DISINFORMED REDUX

JUST CALL ME DEWEY

Ah, but the CIA kept such outsized and colorful characters in their closets. Paul Henze was not only an extraordinary propagandist for his country, but a far-ranging thinker whose “green-belt strategy” came to play an important part in US foreign policy throughout the Middle East. Not the usual Agency hack, Henze was a significant figure who wound up by and bye on the National Security Council.

It must be said that a lot of important (and colorful) Agency figures found themselves assigned to Station Turkey during the tumultuous sixties and seventies. That may be coincidental, but most likely it was because the US considered Turkey to be such a vitally strategic country. The Agency seemed to stock the station with some of its most promising people.

I was aware that Duane “Dewey” Claridge had served as the CIA station chief in Ankara before Henze took over the job, so I bought Dewey’s book—A Spy for All Seasons—thinking he might have some interesting things to say. And, yes, he does. Reading Dewey’s book is like sitting beside him on the next barstool, wondering if there’s any place on earth he hasn’t been, any skill he hasn’t mastered, any lie he hasn’t told.

"Dewey" Claridge

And he does go on. There were early postings in Nepal, and later ones without portfolio, like the time that he mined the Nicaraguan harbors for Reagan’s White House. There’s even information on his early years in Turkey when he was stationed in Istanbul and had to put up with daily insults from leftist organizations.

The situation at that time was doubly galling because Turkish leftists were not usually nurtured by the KGB, but were stubbornly homegrown. They still are. Turkey, unlike the rest of the world that thinks communism is passe, has a thriving left wing even in the twenty-first century.

So what did Dewey have to say about his time as station chief in Ankara?

Nothing.

Not one single word.

It made you want to buy Dewey another round and get him cranked up again. Hey, Dewey, what about those years when the Gray Wolves were being trained and deployed to harass and destroy leftists where they found them? What was your role in that?

Dewey, what were the links between the CIA, MIT, and the Gray Wolves? I mean, how close were they really? As close as it seems?

But Dewey wouldn’t answer that question either, no matter how many drinks you bought him. He has been trained to silence on the subject of Turkey at that moment in time. It was as bad as it looked, and probably a lot worse, but not as bad as the enemy could be.

That was the thing the United States always hung its hat on in those days. We’re not as bad as the other side, and you know it.

We did know it. We were convinced that communism was not only godless but without a reference to anything godlike. They were the not only the enemy, but the anti-Christ.

And then Agca came along and showed us that some things were worse. There were killers without a conscience who had no creed but the way their names and images appeared in the newspapers, on the radio, and television and, God forbid, on the Internet that did not yet exist.