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

Center for more study. But he was wrong. Inquiries at the airport revealed that the chair wasn’t bound for Moscow at all, but for Alma-Ata. And accompanying it was Kunayev himself. Discreet inquiries by several friendly diplomats revealed that the Soviet consul general was returning to his native republic for a brief home leave. He had even boasted to an Indian diplomat that when he went home he would be meeting with his cousin, the party first secretary of Kazakhstan. The chair, Taylor finally understood, was a gift—an elaborate piece of baksheesh. At last, Taylor felt a measure of respect for Kunayev. The corrupt little man was trying to kiss the ass of his political patron.

Taylor sent home a detailed cable summarizing these developments, but the front office was not amused. Continuing the surveillance in Alma-Ata would be a practical impossibility. The operation was finished. The CKJACK transcripts would no longer feed the maw of analysts and taskers and estimators. A “product” would disappear from the shelves; the sum of intelligence would be diminished. It was all very sad. The only person back home who seemed genuinely pleased by this course of events was Edward Stone. A regular reader of the CKJACK traffic, Stone saw another small piece of his mosaic falling into place.

   III

SDROTTEN

LONDON / ISTANBUL

FEBRUARY–MARCH 1979

11

Anna Barnes arrived in London the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran. The agency was in a generalized state of panic. All the big stations in Europe had been alerted to look for assets who might be able to do something, anything, to help patch together contacts with the new regime. The files of old prospects who had been rejected years before as uninteresting or unreliable were now being reopened. They were turning over every stone—wild-eyed Kurdish nationalists, money-grubbing Iranian journalists. French leftists—nobody was so weird that the agency wasn’t willing to give him a look now, when it was in trouble.

What possible interest could any of this have for the young dark-haired American woman arriving on Pan Am Flight 106 from Dulles? None, evidently. She had been immersed in a copy of Institutional Investor on the way over, and when she arrived at Heathrow, she bought herself the latest issue of Euromoney. She was a banker, apparently. A young career woman on the make. They were everywhere that year, the women lawyers and bankers fresh out of Oxford and Yale and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, queuing up for their seats on the global gravy train.

Halcyon Ltd. had its offices in one of those forgettable squares near Holborn Circus. Anna showed up the first day in a dress-for-success pinstripe suit, light makeup, all business. She spent the morning filling out forms for a Mrs. Sanchez, the head secretary, who was the only person there until nearly eleven o’clock.

“You’re PCS, aren’t you?” asked Mrs. Sanchez.

“Excuse me?” asked Anna.

“Is this a permanent change of station, or are you here on TDY?”

“It’s my first station, actually,” said Anna.

Mrs. Sanchez rolled her eyes as if to say: I guessed that. She showed Anna to her office, gave her a key to the ladies’ room, pointed out where they kept the paper clips and pencils, handed her some cable forms, and generally did her best to make Anna feel like an idiot. Apparently Mrs. Sanchez was not entirely comfortable with the notion of a woman case officer entering her domain. Eventually other co-workers arrived and gave Anna at least the semblance of a real welcome.

Presiding over Halcyon Ltd. was a twinkle-eyed and slightly dizzy man in his fifties named Dennis Rigg. He had been a NOC for more than twenty years, and his manner suggested that all the years of concealment and anxiety had devoured the interior of his personality, leaving only the cheery, giddy shell. The firm’s two other associates worked for the agency as well—both young men in their early thirties, who tried very hard to look like Ivy Leaguers but were actually from state schools in the Midwest. Mrs. Sanchez and the other secretaries were CIA, too. The only non-agency person on the premises was a retired military man, Admiral Hawes, or Dawes—Anna could never quite get the name because he swallowed his words—who was nominally the chairman of the firm and was trotted out to impress visitors and putative clients. The Admiral took very long lunches. Sometimes they lasted for days.

Halcyon Ltd. was a nest of NOCs: a small group of case officers working under non-official cover. It was a tidy arrangement. The Halcyon NOCs reported to the London chief of station, just like embassy officers, but they met their handlers at safe houses. Like all NOCs, they had some obvious advantages over the inside people. They could spot and develop agents without disclosing official U.S government interest. They could gain access to people and places that would be denied to an embassy staffer. They could meet unobtrusively with agents. All in all, they had less flap potential. Unless, of course, they got caught.

Halcyon was a product of the agency’s endless wrangle over cover. Everybody knew that embassy cover—as a political or commercial officer—was the same as no cover. It was transparent. If the Russians couldn’t figure out for themselves who were the spies by looking at the Diplomatic List, they had help from State Department wives, who complained endlessly at cocktail parties about the better perks that CIA officers received: bigger apartments, larger allowances for entertaining, more frequent travel. The State Department had tried to help by developing something called “integrated cover,” in which CIA officers going behind the Iron Curtain would train and study alongside ordinary foreign service officers—seemingly indistinguishable. But once people got to the embassies, cliques started to form, and they gave the game away.

The answer was more NOCs. That, at least, was the recommendation of several of the task forces that had examined the cover problem since the 1950s. The argument for more NOCs was always