesting fellow. Perhaps he was screwing the maid at home. Or better yet, the chauffeur.

But Kunayev unfortunately was not such an interesting fellow, after all. The Soviet diplomat appeared to lead an ordinary and relatively blameless existence: He liked to drink whiskey, he shouted occasionally at his wife, he played Benny Goodman records on a scratchy phonograph, and he entertained a string of Eastern bloc diplomats who were surely among the dullest people in Istanbul. His Lithuanian wife listened to a better class of music, but otherwise her life seemed as unexceptional as her husband’s. She was a busy woman, who left the house often to go shopping or run errands. But there was no reason to suspect that she was seeing a lover.

Kunayev’s real problem was the company he kept, Taylor decided. That first week, he gave two formal parties at his home. One was for a visiting delegation of metallurgists from the Ukraine who were attending a conference at Istanbul Technical University. The transcript went on for pages of obscure shop talk about the latest trends in international metallurgy. Eventually one of the Ukrainians got drunk and insulted another member of the group, bringing the evening to an abrupt close. The other big event of the week was a dinner in honor of the Yugoslav consul general and his wife. Kunayev turned out his version of the A list: The East Germans were there. So were the Romanians, and the South Yemenis. Kunayev did his best to try to elicit information from the Yemeni diplomat, but it was evident that the poor man had no idea what was happening back in Aden. Taylor felt sorry for Kunayev. His work seemed even more boring than Taylor’s own.

After two weeks, Taylor reluctantly concluded that the Kunayev bugging operation was unlikely to rewrite the history of the Cold War. Indeed, despite Taylor’s earlier claims to headquarters, it seemed doubtful that Kunayev was even an intelligence officer.

The Turks didn’t seem to mind. Taylor delivered to Serif Osman, with great ceremony, a compilation of the first two weeks’ material. Serif was pleased. He made reference to the historic friendship between MIT and the CIA and promised to study the material with the utmost care. Headquarters didn’t seem perturbed either. Quite the contrary. Timmons was delighted. So were his bosses, and so were their bosses. Processing the transcripts gave them something to do back home, it seemed. They were “product.” It didn’t matter that it was gibberish, because no one with any common sense—no one who might dare to ask: “Who cares about Ukrainian metallurgy anyway?”—would actually read it.

They assigned Kunayev a cryptonym, CKJACK, and began asking all kinds of questions about him. Did he gamble? How many glasses of water did he drink in an ordinary day? How many children did he have and where were they studying? Did he appear to have any unusual sexual interests? The more questions they asked, the more paper they generated, which in turn enhanced the status of the operation. Timmons suggested that one of his men in Ankara, a Russian speaker, take over the case and Taylor happily complied. The whole business had begun to embarrass him.

The only thing that struck Taylor as the least bit interesting about the Kunayev household was the wife’s evident interest in Islam. She spent hours listening to tapes of what sounded like sermons, in a Turkic dialect that Taylor couldn’t understand. She talked often about the subject at home. Kunayev himself, half Kazakh, sounded uninterested. Taylor assumed at first that she was trying to impress him, trying to learn the culture and become a good Central Asian wife. But it was more than that. One day she actually put on a head­scarf and went to see a local mullah, who was said to be friendly with the Iranian ambassador. Another day she went to a lecture at the Islamic Literary Society at Yildiz Palace on the rites of the various Sufi orders, also known as the dervishes.

Taylor tried to read the agent’s report with a straight face. It seemed there were whirling dervishes, howling dervishes, barking dervishes, weeping dervishes, moaning dervishes. One order of dervishes instructed its followers to repeat the name of Allah 78,586 times to achieve enlightenment. Alternatively, the word wahid, expressing the oneness of God, could be repeated 93,420 times. Or the word aziz, expressing God’s preciousness, could be repeated 74,644 times. In addition to these eccentricities, the lecturer at Yildiz Palace had explained another interesting fact about the Sufi brotherhoods. They formed an invisible chain stretching from Turkey east across Central Asia, the lecturer said. And for that reason, the Soviet authorities had been working unsuccessfully since the 1920s to eradicate them. Through this long discussion, the Soviet consul general’s wife had taken careful notes, according to the surveillance report.

An unusual woman, Taylor concluded. There was one more interesting fact about Silvana Kunayeva. She had a habit of disappearing. The Turkish watchers would be following her into a crowded store, or down a sidewalk jammed with people at rush hour, and they would lose the track. She wasn’t doing anything suspicious. She wasn’t doing anything at all. They simply lost track of her.

Then, one day in late spring, it ended. A Russian workman arrived at Kunayev’s residence and put the Ottoman chair in a wooden crate. The sound of hammer and nails was almost deafening for the poor transcribers. The crate was taken back to the consulate, where it waited for several days. Then it was put on an embassy truck, taken to the airport, and loaded aboard a Soviet plane.

Taylor at first assumed the worst: The bug had been discovered and they were shipping the chair back to Moscow