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

out what was going on. I was slightly drunk at the time, to be honest, so maybe that’s why I did it.”

“Did what?”

“I followed him home and had George bug his apartment. It was a stupid thing to do.” Taylor tried to sound contrite.

“Is that all? Is that what I had to promise not to tell anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Forget it. Who cares. Get to the good part. What’s on the tape?”

“Some strange stuff. Rawls meets every few days with one of these émigrés—Uzbeks and Kazakhs and God knows what else—and jerks them off about liberating their homeland. He tells them how nasty the Russians are to Soviet Moslems, as if they needed to be reminded of that. And then he suggests, without quite saying so, that Uncle Sam may be able to help them.”

“Help them do what?”

“He doesn’t ever say, exactly. But tells them: ‘Free Turkestan!’ as if it’s the slogan of some sort of underground movement.”

“Forget it,” said Timmons, shaking his head. “We don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Strictly forbidden.”

“That’s what I thought. But listen to the tape.”

“No way.”

“Listen to the goddam tape!”

And he did. Timmon’s plans for a golf game were abandoned, as he sat numbly listening to selected passages from the tape. Abdallah from Tashkent. The Meshki Turk. The Uzbek. The Tatar. Every time Rawls mentioned “my friends in America,” Timmons would grumble, “Aw, shit!” When Taylor finished his excerpts, Timmons put his head in his hands. He looked crushed.

“I don’t know what this is all about,” said Timmons. “But it goes without saying that it’s very sensitive. Whatever it is.”

“Right.”

“To be blunt,” continued Timmons, “I don’t really want to get involved in it. If someone had thought I needed to know, then I would know. But since I don’t, it’s obviously none of my business.”

“But you do know, now.”

“I don’t need this aggravation,” said Timmons evenly. “I’m due to retire next year and I intend to do so quietly and happily. If you want to make a fuss, that is obviously within your power. But I am staying out of it. It isn’t my case. So it’s all yours. Be my guest.”

“Thanks,” said Taylor. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for Timmons, old and tired and afraid of anything that might rock the boat.

“Copy me on any cables, if you would,” said Timmons. “Just so you’ll know, I will be sending a cable of my own tonight informing headquarters that you have briefed me about a sensitive matter you appear to have stumbled across and that I have advised you not to pursue it.”

Taylor thanked Timmons and shook his hand. He felt like he had been watching someone die of self-strangulation.

The urge to make trouble was for Taylor something akin to a biological instinct. And so, with a dim sense that the trouble he was making might be chiefly for himself, he drafted a cable that night for headquarters. His first thought had been to send an LWSURF message straight to the director, as a way of pulling the highest possible chain. But that was stupid. Hinkle would probably ignore it, or worse, give it to one of the congressional intelligence committees. Taylor’s next thought was to send a message directly to the deputy director for operations. But that was stupid, too. It would look like he was picking a fight. And Taylor had a long-standing rule never to pick a fight when you didn’t know who your adversary was.

All Taylor really wanted to do, he decided, was to needle the bureaucrats, to let them know he had discovered their little game in Istanbul and deliver a polite “Fuck you.” So he drafted the most innocuous sort of cable—a simple request for traces, for any pertinent information in the registry—on one Jack Rawls, filmmaker, with a particular request that he be informed if said Mr. Rawls was a CIA asset, so that he could help protect his cover. Then he settled back into the routine of life in the Istanbul base and waited for the return mail.

18

It was a condition of CIA life in 1979 that you saw the fabric of American power unraveling around the world, perhaps even understood why it was happening, but were powerless to do anything very useful to stop it. If you were at all conscientious about your job, you began to feel bad, like a fireman who has to watch a tall building burn out of control because his hoses and ladders won’t reach the flames. And in the winter of 1979, there was most certainly a three-alarm fire ablaze in the world. Iran was burning. The fire was spreading. The agency seemed willing to do almost anything—except put out the fire.

New schemes were floated every few weeks. In early March, someone back home decided it would be wise to recruit more Kurdish agents, to threaten Khomeini with a revolt by his Kurdish population. Jolly good idea! So the call went out to the stations and bases of the imperial legion, and a few days later Taylor was visiting a toothless old buzzard from Diyarbakir who had been suggested by the CIA base in Los Angeles (Southern California seemed to be the heart of the Kurdish diaspora) as a man who might lead a Kurdish exile army. The old man hadn’t entirely lost his wits. He demanded as a condition of his participation in the Kurdish War of Liberation that a large sum be remitted immediately to a numbered bank account in Switzerland. Taylor duly relayed his message to headquarters, with an information copy to Los Angeles.

Taylor’s biggest headache was recruiting Iranian agents. Headquarters decided it could trade visas for intelligence, so an edict went out that Iranians would receive special-status visas if—and only if—they could demonstrate clear intelligence value. By now, thousands of Iranian refugees had gathered in Istanbul, all clamoring to come to America and open beauty salons or manage 7-Eleven stores or drive taxicabs at Dulles Airport. And every