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

not want your people, ethnic Turks, to cause trouble. So you were moved. Overnight. And if 50,000 of you died on the way, what did it matter to Stalin? You were just poor Turks! You were expendable.”

“What a monster! What a crime!”

“My friends say there is an answer.”

“What is that?”

“Free Turkestan!”

The Meshki Turk inhaled sharply, as if the idea were too dangerous and intoxicating to be breathed in normally. “Free Turkestan!” he said, repeating the two words as if they were the very essence of life.

“Perhaps that is the way to avenge the genocide of the Meshki Turks and protect their rights.”

“Free Turkestan!” said the man once more.

“But only a powerful movement can free Turkestan from its Russian masters and provide safety for its people, from the Black Sea to Sinkiang!”

“Is such a thing possible?”

“I don’t know. But perhaps my friends in America can help.”

And so it went with each of the half dozen visitors to Rawls’s safe house in Bayezit. He altered his pitch slightly for each one. He told the Crimean Tatar about Stalin’s folly in branding a whole race—the sons and daughters of the Crimea—as traitors to the Soviet Union. He wept with a Chechen for the tragedy of their lost and plundered homeland. He raged with an Uzbek about the way that Russians from Moscow had plundered and destroyed the beautiful Aral Sea, the jewel of Central Asia.

One consistent theme, in each of the conversations, was that at some point Rawls would ask the same question: Are you a member of one of the Sufi brotherhoods? Are you a Naqshbandi, or a Qadiri, or a Yasawi, or a Kubrawi? Have you visited the holy places? Shah-i-Zindeh in Samarkand, the burial place of Qutham Ibn Abbas, the “living saint,” who was decapitated in battle and carried his head with him into a well, from which he performs miracles for the faithful? Or the shrine in Kazakhstan of Ahmad Yasawi, the founder of the brotherhood that bears his name? Or the tomb of Ali at Shah-i-Mardan in the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan? Or the tombs of the great Bahaeddin Naqshband, near Bukhara, and Yaqub Charki near Daghestan? They always said no, Rawls’s visitors, but that didn’t mean much. Sufis always denied that they were members of any brotherhood. What mattered was that Rawls asked the question.

“What the fuck is going on here?” said Taylor aloud when he finished reviewing the tapes. He went first to Stanley Timmons. The station chief had scheduled a golf game that afternoon, but at Taylor’s insistence he postponed it. Taylor flew to Ankara with the Rawls tape in his briefcase. Timmons was waiting in his office with his deputy.

“Can I see you privately?” asked Taylor.

“Gee, I guess so,” said Timmons, apologizing to his deputy and escorting him to the door. He turned to Taylor. “What’s the big deal? Why the crash meeting?”

“Stanley,” said Taylor. “I want you to be honest with me about something.”

“Sure,” said Timmons. “If I can be.”

“Are you running a NOC operation in Istanbul I don’t know about? One involving a guy whose cover name is Rawls and who is pretending to be a Canadian filmmaker from Vancouver?”

“What’s his real name?”

“How should I know?”

“Hmmm,” said Timmons. “No. I don’t think so. At least not so far as I can recollect. Of course, I probably couldn’t tell you if we did have such an operation going. Because if you were supposed to know about it, you already would. But no, actually, it doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Then I have some bad news for you. I think someone is running an operation behind your back.”

“Impossible.”

“Are you sure?” Taylor’s tone was sharp and skeptical.

Timmons scratched his head. “Well, no. Not completely. On rare occasions, I suppose I might not be informed.”

“Such as?”

“Cover problems. If headquarters sent a NOC to do something extra sensitive, they might want to keep it away from the embassy. They might even want to keep it away from the station chief. That’s possible. Or sometimes headquarters might want to send someone into the embassy under deep cover, as an admin officer or USIA man, and for security reasons, that person would have no contact with the station whatsoever. That happens.”

Timmons coughed nervously and lit a cigarette. He was working himself into a state of some anxiety as he imagined the various scenarios in which he might be left in the dark.

“Perhaps,” said Timmons, “you had better give me some details about this operation that you claim is being run behind my back.”

“Gladly. But I want you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“That you won’t tell headquarters how I found out.”

“How can I promise that? Maybe you did something unethical.”

“I didn’t.”

“Okay, fine. I promise. Now tell me the story about … what did you say his name was?”

“Rawls. That’s his work name at least. I first saw him a month ago in Omar Gaspraly’s bar in Bayezit.”

“Who’s Omar Gaspraly, for crying out loud?”

“He’s a Tatar whose family ran away from the Crimea a long time ago. His place is kind of a hangout for émigrés from Central Asia. They all go there and get smashed and pretend they’re going to liberate the motherland.”

“Go on, go on.” Timmons, his curiosity aroused, was now eager for details. He was like a cuckolded husband determined to know precisely what his wife had done to him.

“I’m there late one evening with George Trumbo from Athens, who had come in to help me with the Kunayev operation.”

“I remember,” said Timmons dubiously.

“I’m trying to find George a girl when Omar tells me there’s another American in the bar. And it’s this guy Rawls, talking to a couple of wild-eyed Uzbeks. I’m kind of curious, so I send George over to check him out. He says he’s a filmmaker from British Columbia, doing a documentary on Soviet émigrés, and gives George his card.”

“Sounds like a company man. The Canadians don’t have anything going in Turkey.”

“That’s what I thought. And it pissed me off. So I decided to find