Enlightenment

by Maureen Freely

  Did we know where he went next? Of course – we helped arrange it. We were aided by a well-meaning Soviet official who is to remain nameless. As for the rest – I refuse to edit details that fail to fit the desired mould. For Dutch Harding, or whoever he really is – he did not forget us. He protected us, too. Once he was safe and settled in East Berlin, it was to his home that Sinan and Haluk decamped. It was under Dutch Harding’s care that they returned to a semblance of health. Now that my picture of him has been so cruelly rounded, now that we know he was always the shadow behind İsmet, I am wondering if we can also thank him for the modicum of medical treatment I received after jumping from my window. While my care was not the best our small country has to offer, it was nevertheless better than that accorded to others. The same applies to my other short period of incarceration, in 1981. While we were not spared the rod, we were luckier than most. The angel of darkness was watching over us.

  In those days, we were in regular contact. But after the early 80s – after we had honoured our teacher’s wishes yet again and saved his secret by expelling Jeannie and her dangerous questions from our fold – he drifted in other directions. The Berlin Wall was no longer. The Cold War had turned to dust. A great historic shift was underway and he was right in the midst of it. I am sure he did good and helpful work during the early years of reunification. I am even open to the idea that for Dutch Harding – or rather, for the real man behind the false name – the fall of the Iron Curtain was a dream come true. If he was truly Stephen Svabo, and therefore a Hungarian by birth, if he witnessed the 1956 uprising…

  This, then, was the gist of my discussion – now six months past – with my wayward but nevertheless beloved and deeply missed friend M on the eve of her disappearance. I regret to report it was a stormy session. She expected to set down her evidence – destroy my life, my dreams, the secret mission of mercy that has lit my way through three decades of trials and tribulations – and then move on to the next question! No time to breathe, to reconsider, to weigh her evidence, to dismember and repopulate my memory. No consideration for my bruised and battered heart. No thoughts even for her parents, whose loving trust she has so cruelly spurned, whose blameless lives she has so blighted. She had thoughts only for herself. She wanted only to know why we’d lied to her!

  There were moments when the years dropped away and I almost could convince myself that we were both seventeen again, hurling the slings and arrows from which our school newspaper was never safe. Such a tragedy! To be born in a place you can’t call home! Such an outrage! To have a passport from a country whose name is blackened! Every word M writes is drenched with this trauma. So of course she must convince us – and herself – that Jeannie feels the same.

  But to return to our discussion. The last we were ever to have. We had to cross a veritable ocean of accusation – and tears, there were many tears – before she was willing to relent. But as we reached the end of our Ides of March, she did finally concede that (while we may have acted wrongly) we had done so in good faith. That a group of idealist students with no knowledge of the real world might be putty in the hands of the man we knew as Dutch Harding. Yes, by the end, she was willing to admire the doomed tenacity of our loyalty. She acknowledged the searing pain of disillusionment. Though she refused to understand why it was so shaming, so humiliating, to have been dragged to enlightenment by a journalist whose finest work has been on mothers and babies, my relentless though heartfelt friend did – I will concede this – listen closely to my long and wholly honest account of the lonely road I have travelled in recent years, with Sinan my only confidante. And I, in return, made to M my one concession: it had been a mistake not to bring Jeannie into our deliberations. Had our poor, innocent Jeannie known that Dutch Harding was still alive and inhabiting a thousand aliases – she would have shown us our blind spot. She would have known that our villain was not İsmet, but the man behind him.

  Had we known this – had we so much as suspected his heinous and treacherous realities – we would never have gone on protecting this man, until the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour. More to the point, we would not have gone on following his instructions. Because yes, it was Dutch Harding who advised Sinan to flee the country before İsmet’s diggers found the body in his garden in August 2005. It was Dutch Harding who later told me, Suna Safran, that Jordan was on his scent, that Jordan had paid a visit to Jeannie. That though Jordan had not managed to persuade Jeannie that Dutch Harding was still amongst us, our mentor’s life was nevertheless at risk. That Dutch Harding’s safety now depended on my giving Jeannie other things to think about. And so, to my shame, I did his bidding. I guided my dear and trusting Jeannie to the ancient though wholly unfounded incest rumours that drove her to the edge of madness.

  But please God, no further.

  A question remains. If our aim was always to protect our beloved mentor, why did we drag out this old secret that had lain safely buried, for so many years? Here, at least, my doomed and fearless friend M guessed correctly. It was İsmet we were seeking to expose. It was William Wakefield who had started the ball rolling. He had started within minutes of his return to our city. He was angry, of course! Those incest rumours that first reached his ears on the eve of his grandson’s birth – this was not the first straw, but the last! He wished revenge! Not for the first time, we were the vehicles. He fed us first this little clue and then that question. The result was My Cold War. I am sure that Jordan, if he returns to us, will have a similar tale to tell.

  As for the story contained within these pages – its travels through the public domain have been well documented and perhaps excessively analysed – I would like to take this opportunity to highlight a few key points:

  1) I, Suna Safran, was not this story’s original disseminator. I have penned only the afterword you are now reading. The story you have read is the story M transmitted in seven electronic segments to Mary Ann Widener at the Center for Democratic Change. It was only on the night of her disappearance that M saw fit to send me a copy for my perusal. As we have already seen, this copy may be incomplete.

  2) Though Mary Ann Widener has been established to be a real person (those seeking further information are advised to consult the website of the above-named think tank, where her accomplishments are documented in their entirety on the page bearing her name) the identity of the person who chose to post all seven segments of M’s story on a rival website has still to be defined.

  3) There is, however, no difference between the seven documents published on that website and the story M transmitted to me directly.

  4) Although I was immediately aware of her story’s importance (and in touch with the lawyers representing Sinan Sinanoğlu in the US) I had hoped (as did the above-mentioned counsel) to use it in a measured and judicious manner. This is not to say (although it has been said) that our purpose was to censor it. Rather, our hope was to stagger its release in such a way that it did not prejudice the trial, or subject Jeannie, wherever she might be, to unnecessary danger.

  5) We shall never be sure if the trial of Sinan Sinanoğlu was indeed overshadowed by the presence in the public domain of a hot-blooded and intemperate ‘True Confession’ with all the ingredients of a potboiler – a swarthy, swashbuckling hero with a secret, a fair-haired, ivory-skinned maiden in peril, a love affair doomed by a cast of scheming Cold Warriors, ruthless terrorists and colourful locals much feted for their strange ways and linguistic foibles. And last but not least – a mole! Of course, this charming orientalist confection was not admissible as evidence.

  6) But there is no doubt that, due to its high profile and its easy availability on the internet, public interest in the case was magnified a hundredfold. I have been assured by analysts of the strange beast that is US public opinion that in the end, the lamentable guilty verdict may do much to foster moral outrage and therefore further the cause of all those who in this age of terror and unreason still dare to fly while brown.

  7) That Sinan himself re
mains steadfast in the face of adversity we know from both the court records of his trial and the accounts in the responsible press. He may have been convicted, but the cries of outrage grow. As for the cries that must have pierced his own heart upon hearing the truth about our faithless mentor, we can only guess. From his proud posture in the photograph that they flash on the screen with every mention of his name, and his clear-eyed gaze, we can entertain the soothing thought that he has accepted the poisoned arrow of truth lodged inside the heart of M’s confession – perhaps even accepted the possibility that her intentions were, if not perfect, at least sincere.

  8) But there is also his statement: we ignore his words at our peril. So I quote:

  ‘I stand before you charged with links to a terrorist group whose name has yet to be revealed to me. As I await enlightenment, my child remains in the care of court-appointed strangers. My wife’s whereabouts are unknown. Since she fell into the hands of the authorities at the Canadian border in November 2005, the only news of her possible whereabouts has come from an investigative journalist with knowledge of extreme rendition. I ask all decent men and women in this court why they have condoned such vicious and illegal measures against my family. I ask the public to consider whose interests they are here to serve. I call upon my friends to expose the fortress of lies that imprisons their minds, not just with words, but with images.’

  9) From this we can be sure that our unfortunate friend is warning us to accept no compromises. From this we must deduce that Sinan’s incarceration in the country of his birth will be a long one. As we look into the future, we can be sure of only one thing: there are no quick fixes. For the country that invented fast food retains a deep and unshakeable faith in the slow justice. One might, as a foreigner, wish to sneer from the sidelines. But as someone well acquainted with the history of American politics and political thought, I must also add that I am confident the heartfelt grassroots rumblings at perceived injustices will ensure the system rights itself with its customary magnificence when the case goes to appeal.

  10) In the meantime, we can take comfort in the fact that, although the fate of Sinan Sinanoğlu and Jeannie remain uncertain, we have been able to reach a happy resolution of the dispute over their child.

  The book in your hands has been published – and, for the first time, edited – as the companion piece of a more exhaustive (and, dare I say it, more responsible) study of the issues it raises. This study is the fruit of a triptych of workshops held last summer in the immediate aftermath of M’s untoward disappearance and the simultaneous flooding of the internet with her confession in its raw, unedited form. These were triangular in formation, occurring on the same fine June weekend in the US, the UK and our own Boğaziçi University. Our collective title, The East, the West, and the Other, reflects our sweeping intentions. Though I feel I must reiterate that we did not, as some critics claimed, take aim at the deep state.

  Although we look far beyond the individualism so heartrendingly displayed by its gushing if well-meaning author and (by proxy) my dear and sorely missed soulmate, Jeannie Wakefield, our academic tome contains three chapters dealing specifically with the question of authorship. Two of these question the authenticity of the Divine Ms M’s sources – can we say for sure that Jeannie left a letter in her computer, or ever kept a journal? How much did her unauthorised biographer embroider, and how much did she invent? The third and more significant chapter seeks to fill, in a spirit of sympathy and solidarity, a number of lamentable lacunae in the author’s understanding of the country and the chapters of its history she claims to have witnessed at first hand. For though she is forever reminding us of her close emotional connections to the land of her lost childhood, she still does not understand us. If I add that she perhaps never will, I hope that my readers will see in this sentiment a heartfelt longing for her safe return.

  The final chapter of our scholarly collection looks at the scandal’s effects on domestic discourses. Its title (How Does the World See Us?) will perhaps lack resonance for the Western reader: it refers to a much-used headline in the Turkish press, which has been long accustomed to scouring the international media for any mention of Turkey and then publishing said mentions in pirated (for which read ‘badly translated’) form. As anyone who has ever scoured the international media for any mention of Turkey can confirm, the number of mentions in a normal year is dismally low. Against this ‘feast or famine’ background, it was inevitable that the sudden appearance in virtual reality of this lush if ill-considered modern-day ‘J’Accuse’ would, with its all-American villain, cause a hurricane of concern, criticism and moral outrage.

  Amid the largely senseless sturm und drang we can, nonetheless, identify several significant developments:

  1) Although İsmet has not been and most probably never will be held accountable for his actions in the well-shaded past, we can safely say that the scandal generated by the lascivious revelations contained in these pages has well and truly nipped his political aspirations in their buds.

  2) Although he is and most probably will continue to be most helpful to the American friends he made during his time as an intelligence officer and his subsequent career as all-purpose go-between, and will undoubtedly provide invaluable help to all those waging war on terror in his capacity as Turkey’s leading arms dealer, İsmet Şen is unlikely to be able to arrange for the use of our homeland as a training station for the so-called ‘private armies’ that certain unnamed Western powers hope to train up in time for the regional Armageddon they have done so much to stoke.

  3) We can, however, be sure that the scattered but highly incriminating film footage gathered by my friend Sinan Sinanoğlu in utmost secrecy in the year preceding his unlawful detention will clinch this happy outcome, just as we can be almost certain that it was the threat of this same footage seeing the light of day that precipitated his arrest.

  4) But sadly, it remains to be seen what effect this footage – hastily and I fear clumsily assembled for mass consumption by myself and other frantic well-wishers, and therefore sorely lacking in artistic merit – will have on the future course of imperialism.

  5) Moving on now to the real villain – for İsmet, despite his swagger, serves only as his handmaiden. Whatever shape our mentor – our betrayer – takes next, Dutch Harding under any alias is unlikely to be able to operate effectively as a spokesman for the EU and democracy, while also ensuring that Turkey bends to the American military will.

  6) While the story contained within these pages has no doubt contributed to public awareness of the links between the intelligence services of the two nations, our first and foremost thanks must go to my onetime enemy Jordan Frick.

  7) So perhaps a public apology is in order. I hasten to add that the man himself is aware of my views, though I am not in a position to divulge the when, the how, the where. Whatever I might think of Jordan Frick between the sheets, my admiration for his steely courage in the field now knows no bounds. The snake he seeks still lurks in the shadows, but Jordan Frick’s sterling investigation into the true identity of our faithless mentor has, at least, alerted the world to the true crisis in espionage.

  8) If, in so doing, he has suggested that the deep state has its headquarters not in Ankara but in Washington, his words should not, perhaps, be taken at face value. For there is no such thing as the deep state. Without proof, it remains lazy journalism.

  9) At least for the time being.

  10) As for our dear friend Jeannie Wakefield, there is, I regret to say, nothing new to report. The US authorities continue to insist that the blurry photograph of a woman in a jacket said to be packed with explosives is all they have in the way of ‘evidence’. The Michigan-based organisation that calls itself ‘The Friends of Sinan Sinanoğlu’ has, however, subjected the same photograph to analysis, casting serious doubt on its authenticity. There are other anomalies: her ‘foiled attempt’ is said to have been taken place as she attempted to enter her country from Canada. But there is no record
of such an incident on either side of the border. A trawling of immigration forms has failed to establish any trace of her in the entire continent.

  11) In the absence of hard facts, there have been rumours. There have been sightings. In the hundreds! In terms of ubiquity, she is fast outpacing Elvis – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea.

  12) Though some have been more promising than others. If these more promising sightings have been in countries implicated in the recent scandals about spy planes, we can draw our own conclusions.

  13) Moving finally to the Misguided Ms M, the wayward though beloved classmate who chose, without first seeking our permission, to risk her very life to turn us in a public cause célèbre, there is no news either.

  14) By which I mean to say that we intend to say no more than this for the public record. Should readers see fit to criticize my reticence, I can only respond by clinging to the golden thread of friendship as I remind them of the clear and present dangers that full disclosure might bring.

  The reckless Ms M deserves our respect, our protection, our best wishes, and – in spite of everything – our love. So it is with a heavy heart that I move on to the larger issues our missing friend has (albeit with the noblest of motives) forced into the footlights. As difficult as it is to critique a folk legend, I would not be doing my duty as an editor if I did not admit to having serious misgivings about her story. I have felt it my duty to present it in its original form, correcting only its multitudinous literals, and desisting from footnotes. However, it has been a painful experience for all of us who have figured as her characters. And perhaps it is as simple as this: she has entrapped us in a story that is not of our own making, a story that reflects her passions and obsessions at the expense of ours, and now – due to its legendary status – we must share our lives in chapter as well as in verse.