“But it’s a conspiracy theory.”
He laughed. “You Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It’s the rest of us in the world who have been the victims of your conspiracies.”
I ignored him. “I guess I have faith in American journalism,” I said. “Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.”
He smiled. “I’m sorry, there’s no way they didn’t have something to do with it, and now this war?” he said, referring to the war in Iraq. “It’s impossible that the United States couldn’t stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.”
Around that time a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Güng?ren. When I went there the following day, old and young men were repairing the shattered windows of a clothing shop under the blank, watchful eyes of naked mannequins, and a handful of policemen clutched riot shields opposite tiny pink girls jumping around in empty fountains. Huge red Turkish flags hung from balconies where families drank tea; one woman had stretched a flag across the frame from which the glass of her window had been blown out by the bombs. The terrorists had targeted a pedestrian street in a middle-class neighborhood of no significant political or religious character. There were no Byzantine treasures or European corporate headquarters there, either. Just a civilian cross section of working, living, breathing Istanbul, shopping before bedtime. The second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin after 10:00 p.m., killing 17 people and injuring 150, thanks to a tactic the Iraq War had made cruelly familiar: set off one bomb, draw hundreds of concerned citizens to the scene, then set off the other. One witness caught an image of the second bomb exploding, on his cell phone.
“Who does everyone think did this?” I asked my young cabdriver, who’d lived in Istanbul his whole life. “Maybe al-Qaida?”
“Could be,” he said.
“Not the PKK?”
“Could be,” he replied again.
“This is the problem when something like this happens now,” a friend said later. “You think: It could be the PKK, it could be DHKP/C [a radical leftist group], it could be al-Qaida, it could be the ‘Deep State’—it could be anyone!”
The Deep State, or mafialike paramilitary organizations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military, was another story. Turks explained that the Deep State had been formed during the Cold War, as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. At the time, prosecutors had launched what would become known as the Ergenekon trial, which alleged that a group of ultrasecularists and nationalists, including military officers and journalists, had been behind the majority of Turkish crimes in the last few decades. (The Ergenekon mafia apparently had been named for a Turkish myth in which the Turks are descended from wolves.) Many believed it had killed the Armenian writer Hrant Dink, threatened the life of Orhan Pamuk, and had been involved in hundreds of extrajudicial killings of Kurds since the 1990s. Could one group possibly be responsible for all these acts? It strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.
In fact, elements of the Deep State were rumored to have had ties to the CIA during the Cold War, and though that, too, smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality Turks, and Emre, lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the Americans launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Lumumba in 1961, Trujillo in 1961, Diem in 1963, Allende in 1973. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much-hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, U.S.-sponsored, -supported, or -staged regime change: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the United States at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.
But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11—just as huge, as life changing, as disruptive to the country and to people’s lives. The reason Emre may not have believed that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof was that his experience, his reality, told him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. After all, was there much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror?
In the midcentury, the CIA’s misdeeds were often executed by right-wing groups who attacked neutral targets, and then blamed leftist groups or Communists to justify even more violence, or regime change. Just as the Turks so often believed about terror in Turkey. The CIA’s ultimate goal was often what Emre suspected about the World Trade Center attacks: an excuse for wider war.
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