The Second Saladin

Trewitt had known of Chardy for some time. His job on the Historical Staff, to which he’d so recently been attached, had been to edit the memoirs of retiring officers who were paid by the Agency to stay at Langley an extra year and write, the idea being, first, to allow any impulse toward literature to play itself out under controlled circumstances and second, to compile a history of the means and methods of the secret wars. Aspects or fragments of Chardy kept showing up in these accounts, memories of him echoing through a dozen different sources, sometimes under cryptonyms. He’d been pretty famous in his way.

“And here he is,” Trewitt announced, clicking his button, “among the Nungs.”

Chardy had been recruited out of the Marine Corps in Vietnam in the early days, ’63, ’64, where he was for a time a platoon commander and then a company commander and finally, having extended his tour, an intelligence officer, coordinating with South Vietnamese Rangers and running (and occasionally accompanying) long-range recons up near the DMZ. But an Agency hotshot named Frenchy Short talked him into jumping to the Company, which at that time desperately needed jungle-qualified military types.

The slide on the wall now was a favorite of Trewitt’s, for it seemed to express exactly a certain heroic posture — the two men, Paul and Frenchy, among Chinese mercenaries from the Vietnamese hill country whom they’d trained and led in a hit-and-run war way out in the deep, beyond the reach of law or civilization.

“He did two long stretches with the Nungs,” Trewitt said to the men in the quiet briefing room in Langley, Virginia, “with a stay in between at our Special Warfare school in Panama.”

The two of them, the younger, leaner Chardy, his black Irish face furious and pale, and the older Frenchy, a stumpy man with a crewcut, thick but not fat, his raw bulk speaking more of power than sluggishness. They wore those vividly spotted non-reg jungle camouflage outfits — called tiger suits — and were hatless. Paul had an AK-47 and a cigarette dangled insolently from his lip; Frenchy was equipped with a grease gun and a smile. They were surrounded by their crew of Chinese dwarfs, tiger-suited too, a collection of sullen Mongolian faces that in their impassive toughness seemed almost Apache. Wiry little men, with carbines, grenades, a Thompson or two, a gigantic BAR — this was before the fancy black plastic M-16s arrived in Vietnam. The picture had a nineteenth- century feel to it: the two white gods surrounded by their yellow killers, yet in subtle ways that the photograph managed to convey, the white men were turning wog themselves, going native in the worst possible way.

“God, old Frenchy Short,” somebody said; Trewitt thought it might have been Sam Melman. “He was a piece of work, wasn’t he? Jesus, I remember when he nailed Che in Bolivia. He went all the way back to Korea. He was one of the guys we had ashore at the Bay of Pigs, one of the first in and one of the last out.”

“Frenchy was something,” somebody else agreed, and Trewitt recognized Yost Ver Steeg’s voice. “I had no idea he went so far back with Paul.”

“It was Frenchy who got Paul reinstated after he punched Cy Brasher,” another voice offered.

“Paul’s finest moment in the Agency,” somebody — Sam? — said, and there was laughter.

It’s true, thought Trewitt. Chardy was thin-skinned as well as brave and tough, and especially vulnerable to pedants and bureaucratic snipers of the sort intelligence agencies tend to attract in great number. Both his stateside tours, routine administrative pit stops that all career-track officers are expected to pull, had been disasters. And in Hong Kong, Chardy came up against Cy Brasher (Harvard ’49, as he was fond of telling people) in what was referred to still as the Six-Second War. This was 1971, when Chardy was coming off his second long, terrible tour among the Nungs.

Brasher was an imperious, lofty man, cursed with a need to correct everybody. He was widely loathed but exceedingly well connected (the Brashers) and had skated without apparent effort to Head of Station in Hong Kong. During the first three seconds of his war with Chardy, he suffered a broken nose and the loss of two teeth; in the second three seconds he took several savage body blows which broke two of his ribs.

“I still worry about this guy, Yost,” somebody said. “Lord knows I despised Cy Brasher as much as anybody. But junior personnel just can’t go around slugging station chiefs, no matter how fatuous an ass the station chief is. And if we have to rely on a guy like Chardy, then we are in rather desperate straits.”

“We are in rather desperate straits,” said Yost. “Trewitt?”

Trewitt obediently tripped the button, and a picture of Joseph Danzig appeared on the screen.

“The year,” Trewitt said, “is nineteen seventy-three. The year of the operation called Saladin Two.”

Danzig’s famous face filled the room. There’s no reason to show it, really, thought Trewitt, for they all know what he looks like, and all of them will remember what the Agency was like in those days, those Danzig days.

It had been his fiefdom, his ego extension; it existed only to serve his will. He had repaid this fealty, this slavish obedience with contempt and derision.

All of the men in this room had felt his influence, worked in his shadow or under his supervision, tried to guess what he wanted. Joseph Danzig, formerly of Harvard University and then the Rockefeller Advisory Board on Foreign Affairs, had been, under a certain President, Secretary of State. He was almost as famous, in his own way, as that other paradigm of academic-cum-international kingmaker and unmaker, Henry Kissinger, his contemporary at Harvard and in many ways his rival and his equal. Their beginnings were even similar: Kissinger born a German Jew, Danzig, whose family name had been simplified from something unpronounceable to that of the city of his origin by an American Immigration officer, born a Polish one.

But Saladin II and Danzig are linked, Trewitt realized, just as tightly in their way as Saladin II and Chardy. Without Danzig there would have been no Saladin II. It was shaped to his specifications, blueprinted to his calculations, implemented at his whim, and aborted by his will.

“Most of you are aware of Saladin Two,” said Yost Ver Steeg, the host of this meeting. “Those who aren’t are shortly to be so. Everything that happens now happens because of what happened then. This crisis we’ve got comes to us courtesy of that famous gent up there.”

“Famous gent” — an uncharacteristic attempt at levity by Yost, who is normally, Trewitt reflected, about as amusing as a fish. Perhaps it’s his nervousness, for he’s the man whose job it is to stop the Kurd from doing whatever the men in this room are so terrified he’ll do. And they are plenty terrified, except for Miles, who isn’t terrified of anything.

Yost began to summarize what Trewitt already knew. Saladin II was pressure. It was pressure here to tilt this that way and that this way, a Rube Goldberg contraption of stresses and springs and gizmos that had as its only real purpose the spirit of keeping the Soviet Union off balance. Not included in the higher calculus of the design — and this too was a Danzig trademark — was a cost in human lives.

Saladin II had its origins in a complaint to an American President by the late Shah of Iran about difficulties with his obstreperous Arab neighbor, the radically pro-Soviet regime of Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr in Iraq. What, wondered the Shah, could be done to put the squeeze on the aggressive Iraqis and their new T-54 tanks and SAMs and pesky Russian infantry and intelligence advisers?

Part of the answer lay in the fact that spread throughout much of the contested region of northern Iraq and northern Iran were a people called the Kurds, who dreamed of a mythical kingdom called Kurdistan. They are a fierce Indo-European race of great independence and cunning, descended from the fearsome Medes of antiquity and said also to carry the genes of Alexander’s legions, which might explain the astonishing presence among them of blue eyes and upturned little noses and blond heads and freckles, an island of northern fairness in the swarthy sea of darker Mediterraneanness. The Kurds were forced to traffic with whoever would have them — they are a cynical people, expecting little of the world; one of their bleak proverbs is “Kurds have no friends” — and their ambitions must be seen as pitifully tiny against the designs of the superpowers: they wanted only their own schools, their own language, their own literature, and to be ignored by the outside world. They wanted a country, in other words, of their very own, which they would call Kurdistan.

The Shah did not like them but he saw a use for them. The Kurds have a violent history of insurrection against — against nearly everybody. In their time they have fought Turk and Persian and Iraqi with equal vehemence.

The answer then to everybody’s problems, as suggested by Joseph Danzig, American Secretary of State, and implemented at his specific request by the Special Operations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, was, in the language of the trade, a “covert action.” In plainer words: a little war.

Trewitt clicked his button.

The new face was blurry, out of focus, taken from absolute zero angle without consideration of the esthetics.