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!”