[akin at kurdish.org (AKIN)] Turkey's Terrorists by Lucy Komisar

[ozgurluk at xs4all.nl]

Subject: [akin at kurdish.org (AKIN)] Turkey's Terrorists by Lucy Komisar
From: Press Agency Ozgurluk <ozgurluk at xs4all.nl>

--Multipart_Mon_Apr__7_04:26:46_1997-1
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII



--Multipart_Mon_Apr__7_04:26:46_1997-1
Content-Type: message/rfc822

Message-Id: <v01540b00af6df341b592@[168.143.23.172]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 20:50:00 -0400
To: friends2 at mail.clark.net
From: akin at kurdish.org (AKIN)
Subject: Turkey's Terrorists by Lucy Komisar


This article was published in the April 1997 issue of The Progressive.

Turkey's Terrorists: A CIA Legacy Lives On

By Lucy Komisar

On November 3, a truck crashed into a Mercedes Benz in Susurluk, 90 miles
south of Istanbul, and killed three Turkish passengers: a fugitive heroin
smuggler and hitman, a former high-ranking police officer, and a former
"Miss Cinema." The lone survivor was a rightwing member of parliament. In
the car's trunk, police found a forged passport, police identification
papers, ammunition, silencers and machine guns.

Abdallah Catli, the fugitive heroin smuggler, had escaped from a Swiss
prison. The dead beauty queen, Gonca Uz, was his girlfriend.

The police officer was Huseyin Kocadag, head of a Turkish police academy
and a former Istanbul deputy police chief who reportedly organized hit
squads in the southeast that kill Kurdish guerrillas and their supporters.

The survivor, Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament from the conservative
True Path Party is reportedly in charge of 2,000 Kurdish mercenaries paid
by the government to fight Kurdish guerrillas.

The car carsh has created a sensation in Turkey and had led parliament to
hold hearings on the ties linking the True Path Party, the police, and
thugs like Abdullah Catli. Newspapers in Turkey are making connections
between what they are calling the "state gang" and a secret paramilitary
force that for decades has attacked the left. But as Turkish investigators
dig, they may come across one more hidden connection: The United States set
up that secret paramilitary force at the height of the Cold War.

In the 1950s, the United States was concerned that the Soviet Union would
conquer much of Western Europe. The CIA and the Pentagon came up with a
plan to establish secret resistance groups within various Western European
countries that would fight back against the predicted Soviet occupation.
These groups were called "stay behind" organizations: little cells of
paramilitary units that would take on the Soviets behind enemy lines.
Belgium, France, Holland, Greece, Italy, and Germany have all acknowledged
that they participated in the covert network.

The United States funded these stay behind groups for decades. Even though
there was no Soviet occupation, some of the groups did take up
arms--against leftwing dissidents in their own countries. Some descendants
of these groups are still at it, especially in Turkey.

Abdullah Catli was one of these.

"The accident unveiled the dark liaisons within the state," former prime
minister Bulent Ecevit told parliament in December. Now leader of a small
opposition social democratic party, Ecevit knows a lot about those
liaisons. He first told me about them--and the American connection--back in
1990, when I interviewed him in his Ankara office, where he sat in a soft,
brown chair sipping a cherry drink.

Ecevit is a genial, seventy-one year old man with a high forehead, deep-set
eyes, a beakish nose, curly black hair, and a moustache. The son of a
doctor and a painter, Ecevit is an intellectual and a poet who has
translated T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound. He graduated from the American-run
Robert College and lived in the U.S. as a student and a journalist. He once
led the major social democratic party; there was a split, and he now heads
the smaller of the two.

Ecevit became prime minister in 1973. He told me he was startled the
following year when the Turkish military high command requested money from
the prime minister's secret fund to pay for a new headquarters for the
Special Warfare Department. General Semih Sancar, Turkey's army commander,
told him about the department. He said the Americans had funded it from the
start, but now they were allegedly pulling out. Sancar advised Ecevit not
to look too closely at the matter. Ecevit investigated and found no such
organization in the state budget.

"There are a certain number of volunteer patriots whose names are kept
secret and are engaged for life in this special department," a military
briefer told Ecevit. "They have hidden arms caches in various parts of the
country."

At the time, Ecevit worried that these so-called lifetime patriots might
have a rightist slant and would use their weaponry to advance their
ideological goals. But he felt he was in no position to deny them funds.
Ecevit's party was the largest, but it had won only a third of the votes.
He was running a shaky coalition government. Ecevit released the funds the
military wanted and never discussed the matter with the United States.

But the U.S. government surely knew about it. It set up the secret stay
behind organization and funded it for more than two decades.

Working out of the Joint U.S. Military Aid Team headquarters, it was known
first as the Tactical Mobilization Group and then the Special Warfare
Department. In 1971, after a military coup, it was dubbed the
counterguerrilla force and turned into an instrument of terror against the
left.

Journalist Ugur Mumcu, who was arrested shortly after the coup, wrote later
that his torturers told him, "We are the counterguerrilla. Even the
president of the republic cannot touch us." (Mumcu, who continued to write
in the daily Cumhuriyet about the counterguerrilla force and about the
existence of rightist drug gangs connected to the government, was killed by
a car bomb in 1993.)

Confirmation of the counterguerrilla force's existence has come from the
highest sources. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Kennan Evren, who led a
1980 coup, wrote in his memoirs that Suleyman Demirel, now president and in
the late 1970s prime minister, asked then that the Special Warfare
Department be used to combat terrorism. Evren said he refused, but that
Demirel had insisted, pointing out that it had been used in 1971 against
subversive activities.

General Evren acknowledged that the Special Warfare Department was involved
in clandestine activities, citing the murder of nine leftwing militants at
Kizildere in northern Turkey in 1972. He told a newspaper that civilians in
the paramilitary organization run by the department may have been involved
in terrorist incidents in the 1970s without his knowledge. Given the
military's tight control over security, such ignorance is highly unlikely.

One notorious terrorist incident the stay behind group may have been
involved in occurred on May Day, 1977, when the major trade union
confederation organized a rally that brought several hundred thousand
people to Istanbul's main Taksim Square. As the sun was setting, snipers on
surrounding buildings started firing at the speakers' platform. The crowd
panicked. Thirty-eight were killed; hundreds were injured. The shooting
lasted for 20 minutes; several thousand police at the scene did nothing.

Ecevit, who was out of office at the time, went to see President Fahri
Koruturk and told him he thought the counterguerrilla force might have
carried out the massacre. "Give me a written statement," Koruturk answered.
He relayed Ecevit's fears to Prime Minister Demirel, Ecevit recalled, but
nothing came of it.

When he ran for prime minister in late 1977, Ecevit denounced the
counterguerrillas. When he became prime minister, he told Army Chief of
Staff Evren, 'During the Kizildere incidents the Special Warfare Section is
said to have been used. I am worried about this civilian organization.
There is no means of knowing or controlling what a young recruit may get up
to after twenty years in such an organization."

Evren replied, "There is nothing to worry about. We will deal with it." So
Ecevit blocked a parliamentary debate on the issue. At a news conference,
he denied existence of the counterguerrilla group and said his earlier
charges were just suppositions. Signaling his fear of provoking the
military, he said, "We must all be respectful towards the Turkish Armed
Forces and help them in the realization of their desire to remain out of
politics."

Once, when Ecevit was touring the country, a general in eastern Turkey gave
a dinner in his honor. When Ecevit learned he had worked in the Special
Warfare Department, he told the general, "I have deep suspicians about the
civilian extension of that department."

"The civilians work very honestly, very faithfully," the general assured
him. "There is nothing to be afraid of."

Ecevit told him, "Simply as a hypothesis, it's quite possible, general,
that one of those lifetime patriots might at a certain later date become
the party chief of the Nationalist Action Party which is involved in
rightwing terrorism in this very town.

"Yes," said the general, "This is the case, but he's a very nice man."

By the late 1970's, violence between the left and right threatened Turkey's
stability. The chief violent group on the right was the neofascist "Grey
Wolves," the militant arm of the rightist Nationalist Action Party head by
Alparslan Turkes, a former colonel and a leader of the 1960 military coup.

Our dead heroin trafficker, Abdallah Catli, was a leader of the Grey Wolves
when he was found guilty in absentia of organizing the 1978 murders of
seven student members of the Turkish Labor Party.

After the car crash, Turkes admitted that Catli had worked clandestinely
for the military and police, that he had worked "in the framework of a
secret service working for the good of the state." A former Turkish
foreign-ministry adviser and the head of the intelligence anti-terror unit
also told officials conducting the current parliamentary inquiry that Catli
worked for Turkish intelligence.

Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller, a leader of the conservative True Path
Party, praised Catli after the crash: "Those who fire bullets or suffer
their wounds in the name of this country, this nation and this state will
always be respectfully remembered by us."

The rightwing terrorism Catli was involved in during the late 1970s helped
set the stage for the 1980 military coup, which the generals said was
needed to save the country from anarchy.

After the 1980 coup, several hundred thousand leftists were jailed for
three or four years without trial. Many were tortured. The parliamentary
commission has called on Evren to testify about charges that terror squads
were used routinely by the military junta and participated in roundups of
leftists.

By the mid-80s, the counterguerrillas had a new target; the Kurds.
Government security agencies began using paramilitary death squads against
Kurds who started an armed struggle in 1984. In November 1990, six months
after our interview, Ecevit repeated publicly that a clandestine
paramilitary force existed in Turkey. Three weeks later, the head of the
Turkish Army Operations Department and the commander of the Special Forces
issued a statement that there was a special NATO organization in Turkey
called the Special Warfare Department, whose mission was "to organize
resistence in the case of a communist occupation." They said its secret
member "patriots" were not connected to the counterguerrillas. The special
NATO organization was, of course, the "stay behind" operation the Americans
had started.

In 1992, the commander of the Special Warfare Department, General Kemal
Yilmaz said, "The department is still active in security operations against
armed members of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) in Turkey's southeastern
provinces."

The U.S. State Department's 1995 human rights report on Turkey was blunt:
"Prominent credible human rights organizations, Kurdish leaders, and local
Kurds asserted that the government acquiesces in, or even carries out, the
murders of civilians." It said, "Human rights groups reported the
widespread and credible belief that a counterguerrilla group associated
with the security forces had carried out at least some 'mystery killings.'
"

The State Department's 1996 report on Turkey did not mention the
counterguerrillas, but said that, " 'mystery killings,' continued to occur
with disturbing frequency." It also said, "The 1995 recommendations of a
parliamentary committee, designed to purge "illegal formations" within the
state which the committee said committed some mystery killings, were not
implemented."

The Turkish embassy in Washington said it had no information on these
illegal formations. Meanwhile, the paramilitary commission investigating
the Mercedes Benz crash has recommended prosecuting the lone survivor of
the crash, along with thirty-four others linked to the scandal, including
several former police chiefs and officers.

As for Washington's role, Pentagon would not tell me whether it was still
providing funds or other aid to the Special Warfare Department; in fact, it
wouldn't answer any questions about it. I was told by officials variously
that they knew nothing about it, that it had happened too long ago for
there to be any records available, or that what I described was a CIA
operation for which they could provide no information. One Pentagon
historian, said, "Oh, you mean the 'stay behind' organization. That's
classified."

The Pope's Assassins

Abdullah Catli, the fugitive who died in the Mercedes Benz crash, was also
connected to the man who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981,
Mehmet Ali Agca.

Both were members of the Grey Wolves. Both had worked together in a
previous assassination effort. In 1979, Ali Agca killed a Turkish newspaper
editor. Catli was in on the plot. When the police arrest Agca, they found a
false passport belonging to Catli.

Catli then reportedly helped organize Agca's escape from an Istanbul
military prison, and some have suggested Catli was even involved in the
Pope's assassination attempt.

The CIA said the assassination attempt was the work of the Soviets, through
their Bulgarian allies. This has never been proven, and a much more
plausible case can be made that it was a rightist plot. The Grey Wolves
were clearly implicated, and they are directly related to the Turkish
counterguerrilla force.

But why would a Turkish rightist squad have an interest in assassinating
the Pope? The answer may lie with links between the "stay behind"
organizations in various European countries, which all had a stake in
blaming terrorism on the left.

Most is known about the Italian Gladio, Latin for sword, which worked with
the Mafia and neofascists to prevent Italian communists from taking power
through insurrection or the vote. Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti
acknowledged the existence of the Gladio in testimony before an Italian
parliamentary commission on August 2, 1990. He said Italy had used a
"strategy of tension" to undercut the influence of the legal communist
party.

That strategy was terrorism. The Gladio conducted bombings, and then blamed
the bombings on the left. The assassination attempt on the Pope may have
been part of this strategy of tension.

At the scene of the Mercedes Benz crash, Turkish investigators found Catli
with a fake passport. "The person on this photo, Mehmet Ozbay, works as a
specialist for the police directorate and he is allowed to carry guns."
Mehmet Ozbay was an alias--the very same alias that Mehmet Ali Agca had on
his own passport.



Lucy Komisar, a New York journalist, is doing research about Turkey for a
book on U.S. foreign policy and human rights in the 1970s and 80s.


----
American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2623 Connecticut Avenue NW #1
Washington, DC 20008-1522

Tel: (202) 483-6444
Fax: (202) 483-6476
E-mail: akin at kurdish.org
Home Page: http://www.kurdistan.org
----

The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship


Press-Agency Ozgurluk: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ozgurluk
Turkey Contra-Guerrilla-State: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ozgurluk/contrind/
Searchable Database: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ozgurluk/ml.html
KURTULUS HAFTALIK SIYASI GAZETE: http://www.kurtulus.com



--Multipart_Mon_Apr__7_04:26:46_1997-1--