Let me pause here, Mary Ann, to answer a question that one of your number raised in a recent email. As the mother of two grown children, I do understand where it comes from. It must be very hard for someone in Washington DC to take on board – especially if that person is sitting in the well-appointed, amply funded and closely guarded offices of the Center for Democratic Change. Here we have a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come close to death or serious injury at the hands of an anti-American rabble in the streets of Istanbul. Why did she not take the first plane home? To quote your colleague – there are two parents involved here. If William Wakefield refused to see the writing on the wall, why did Jeannie’s mother also fail to act, once it became clear that the city was fast becoming a no-go zone for US personnel?
In fact, she did, though she was hampered at first by poor information. To illustrate my point, let me backtrack to the first incident your colleague mentions: the bombing of the NCO Club by leftwing students in Ankara in late November 1970. Sadly, it did not make the New York Times, so Jeannie’s mother never heard of it.
As for the incident in late December – when another group of leftwing students threw firebombs at the Prime Minister’s car in downtown Istanbul – the New York Times did run a short item on his narrow escape. Solicitous mother that she was, Nancy Wakefield called Istanbul at once to register her concern. But her ex-husband insisted there was nothing to worry about. The bomb, he said, was ‘a flash in a pan.’
In January, there was a lull – though the New York Times ran a long piece in the middle of the month that alluded to dangerous student extremists pushing the country towards civil war. However, the author was confident that the Prime Minister would keep the ship of state on course, and when William Wakefield spoke to his exwife, he quoted from this article.
A week later, students barricaded themselves into the faculty buildings of a university in Ankara and fought back the police with gunfire, firebombs, dynamite and stones. Eight people were injured, and forty-five were arrested. There was no report in the New York Times, and therefore no phone call from Northampton.
In February 1971 Turkey became ‘a story’. When Demirel, the Prime Minister, introduced legislation that would make it a prisonable offence to ‘interfere with commercial activity, occupy factories, make bombs, insult or resist officers of the law, interfere with public services or road transport and deface official posters’, the New York Times devoted the better part of a page to putting his move into context. Again, they described the threat as seen from the Prime Minister’s office: the universities were full of dangerous anarchists, subversives and extremists. The most dangerous were their leaders, who were not really students, he said, but ‘agents provocateurs’. Their demands, he said, had nothing to do with university reform but with ‘extreme Marxism and Maoism.’ And yes, this did give Jeannie’s mother pause.
So imagine her horror when, four days later, she opened her morning paper to read that a band of extreme leftwing students connected to Revolutionary Youth, Turkey’s largest leftwing student association, had kidnapped a US sergeant in Ankara. Though they released him seventeen hours later, the Turkish authorities were now under pressure to take visible and decisive action to end the wave of terrorist attacks on US personnel, so they instigated a series of arms searches in the country’s largest universities. They met with heavy resistance. In one raid at Hacıttepe Medical University in Ankara, there were twenty people injured and two hundred arrests.
Reporting on the wave of bomb blasts in other parts of the country, the New York Times spoke of an ‘expanded urban guerrilla movement’, increasing hatred of ‘US imperialism’, and the growing danger to which US citizens living in Turkey were now exposed. Reading this, Nancy Wakefield began her campaign in earnest, but she had made little headway when, in early March, a group calling itself the Turkish People’s Liberation Army, kidnapped four US airmen as they were driving out of an airbase near the capital. The kidnappers sent a letter to a newspaper to announce that they were ‘purging the country of all American and foreign enemies’ and to promise that the hostages would be killed unless they received $400,000 dollars by the following night.
The government responded by sending two thousand policemen and militiamen out to search the universities, where they reported finding a ‘huge amount’ of explosives, guns and ammunition. Students occupying one dormitory in Ankara tried to fend them off with gunfire and dynamite. Two died on the scene and twelve were injured. The next day, reconnaissance planes and jeeps provided by the US for opium control joined the search for the kidnapped airmen. A day later, the hostages returned to base unharmed: their kidnappers had panicked and fled. The search for the kidnappers continued unabated, but a government spokesman said that the job was made more difficult by the fact that the perpetrators of the crime were almost certainly ‘university or graduate students of middle-class background.’ They were probably, he said, hiding out ‘in some plush home.’
The story was front-page news for the better part of a week, so there were daily calls from Northampton. Over and over, William Wakefield stalled her, and if you are wondering why he felt justified to do so, it was because only a handful of the 16,000 US personnel in Turkey had been touched by the violence, and no action whatsoever had been directed against their thousands of dependent children.
He assured his ex-wife that ‘things’ were happening behind the scenes: the military was losing its patience and preparing to step in. The clincher would be the CENTO summit, scheduled to take place in Ankara at the end of March. There was, he said, no way the authorities were going to expose the US Secretary of State and twenty-odd other leading Western statesmen to any risks. He was right: two weeks before the summit, on March 12th 1971, the commanders of the Turkish army issued an ultimatum and Demirel stepped down.
But still the violence continued, and on the night of the 14th of March, there were four bomb attacks against US interests in Istanbul – a Turkish-American trade bank, two newspapers, and the US Consulate. The following morning, two students shot and wounded the American manager of an English language bookshop. Later that same day, Northampton called, in tears this time, demanding Jeannie’s immediate return.
Knowing that his ex-wife was genuinely distraught, but determined not to let her have her way, William Wakefield went on the offensive. He told her she was to stop drawing wild conclusions from what she read in a ‘paper that doesn’t even bother to have a bureau here.’ Yes, the universities in downtown Istanbul were war zones, ‘and no one can claim I’ve tried to hide this from you. But Jeannie never goes near those places, nor would she want to. And there are, I assure you, no gunbattles at Robert College.’ Technically this was true, but there had been several small bombs, a long string of noisy boycotts, and a fierce campaign to nationalise the university. At least half of the student body belonged to Revolutionary Youth. There was no need to go into this: it had not been mentioned in the New York Times.
So once again, Jeannie was off the hook. But freedom came at a price – as her father, still nursing a grievance, was only too happy to remind her. She would only be able to stay in Turkey for as long as she let him lie for her.