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

level supported equality among Armenians and Turks, Christians and Moslems, and all that. Was there another level?”

“Ah, I am sorry. That is the heart of my dissertation. I really cannot discuss it.”

“Please,” said Anna, touching the Greek man’s hand. “The documents are all yours. I won’t do anything with them. Honest. I’m just very curious.”

“I really should not discuss this, you know.” He was softening. It was not in the nature of a Greek man, even a library dweller, to refuse the plea of a woman.

“Please,” said Anna again.

“I will tell you, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else.”

“I promise.” She held up her hand, as if swearing an oath.

“Very well. The truth is that the Union and Progress Committee was a trick. They talked about equality, but it was not true. They had members—whole branches—that were Greek and Armenian and Coptic and Bulgarian. But from the beginning, there was an inner circle, controlled by Moslems. It was called the Merkezi Umumi. The Central Committee.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because, Miss Morgan, it is in the papers of Ibrahim Temo.”

“How? Did they describe two levels?”

“Not in so many words. But they did not have to. They did everything in code, these people. What I found was that they had two codes. One for everyone, including Christians. And one for the core group, which was Moslem only. I have found a letter, for example, that was sent in code to the Cairo branch. It warned the leaders—who were Moslems—not to share any secret documents with Copts.”

“Why were the Moslems so suspicious?”

“Because they simply did not trust the others. They did not believe that the non-Moslem subjects of the empire truly wanted a modern and progressive Ottoman state. They suspected that the Greeks were really fighting for an independent Greece, the Armenians were really fighting for an independent Armenia, the Bulgars for Bulgaria, and so on.”

“And they were right.”

“Yes, of course. They were right.”

“And did the Armenians and Greeks know that they were being treated differently within the committee?”

“Yes, probably.”

“So what you are telling me is that, from the beginning, the members of this noble revolutionary network were at each other’s throats.”

“Not quite at each other’s throats. But the seeds of hatred were there, ‘from the Adriatic Sea to the Chinese Sea,’ as they liked to say. Now you must remember your promise to me, Miss Morgan. You will not tell anyone about what is in these documents.”

“My dear Mr. Papadapoulos, I promise you with all my heart that I will not tell anyone what you have found. My interest is in the present, not in the past. What I would like is to find a way to avoid reliving this history—not to retell it.”

   VI

WILLIAM GOODE

WASHINGTON / ATHENS ISTANBUL / TASHKENT

JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1979

28

A real war was beginning that summer, in a place where the national sport was playing polo with a sheep’s head. The place was Afghanistan, and like Vietnam and Algeria, it would soon become famous not so much for itself as for the folly into which it tempted a larger power. There was something about such places that subverted normal logic and common sense, that inspired the would-be conqueror to make an initial bold and foolhardy move, which soon would be lost without another such move, and then another, until the reputation and treasure of the giant power had been staked on swatting the geopolitical equivalent of a horsefly.

For decades Afghanistan had been a matter of pure indifference to the rest of the world, including the Soviets. The Peace Corps spent more time and effort there in the 1960s than the KGB. Even the British, who had once imagined Afghanistan as the fulcrum on which were balanced the Russian Empire and the British Raj in India, no longer paid much attention. But by the late 1970s, the Soviets had finally caught the virus that occasionally infects great nations and weakens their normal protection against stupidity and unreason. The Soviet media ruminated darkly about American meddling in that part of the world, which required a decisive Soviet response. “Sinister plots” by “certain Western agencies” were invoked.

The march of folly seemed inexorable. Moscow had installed a Communist government in Kabul in 1978, hoping to break the Islamic movement that was developing in the rural areas of the country. But the Afghan Communists only inflamed the Moslem resistance, leaving Moscow the unpleasant choice of intervening more decisively or admitting defeat. How familiar that sounded to the generation of CIA men who had watched the unfolding of Vietnam. Through the spring of 1979, the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan increased. Soviet military advisers, dressed in Afghan Army uniforms, were spotted throughout the country. One summer day the CIA station in Kabul sent an agent out to count the number of light-skinned men playing volleyball in the military compound at Bagram Air Base. The agent stopped counting at 400.

To a student of human folly, which Anna Barnes had considered herself for nearly a decade, the nature of the coming war in Afghanistan was obvious, without reading any intelligence reports. The essential facts were contained in a short newspaper story she read on the plane back from Athens. It described the fate of several Soviet advisers who had been captured by the mujaheddin. The Afghan rebels boasted that they had cut the ears and testicles off their Russian prisoners and then peeled off their skin, a strip at a time.

What struck Anna about this account wasn’t the unusual barbarism of the incident, but its ordinariness. It might have been written about any war in that part of the world during the past millennium. For the history of that region was, on the simplest level, a theater of pain. The unlucky Russian soldier in Afghanistan, screaming in agony as another strip of pulpy white skin was torn from his body, might recognize in his tormentor the face of the Ottoman general Lala Mustafa. After