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. 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 anyrate, 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
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
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. 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 anyrate, 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
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
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