The Second Saladin

Its subject looked like a victim. The face, even with the startled eyes from the unexpected flash, was young and smooth. It sported a huge moustache, a batwing thing that pulled the features down tragically, and the Adam’s apple was prominent. The eyes were sharp and bright and small.

“We think,” said Trewitt, “that this is Ulu Beg. Chardy will be able to confirm for us tomorrow. At any rate, in one of Chardy’s early Saladin Two reports he mentioned that somebody had told him the Kurd had been to the American University of Beirut. He evidently learned his English at an American high school near the Kirkuk oil fields — there was a good one there. This would have been courtesy of an A.I.D. scholarship. In those days A.I.D. educated half the Middle East.”

“And of course we fund A.I.D., so in effect we taught him his English,” Yost amplified.

“We believe this is Ulu Beg at nineteen, during his one year at AUB. We went to a great deal of trouble to get this photo — it’s from Lebanese police files. He was arrested late in his first year for membership in a Kurdish literary club — for which you may substitute ‘revolutionary organization.’ This is the picture the Lebanese cops got of him, at the request of Iraqi officials. He escaped the Lebanese pretty easily, and nobody ever touched him again until Saladin Two.”

The face glared at them.

Trewitt tried to read it. It did not look particularly Middle Eastern. It was just a passionate young man’s face, caught in the harsh light of a police strobe. He was probably scared when they got this; he didn’t know what was going on, what would happen. He looked a little spooked; but he also looked mad. The cheekbones were so high — they gave his face an almost Oriental look. And the nose was a blade, even photographed straight on, a huge, bony hunk.

“The key document,” said Yost, “from this point onward is ‘AFTACT Report Number two-four-three-three- five-two-B-slash Saladin Two.’ I urge any of you unfamiliar with it to check it out of the Operations Archive. You can also call on your computer terminals if you’re Blue Level cleared.”

“It sounds familiar,” said a well-modulated, cheerful voice, to a small whisper of laughter.

Trewitt recognized the voice of Sam Melman, who, in the dismal aftermath of Saladin II, had compiled “AFTACT 243352-B,” when he was Director of the Missions and Programs Staff in the Operations Directorate and had therefore committed his name to the document, for it was known in the vernacular (by the few that knew of it) as “The Melman Report.”

The men who laughed with Sam would be his current staff, an Agency elect themselves, for Sam was now Deputy Director of Operations.

Trewitt had seen the report himself. It was a sketchy thing, a few dismal sheets of typewritten red paper (to prevent photocopying), such a tiny artifact for what must have been an extraordinary occurrence.

“You’re not going to read us the whole thing?” somebody in the dark wanted to know. “I agree we’ve got a crisis, but nothing is worth that.”

Sam’s laughter was loudest.

“No,” said Yost. “But we thought you should have the context at least available.”

But Trewitt couldn’t let it pass from consciousness so easily. It haunted him, just as Chardy, the fallen hero, in his way haunted him. Chardy’s performance before Melman, for one thing, was so strange. Trewitt had read it over and over, trying to master its secrets, the secret weight of the messages between the words. But there were none. Poor Chardy: Melman just barbecued him. Chardy had so little to offer in his defense, and on the stand, under oath, was vague and apologetic, either deeply disturbed or quite stupid or … playing a deeper game than anybody could imagine.

He confessed so easily to all the operational sins, all the mistakes, the failures in judgment, the follies in action. Trewitt could almost remember verbatim:

M: And you actually crossed into Kurdistan and led combat operations? Against all orders, against all policies, against every written or unwritten rule of the Agency. You actually led combat operations, disguised as a Kurd?

C: Uh. Yeah. I guess I did.

M: Mr. Chardy, one source even places you at an ambush site deep in Iraq, near Rawanduz.

C: Yeah. I got a tank that day. Really waxed that —

M: Mr. Chardy. Did it ever occur to you, while you were playing cowboy, how humiliating it would have been to this country, how embarrassing, how degrading, to have one of its intelligence operatives captured deep within a Soviet-sponsored state with armed insurgents?

C: Yeah. I just didn’t think they’d get me. (Laughs)

“Trewitt. Trewitt!”

“Ah. Yessir.” Caught dreaming again. “The next slide.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He punched the button and the Kurd disappeared.

Somebody whistled.

“Yes, she’s a fine-looking woman, isn’t she?” Yost said.

“Chardy wouldn’t talk about her at the hearings,” Melman said. “He said it was private; it wasn’t our business.”

The picture of Johanna was recent. Her face was strong, fair, and somehow bold. The nose a trifle large, the chin a trifle strong, the mouth a trifle straight. Her blond hair was a mess, and it didn’t matter. She was all earnest angles. Her eyes were softened behind large circular hornrims and a tendril of hair had fallen across her face. She looked a bit irritated, or late or just grumpy. She’s also beautiful, Trewitt realized, in an odd, strong way, an unconventional collection of peculiarities that come together in an unusual and appealing way. Jesus, she’s good- looking.

“One of the Technical Services people got this just last week in Boston, where she teaches at Mr. Melman’s alma mater,” Yost said.

“The Harvard staff didn’t look like that when I was there.” Sam again.

“Somehow Miss Hull managed to get into Kurdistan,” Yost continued. “We don’t know how. She wouldn’t speak to State Department debriefers when she finally got back. But she’s the key to this whole thing. Chardy had a ‘relationship’ with her, in the mountains.”

The word “relationship,” coming at Trewitt through the vague dark in which Yost was just a shape up front, sounded odd in the man’s voice; Yost didn’t care, as a rule, to speculate on a certain range of human behavior involving sexual or emotional passion; he was a man of facts and numbers. Yet he said it anyway, seemed to force it out.

“Chardy will love her still,” Miles Lanahan said. The sharpness of his voice cut through the air. “He’s that kind of guy.”

The woman on the wall regarded them with icy superiority. She was wearing a turtleneck and a tweed sports coat. The shot must have been taken from half a mile away through some giant secret lens, for the distance was foreshortened dramatically and behind her some turreted old hulk of a house, with keeps and ramparts and dozens of gables, all woven with a century’s worth of vines, loomed dramatically. It’s so Boston, so Cambridge, thought Trewitt.

“Chardy had no brief to cross into Kurdistan. This woman had no right. But they both were there, in the absolute middle of it, with Ulu Beg. They were there for the end. In a sense they were the end.”

Yost is discreet in his summary, Trewitt thought. The prosaic truth is that sometime in March of 1975 the Shah of Iran, at Joseph Danzig’s urging and sponsorship, signed a secret treaty with Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr of Iraq. The Kurdish revolution, which was proceeding so splendidly, became expendable. Danzig gave the order; the CIA obeyed it.

The Kurds were cut off, their materiel impounded; they were exiled from Iran.

Chardy, Beg, the woman Hull: they were caught on the wrong side of the wire.

Chardy was captured by Iraqi security forces; Beg and Hull and Beg’s people fled extreme Iraqi military pressure. Fled to where? Fled to nowhere. Trewitt knew that Yost wouldn’t mention it, that even the great Sam Melman wouldn’t mention it. But one passage from Chardy’s testimony before Melman came back to haunt him, now in this dark room among Agency elect, his own career suddenly accelerating, his own membership on the staff