HOOK REVIEWS

BY DAVID BARCHARD

During World War II the city teemed with spies, saboteurs, defectors, diplomats, lovers, assassins, journalists, and a future Pope.

ISTANBUL INTRIGUES smile at breathless passages such as: “Sch­ By Barry Rubin, McGraw Hill, $ 18.95 warz had never before been granted an r-m -mSm interview. His very existence was a secret”, Almost everyone has heard of the Cicero or, “The Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest Affair and how Elyesa Bazna, the Albanian- was the center of and intrigue in born valet of Sir Hughe Knatchbull- that capital.” In , thé now vanished Hugessen, British Ambassador to , mmm Park Hotel seems to have played that role. stole the key to his master’s private safe and The better known Pera Palas Hotel suf­ dispatch box and filmed their contents for fered the less enviable fate of being blown up the Germans during the Second World War. INTRIGUES by a bomb planted in the baggage of the A TRUE-LIFE CASABLANCA Less familiar is the sorry tale of a departing British Ambassador to band of German intelligence of­ , Sir George Rendel, by the ficers, loudly singing “Zwoelfland, Bulgarian government. For the rest zwoelfland, ueber ailes” at the of his life, Sir George was always a Taksim Casino in Istanbul for the : little indignant that the Turkish benefit of a British group at an­ “ government made him, rather other table. They were rubbing in ji than the Bulgarians, pay the the fact that an incompetent Brit­ damage — a detail not mentioned ish officer had let slip the infor­ ilKiAitv. rtitt by Rubin. mation that Berlin was referred •Sis One of the fascinating things to as “1200” in signals, so com­ "-'.'t,.*’: t .... -"i" ‘ M*1“ Z.!...... S ' i about this distant world of Tur­ promising the entire coding sys­ key in the 1940s is that some of tem. So disheartened were the Rubin’s impressive cast-list British that they did not dare surface in different roles a few report the episode to London. decades later. There was An- This latter story is not in ' gelo Roncalli, a “rotund little Barry Rubin’s account of during the Rubin, writing for American readers, Italian peasant” serving as papal legate to Second World War, but the book is packed tends to concentrate on the United States’ the Catholics of Istanbul and actively trying with colourful anecdotes. It begins with an angle in the events he describes, although to save the Jews of Eastern Europe and explosion on the Atatürk Bulvari in Ankara this brings a bonus in the form of reminis­ Italy. Rubin believes that it was in Istanbul, in February 1942 when the would-be as­ cences from exiles in wartime Turkey who the capital of several dead empires, that sassin of , the German went on after the war to become dis­ Roncalli decided that the Church must adapt Ambassador, blew himself up by mistake. tinguished Americans. to the modern world, a view which domi­ His masters had given him a “smoke bomb” The Cicero case was, in fact, almost the nated his pontificate as Pope John XXIII. to release after shooting the ambassador. only real success of German intelligence It is less savoury to learn that the junior Unfortunately for its user, the bomb was during the Second World War — and KGB man in the Soviet Consulate in Istan­ filled with explosive. perhaps because of this the Germans did bul in 1945 was Gaydar Aliyev, party boss in Although Rubin is an academic from not recognise how important it was. The Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1980s and the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Allies seem constantly to have held the highest ranking Turk in the Soviet Union. his book is firmly planted in the genre of initiative. Aliyev presumably helped Kim Philby on his real-life spy thrillers. The story it has to tell There is rather too much in this book famous visit to Istanbul to head off an is a good one and all the better for being about journalists (easier people to meet and attempted defection by the Soviet Consul rather unfamiliar to most people. It is inter­ write about than spies) and their fairly there. esting, for instance, to read of the wartime predictable memories of bars, restaurants This is a richly informative book, all the Hungarian government’s attempts to es­ and grumbles about censorship of their more fun because although its events take cape from its entanglement with the Third work by the authorities. place in a vanished universe, we still walk in Reich by sending messages to the Allies In places, Rubin piles on his special its streets and still (just) have some of its through Istanbul. effects a little too eagerly. It is difficult not to survivors among us. 106 TURQUOISE

Kişisel Arşivlerde Istanbul Belleği Taha Toros Arşivi