SHADOW WARS

 

Air raid drill, ca. 1944: Istanbul firemen in gas masks stand guard outside the entrance to Galatasaray Lycée on a deserted Grande Rue.

 

FIVE MONTHS AFTER JOSEPH GOEBBELS checked out of the Pera Palace, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Turkey soon affirmed its neutrality. The country had been an early joiner in the First World War, and Turkish politicians—not to mention the republic’s refugee citizenry—could remember the result. Few families had been untouched by the effects of genocide, foreign invasion, ethnic cleansing, and forced migration. At a funeral it doesn’t matter where you stand, the Turkish foreign minister told the British ambassador, so long as you’re not lying in the coffin.

The commitment to staying on the sidelines was as old as the republic itself. Mustafa Kemal had articulated the principle of “peace at home, peace in the world,” and it became the polestar of the country’s foreign policy. The concept flowed as much from rational self-interest as from idealism. Turkey had sloughed off its old empire to its own great advantage. Smaller and leaner, the republic had few of the territorial problems that had bedeviled its imperial predecessor. “Where should we be now if, forced to mobilize and put our troops in Thrace, we had at the same time to defend the Yemen?” Prime Minister ükrü Saracolu explained to a colleague. But Turkey was still situated in a complicated neighborhood.

In the Mediterranean, Italy’s ambitious rise was seen as a major threat, especially after the Italian occupation of Albania in the spring of 1939. Across the Black Sea, the Soviet Union had become a serious worry. The days of looking to the Soviet model of single-party rule, quick economic development, and breakneck nation-building were gone. Ankara and Moscow were united in a nonaggression pact left over from the early years of the republic, but the concern now was that Stalin would use war as an excuse to grab Turkish territory in eastern Anatolia or to realize the old Russian dream of controlling the Straits. To the south, British and French influence lingered on in those countries’ mandate administrations in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Some Turkish politicians saw the old adversaries as prospective allies, but two decades after the occupation of Istanbul and the abortive Treaty of Sèvres, others still looked warily on relations with London and Paris. In the Balkans, Turkey was bound by a treaty with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The pact committed the signatory states to stable borders and consultations in the event of hostilities, but Bulgaria’s refusal to join kept the region tense and Turkey’s border unsecured.

Farther afield, Germany was Turkey’s most important trading partner and a core market for raw materials such as chromium, used in the German arms industry. Despite the disastrous alliance with Berlin during the First World War, there was considerable sympathy for the confident nationalism and state-dominated economy of Hitler’s new order. Some public figures in Istanbul and Ankara shared the Reich’s founding ideology as well, declaring Turks and Aryans natural allies in the coming racial struggle. The same month as Goebbels’s visit to Istanbul, Berlin deployed one of its most seasoned officials, former chancellor Franz von Papen, as the new ambassador in Ankara. Although a sometime critic of Hitler, von Papen had in fact been one of Nazism’s great enablers, assisting in Hitler’s rise to the German chancellorship and in winning over Austria to the German cause. His powers of persuasion now seemed to be aimed squarely at Turkey.

All the countries that Turks had once seen as models of civilized behavior—France and Britain in the nineteenth century, Germany in the early twentieth, the Soviet Union during the war of independence—were hurtling toward mutual destruction. Turkish foreign policy thus involved careful balancing. The strategy was to build a protective web of alliances, counteralliances, and nonaggression agreements, all the while trying to convince each major power that Turkish neutrality was in everyone’s best interest. In 1936, Turkey had signed the Montreux Convention governing shipping on the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The government was required to keep the Straits open to civilian traffic in peacetime and to restrict the deployment of naval vessels not belonging to states bordering the Black Sea. When at war, Turkey was authorized to place its own limits on the passage of both military and civilian craft of belligerent countries. Those provisions gave the Turkish government a convenient out: They provided a legally binding reason for dealing evenhandedly with all countries, whether Allies, Axis, or neither. But as Europe raced toward war, old treaties and commitments were falling by the wayside. Few people could predict how Turkey’s foreign policy might evolve in the immediate future. The reason was that the country was itself in the middle of the most profound period of political uncertainty since the foundation of the republic.

When the law requiring surnames was passed in 1934, the Grand National Assembly voted to award Mustafa Kemal the name Atatürk, often translated as “Father of the Turks.” Atatürk was certainly perceived that way at the time: as the military liberator, first president, and visionary modernizer of his country—the true founding father and model citizen for the earliest generation of republicans. But a better translation would be something like “Papa Turk.” Not only was he the driving force behind the country’s sweeping cultural, political, and economic changes; he was also regarded as an avuncular figure whose every utterance gave rise to reverent and—so far as these things can be discerned—genuine adoration.

Atatürk was very much in the mold of other twentieth-century dictators. He ground down political opposition and held firm to the belief that state planning could realize the true interests of the nation, without ever feeling the need to ask the nation what its interests happened to be. Yet, unlike a Mussolini or a Franco, he knew where to draw the line. He was one of the few supreme leaders of the era to develop a cult of personality that staved off its own inevitable decay. The reason was a matter of timing.

Atatürk had the good fortune, in a way, to exit the stage while his reputation was still near its height. He spent the summer of 1938 in Istanbul, much as he had done each of the previous ten years, visiting Florya beach and lodging at Dolmabahçe Palace and aboard the Savarona, a yacht the Turkish government had purchased for his use. Much of his youthful vigor was gone, however. His stocky physique and upright bearing had given way to a stoop. His skin had gone sallow and green. Cirrhosis of the liver had sapped his strength, and nosebleeds, rashes, and pneumonia had caused him to withdraw from daily tasks. At a frail fifty-seven years old, he had become more a venerable head of state than the energetic head of government who had pushed through the last batch of monumental reforms—the surname law, women’s suffrage, a constitutional guarantee on secularism—only a few years earlier. In mid-October, he fell into a coma, recovered briefly, and then slipped back into unconsciousness. He died on the morning of November 10 at Dolmabahçe, the site of so many other defining moments in Istanbul’s modern history, from the exile of the last sultan to the departure of the Allied occupation force. To this day, the clock in his palace bedchamber is set permanently to 9:05, the moment of the president’s death.

The city, like the country as a whole, went into a frenzy of grief. Children poured from schools weeping, to be picked up by worried parents who themselves had tears streaming down their faces. Newspapers appeared in midday editions with their pages framed by black borders. Atatürk’s last words had been a Muslim salutation—“Peace be upon you”—but his funeral arrangements were decidedly secular. His body was embalmed, rather than buried immediately as required by Islamic law, and lay in state at the palace for an entire week. The crowds were vast and inconsolable. Nearly a dozen people were trampled to death in the crush. A few days later, his coffin was taken in solemn procession to a battleship. As the cortege departed the city, hundreds of thousands of people watched from the shore, lined up like seabirds on piers and breakwaters. The ship continued across the Sea of Marmara and transferred its cargo to a train for the onward journey to Ankara, where the president was interred. He was later moved to an august mausoleum overlooking the capital.

Atatürk’s final gift to his country was his failure to name a preferred successor. That act of silence meant that the regular process for selecting a new president was allowed to work. The constitution specified that the head of state was to be elected by parliament, as Atatürk himself had been, term after term. The Grand National Assembly soon selected smet nönü—the field commander from the war of independence and sometime prime minister—as the republic’s second president.

A farewell salute, November 1938: Wailing crowds and police officers at the funeral procession of Atatürk.

nönü had been one of Turkey’s great political survivors. He had managed to outlast most of the other early allies of Atatürk and had become a dutiful second-in-command to the president, although by no means always within his good graces. His invented surname harked back to 1921, when, as smet Pasha, he had led nationalist forces at the dual battles of nönü, engagements that marked early milestones in the nationalists’ strike against the Hellenic army. In addition to the presidency, the parliament awarded him the honorific title of “National Leader,” but it was an uncomfortable fit. Thin and mustachioed, nönü was a manager and a strategist, with none of the charisma or drive of an Atatürk—a figure who, even in death, was given the even grander title of “Eternal Leader.”

All of that turned out to be a good thing, however. nönü had done a great deal of backroom maneuvering to ensure his succession as president, but outwardly the transition was smoother than anyone had expected. According to the British ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, “The only change noticeable was the introduction of a quieter and more orthodox life in political circles.” nönü flirted with a Turkish version of blood-and-soil nationalism and remained suspicious of ethnic minorities, but his approach to foreign policy was to embed Turkey in a set of treaties and explicit undertakings with rival governments. As Hitler and Stalin jointly occupied Poland, nönü first turned to the West, signing a mutual assistance pact with Britain and France. Once German troops marched into Paris and German planes began targeting London, that lifeline came to look more like a sea anchor threatening to drag Turkey into the conflict. In June 1941, Turkey pivoted and signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany. The same month, Hitler launched his sudden attack on the Soviet Union, opening a new front in the war and seemingly confirming the bet that Ankara had made on Germany’s ascendancy.

As both a neutral country and one with a geographical position at the intersection of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East, Turkey was never short of strategic suitors. Trying to figure out which direction Turkish public opinion was moving and seeking to use it to the advantage of either the Axis or the Allies became one of the great parlor games of the war. It was also a project pursued by countless freelance agents, paid operatives, and professional intelligence services, all energetically spying on one another and hoping to turn Turkey toward their cause.

“You could almost throw a stone out of the window of any leading hotel and hit an agent,” recalled an American official about wartime Istanbul. “In fact, we should have.” Foreign embassies had left behind their ornate Ottoman-era buildings in Pera and their summertime residences on the Bosphorus for more utilitarian quarters in Ankara. But the easy accessibility of Istanbul and its status as the largest urban center in the republic still made it a vital arena for gathering information on Turks as well as enemies.

That task was aided by the city’s large number of foreigners, a population that had grown over the course of the 1930s. Virtually every European language was represented in Istanbul, and among each of these communities it was not difficult to find someone—a business leader, a banker, a shopkeeper, a professor, a bar attendant—dissatisfied enough with his old homeland to provide information to a rival power. German politics in particular had produced a tide of refugees eager to work against Nazi rule. Just as Istanbul had been the way station for White Russians pushed out of Bolshevik Russia, it now served as a lifeline for academics, especially Jews, dismissed from their posts by the Nazis.

Through Swiss intercessors, German and Austrian scholars made contact with the Turkish Ministry of Education and managed to secure posts as lecturers in Istanbul. The desire to rid German universities of the racially impure and politically suspect was to Turkey’s immediate benefit. The republic had recently established its first real Western-style institution of higher education, Istanbul University. German-speaking professors became its principal teaching cadre, delivering lectures with the assistance of local translators and helping to structure the new institution’s departments along European lines. When the first German professor stepped into a lecture hall, in November 1933, Yunus Nadi ran a front-page headline in his newspaper to announce the fact. Turkish higher education, he claimed, had finally joined the Western world.

University students suddenly had access to some of the continent’s leading lights in virtually every field of study. Philosophy and geography were taught by Alexander Rustow from Nuremberg, the noted socialist activist (and the father of political scientist Dankwart Rustow). Leo Spitzer, the comparative philologist, moved from Cologne to head up the faculty of foreign languages. Walter Gottschalk, one of Berlin’s greatest Orientalists, organized the university library and catalogued the substantial scholarly collection that Sultan Abdülhamid II had amassed at Yıldız Palace. Erich Auerbach, the literary theorist, moved from Marburg to teach philology. He began one of his masterpieces, Mimesis—a study of the fluidity of representation and reality in Western literature—while teaching on the Bosphorus. Albert Einstein might have been part of the cohort as well, if an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, had not come through before he was able to move to Istanbul.

These scholars were not just out of work in their home countries. They were also without home countries. Many would eventually have their citizenship revoked by the Nazi regime. They were known as Heimatlose—legally homeless—much as the White Russians had been after the advent of Bolshevism. But they were also living in a city that, as in the 1920s, placed victors and victims in close quarters. In addition to the refugee professors, there were perhaps a thousand German citizens in Turkey, most in Istanbul. Many of these expatriates were organized into Landesgruppen, or regional organizations, of the Nazi Party. The party organization was headquartered in Moda, a fashionable neighborhood on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. On Sundays, local Germans and their sympathizers working for the party would gather there at the local affiliate of Kraft durch Freude—or Strength through Joy, the Nazi tourist agency—to receive instructions for the coming week. Many of the senior officers had their lodgings at the Deutsche Schule, the prestigious German-language high school just off the Grande Rue, which was also a short stroll from the Teutonia Club, the principal meeting place for the party elite.

Nazi race laws tended to reproduce themselves abroad, and German citizens were instructed to conduct business only with firms that had been vetted as both politically and racially pure by the German Consulate—that is, no commerce with anti-Nazi sympathizers among the German-speaking diaspora, or with businesses thought to be in the pocket of the Allies, or of course with Istanbul’s Jews. The Tokatlian Hotel, run by an Austrian, Nicolaus Medovi, was on the approved list, as were the bookstores on the Grande Rue run by Erich Kalis and Andres Kapps, the rug shop owned by Josef Krauss in the Grand Bazaar, and the travel bureau in Galata run by Hans Walter Feustel. Local Jews, in turn, responded with their own boycott. In 1938, when Medovi; began to fly the Nazi flag outside his establishment—a nod to the Anschluss between Germany and his native Austria—Jewish Istanbullus organized a campaign to convince fellow citizens to avoid the hotel and its restaurant. The Tokatlian had been one of the premier establishments in the city, a favorite venue for everything from society weddings to receptions for Yunus Nadi’s Miss Turkey competition. With the boycott, however, the Tokatlian’s fortunes plummeted, much to the advantage of other locales such as the Pera Palace.

The presence of such a large, vocal, and politically committed German community also made Istanbul the ideal site for clandestine intelligence-gathering by all sides. It was the natural route of communication between Europe and the Middle East. A long history of German ties to the Turkish military, going back to the late Ottoman period, meant that many educated and successful Turks had sympathies for the German cause. Moreover, the presence of White Russians who were reliably anti-Soviet, Armenians who were potentially anti-Turkish (and could therefore be enlisted to provide information on Turkish affairs), and a Turkish policy establishment with long experience in spying on its own population meant that Istanbul was fertile ground for both Axis and Allied spycraft.

By one count, seventeen separate foreign intelligence agencies were active in Istanbul during the war. The problem was not that operatives from many countries were conducting work inside Turkey. That was to be expected in a neutral state, and Istanbul had been prime ground for collecting information since the days when the sultan’s own agents had been politely asked to vacate their tables to paying customers at the Pera Palace. As long as a foreign country kept its activities discreet and at a level that did not inconvenience the host, Turkish officials were generally content to allow the clandestine derring-do to flourish. On occasion, however, the shadow war moved into the light, and when that happened, it became evident to many Istanbullus just how vulnerable their city had become.

In the crush of passengers and station touts that accompanied the arrival of the Sunday evening train from the Balkans, diplomats scrambled to find their luggage and hail a fleet of taxis. It was March 11, 1941, and the entire British mission to Bulgaria had been expelled. Bulgaria was a German ally now—just as it had been in 1914—and no longer welcoming to officials whose country was being targeted by German bombers. Sixty British diplomats were being evacuated to the safety of Istanbul. The last time so many Allied officials had arrived in the city at once had been aboard the Superb and other British vessels during the occupation. Now they were arriving as guests of the Turkish government.

It was not the way they had expected to leave their posting. On March 1, German advance troops had entered Sofia. Soon afterward, the British ambassador, George Rendel, visited the Bulgarian prime minister, Bogdan Filov, and in a sharp exchange delivered his country’s note severing diplomatic ties. Rendel’s daughter, Anne, made a point of driving around town with a Union Jack fluttering behind her car.

Rendel returned to the embassy and ordered all the documents burned. A huge pile of trunks, suitcases, and parcels accumulated in the embassy’s drawing room. American diplomats, still nonbelligerents in the war, were on hand to take the building keys and receive the ambassador’s thanks for looking after the property in the Britons’ absence. The luggage at last sorted, the diplomats formed a long convoy of cars and lorries toward a suburban station. Two German security officers were on hand to watch the departure from the sidelines. To keep up the evacuees’ spirits, the American ambassador and a few pro-British Bulgarians accompanied the group on board the train as far as the Bulgarian border. Farewells were toasted with champagne, and then the extra passengers disembarked just before the train crossed the Maritsa River and continued toward Turkey.

Looking out the train windows at the undulating countryside of Thrace, Rendel fell into a gray mood. In Sofia, he had seen the disciplined German soldiers, the mechanized transports, the crisp uniforms. Now he could see Turkish soldiers being sent to reinforce the border: an army of oxcarts and ponies, and men armed with what looked like antique muskets. “My impression was strengthened that, if the Germans decided to attack and occupy Turkey, there would certainly be nothing to oppose them until they got to the Bosphorus, if then,” Rendel recalled.

The British diplomats arrived in Istanbul around six o’clock in the evening. Sirkeci station was humming. Friends from the British Consulate were there to welcome the group, along with representatives of the governments-in-exile of Nazi-occupied Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As they made their way down the quay and out through the brick-and-granite façade, they had their first glimpse of the heights of Pera, with house lights just coming on around the Galata Tower and fishing boats bobbing on the Golden Horn.

The taxis left the station and crossed Galata Bridge, heading out of the forest of minarets in the city center and toward Tepebaı and then onto Merutiyet Avenue, the former Graveyard Street. After a few blocks, the cars swung around a corner and pulled up at the Pera Palace. Porters unloaded the steamer trunks and leather suitcases into the marble foyer. Clerks rushed to take down passport details. Once the formalities were completed, Rendel accompanied his daughter to their room and began to unpack. Other members of the mission took the short flight of steps toward a nightcap in the velvety darkness of the Orient Bar.

A flash of light, then a deafening boom suddenly shook the hotel. The elevator creaked on its cables and plummeted to the bottom of its shaft. The glass canopy collapsed, showering shards on the reception hall. Inlaid cabinets and mahogany chairs slid in pieces across the parquet. Blood spattered the marble stairs and plaster walls, and small fires erupted from the wood paneling.

An eerie silence followed, soon broken by the moans of the injured emerging from the smoke and plaster dust. A jagged canyon had been cut through the ground floor into the cellar; in the darkness, dazed guests tumbled into it unaware. Two British Embassy employees lay in agony and would soon succumb to their wounds. Several Turkish hotel workers and bystanders were also either dead or dying, while others were missing limbs or covered with excruciating burns. Two local Jewish doormen, the hotel’s Greek general manager, Mr. Karantinos, a Muslim chauffeur, two Turkish policemen, the Greek head clerk, a Muslim night watchman, and a range of other workers and guests all sustained injuries. In all, six adults and the unborn child of an embassy staffer would be listed as fatalities. Outside, people lay unconscious or wandered up the avenue in shock. Windows and storefronts were blown out in the surrounding streets, and upstairs, guests rushed from their rooms, certain that German planes had launched an air raid.

Some of the survivors knew immediately that the cause lay elsewhere. Their thoughts raced back to the busy train station in Sofia. The owners of two pieces of stray luggage had not been identified before the train left Bulgaria, but in the rush to depart, officers with the legation had decided simply to load the suitcases with the others and sort out the ownership once everyone arrived in Istanbul. As soon as the explosion rocked the Pera Palace, one of the diplomats raced to a nearby hotel where other members of the party were checking in. He identified the second stray suitcase, ran with it outside, and flung it onto a patch of open ground. There was no explosion, but when the police arrived soon afterward, they realized there well could have been. The bag contained a fuse and a powerful charge of TNT.

An explosion’s aftermath, March 1941: The lounge of the Pera Palace after the detonation of a suitcase bomb.

Only sometime later was the entire chain of events put together. Bulgarian agents, working in league with the Germans, had placed the explosive luggage in the British pile. It was a shoddy and fruitless piece of sabotage, aimed at little more than creating a sensational mass assassination of enemy diplomats. The Turkish government remained diffident, worried about escalating a crisis whose target was apparently not Turkey itself. The public prosecutor, who issued a report the next month, was officiously clear: “Having come to the conclusion that the event . . . is an attempt against the staff of the British Legation and prepared at Sofia by a German or Bulgarian organization or an organization dependent on them, and as no proof whatever has been found to the effect that this attempt has been organized and prepared within the frontiers and by a person or an organization residing in Turkey, our Office has decided that there was no room to undertake any legal proceedings against anybody.”

That was the end of the affair, at least as far as diplomacy was concerned. The Pera Palace had not been intentionally targeted by the bombers. Its fate was a function of its reputation. Neither of the two bombs had exploded in the way they were apparently intended, on the train; the devices only arrived at the hotels because the British legation had selected them as comfortable places to stay. The British government eventually paid out benefits to the families of the two embassy personnel killed in the Pera Palace blast—typists Gertrude Ellis and Therese Armstrong—along with several other British subjects who were injured. London also compensated the Turkish government for the death benefits and medical expenses of a substantial group of local individuals killed or injured by the fire and flying debris.

As Misbah Muhayye, the hotel’s unlucky proprietor, began making plans for rebuilding, the bombed-out Pera Palace stood as a reminder of just how close the war was coming. German troops were already in Bulgaria, and in April and May 1941, the Wehrmacht began its campaign in the Balkans, quickly occupying Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete. Istanbul was on the front line, and more than ever before, Turkey would have to be prepared to defend its borders, noted Yunus Nadi in Cumhuriyet. Istanbullus had already been practicing air-raid drills and blackouts since the previous November. Trees, sidewalks, and electric poles had been painted white so people could navigate them more easily in the moonlight. During the drills, firemen lined the Grande Rue in gas masks that made them look like creatures from another world, as three hundred sirens blared throughout the city. To conserve fuel, private automobiles were banned from the streets, and half of the nearly two thousand taxis were pulled out of commission.

For foreign governments, the expansion of the war meant that Istanbul was more important than ever, not just as a venue for gathering intelligence but also as a station for organizing multiple underground campaigns: to shift Turkish public opinion toward one side or the other, to organize operations against Germany and its allies in southeastern Europe, and to funnel money and arms to resistance fighters holding out in the rugged uplands of Greece and Yugoslavia. Once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Turks were surrounded by active military campaigns on virtually every side. For the Turkish government, being neutral was no longer just about refusing to enter the fray. It entailed buying friends and understanding potential enemies—in other words, playing the spy game as actively as the belligerents themselves.

Mahmut Ardıç and Reat Mutlugün were two of the six people killed by the blast at the Pera Palace. Both men were Turkish Muslims, judging by their first names, and they probably were the first people in a long line of ancestors to have family names that could be passed down from father to children. Ardıç and Mutlugün were variously identified as detectives or gendarmes, but a grand hotel would have been an unusual place to find a beat cop or a gumshoe investigator, especially since there is no record of any significant crime having been committed there in the days leading up to the explosion. What is more likely is that the two men—whose surnames made them the unlikely duo of Officers Juniper and Happy Day—were members of the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet. Their untimely deaths, a result of nothing more than the ill fortune of being at the Pera Palace when the rigged suitcase exploded, were emblematic of the intertwined worlds of foreign intelligence, diplomacy, and business in the wartime city.

Emniyet officers would have been expected to be on hand to supervise the arrival of a large foreign delegation, especially one that was being evacuated from an enemy country aboard a special train. Keeping tabs on visitors was part of the organization’s job, along with surveilling political dissidents, poets, journalists, religious zealots, subversives, terrorists, militants, revolutionaries, communists, socialists, and virtually any other category that the Emniyet perceived to be a present or possible threat to the state.

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 with 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 purveyor 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.