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

The answer seemed obvious. “Burn him,” he said. “Expose him to the Turks as a Soviet illegal. Have the Turks PNG him and his lady case officer and the consul general and anybody else they feel like.”

“Well, of course. That’s always the right answer, isn’t it? Burn someone. Put him out of business. But what would that get you in this case?”

“It would embarrass the hell out of the Soviets, in addition to breaking up their little network.”

“Tempting. But wouldn’t they simply do it again? Not in Turkey perhaps, but somewhere else. And we’d have to start all over again, assuming we were lucky enough to find out.”

“So what’s the correct answer?”

Stone looked at his coffee cup, which was empty. “Is there any more coffee, do you suppose?” Taylor summoned the code clerk, who returned with another cup of coffee for Stone.

“What’s the correct answer?” repeated Taylor.

“Do you mind if I answer you in a somewhat roundabout way?”

“No. I’m getting used to it.”

“I’ll begin with a question. Don’t you find it troubling that the Soviets are so aggressive in this part of the world? In Iran, and Afghanistan, and even here in Turkey?”

“Of course I do. It drives me nuts.”

“And haven’t you wondered how we might be able to tilt the balance the other way? How we might be able to undermine the Soviets, and create a measure of strength out of our present weakness?”

“Yes, but I haven’t come up with much, other than bugging Soviet diplomats.”

“Well now,” said Stone, banging the table lightly for emphasis. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could, in fact, do what your Mr. Rawls is pretending to do? If we could organize a true CIA-sponsored network in Central Asia?”

“Sure, if it would work.”

“A network of agents that could organize clandestine cells inside the Asian republics, distribute subversive literature, smuggle guns across the border.”

“Great,” said Taylor. He still looked dubious.

“An underground that could put the fear of God into the Kremlin. Better than that, the fear of Allah. An underground network that would absolutely terrify the Soviets and make them worry that their country was in danger of unraveling. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“Lovely.”

“Unfortunately,” said Stone, “we can’t do it.”

“Because it’s illegal, I suppose.” Taylor was getting exasperated.

“Not illegal, technically. But any such operation would require a finding by the President. In the unlikely event that he agreed, it would also require notification of Congress. And even if they agreed, we still couldn’t do it.”

“Why the fuck not?” Taylor was losing patience with Stone’s riddles.

“Because it is beyond our capabilities, my friend. The sad truth is that we don’t have the plumbing in this part of the world to pull off such an ambitious operation. Never have had.”

“So we’re back to square one.”

“Not quite,” said Stone with a smile. “Not quite. That’s what I realized last night. It may be true that we cannot create an actual underground organization of our own. But we can create something almost as good. We can create the illusion of one.”

“How, for chrissake?”

“Isn’t it obvious? By using your Mr. Rawls. By feeding him, by putting information in his hands that will convince the Russians that we are doing the very thing they’re afraid of, the very thing they’re pretending to do themselves. If we’re clever about it, we can convince them that they have stumbled across evidence that the CIA is running an anti-Soviet underground that stretches from Baku to Tashkent.”

Taylor smiled. The idea was simplicity itself. “Will they believe it?”

“Yes, if we let them discover the evidence themselves, piece by piece.”

“And what will we do with this imaginary network?”

“We will run operations. Or more precisely, we will create the illusion that we are running operations. We will let Rawls and his colleagues discover an underground organization that is sending guns into Azerbaijan. Then we’ll let the KGB chief in Baku find the guns. We will tell Rawls the underground is smuggling thousands of religious cassettes to the underground mullahs of Uzbekistan. The KGB man in Samarkand will only have to find a few dozen cassettes to believe it’s real.”

Taylor tried not to sound snowed. “Not bad,” he said.

“That’s the beauty of it, you see. It doesn’t have to be an underground network. It just has to look like one.”

“Mr. Stone, you are a devious son of a bitch.”

“Thank you. Coming from you, I take that as a great compliment.”

“So how do we get started?”

“You’ll need a small team. A half dozen people, at most. Contract hires, most of them, I should think. It’s important that this be invisible, even from the clandestine service. Especially from the clandestine service. We’ll talk about the details when we get back home. Can you be in Washington in two weeks?”

“I don’t know. What will headquarters say?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that too much. In a certain sense, I suppose I am headquarters. I’ll arrange whatever needs to be arranged.”

“Then I’ll be there.”

“Anything else?”

Taylor thought a moment, about the life he was giving up, and the one he was beginning, and a thought fell into his head. He recalled a conversation several weeks earlier with a young woman case officer from London—a woman who appeared to be unusually knowledgeable about the life and times of the peoples of Central Asia.

“I have one personnel suggestion for you,” said Taylor.

“And who might that be?”

“A NOC named Anna Barnes. Before joining the outfit she studied Ottoman history. She knows this part of the world.”

“Anna Barnes,” repeated Stone. He had that odd smile that came over him when he was caught in the midst of one of his games.

“That’s right. Anna Barnes.”

“How interesting that you should mention her. As it happens, Miss Anna Barnes is already on my list. As a matter of fact, I am planning to see her in London tomorrow. With any luck, she’ll be joining us in Washington for our little planning session.”

But Stone never left anything entirely to luck. The papers for Anna Barnes’s TDY assignment to Washington were already in the works