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Turkey's Terrorists: A CIA Legacy Lives On
Turkey's Terrorists: A CIA Legacy Lives On
By Lucy Komisar
On November 3, a truck crashed into a Mercedes Benz in Susurluk,
90 miles south of Istanbul, and killed three Turkish passengers: a
fugitive heroin smuggler and hitman, a former high-ranking police
officer, and a former "Miss Cinema." The lone survivor was a
rightwing member of parliament. In the car's trunk, police found a
forged passport, police identification papers, ammunition, silencers
and machine guns.
Abdallah Catli, the fugitive heroin smuggler, had escaped from a
Swiss prison. The dead beauty queen, Gonca Uz, was his girlfriend.
The police officer was Huseyin Kocadag, head of a Turkish police
academy and a former Istanbul deputy police chief who reportedly
organized hit squads in the southeast that kill Kurdish guerrillas
and their supporters.
The survivor, Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament from the
conservative True Path Party is reportedly in charge of 2,000
Kurdish mercenaries paid by the government to fight Kurdish
guerrillas.
The car carsh has created a sensation in Turkey and had led
parliament to hold hearings on the ties linking the True Path Party,
the police, and thugs like Abdullah Catli. Newspapers in Turkey
are making connections between what they are calling the "state
gang" and a secret paramilitary force that for decades has attacked
the left. But as Turkish investigators dig, they may come across one
more hidden connection: The United States set up that secret
paramilitary force at the height of the Cold War.
In the 1950s, the United States was concerned that the Soviet
Union would conquer much of Western Europe. The CIA and the
Pentagon came up with a plan to establish secret resistance groups
within various Western European countries that would fight back
against the predicted Soviet occupation. These groups were called
"stay behind" organizations: little cells of paramilitary units that
would take on the Soviets behind enemy lines. Belgium, France,
Holland, Greece, Italy, and Germany have all acknowledged that
they participated in the covert network.
The United States funded these stay behind groups for decades.
Even though there was no Soviet occupation, some of the groups
did take up arms--against leftwing dissidents in their own
countries. Some descendants of these groups are still at it,
especially in Turkey.
Abdullah Catli was one of these.
"The accident unveiled the dark liaisons within the state," former
prime minister Bulent Ecevit told parliament in December. Now
leader of a small opposition social democratic party, Ecevit knows
a lot about those liaisons. He first told me about them--and the
American connection--back in 1990, when I interviewed him in his
Ankara office, where he sat in a soft, brown chair sipping a cherry
drink.
Ecevit is a genial, seventy-one year old man with a high forehead,
deep-set eyes, a beakish nose, curly black hair, and a moustache.
The son of a doctor and a painter, Ecevit is an intellectual and a
poet who has translated T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound. He graduated
from the American-run Robert College and lived in the U.S. as a
student and a journalist. He once led the major social democratic
party; there was a split, and he now heads the smaller of the two.
Ecevit became prime minister in 1973. He told me he was startled
the following year when the Turkish military high command
requested money from the prime minister's secret fund to pay for a
new headquarters for the Special Warfare Department. General
Semih Sancar, Turkey's army commander, told him about the
department. He said the Americans had funded it from the start, but
now they were allegedly pulling out. Sancar advised Ecevit not to
look too closely at the matter. Ecevit investigated and found no
such organization in the state budget.
"There are a certain number of volunteer patriots whose names are
kept secret and are engaged for life in this special department," a
military briefer told Ecevit. "They have hidden arms caches in
various parts of the country."
At the time, Ecevit worried that these so-called lifetime patriots
might have a rightist slant and would use their weaponry to advance
their ideological goals. But he felt he was in no position to deny
them funds. Ecevit's party was the largest, but it had won only a
third of the votes. He was running a shaky coalition government.
Ecevit released the funds the military wanted and never discussed
the matter with the United States.
But the U.S. government surely knew about it. It set up the secret
stay behind organization and funded it for more than two decades.
Working out of the Joint U.S. Military Aid Team headquarters, it
was known first as the Tactical Mobilization Group and then the
Special Warfare Department. In 1971, after a military coup, it was
dubbed the counterguerrilla force and turned into an instrument of
terror against the left.
Journalist Ugur Mumcu, who was arrested shortly after the coup,
wrote later that his torturers told him, "We are the counterguerrilla.
Even the president of the republic cannot touch us." (Mumcu, who
continued to write in the daily Cumhuriyet about the
counterguerrilla force and about the existence of rightist drug gangs
connected to the government, was killed by a car bomb in 1993.)
Confirmation of the counterguerrilla force's existence has come
from the highest sources. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Kennan
Evren, who led a 1980 coup, wrote in his memoirs that Suleyman
Demirel, now president and in the late 1970s prime minister, asked
then that the Special Warfare Department be used to combat
terrorism. Evren said he refused, but that Demirel had insisted,
pointing out that it had been used in 1971 against subversive
activities.
General Evren acknowledged that the Special Warfare Department
was involved in clandestine activities, citing the murder of nine
leftwing militants at Kizildere in northern Turkey in 1972. He told
a newspaper that civilians in the paramilitary organization run by
the department may have been involved in terrorist incidents in the
1970s without his knowledge. Given the military's tight control
over security, such ignorance is highly unlikely.
One notorious terrorist incident the stay behind group may have
been involved in occurred on May Day, 1977, when the major trade
union confederation organized a rally that brought several hundred
thousand people to Istanbul's main Taksim Square. As the sun was
setting, snipers on surrounding buildings started firing at the
speakers' platform. The crowd panicked. Thirty-eight were killed;
hundreds were injured. The shooting lasted for 20 minutes; several
thousand police at the scene did nothing.
Ecevit, who was out of office at the time, went to see President
Fahri Koruturk and told him he thought the counterguerrilla force
might have carried out the massacre. "Give me a written statement,"
Koruturk answered. He relayed Ecevit's fears to Prime Minister
Demirel, Ecevit recalled, but nothing came of it.
When he ran for prime minister in late 1977, Ecevit denounced the
counterguerrillas. When he became prime minister, he told Army
Chief of Staff Evren, 'During the Kizildere incidents the Special
Warfare Section is said to have been used. I am worried about this
civilian organization. There is no means of knowing or controlling
what a young recruit may get up to after twenty years in such an
organization."
Evren replied, "There is nothing to worry about. We will deal with
it." So Ecevit blocked a parliamentary debate on the issue. At a
news conference, he denied existence of the counterguerrilla group
and said his earlier charges were just suppositions. Signaling his
fear of provoking the military, he said, "We must all be respectful
towards the Turkish Armed Forces and help them in the realization
of their desire to remain out of politics."
Once, when Ecevit was touring the country, a general in eastern
Turkey gave a dinner in his honor. When Ecevit learned he had
worked in the Special Warfare Department, he told the general, "I
have deep suspicians about the civilian extension of that
department."
"The civilians work very honestly, very faithfully," the general
assured him. "There is nothing to be afraid of."
Ecevit told him, "Simply as a hypothesis, it's quite possible,
general, that one of those lifetime patriots might at a certain later
date become the party chief of the Nationalist Action Party which
is involved in rightwing terrorism in this very town.
"Yes," said the general, "This is the case, but he's a very nice man."
By the late 1970's, violence between the left and right threatened
Turkey's stability. The chief violent group on the right was the
neofascist "Grey Wolves," the militant arm of the rightist
Nationalist Action Party head by Alparslan Turkes, a former
colonel and a leader of the 1960 military coup.
Our dead heroin trafficker, Abdallah Catli, was a leader of the Grey
Wolves when he was found guilty in absentia of organizing the
1978 murders of seven student members of the Turkish Labor
Party.
After the car crash, Turkes admitted that Catli had worked
clandestinely for the military and police, that he had worked "in the
framework of a secret service working for the good of the state." A
former Turkish foreign-ministry adviser and the head of the
intelligence anti-terror unit also told officials conducting the
current parliamentary inquiry that Catli worked for Turkish
intelligence.
Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller, a leader of the conservative True
Path Party, praised Catli after the crash: "Those who fire bullets or
suffer their wounds in the name of this country, this nation and this
state will always be respectfully remembered by us."
The rightwing terrorism Catli was involved in during the late 1970s
helped set the stage for the 1980 military coup, which the generals
said was needed to save the country from anarchy.
After the 1980 coup, several hundred thousand leftists were jailed
for three or four years without trial. Many were tortured. The
parliamentary commission has called on Evren to testify about
charges that terror squads were used routinely by the military junta
and participated in roundups of leftists.
By the mid-80s, the counterguerrillas had a new target; the Kurds.
Government security agencies began using paramilitary death
squads against Kurds who started an armed struggle in 1984. In
November 1990, six months after our interview, Ecevit repeated
publicly that a clandestine paramilitary force existed in Turkey.
Three weeks later, the head of the Turkish Army Operations
Department and the commander of the Special Forces issued a
statement that there was a special NATO organization in Turkey
called the Special Warfare Department, whose mission was "to
organize resistence in the case of a communist occupation." They
said its secret member "patriots" were not connected to the
counterguerrillas. The special NATO organization was, of course,
the "stay behind" operation the Americans had started.
In 1992, the commander of the Special Warfare Department,
General Kemal Yilmaz said, "The department is still active in
security operations against armed members of the PKK (Kurdish
Workers Party) in Turkey's southeastern provinces."
The U.S. State Department's 1995 human rights report on Turkey
was blunt: "Prominent credible human rights organizations,
Kurdish leaders, and local Kurds asserted that the government
acquiesces in, or even carries out, the murders of civilians." It said,
"Human rights groups reported the widespread and credible belief
that a counterguerrilla group associated with the security forces had
carried out at least some 'mystery killings.' "
The State Department's 1996 report on Turkey did not mention the
counterguerrillas, but said that, " 'mystery killings,' continued to
occur with disturbing frequency." It also said, "The 1995
recommendations of a parliamentary committee, designed to purge
"illegal formations" within the state which the committee said
committed some mystery killings, were not implemented."
The Turkish embassy in Washington said it had no information on
these illegal formations. Meanwhile, the paramilitary commission
investigating the Mercedes Benz crash has recommended
prosecuting the lone survivor of the crash, along with thirty-four
others linked to the scandal, including several former police chiefs
and officers.
> As for Washington's role, Pentagon would not tell me whether it
was still providing funds or other aid to the Special Warfare
Department; in fact, it wouldn't answer any questions about it. I
was told by officials variously that they knew nothing about it, that
it had happened too long ago for there to be any records available,
or that what I described was a CIA operation for which they could
provide no information. One Pentagon historian, said, "Oh, you
mean the 'stay behind' organization. That's classified."
The Pope's Assassins
Abdullah Catli, the fugitive who died in the Mercedes Benz crash,
was also connected to the man who tried to assassinate Pope John
Paul II in 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca.
Both were members of the Grey Wolves. Both had worked together
in a previous assassination effort. In 1979, Ali Agca killed a
Turkish newspaper editor. Catli was in on the plot. When the
police arrest Agca, they found a false passport belonging to Catli.
Catli then reportedly helped organize Agca's escape from an
Istanbul military prison, and some have suggested Catli was even
involved in the Pope's assassination attempt.
The CIA said the assassination attempt was the work of the Soviets,
through their Bulgarian allies. This has never been proven, and a
much more plausible case can be made that it was a rightist plot.
The Grey Wolves were clearly implicated, and they are directly
related to the Turkish counterguerrilla force.
But why would a Turkish rightist squad have an interest in
assassinating the Pope? The answer may lie with links between the
"stay behind" organizations in various European countries, which
all had a stake in blaming terrorism on the left.
Most is known about the Italian Gladio, Latin for sword, which
worked with the Mafia and neofascists to prevent Italian
communists from taking power through insurrection or the vote.
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti acknowledged the existence of the
Gladio in testimony before an Italian parliamentary commission on
August 2, 1990. He said Italy had used a "strategy of tension" to
undercut the influence of the legal communist party.
That strategy was terrorism. The Gladio conducted bombings, and
then blamed the bombings on the left. The assassination attempt on
the Pope may have been part of this strategy of tension.
At the scene of the Mercedes Benz crash, Turkish investigators
found Catli with a fake passport. "The person on this photo,
Mehmet Ozbay, works as a specialist for the police directorate and
he is allowed to carry guns." Mehmet Ozbay was an alias--the very
same alias that Mehmet Ali Agca had on his own passport.
This article was published in the April 1997 issue of The Progressive.
Lucy Komisar, a New York journalist, is doing research about
Turkey for a book on U.S. foreign policy and human rights in the
1970s and 80s.
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