HOOK REVIEWS
BY DAVID BARCHARD
During World War II the city teem ed w ith spies, saboteurs, defectors, diplomats,
lovers, assassins, journalists, and a future Pope.
ISTANBUL INTRIGUES
By Barry Rubin, McGraw Hill, $ 18.95
Almost everyone has heard of the Cicero Affair and how Elyesa Bazna, the Albanian- born valet of Sir Hughe Knatchbull- Hugessen, British Ambassador to Ankara, stole the key to his master’s private safe and dispatch box and filmed their contents for the Germans during the Second World War.
Less familiar is the sorry tale of a band of German intelligence of ficers, loudly singing “Zwoelfland, zwoelfland, ueber ailes” at the Taksim Casino in Istanbul for the benefit of a British group at an other table. They were rubbing in the fact that an incompetent Brit ish officer had let slip the infor mation that Berlin was referred to as “1200” in signals, so com promising the entire coding sys tem. So disheartened were the British that they did not dare report the episode to London.
This latter story is not in
Barry Rubin’s account of Turkey during the Second World War, but the book is packed with colourful anecdotes. It begins with an explosion on the Atatürk Bulvari in Ankara in February 1942 when the would-be as sassin of Franz von Papen, the German Ambassador, blew himself up by mistake. His masters had given him a “smoke bomb” to release after shooting the ambassador. Unfortunately for its user, the bomb was filled with explosive.
Although Rubin is an academic from Johns Hopkins University in Washington, his book is firmly planted in the genre of real-life spy thrillers. The story it has to tell is a good one and all the better for being rather unfamiliar to most people. It is inter esting, for instance, to read of the wartime Hungarian government’s attempts to es cape from its entanglement with the Third Reich by sending messages to the Allies through Istanbul.
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INTRIGUES
A TRUE-LIFECASABLANCA
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Rubin, writing for American readers, tends to concentrate on the United States’ angle in the events he describes, although this brings a bonus in the form of reminis cences from exiles in wartime Turkey who went on after the war to become dis tinguished Americans.
The Cicero case was, in fact, almost the only real success of German intelligence during the Second World War — and perhaps because of this the Germans did not recognise how important it was. The Allies seem constantly to have held the initiative.
There is rather too much in this book about journalists (easier people to meet and write about than spies) and their fairly predictable memories of bars, restaurants and grumbles about censorship of their work by the authorities.
In places, Rubin piles on his special effects a little too eagerly. It is difficult not to
smile at breathless passages such as: “Sch warz had never before been granted an interview. His very existence was a secret”, or, “The Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest was the center of espionage and intrigue in that capital.” In Istanbul, thé now vanished Park Hotel seems to have played that role.
The better known Pera Palas Hotel suf fered the less enviable fate of being blown up by a bomb planted in the baggage of the departing British Ambassador to Sofia, Sir George Rendel, by the Bulgarian government. For the rest of his life, Sir George was always a
: little indignant that the Turkish
“ government made him, rather
j i than the Bulgarians, pay the
damage — a detail not mentioned by Rubin.
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•Sis One of the fascinating things
S ' i about this distant world of Tur
key in the 1940s is that some of Rubin’s impressive cast-list surface in different roles a few decades later. There was An-
' gelo Roncalli, a “rotund little
Italian peasant” serving as papal legate to the Catholics of Istanbul and actively trying to save the Jews of Eastern Europe and Italy. Rubin believes that it was in Istanbul, the capital of several dead empires, that Roncalli decided that the Church must adapt to the modern world, a view which domi nated his pontificate as Pope John XXIII.
It is less savoury to learn that the junior KGB man in the Soviet Consulate in Istan bul in 1945 was Gaydar Aliyev, party boss in Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1980s and the highest ranking Turk in the Soviet Union. Aliyev presumably helped Kim Philby on his famous visit to Istanbul to head off an attempted defection by the Soviet Consul there.
This is a richly informative book, all the more fun because although its events take place in a vanished universe, we still walk in its streets and still (just) have some of its survivors among us.
106 T U R Q U O I S E
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