KurdistanObserver.com
Turkey's
Drug-Terrorism Connection
consortiumnews.com
By Martin A. Lee
January 25, 2008 (Originally published in 1997)
Editor’s Note: Former FBI Turkish-language translator Sibel Edmonds alleges that
shadowy intelligence relationships involving Turkey, Israel and the United
States may have helped Pakistan obtain a nuclear bomb.
In
an interview with the London Sunday Times, Edmonds said the Turks and Israelis
planted “moles” in military and academic institutions to glean nuclear secrets
that were eventually sold to Pakistan – and that U.S. officials have helped
cover up related crimes. [See
Sunday Times, Jan. 6, 2008]
Edmonds, who left the FBI in 2002, said she stumbled upon this corrupt network –
which also may have involved money laundering and drug trafficking – when she
was hired after the 9/11 attacks to translate a backlog of tapes dating back to
1997.
That was the same year when Consortiumnews.com published a remarkable story by
Martin A. Lee about Turkish government officials caught in a web of corruption
with notorious drug traffickers and right-wing terrorists.
In
view of the Sunday Times article and
a follow-up on Jan. 20, we are republishing our earlier story to provide
historical context for Edmonds’s allegations:
In broad daylight on May 2, 1997,
50 armed men set upon a television station in Istanbul with gunfire. The
attackers unleashed a fusillade of bullets and shouted slogans supporting
Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Ciller.
The gunmen were outraged over the
station's broadcast of a TV report critical of Ciller, a close U.S. ally who had
come under criticism for stonewalling investigations into collusion between
state security forces and Turkish criminal elements.
Miraculously, no one was injured in the attack, but the headquarters of
Independent Flash TV were left pock-marked with bullet-holes and smashed
windows. The gunfire also sent an unmistakable message to Turkish journalists
and legislators: don't challenge Ciller and other high-level Turkish officials
when they cover up state secrets.
For several months, Turkey had been awash in dramatic disclosures connecting
high Turkish officials to the right-wing Grey Wolves, the terrorist band which
has preyed on the region for years. In 1981, a terrorist from the Grey Wolves
attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.
But at the center of the mushrooming Turkish scandal is whether Turkey, a
strategically placed NATO country, allowed mafiosi and right-wing extremists to
operate death squads and to smuggle drugs with impunity. A Turkish parliamentary
commission is investigating these new charges.
The rupture of state secrets in Turkey also could release clues to other major
Cold War mysteries. Besides the attempted papal assassination, the Turkish
disclosures could shed light on the collapse of the Vatican bank in 1982 and the
operation of a clandestine pipeline that pumped sophisticated military hardware
into the Middle East -- apparently from NATO stockpiles in Europe -- in exchange
for heroin sold by the Mafia in the United States.
A Car Crash
The official Turkish inquiry was triggered by what could have been the opening
scene of a spy novel: a dramatic car crash on a remote highway near the village
of Susurluk, 100 miles southwest of Istanbul.
On Nov. 3, 1996, three people were
crushed to death when their speeding black Mercedes hit a tractor and
overturned. The crash killed Husseyin Kocadag, a top police official who
commanded Turkish counter-insurgency units.
But it was Kocadag's companions who stunned the nation. The two other dead were
Abdullah Catli, a convicted fugitive who was wanted for drug trafficking and
murder, and Catli's girlfriend, Gonca Us, a Turkish beauty queen turned mafia
hit-woman.
A fourth occupant, who survived the
crash, was Kurdish warlord Sedat Bucak, whose militia had been armed and
financed by the Turkish government to fight Kurdish separatists.
At first, Turkish officials claimed that the police were transporting two
captured criminals. But evidence seized at the crash site indicated that
Abdullah Catli, the fugitive gangster, had been given special diplomatic
credentials by Turkish authorities.
Catli was carrying a
government-approved weapons permit and six ID cards, each with a different name.
Catli also possessed several handguns, silencers and a cache of narcotics, not
the picture of a subdued criminal.
When it became obvious that Catli was a police collaborator, not a captive, the
Turkish Interior Minister resigned.
Several high-ranking law enforcement
officers, including Istanbul's police chief, were suspended. But the red-hot
scandal soon threatened to jump that bureaucratic firebreak and endanger the
careers of other senior government officials.
Grey Wolves Terror
The news of Catli's secret police
ties were all the more scandalous given his well-known role as a key leader of
the Grey Wolves, a neo-fascist terrorist group that has stalked Turkey since the
late 1960s.
A young tough who wore black leather
pants and looked like Turkey's answer to Elvis Presley, Catli graduated from
street gang violence to become a brutal enforcer for the Grey Wolves.
He rose quickly within their ranks,
emerging as second-in-command in 1978. That year, Turkish police linked him to
the murder of seven trade-union activists and Catli went underground.
Three years later, the Grey Wolves gained international notoriety when Mehmet
Ali Agca, one of Catli's closest collaborators, shot and nearly killed Pope John
Paul II in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.
Catli was the leader of a fugitive
terrorist cell that included Agca and a handful of other Turkish neo-fascists.
Testifying in September 1985 as a witness at the trial of three Bulgarians and
four Turks charged with complicity in the papal shooting in Rome, Catli (who was
not a defendant) disclosed that he gave Agca the pistol that wounded the
pontiff.
Catli had previously helped Agca
escape from a Turkish jail, where Agca was serving time for killing a national
newspaper editor. In addition to harboring Agca, Catli supplied him with fake
IDs and directed Agca's movements in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria for
several months prior to the papal attack.
Catli enjoyed close links to Turkish drug mafiosi, too. His Grey Wolves henchmen
worked as couriers for the Turkish mob boss Abuzer Ugurlu.
At Ugurlu's behest, Catli's thugs
crisscrossed the infamous smugglers' route passing through Bulgaria. Those
routes were the ones favored by smugglers who reportedly carried NATO military
equipment to the Middle East and returned with loads of heroin.
Judge Carlo Palermo, an Italian magistrate based in Trento, discovered these
smuggling operations while investigating arms-and-drug trafficking from Eastern
Europe to Sicily.
Judge Palermo disclosed that large
quantities of sophisticated NATO weaponry -- including machine guns, Leopard
tanks and U.S.-built Cobra assault helicopters -- were smuggled from Western
Europe to countries in the Middle East during the 1970s and early 1980s.
According to Palermo's investigation, the weapon delivers were often made in
exchange for consignments of heroin that filtered back, courtesy of the Grey
Wolves and other smugglers, through Bulgaria to northern Italy.
There, the drugs were received by
Mafia middlemen and transported to North America. Turkish morphine base supplied
much of the Sicilian-run "Pizza connection," which flooded the U.S. and Europe
with high-grade heroin for several years.
[While it is still not clear how the NATO supplies entered the pipeline, other
investigations have provided some clues. Witnesses in the October Surprise
inquiry into an alleged Republican-Iranian hostage deal in 1980 claimed that
they were allowed to select weapons from NATO stockpiles in Europe for shipment
to Iran.
[Iranian arms dealer Houshang Lavi claimed that he selected spare parts for Hawk
anti-aircraft batteries from NATO bases along the Belgian-German border. Another
witness, American arms broker William Herrmann, corroborated Lavi's account of
NATO supplies going to Iran.
[Even former NATO commander Alexander Haig confirmed that NATO supplies could
have gone to Iran in the early 1980s while he was secretary of state. "It
wouldn't be preposterous if a nation, Germany, for example, decided to let some
of their NATO stockpiles be diverted to Iran," Haig said in an interview. For
more details, see Robert Parry's Trick or Treason or
Secrecy & Privilege.]
A Vatican Mystery
Italian magistrates described the
network they had uncovered as the "world's biggest illegal arms trafficking
organization." They linked it to Middle Eastern drug empires and to prestigious
banking circles in Italy and Europe.
At the center of this operation, it
appeared, was an obscure import-export firm in Milan called Stibam International
Transport. The head of Stibam, a Syrian businessman named Henri Arsan, also
functioned as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,
according to several Italian news outlets.
With satellite offices in New York, London, Zurich, and Sofia, Bulgaria, Stibam
officials recycled their profits through Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest
private bank which had close ties to the Vatican until its sensational collapse
in 1982.
The collapse of Banco Ambrosiano
came on the heels of the still unsolved death of its furtive president, Roberto
Calvi, whose body was found hanging underneath Blackfriar's Bridge in London in
June 1982. While running Ambrosiano, Calvi, nicknamed "God's banker," served as
adviser to the Vatican's extensive fiscal portfolio.
At the same time in the mid- and late 1970s, Calvi's bank handled most of
Stibam's foreign currency transactions and owned the building that housed
Stibam's Milanese headquarters.
In effect, the Vatican Bank -- by
virtue of its interlocking relationship with Banco Ambrosiano -- was fronting
for a gigantic contraband operation that specialized in guns and heroin.
The bristling contraband operation that traversed Bulgaria was a magnet for
secret service agents on both sides of the Cold War divide.
Crucial, in this regard, was the
role of Kintex, a Sofia-based, state-controlled import-export firm that worked
in tandem with Stibam and figured prominently in the arms trade. Kintex was
riddled with Bulgarian and Soviet spies -- a fact which encouraged speculation
that the KGB and its Bulgarian proxies were behind the plot against the pope.
But Western intelligence also had its hooks into the Bulgarian smuggling scene,
as evidenced by the CIA's use of Kintex to channel weapons to the Nicaraguan
contras in the early 1980s.
The Reagan administration jumped on the papal assassination attempt as a
propaganda opportunity, rather than helping to unravel the larger mystery.
Although the CIA's link to the
arms-for-drugs traffic in Bulgaria was widely known in espionage circles,
hard-line U.S. and Western European officials promoted instead a bogus
conspiracy theory that blamed the papal shooting on a communist plot.
The so-called "Bulgarian connection" became one of the more effective
disinformation schemes hatched during the Reagan era. It reinforced the notion
of the Soviet Union as an evil empire.
But the apparent hoax also diverted
attention from extensive -- and potentially embarrassing -- ties between U.S.
intelligence and the Turkey's narco-trafficking ultra-right.
Fabrication of the conspiracy theory might have even involved suborning perjury.
During his September 1985 court testimony in Rome, Catli asserted that he had
been approached by the West German BND spy organization, which allegedly
promised him a large sum of money if he implicated the Bulgarian secret service
and the KGB in the attempt on the pope's life.
Five years later, ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his
colleagues, under pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to
lend credence to the contention that the Soviets were involved.
"The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot," Goodman told the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
Friends of the Wolves
Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, the CIA
station chief in Rome at the time of the papal shooting, had previously been
posted in Ankara.
Clarridge was the CIA's
man-on-the-spot in Turkey in the 1970s when armed bands of Grey Wolves unleashed
a wave of bomb attacks and shootings that killed thousands of people, including
public officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social
democrats, left-wing activists and ethnic Kurds. [In his 1997 memoir, A Spy
for All Seasons, Clarridge makes no reference to the Turkish unrest or to
the pope shooting.]
During those violent 1970s, the Grey Wolves operated with the encouragement and
protection of the Counter-Guerrilla Organization, a section of the Turkish
Army's Special Warfare Department.
Headquartered in the U.S. Military
Aid Mission building in Ankara, the Special Warfare Department received funds
and training from U.S. advisers to create "stay behind" squads comprised of
civilian irregulars. They were supposed to go underground and engage in acts of
sabotage if the Soviets invaded.
Similar Cold War paramilitary units were established in every NATO member state,
covering all non-Communist Europe like a spider web that would entangle Soviet
invaders.
But instead of preparing for foreign
enemies, U.S.-sponsored stay-behind operatives in Turkey and several European
countries used their skills to attack domestic opponents and foment violent
disorders. Some of those attacks were intended to spark right-wing military
coups.
In the late 1970s, former military prosecutor and Turkish Supreme Court Justice
Emin Deger documented collaboration between the Grey Wolves and the government's
counter-guerrilla forces as well as the close ties of the latter to the CIA.
Turkey's Counter-Guerrilla
Organization handed out weapons to the Grey Wolves and other right-wing
terrorist groups. These shadowy operations mainly engaged in the surveillance,
persecution and torture of Turkish leftists, according to retired army commander
Talat Turhan, the author of three books on counter-guerrilla activities in
Turkey.
But the extremists launched one wave of political violence which provoked a 1980
coup by state security forces that deposed Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. The
Turkish security forces cited the need to restore order which had been shattered
by rightist terrorist groups secretly sponsored by those same state security
forces.
Cold War Roots
Since the earliest days of the Cold
War, Turkey's strategic importance derived from its geographic position as the
West's easternmost bulwark against Soviet communism.
In an effort to weaken the Soviet
state, the CIA also used pan-Turkish militants to incite anti-Soviet passions
among Muslim Turkish minorities inside the Soviet Union, a strategy that
strengthened ties between U.S. intelligence and Turkey's ultra-nationalists.
Though many of the Turkish ultra-nationalists were anti-Western as well as
anti-Soviet, the Cold War realpolitik compelled them to support a
discrete alliance with NATO and U.S. intelligence.
Among the Turkish extremists
collaborating in this anti-Soviet strategy were the National Action Party and
its paramilitary youth group, the Grey Wolves.
Led by Colonel Alpaslan Turkes, the National Action Party espoused a fanatical
pan-Turkish ideology that called for reclaiming large sections of the Soviet
Union under the flag of a reborn Turkish empire.
Turkes and his revanchist cohorts
had been enthusiastic supporters of Hitler during World War II. "The Turkish
race above all others" was their Nazi-like credo.
In a similar vein, Grey Wolf
literature warned of a vast Jewish-Masonic-Communist conspiracy and its
newspapers carried ads for Turkish translations of Nazi texts.
The pan-Turkish dream and its anti-Soviet component also fueled ties between the
Grey Wolves and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a CIA-backed coalition
led by erstwhile fascist collaborators from East Europe.
Ruzi Nazar, a leading figure in the
Munich-based ABN, had a long-standing relationship with the CIA and the Turkish
ultra-nationalists. In the 1950s and 1960s, Nazar was employed by Radio Free
Europe, a CIA-founded propaganda effort.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the shifting geopolitical terrain
created new opportunities -- political and financial -- for Colonel Turkes and
his pan-Turkish crusaders.
After serving a truncated prison
term in the 1980s for his role in masterminding the political violence that
convulsed Turkey, Turkes and several of his pan-Turkish colleagues were
permitted to resume their political activities.
In 1992, the colonel visited his long lost Turkish brothers in newly independent
Azerbaijan and received a hero's welcome. In Baku, Turkes endorsed the candidacy
of Grey Wolf sympathizer Abulfex Elcibey, who was subsequently elected president
of Azerbaijan and who appointed a close Grey Wolf ally as his Interior Minister.
The Gang Returns
By this time, Abdullah Catli was
also back in circulation after several years of incarceration in France and
Switzerland for heroin trafficking. In 1990, he escaped from a Swiss jail cell
and rejoined the neo-fascist underground in Turkey.
Despite his documented links to the papal shooting and other terrorist attacks,
Catli was pressed into service as a death squad organizer for the Turkish
government's dirty war against the Kurds who have long struggled for
independence inside both Turkey and Iraq.
Turkish Army spokesmen acknowledged
that the Counter-Guerrilla Organization (renamed the Special Forces Command in
1992) was involved in the escalating anti-Kurdish campaign.
Turkey got a wink and a nod from Washington as a quid pro quo for cooperating
with the United States during the Gulf War.
Turkish jets bombed Kurdish bases
inside Iraqi territory. Meanwhile, on the ground, anti-Kurdish death squads were
assassinating more than 1,000 non-combatants in southeastern Turkey. Hundreds of
other Kurds "disappeared" while in police custody.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and the European Parliament all condemned the Turkish security
forces for these abuses.
Still, there was no hard evidence
that Turkey's security forces had recruited criminal elements as foot soldiers.
That evidence surfaced only on Nov. 3, 1996, when Catli died in the fateful auto
accident near Susurluk.
Strewn amidst the roadside wreckage
was proof of what many journalists and human rights activists had long suspected
-- that successive Turkish governments had protected narco-traffickers,
sheltered terrorists and sponsored gangs of killers to suppress Turkish
dissidents and Kurdish rebels.
Colonel Turkes confirmed that Catli
had performed clandestine duties for Turkey's police and military.
"On the basis of my state
experience, I admit that Catli has been used by the state," said Turkes. Catli
had been cooperating "in the framework of a secret service working for the good
of the state," Turkes insisted.
U.S.-backed Turkish officials, including Tansu Ciller, Prime Minister from
1993-1996, also defended Catli after the car crash.
"I don't know whether he is guilty
or not," Ciller stated, "but we will always respectfully remember those who fire
bullets or suffer wounds in the name of this country, this nation and this
state."
Eighty members of the Turkish parliament have urged the federal prosecutor to
file charges of criminal misconduct against Ciller, who currently serves as
Turkey's Foreign Minister, as well as Deputy Prime Minister.
They asserted that the Susurluk
incident provided Turkey "with a historic opportunity to expose unsolved murders
and the drugs and arms smuggling that have been going on in our country for
years."
The scandal momentarily reinvigorated the Turkish press, which unearthed
revelations about criminals and police officials involved in the heroin trade.
But journalists also have been
victims of death squads in recent years. The violent attack on Independent Flash
TV was a reminder.
Prosecutors have faced pressure,
too, from superiors who are not eager to delve into state secrets. Thus far, no
charges have been lodged against Ciller.
Across the Atlantic in Washington, the U.S. government has yet to acknowledge
any responsibility for the Turkish Frankenstein that U.S. Cold War strategy
helped to create.
When asked about the Susurluk
affair, a State Department spokesperson said it was "an internal Turkish
matter." He declined further comment.
Martin A. Lee's book on neo-fascism is entitled
The Beast Reawakens.
