.: THE LAST IN THE SERIES

.: THE LAST IN THE SERIES: A NOTE FROM OUR SPONSOR If any of us have to ask who “our boys” were, we'll never be invited to the party at that restaura...

THE LAST IN THE SERIES

A NOTE FROM OUR SPONSOR

If any of us have to ask who “our boys” were, we'll never be invited to the party at that restaurant-bar in Tyson's Corner. In retrospect, the wishes of the American establishment and the Turkish establishment dovetailed neatly and completely. We wanted the coup. The Turkish general officers wanted it. They had prepared for it. No one who knows the country, or its military, or their relationship with the CIA during the seventies, thinks they were waiting passively for events to ripen.­

If they stepped aside in the run-up to the coup, it was only to foment chaos on a grander scale with less visible origins. It was like the assassination of Abdi Ipekci that was never really solved. Like the rogue bands of Gray Wolves they allowed to run rampant all over the subcontinent of Turkey and later over the continent of Europe. And like a lot of other bad things for which they could never be held responsible.

Recently, however, in the spring of 2012, a trial was opened in Istanbul that brought serious charges against the leaders of the coup of 1980. Although the charges were specific, the purpose is to have them answer for their sins. These were many, including the torture and murder of thousands of Turkish citizens.

Before the dragnets that followed the coup were done with their work, more than half a million people, most of them leftists, were arrested. Wages were frozen, unions were suppressed, journalists were imprisoned, and academia purged.

The left wing in Turkey virtually ceased to exist as a result of these “reforms.” The right wing, though also subject to arrest and punishment, did not experience anything like the blanket that covered and finally smothered the left. Some fascists were put in jail, two Gray Wolves were hanged, but the devastation was so one-sided that it did not compare.

The families of the victims, disproportionately left-wing students and militant organizers, are happy that the government has owned up to its duty even at this late date. But they do not—with good reason—see the current Islamic government as a friend to freedom, and especially not to left-wing freedoms.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s regime is simply a different extension of the clandestine authoritarianism that has ruled Turkish life from the “deep” for decades. What the families of the lost hope for from the trial is some closure, so the healing process can at long last begin.

They probably won’t have more than that. General Evren is ninety-four years old and pleading ill health. Only time, and the Turkish judicial system, which is badly flawed, will tell whether justice has been served. For all the ones who didn’t make it, we can only say rest in peace.

And now for a note from our sponsor.

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.: OUR BOYS DID IT!True to form, the circumspect o...

.: OUR BOYS DID IT! True to form, the circumspect o...: OUR BOYS DID IT! True to form, the circumspect officers who met at the Selimiye Barracks did not act on the things they ...  If you have to ask who Our Boys are, you missed it!

OUR BOYS DID IT!

True to form, the circumspect officers who met at the Selimiye Barracks did not act on the things they had discussed for quite a while--another year and more. The official line, stated after the coup had taken place, was that the army waited patiently to see if the civilian government could sort out the troubles by itself.

The implication was that the military would have preferred a rational civilian settlement for the problems that bedeviled the country, but could not wait forever. The commander of the coup, General Evren, was a bit more blunt when he said, “I wanted to wait until the knife hit the bone.”

The real problem—the hidden problem—was that the military had done a great deal to encourage the chaos that existed in Turkey at that time. Right-wing elements did their best to prepare the conditions that would cause the army to step in. They were quite forthright about it, telling anyone who would listen that was their goal.

On a more subterranean level—the decision level--those connections were never to be known by anyone who had to ask. MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, was at that time close to the Turkish military, and closer still to those ominous and arrogant Counter-Guerillas who had tortured Ugur Mumcu. General Evren, in fact, had been head of the Counter Guerillas before he assumed his newer position as the head of the coup.

General Evren

The Counter-Guerillas had been involved in so many violent episodes throughout the seventies that they could hardly be distinguished from a pack of Gray Wolves. Unlike MIT, they did not seem to be very much involved with the heroin trade, but that was because they were so busy in other areas.

It’s clear in retrospect that the Counter-Guerillas were among those responsible for killing and wounding hundreds of leftists during the May Day Parade in 1978. They used snipers for that clandestine exercise, shooting from rooftops and hotel rooms, but no methods were barred to them. They knew that there was no chance the police, who knew where their orders came from, would intervene to stop the slaughter.

At the very least, what happened in the seventies throughout the country marked the beginning of an incestuous gathering of patriots and thugs that has come to be known by the fearsome, anonymous name of the Deep State. Trying to sort the conflicting lines of mayhem, especially who told whom to do what, has been since that time almost impossible to determine. Even things like who told whom to kill are lost in that very deniable chain-of-command.

The only thing anyone can be sure of is that authoritarian elements in the military and the government decided to take charge of the direction of the country to save it from itself. And they reserved the right to keep saving it whenever necessary.

Paul Henze, for one, was ecstatic when he heard the news of the successful coup. At that time CIA Station Chief in Ankara, he sent a cable (remember those?) to Washington saying “Our boys did it!”

.: BARRACKS BOYS

.: BARRACKS BOYS: THEY BROUGHT THEIR WIVES There’s only one piece missing from the puzzle now. Was there a purpose behind all this ot...

BARRACKS BOYS

THEY BROUGHT THEIR WIVES

There’s only one piece missing from the puzzle now.

Was there a purpose behind all this other than disinformation? The CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies might have been waiting to jump on the assassination bandwagon for a while, but they weren’t responsible for the attempt on the pope’s life. At least not that anyone could discover. They were simply capitalizing on the blood of the lamb.

So if the CIA didn’t do it, or the KGB, or even the Bulgarian CSS, what motivated the attempted assassination of the pope? Or the successful assassination of Abdi Ipekci?

The first thing to realize is that there was a bigger picture in Turkey, too. In fact, it’s so big that the smaller pieces—or clues—don’t seem in retrospect to be relevant.

It’s been said, for instance, that the killing of Abdi Ipekci was done at the behest of the heroin trader Ugurlu, who knew that the editor was looking into his smuggling networks.

That’s a reason to kill.

It’s also been said that the Gray Wolves were offended by any voice of public moderation and meant to silence the one who was most respected in the land.

That’s a reason, too, though more abstract.

Other reasons have been put forward, such as the ease of killing a prominent but unprotected man like Ipekci. That was Agca’s explanation—or one of them. He said that he had chosen Ipekci from a list of targets because the man had no security. He looked up Ipekci’s name in a phone directory, staked out the street on which he lived, and the rest was straightforward.

This is one case where the reader might be tempted to believe a lunatic liar like Agca. He probably would be advised to do so if something else was not at work in the background. Something much bigger. Control of the entire country, let’s say.

The coup that occurred in September 12, 1980, in Turkey was carried out with a purpose and efficiency that no other replacements of the civilian government had done in the Turkish past. It happened quietly and was nearly bloodless in the beginning. The planning seemed perfect.

That was because the basic elements of the coup began early. In December 1978, a couple of months before Ipekci was assassinated, a group of senior army officers met at the barracks in Asian Istanbul, bringing their wives along to provide window dressing and disguise the purpose of the meeting. They wanted the deepest secrecy because the subject of their discussion was the subversion of the government.

The Turkish military don’t usually categorize their coups in such stark terms. They like to see themselves as the arbiters of last resort. Saviors, in other words, if not in truth. These are men who step into the breach when the civilians have proven their incompetence once more. Whether the act of stepping in conditions the electorate to expect, and often welcome, their intervention is something that should not be discussed outside the barracks.

And they have always, to date, returned the reins of government back to the civilians in the end, which is a rare feat in the worldwide history of military coups. That's the one salient fact that gives the Turkish military a head feint at credibility, and it must be said that it's an important distinction. In most Middle Eastern countries, the military that takes over the government is the government for life.

The Turkish military also seemed to realize that the military who took the reins of government was the one that held the nastiest end of the stick. A lot of money could be made under the table, of course, but there was far too much aggravation for the dollar.

And no honor at all.

.: MADNESS, OR DISINFORMATION AND THE INSANE

.: MADNESS, OR DISINFORMATION AND THE INSANE: THE MERRY-GO-ROUND Ronald Reagan had his Evil Empire speech prepared long before he became president. When he appointed Wi...
More from the archives of dysfunction.

MADNESS, OR DISINFORMATION AND THE INSANE

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

Ronald Reagan had his Evil Empire speech prepared long before he became president. When he appointed William Casey as head of his CIA, he showed the world that he was serious about fighting the Soviet Empire on its own terms—propaganda.

Much of the reason for the huge gaps in the record of the assassination of John Paul II can be traced to the appointment of Casey as Propagandist-in-Chief. That was his job. The US had been getting its ears beaten in for years by sticking to the truth in roundabout ways. Casey meant to scourge the Russians with their own weapons—deception, disinformation and blitzkrieg dissemination.

William Casey

The 3Ds became a potent weapon under Casey’s hand, but none more so than the circumstances surrounding the Plot to Kill the Pope. He made the offensive against the truth—which was also an offensive against the Russians—one of the priorities of his agency. The CIA was to make war on the Soviets and was not to let things like facts stand in its way.

No one was in a position to question the facts anyway. When Claire and Paul went out on their media rounds, their arguments were not seriously questioned by anyone. Who could possibly question them? The only real sources for information on terrorism were the CIA and agencies like them. Since they supplied the information, they could hardly be contradicted. Besides, no one in the media wanted to contradict them.

Where does a writer or researcher get information on the secret workings of terrorists except from the people who make it their business to investigate the secret workings of terrorists? Anyone who cried conflict of interest didn’t understand the principle of the merry-go-round. Or any other kind of circle.

In the end that’s all there was. Casey was so taken with Claire’s book that he recommended it be read by all the people in his CIA.

Think of that. The research had been fed to Claire by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, so the folks at Langley were being told to read a book whose facts they had largely provided. This was an echo chamber for sure. And that’s precisely what happens when the truth is deliberately buried.

It becomes madness.

But some people within the agency knew better. Melvin Goodman, a CIA official who testified before Congress, said that the analysts at the agency considered Sterling’s claims fiction. The CIA enjoyed a window into the workings of the Bulgarian secret police due to penetrations of that agency, he said. They were sure nothing like that had happened.

Goodman also said that analysts at the CIA had been pressured into slanting their reports in the direction that higher-ups wanted them to go, which was toward the Bulgarian-KGB complex. The CIA, believe it or not, "had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot."

Never mind. Events conspired to promote Casey’s thesis. The Solidarity movement had begun in Poland in the summer of 1980. With a Polish pope already in place, that provided a tremendous opportunity to exploit the weaknesses in the monolithic communists bloc. John Paul II did his best to cooperate, funneling money to the movement and providing himself as a beacon of hope. The attempt on his life in May of 1981 was such a logical event—an answer by the Soviets to his interference—that it simply could not be anything else.

That’s what almost everyone thought and certainly what they wanted to think. The Bulgarian line was enthusiastically taken up by various Catholic presses and parroted all over the world until it became a virtual chorus of righteousness. The same was true of the irreligious publications of the liberal and illiberal West.

No one even cared if it was wrong.

.: BULGARIA

.: BULGARIA: THE ROAD SHOW All this does not mean that the CIA had a hand in the murder of Mumcu. He was so persistent in his research, so cour...
This is the real Bulgarian Connection

BULGARIA

THE ROAD SHOW

All this does not mean that the CIA had a hand in the murder of Mumcu. He was so persistent in his research, so courageous in taking on targets that were reactionary and violent, and so heedless of his safety, that the suspect list goes on for pages.

The Turkish police were of no use in bringing the killer to justice. They seldom are when the victim opposes the establishment. Considering that MIT, Turkey’s intelligence agency, could have been the killers who did the deed, the chances of an arrest were slim.

Or none.

The killings of Ugur Mumcu and Abdi Ipekci, as well as others of their profession, were part of an accelerating trend that has made Turkey the second most dangerous place for newsmen in the world. Colombia is first. It’s not much of a coincidence that both countries have thriving drug trades that sometimes dwarf their legitimate businesses.

When illegal drug networks become so big that a significant portion of a nation’s economy depends on them, the lives of the men and women who guard the gates to the Fourth Estate are easily forfeit. Too many people competing for too small a pie spells trouble for free speech. For critical reporters, it can spell doom.

Much the same was true of Turkey’s neighbor, Bulgaria, during the late seventies. Freedom of the press was not a problem there, since it did not exist, but the Turkish drug gangs who made Sofia their home lived lavishly in the best hotels, passing out bribes to government officials who begged for them.

We could ask ourselves, if we were obtuse, what kind of communist would accept bribes from the most lowdown capitalists anyone had ever seen in that country? But that question is too stupid for words. It doesn’t take a capitalist to want more gold in his pocket. Anyone who thinks so should audition for the next round of the Paul and Claire Road Show. (And there will be one.)

The truth is that Turkish drug smugglers did what they wanted in Bulgaria. Communist officials waited their turn at the hog trough. They did not give orders to men who could buy and sell them like rolls of toilet paper. Supplicants on bended knee are in the wrong position to do anything but wipe their asses.

Nor should it be a surprise to discover that Turkish drug smugglers are fascists at heart. Ugurlu and Celenk and the others kept close ties back to the homeland and kept the right palms greased. Those palms almost always belonged to the facilitators of the heroin trade, who worked hand in hand with MIT and the Gray Wolves.

To think that a completely mercenary drug connection offers proof of communist intervention in the attempted assassination of the pope is well beyond credibility, but it’s the version of events that’s widely believed by the right wing of this universe, and even the general public. In most cases no one even questions it. The books, including but not restricted to Sterling and Henze, are still out there, and the Internet—that worldwide cathedral of gossip and bad information—still brings up an avalanche of references to what should never have been given the slightest credit.

If we want to know what really went down in Sofia the fall of 1980, we might look at the friends of Agca who joined him there when they fled from Turkey. There were any number of them, but in the important ways they were all the same.

They were men like Abdullah Catli (Chat–luh), a Gray Wolf and handsome young killer who had already been responsible for wiping out eight student leftists in Ankara in a single night. He was a friend of Agca’s from early on, helping him in every way he could. Catli would go on from Bulgaria to a career in the heroin trade across Europe that did not end until he was thrown in prison in France and then Switzerland.

Abdullah Catli

After escaping from prison in a semi-miraculous fashion, Catli made his way back to Turkey in the nineties to help rationalize the casino business by murder and the Kurdish Rebellion by torture and murder. He was never interrupted in his activities until the car he was traveling in smashed to pieces under a trailer truck one night.

The fact that Catli was a wanted criminal at the time meant nothing to his traveling companions. One was a former beauty queen and a purported female assassin, another was one of the highest police officials in the country, and the last a Kurdish member of parliament. The upshot of that random accident, however, became the greatest scandal in modern Turkish history.

The Susurluk Crash

They're still sorting that fantastic mess out, but we shouldn't be surprised to hear that the list of Agca's associates coming to call in Sofia goes on for some length. Oral Celik, who was said by one witness to have participated in Ipekci’s assassination, came to Sofia, too. He was primed for new adventures in—guess what?—the heroin trade. Like Catli, he worked all over the continent until he wound up, like Catli, in prison for running that drug. He too executed a miraculous escape from prison and returned home to become something of a hero for doing one of the worst things on earth.

Other Gray Wolves made the same journey to the same places doing the same things, like Mehmet Sener and Yalcin Ozbey. These men had been together for some time on and off. Sener had taken receipt of the gun that Agca killed Ipekci with, and Ozbey had been Agca’s roommate and paymaster for the Ipekci assassination. He was apparently responsible, along with Catli, for springing Agca from Maltepe Prison. After the escape, Agca spent two weeks hanging out at Catli’s apartment when he should have been trying to assassinate the pope in Istanbul, as he had promised in writing.

Agca’s connections to his associates did not lapse until he was put into deep jail following his attempt on the life of the pope. His friends hardly missed a beat in picking up their lives in exile. After leaving Bulgaria, Catli had lived in Vienna and traveled extensively in Europe, using the connections of the radical right to help him with food, living quarters, and many etceteras.

Agca had used the same network for the same reasons, particularly when he needed a clean weapon for the assassination. About a month before he shot John Paul II, Agca sojourned to Western Austria to meet Catli and Celik. Celik was an old friend who had been born in the same village as Agca, moved to the city of Malatya at about the same time as Agca, and had come to Istanbul to find his fortune at the same time, too.

Oral Celik

The good news for Agca was that Catli and Celik had managed to score four factory-fresh Browning Hi-Powers from an ex-Naz in Austria. Agca took only one of the pistols with him, probably thinking that if he needed more than fourteen rounds plus a spare clip of fourteen he was doomed anyway.

He ran the weapon across the border to Switzerland, where he stashed it (and the extra clip and three boxes of ammunition), with Omer Bagci, the leader of the Gray Wolves in Olten, Switzerland.

These connections were always valuable to Agca and his friends. Turks who had emigrated to Europe were often lonely souls who were more committed to the motherland in exile than they had ever been when they were at her bosom. Prime Gray Wolf recruits could be found nearly everywhere on the continent where emigre Turks were found. When these men were called on for help, they usually came through.

So we can see how the network of radical right supporters assisted Catli and Agca and the rest of the team. They kept on assisting him until the moment he shot the pope.

Correction: They assisted him up until the moment he was caught.

But even after Agca was apprehended, he was given support. Catli was called by the Italian authorities to testify about what he knew concerning the assassination and related circumstances. The things he said in court, particularly the ones that told about the links between his homeland and the Bulgarian drug trade, should have put Claire and Paul and their theories in the shade forever.

But that didn’t happen either. The Western press, many of whom were present when Catli testified in Rome, steadfastly ignored almost all the things he said.

Most of their commentaries sounded vaguely offended by these bursts of truth. Where were the commies in all this? The Russians? The KGB? The Etceteras? If you believed this raving Turk, no leftists had any real part in the Plot to Kill the Pope.

How could that be?

Well, it couldn’t be if all you believed were the lies you had been fed by the CIA and the Road Show it had put in motion.

.: INFORMED, FINALLY

.: INFORMED, FINALLY: THE MAN WHO DUG UP THE GOOD STUFF The curious thing about a lot of the research that was unearthed concerning the assa...  This episode ends explosively.

INFORMED, FINALLY

THE MAN WHO DUG UP THE GOOD STUFF

The curious thing about a lot of the research that was unearthed concerning the assassination of John Paul II is that much of it—in Istanbul and Europe—was done by a Turkish reporter.

Not Henze. Not Sterling.

And certainly not Dewey.

A Turk.

Ugur Mumcu (Mum–ju) worked for Cumhurriyet, an intellectual center-left newspaper. He was a university-trained researcher with a bloodhound’s nose and a natural suspicion of authority. That made him a great investigative reporter. Mumcu was the man who traced the links between Turkey and the Bulgarian connection to which Agca had run and that sustained him while he ran on his long trip to St. Peter's Square. It was a small tragedy that the facts and links that Mumcu turned up were turned on their head for propaganda purposes.

Mumcu’s thesis was that Agca went to Bulgaria to seek help from the Mafia who made Sofia their headquarters for their underground assault on Europe. They were smugglers, most of them, men like Abuzer Ugurlu (Oo–ur–lu) and Bekir Celenk (Che–lenk). Those two dealt mostly in cigarettes and heroin, with no preference in either as a moneymaking commodity. Whatever sold, sold.

Mumcu published his findings in Cumhurriyet and in a book called Papa, Mafya, Agca. In all his writings, he insisted that not only Agca but the lords of the Turkish drug trade were linked to right wing thugs and the military in Turkey. These, in turn, could be linked to the Italian Mafia and fascist organizations in Italy. The links, he said, were clear.

Henze and Sterling did not agree. They showed up at Mumcu’s house one day and tried to talk him around to their point of view. His facts were OK, sure. In fact they were better than OK. They were impeccable, and in many cases they were the only ones that anyone had ever found. But Mumcu didn’t have the proper twist to the facts. The direction was wrong. Left was not the way to go, they said, and Mumcu was going way too far to the left.

Thereafter, as Sterling and Henze continued to filch Mumcu's research—as they spread it over the known world—they always took pains to condemn him and his interpretations as “leftist.” From the vantage point of today, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that what they really meant was “sensible.”

In any case, Mumcu held out that day, refusing to conform to their warped view of the world. He said that he would follow the information wherever it led, regardless of the direction. That seems like a sensible response, but it may be worth noting that before leaving Mumcu’s house Henze told him, “If you do that, you might find a nice surprise in store.”

At least that’s what Mumcu’s wife said that Henze said. But even she knew her husband was prejudiced when it came to the CIA. In the early 1970s, during one of Turkey’s periodic military coups, Mumcu had been arrested and tortured. His torturers said they were not worried about what he thought or said. “We are the Counter-Guerillas. Even the President of the Republic cannot touch us.”

By this time it should not be surprising to learn that the Counter-Guerillas were funded by the CIA. Although the Counter-Guerillas were a branch of the Turkish military-intelligence complex, they were paid for many years by the main intelligence branch of the US government. The Counter-Guerillas were part of an overall NATO program that called for underground groups to be formed in every member country in the event of a successful left-wing bid to take over that country.

It was all in a good cause, certainly, but woe to anyone who got in its way. It happened that in Turkey the Counter-Guerillas reached for allies where they could find them. They thought--not so strangely--that the best place to find allies was among the various right-wing groups. And the most right wing of all the groups were the stone-crazies of the Gray Wolves.

Henze knew that. He also knew that friends of his had done their best to get the Wolves off to a good start with weapons, training and tactics. The CIA did not control the Wolves, however. Who could? Who, after all, would even want to?

But Henze was determined not to point to those equivocal items. It was important for his country not to be linked to death squads that had gotten so far out of hand that they subverted their original purpose and ending up biting the hand that fed them.

The Gray Wolves had absolutely no respect for that hand. They hated Americans and Russians equally, as well as every other foreign group or nationality. They cared for Turkey to the exclusion of everything else and would do anything to make that exaltation come true.

These days, this entire complex might constitute what is called “blowback” in Langley-speak. But it was a nightmarish sort of blowback—the original archetypal huffing and puffing until the house came down.

So the connection had to be severed not only in reality, but in the mind of Western Civilization. That included the talk shows but did not include Soviet Russia.

The Paul and Claire Team hit the television circuit as hard as it’s ever been hit. They wrote the articles and the books, and they talked and talked even as they talked and walked. Every single fact they cited pointed to the even simpler fact that a right-wing killer had performed two very high-profile assassinations, one successful, the other nearly so, but if those two kept talking and shunting the media toward the Bulgarians and the KGB--as they were pretty sure they could--then everything would eventually fall into place.

And black would indeed be made white.

Color didn’t matter when your cause was just.

Henze’s book—The Plot to Kill the Pope—got rave reviews in every media, praised for its research and the soundness of its argument. Henze was praised by the head of his agency and feted by men who could not question his facts, since they were Mumcu’s; and could not question his conclusions, since they were what everyone wanted to hear. Henze was the supreme anti-communist of the moment and a propagandist par excellence.

Ugur Mumcu did not fare as well. Several years later he kissed his wife and children goodbye one morning in January, walked to his car, got in, and turned on the ignition. When the electrical current passed to the detonator that was attached to the plastic explosive that was attached to his Renault, he was blown to pieces.

.: DISINFORMED REDUX

.: 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 extraor...  The Anti-Christ identified.

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.

.: DISINFORMED AGAIN

.: DISINFORMED AGAIN: A LETTER TO THE EDITOR So Agca was gone, heading out on the long road to Rome via most countries in Europe. Before he absconded,...

DISINFORMED AGAIN

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

So Agca was gone, heading out on the long road to Rome via most countries in Europe. Before he absconded, he left one clue to his future wanderings. He sent a letter to Milliyet, Ipekci’s old paper, warning that he planned another assassination.

This time he said he would kill Pope John Paul II, who was scheduled to visit Turkey within the week. His purpose was to meet and reconcile with , the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church at his headquarters in Istanbul. Ankara and Ephesus were also on the pontiff’s itinerary.

The major works of nonfiction (which in this case are largely works of fiction) that deal with the attempted assassination of John Paul II glide over this point very gingerly. They don’t like to make too much of the fact that Agca had fixated on the pope long before he reached Bulgaria through the impenetrable curtain of communism.

John Paul II

If these conspiracy theorists had to face reality, then their theories of Bulgarian-Russian involvement suffered a body blow. Almost fatal, but not quite. If Agca wanted with all his heart to kill John Paul II before he had a single sit-down with the KGB, then all their carefully gathered sheaves of propaganda tended to fall loose in their hands.

Not that it bothered them. They were simply in a hurry to put the truth behind them before moving on to more interesting, and grand, theories of state-sponsored terrorism. And the state most responsible, of course, was our archenemy, the Soviet Union.

The two main disseminators of the commies-did-it theory were Claire Sterling and Paul Henze. Both were hired by Reader's Digest to write about the assassination, and both turned their articles into book-length books that could turned into film in an assassin’s minute.

They hit the talk shows like a tag-team who could bail each other out whenever the bullshit rose to dangerous levels around their ears. Their warped versions of the truth were disseminated by so many public means, and so many hidden means including the vast informal network of ex-intelligence officers, that no other versions were ever considered by the mainstream media. Henze and Sterling were so close that Sterling’s Reader's Digest article in 1982 was called “The Plot to Kill the Pope.” Henze, without blinking, called his 1983 study in deep background on the assassination The Plot to Kill the Pope.

Those two were sympatico in every way. Sterling had been plugged into the world of terror networks by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies like a 110-watt bulb into a 220-volt socket. Henze was a virtual polymath of terror, having been the CIA station chief in Ankara when some of the worst depredations of the seventies were taking place. Henze had known Ipekci and even visited him a couple of weeks before his death. Who was better qualified to speak of the subject of Turkey and terrorism than the man who knew them first hand?

Paul (The Man) Henze

And who was more to be believed than the man who had made anti-communist propaganda his life’s work?

We might want to rephrase that. A better question should be: What hand did Henze have in furthering right-wing terror networks in Turkey? There’s a lot of suggestive evidence that he might have been in it up to his curly beard.

But the best question for the contemporary audience should undoubtedly be this: Were Paul and Claire sleeping together?

We’ll let that one go for the next time.

THE SATAN MACHINE

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS??

Who planned these assassinations is the question that dominates discussion of the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II, and the earlier successful assassination of Abdi Ipekci.

Agca isn’t saying.

Actually, he was saying, if anyone bothered to listen. They just had to read between the lines.

The public didn’t do a good job of that, the press was even worse, and the book-length writers who took on the complex afterward were the next thing to wretched.

They kept ignoring facts and inventing their own. The educated people of Turkey, which sometimes includes the press, have a visceral dislike of the lower-class Islamic majority. They will not stand to have their very secular military criticized in any meaningful way.

The military is their guardian when chaos in the form of political Islam periodically threatens to invade their lives. The military has initiated coups against civilian governments on a clockwork basis. It’s a hell of a way to tell time, and a true bargain with the devil. And it’s what sets THE SATAN MACHINE in motion.

The important thing to know is that when Ipekci was assassinated, and when Agca was caught, and while he was tried for murder, Istanbul had been placed under martial law for some time. The military ruled Istanbul and twelve other provinces in the country, though they usually deferred to civilians for the day-to-day.

Who wanted to be bothered with the day-to-day? The military handled matters of real importance, like the trial of Agca.

A lot of things became clear, or should have been, when one day Agca stood up in court and said that he wished to recant his testimony. He did not kill Ipekci, he said. But—and this was a very large but—he was prepared to reveal who had done it. He would do this tomorrow at the trial.

Agca while in police custody but before his trial

Not today. Tomorrow.

That was enough time for everyone to get their ducks in a row. By the time the trial opened the next day, it had been decided that Agca, based on his irrational performance of the preceding day, should be removed to another venue for psychiatric examination.

That process lasted a while. Not a day or a week but several months, most of them spent in prison by our young assassin. And by that time Agca had escaped custody. He was just gone.

It seemed incredible. Agca had been confined to the prison at Kartal-Maltepe on the Asian side of Istanbul. It was thought to be a secure facility, though Turkish prisons were never as secure as Midnight Express would have us believe. Still, this one was run by the military, so most people were surprised that a high-value inmate like Agca could walk through numerous checkpoints to melt away into the night before Thanksgiving, 1979.

That meant he had help. A lot of help. Within the prison. The military prison.

And the educated elite of Turkey, who so mourned the passing of Ipekci, and so backed the military without thought or compunction, could do nothing but wring their hands.

And perhaps howl at the moon.

Disinformed (Cont'd)

THE BOY KILLER

In the early evening of February 1, 1979, Agca killed Abdi Ipekci on the finest street in Istanbul.

The murder of Ipekci (Ee-pek-chee) is usually called an assassination, which implies that the victim is a prominent person, usually a politically prominent person.

Abdi Ipekci was a prominent man, but hardly a politician. He never had given an indication in his life that he wanted to lower himself to that degree.

Abdi Ipekci

Ipekci was the editor of the most important newspaper in the country—Milliyet. He was also the friend of politicians, because they were useful to his work. On the day of his death he had visited Ankara, the capital, to confer with the prime minister of Turkey, Bulent Ecevit (Ej-e-vit).

Ipekci wanted Ecevit’s backing for an initiative that he was sponsoring to promote peace and friendship with the Greeks, who were bitter longtime enemies of the Turks. Ipekci did his best to secure Ecevit’s agreement for his work, then caught the late afternoon plane back to Istanbul. He drove quickly from the airport to the headquarters of Milliyet, where he had to prepare the paper for the next day’s edition, and write his column, Durum (The Situation).

He managed to do both before driving home to pick up his wife in order to make a late dinner with his publisher. It was a cold night with intermittent rain that made traffic slower than it habitually was. As he came around the corner and down the gentle hill toward his apartment building, a young man blew out of the darkness of the winter’s night and fired his nine millimeter pistol through the window of the driver’s side until the window shattered.

He continued to fire. The police were not sure—they still are not sure—how many shots were fired, but at least five bullets struck Ipekci. Several more lodged in the upholstery of the car. Considering that the shots were fired at point-blank range, the assassin must have been hyped nearly out of his mind. And no doubt Agca was. On this day in the winter of 1979 he was all of twenty-one years old.

The bouts of official incompetence that followed Ipekci’s assassination were made worse by the fact that so many people turned out to mourn one of the heroes of Turkey of that day. The streets of Tesvikiye and Nisantasi, where Ipekci lived, were jammed shoulder to shoulder with mourners as his coffin passed through the gigantic crowd.

Clearly, these people wanted to honor a man who more than anyone had stood for moderation in the midst of sectarian strife. He was not the only one who craved peace, but he was the one they knew best. And he was the most rational.

No one was apprehended for his assassination. The authorities had a sketch of the assassin given by witnesses that in retrospect seems to be accurate, but the man himself simply could not be found.

Agca might never have been found if Milliyet and the newspaper publishers association had not offered a reward of a hundred thousand dollars—a huge sum in those days in Turkey.

Still, it took quite a while to round up our killer. Agca hung out in places where the Gray Wolves were wont to howl, and those places should have been the first the authorities checked, but they apparently did not. Only when the reward proved too much of a lure was he discovered at the Marmara Coffeehouse in Istanbul.

A young man had to hang out somewhere, didn’t he? The Marmara was one of the best known places in the city where right-thinking men gathered. Snug in Beyazit, the district where Istanbul University lay, it was also within easy walking distance of the Milliyet building.

Everything was convenient. It was as if it had all been planned well in advance.

THE WOLF PACK

The problem was this: Ali Agca was a member of a fascist organization known as the Gray Wolves. They were the youth wing of the National Action Party in Turkey, which was headed by a former army colonel named Turkes (Tour–kesh).

To say that the Gray Wolves were an extreme right-wing organization is to understate the obvious. They were unapologetic fascists. The Gray Wolves were the close kin of the Hitler Youth, but considerably more violent. Although they received some training in weapons and methods, they were essentially a group of young men who got most of their practical experience on the job. Often, their job consisted of killing.

The 1970s in Turkey were marked by deadly and steadily rising violence between the political left and the right. Nor was the violence always small scale. The streets of the cities were rife with mayhem, especially those streets that bore hard upon the universities in the major cities.

The year 1978 marked something of a watershed in urban violence. Several prominent faculty members of Turkish universities were assassinated. Any number of students were assassinated almost at random. Bombs exploded on and off campuses, killing and wounding students of all parties in the political spectrum, but especially targeting leftists.

The police usually did not intervene in these actions, and sometimes collaborated with right-wing elements—led by the Gray Wolves—whose purpose was the intimidation and murder of their enemies. Arrests were seldom made even in cases where the attackers were known. People like Mehmet Ali Agca (Ah–ja) were more or less free to practice their training on these jobs.

Agca had come to Istanbul as a student transfer from Ankara. Born and raised in Malatya Province in central Turkey, he was a bright but not brilliant young man who liked history, right wing politics, and handguns. Although born to a poor family, his bank accounts in Istanbul were usually filled to overflowing. And although he was a good student, someone else took his entrance exams before he transferred from Ankara University to Istanbul University.

It should be repeated that Agca never gravitated toward left wing individuals or organizations except to want to harm them by gunfire. Although no one has been able to confirm the source of his funding or the origination point of his orders, the results of his actions are remarkably consistent. They dovetail neatly with the goals of the National Action Party and their allies in the Turkish Army and Turkish intelligence (MIT).

At the risk of making everything too simple, we should keep that fact in mind. Colonel Turkes, when he became a member of coalition governments in the 1970s, never said that he wanted much. He simply asked for control of the intelligence departments of the Turkish state. In exchange for his political cooperation, he was pretty much given what he wanted. His army contacts, well, it would be silly to think they were allowed to lapse.

Turkes is long gone to his reward, and we can only hope that it's fitting. But his National Action Party still casts its shadow on Turkish politics. From time to time they participate in the formation of governments, though their platforms are never less than freakish.

They believe in Turkey only for Turks, despising and promising to deal harshly with minorities like Armenians and Kurds. As is typical with fascist parties, they hate much better than they love. They despise Russians, but do not like Americans either. They hate Christianity or any religion other than Islam, which they usually honor by ignoring.

And like all racists, they never give up. When Agca was finally released after decades in prison in Italy and Turkey, he was welcomed back to the bosom of his country by a procession of Mercedes-Benz sedans and undisguised cries of vindication from his fellow Gray Wolves.

These dudes howl at the moon when they get together in a pack.

Yes, it’s weird. And the weirdness will only grow in further installments of Mystery Central.

DISINFORMATION

One of the strangest experiences a writer can have is to bang out a work of fiction and find the things he has made up are more accurate than the things most people think are real. It's even stranger when the thing he's writing about is one of the most sensational events of the 20th century.

But that happened when I worked on THE SATAN MACHINE. The book deals with the attempted assassination of Pope Paul II and the earlier, successful assassination of the editor of the leading newspaper of its day in Turkey. Since the killer was caught after he assassinated the editor, you'd think no one would have a problem dealing with reality.

But that's not what it happens when reality and power politics meet. Thirty odd years ago the world was divided into gigantic blocs—east-west, capitalist-communist, American-Russian. Each bloc got their fingers deep in the assassination pie, twisting the facts to suit their prejudices. The CIA in particular became involved in a large way, spreading immense lies that were, after all, told for a good purpose.

The good purpose had nothing to do with the truth of course. It so happened that it was a Polish pope who had been shot. At the same time, communist Poland had begun to come apart. The Solidarity movement headed by Lech Walesa was agitating against the Polish government on the world stage and all above board. Under the table, they were asking for money from the Vatican, which John Paul II was eager to supply.

So when an assassin tried to gun down the pope in St. Peter's Square, coming closer to accomplishing his goal than almost anyone knew, the propaganda wheels began to turn as soon as John Paul II got out of surgery. Actually, the wheels might have begun to turn a little before that. Almost no one in the competing intelligence services cared if he lived or died, though they pretended otherwise. Either way they could see that there was an important opportunity to be exploited.

The stage could not have been better set—and it was the greatest on earth, literally encompassing the whole earth. The victim could hardly have been more blameless—at least as most people understood his role in world affairs. On a clandestine level, the behavior of John Paul II could hardly have been more threatening to the communist bloc.

So there was motive. No doubt of it. The Soviet government would have been delighted to have the Polish pope off their back. It seemed a very short step to connect them to the attempted assassination.

But the facts were a bit off center. A bit weird in fact. The assassin was a Turk. That didn't fit the scenario. Furthermore, Mehmet Ali Agca was a member of the most extreme wing of a neo-fascist party. That didn't fit either. In fact, it was backwards.

Yet if a man thought about it long enough, there were things that could be brought out, fleshed out, and tied to that long communist tail. For one thing, Ali Agca had left Turkey and for a short period of time stayed in communist Bulgaria. That was suggestive. Very.

Anyway, it was start, a clue, an opening. The CIA stepped in so fast that the door couldn't possibly hit them in the ass.

Next, we'll look at what never really hit them in the ass but should have crippled them for life.