Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  The Emniyet had only been around since 1926, but it was part of an entire system of surveillance and repression that had grown up alongside the single-party government created during Atatürk’s presidency. It also rested on a longstanding Turkish obsession with public order and the machinations of unseen forces. Half a century earlier, Abdülhamid II had spent much of his day reviewing the written reports of his network of spies, who noted everything from foreign arrivals to antigovernment jokes overheard in the street. The sexual peccadilloes of diplomats were of particular interest to the sultan, who would casually drop hints to red-faced ambassadors to let them know that their most intimate moments in a Pera bordello had been watched. In those days, Muslims seen conversing with Europeans could be threatened with exile, tramcar passengers remained studiously silent, and public conversations in the Pera Palace were usually conducted in whispers.

  Now, the Emniyet became the central body tasked with both protecting the Kemalist revolution and uncovering its internal enemies. It specialized in unveiling conspiracies, and, as in the case of enemies of the state such as Nâzım Hikmet or rambunctious exiles such as Halide Edip, it developed a particular sideline in observing the supposed links between opposition currents in the Turkish Republic and their external backers. As with all clandestine services, however, the line between neutralizing a real danger and manufacturing one precisely so that it could be neutralized was always somewhat hazy. Intelligence work could be a closed circle. Sometimes the evidence that a threat existed was no more than the fact that some security operative had decided to report that it did. It was a way of thinking about security, politics, and foreign intrigue that was built into the basic structure of the republic and its police apparatus.

  An information-hungry city naturally produced a surfeit of information suppliers, which is probably why officers such as Ardıç and Mutlugün had found themselves at the Pera Palace on the day of their death. Hotels were at the center of an intricate economy of information gathering and sharing. “Istanbul has many people who try to make a living by selling information to anyone who will buy it,” noted a secret US intelligence dispatch. The more foreigners, the more work, and the more work, the more lucrative intelligence became. The Emniyet regularly supplied written reports, photographs, arrival and departure lists, hotel registration information, and even passport photographs of any person whose likeness a foreign intelligence agency might wish to track down—and pay for. When a newcomer arrived at a hotel and delivered his passport to the concierge, he could be certain that it would soon be shown to the Turks, the Soviets, the Americans, the Germans, the British, the Italians, “and probably the bartender in his favorite café.”

  Many efforts to elicit information or to buy Turkish sympathies were not surreptitious but, rather, public and invariably creative. In February 1943, Germany returned the decayed corpse of Talât, the Unionist leader and mastermind of the Armenian genocide, who had been shot more than two decades earlier by an Armenian assassin in Berlin. It was a goodwill effort built on the macabre return of an old exile—a controversial figure whose historical role had been downplayed during Atatürk’s lifetime but who was now ceremonially resurrected and elevated to the pantheon of Turkish nationalists. In a grand procession attended by President smet nönü, Prime Minister ükrü Saracolu, Ambassador Franz von Papen, and Turkish and German officers in full dress, the old pasha’s remains were reinterred on a small hilltop in Istanbul. He would eventually be joined by other Young Turks, including his associate Enver, whose remains were brought from Tajikistan in the 1990s. In a twist that no one seems to have noted at the time, the hill happened to look across to one of the city’s main Armenian cemeteries.

  The Allies, too, worked assiduously to move Turkish public opinion and lure the republic out of its neutral stance. Their relative success depended mainly on the course of the war, however, rather than on intelligence coups. Turkey’s nonaggression pact with Germany looked like a reasonable move in the summer of 1941, as the Wehrmacht swept quickly eastward. By the next fall, however, the Axis advance into the Soviet Union had stalled at Stalingrad, German strength in North Africa was withering, and the Allies were beginning to press Turkey to enter the war on the Allied side. The long history of ducking and weaving, tactical reassessments, and elaborately orchestrated dissimulation was coming up against the dawning reality that Hitler could well lose the war. Once Mussolini fell from power in Italy, in July 1943, the Axis was effectively split, and Turkey’s position of calculated neutrality appeared increasingly untenable.

  War’s lighthearted moments, ca. 1944: An office worker demonstrates his gas mask to a female colleague.

  British intelligence services, including the renowned Special Operations Executive, or SOE, were operating in the city already at the time of the Pera Palace blast. Istanbul had become the center of SOE activities in the Balkans, which meant that British officers were not only acquiring information but also planning specific acts of sabotage or assistance to underground fighters in other countries, especially in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Greece. As the war wound on, the SOE put in place a plan for coordinating resistance operations in the event of a German invasion of Turkey, including cultivating agents who posed as loyal Nazis and would therefore presumably form part of the postinvasion occupation force, effectively serving as double agents inside German institutions.

  Once the United States joined the war, the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, eventually set up shop in the city as well. Lanning “Packy” Macfarland, a Chicago banker, arrived in the summer of 1943. He had been recruited into the service in the United States and initially worked out of the US Consulate in Istanbul before renting an apartment not far from the Pera Palace. The Americans intended to use the city’s substantial émigré communities—Germans, but also Czechs, Hungarians, and others from Nazi-occupied or Axis lands—as sources of information, much as the British had been doing for some time.

  A detailed history of this silent war comes from the most boring and inadvertently revealing of sources: the reimbursement forms that intelligence handlers filled out after making contact with a secret informant. Agents received between 50 and 500 Turkish lira per month as retainers; Turkish police were given up to 400 lira per month for supplying hotel arrivals and departures lists. Handlers’ reimbursement forms included a printed line item for “Bribery,” where OSS employees could claim expenses for everything from paying telephone operators not to report long-distance calls to the all-encompassing “purchase of strategic information” from a Turkish or other source. Handlers expensed the purchase of musical instruments, tennis rackets, and men’s suits. The underground economy of tattling and whispering was operating in a warren of streets where people on opposite sides of a worldwide war could literally bump into one another as they went about their work. It was all a bizarrely intimate business. If an agent needed a hernia belt, for example, it might be an American handler who supplied it.

  Running agents in Istanbul was like fishing in a trout pond. There was never any trouble getting a strike on the line; the real issue was making sure that it was the fish you really wanted. “Espionage directed against other countries from Turkey is regarded as a kind of lucrative game at which anyone can play with relative impunity,” said an OSS report. In a city teeming with willing agents, the most important job was to vet them for reliability. It was a field that American operatives called X-2, or counterespionage. In July 1943, an American operative named Joseph Curtiss arrived in Istanbul with $25,000 in private donations allegedly to cover the purchase of antiquarian books for libraries at three East Coast universities. For the next several months, he established his credentials by consulting with book and manuscript dealers in the Grand Bazaar and spreading the word that he was looking for exceptional texts for scholarly collections. The money he carried, however, was for paying agents, not buying rare books. By October—long enough for Curtiss to develop his cover story—it was safe enough for him to have direct contact wit
h Macfarland, the OSS station chief, in order to lay out a plan of action. He was given an office in the OSS headquarters and set up shop before the arrival of another X-2 operative and eventually the branch’s overall director, John Maxson, the following January.

  Curtiss and Maxson were running a shoestring operation, but they quickly realized that they had at their fingertips a network that no one had yet put fully to use: the sizable American community working in the city. Business leaders had been some of the earliest OSS recruits. Archibald Walker, the director of the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, had in fact run the spy operation before the arrival of Macfarland. But X-2 soon set about systematically contacting Americans, many of them working at Robert College, the brother institution to the American College for Girls and a Protestant missionary school that had become one of the country’s best educational centers. Professors, receptionists, and the registrar were all signed up as providers of information. Betty Carp, the matronly administrative officer at the US Consulate and—despite her American-sounding name—a native Istanbullu of Austro-Hungarian background, became one of the major suppliers and vetters of information. Her quiet tradecraft and sharp judgment were so renowned that she had earlier been deployed to Washington. There she had regularly invited the wife of Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov to the movies and then reported their conversations back to the OSS. Her fluency in multiple languages, including German and Turkish, and her low-key ability to ingratiate herself with virtually anyone in Istanbul, gave her unprecedented access. Few Germans probably realized that the short, middle-aged figure standing nonchalantly outside the Teutonia Club was actually making detailed mental notes on who was coming and going.

  One of the few Americans not working in some capacity as an agent was the redoubtable Thomas Whittemore. His ability to spin fantasy into reality was invaluable in fundraising for the Hagia Sophia, but in the world of spycraft, it was a detriment. “Mr. Thomas Whittemore is a very well known Byzantine scholar . . . [and] he is well informed and has contacts with the various Cabinet Ministers,” noted Betty Carp in a secret report. “He is however the type who never condescends to give his information to anyone lower than Churchill or Roosevelt.”

  In a city where information was at a premium, any agent was under enormous pressure to sell it to the highest bidder as well as to attract multiple buyers for the same product—that is, to become a double agent. “They are everywhere in Istanbul,” reported the Istanbul office to the OSS director in Washington, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Part of the work involved keeping tabs on the movement of “enemy nationals” in Istanbul, and the results were substantial. Within only a few months after its establishment, the OSS’s X-2 branch had assembled some three thousand notecards, each providing background and intelligence on a distinct person. The problem was that German handlers were even better, at least when it came to soliciting informants with truly interesting things to say. In particular, the Abwehr—the German military intelligence wing—had a remarkable ability to recruit the kind of agent that Allied personnel seemed to find irresistible, the community that a secret American X-2 report called “bar girls, artistes, and the like.” German handlers spent lavish sums on bribing and covering the expenses of agents working in hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs. Americans seemed especially willing to believe that “any attractive girl who shed a few tears and told him how much she hated the Germans was genuinely anti-Nazi.” Employees of American intelligence services had reportedly thrown “large and rather drunken parties” where women known to be German agents were present. Tongues loosened by alcohol were the stock-in-trade of this particular brand of Istanbul spy.

  By 1944, the security breaches had reached such a level of absurdity that American handlers developed their own theme song, written by a US government employee and given a rousing premiere at a local dance-bar. Its words were mimeographed and distributed to the audience, and it became such a fashionable tune that orchestras throughout the city would strike it up whenever a group of Americans came through the door. The title and refrain—“Boo Boo Baby I’m a Spy”—were the last thing an undercover operative wanted to hear as he walked into a lounge.

  “I’m involved in a dangerous game,” the song went:

  Every other day I change my name,

  My face is different but the body’s the same,

  Boo Boo Baby I’m a spy.

  Of course you’ve heard of Mata Hari,

  We did business cash and carry,

  But Pappy caught us and we had to marry,

  Boo Boo Baby I’m a spy.

  I’m a lad not altogether bad,

  In fact I’m a damn good lover,

  But listen, sweet, let’s be discreet

  And do this under cover. . . .

  A government employee’s openly touting his position as a spy in a cabaret tune was, at the very least, poor tradecraft, and American officials reported the lyrics to Washington as a security threat. But the song was mainly an exercise in bravado. “I’m so cocky I could swagger,” went the chorus. “I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger.” In fact, American spies rarely had the inside dope at all.

  Much of their information came from an extensive array of eastern European émigrés then resident in the city, a group of individuals known as the Dogwood chain, after the code name of its principal liaison with the OSS, a Czech engineer named Alfred Schwarz. Recruited by Macfarland, Schwarz developed what may have been the largest information network in occupied Europe, funneling information on troop movements, airfields, munitions dumps, and fuel terminals back to the OSS station in Istanbul. The problem was that many of the subordinate agents in the chain were actually double agents for German intelligence. Dogwood was deemed to be so unreliable that Macfarland ordered it terminated in the summer of 1944.

  Most of the Dogwood reports had been, at best, mediocre. That was par for the course in Istanbul, and perhaps the inevitable result of too much money chasing too many willing spies. Few espionage efforts produced spectacular results, and those that did were predictably located in Ankara. In early 1944, the British secured the defection of Erich Vermehren, the secretary to the local Abwehr chief. That success proved to be a considerable blow to German morale in Turkey, but the Abwehr had in fact already gone one better.

  The British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, was an irreproachable member of the diplomatic corps. The product of Kentish village life, Victorian rectitude, and the scholarly trail leading from Eton to Oxford, Knatchbull-Hugessen was the image of a British Foreign Office official, with a trim mustache and three-piece suit. The ambassador was supremely well respected within the diplomatic corps, even by his archrival von Papen. The Turks’ only complaint about him, it seems, was his unpronounceable name. But his exalted position may have lured him into complacency. In one of the greatest insider jobs of the war, the Germans in the autumn of 1943 had recruited a person they code-named Cicero. He turned out to be the ambassador’s valet.

  Cicero had in fact fallen into the Germans’ lap. He had presented himself to the first secretary at the German Embassy in Ankara, speaking poor French, using the name “Pierre,” and promising an unbelievable array of secret documents, which he was happy to turn over to Berlin for a fee. “You see, I hate the British,” he explained simply, and he threatened to offer his services to the Soviets if the Germans were not willing to pay the asking price. The diplomats were skeptical, but the valet soon delivered the goods. He was able to access the safe in Knatchbull-Hugessen’s office and photograph secret dispatches between the ambassador and London, including details of wartime conferences and hints of Operation Overlord, the plan for the Allied invasion of Normandy. Some of these documents made it all the way to Hitler, but the Abwehr was never able to capitalize fully on Cicero’s access, largely because of persistent fears that he was too good to be true. In a country where double agents were common, German handlers repeatedly worried that Cicero himself was one. In fact, Cicero seems to have been a sincere pu
rveyor of reliable information, which might have changed the course of the war had Germany heeded it. Instead, the real double cross worked the other way around. The considerable sums of money that Cicero—an Albanian named Elyesa Bazna—received for his services as a spy, the equivalent of several hundred thousand British pounds sterling, turned out to be counterfeit.

  The bombing of the Pera Palace was a rare exception to the general rule that governed espionage in a neutral country: Don’t bother the hosts. By and large, the war in Istanbul was carried out in private apartments and secret meeting places, with handlers and agents mainly interested in avoiding one another in public whenever possible. Even at Turkey’s Republic Day celebrations on October 29, when diplomats were invited to a grand reception at the foreign ministry in Ankara, Turkish officials provided two separate rooms so that enemy powers would not have to share the same hors d’oeuvres and champagne. The foreign community was so small that bumping into a rival operative was reasonably common, however. Teddy Kollek, an Austrian citizen by birth, recalled being approached by a Nazi agent at the Abdullah Efendi restaurant in Istanbul, a popular dinner spot for both Allied and Axis officials. The agent began eagerly speaking to him in German, which Kollek spoke fluently. The conversation abruptly came to a halt when the agent realized he had made a terrible mistake. Kollek was actually working for the Zionist underground in league with British and American intelligence agencies.

  Kollek’s work was only the beginning of a long and storied career. Among other things, after the war he went on to become mayor of Jerusalem. But during his time in Istanbul, he participated in the one operation that could claim to be an unqualified success. By 1944, just as OSS operatives were beginning to wrap up their work in the city, clearing financial accounts and thinking about the next stages in their own careers, a new kind of intelligence effort was kicking into overdrive. Its organizers knew that their work depended not on placating the Turkish authorities but rather on bothering them a great deal. It was a form of undercover work that, more than any other, bumped up against the Turkish Republic’s most hallowed precepts—its claim to ethnic purity, its slow-burning war on its own minorities, and its desire to deal evenhandedly with both Axis and Allies. Rather than gathering information, however, it involved a desperate and risky effort to gather exiled people.