Jeremy Seal - A Coup in Turkey

Adnan Bey, Kargcak

The first statue of Atatrk, Istanbul

Adnan Bey portrait, ukurcuma, Istanbul

Adnan Bey and Berin Hanm

Erdoan Rally placard, 2016

Ulucanlar Prison noose

Ismet Paa ( Corbis Historical / Getty Images)

Baysan Aygns engagement party ( Baysan Bayar)

Istanbul, 27 May 1960

Yassada, 2013

Prisoners bedside table, Yassada, 1960 ( Mehmet Tadelen)

Guards in Ward 1, Yassada, 1960 ( Mehmet Tadelen)

Sports hall, Yassada, 1960 ( Mehmet Tadelen)

Ayhan Aydan, Yassada

Adnan Menderes, Yassada, 15 September 1960 ( Mehmet Tadelen)

Margaret Bailey, Daily Express, 16 September 1961

Adnan Menderes, Yassada, 17 September 1961 ( Ismail enyz)

Adnan Menderes, Imral, 17 September 1961 ( Ismail enyz)

Adnan Beys cigarette box

Every effort has been made by the publishers to trace the holders of copy-right. Any inadvertent omissions of acknowledgement or permission can be rectified in future editions.

Over a number of years, and in the course of several visits to Turkey, I have researched the story which appears in these pages. The book draws upon material including newspaper reports, published memoirs and accounts, state documents, court transcripts, unpublished letters, interviews, photographs and film footage; all these sources are acknowledged in the Notes.

For the sake of narrative clarity, I have reordered the incidents described so that they do not always appear in the sequence, or at the time, that they actually occurred. I have also presumed to speculate, not only upon the unspoken thoughts and motivations of some characters but what might have been said at crucial meetings and encounters known to have taken place where the actual exchanges went unrecorded or otherwise remain undisclosed. Much of the dialogue, then, is my own in a work which is ultimately that of an imagination Ive done my best to inform.

I have used the Latin-based Turkish script, introduced by Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, where some of the characters carry diacritics which assign pronunciations. The most common of these are summarised here:

• The Turkish c is pronounced j (journalism)
• is ch (church)
• is sh (shower)
• is silent but denotes a lengthening of the preceding vowel, and often performs the function of the English w as in the surname of Turkeys President Erdogan (Er-dow-an)
• is the flat schwa sound, as in shower, whereas the dotted i is pronounced as in ink
• and are hard to render but indicate characteristically Turkish modifications of the typical English vowel sounds

I have chosen to use the Turkish versions where readers may be more familiar with anglicised forms, so that our pasha (general) is given here as paa, and hodja (teacher) as hoca.

Many common Turkish titles, among them Bey (Mr) and Hanm (Mrs, or Madam), are given after the subjects first name. Im never more delighted than when Im addressed as Jeremy Bey.

On a fog-bound afternoon a few years before my own birth a passenger plane plunged into a wood three miles short of the runway at Gatwick in southern England. Back then, when Kitty Hawk was a living memory and many remembered craning young necks to the sound of engines overhead, those heralds of the new age, and airports were little more than airfields, crashes were commonplace. This one might have been no more exceptional if it were not for the man who walked unscathed out of the wood on that February day in 1959. As it was, the consequences for the country the flight had left hours earlier, amidst high hopes, were to prove unimaginable.

The twenty-four passengers and crew, most of whom were pitched instantly into the final moments of their lives, bore the immediate impact. The plane was into its descent when they felt sudden reverberations beneath their feet, and heard scrabbling sounds which some were yet to recognise as tree crowns brushing against the undercarriage, before leafless beech branches were thrashing at the windows or turning to tinder in the clogged maws of the propellers. Lurching lower still into a cradle of thickening boughs, the Vickers Viscount stalled and crashed into Jordans Wood.

The fog so muffled the screaming engines and shattering boughs that the noise barely reached the farmhouse on the far edge of the wood where Margaret Bailey was feeding her chickens. Instead a series of concussive thuds caused Margaret to rush inside where she found her husband, Tony, hurriedly pulling on a pair of boots; over the years the couple had heard aircraft overhead often enough to understand not only that one had crashed but that it must be close, for the impact had shaken the farmhouses fourteenth-century walls and raised seams of dust that had not settled by the time they slammed the door behind them. From the wood store Tony grabbed an axe which he threw into the boot of the car before speeding off down the lane, the two peering anxiously through the gloom. Within seconds Margaret picked out a faint corona which flared among the trees.