so the headquarters duty officer could hear the battle going on outside.I STUCK THE HANDSET of the STU-III, a secure telephone, out the window of what passed for a CIA so the headquarters duty officer could hear the battle going on outside.
“Listen to it,” I hollered just as a tank in the street behind the Oktoberskaya Hotel fired a round from its main gun. A long burp from a heavy machine gun and a couple of explosions followed in quick succession. Only a stone’s throw away from the hotel, Dushanbe’s main mosque kept belting out the same Koranic sura over its PA system. Every once in a while someone would break in and scream, “La Allah illa Allah”—there is no God but God.
I had been up for most of the last forty-eight hours, and fatigue was setting in. It didn’t help that I’d been on the road the entire week before, including five days waiting in Kiev for a flight to Dushanbe that didn’t exist. Every morning I went to the airport expecting to board the Dushanbe plane, which was advertised to leave on time. Every day the plane never left. Finally, on the fifth morning the airport manager took pity on me, pulled me aside, and spilled the state secret that the Kiev to Dushanbe flight had stopped flying six months before. “No airplanes, no gas,” he said, shaking his head sadly. I made a mental note to tell the clowns back in the travel section to stop booking people on the Kiev to Dushanbe flight. I wasn’t even going to think about why Aeroflot let me check in every day but I was starting to get an inkling why the Soviet Union had collapsed.
Without a Russian visa, I was forced to backtrack to Frankfurt, where I slept a few hours in a chair at the Rhein-Mein Air Base, then rode into Dushanbe on top of a cargo palette in the back of a freezing U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter. The pilot came in low, below the twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks that cover nearly all of Tajikistan—the same mountains that so awed Alexander the Great that he turned south and marched east through Afghanistan rather than try to cross them.
There followed two long nights drinking vodka with a couple of Tajiks. My second day on the ground, I caught a bad cold. The only thing that could have awakened me at 6:09 on the morning of the third day did—the throaty growl of a ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun firing outside my window. At first I couldn’t remember where I was, but when you think you’re taking incoming fire, it doesn’t really matter. My inclination was to take cover in the bathtub, except there wasn’t one. Someone seemed to have stolen it, maybe while I slept. Only then did I fully remember where I was—Tajikistan: the remotest, poorest, most isolated republic in the former Soviet Union. The edge of the crumbling periphery.
Lying in bed as I listened to the gunfire, I wondered what exactly I’d gotten myself into this time. After Paris, I had been assigned to Rabat, Morocco, for a three-year tour. With its big houses, mild climate, clay tennis courts, and emerald-green golf courses, Rabat was a plum post. There was even skiing in the Atlas Mountains outside of Marrakech. I’d had a good job, too—deputy chief of 
, the management track. Three years in Rabat, and I could take full command of a midsize 
the next time around.
The fact is, though, that I was bored. The war in the western Sahara was over. Worse, everything important in Morocco went on inside the royal family, and the only figure of any significance inside that closed circle was King Hassan II, a man who kept his own counsel. When Hassan II wanted access in Washington, he went through a K Street lobbyist, not the CIA. Essentially, we didn’t know what was going on in Morocco until we read it in the newspapers.
That left the Soviet target, but in early 1992, Uncle Milty my old Khartoum boss and now chief of the Central-Eurasian Division, informed Rabat that Russia would henceforth be treated like Germany, France, Italy, or any other friendly country. The cold war was over. Period. As for our old nemesis the KGB, we could just take it off our target list. If the KGB rezident in Rabat were to walk in and volunteer to tell us everything he knew, we weren’t authorized to give him even a nickel to catch a bus back to his embassy. None of this squared, of course, with the subsequent arrest of dozens of Russian spies, from RickAmes to Robert Hannsen. To give another example, it meant the CIA had to turn away Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who then volunteered to British intelligence and provided information that led to the identification of dozens of spies, including a U.S. colonel. You figure the logic in that.
The bottom line: If Rabat were to turn out the lights and close up, it would be a long time before anyone noticed. I wanted back in the action, and Tajikistan seemed to be the ticket. It was a country in the throes of an Islamic revolution, and it looked as if Islamic fundamentalism might spread from there to the rest of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, maybe even up into Russia. Stingers and heroin were coming north across the border from Afghanistan, and all sorts of sophisticated weapons were going back the other way, mainly to Iran. The place seemed to offer everything: terrorism, drugs, and nuclear-weapons, the three demons the CIA could still use to justify its budget. Besides, my other career choices—a résumé-building desk job back in Langley or maybe, if I could dress myself up well enough, a staff position with one of the congressional intelligence committees—were seeming less and less like any me I wanted to be. If Tajikistan couldn’t hold my interest, I figured, no country could. When I went back to Washington to volunteer, I was all but handcuffed to make sure I wouldn’t get away. The ranks of adventurers in the CIA were thinning fast.
There was something to take care of first, though. I’ve been tight-lipped, I realize, about personal matters. The CIA doesn’t encourage a lot of openness where family is concerned, and I’ve had plenty of reason not to advertise the fine details of my life. Suffice it to say that I got married while working in a Middle East capital I’m not allowed to mention I ever lived in, to a woman I’m now divorced from. In the balmy days of our marriage, though, my wife and I brought three children into the world. When I was working in Beirut, my family lived at first in Cyprus but moved to Belgium when a couple of Libyan thugs started following me. This time around, I wanted to make sure they had a more permanent address, so before I started out for Dushanbe, my wife and I bought a postage-stamp-size vineyard on Burgundy’s Cote d’Or in France. On it was a charming, dilapidated farmhouse that sat on the side of the hill, in the middle of the vines, with a sweeping view of the Saone Valley. The property caught my eye as I was driving back from an agent meeting. I didn’t even know it was for sale until I saw it advertised in the next village. The same afternoon I called my lawyer in Paris to make the owner an offer. I figured it would be the perfect rear base to stash my family while I was on the frontier, serving in the armies of civilization.
THE HEADQUARTERS duty officer back in Washington whistled in appreciation as he listened to the fighting going on around us. When I got back on the telephone, I told him State was bringing in an evacuation flight to take everyone out, including the CIA. Problem was, I still had to call McDill Air Force Base to ask for the C-141.
“Dushanbe? Never heard of it,” the duty officer at McDill said. “Is this some kind of joke?”
I read off Dushanbe’s eight-digit coordinates from an air chart. When he found Dushanbe, he laughed. “You assholes really are out in the middle of nowhere.”
“About our plane?”
“When the money’s in the bank, you’ll get your plane,” he said as he hung up.
The standing agreement between State and the air force was that an evacuation plane was paid for in advance. The air force must have been stiffed in the past.
Assuming his masters would pony up, Stan Escudero, the ambassador—who by then had a pistol strapped to his side—deputized me to round up the Americans and bring them to the embassy. It wasn’t going to be easy. The fighting hadn’t let up; worse, we didn’t know where all the Americans were. By the end of the day, though, we had managed to let most of them know they were to assemble the following morning at the Tajikistan Hotel. Luggage would be limited to one carry-on bag each.
To transport everyone to the airport, the ambassador borrowed three BTR-80 armored personnel carriers and their crews from the 201st Motorized Rifle Division, a Russian regular army unit that stayed on after Tajikistan got its independence in 1991. Lowering myself into the hatch of the first BTR, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Ten years before, I would have paid an agent a lot of money for the plans to one of those things. Now I had one of my own.
The BTR driver didn’t pay much attention to the rules of the road. He drove down sidewalks, rammed a couple of cars, and knocked down at least two iron fences before driving right up the stairs in front of the Tajikistan Hotel. I must have been a sight, nursing a hangover and disheveled, as I stood talking on a Motorola radio in the BTR’s turret like I was Rommel in the Libyan Desert.
The Americans and about fifty other foreigners were waiting in the Tajikistan Hotel’s dark, dreary lobby.
“I’m from the U.S. government, and I’m here to help you,” I started. I admit it wasn’t very funny, but it was the best I could do at the moment. There wasn’t a smile in the whole lot.
“I’ve got good news. A plane is on its way here to evacuate us. You’re all welcome to leave on it, including citizens of the European Community.”
Before I could finish, they started arguing with one another whether to stick it out or leave.
“Listen up,” I interrupted. “I also have some bad news. Before we let you on the plane, you will have to agree to reimburse the U.S. government up to $10,000 to defray the cost of the airplane.” In fact, it was State regulation that civilians had to pay for a seat on an evacuation flight. In practice, though, State rarely billed anyone, as I tried to reassure them.
Several Iranian diplomats in the crowd seemed to miss this last nuance. They eagerly took notes and kept asking me for my name. I finally threw them a scrap. “Mr. Bob,” I said. That night Tehran Radio broke in with a news flash that a Mr. Bob was selling tickets to poor, stranded refugees in Tajikistan, making an obscene profit. My image in the press wouldn’t improve in the years ahead.
We spent the rest of the day closing up. I’d received permission to go into a “phase three burnout,” which meant everything was destroyed, from documents to the computer hard drives.
Right before destroying our crypto, I called the CIA’s operations center to let it know we were going off the air. “This is Dushanbe. We’re going tactical,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. The young lady with the honey voice on the other end of the line didn’t get it. Like the guy at McDill, she probably didn’t know where Dushanbe was. Just then there was a crescendo of tank fire down the street. It sounded like the siege of Stalingrad. And then, right on cue, Jim Morrison’s voice filled the air. We’d been playing and replaying our five office CDs all morning to drown out the mosque. Now Morrison seemed to be telling Dushanbe’s story: This is the end, my only friend, the end. The woman at the operations center at least knew who Jim Morrison was. I heard later she sent a recording of our conversation to Tom Twetten, the director of operations.
WE MADE IT OUT SAFELY, the ex-communists recaptured Dushanbe back from the fundamentalists, and we were able to open again for business in January 1993.
I reclaimed our rooms on the third floor of the Octoberskaya Hotel, but in our absence the Russian embassy had opened down the hall from us. We had to pass through its hallway to get in and out, which meant that the CIA’s office in Dushanbe was located inside the Russian embassy. I bet Uncle Milty never imagined that when he decided Russia was a friendly country, but it worked out fine. I got along with the Russians, including the KGB rezident, who would come down to our offices late at night and pound on the door looking for a bottle of Scotch.
Truth is, the only real game in town was the Russians. The 201st Division was the thin khaki line holding back a wave of Islamic fundamentalism that threatened to sweep across the southern tier of the former Soviet Union. We were reminded of it every few weeks. Each time the fundamentalists tried to mount an attack on Dushanbe, you could hear the tanks at the 201st’s cantonment start up their engines and head out into the mountains, the clattering of their treads echoing all over Dushanbe. From time to time you could see Russian bombers from Mery, Turkmenistan, pass over Dushanbe on their way to attack rebel positions in the mountains.
To me, it was clear that we needed a Russian source to tell us what the Russians were doing. Washington, for example, would need to know in a hurry if the Russians suddenly decided to pull back and leave Tajikistan to Islam. The Russians, though, had apparently never received Uncle Milty’s ukase that we were all friends. There was nothing they could do about the CIA office located in their embassy—we’d paid our rent a year in advance—but Russians were required to report all contact with Americans, especially with me, the CIA chief. And one report usually meant the end of the contact.
To find a way inside the friendly enemy camp, I took up skiing again. Russians love mountains just like Indian military officers love hunting. The conditions were primitive, a single rope tow. If you wanted a long run, you climbed a glacier. But I quickly became friends with several Russian skiers, and soon we were heading off almost every weekend to a pass with year-round snow.
It wasn’t long before the ploy paid off. In March I met Colonel Yuri Abramov, a Russian paratrooper assigned to Tajik paratroopers. Yuri was a world-famous jumper, holder of something like forty-nine international records. One night he invited me over to his apartment in Dushanbe. Out came the vodka, and the last thing I remember before taking a nap on Yuri’s couch was a toast to our mothers.
Early the next morning Yuri shook me awake: “We’re going now.” I didn’t bother to ask where. It was still dark. An hour in a lumbering UAZ, a Russian military jeep, and we arrived at a military base in the mountains south of Dushanbe, about a five-minute flight from the Afghan border. In the middle of the sloped grass field was an ancient AN-2 biplane. Without saying a word, Yuri jumped out of the jeep, grabbed a parachute lying on the ground, and handed it to me. “Here, put it on.” It was only then I remembered telling Yuri the night before that I had once parachuted.
A dozen Tajik and Russian paratroopers were already sitting on the floor of the AN-2. Judging from their AKS74Us (a short AK-47 with a grenade launcher under the barrel) and the ammunition magazines and grenades strapped all over their bodies, we were going on a combat jump. Into which war was the question. I also wondered about the parachute strapped to my back. Did it have toggles, or would I have to steer by pulling on the risers? Thanks to my big mouth, I would have a chance to find out, on the way down.
The plane took off and headed toward the Afghan border. But before we got there, we started to ascend in circles. As I waited for my inevitable turn in the door, I had to ask myself once again what I was doing. I didn’t like small airplanes, parachute jumping, or even vodka, which I’d swilled most of the night before. I was forty years old, too old to be jumping with Russian special forces. And the reason I was doing it? It was the only way to get close to the Russian military. I was just doing my job, or at least the job I conceived I should be doing.
When we reached two thousand feet or so, Yuri emerged from the cockpit and motioned for me to hook up to the static line. The paratroopers were smirking at me like drunken apes, knowing what was in store as Yuri led me to the open door. The view wasn’t reassuring. The clouds and rain were too thick to see the ground, and a heavy wind buffeted the AN-2, making it creak like an old wooden bed. For all I knew, we’d been blown off course and were actually over Kabul. Red, my jump instructor at the Farm, never would have let us jump into a storm like that.
“What about the wind dummy?” I yelled into Yuri’s ear. If we were going to jump, I at least wanted something nonhuman to go out the door first to show us which way the storm was blowing so I could steer my chute into it.
He either didn’t understand or purposely ignored me.
“You’re first,” he shouted. He then added, as if it sealed the matter, “You’re our guest.”
As I plummeted through a cloud, I realized why Yuri didn’t need a wind dummy. I was it.
TWO THINGS ENSUED from my little jump. First, headquarters sent a message to all the offices in the former Soviet Union, stating there would be no more leaping out of Russian military airplanes. Fine, I remember thinking, because there was no way I was ever going to get back in that damn sardine can again. Then, about a week after the jump, there was a knock at my door. I opened to find a Russian in Levi’s and a plaid shirt. “My colonel would like to see you,” he said, sounding like Boris Karloff. Without waiting for my answer, a Russian colonel in combat fatigues came out of the shadows and walked into our office. Pretty gutsy, I thought, an officer showing up at my door right under the nose of the KGB rezident.
The colonel had the self-possession of a cavalry officer. Probably because he was. One of the youngest full colonels in the Russian army, Grigor, as I’ll call him, commanded an elite armor regiment. His father had been a very senior official in the Soviet Union. With nomenklatura credentials like that, it was no wonder he could just waltz through the Russian embassy as if he owned it. He probably could have had the rezident shipped off to the gulag if he’d wanted.
“Are you the American military attaché?” Grigor asked.
For a Russian buzzard colonel, I would be anything he wanted me to be. “Yes, I fill in for that position.”
“Good,” he said. With his blond hair, thick neck, and blue eyes, the colonel looked more German than Russian. He had a German directness about him, too. “Tomorrow there will be a car to pick you up at nine.” He did an about-face and walked out, his aide following in his wake.
The next day things started out calmly enough. The driver dropped me off at the main Russian military range, about forty miles from Dushanbe. The colonel, his wife, and a dozen other Russian officers and their wives were already there. I was the first American most of them had ever met. I broke the ice by pitching in to pick mushrooms. While the women cooked them over an open fire, the officers and I drank vodka. We made at least four toasts to the hero of the Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf.
Just when everyone was starting to feel good, two of the Russians brought out their miniature silenced assassination weapons. One looked like a derringer pistol; the other was disguised as a pen.
“This is how we deal with the Vahabis,” a captain said, holding his pen up in the air.
Vahabis—or Wahabis as we call them—refers to Saudi fundamentalists. It’s a word derived from the eighteenth-century Saudi Islamic reformer Muhammad Ibn ’Abd Al-Wahab, the man responsible for Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam. I’d heard the rumor that the Russians were assassinating fundamentalists in Tajikistan. Suddenly, I suspected it was true.
The captain unscrewed the top of the pen and extracted a 7.62 subsonic bullet. It looked just like a standard AK round, but the captain noted that it was made of soft lead, which would explode on impact. “It’s the perfect assassination round,” he said. When he reloaded the pen and fired it into a small pond, the only sound was a splash. It was much quieter than any CIA suppressed weapon I’d ever heard.
More vodka followed. Just as everything was starting to get a bit hazy, it was time to move to the next activity—the range. While the wives stayed behind, we piled into a couple of jeeps and drove half a mile to a pop-up range with about a dozen metal silhouettes. We got to pick our weapons from the back of a truck, anything from AK-47s to belt-fed .30-caliber machine guns to RPGs. There was even a 40mm chain gun.
Fortunately, no one picked the chain gun. The experience was hair-raising enough as it was. Every once in a while someone would accidentally hit one of the silhouettes, knocking it down, but since the control box used to raise it back up wasn’t working, one of the revelers would have to walk downrange to right the silhouettes—and no one, except me, stopped firing.
GRIGOR DECIDED I’d acquitted myself well enough and invited me the following week to take one of his T-72s out for a test drive.
I’d never driven a tank in my life, let alone a Russian tank. The driver’s compartment was a nice fit for someone about four foot two. Hunched over, I could barely see through the Plexiglas aperture, but I wasn’t going to say no. I started off by driving it right through a mud hole about ten feet deep. Once I got my sea legs, I joined the other tanks as they raced around a valley, stopping occasionally to fire at cardboard targets in the shape of tanks. Yuri was so proud of me, he made me an honorary member of his regiment.
Headquarters took notice of my efforts with another message to all offices in the former Soviet Union: No more driving Russian tanks. I was sorry about that. Unlike the AN-2 biplane, I’d become attached to the T-72. But I was also earning Grigor’s trust, enough so that he decided to show me the dark side of Russia.
GRIGOR HAD TOLD ME only that he wanted to show me something that would interest my country. Shortly after eleven at night, we headed off to the airport, taking backstreets to avoid patrols and checkpoints. Grigor entered the airport through the military side. The Mi-8 and Mi-24 Hind helicopters and transport planes were just shadows in the dark. We stopped about a hundred feet from an IL-76 cargo plane and sat without saying a word.
After about an hour the IL-76’s cockpit lights came on. A soldier standing by the plane flicked on a flashlight and waved it in slow circles. A little while later an Mi-8 helicopter put down next to the IL-76, leaving its rotors turning. Someone started throwing heavy burlap bags out onto the tarmac. A half-dozen soldiers picked them up and threw them through the IL-76’s cargo door. It was all over in ten minutes. The Mi-8 flew back in the direction of Afghanistan. The IL-76 started up its engines, taxied out onto the runway, and took off.
“Heroin,” Grigor said. “The weekly shipment.”
On the way back he told me the story. The Tajik interior minister, Yaqub Salimov, and a few Russian generals were smuggling tons of raw opium from Afghanistan to Moscow on Russian military airplanes. After secret labs around Moscow processed the opium into heroin, it was smuggled into Sweden by boat and from there all over the world, including the United States.
I told the story to our ambassador. An old-school Foreign Service officer, Escudero believed in the mission more than his career. He agreed to go with me and make a call on Salimov.
Salimov was a thug. He had started out life as a boxing instructor at Dushanbe’s agricultural college. On the side, he temped as an enforcer for a local criminal group. One time he put too much muscle into his work and ended up doing seven years for manslaughter. He never cut his ties to the ex-communists, though, and when they came back to power in Tajikistan in 1992, he was a natural choice to keep the peace.
“Let me do the talking,” I whispered to Escudero as we walked up the two flights of stairs to Salimov’s office.
Mustering all the authority I could, I explained to Salimov that the U.S. government could no longer tolerate Tajikistan’s involvement in the heroin trade. I went on for about ten minutes. Salimov maintained a stony silence, all the while twirling a pen between his fingers, which were roughly the size of bananas. Sometimes he would put the pencil down to crack his knuckles. It was as if he were limbering up for a big fight. Escudero never said a word until we were outside, and then only winked at me in appreciation.
Two weeks later, Salimov sent me his response. I was sitting in the office with Stephan Bentura, an Agence France Presse correspondent based in Moscow, when we heard a thunderous boom. In Dushanbe, a bomb in the middle of the night wasn’t something to write home about, and this one had gone off about a mile away. No sweat; we kept talking. A couple minutes later, the embassy administrator burst through the door. “They blew up your house.”
I’d just rented the place a month before, in a quiet residential neighborhood. I intended to use it as a place to meet my contacts, out of range of the KGB rezident.
Driving up, you could see the house was pitted from shrapnel. A deep crater had magically appeared in the front lawn. The night watchman, who was sitting in the living room at the time, said he saw two police cars drive up and a person leaning out. The next thing he remembered, a satchel charge was sailing at the front window. Fortunately for the watchman, the bars on the window stopped it, and he suffered only a concussion. I noticed the telephone wires to the house were cut.
When I told Grigor what had happened, he clucked his tongue in disapproval. It was time to raise the stakes: He offered me a T-72 to flatten Salimov’s house.
As if I needed further proof of Mother Russia’s capacity for corruption, Grigor introduced me to the aide of the Russian ground-forces commander during one of his visits to Dushanbe. As soon as we sat down to a dinner party in the officers’ mess, the aide remarked without the least warm up that he’d heard the CIA had a C-130 coming in once a month. I acknowledged it was true. “Then why don’t we do some business,” he said. “I’ll fill it up with cigarettes and sell them to the army here, and we split the profits fifty-fifty.” Even after all I’d seen in Dushanbe, I was astonished. I’d just met the man, and he was proposing I join him in some Russian mafia deal. I’m sure if I’d asked him, he would have sold me a stolen nuclear warhead.
GRIGOR SOON OPENED UP a new subject, one Washington hated hearing about: Russian nationalism.
Grigor liked to describe himself as an enlightened Russian nationalist, but in fact he was just a Russian nationalist. He’d made up his mind that Russia badly needed a revolution, as profound as the October Revolution, to cleanse it of the corrupt politicians and drug-dealing generals.
One night I came over to his house with a crate of good German beer. Grigor liked his vodka, but the beer was a special treat. Halfway through the crate, Grigor let his guard down and talked about Boris Yeltsin’s 1993 assault on the Moscow White House and how close it came to destroying the Russian army. When the elite Tamanskaya Division received the orders to assault the White House, the enlisted crews, to a man, refused to get in their tanks. Simply put, they mutinied. As a result, every tank that participated in the assault was officer-crewed, but that wasn’t the end of it. Afterward the officers who had participated in the assault were all but drummed out of the army. Ostracized and passed over for promotion, many resigned in humiliation. “Yeltsin tore the army apart,” Grigor told me. “He will never be able to count on it again.”
I visited him at home again a week later. Grigor was in a particularly somber mood. Before I could sit down, he said, “Let’s go for a drive.” His UAZ was waiting in front of the apartment building, but he sent his driver away and drove himself.
We drove aimlessly for a while before he said anything. “What would Washington think if some honest Russian officers put an end to the farce in Moscow—get rid of Yeltsin?”
I looked at Grigor. He was serious.
Grigor didn’t say anything for a full minute. “Look, Mr. Bob, I and a few officers have been talking. We’re all serving on the borders of the former Soviet Union, places that those bastards in Moscow won’t even visit. They don’t give a shit that if it weren’t for us, Russia would collapse. All they care about is stealing everything they can put their hands on to go live in southern France. You wouldn’t believe it. Ammunition crates arrive empty—every last round stolen. I can’t get radios for my tanks. The bastards are stealing them and selling them to Moscow taxi companies. Our kitchen gardens are the only thing that keep us from starving. It’s the worst sort of treason.”
“Grigor, who do you mean by ‘us’?” I asked.
“Oh, there are hundreds of officers who think like me. We’re all on the frontier. Maybe ten percent of the military, but we’re the fighters.”
“Alexander Lebed is the only one who can pull this off, but we’re not talking to him yet. It’s too early.”
General Lebed, then the commander of the 14th Army in Moldava, was Russia’s most popular general. Soldiers were deserting from all over the former Soviet Union to join Lebed’s force, which was fully staffed. The rest of the army, mean while, was running about two thirds below full manpower.
“Isn’t there someone else?”
“There’s a general at the Staff College who knows us all—General 
. But Mr. Bob, you ask too many questions. Let me ask you one. What would the United States do if we made a coup against Yeltsin?”
Grigor wasn’t looking for a green light, but when I reported what he had told me, headquarters burned up the return lines with a message for Grigor: No coup; Washington fully backs the democratically elected government in Moscow. I’d already anticipated that response. I was just happy that headquarters let me keep meeting Grigor.
I did try to do a favor for him, though. I have no idea where he found them, but at one meeting he produced several brochures for Motorola communications equipment. He asked if I could help him procure a system for his regiment. The response from headquarters was unusually terse: “Inappropriate.”
IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER NINE on August 9, 1993, and someone was pounding on our office door. It was Grigor.
“Have you heard the news?” he asked me, out of breath.
I’d been out all morning with the communicator. We still hadn’t taken traffic.
“Your man in Tbilisi. He was assassinated.”
. Fred Woodruff was 
. He was temporarily assigned to the embassy in the Georgia capital of the former Soviet republic. Woodruff had been shot and killed the evening before.
“I know who did it,” Grigor said. “Those bastards in Moscow.”
Grigor, in fact, knew nothing about Woodruff’s killing, but if his suspicions were paranoid, they weren’t necessarily wrong. Fred Woodruff had been shot outside of Tbilisi while riding in the backseat of a Niva jeep driven by Eldar Gogoladze, the head of the bodyguard detail for Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. There were two female passengers in the car.
Beyond that, things got murkier. The Georgians arrested a soldier and charged him with the shooting. According to the Georgian police, the soldier, drunk at the time, had fired one round from his rifle in an attempt to flag down the Niva for gasoline. The Georgians, however, refused American investigators access to the soldier—at least not until he was on his deathbed several years later, by which time he had recanted his confession.
Other inconsistencies in the Georgian story went unexplained. A militia checkpoint, only a hundred yards from where Woodruff supposedly was shot, heard and saw nothing. Gogoladze said he passed the checkpoint after the shooting but didn’t stop. He couldn’t explain why or why he hadn’t at least alerted the militiamen about the shooting. Nor did Gogoladze seem to be in any hurry: It took him more than two hours to get to the hospital, normally a twenty-minute drive. Gogoladze explained that he gotten lost but couldn’t remember where. This was a man who’d spent his life in Tbilisi.
Not only did Gogoladze’s Niva disappear during those crucial two hours, it stayed gone for more than thirty-six hours after Gogoladze delivered Woodruff to the hospital, and when it did reappear, it had obviously been cleaned up. The embassy security officer found a dent in the Niva’s ceiling, right above the driver’s seat, where the bullet hit after it exited Woodruff’s head. Clearly, the bullet had not left the car, but it was nowhere to be found inside and thus couldn’t be matched to the confessed shooter’s AK-47. There was also no sign of how the bullet entered the car. The rear window was intact, and there was no hole in the metal skin. When the security officer pointed this out to the Georgians, they went away. The next day they came back and announced that they had discovered a small puncture in the seal that held in the rear window’s glass. Indeed there was one, but the embassy security officer was almost certain it hadn’t been there when he first checked the car.
There were other odd details that didn’t add up. Based on the autopsy, Woodruff had been shot with a dumdum bullet—an assassination bullet like the Russian officers showed me that day at the range—yet the shooter had no reasonable explanation why he had loaded his AK-47 with hard-to-come-by assassination rounds.
The FBI spent days going over the gunman’s supposed position but couldn’t find the spent shell casing until the Georgian investigators showed up. One of them grabbed an AK, positioned himself where he believed the gunman had stood, and fired a round in the air. He then followed the trajectory of the spent casing into some bushes. There he found not only the casing from the bullet he’d just fired but a second one as well. “Here is the casing,” he said triumphantly. The FBI agents were incredulous.
Another part of the mystery was that the Russian mole Rick Ames had met Woodruff in Tbilisi shortly before the murder. According to eyewitnesses, they got into an ugly argument, but no one ever found out exactly why. Did Woodruff accuse Ames of being a mole? And what had been in Woodruff’s camera? The female passenger in the front seat said that when Woodruff was shot, she turned around to see the woman in the back opening up the camera to take out the film, but the trail went stone cold from there. None of these anomalies proved a conspiracy, but I found it curious that no one was interested in running them down.
Long after the investigation came to a standstill, rumors and leads surfaced that complicated the Woodruff case still more. The most intriguing came when a Russian military intelligence officer was arrested in a neighboring country carrying a flash suppressor for an assassination rifle. Under interrogation, the Russian claimed he was a member of the team that had assassinated Woodruff. He was released and disappeared before his story could be confirmed, but that wasn’t the only potential link. Although she denied any connection to the murder, one of the female passengers in the Niva was married to a Russian military intelligence officer. Again, no one followed these leads.
Woodruff’s murder was like Pan Am. Part of the problem was that there was no solid proof of a bigger conspiracy. The larger part by far, though, was that Washington didn’t have the stomach for a thorough investigation. Even after it was determined that Russian intelligence had fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the side of our embassy in Moscow on September 13, 1995, the Clinton administration wasn’t interested in confronting Russia or even acknowledging that Russian nationalism was a problem. Incidentally, the FBI agent who hypothesized the Russians were behind Woodruff’s murder was quietly reassigned to a bank-robbery squad in Atlanta.
GRIGOR’S TUTORIALS were convincing me that the lash-up replacing the Soviet Union wasn’t going to work. Now he wanted me to take a deeper look by making a trip to the Pamirs. Although a few embassy officers had visited Khorog—the Pamirs’ capital—by helicopter, no American official had ever driven through them. “If you want to see what will become of Russia one day, drive along Tajikistan’s border,” Grigor told me. “It’s the best preview of hell you’ll ever have.”
I could only imagine. The Pamirs, which covered about three quarters of Tajikistan, were maybe the most lawless land in the world, ruled by a patchwork of Islamic guerrillas, warlords, bandits, smugglers, and Russian deserters. The only way to make a living in the Pamirs was by trading in weapons and narcotics. Not surprisingly, the ever opportunistic Iranian Pasdaran was having a field day. It had set up a base right on the other side of the border, in Taloqan, Afghanistan, to fuel instability in central Asia. It had even gone so far as to buy a couple of U.S. Stinger surface-to-air missiles and turn them over to the Tajik fundamentalists. The Russians maintained several outposts along the border, but the poor bastards defending them were lucky just to keep their heads. Every now and then, of course, their luck would tail out and the rebels would overrun one of them. The next day the newspaper would feature gruesome pictures of heads detached from bodies.
The danger was certainly part of the lure, but I had other reasons for wanting to spend time in the Pamirs. Ever since I had arrived in Dushanbe, I’d heard rumors about the remnants of an ancient civilization tucked away in a valley high in the mountains. The people who lived there were said to be descendants of the ancient kingdom of Samarkand, which had produced Alexander the Great’s wife, Roxane. Although they now called themselves Yaghnobis, their language hadn’t changed significantly in the last twenty-five hundred years. It was very close to ancient Soghdian, an Indo-European tongue in the Iranian family. The Yaghnobis’ way of life apparently hadn’t changed, either. They lived without electricity or running water. And if the wild rumors were true, the Yaghnobis had even reverted to worshiping fire.
Joseph Stalin had unsuccessfully attempted to efface the culture by scattering the Yaghnobis across the Soviet Union. After the regime fell in 1991, Harvard professor and Iranian scholar Richard Frye—a veteran of the World War II–era OSS—was the first American to hike up into Yaghnob. The window slammed shut again the next year, with the start of the civil war. If I managed to make it up there, I’d be on a very short list of Americans who had ever visited the ancient kingdom of Samarkand.
Basically, I decided to combine two trips in one. The first half would be a drive through the Pamirs, following a two-lane road that ran along Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan and China. On the way back to Dushanbe, I’d return through the Garm Valley and see if there was a way to walk into Yaghnob. At best, it was an iffy proposition. A fifteen-thousand-foot pass stood between the Garm and Yaghnob valleys, and there was no way to learn from Dushanbe either who controlled the pass or whether it was clear of snow.
The first hurdle was to get through rebel lines. To figure that out, I needed to make a reconnaissance trip to Tavildara, the last town under government control. Since it was safer to travel in pairs, I persuaded the embassy’s economic officer, whom I’ll call Maggie, to accompany me. A newly minted Foreign Service officer, Maggie was looking forward to putting a little war reporting under her belt.
Maggie and I brought along a linguist, an attractive young Iranian girl I’ll call Nell. Nell not only spoke native Farsi, of which Tajik is a dialect; she had also picked up a few East Iranian dialects, including Soghdian, while she was a student at Oxford. But Nell’s talents weren’t limited to languages. She had helped pay her way through Oxford, she told me, by dressing up in a heavy set of clothes wrapped with flashing lights and dancing as a kind of come-on during raves at abandoned airfields. Having never attended a rave, I had to take her word for it, but even though her university dancing days were over, she still didn’t mind dressing the part.
Driving into Tavildara reminded me of the final sequence in Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen reaches Marlon Brando’s lair at the river’s end. Tavildara, though, was a hot battlefield. You could see it as soon as you drove into town, or what had once been the town. The only sign that anyone had ever lived there was mounds of rubble. The road was missing, too, replaced by huge craters strung together like a pearl necklace. We stopped to hear if there was any shooting going on, but it was absolutely quiet. If the rebels were in the surrounding mountains, we couldn’t see them.
A burned-out T-72, still smoking and with a tread thrown across the road, marked the entrance to the army’s camp. Shirtless and holding a sniper rifle, a soldier sunned himself on a nearby rock. He shrugged when we asked where his commander was. Ten minutes of poking around the camp finally led us to his billet, in the basement of what must have previously been a house. You had to pull away the camouflage netting and climb down a hole the size of a toilet to get in. Inside was a warren of sandbags, crates of grenades and ammunition, racks of RPGs and light antitank rockets, and stacked assault rifles. If the place took a direct hit, half of Tavildara would go up with it.
A private was sitting on the floor, loading an ammunition belt. The commander, Colonel Sergei, was “taking his bath,” he informed us. The private showed us into Colonel Sergei’s room, which was the size of a big rabbit hutch. He closed the door and left us alone. We sat down on a pair of cots to wait. Nell put on her Walkman and tuned out.
Maggie and I heard Colonel Sergei before we saw him. Drunk as a Siberian pickle, he was belting out some old Volga boatman’s song. I looked at my watch. It was just about noon. Apparently informed by the private that he had guests, Sergei stopped singing. Now we could hear him giggling as he tried to sneak up on us. All was going fine until he bumped his head on the low ceiling and cursed under his breath. The next thing we knew, he had knocked the makeshift door almost off its hinges with his rifle butt and burst into the room. As soon as he saw us, though, Sergei froze. The orderly apparently hadn’t told him his visitors were Americans. I, for one, was every bit as surprised to see him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight or -nine. With his full blond beard, emerald-green eyes, and sheepish grin, he wasn’t my idea of the commander of the farthest outpost of the former Soviet Union.
Once we were all seated, Maggie, who had good Russian skills, asked about the recent fighting around Tavildara, but Sergei ignored her. Instead he shouted at the private through the wall, “I curse the eyes of your whore of a mother. Why is there never a goddamn bottle of vodka when I need one?” The private found a bottle, and the day went into a tailspin from there.
Sergei’s second in command, an Uzbek major, showed up with two more bottles of vodka. We were into the first of those when the Uzbek got up, went out, and came back with an American land mine he’d captured from the rebels. No one had bothered to remove the detonator. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “This is a present from the great Soviet Union to America.” Not to be outdone, I went out to the Niva and brought back a surplus U.S. military flak vest. The major loved it. He put it on, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me back outside. Handing me his Makarov pistol, he said, “Shoot me.” Fortunately, I was sober enough to say no. I finally persuaded him to hang the vest on a pole. The major emptied a clip into it and was so delighted when not a single round penetrated the vest that he grabbed an AK-47 and emptied a magazine into it. This time the vest shredded. The major didn’t mind, though. He put the vest back on and wore it for the rest of the party.
By the time we had polished off bottle three, it was time to go out on the range. Although Sergei was completely plowed by then, he still had enough presence of mind to tell us to shoot down the valley, not up into the mountains where the enemy was perched out. No point in irritating the rebels if you don’t have to, he said.
Things went just fine, at least at first. It was a beautiful cool day. Nell and Maggie got to fire an AK for the first time. Mercifully, there was no more vodka. I’d retrieved from the Niva a CIA-issue twelve-gauge folding-stock riot gun and showed it to the Uzbek major, who by now had presented me with a box of hand grenades. The riot gun proved to be a mistake. The major insisted on trying it out and fired off a couple rounds—in the direction of the mountains.
In theory, it wasn’t a threatening act: A twelve-gauge shotgun is useful only at close quarters. But the rebels were in no mood for fine distinctions. The first incoming round pinged off a tank only twenty feet from us. Several short bursts of fire followed and then a constant staccato of automatic rifle fire that seemed to be coming from everywhere. It wasn’t long before a mortar round whistled over the camp and exploded about fifty yards beyond the perimeter.
I looked over at Maggie. She was wheezing. She’d bargained only to cover a war, not to start one. “Let’s go,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. It reassured her that someone had a plan. “I’ll get the shotgun and you get Nell,” I said.
Maggie ran toward Sergei and Nell. “We’re leaving!”
Sergei, who had taken a liking to Nell as the day wore on and now had his arm around her, shouted back at Maggie in his broken English, “Good. You go. Woman stay here with me.”
Not one to be messed with, Maggie ran over, grabbed Nell, and pushed Sergei backward. We all ran for the Niva.
As we drove out of the camp, crews were scrambling into their tanks. I noticed they were all Tajiks. Their Russian officers were too drunk to do anything but watch. It was something to hear a dozen T-72s starting up their engines simultaneously. I turned around one last time and saw the camp covered in a heavy pall of diesel smoke.
We stopped about half a mile beyond Tavildara to listen to what sounded like a fierce battle. I threw the land mine and the box of grenades into the river, and we continued back to Dushanbe.
THE NEXT SPRING, when the snow melted off the passes, I dusted off my project for a trip through the Pamirs. This time I persuaded Henry, a visiting State Department officer, to accompany me. Henry spoke near-flawless Russian. What’s more, he’d been in the special forces. He was the perfect traveling companion for the Pamirs.
We packed the Niva with military rations, water, and some twenty jerry cans of gasoline. Our only communications equipment was a handheld radio that linked us up to Washington via a low-altitude navy satellite. I left the shotgun behind, but I did bring along two grenades, which I hid up behind the dashboard. To Henry’s astonishment, I also strapped a pair of skis to the roof of the car. “It’s good cover,” I explained. “The bad guys will think we’re just adventurers.”
When we came to Tavildara, we didn’t even slow down. Sergei was likely to still be sore about Nell. In the mountains above Tavildara, the road had disappeared beneath a massive landslide. There wasn’t a single vehicle on the road. We didn’t even see any rebels along the way, but at the top of Kaborabad pass, we came across the remains of a fresh battle. The side of the mountain was pockmarked with black craters—probably from SU-27 fighter-bombers—and burned-out tanks and armored personnel carriers.
We were starting to wonder if the Russians were fighting a war with themselves when two scarecrows cradling AK-47s stepped out from behind a rock and blocked our way. When they put us in the sights of their rifles, stopping seemed only politic. They asked us for a ride to Kalai-khum, the first town on the Afghan border.
It didn’t take long for the chitchat to lapse into an uneasy silence. I watched in the rearview mirror as the two mujahadin cased the Niva to see what was to be had. When they switched into Tajik, which they assumed we didn’t know, the situation took a menacing turn. As best as we could tell, they were debating what to do about us. Taking us home and introducing us to their families wasn’t an option they were considering.
Before our passengers could come to a decision, we came to Kalai-khum. An Afghan flag fluttered over a mud-and-wattle border-post hut on the other side of a shallow stretch of the Panj River. In front of us, a sandbagged .50-caliber machine-gun position blocked our entry to the town. Our muj hopped out and were in the middle of an animated conversation with two of their colleagues manning the machine gun when one of the hitchhikers came back and stuck his head in the window: “We need you to come with us to take care of formalities.” That wasn’t a good sign. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll go right to the police station.” Instead I slammed the Niva into first and peeled out. When I looked in the rearview mirror, the four muj were running behind us.
We drove out the other side of the Panj as fast as we could. Afghanistan, across the river, suddenly seemed a lot more civilized than the Tajik side. We were making good time until a tire started to go flat. Fortunately, a Russian border post sat just ahead, protected by high berms, walls, and razor wire. I drove through the front gate without giving the sentry a chance to stop us. Immediately, a knot of Russian soldiers gathered. With their hollow eyes and filthy uniforms about to fall off their backs, they looked like they’d been on strict rationing for a long time. Even their rifles were rusted. I offered them some of our rations, but no one accepted.
While I changed the shredded tire, Henry went to look for the commander. The soldiers just stared at me. No one offered to help.
I was tightening up the last lug nut when Henry came back following a Russian lieutenant who looked to be about sixteen years old. They were arguing loudly in Russian. The lieutenant kept repeating that it was forbidden for foreigners to visit this part of the Soviet Union. He ignored Henry’s reminder that there was no Soviet Union. Finally, the lieutenant walked over to the Niva and stuck his face in mine. “You and your friend get the hell out of here. Now.”
Henry made one last try. “Can’t we at least sleep outside the gates?” It was dusk now. Khorog lay at least eight hours away—along a road the Afghan muj used for target practice.
“No,” the lieutenant shouted. I could see he was more scared than angry. “It will give the bastards something else to shoot at. You’ve got one minute to get out, and I don’t care where the fuck you go.” He nodded at the guards, who started fingering their triggers. It was then that I noticed the base’s main defense amounted to a half-dozen antiaircraft guns, all facing across the river toward Afghanistan. The gunners were starting to feed in ammunition belts, preparing for another night on the frontier.
We made it to Khorog by the next morning, stayed a day, and then continued along the Chinese border, hard by some of the most beautiful mountains in the world. At each border post we stopped at, the Russians were totally mystified by our presence. Every time they asked if we had Moscow’s permission to drive through the Pamirs. It was as if they hadn’t heard the Soviet Union no longer existed. We stayed at the border post at Murgab. (The Russians told us it meant “dead chicken” in the local dialect.) For dinner we ate Marco Polo steaks, from the stately and vanishing Marco Polo sheep, about all the food there was to be had at Murgab. The commander said he hadn’t received supplies in a year. Then he added that he was finishing up an eight-year tour. Had Moscow changed much, he asked?
Although Henry and I didn’t make it to Yaghnob, I eventually found a guide to take me there. We entered the valley from the western side, then walked for two solid days along a narrow trail perched precariously above a two-thousand-foot cliff before we came to the first settlement. The rumors were right. The Yaghnobis really weren’t of the last two millennia.
At the next village, we ate around a table that used a carpet for its top. Even though it was the middle of summer, it was cold, and a little boy kept placing fresh burning embers under the table to keep us warm. Thanks to sleeves in the carpet, we could stick our arms through the tabletop to warm our hands as we chewed. The village was without running water or electricity, but the setting—a combination of mountains and glacier covered by year-round snow—was spectacular and intricately tied to the ancient culture. Instead of praying to Mecca, as most Muslims do, the Yaghnobi prayed to the highest peak, which they considered the jumping-off point to heaven.
AFTER ALMOST TWO YEARS of turning on the tap and seeing mud spurt out, taking ice-cold showers, and living off military rations, I’d had enough of Tajikistan. It was time for someone else to come out and share the fun. In January I started to nudge headquarters to find a replacement. After two months of silence in response, I got on the telephone to the division’s personnel office. I was apologetically told the Russian speaker who was supposed to replace me was going to the Army War College instead. An alternate would be found right away. But that guy ended up going to some midcareer management-training course. The third alternate simply dropped out of the assignment. Dushanbe “wasn’t a good career move,” he’d told the division. I was starting to feel like I had died, gone to hell, and would spend eternity in Dushanbe when headquarters proudly informed me it had found a replacement. I was ecstatic, at least until I started reading the guy’s bio. He was a paramilitary officer who spoke neither Russian nor Tajik, had never recruited an agent or even handled one. It was as bad as sending an analyst out to replace me. The one thing he apparently knew how to do was crimp a blasting cap, which would be helpful only if headquarters decided to relocate our Dushanbe office to Tavildara.
Even after all my years in the CIA, I was stunned. The CIA had no agents in the Russian military and apparently didn’t care, at least not enough to send someone to Tajikistan to recruit one. It also didn’t care that my replacement wouldn’t be able to talk to Grigor, who didn’t speak English. The CIA had apparently written off the Russian military, despite the fact that it still possessed missiles that could deliver a nuclear warhead to anywhere it wanted in the U.S.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. As the civil war in Afghanistan started to boil, I repeatedly asked for a speaker of Dari or Pashtun, the two predominant languages in Afghanistan, to debrief the flood of refugees coming across the border into Tajikistan. They were a gold mine of information. We could have even recruited some and sent them back across the border to report on Afghanistan. I was told there were no Dari or Pashtun speakers anywhere. I was also told the CIA no longer collected on Afghanistan, so those languages weren’t needed. Headquarters instead offered to send out a four-person sexual-harassment briefing team. Another black mark was put up against my name when I declined the offer.
I was beginning to seriously wonder what the CIA did care about these days when a cable landed on my desk, informing me that Clairborne Pell, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was coming out to Tajikistan and wanted to talk to me. Finally, I thought. Pell was a former Foreign Service officer and a veteran of the cold war. Surely he would want to hear what I had to say about the Russian army.
The week before his arrival, I organized my thoughts on a stack of three-by-five cards. I especially wanted to tell Pell what I’d learned about the Russian officers plotting against Yeltsin. How could he not be interested in the possibility of a coup? I secretly hoped he might go back and pound on headquarters until it sent a real case officer to Dushanbe to replace me, someone who could at least keep meeting Grigor.
It seemed less important than the Russians at the time—as it still might prove, since missiles will always be a better delivery system for mass destruction than jumbo passenger jets—but I also wanted to tell Senator Pell what I was learning about Islamic fundamentalism in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
I had resumed my Islamic studies when I got to Dushanbe. Almost every day I read the Koran and the other canons of Islam with a Muslim scholar. Apart from improving my Arabic and Persian, I wanted to see what the Islamic texts said about holy wars and suicide. There was no consensus. You could pretty much read what you wanted into them.
Along the way, I also had recruited a 
who was close to the Tajik Islamic chieftain Abdallah Nuri. Nuri operated out of Afghanistan, where he waged a relentless war against the Russians and their local allies. The connection was important: Russia and Tajikistan were begging the U.S. for help against Nuri. They were convinced the U.S. knew more than it was saying. Nuri received a lot of his funding from our closest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Independently, we tracked large clandestine subsidies and weapons shipments from the World Islamic League of Saudi Arabia, an organization protected by the Saudi royal family, going to Nuri. Since our offices in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seemed incapable of providing intelligence, the 
was almost all we had to go on.
Incidentally, Russia’s and Tajikistan’s concerns proved to be well founded. In July 1996 Nuri brokered an alliance between Osama bin Laden and Iranian intelligence. At least one meeting took place between bin Laden and an Iranian intelligence officer. Although we never found out what happened at the meeting, we knew bin Laden intended to propose to Iran a coordinated terrorism campaign against the U.S. Perhaps if I’d been replaced with a case officer who could talk to the 
, we might have found out if bin Laden’s proposal was ever acted on.
Again, and I can’t emphasize this often enough, there is no silver bullet that, all by itself, would have prevented the horror of September 11. But not meeting agents like the 
I recruited, or using him as an access agent to get to people who knew still more about bin Laden, ensured we wouldn’t. The fact was, bin Laden took advantage of a constellation of factors to forge his network, and any number of groups or sources might have told us what he was up to.
America is at war as I write, and the enemy’s recruits are like water. Arrest or kill hundreds of them, and hundreds of others will flow into their places. We can’t kill them all, but we can figure out what their plans and intentions are by talking with them. We can figure out the direction of their war by infiltrating people in the mosques who might tell us how bad things are and how many young men are devoted to taking their own lives. That’s what we didn’t have. That’s what we were forfeiting all over the CIA and the intelligence community generally, in the pursuit of goals I still can’t fully understand. And that’s what I wanted to say to this senator who had dared to come to the front lines in Tajikistan.
CLAIBORNE PELL’S air force C-20 put down in the early afternoon on March 31, 1994. I didn’t have a chance to speak with him until that evening, at a dinner at the presidential dacha. Pell was holding up remarkably well, especially for a man of his age who had been on a plane all night. After dinner Ambassador Escudero introduced us, and Pell and I walked the grounds and talked.
I started by telling him about the ground-forces commander’s aide trying to recruit me into his criminal enterprise. Pell didn’t say anything and just kept walking. Figuring I had him hooked, I moved on to what I had learned about the attack on the Duma in 1993 and how it had affected the military. I was building up a head of steam that would carry me into Islamic fundamentalism, the lack of a Tajik-speaking case officer to meet my cleric, and more.
“The ambassador told me about your trip to the Pamirs, to Soghdiana,” Pell interrupted. “Tell me about it.”
For the next twenty minutes I talked about what I’d seen in the Yaghnob valley. Pell was fascinated, and I never got back to Russia. It turns out I had been expected to deliver a travelogue instead of intelligence. Maybe, I remember thinking, it was time to rename the CIA the Central Itinerary Agency: “Out-of-the-world trips to out-of-the-world places.” Hell, they wouldn’t even have to change the monograms back in sunny Langley.
The cold war truly was over, I finally realized—dead and buried. I just hoped our capacity to spy hadn’t died completely with it.