Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

At this point Prince Kalash entered. I repeated to him what I had just told the Amir. The prince received my report with more animation than his father had done. He was curious about the origins of the photograph he had found. “Find out where it comes from,” he said; “that information is very important.” I explained that the photograph had likely been supplied by the Soviet intelligence people. Tracing the photographer was not only an impossible job, but a meaningless one. Prince Kalash did not accept this line of argument; he wanted to know who in Geneva had betrayed him. I told him I would pursue the matter.

It was apparent that the Amir would not again be anxious to risk Prince Kalash. I therefore presented to him an alternative plan. This involved his illegitimate son who is in a position of leadership in the ALF.

“Highness, may I speak to you of this man Qemal who claims to be your child?” I asked.

“He is my child,” the Amir said. “I remember his mother very well. She died young. The boy grew up here. I treated him as a son. One assumes that one’s sons will not become Communists.”

All this I knew. The Amir must be permitted to speak rhetorically.

“A son is a son,” I said. “The son of an Amir is always the son of an Amir. Not even Communists can change that. They can manipulate Qemal’s pride in his birth, but they cannot change that pride in its essentials. I know the boy. The fact that he is your son is the central fact of his life.”

“Of course it is,” said the Amir. “Get to the point, Aly.” If he called me by my name I knew the storm had passed. “Highness, I ask you to treat Qemal as a son. I can get a message to him. I should like to tell him that he is welcome in this household. Bring him here on your word. Once he is here, let me speak to him- not as the head of the Special Branch but as your nephew and as his cousin. Let me tell him that if he delivers his Communist comrades to us, you will forgive him this foolishness.”

“What good is that to him?” the Amir asked. “He wants more than my fatherly embrace. Look at what he’s done already. He wants power. He cannot help that, it’s in his blood. He has gone beyond forgiveness.”

“The forgiveness need not be genuine.”

The Amir’s eyes bored into the flesh of my face. “I do not,” he said, “betray my own son.”

“The alternative is the death of many innocent men. I have told you of their plan to assassinate the leading figures of the government. Do you owe these men nothing, Highness? They have their positions because you do not object to them. All are honourable men. Many are members of this family. With the greatest respect, Highness, to do nothing is to betray them. We do not know what names are on the killing list of the ALF. God knows who we might send to his death.”

The Amir closed his eyes and fell into one of his silences. This lasted for some time; it is uncanny how long he is able to remain still. As a child I believed that my uncle, when he closed his eyes and sat like a statue, was hearing the advice of the Prophet. Now, apparently, he was guided to a means of betraying Qemal without being himself obliged to play the traitor.

“You may send your message to Qemal,” he said, opening his eyes. “But he must deal with Prince Kalash, who can make whatever promises he likes; Prince Kalash has no power to keep promises now. When he sits here as Amir he will not be bound by anything Prince Kalash has guaranteed.”

Prince Kalash looked at me. He was as impassive as his father. I took my leave and began my preparations.

The information contained in the above memorandum did not come into our possession until 20 July, when Qasim returned to Khartoum. Qasim gave us no advance notice of his plan concerning Qemal-who was, of course, the agent we called “Firecracker.” It was therefore impossible to inform Qasim of Firecracker’s value to us, not to mention the considerable service he had already rendered to his country.

It is our impression that Qasim’s proposals to the Amir were in the nature of a spur-of-the-moment attempt to salvage his operation to destroy the ALF and to rescue his own credit with the Amir. This turn of events could not have been anticipated except through advance briefing of Qasim on Firecracker’s role and identity. This would have constituted a breach of security that at the time was considered unacceptable.

By last night I had regained control of myself. The killing unnerved me. As my own psychiatrist I know why only too well; the machine gun will never be my weapon. I see Mother’s face in every muzzle flash. How could I know those men would choose to attack us? Once they had done so, instinct took command. Some mystical force, occupying a place on the spectrum of emotion somewhere between rage and ecstasy, flooded into the cavity of my body. It is the primitive brain, not the mind, that controls men in all important matters. I did not consciously think of protecting Zofia, much less Ilona and the other males. One does not operate rationally at such moments. I ran into the darkness, meaning to kill, knowing that only murder would release me from the force that seized me. I had no thought for the lives of those men, no thought for the future, no thought for anything except the Sten gun that was dearer than any part of my own body.

I do not dramatize; if anything, I fail to find language gorgeous enough to describe what I felt and what I did. The death-giver is beyond language, beyond thought, he enters another region of experience. No wonder the Society of Assassins, the SS, the Cheka took on the character of religious brotherhoods. They knew secrets other men dared not seize. It was only afterward, looking at those ragged blood-stained bodies, that I realized what I had done, and what my act meant in terms of the future. The dead men, in themselves, still had no reality for me. Only the act of killing had meaning. I realized that I had loved killing them. The after-emotion was similar, I think, to that which must be felt by a man who acts out an obsessive sexual fantasy. He dreams for years, lurks about schoolyards, reads in the newspaper of more courageous maniacs. At last he rapes a child. Joy is what he feels in fact; horror and remorse is what he knows he must feel in theory. He instructs his mind to repel the memory of ecstasy. The mind obeys, but the primitive brain lies down for a little happy sleep: he knows it will awake again, overpower the mind, and insist on a repetition of the crime. He watches over its cot with tenderness.

Of course I knew who the victims were. Pathetic dolls manipulated by men like me. We plant the germ of an idea in them and send them out to die of their infection. Perhaps they were as happy when the bullets ripped into them as their ancestors would have been to receive the spear-blade that sent them to Allah. As they died in the moonlight did visions of Marx pass before them? Did an incantation by V. I. Lenin echo in their ears? The wretched will always find something they do not understand to die for. Death itself is their reward: Christ, Mohammed, and Beria must all have expired with a final little shiver of spiritual avarice, knowing that they had been the brokers of so much joy.

Tonight-life! Or Kalash’s vision of it. He has himself been rather glum, but for different reasons from mine. To be the object of murder is not, for Kalash, a religious mystery but an insult to his position at the apex of the human species. Apparently he and his father have worked out some suitable revenge, for today he was cheerful again. Late in the afternoon he had Paul and Nigel and me summoned to one of the gardens inside the walls of this astonishing palace. We found him sitting under a baobab tree whose branches provide a canopy above the little courtyard. A lion slept under a stone table a few feet away. (These beasts are household pets of the Khatar; slaves are specially trained to capture them as cubs and to acquaint them with human customs. They seem to be decorative rather than functional; I don’t believe they act as watchdogs, for example. Kalash in his blunt way had told Zofia and Ilona to be careful of them. “Girls who go near lions when they are menstruating often are killed. The beast smells blood and attacks. No amount of training can remedy this behavior. Otherwise they are quite harmless.” Kalash pays less attention to the lions than an Englishman to a dozing terrier. He is magnificent in his lack of sentimentality.)