DAVID IGNATIUS
SIRO
A NOVEL
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Dedication
For the memory of my grandparents
And for Eve, Elisa, Alexandra and Sarah
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
OUR GODS
I: AMY L. GUNDERSON: WASHINGTON / SAMARKAND (JANUARY 1979)
1
2
3
II: AMOS B. GARRETT: ISTANBUL / WASHINGTON (JANUARY 23–26, 1979)
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
III: SDROTTEN: LONDON / ISTANBUL (FEBRUARY–MARCH 1979)
11
12
13
14
15
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IV: RTACTION: ISTANBUL (MARCH–MAY 1979)
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18
19
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V: KARPETLAND: WASHINGTON / BROOKLYN (MAY 1979)
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22
23
24
25
26
27
VI: WILLIAM GOODE: WASHINGTON / ATHENS ISTANBUL / TASHKENT (JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1979)
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29
30
31
32
33
34
VII: LUCY MORGAN: WASHINGTON / PARIS ISTANBUL (SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1979)
35
36
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38
39
VIII: ANNA BARNES: WASHINGTON / ISTANBUL YEREVAN / BOSTON (OCTOBER 1979–DECEMBER 1980)
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41
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47
Author’s Note
Praise
Copyright
Also by David Ignatius
OUR GODS
Older than us, but not by that much, men
Just old enough to be uncircumcised,
Episcopalians from the Golden Age
Of schools who loved to lose gracefully and lead—
Always there before us like a mirage,
Until we tried to get closer, when they vanished,
Always there until they disappeared.
They were the last of a race, that was their cover—
The baggy tweeds. Exposed in the Racquet Club
Dressing room, they were invisible,
Present purely in outline like the head
And torso targets at the police firing
Range, hairless bodies and full heads of hair,
Painted neatly combed, of the last WASPs.
They walked like boys, talked like their grandfathers—
Public servants in secret, and the last
Generation of men to prefer baths.
These were the CIA boys with EYES
ONLY clearance and profiles like arrowheads.
A fireside frost bloomed on the silver martini
Shaker the magic evenings they could be home.
They were never home, even when they were there.
Public servants in secret are not servants,
Either. They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who just by pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.
—FREDERICK SEIDEL, FROM THESE DAYS
I
AMY L. GUNDERSON
WASHINGTON / SAMARKAND
JANUARY 1979
1
Anna Barnes completed her training on the third Wednesday of January 1979, a day after the Shah left Iran. It was not an auspicious moment to sign on as an American intelligence officer. The CIA was scrambling all over Europe and the Middle East that week, trying to save the thousands of Iranians who had been foolish enough to believe that the Imperium Americanum in that part of the world would last more than a few haphazard decades. And the agency was failing. America’s friends (many of them less than admirable characters, it must be said) were being rounded up in Tehran a few had already been killed.
That January was the sort of moment that intelligence agencies dread, for it seemed to call the entire enterprise into question. An intelligence agency is built around an implicit promise: We will keep faith with you. We will never betray you, or leave you to the mercy of your enemies. But who could believe such a promise from America now? It was always a lie, even in the best of times. Intelligence agencies betray people every day. But they don’t like it to be quite so obvious as it was in those frantic weeks of early 1979, when the United States was on the run and its friends were being pursued like pigs in an abattoir. It looked bad. It frightened the new recruits.
Anna Barnes didn’t have much of a graduation, as it happened. Late that Wednesday afternoon her instructor finished a lecture on agent development and said: “I guess that’s it.” He shook her hand and walked out the door of the motel room in Arlington where he had been holding classes for the past two weeks. And that was it. There was no diploma, no shaking hands with the director, no fond farewells to classmates, no plans to meet for drinks next summer in Vienna or Peshawar. Anna’s only formal notice that she had completed her training came when she received a letter several days later, officially granting her a pseudonym—Amy L. Gunderson—which she would use forever after in agency cable traffic.
This can’t be all there is to it, Anna told herself. But in her case, it was. She hadn’t gone to “the farm” for training. She hadn’t been near headquarters. She had not, in fact, attended a single lecture, briefing or orientation session that included any other recruit. Her training had consisted entirely of one-on-one meetings in motel rooms and safe houses around the Washington area. These sessions had covered the standard curriculum in tradecraft: the “flaps and seals” course in opening mail; the “crash-bang” course in high-speed driving and self-defense; the various lessons in recruitment and development of agents. But in every instance, she was the only student.
It was all very flattering. But for Anna, who a year before had been a doctoral candidate in Ottoman history, it was also a bit lonely. “You’re special,” an instructor had told her early on. That made it sound like a program for children with learning disabilities. But the mandarins knew what they were doing. Anna was in a kind of quarantine, whose purpose was to keep her work as close to secret as possible, even from most of her colleagues. That was because Anna Barnes was about to become a case officer under non-official cover, known in the secret language of the club as a NOC.
The closest thing Anna had to a real graduation was a meeting in late January with a senior member of the clandestine service named Edward Stone. He had been chief of the Near East Division for more than a decade, but Anna gathered from the person who set up the meeting that Stone was doing something different now, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that was. All they told Anna was that Mr. Stone had heard about her unusual language skills—she had studied French, Turkish, Persian and German at various points during her training as an Ottomanist—and had asked especially to see her before she headed overseas.
Once upon a time, in the bad-old good-old days, such a meeting
