“You have created slaves and compradors in Turkey … Your soldiers can bring into the streets tens of thousands of Turks by being disrespectful to Turkish women. Your soldiers constantly tear down and trample Turkish flags. They run over people in the streets and are not even tried in Turkish courts.”
The first democratically elected prime minister of Turkey, Adnan Menderes, a champion of the United States, had by then been in power for almost ten years. The long period of power corrupted him; he also had begun to wreck the Turkish economy, displeasing his American patrons as well as the Kemalist generals. In 1960, Turkish military officers staged Turkey’s first of many military coups, and Menderes was hanged on the island of Imral?. In response to Menderes’s authoritarianism, the generals drafted a new constitution intended to strengthen civil society. When Baldwin arrived in Turkey in the early sixties, he landed in a country in which newspapers, writers, playwrights—and, in effect, leftist movements—had been newly set free.
The turning point in American and Turkish relations was a crisis that broke out between the Greek and Turkish peoples on the island of Cyprus in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson intervened by threatening both the Greeks and Turks with a loss of U.S. weapons and aid, which effectively paralyzed the Turkish military and prevented a war. To the Greeks, Johnson said: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution … We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long…” To the Turks, Johnson wrote a letter saying pretty much the same thing. For Turks, men and women, children of Atatürk who believed themselves the liberators and guarantors of their nation and resented the direct intervention of any foreign country, the Johnson letter was the ultimate shame.
In 1968, demonstrations across the country broke out against the U.S. naval brigade that patrolled the Mediterranean. A leftist student declared: “Istanbul is not the brothel of the Sixth Fleet. We will continue our fight against imperialism.” The following January, the U.S. ambassador Robert Komer came to Turkey from South Vietnam, where he had been serving in Johnson’s war as its “chief of pacification,” the overseer of the “hearts and minds” department of Operation Phoenix, which targeted Vietcong agents and caused the deaths of twenty thousand Vietnamese. When Komer arrived to give a talk at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, in January 1969, a group of students who belonged to the Marxist-Leninist movement Dev-Gen? set his car on fire. The violence in Turkey against American targets escalated: unlike the warm welcome given to the USS Missouri in 1946, thirty thousand people protested the arrival of the Sixth Fleet to Istanbul. Riot police killed two people and injured hundreds (it was called Bloody Sunday). Bombs went off at a military installation in Ankara, assailants shot security guards outside the American embassy, and a radical group kidnapped four U.S. Air Force personnel and demanded four hundred thousand dollars in ransom, inciting a nationwide manhunt.
A young American woman named Maureen Freely—her father, John Freely, a professor at Bo?azi?i University, was a friend of James Baldwin—was living with her family in Istanbul at the time. She spent her childhood gazing dreamily out the window at military ships passing through the Bosphorus, and attended Robert College with children whose parents were spies. Gritty, unfashionable Istanbul in the 1960s exuded an atmosphere of skulduggery and suspicion. Freely, who would write a series of novels about the Cold War, never seemed to shake the terror of the time, or her own complicity in Turkey’s fate. “It was widely believed that the military, the prime minister, and everyone beneath him were US puppets,” Freely wrote later in her novel Enlightenment. “In the popular imagination, it was CIA pulling their strings.”
For three decades after the USS Missouri docked in Istanbul, Turks fought their version of the Cold War on city streets. Labor unions and leftist parties faced off against neo-Fascists and Islamists, all sides seemingly backed by foreign powers no one could see. These were not petty street fights. An average of twenty people died every day, often from leftist violence, but more so by mysterious right-wing-perpetrated murders and assassinations that would never be solved, forever making Turks “paranoid,” or “conspiracy theorists,” or skeptics, like Emre, like the Greeks, like the Guatemalans, the Indonesians. Right-wing paramilitary violence, as had been used in Greece and Latin America, however, wouldn’t quell the Cold War crisis in Turkey. There, the Americans would become so terrified of the rise of communism that they would soon encourage the Turkish government to use an unlikely force against it: Islam.
5.
MONEY AND MILITARY COUPS: THE ARAB WORLD AND TURKEY
What the hell do the Americans want, ignorant people?
—SAID ABURISH