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

the same: They were truly clandestine. The argument against them also was always the same: They were a pain in the ass. Halcyon illustrated both sides of the debate. Since the firm nominally specialized in Third World investment projects, especially in the Near East, its “employees” could travel widely and meet a range of people without arousing suspicion. The drawback, from the London station chief’s standpoint, was that running NOCs was almost as complicated as running agents.

It was assumed that NOCs were neurotic. They had to be, living out there in the cold. They would come back after a half dozen years of pretending to work for an advertising agency or an airline all messed up in the head. Sometimes the cover job would have taken over so completely that the NOC would imagine it was all for real—the big car, the trips to Nice—and forget he was still a GS-14. It was hard, even for men. And for years, it had been assumed that it would be impossible for women. They would get too lonely, too isolated, too weird. They would fall in love with their agents, or their case officers, or any old Joe who talked to them in the street. Those old assumptions were slowly changing. Even so, the mandarins probably wouldn’t have sent Anna Barnes forth so eagerly that year if the world hadn’t been so obviously going to hell.

The real problem with being a NOC, Anna decided after her first week, was that there wasn’t enough to do. The gang at Halcyon wasn’t allowed to operate on its own, assigning itself targets and levying requirements. Everything had to be cleared through the London station, then through Langley, then back through the station, and back finally to Halcyon. That multiplied the paperwork and delays.

At first Anna thought it was just because she was so new that she had so few real things to do every day. But she noticed that it was the same for the others. They spent an awfully long time reading the newspapers each morning. At twelve forty-five the men would all stride off to lunch, for fancy meals in Mayfair restaurants that were allocated variously to “spotting” and “development” of prospective talent. They returned around three o’clock, usually looking a bit flushed, and occupied themselves with paperwork for several hours. Sometimes they even did a little merchant banking business, to keep their cover intact. But the impression remained that they were somewhat underemployed. Anna remembered what Edward Stone had said about intelligence work and boredom. Perhaps he had been right.

Anna busied herself the first week with moving into a flat in the newly fashionable district of Notting Hill Gate. (“Yes,” Dennis had said, “that’s where you would live.”) She also reacquainted herself with London, a city she had passed through a half dozen times before, often with her father. During her lunch hour—at Halcyon it was more like two hours—she took to visiting her father’s old haunts. She paid calls to his favorite shirtmaker on Jermyn Street, to the store where he bought his hats on St. James’s Street, to his favorite shoe store on King Street. After two days of visiting the stations of the cross, she got tired of it—there wasn’t much to see in a men’s shoe store, after all—and went shopping for herself along New Bond Street.

Several times that first week Anna told her twinkle-eyed boss that she worried she wasn’t getting much accomplished. Dennis answered such queries with aphorisms culled from a lifetime in the spy business. “Keep spotting!” he would say. “Always be on the lookout!” At the end of the first week, sensing that all was not entirely happy with the new girl, Dennis sent her off to a seminar on Saudi development planning, thinking that would make her feel better.

Anna needn’t have worried quite so much. The wheels of the bureaucracy, although invisible to her, were indeed turning. At the beginning of her second week on the job, she received a telephone call from a man at the embassy named Howard Hambly. He was nominally a second secretary in the economic section, but he was in fact the officer assigned to supervise the care and feeding of Anna Barnes. He was calling from phone booth to arrange a meeting.

They met at a safe house in Stoke Newington. It was a small workingman’s house on a quiet street called Carysfort Road, a block from Clissold Park. It was a street where milkmen and minicab drivers lived, a street where people went out to eat at the fish-and-chips shop around the corner. It struck Anna as a silly place for a safe house, a place where an empty dwelling occupied briefly and occasionally by Americans would stick out rather obviously. But she was new to the business.

Howard was waiting at the door. He was balding man in his mid-forties, harried-looking, not quite put together, the sands running out in the hourglass of his career. He had been sent to London as a reward for many years in sub-Saharan Africa, and he seemed to regard his tasks in the London station as a diversion from the important work of attending plays and visiting pubs. Running a NOC was the last thing he wanted to be doing. They were notoriously fucked up. Even the men.

“So how are you settling in?” Howard asked solicitously. Meaning: Are you cracking up yet?

“Fine!” said Anna cheerily.

“Got an apartment?”

“Yes. A really nice one. Above an antique shop.”

Howard surveyed her. She certainly didn’t look neurotic, which to Howard meant homely. She was dressed neatly, attractively even, in a skirt and cashmere sweater. She seemed perky enough. She wasn’t complaining.

“I have a little job for you,” said Howard.

“Great!” said Anna. “What is it?”

“We have a guy who’s been trying very hard to make contact with us. He’s an Iranian. He keeps calling the embassy, leaving messages. Claims to be part of Khomeini’s secret intelligence service, which is weird, because we don’t think Khomeini