BARRACKS BOYS

THEY BROUGHT THEIR WIVES

There’s only one piece missing from the puzzle now.

Was there a purpose behind all this other than disinformation? The CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies might have been waiting to jump on the assassination bandwagon for a while, but they weren’t responsible for the attempt on the pope’s life. At least not that anyone could discover. They were simply capitalizing on the blood of the lamb.

So if the CIA didn’t do it, or the KGB, or even the Bulgarian CSS, what motivated the attempted assassination of the pope? Or the successful assassination of Abdi Ipekci?

The first thing to realize is that there was a bigger picture in Turkey, too. In fact, it’s so big that the smaller pieces—or clues—don’t seem in retrospect to be relevant.

It’s been said, for instance, that the killing of Abdi Ipekci was done at the behest of the heroin trader Ugurlu, who knew that the editor was looking into his smuggling networks.

That’s a reason to kill.

It’s also been said that the Gray Wolves were offended by any voice of public moderation and meant to silence the one who was most respected in the land.

That’s a reason, too, though more abstract.

Other reasons have been put forward, such as the ease of killing a prominent but unprotected man like Ipekci. That was Agca’s explanation—or one of them. He said that he had chosen Ipekci from a list of targets because the man had no security. He looked up Ipekci’s name in a phone directory, staked out the street on which he lived, and the rest was straightforward.

This is one case where the reader might be tempted to believe a lunatic liar like Agca. He probably would be advised to do so if something else was not at work in the background. Something much bigger. Control of the entire country, let’s say.

The coup that occurred in September 12, 1980, in Turkey was carried out with a purpose and efficiency that no other replacements of the civilian government had done in the Turkish past. It happened quietly and was nearly bloodless in the beginning. The planning seemed perfect.

That was because the basic elements of the coup began early. In December 1978, a couple of months before Ipekci was assassinated, a group of senior army officers met at the barracks in Asian Istanbul, bringing their wives along to provide window dressing and disguise the purpose of the meeting. They wanted the deepest secrecy because the subject of their discussion was the subversion of the government.

The Turkish military don’t usually categorize their coups in such stark terms. They like to see themselves as the arbiters of last resort. Saviors, in other words, if not in truth. These are men who step into the breach when the civilians have proven their incompetence once more. Whether the act of stepping in conditions the electorate to expect, and often welcome, their intervention is something that should not be discussed outside the barracks.

And they have always, to date, returned the reins of government back to the civilians in the end, which is a rare feat in the worldwide history of military coups. That's the one salient fact that gives the Turkish military a head feint at credibility, and it must be said that it's an important distinction. In most Middle Eastern countries, the military that takes over the government is the government for life.

The Turkish military also seemed to realize that the military who took the reins of government was the one that held the nastiest end of the stick. A lot of money could be made under the table, of course, but there was far too much aggravation for the dollar.

And no honor at all.