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

contain, much less what he would do with it. The recorder was still operating after more than a month, just as George Trumbo had said it would be. But transcribing the tape was a bit awkward. Taylor didn’t want to give it to one of Timmons’s technicians in Ankara, who might begin asking questions. He decided against having his own secretary transcribe it, for the same reason. So with some cryptic telephonic advice from George in Athens, he struggled himself through the many hours of conversation recorded over the past month.

Once Taylor began reviewing the Rawls tape, he couldn’t stop. He stayed up all one night and into the next morning, listening and transcribing in longhand the parts that interested him most. What he heard, as he sat listening on the floor of his apartment in Arnavutkoy, surprised even a career neggo who had made it a practice never to be surprised by anything: Mr. Jack Rawls, the putative film producer from British Columbia, was organizing what sounded like a private army of Central Asian émigrés.

Rawls began each conversation the same way: He would thank the visitor for coming, talk a little nonsense about his documentary film on Soviet émigrés, and then move gradually into a discussion of the history and politics of Central Asia. He seemed to be trying to gauge the intensity and commitment of each of his visitors. As Rawls talked passionately in his TV preacher’s voice and the visitors responded in kind, the sessions took on the air of a revival meeting.

The first meeting was with a man who called himself Abdallah. Taylor imagined him to be a short dark man with broad cheekbones and hollow eyes. Rawls began with pleasantries, invocations of Allah and talk about his movie. Then, when he had established that his visitor’s family was from Tashkent, at the center of the vast expanse of Central Asia once known as Turkestan, Rawls began turning the crank.

“The Russians have dismembered Turkestan,” said Rawls, speaking in his language-school Turkish. Taylor clasped the earphones tight, trying to hear every word above the hiss of the tape. “The Russians in Moscow took the great land of Turkestan, which stretches from the Black Sea to China, and what did they do with it? They colonized it!”

“Oh yes!” chimed in Abdallah.

“Yes, my friend,” returned Rawls. “The Russians cut great Turkestan into little pieces. They took the vast and noble empire of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and divided it into five little pieces they could swallow. Uzbekistan. Tajikistan. Kazakhstan. Turkmenistan. Kirgizia. Little lands, too small to fight. And then, when great Turkestan was weakened, the Russians destroyed the mosques! Stalin tried to keep his crime secret, but I have the numbers.”

“You do?”

“Listen! In 1917, there were 26,000 mosques across Turkestan and the Caucasus. By 1942, only 1,312 remained!”

“Shame!” said Abdallah. His voice was trembling.

“And do you know what the Russians call the sons of noble Turkestan today? They call them chernozhopy, which means ‘black bottoms.’ ”

“No!”

“Or they call them churka, which means ‘wood chips’! Do you understand me? The Russians think your boys are as dumb as chips of wood.”

“Allah!”

“The sons of your land! Black bottoms and wood chips!”

“Yok! We must teach them a lesson!”

“Yes. But we must be careful.”

“What should we do?” The émigré’s voice had the eager sound of a believer waiting for the good news.

“Perhaps my friends can help,” said Rawls slowly.

“Who are your friends?”

“My friends in America.”

“The CIA?”

“Do not mention that name, ever. I told you that you must be careful.”

“Am I dreaming?” cried Abdallah. “Do you mean that you are ready to help us at last? I have waited my lifetime for this!”

“My friend, great Turkestan is the last colony on earth. When was Algeria freed? Twenty years ago. And Kenya and the Congo and all those little black African lands. Great Turkestan is still waiting, but its time will come.”

“Allah!” thundered Abdallah. “You will help us at last!”

Rawls spent the remainder of that conversation swearing Abdallah to secrecy and warning him to tell no one—absolutely no one—about their contact. “Free Turkestan!” said Rawls as they parted.

“Free Turkestan!” repeated Abdallah.

Taylor moved the tape forward to another session. This time Rawls’s visitor refused to give his name. But as the conversation progressed, it became clear that he was one of the so-called Meshki Turks, whose families had been deported from Georgia to Uzbekistan in 1944. Rawls played him like a virtuoso. Taylor listened to the tape with a mounting sense of Rawls’s skill as an intelligence officer.

“Where was your family from, my friend?” Rawls began, oh so gently.

“From Akhalkali district, in southern Georgia.”

“And you spoke Turkish there?”

“Yes. Turkish. Always Turkish. Until 1935, when they told us we were Azeris and made us learn the Azeri language. No one knew why. In those days, you did not ask.”

“And what happened in 1944?”

“My family was sent away.”

“And where were they sent?”

“To Uzbekistan, near Ferghana. They went by wagon.”

“And many died?”

“Yes, very many. My aunt died. My brother died.” He paused and took a breath. “My mother died. And for no reason. What had she done? What had any of us done? Why did they move us like that in the middle of the night, and take us a thousand miles away from our homes, for no reason?”

“It was genocide.”

“Yes, it was,” said the visitor. “But the world knows nothing of it.”

“You are wrong,” said Rawls. “We know, and we have not forgotten.”

“Who?”

“My friends in America. We have kept records. We know that 200,000 people were deported from Meshketia on the night of November 15, 1944. We know that at least 50,000 people died on their way to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. And we know why.”

“You do?” He sounded dazed, as if the American were suddenly offering to solve the riddle of his life.

“Your family and the thousands of other Moslem Turks of Meshketia were deported because Stalin was preparing to seize the provinces of eastern Turkey—Kars and Ardahan—that he claimed belonged to the Soviet Union. And he did