Istanbul Intrigues
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Istanbul Intrigues by Barry Rubin, 1950-2014 Published: 1989 J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents Author‘s Note Preface Poems & Chapter 1 … Diplomacy by Murder. Chapter 2 … Sailing to Istanbul. Chapter 3 … Intimations of Catastrophe. Chapter 4 … At the Court of Spies. Chapter 5 … The Last Springtime. Chapter 6 … The Front Line Comes to Istanbul. Chapter 7 … The Story Pursues the Journalists. Chapter 8 … The Americans Arrive: 1942-1943. Chapter 9 … American Ignorance and Intelligence. Chapter 10 … The Archaeologist’s Navy: The OSS in the Aegean, 1943-1944. Chapter 11 … Dogwood’s Bark: OSS Successes in Istanbul. Chapter 12 … Dogwood’s Bite: The Fall of OSS-Istanbul. Chapter 13 … Rescue from Hell. Chapter 14 … Germany’s Defective Intelligence. Chapter 15 … The Valet Did It. Chapter 16 … World War to Cold War. Epilogue Selective List of Code Names for OSS-Turkey Intelligence Organizations Interviews Acknowledgements J J J J J I I I I I Author‘s Note This is the story of Istanbul—but also of Turkey, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean—during World War II, based on extensive interviews and the use of archives, especially those of the OSS, which I was the first to see for this region. The book is written as a cross between a scholarly work and a real-life thriller. The status of Turkey as a neutral country made it a center of espionage, a sort of actual equivalent of the film Casablanca . Aspects of the story include the Allied-Axis struggle to get Turkey on their side; the spy rings set up in the Middle East and the Balkans; the attempts of Jews to escape through Turkey; the Allies’ covert war in Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and other countries; and the first accurate account of how the Germans recruited the British ambassador’s valet as a spy, who could have been their most successful agent of the war if only they had listened to his warnings. Other interesting stories include America’s first faltering attempts to establish its own intelligence agency and the affair of the efforts to bring about Hungary’s secret surrender to join the Allies, both of which ended in disaster. The book was published by McGraw Hill in 1989 with a paperback from Pharos/MacMillan in 1992. It was then published by Bosphorus University Press in 2002. The Turkish edition was published as Istanbul Entrikalari in 1994 and reprinted in 1996, 1999, and—by Dogan—in 2007 —Barry Rubin, October 2012 Preface This is a book about Istanbul and about those who conducted political and espionage missions there during the Second World War. It is a work of nonfiction based on extensive archival research and interviews. Each event and every conversation is reconstructed as accurately as possible. Whenever I interviewed those involved, four decades after the events herein described, there always came a moment when these Americans, Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Israelis, Russians, and Turks would almost visibly reach back in time. Their eyes would light up in recalling those remarkable days that had forever marked their Jives. To some, these were moments of great achievement and romance; to others, searing tragedy. For all of them, it was an era of great perils and passionate idealism when they hoped their actions would shape a new world. One of Istanbul's most intriguing wartime characters was Wilhelm Hamburger. A highly successful German intelligence officer who later defected to the British, Hamburger then disappeared from history until I found—on my last day of research in the OSS archives—one of his letters that the ass had intercepted in 1945. In a postscript, Hamburger mentioned the new name he was taking. After checking a Vienna telephone book, I had his address within an hour. It was particularly meaningful for me to visit Vienna a century to the day after my great-grandfather left there for America. I walked to Hamburger's apartment down streets named for the city's great composers. Wiry and charming, as described in Allied intelligence reports forty years earlier, he spoke with me for six hours. Hamburger's wealthy, sophisticated upbringing made him self-confident and poised. He spoke candidly about his experiences. After defecting, he worked on psychological warfare in Cairo until the mis-trustful British exiled him to Sudan. By 1945, Hamburger was exhausted and angry. His beloved Vienna was wrecked, and he feared his scattered family was dead or in the hands of the Soviets. Over the years, he rebuilt his fortunes, as the luxuriously furnished flat showed. For Hamburger, his secret contact with George Earle in wartime Istanbul had been a central event in his life. An American politician and friend of President Roosevelt, Earle also thought himself a great spy. One American diplomat described Earle this way: "The most bizarre and despicable character I had ever known." Hamburger and other Austrian patriots had spent a great deal of time cultivating Earle as what they hoped would be a reliable channel to the White House. Like so many who had performed espionage and counterintelligence work during the war, Hamburger had spent decades pondering a painful question. Finally, he turned to me and asked if "anything we did made any difference?" Events in Istanbul did greatly affect the war and the world that emerged from it. Defeating German efforts to seduce Turkey and conquer the Middle East was essential for Allied victory. Failure to subvert Berlin's Balkan allies quickly enough doomed millions of people and made inevitable Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Intelligence sent from Istanbul helped Allied bombers devastate German industry and shorten the war. Frictions there were catalysts in the Cold War; experience gained there formed a foundation for building the postwar U. S. intelligence agencies. It became possible to discover the truth about these events only after a treasure trove of information became available when the CIA released the vast archives of its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). But Freedom of Information requests were necessary to obtain more material, and there were additional tens of thousands of pages of embassy cables, army and navy intelligence reports, prisoner interrogations, and captured German records to examine. The most difficult task was to uncover the people behind the code names. Like a counterintelligence officer, one had to seek some slip in a cable or detail in an interview that made possible a breakthrough. There were also journalists' accounts, Turkish newspapers, British military and diplomatic records, and the correspondence of the Zionist delegation in Istanbul. I interviewed dozens of people now living on three continents and in twenty American states. Among those I most wanted to meet was Lanning Macfarland, war- time head of the OSS in Turkey. I knew he was from Chicago but had no luck locating him. One day I discovered Macfarland's 1942 application to join the OSS, which mentioned he was a trustee of a small Iowa college. I wrote a letter to the school and received Macfarland's obituary and his son's address. By coincidence, the son was visiting Washington the day before I left on along research trip abroad. Inspired by my letter, Lanning Macfarland Jr. had opened a locked suitcase left by his father and found a 180-page memoir detailing his father's operations in Istanbul. He graciously gave me a copy. And so it went, interviewing people in an attempt to reconstruct life in wartime Istanbul: an appointment to meet with an ex-OSS man in a cafeteria; a visit to one former U.S. diplomat at his New Hampshire retirement home, to another at his New York club; a drive up to Nyack, New York (whose beautiful Hudson River vista bears a striking similarity to Istanbul) to see a Turkish official's widow; an accidental meeting at a California reception with a German-born refugee who had been a professor in Istanbul. In southern Virginia, Robert St. John—one of the great foreign correspondents—told me about his experiences in the Balkans. In England, I took a train to a retired British diplomat's country estate to resolve the mysterious, world-famous case of the British ambassador's valet who spied for the Germans. We spoke in his dining room amid 2OO-year-old pictures of his ancestors. A Soviet defector, forty-five years after fleeing Stalin, insisted we meet in a way that allowed him to reconnoiter the place to ensure I was not a KGB agent. I drove two hours through Israel's Negev desert to meet one leader of Istanbul's Zionist rescue mission and went to Jerusalem's city hall for an interview with another, Mayor Teddy Kollek. In Washington, I met a former Hungarian diplomat, Aladar Szegedy, who lived only a few blocks from where I grew up. Well into his eighties, Szegedy served coffee with a sure hand and then pulled out reams of Hungarian articles and documents and recounted with remarkable accuracy his experiences as a Foreign Ministry official active in secret peace contacts with the Allies in Istanbul. He described, as if it had happened only yesterday, being thrown into the Gestapo's Budapest prison. A few lines from Tom Stoppard's remarkable play Travesties, about Zurich during World War I, were an inspiration: "Great days… Zurich during the war. Refugees, spies, exiles, painters, poets, writers, radicals of all kinds. I knew them all. Used to argue far into the night … at the Odeon, the Terrasse…" The lines fascinated me. Stoppard masterfully brought to life the relations between famous and obscure people, the ways that memory recalls or distorts life, and those particular moments when history is at a crossroads and all the onlookers know it.