Walter Williams - Deep State

He looked up at her, eyes glittering in his pinched face.

“No way!” he said. “The north side of the island is run by the people we’re trying to subvert. I’m not going over there.”

“It’ll be very inconvenient,” Dagmar pointed out, “to have to send all Team C back and their gear through the checkpoints in Nicosia.”

Angry Man flushed. “It’ll be even more inconvenient if I’m picked up by the Turkish Cypriot police and tortured,” Byron said. He pointed down the corridor, toward Lincoln’s office.

“Ask Chatsworth,” he said. “I don’t have to go over the Green Line.”

“I’m not ordering you,” Dagmar said.

Byron folded his arms.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Orders or not, I’m not going. It’s in my contract.”

Dagmar paused and felt everyone in the ops room looking at her. She sensed that her authority was teetering on the brink of an undefined precipice.

She knew she wasn’t any good at being a tyrant. She owned a company, but she wasn’t an authoritarian boss-rather than imposing her will on her subordinates, she relied on shared enthusiasm to achieve results-and so she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Byron’s defiance, especially if he was right.

“Well,” she said lightly. “If it’s a contract, and you can’t be tortured over there, then we’ll have to find a way to torture you here.” She looked at him for a moment, long enough to see him shift uneasily in his chair, and then she nodded.

“Try and fix their problem again,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, try a third time.”

It took an afternoon, and eventually Magnus and Helmuth were both called in. It was Magnus who solved the crisis, by moving a certain jumper from its slave to its master setting. It was a nice piece of long-distance diagnosis, and Magnus seemed very pleased with himself for providing the answer.

So much, Dagmar thought, for Byron’s claim that Kilt Boy wasn’t able to think on his feet.

“Yes,” Lincoln said later, when Dagmar reported the problem and its solution. “It is in Byron’s contract-and Magnus’s, too-that they’re not to be deployed in the field. In fact, it’s Company policy not to use American citizens in situations where they might be in jeopardy.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “I didn’t know that.”

Lincoln swiveled his Aeron chair toward his safe. Keeping his body between Dagmar and the digital lock, he opened the safe door.

“You’re not cleared to view their contracts,” he said. “So that’s understandable.” He looked over his shoulder. “Plus you’ve seen all those spy movies, where sinister Agency masterminds put ordinary people in deadly situations over and over.”

“Is there anything else,” Dagmar asked, “that I need to know that’s in documents I’m not cleared for?”

Lincoln swung his chair toward his desk. “I’m sure there is,” he said cheerfully. “That’s how our business works.”

“Terrific.”

Lincoln opened the safe, then took the day’s papers and portable memory and locked them away. Dagmar heard bolts chunking home. An LED on the door turned from green to red. Lincoln straightened and looked at her.

“Buy you dinner?” he offered.

“Sure,” Dagmar said. “Why not?”

It wasn’t like she had a more exciting evening planned.

Dinner was takeout from an Indian place just outside Akrotiri’s gates. Lincoln found a parking place overlooking the Mediterranean, and the two balanced paper containers of vindaloo and steaming-hot samosas on lichen-scarred boulders while white surf boomed against the ruddy, broken cliff beneath their feet.

Dagmar slurped her mango lassi.

“When I met him that time,” she said, “Bozbeyli said that the army generals who led previous coups all returned to the barracks.”

Lincoln tilted his hat to the west, the better to intercept the sun, and nodded.

“They did,” he said.

“So why are we doing this, then?” she said. “Why aren’t we waiting for the junta to just go home?”

“Bozbeyli’s different,” Lincoln said. “The previous military governments were composed of genuine patriots who believed they were acting in the country’s best interests. You didn’t see them behaving like military rulers elsewhere-after their retirement, they weren’t living in palaces, they weren’t hanging out with movie stars, and they didn’t have big Swiss bank accounts.”

“But Bozbeyli’s in it for the money.”

Lincoln cut a samosa with his plastic knife and fork, then thoughtfully chewed a piece. Dagmar caught a whiff of cumin on the wind.

“When Ataturk first created the country,” he said, “he called it the Republic of Turks and Kurds. But over time the Kurds got sort of left out, and the government decided as more or less official policy that everyone in Turkey was a Turk by definition. The Kurds, according to this scheme, were just Turks who hadn’t quite learned to be Turks yet, and so they had to be made to be proper Turks, and they were to be educated in Turkish and forbidden to speak their own language.” He waved his plastic fork. “Just as all Turkish Muslims were, by definition, Sunni Muslims-which left out a very large minority of Alevi Muslims… Christians and Jews can have churches and synagogues, but the Alevis can’t have mosques and have to meet in private homes, because all Muslims are officially Sunni, and so are all the mosques.”

He looked up suddenly. “Are you following this?” he asked.

“What are Alevis?” Dagmar asked.

Lincoln flapped a hand. “Too complicated.”

Dagmar reflected that this was not unlike everything else in Turkey.

“Okay,” she said.

“I was talking about the Kurds, anyway,” Lincoln said. “So-given that the Turks were trying to extinguish their language and culture-a lot of them were less than pleased with the situation, and back in the nineties there was a genuinely dangerous Kurdish insurgency led by a party called the PKK. Which was mainly financed by Syria but also in part by Kurdish heroin dealers who were importing Afghan and Iranian narcotics along the traditional drug highway to the West. The Turkish authorities didn’t see why the heroin money should go to the insurrection, so they sent right-wing gangsters and the Gray Wolves and government assassins to kill the heroin dealers and take over their networks-and they largely succeeded. And then the heroin money started percolating up into the system, and before long the war was just too profitable to allow it to end, even after the insurgency had been crushed through the usual deportations, killings, and random acts of terror.

“After which”-waving a bit of tikka masala on his plastic fork-“there was the Susurluk incident, where a Mercedes truck squashed an auto that held a police chief, a wanted heroin dealer and assassin, and a Kurdish member of parliament, along with the gangster’s mistress, drugs, and a hell of a lot of firearms. And the heroin dealer was carrying ID issued by the minister of the interior, which showed that both sides of the insurrection were hip deep in collusion. After that it was clear that the war was just being continued for all the drug money, and the Deep State was exposed and faded away, along with the war. For a while.”

But the money, Lincoln continued, was still there. And the heroin was still there. And it became impossible for either the PKK or the authorities to resist all that, and so the war picked up again, and this time the death squads were killing moderate Kurds, anyone who suggested compromise was possible… the elected moderate Islamic government kept trying to make peace on terms that were unacceptable to the military, such as admitting that Kurds are Kurds and not Turks… and then the government started making remarkably clumsy efforts to assert its control of the military, by promoting Islamists to field command. And the result was a series of bombings and assassinations that served as the provocation for Bozbeyli and his clique to take command and restore order, essentially by canceling the chaos they themselves had provoked…