“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
“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
“We
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
that
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. 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 Kirkūk 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 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
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
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 Rawāndūz.
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
The Kurds were cut off, their matériel 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 of an important operation suddenly achieved.
C: But what about the Kurds?
M: I’m sorry. The scope of this inquiry doesn’t include the Kurds.
The last details are remote, Trewitt knew. Nobody has ever examined them, no books exist, no journalists have exhumed it. Only the Melman report exists, and its treatment is cursory. Joseph Danzig himself has not commented yet. In the first volume of his memoirs,
The fates of the three principals were, however, known: Chardy, captured, was taken to Baghdad and interrogated by a Russian KGB officer named Speshnev. His performance under pressure, Trewitt knew, was a matter of some debate. Some said he was a hero; some said he cracked wide open. He would not discuss it with Melman.
He was returned to the United States after six months in a Moscow prison.
Johanna Hull showed up in Rezā’iyeh by methods unknown in April of 1975 and returned to the United States, and her life at Harvard. She had lived quietly ever since. Except that three times she had tried to commit suicide.
Ulu Beg, one source reported, was finally captured by Iraqi security forces in May of 1975 and was last seen in a Baghdad prison.
The fate of his people — his tribe, his family, his sons — was unknown.
“Lights,” Yost said.
Trewitt fumbled a second too long for the switch but finally clicked it on.
The brightness flooded the room and men blinked and stretched after so long in the dark.
Yost stood at the front of the room.
“Briefly, that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you informed. Chardy arrives tomorrow.”
“Lord, you’re bringing him
“Yost, I hope you can control this Chardy. He can be a real wild man.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Miles Lanahan said.
He smiled, showing dirty teeth. He was a small young man with a reputation for ruthless intelligence. He was no sentimentalist; the “old cowboy” stuff wouldn’t cut anything for him. He’d started out as a computer analyst working in “the pit,” Agency jargon for the video display terminal installation in the basement of Langley’s main building, and worked his way out in a record two years. Everybody was a little afraid of him, especially Trewitt.
“All right, Miles,” said Yost, “that’s enough.”
not
And now, on the night before what he knew was the most important day of his life, the game was especially kind to him. For of late his shots would not fall, his legs had been thick and numb, his fingers clumsy. But all that was a memory: tonight he could not miss. From outside, inside, but usually from the baseline with no backboard for margin of error, he shot, the ball spinning to the rafters and dropping cleanly through. It was only a Y-league game, mostly ex-college jocks like himself, or black kids with no college to go to; and it took place in a dim old gym that smelled of sweat and varnish and sported a shadowy network of old iron girders across the ceiling.
But for Chardy there was nothing but basketball court, no outside world, no Speights or Melmans or Ulu Begs. It was an absolute place: you shot; it went in or it didn’t. There was no appeal, no politics, no subtle shading of results. It was a bucket or it wasn’t.