Declare

Theodora will give you the details of your final assignment, after the rest of us leave here. Suffice to say right now that Moscow is the entity behind Nasser’s recent, ostensibly Egyptian, imperialism in the Middle East—three months ago his Yemeni rebels seized our main gulf fueling station at Aden, and in Cairo Nasser’s men are obediently painting Turkish insignia over the Soviet markings on Tupelov TU-16 aircraft, and Russian pilots are flying them to Ankara. We’ve even traced the distinctive radar echo of the eight-blade propellers on the big Tupelov TU-95 Bear bombers over Kurdistan, but that’s stopped in the last month—probably just because they’ve developed non-metallic composite propellers. The Arab countries are mostly using the Swiss Hagelin cipher machines, and even a lot of the old wartime German Enigma machines; we can break their traffic, but everything they imagine they know is soapy Soviet front-story—the Soviets themselves are using the new Albatross-class cipher machine, and just in the last ten days the Soviet residencies have all switched to new call signs and cipher keys.”
    Hale nodded. This looked like the prelude to a big Communist takeover in the Arab states; bad enough, certainly, but where precisely did Declare come in? Why had White consulted the Pope?
    “This government won’t be able to weather it,” growled Macmillan, leaning on the chair across from Hale. “The wage-freezes in ’61 hurt us politically, and it looks too likely that de Gaulle will veto Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community within the month, because we’ve agreed to take American nuclear missiles on our submarines; but since the Suez Canal fiasco the Americans won’t support us very far. And if our Conservative government falls, and the Liberals do step into power in Whitehall, the Soviets will have no substantial difficulty in taking what they’ve wanted to get ever since the Versailles Treaty—the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and thus free passage of shipping from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean—and all the most oil-rich countries in the world!—in fact, the Ottoman Empire, all of Moslem Asia as it existed before the First World War.” He stared at Dick White, and then, alarmingly, straight at Hale. “I wasn’t in the government in 1948, when this unsanctioned Declare operation was somehow… exercised, in eastern Turkey; I’ve simply inherited it. You commanded it, I think.”
    And saw the five men in my charge driven mad or killed, thought Hale; along with some number of Russians. “That 1948 operation, yes.” Not for the first time, he wondered what had become of the two members of his party whom he had briefly seen on the road down out of the Ahora Gorge, on that night. Beds in British military mental asylums? Begging bowls, or unmarked graves, in the Kurdish villages around Lake Van?
    “Britain needs you to end the damned misbegotten thing now,” said Macmillan, with a sweeping gesture that took in all three of his listeners. “Silently and invisibly, and taking your Soviet opposite numbers and their filthy agenda with you.”
    “We do have a sort of agent-in-place,” said Theodora, “closely involved in this Soviet enterprise. A somewhat shaky agent, but…” He looked around at Macmillan and the other two. “Quis?”
    Macmillan just scowled.
    “Ego,” said the red-haired man. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at Hale. “I was Head of Station in Turkey in ’51—summers in the old consulate building in Constantinople, but winters up in Ankara. Kim Philby had been gone for three years, but his old jeep was still in the Ankara embassy motor pool, and there was still a yard-long length of rope tied to a hook on the dashboard; everybody said Philby put it there so his drunk Foreign Office chum Burgess could hang on, when the two of them went surveying in the mountains out beyond Erzurum. Being mere SIS , of course, we didn’t know about Declare.”
    He had paused, so Hale shifted in his chair. “I remember the rope,” he said cautiously. He was disoriented by the incongruous public school Quis? and Ego exchange, which roughly meant Who wants this? and I’ll take it. A cigarette would have been a godsend, but there were no ashtrays in sight.
    Theodora raised a lean finger. “And several of us don’t want to hear about it,” he said.
    The red-haired man nodded, conceding the point. “I’m told,” he went on, still speaking to Hale, “that