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

America ever finally decided to abandon the ethos of Walt Whitman and Felix Frankfurter and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, someone would have to paint the New Deal murals over.

The Central Intelligence Agency was the product of a subtly different time and ethos. Its founding myths dated to the 1940s—the years of World War II and its immediate aftermath—and its traditions were patrician, not proletarian. When the CIA mandarins built their headquarters up the river in Virginia, they decided it should look like an Ivy League campus—cool and austere, like one of the modern buildings at Yale or Harvard. No one at CIA would ever have thought of commissioning a mural of some sweaty laborer in the vineyard of intelligence. Too vulgar. Too public. If the agency wanted to honor its traditions, then have Tiffany’s engrave a nice silver plate. The CIA was different. It was the product of an America that had grown up in a hurry, that had left behind the idealism and confusion of the 1930s and become, in the space of a few years, tough and confident and cynical. It had come into being to save America, not from the nebulous problems of poverty and injustice, but from Germans and Japanese. And then, everlastingly, from the Russians.

That explained Edward Stone’s special status in the agency. By 1979, he was one of the last remaining veterans of the founder generation still at Langley. He was one of the few people who could still remember that “Q clearance” originally meant you had access to Building Q, one of the temporary buildings scattered around Foggy Bottom in which the agency was first housed: one of the few who could remember shuttling among those buildings in the little buses known as “green beetles.” And what mattered most, he was one of the few left who remembered just how ragged things had been in those days, when there weren’t any rules and you had to make things up as you went along.

Stone’s lineage, in agency terms, was part British and part German. That was the very best pedigree to have. He had come to London at the beginning of the war as a young army officer assigned to OSS and begun working with the British to unravel Nazi intelligence networks. When the war ended, he went to Germany and continued the work—looking now at the Nazi networks that ran east, toward the Soviet Union, rather than west toward Britain and America. From those two spent empires, Britain and Germany, Stone and his colleagues built an American intelligence agency. From the British they drew the tradecraft and the élan; from the Germans they drew many of their agents. It was an awkward mix, but there hadn’t been time, back then, to worry about it.

The lessons of that time were hard-wired on Stone’s brain: the Soviets were reckless and duplicitous adversaries; the Europeans were gutless accommodationists; the Americans and British were the world’s last and best hope—not all of them, mind you, but the right kind, the tough-minded ones. By 1979, Stone had been out of the military for more than three decades, but he still wore a kind of Anglo-American civil servant’s uniform: neat English suits of tweed and flannel: sturdy shoes with waxed laces; a brown homburg hat for ordinary occasions and, for special events, a stiff-brimmed gray one. He was utterly uninterested in change: When one of his suits became so threadbare and shiny it couldn’t be worn anymore, he had his tailor make an identical one, same style, same color. He felt the same way about the agency.

Stone had not made the “transition” during the great American cultural revolution of the 1970s. Indeed, he hated what the agency had become by the end of the decade. It seemed to him cheap and undignified—all those congressmen running around holding hearings and the agency people meekly complying—quite apart from the dangers it caused to the craft of intelligence. “Oversight” was the new cure-all. Perhaps the congressmen thought that if clean people, such as themselves, had their hands in a dirty business, it would perforce become clean. A charming idea. But it seemed evident to Stone, after thirty-five years, that the only way intelligence work would ever become clean was if people stopped doing it.

What Stone truly couldn’t understand was why the agency went along with this preposterous charade. Of course, members of Congress would talk about oversight committees and legal charters and American values. That was what congressmen did. But why had the agency signed onto this sort of Fourth of July nonsense? Had people lost their minds? Every time Stone saw Charles (Chuck) Hinkle leading a new group of congressmen on a tour of the agency, he felt a knot in his stomach. The barbarians were at the gate. The walls of the temple had been breached.

Stone had decided in the mid-1970s, as the onslaught gathered momentum, that it was a good time to disappear. The great purge of the clandestine service was already beginning; scores of covert bureaucrats with names like Evan and Nevin were being fired every few months. The auditors and nannies all agreed that the Directorate of Operations had too many bodies, and in a sense they were right. The clandestine service, like any well-fed animal, had built up layers of protective fat over three decades, and there were too many aging, wellborn spies on the payroll, thinking up dubious schemes to keep themselves occupied. But that wasn’t really what the great purge was about. It was about power—about a secret arm of the government that had run its own affairs (and those of a good many other people) unhindered for thirty years and in the process made too many mistakes and too many enemies. And now it was at the mercy of the very people it had kept at bay all those years. Congressmen, journalists, bureaucrats—all looking for scalps.

Edward Stone, who had headed the Near East Division for more than a decade and was a sort of