The Cold War was an interesting time in Turkish history, cutting across an era in which the country was still forming and shaping up its institutions and emerging from the shadow of the former Ottoman system. It was a time of great risk. The neighbouring Soviet Union was snatching up states that had emerged from the collapse of the empire and the fires of the Second World War. To fend off the red tide coming its way, the Turkish state turned to the British and Americans to support them with aid, military assistance and intelligence. In his new book Turkish Intelligence and the Cold War: The Turkish Secret Service, the US and the UK. Egemen Bezci looks into the shadowy world of cold war spies. 

Luke: The first thing I want to ask you about is the research process for your book. How does one research the world of espionage when so much of it is secret or classified? 

Egemen: There are a couple of ways that one can do academic research on the world of secret agencies, depending on the academic discipline that you are pursuing. One can think about sociology and management and look at the organisations, because, due to transparency, we know what these organisations look like, so there are a couple of scholars in the UK, for example Philip Davies, who looks at this aspect. One can also look at more comparative politics. You can look at the combination of human rights and intelligence. There are others who come from the British school of thought who look at the archives and trace events, putting them into a theoretical framework from which we can work out how intelligence agencies behave and influence domestic or foreign policy. My path was more the latter, because I did my PHD in the UK. My supervisors were some of the most prominent scholars on this issue, such as Richard Aldrich, John Young and Rory Cormack, who have already been publishing about British intelligence. They write about MI6 and CGHQ and they dig into the archives. They were great examples and mentors for me.

This is what I did. First, get all the data in a given time frame that I thought would be useful for my research questions. Let’s find the data, if we don’t find the data, then we can’t even research that aspect. 

Luke: You mention in your book that there are some sources of data that are quite open - declassified CIA documents, for instance. You say that there is quite a rich stream of documents there. But that is not true for other organisations and sometimes you just don’t have information. So I was wondering, if there were a declassification of say, Turkish intelligence or MI6 documents, what questions would you try to answer with that new information? 

Egemen: So I would look at the relationship between the decision makers, politicians and intelligence agencies. Let’s be honest here; most of the time the work is secret, the relationships are secret and they are not in the archives because they did not keep records of it. Even in the British archive, it is like that. There is a huge academic debate about it. In some places  in the archive it says, “we have deleted everything related to that issue.”

In the MI6 case I would look more at operations and the rivalry between the British and the Americans in Turkey and the Middle East because there were some issues around that. With the Turkish case, how is it structured? What is the relationship between elected politicians the military and the intelligence agency itself. 

Luke: That is something I wanted to ask about. One thing that was unclear to me was to what extent Turkish politicians were influencing the policy of Turkish intelligence or to what extent the agencies were making it up for themselves. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that?

Egemen: We know from the archives for example, that Şükrü Âli Ögel was the first spymaster in the Turkish intelligence agency. He wrote an article in the mid 1970s stating just as much. When discussing the 1940s, he complained about how, when prime ministers changed, they would try to influence the agency. That is why he resigned, in fact. So he can give testimony in his memoirs and writing. But after that we can only trace it back. We can only imagine the rivalry in the Turkish government to influence intelligence. 

We can not just talk of one Turkish politician either. There was a new state forming. There were different groups and they are trying to put their agenda forward by using the intelligence agencies’ capabilities. Still we have to keep in mind that this is early in the country’s history. I would say that politicians of the time would influence the police and police intelligence comparatively more, as lots of these things are to do with domestic issues. This is my assumption and I was able to trace only a couple of documents showing direct influence, as shown in the book. It was especially pertinent regarding the Kurdish question and so on, but we can’t clearly state as to whether Menderes did this or İnönü did that. We need more archive research. 

Luke: The Menderes part is interesting because he was clearly trying to use intelligence to try and shore up his domestic policies. I think you demonstrated that quite effectively in the latter parts of the book. It didn’t save him, but you could see he was trying. 

The next thing I want to talk about is some of the vocabulary you use. I found the phrase Intelligence Diplomacy really useful. Could you just broadly explain what Intelligence Diplomacy is? 

Egemen: Of course, so it is still an early concept. I tried to coin that term for my conceptual framework and I borrowed some other concepts from the broader literature because I thought that diplomatic relationships between countries do not necessarily explain what we are seeing here Because intelligence agencies and their very specific capabilities and roles in bilateral or multilateral relationships are more open to manipulation and more open to leverage than open diplomatic relationships, Intelligence diplomacy uses the means of intelligence agencies of two countries to exercise certain policy preferences on other countries. It is mostly done between the intelligence officers as part of their role and correspondence with the foreign ministry or the military and so on. So it is not conventional diplomacy. In addition, we also have propaganda, black propaganda and physiological warfare methods which are not always in a normal diplomatic code of conduct. 

Luke: With regards to the Turkish context, to what extent was the intelligence diplomacy and the regular diplomacy integrated? Were diplomats talking to their spies or was it two separate channels of information? 

Egemen: Firstly, if you are talking about a country like the UK, of course the secret intelligence service is subordinate to the foreign office. Diplomats speak to their own spies, for sure. But in the Turkish case, since it was so new, people didn’t know where to put these capabilities and there were so may rival organisations within the government, I could not say that in one hundred percent of the operations that it was concurrent with conventional diplomacy. Turkish diplomats didn’t always know what was going on. There is one place in the book where, it was in an official publication of the minister of foreign affairs and they were talking about a briefing about espionage, how to counter it and what to do. They were saying -it was Aziz Yakin- I guess the author of the document- some of the diplomats were trying to gain influence and power back in Ankara by translating local new articles into Turkish and sending them back to Ankara saying, “we have acquired this very secret intelligence. Just give me a promotion or whatever.” In the Turkish case, in theory they need to be synchronised, but it was not really the case. I don’t really know about modern days, but it wasn’t back in the day. 

Luke: In your book, you identify some key goals of the intelligence community. Could you explain how they change from World War II into the Cold War and indeed how they don’t change? 

Egemen: If we are looking at the global intelligence community, then war time is war time. Your intelligence priorities are very different; more real time, “Where are the tanks, how many soldiers do they have? Can we crack the code and work out the movements of the enemy?" Moving into the cold war we see something else. We see thermonuclear weapons. It was extraordinary. It is still something very frightening for me the thought of thermonuclear weapons on this earth and imagine back then. It was extremely concerning for any intelligence agency and they needed to know who has them? Who has the capabilities to have them? And you can not just sent an agent to find it out. You need to increase technological developments and so on. You get the emergence of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block -that was very difficult to penetrate- exposing itself as a threat to the western alliance at that time. It created the requirement of strategic intelligence supported by new development such as trying to understand who has nuclear weapons and what to do with that. Most of the money and effort went into signal intelligence. 

Later we see them working on the missile gap. The soviets have this many weapons and the western alliance has this many and developing their process for that. 

Counter subversion also becomes more emphasised. Even before the cold war it was the case for Britain. But now, there was a more concrete block of how to define subversion in ideological warfare. It wasn’t the case so much before the Cold War. I guess covert action was to prevent war, but you wanted to gain information, influence people or create disruption you wanted use covert action for that as well.

Luke: One of the things I found fascinating was this idea that developed within Turkish intelligence that they needed the American and the British for their security, but they were determined not to be the stooges of the facists or the Soviet Union, the Americans or anybody. Today when I talk to some Turkish people, there is a lot of suspicion about organisations like the CIA both in what they are doing now and what they have done in the past. What I think your book showed was that yes the CIA was trying to influence Turkish policy, but Ankara was manipulating back at them and in many cases were punching quite above their weight and were able to get some quite impressive concessions out of the Americans over the years. Have I understood that correctly? 

Egemen: Yeh. That is the very essence of intelligence diplomacy. You need to punch above your weight. I can tell you that it was my concern when I started this research project because I am Turkish, I still go to Turkey every summer and I’m in touch with Turkish people. Everybody is like, “the CIA is doing something.” I say, “Yes they do something but you have an intelligence agency and a foreign ministry and decision makers. They do something as well. It is not a one player game.” I think this is one of the key concepts that I was trying to reveal. Because of Turkey’s very unique strategic location,  Turkish decision makers were thinking, “How can we leverage it?” This is what I was trying to get to. America depended on Turkey at that point. There was no other location to open up operations and they were trying to influence Turkey, but Turks knew they were trying to gain influence and there might have been some agents or politicians who were more exposed to bribes -these things happen in the secret intelligence world- but the overall structure was, “we are small, we are weak, we need to not be stooges and we need their military aid, economic aid whatever.” It worked quite well.

Luke: I felt broadly that Turkish intelligence was effective at getting what they wanted out of Turkish intelligence. I though they were quite effective a manipulating the British and Americans. It was interesting how they played quite a weak hand very effectively. 

Egemen: Exactly. I didn’t quote it in the book, but there is one interview by a person who was the the CIA mission deputy chief in the 1980s if I'm not mistaken. He gave quite an exclusive interview about his experience in Turkey. It is not only in only the early cold war but also in the 80s and 90s they were trying to do it. Back then it was even stronger. 

Luke: Part of the idea of Intelligence Diplomacy is shoring up your own intelligence, sharing technical expertises and tactical advantages, but the thing that is a bit different between Turkish intelligence, MI6 and the CIA is that there is a large internal element to the Turkish intelligence services. Could you talk a bit about the role of Turkish intelligence in domestic politics?

Egemen: This is a very interesting concept for me. I was able to find that most of documents had to do with counter-subversion within the context of NATO and the Bagdad Pact and what they did by themselves. However, I wasn’t able to find much archival sources. I don’t want to speculate that they did this or that. However, I can just say that it was the Cold War and there were certain Cold War framework like the communists or socialists were perceived as  the threat. Back then some people within the intelligence service believed that it  was soviet subversion and the root of it was outside the country. They were trying to get more support for this cause and they were doing it fiercely. 

However, I should say that  we also have the Kurdish case. In the domestic sense, I would like to break it down to a couple of elements. So we have the Milli Emniyet Hizmeti the newly developing intelligence service. It had a limited budget, limited personnel, mostly focusing on certain key areas and having to do some things abroad. We also have the gendarmery, which was extensive. Compared to to MAH, the Gendarmery was much more extensive. Turkey was rural and by administrative law the gendarmes had more control and more informants and so on. So I would say most of the intelligence and the information came from the gendarmery from the rural areas in the Kurdish case. So there were several official publications about that, which I quote, saying they had informants and so on. If you are specifically talking about MAH, MAH  had certain aims mostly in metropolitan areas. Mostly they were subjected to politicisation by decision makers pursuing their agendas. Other times they were not. That is why I pointed out the different context of what each agency does and which ones had more exposure to political influence. We also need to look at the personnel. For the MAH most of the personnel comes from the elite families their relationship and vulnerabilities to the decision makers was different from that of the police. 

Luke: The Kurdish dimension was interesting. I found it fascinating that Turkish intelligence was exaggerating the amount of influence the Soviet Union had on Kurdish groups in an attempt to leverage more aid out of the Americans. Do we know to what extent the KGB or the Soviet Union was trying to funnel money into Kurdish groups? Do we know the Russian side of this? 

Egemen: We have a good picture of that to be honest because in Cambridge there is the The Mitrokhin Archives, one of the most famous soviet defectors he brought a huge amount of documents from the KGB. From there we know some things. The very interesting irony is that of course there was a Kurdish problem. However, this is the thing that Turkish decision maker didn’t or didn’t want to understand, there were some Kurdish youth coming from elite Kurdish families they had nationalistic aspirations and they were looking for money. Even in Baghdad, even in Europe from some of the people who emigrated to Europe in the 1950s. They were looking for sources of funding and the KGB saw a good opportunity and they gave some money. It was normal. There is nothing to exaggerate about that because it is the job of an intelligence agency to support opposition elements in your target country. I guess the Kurdish groups knew that too. They were not Communists one hundred percent. There were maybe some communist and some islamists, but their common ground was Kurdish nationalism and they were looking to get connections, political and monetary support. At one point the KGB said, “ok we can use you let's do it.” 

Luke: This is interesting because when you watch foreign policy people talking about groups like the PKK, they can’t resist describing them as Marxists. So when people say that the PKK was an extension of Soviet foreign policy is that an over-exaggeration? 

Egemen: The PKK is a very different issue. It is different because before the 1980s there were a variety of Kurdish movements. In fact, there are articles that are available and records of MAH wire tapping of certain key figures of the Kurdish political groups. They were wiretapping their houses and listening in on debates about communism and various ways to achieve Kurdish statehood. So there are a variety of positions in the movement, but the PKK comes from a Marxist back ground. There is no doubt about that. They had a longstanding relationship with the Soviet Union and Syrian intelligence as well. They were communists. One can look at the early propaganda materials of the PKK. It doesn’t mean that all Kurdish groups were communists. The PKK was part of Soviet foreign policy, but it was not a one way street. 

Luke: That has really cleared things up for me, thank you. I’d like to move on and talk about the coup against Menderes. Do we know to what extent Turkish intelligence was involved in that coup de tat. 

Egemen: There was a lot of debate about that, to what extent the intelligence was involved or not involved who knew what and when in the official trials of Menderes. But I wasn’t interested in that because in that moment in Turkish intelligence and security framework some things were more to do with the Turkish American relations and the Turkish military. The big guy in the room was the Turkish military. The MAH was negligible at that point because of the personal power and network of the Turkish military. If I were looking at it, more emphasis should be placed on the military. I know that people would like to see the intelligence service as very serious and clandestine group, but over certain periods there are more powerful organisations in the hierarchy of the security institutions. There is a memoir on this and intelligence officers were involved of course, but most of them were just government officials with other personal considerations. They had their own ambitions and plans and most of them were thinking, “How can I keep my career in order after this?” 

Luke: So they went with the flow?  

Egemen: Some of them did, some of them didn’t. 

Luke: It is still a topic that comes up when I talk to Turkish people today, to what extent were the CIA involved in Mender’s removal. I’m not totally sure where you land on this because you suggest that they were aware that it was going to happen, but it didn’t get through to the decision makers. Could you clear that up for me? 

Egemen: Definitely. One of the things about the intelligence services which we need to understand is that they are like any other government branch. They are a bureaucratic institution. We have the evidence that I found in Eisenhower’s archives. There is one piece of paper in the presidential library that says “we have got this information, there will be a coup.” But it is just one paragraph and there are twenty other items dealing with other issues around the world that the president had to pay attention to on that same page. If you are Eisenhower and you are in that moment, you have so many things to do. You find out there will be a coup, you say, “Ok let them do it, let’s see what happens it is the natural process of history.” Perhaps they found out who possible guys behind it were and perhaps said, “We need to find out if it is a threat to us. If not, it is the natural course of history.” They were not that happy with Menderes anyway, so they were hoping that whoever came next would be more cooperative than him. Though, it didn’t turn out that way. They knew, but as they saw that it wouldn’t be a threat to their position in the Balkans or the Middle East then they were not that much worried. 

Luke: Did they think that whoever would replace Menderes would follow the American line on the Soviet Union. 

Egemen: There is one document about that. They wanted to get some information about the people taking part in the coup. Then there are some other documents finding out all their biographic information, who is who, who does what their allegiances and so on. This kind of stuff is not very great to expose in the book because they were just detailed biographies of the people involved.

Luke: In 1957, the US ambassador interrupted a cabinet meeting to stop Turkey going to war in Syria to prevent a broader escalation with the Soviet Union. There are obvious parallels between that moment and the current situation. That is really interesting to me, because the idea that the American ambassador could have such influence on Turkish policy seems unlikely in the current context. It seems like there has been a real break down in the communications over Syria. It seems the Americans completely misunderstood or ignored Turkish concerns over the Kurdish question. Does this mean that the intelligence diplomacy that you describe in your book has broken down? 

Egemen: I don’t know. maybe. Maybe it has worked out. I guess Erdogan has got what he wanted at the moment. Trump pulled out the troops. The PKK related groups and the PKK itself are very vulnerable at the moment. Maybe it is working today as well. We don’t know. We can only speculate. We have to remember that back in the day, America was the most powerful country in the world and they were able to exercise their power globally. At that moment, no country like Turkey could say no to America in a direct way. Also, international norms were not so well established. The United Nations was still new. The Americans back then were afraid of escalation and more doubt was held over the Turkish military. “They want this, can they do this? Or will there be a huge mess? Can they hold the soviets on one boarder and make an exaction into Syria. Can they do that without American support?” There was more doubt because I saw in the archives a couple of evaluations about that. There were wondering if Turkey ask for this can they do it? They concluded that no, not without American support. That’s why they could interrupt the meeting. “Ok, we hear that you want to do this, you know that you can’t do it on your own, so don’t do it,” they said. But now they don’t need American support. 

Luke: I guess the other thing that occurred to me is that the Soviet Union acted as a way of disciplining the Turkish thinking because you had to follow the American policy because if you didn’t it left you exposed to the soviets. Without that disciplining effect of the soviet union it gives smaller countries the ability to make their own decisions. 

Egemen: Exactly. That is a predominate theory in international relations to be honest. With the Cold War over and without a huge threat of Soviet Union against relatively weaker countries such as Turkey, Sweden or Finland. Things are changing and Turkey can act more freely. However, also the Americans don’t need Turkey to that extent. Back in the day, they needed some bases over here for rapid deployment because they thought a war was coming between the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance. Everyone thought it was inevitable. All the structural relationships were built on the assumptions of who is going to do what in the war that is coming. Can you think of a US Russian war over Turkey right now? Would Turkey be any use for that? I don’t think so. Now the technology has changed people can deploy missiles from space. Or they can use some other means of espionage over the internet or via spy satellites. Everything has changed. 

Luke: Could you recommend some books that speak to this topic? 

Egemen: I’m not aware of the Turkish ones, though I am aware that some PHD students are working on related topics in Turkey. In English there is The Hidden Hand by Richard Aldrich. It is 600 pages book like a brick, but it is a fascinating book. I would suggest it. I would suggest another book from the same author GCHQ and there is a whole chapter of the book on Turkey. It talks about the Kizildere incident where a leftist group kidnaped and killed some GCHQ technicians deployed in Turkey. He unearths some of the issues around that. There is one more Disrupt and Deny by Rory Cormac. It is a really good book as well. 

Luke: Thank you so much for this conversation. It is an interesting topic. Because it is sometimes quite opaque, you really cleared up some of things I didn’t quite understand.