Siro Page 4

  The day the academicians opened Tamerlane’s tomb was June 21, 1941. history records that on that very day Hitler made his decision to invade the Soviet Union. It was a day on which the spirit of war truly burst forth—with greater savagery, perhaps, than at any time since Timur walked the earth five centuries ago. To the superstitious people of Central Asia, it had been obvious enough what had happened. Cause and effect.

  And it would have been obvious, too, to any amateur student of Oriental ethnology; to any visiting American who happened to overhear several Pakistani friends narrate this astonishing tale, as Edward Stone did one evening during a visit to Peshawar. For such a person, it would have been almost impossible, once he had heard the tale, not to contrive an experiment that would test what might happen in the vast and silent lands of Central Asia if the tomb were to become open once again. It took so little effort—a few clever Uzbek operatives based in Peshawar—and it had the potential to cause so much trouble. But at first, for Stone, it was a game; a way of testing his liaison network, of oiling the machinery and making sure that it would work. And it offered, too, a modest test of his hypothesis that the Soviet edifice in Central Asia was frail and ready to crumble.

  The easiest evidence to monitor was electronic. An hour after the open tomb was discovered, Radio Samarkand went dead. When it returned to the air a few minutes later, the announcer began reading propaganda material that had been scripted for such delicate moments by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan. The voice was bland and unmodulated, the verbal equivalent of an eye that never blinks:

  “Everything that is joyous and happy in the life of the people of Samarkand and of the Soviet East as a whole is associated with the heroic activities of the Communist Party and with the great leader of the revolution, Lenin,” said the voice. “The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of rejuvenation for the ancient city. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the people of Samarkand realized revolutionary measures creating new schools, medical establishments, industrial enterprises and implementing agrarian transformation in the region. Comrades: At the hour of trial, the people of Samarkand gave a pledge to Lenin. They wrote: ‘Dear Vladimir Ilyich. We swear to stand firmly and defend the gains of Soviet power. We shall rather perish in struggle than allow the enemies of the socialist revolution to overthrow Soviet power in Turkestan.’ ”

  By noon, the news had spread throughout the city with the speed of fire burning through dry grass. The rumors traveled fastest along the several miles between the mausoleum and the bazaar, where the farmers gathered each day to sell the fruits and vegetables from their orchards and gardens. The bazaar was a wondrous place, nearly impervious to Soviet power. Farmers and merchants jostled against one another, beckoning in the same boisterous language as five hundred years ago, when the bazaar stood astride the Silk Road.

  Now as then, the commodity traded best in the bazaar was rumor. The red-kerchiefed woman selling apricot nuts told the news of the open tomb to the woman selling almonds, who walked over to the spice table and told the old crone selling cardamom, whose husband overheard and shouted across to his friend selling onions; the news jumped a long aisle, toward the cabbage sellers, and the radish men, and the women stacking their carrots in neat pyramids; and it traveled back to the far reaches of the bazaar, to the sellers of fabric and shoes and books and hardware. People even went to the phone booths, covered by black metal roofs shaped like four-cornered hats, and called their friends.

  By midday, the whole of the bazaar was in an uproar. At prayer time, a mullah climbed atop the roof of a coffeehouse at the far end of the bazaar and shouted, “Allahu akhbar,” in the wailing cry of the muezzin. Militiamen had been in the market since midmorning, and several of them ran after this impromptu mullah, but the chase was useless. Their way was blocked by burly Uzbeks and low, shambling Turkmen. They weren’t deliberately resisting the militiamen; they just stood where they were, crowding the doorways of coffeehouses, slow and deliberate in their movements, the way people in Central Asia can be when they don’t want to be rushed, when even the great god of history cannot move them out of the way.

  Radio Samarkand continued to dispense its verbal balm:

  “Comrades,” said the radio. “There is an Uzbek legend about a golden book in a golden casket which was buried in the ground at the time of bloody invasions by evil tribes. Centuries passed and the people believed that a warrior would be born to find the book and return it to the people. There eventually came into this world a warrior whose mind was brighter than the sun, whose eyes were kind, whose smile instilled cheer and hope and refreshed the tired as a water spring in the desert, whose words were filled with great wisdom. This warrior was the great Lenin. He found the golden casket with the wonderful book and opened it to the Uzbek and other enslaved peoples of the world.”

  The Uzbeks began to turn off their radios, across the length of the bazaar, in the barbershops, even in the barracks of the militia. But the voice continued:

  “Lenin transformed the legend into a long-expected reality. Under the guidance of Lenin, the Uzbek people joined the working class of Russia and their class brethren throughout the country and launched the struggle for freedom and socialism.”

  The radios were all extinguished now, but the unblinking voice continued to speak:

  “The socialist revolution brought happiness into the home of every Uzbek. It meant freedom for the Uzbek people from social, economic and national oppression. Lenin died, but Leninism is alive—as firm and unshakable as a rock.”

  What Stone instinctively understood was that this fabric of lies would not last another generation. The revolt expressed itself that day, and every day, in small individual acts, as simple as the assertion that God exists in an officially godless state. The evidence of this Islamic revolt was as pervasive and invisible as the dust in the air. It was everywhere and nowhere; everyone was a believer and no one. It was as if the entire Uzbek nation were engaged in a genial deception of their Soviet overlords—friendly, smiling, taking whatever money and modern conveniences Moscow was willing to supply; wearing their war medals and party buttons on holidays and pinning Mother Heroine decorations on their wives when the tenth child was born, but believing not a word of the Marxist cant that surrounded their lives, and waiting always for a moment to speak the subversive name of God.

  Had Stone been at the tomb of Qutham Ibn Abbas that day, alongside one of his far-flung correspondents, he would have seen one more small moment of the rebellion that he knew lay ahead. It was trivial in itself, but it was one of a thousand seeds of rebellion that were scattered across the plain of Central Asia, ready to sprout. This particular incident began early in the afternoon when a group of Uzbek farmers walked down the road from the bazaar to the holy shrine of Ibn Abbas, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin.

  It happened quickly, almost as an act of guerrilla theater. The group climbed the long stairway up to the tomb. Inside, the small room was crowded with a busload of Russian tourists, listening to a lecture on native folklore from an officious Armenian guide. They tromped about the room in their heavy Russian shoes, with no thought that they were in a mosque, walking upon holy ground. To them it was a curiosity, a relic of the pagan past that made Central Asia a quaint tourist attraction.

  The Uzbek group gave way and stood aside, staring reverently at the wooden screen that shielded the tomb—but blocked from it by the Russians with their cameras and their loud talk and their guide telling amusing anecdotes about the religious practices of the Moslems. The act of sedition came in the wink of an eye. As the Russian group began to leave the room, one Uzbek man motioned to his brothers and sisters to sit down. They squatted on their haunches with their backs against the north wall, the women in the group squatting just apart from the men, as the Koran commanded. The chant began the moment they were in place.

  “Allahu akhbar,” sang the mullah. He was in fact an ordinary farmer, a graduate of no madrass
ah; almost certainly he did not own a Koran; almost certainly he could not have read it if he did. But that day, in that moment, he was a mullah, calling his people to prayer.

  “Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa-Llah.” I bear witness that there is no god but God. The tiny congregation, squatting against the wall, murmured a response.

  “Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasulu-Llah.” I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of God.

  He prayed quickly. The next Russian tour group would be arriving any minute from the front gate, from the bookstore where they sold atheist literature and anti-Islamic tracts. The mullah hurried. The name of God was no less powerful if it was said quickly.

  “Allahu akhbar,” he began again, repeating the call to prayer.

  “Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa-Llah.”

  The untutored mullah recited the fatiha, the first sura of the Koran. He was racing now:

  “Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds,

  The Compassionate, the Merciful,

  King of the Day of Judgment,

  It is Thee we worship and Thee we ask for help.

  Guide us on the straight path,

  The path of those whom Thou has favored,

  Not the path of those who incur Thine anger

  nor of those who go astray.”

  The men and women put their hands to their faces, bowed, put their hands to their faces again. In the small room the sound echoed and reverberated, so that it began to sound like a great chorus of Moslems, rather than eight dusty Uzbek farmers. An old Turkman appeared at the door in a blue coat and white turban, his eyes alight with pleasure to hear the sound of prayer. He put his hands to his face the moment he entered the room and followed along. A few more old men arrived and joined in the chant, but the sound of heavy shoes and Russian voices was approaching.

  It ended as suddenly as it had begun. The mullah broke off at the last verse, stood up and led his little band out the door single file, into the world of God’s grace, and Soviet power.

  It was nearly a month before an account of these events in Uzbekistan—and a half dozen more that told the same story—made its way back to Edward Stone in Washington. The delay wasn’t surprising, given the route the news traveled. It might have been borne by the Pathan horse trader Mahbub Ali, who roamed the strange land that Kipling called “the back of Beyond.” A visiting trader in the marketplace at Samarkand made his way by rickety Russian bus down the road to Termez, at the southern border of Uzbekistan, stopping overnight in Karshi, and two nights in Sherabad. When he reached Termez, the man found his way to the back room of a particular coffeehouse, and chatted with a particular old Uzbek gentleman who had relatives living in Kabul. And somehow—better never to ask exactly how—the news traveled across the supposedly impermeable Soviet border, till it was the talk of Mazar-i-Sharif and Baghlan, and then down the great highway to Kabul. And from there it flowed steadily, like water tracing its course downhill, through the peaks and valleys of southern Afghanistan and across the frontier into Pakistan. And when the news reached Peshawar, it came to the attention of a very particular friend of Edward Stone’s, a Pakistani gentleman who worked for an organization with the bland title Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and who was, like Stone himself, a player of the Great Game.

  And when it finally reached Stone’s desk, the news brought a smile, a long moment of contemplation and the consideration of new ventures for the future.

  II

  AMOS B. GARRETT

  ISTANBUL / WASHINGTON

  JANUARY 23–26, 1979

  4

  The American consulate in Istanbul at least looked as if it belonged to a superpower. It occupied a fine old marble building in the center of town, and on a sunny day, with the American flag flapping in the breeze off the Golden Horn, it looked rather grand. Not quite as grand as the Soviet consulate, a salmon-pink palace a few blocks away. But entirely adequate to the American purpose in that part of the world, which in the late 1970s rested on less secure foundations than its diplomatic real estate.

  The consulate building had been constructed in the 1870s by a Genoese shipowner named Corpi. He had spared no expense, importing marble and rosewood from Italy, and some of the more high-minded members of the consulate staff still liked to refer to the building as the “Palazzo Corpi.” Signor Corpi had died a few months after his dream house was completed, so he never had much chance to enjoy the frescoes of nymphs and satyrs cavorting on the dining-room ceiling. Neither did the Americans, as it turned out. The United States purchased the lavish building in 1907, frescoes and all, supposedly after the American ambassador to Turkey beat the Speaker of the House of Representatives in a poker game. But during the 1930s, a particularly prudish consul general’s wife decided the frescoes were pornographic and had them plastered over.

  Every time Taylor looked up at that dull, whitewashed ceiling, he thought of the long-dead ambassador’s wife and said a silent curse. She was an American type, an example of our national desire to paint over the world and blot out the disturbing parts. Perhaps some people still regarded these Americanisms as harmless, but in 1979 Taylor had lost patience.

  Alan Taylor was the CIA’s base chief in Istanbul. He had been assigned that post, rather than a larger station with more administrative responsibility, because he was what the agency liked to call a “natural recruiter.” That wasn’t quite a compliment. He was a handsome man, just under six feet, thin at the waist, with a barrel chest that occasionally made him look like a pugilist or a barroom bouncer, despite his dignified features. He had dark hair, which he combed straight back on his head, and although he did not appear to be a fastidious man, he never seemed to have a hair out of place.

  Taylor was in his late thirties, in the foothills of middle age but walking backward. He had a vaguely continental look, and people on the street might have assumed he was English or French because of his clothes and manners. But he was in fact a distinct American type, just as much as that long-ago ambassador’s wife: He was the rebellious preppy, the naughty boy from the good family, who loved nothing more than telling the world to go to hell. Men and women tended to say the same thing about Taylor: He was the most charming man they had ever met. He was, as they said, a natural recruiter.

  Such people were a vanishing breed in the homogenized world of American intelligence. And the feeling back at headquarters was: good riddance. The hell with the macho Ivy Leaguers, the boys from Beacon Hill who swore like they were from South Boston. The new vogue at Langley was to hire salesmen as case officers. Not ordinary, used-car salesmen, mind you, but serious salesmen. The kind who graduated in the top half of their class at Penn State and went to work for General Electric selling million-dollar electric turbines, who could spend a whole year, cool and calm, preparing a customer for one big deal. The sort of men who could look you straight in the eye as they told their earnest American lies, and make you feel good about it. Whatever Taylor’s faults, he was not a salesman.

  Taylor did not refer to the consulate building, ever, as the “Palazzo Corpi.” His wife had done so, in the months before she packed up and left Istanbul, and it had been one of the small things that had gotten on his nerves. She was the sort of woman who should have been married to a diplomat, to one of those sturdy fellows who spent their time drafting unreadable cables about visits by the POLOFF to the FORMIN of the GOT. Taylor’s wife had loathed the CIA, which was another thing she shared with the diplomats. She called it “the Sandbox.”

  The State Department had a more elaborate code. They had become so skittish about the agency in recent years that even in secret cables they referred to it only euphemistically, as the “Special Reporting Facility.” And then, when even that tame phrase seemed too specific, by a new four-letter code word—“SIRO”—which sounded like the beginning of something interesting, like “seraglio” or “sirocco,” but in fact meant nothing at all.

  Taylor entered the ornate chancery building only when it was absolutely necessary. His hom
e was the shabby office next door, a grayish stucco building the color of Bosporus sludge, which housed the consular section and Taylor’s office.

  From his window in the annex, Taylor could see the walls of the old Pera Palas Hotel down the street, and when his mind wandered—­which was often—he would imagine what it must have been like in the salad days of the spy business. A lobby full of absurdly conspicuous intelligence officers from all the capitals of Europe, smoking cigars and trading stories. Mysterious Oriental characters weaving among them, selling information. Exotic, ruined women taking the lift to assignations on the upper floors. It was said that Mata Hari herself had stayed in the hotel once. Taylor had never taken Mata Hari seriously until he read that despite her seemingly voluptuous figure, she was actually flat-chested and wore a padded bra even in bed. From that point on, Taylor had regarded her as a sublime espionage agent—a princess of deception—and when he wandered over to the Pera Palas for a drink after work, he would try to conjure up her ghost. But he was always disappointed. The bar tended to fill up with heavy-breasted German tourists and daffy American girls looking for a two-week adventure. They were not Mata Hari, but they helped pass the time.

  Taylor’s immediate concern that January was the Turks. Turkey was one of the loose timbers in the world, but in the general commotion over Iran, nobody quite seemed to have noticed. The Shah’s departure and the turmoil in the oil market had shaken New York and London, and as the aftershocks radiated out toward Istanbul and Ankara, they grew larger and more violent, until the very floorboards began to creak and sway. The problem in Istanbul wasn’t long lines at the gas pumps. Much of the time, as the winter progressed, there simply wasn’t any gas to be had. Oil prices increased eighty percent at the start of the year and kept climbing. There were daily power cuts in Istanbul and bare shelves in the stores. The Turks were responding to these dark forces by doing the one thing that still seemed within their power—killing each other.