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

are prudent,” Stone continued. “When they decide they have a problem, they look for a way to control and destroy it. And they have been playing this particular game of émigré politics since the 1920s. Have you heard of the Trust?”

“Of course,” said Taylor. He wanted to say: Ad nauseam. It was the one Soviet counterintelligence operation that everyone in the agency had heard of. The research director of the counterintelligence staff had spent the better part of thirty years studying it. In the Trust, the Soviets had created an anti-Soviet underground network during the 1920s and through it fed false information to every intelligence service in Europe. The Soviets, in effect, had created their own opposition. And they had done the same thing again in the early 1950s, creating a phony liberation movement in the Baltic states that Britain and America both embraced.

“It’s quite a sophisticated little operation,” said Stone. “Rawls undoubtedly reports to a case officer, someone unobtrusive who can maintain contact with him and send his reports back to Yasenevo. Probably someone we would never think to look for.”

“Oh shit,” said Taylor, shaking his head.

“What is it?”

“I have a feeling I know who the Russians are using as Rawls’s contact.”

“And who might that be?”

“A nice Lithuanian lady who’s married to the Soviet consul general and spends all her time studying Central Asia.”

“Touching,” said Stone.

“Very. She had a habit of disappearing on us, but we could never figure out where.”

“Perhaps now you have the answer.”

Taylor shook his head again. He rose and walked unsteadily to the gunnels of the little boat. “I feel like shit,” he said.

“You shouldn’t,” said Stone. “The fact is that you have given us a rather extraordinary opportunity.”

The sun had set and a light fog had settled over the black waters. The Bosporus was quieter now, with only a few small boats—water taxis—shuttling back and forth between Yenikoy and Beykoz. There was a chill in the air. In the distance, there was the horn of a big boat moving into the Bosporus from the Black Sea.

“Time for a drink,” said Stone. Taylor brought out a bottle of whiskey and proposed a toast to their fictive colleague, Mr. Jack Rawls.

“By the way,” said Stone when they had settled into their second whiskey. “Why did you do a damn-fool thing like bug Rawls?”

“Because I was curious. And because he pissed me off.”

“But it was against the rules. You didn’t have authorization.”

“That’s true,” said Taylor. “But I have learned over the years that by the time you get authorization to do something, the something in question is probably not worth doing.”

“You had better explain that to me,” said Stone, eyeing the younger man. Taylor looked at him and wondered whether to be honest.

“I’m going to pretend that you and I are friends,” said Taylor.

“No need to pretend.”

“I’ll tell you a story that will help explain what I mean. When I was in Somalia, before coming to Istanbul, I had an agent high up in the government. At the top, actually. He was the foreign minister.”

Stone nodded.

“We had all kinds of information that would have been useful to him about the Ethiopians and the Sudanese and the internal opposition in his own country. But technically I wasn’t supposed to share any of it with him. It was all marked ORCON or NOFORN. That seemed ridiculous. So I just told him. It saved his ass a couple of times.”

Stone remained impassive.

“Sometimes the case officer in the field just has to trust his judgment,” continued Taylor. “Otherwise, what’s the point of having us out here? You might as well run everything from the front office. Although I gather that sort of thinking doesn’t sit too well with Mr. Hinkle.”

Stone took a long sip of his drink. “I loathe Hinkle,” he said after a few moments. “As for the Somali case, I read about it in the files before coming here. I think you handled it appropriately. Better than appropriately. You handled it the same way I would have.”

Taylor was surprised, not for the first time that evening, or the last.

“I am tempted to pay you a vain compliment,” said Stone. “Which is to say that you remind me of myself when I was younger. But it was easier in those days to trust your own judgment. You didn’t really have any other choice.”

Taylor looked at the old man: the smooth, impassive face, the tired eyes, the look of a man who had so thoroughly immersed himself in his work that he had, in some sense, become that work. He tried to imagine himself as a man in his sixties and his mind went fuzzy, and then blank.

“I’ll tell you a little story of my own,” said Stone. “Would you like to hear an old war story?”

Taylor nodded.

“When the war ended in 1945, I was twenty-seven years old. What a heady time that was. We were barely out of college, and we had the world at our feet. I was still in the army, working as an intelligence officer at the U.S. headquarters in Heidelberg. By that time we had already made contact with General Gehlen, and we had decided that we would try to maintain his network of agents in Eastern Europe. The funny thing was, we didn’t ask anybody’s permission to do it. Who could we ask? The war was over. Nobody back home really cared. So we just did it, on our own authority. But we had one problem.”

“What was that?”

“How to pay Gehlen’s agents. Since we had no formal authority, we had no money.”

“So where did you find the money?”

“The black market,” answered Stone. He was beaming at the recollection of his sweet and reckless youth. “We had whole trainloads of coffee beans and cigarettes coming into Germany for the use of the U.S. troops there, you see. So we diverted just enough to sell on the black market and pay stipends for Gehlen’s agents. That way, we didn’t have to ask anybody for funds. It