Date: 2/10/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.

Before we delve into this week’s offering of “Spy Tales,” I thought it appropriate to bring you up to date on some other matters that have been weighing on my mind of late.

Fifty years ago, I was in Vietnam plying the intel trade for the first time. Fifty years ago today (February 10) I was on a tributary of the Mekong playing a deadly game of tag. In a little over a month, the half century anniversary will occur of a series of events (centering about March 15) that literally changed the course of my life. It was preceded by several episodes I still can’t talk about and would be followed by the one time I flagrantly violated procedures, resulting in a letter of reprimand put into my 201 (one’s personnel file). That letter was finally removed over a decade later.

My only regret is that I didn’t shoot the bastard a few weeks earlier when I had the chance. A lot of lives would have been spared. Such callous calculations are what war does to you.

I cannot yet talk about any of this in “Spy Tales” (or anywhere else for that matter). But the negotiations are making progress and something should break on the matter shortly. It is, as I have noted previously, a somewhat staccato process.

“Mother” knows about the approaching anniversary. It can hardly be otherwise. What transpired by mid-March 1971 would result in my first Presidential Commendation, a Commander’s Legion of Merit, two Vietnamese decorations (the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Valor), my first intel community award, and the personal embarrassment of becoming a primary case study in counterinsurgency courses taught at military academies, “The Farm” and other training bases, as well as think tanks nationwide.

All of that is also in the 201.

Meanwhile, last Friday I did receive permission to write about another restricted mission. This one hits quite close. As longer-time readers of my work know, there is a piece I run each year near Memorial Day. It remains the one registering more comments than anything else I have ever written. It recounts a day I should have died but did not. Another did instead.

Well, this time around I finally get to put some closure on that story. Because there is a final chapter in which we got even and I was able to do it personally. So, coming in May, I will provide you with two Spy Tales running consecutively.

So, with that off my chest, we move on to this week’s tale.

Twice previously these weekly “Spy Tales” have brought you to the Anatolia peninsula: tracking Soviet shipping traffic during a Greek political crisis (“Watching Ships in the Aegean,” December 30, 2020); and connecting offshore money to shell companies set up in the US (“Shadow Banking on Cyprus and a Death in San Francisco,” February 2, 2021).

The former involved assessing freighters moving through the Bosporus past Istanbul into the Aegean Sea; the latter traced funding from banks on Cyprus off the Turkish southeastern coast.

Today we center attention about halfway down the west Turkish Aegean coast between Istanbul and Cyprus. This is the city of Izmir (Smyrna in classical times), the third largest in Turkey and a way station during several of my journeys in the region. It has one of the best waterfront corniches in the region, the Kordon.

The Kordon provides for numerous small craft landing locations and plenty of spots for meetings, clandestine or otherwise.

When this story unfolds it is late 1989, roughly between our previous tales of my operation on Thera (1981) and the deadly consequences of following Russian money from Cyprus (1995). My stay in Izmir this time around was not supposed to be more than a 48-hour layover after a less than successful sojourn in the Persian Gulf. The objective was to facilitate the handover of an expat Bulgarian asset living near Izmir to his new control officer.

For purposes of this story, let’s call him Yusuf. This guy was not one of my agents. He had been reporting to an associate who had been called back to the states because of an ill child. Yusuf’s  new “closest friend” would be meeting him in Istanbul. In between, I was merely to meet , debrief, assess, provide him with his latest payment and travel expenses, send him on his way, and complete the inevitable paperwork.

Merely routine, I told myself. But that was to change as soon as I set foot in what was the local airport in those days. Çiğli is now a military air base. However, in 1989, it still served as Izmir’s excuse for an international air terminal. It would be replaced early in this century by the far more modern and comfortable Adnan Menderes Airport.

As I made it into what passed for the Çiğli arrivals lounge, I knew something was wrong. A young American was propped up against the main central column directly facing the exit door from customs. He had on a red tie and was carrying the International Tribune Review under his left arm – that day’s signal to abort and report immediately to the Izmir office.

I have noted in previous Spy Tales that virtually all agency main stations worldwide (along with the Chief of Station and senior staff) are in capital cities where the local central government resides.

In Turkey, that is Ankara. Offices could be and usually are in other cities as well. In fact, the “office” in Istanbul has twice the officers as Ankara. Izmir then and now is a much smaller staff. Nonetheless, it is still the point for operations throughout western Turkey.

The office was located in a relatively new section of the city, halfway up a medium high rise given over largely to Western-based companies, public agencies, and NGOs.

The fellow in charge of the Izmir outpost came right to the point. Let’s call him George because,  well, his face looked like he had slid off of a one-dollar bill. George quickly outlined a more complicated scenario in which I was suddenly being moved 55 miles further west to Ҫeşme, a picturesque vacation spot separated from the Greek island of Chios (Khios) by the Chios Strait.

Some background. Later, Ҫeşme would become a center for new Turkish wealth and spawn a strip of high end resort hotels. By 1989, this was beginning with some international investment coming in to jump start the development.

This was my first travel to the coastal town and surrounding region (also carrying the same name), but it would hardly be my last. In the mid-1990s Ҫeşme would become ground zero for an ambitious sortie into renewable energy. That would occasion my switching hats and putting on the one which says “global energy advisor.” In that parallel career I would have several visits there to assess investment targets in both energy generation and infrastructure.

At issue was the replacement of traditional picture postcard windmills like these seen in this part of the Greek and Turkish Aegean:

with what would become fields of giant wind turbines sprouting up on just about every hillside outside of town:

I spent some time analyzing what the transformation would mean to the regional power supply, witnessing an on again off again local political fight over implications. Meanwhile, the sea  breezes would generate an impressive increase in electricity.

In spite of all the changes afoot, the town would retain much of its earlier character. Charming narrow streets cut through its center where residents continued daily life in marked indifference to what was happening around them.

The old town shoreline seen below stood in stark contrast to the resort hotels rising further up the beach.

And little anchorages and marinas up and down the coast provided amble opportunity to slip in and out on small boats from Chios (and elsewhere) almost at will.

Ҫeşme came into play for my 1989 assignment after Yusuf provided information that he may have been compromised. What he did for a living (sorry, nothing further allowed here) had been of some interest to us, although his “product” had never been first rate.

Nevertheless, we were stretched thin for asset sources in this part of the world and Yusuf became first team almost by default. In the business, one protected sources and methods, even if some of the sources were of suspect value.

On the other hand, the changes required demanded an increase in our manpower and some creative planning. Originally, I was to meet with Yusuf  on my own at a safe house in Izmir, go through the drill, pay him his money (getting him to sign a receipt for the bean counters back home), and then move on.

I now had a team of seven and two drivers to handle surveillance and allow a necessary switch. The other side was as thin in western Turkey as the agency was. That was one of the elements we were counting on that to pull off what was now an expanded operation. Another was that the other side – KGB, or their lackeys in the Bulgarian Darzhavna Sigurnost (DS), among Turkish  thugs , or whomever had ‘made” Yusuf– would exercise no individual initiative and follow their standard operation procedures.

Ҫeşme was selected as the new location for one overriding reason, this:

Castle Ҫeşme loomed over the older port side of the town. It was originally built in the late  fifteenth century with additions to the fortifications made throughout the sixteenth. It was one of the central Ottoman defenses against incursions by Venice over trading routes. It remains a remarkably interesting structure today with an excellent museum.

But I was not there for the guided tour.

On the water side, the castle had a parapet leading to one of the minarets from which the muezzin would call out the adhan (ezan in Turkish), the Muslim call to prayers five times a day.  This was crucial to what we were going to do.

There was no way anybody could come too close behind us on the parapet leading to the minaret without being exposed. At the narrow entrance in the minaret base there are two doors. Yusuf and I would walk in one door. Another member of our team already positioned inside and dressed in the same yelek-cebken (a Turkish jacket/vest combination) as Yusuf would walk out with me from the door on the other side of the minaret and then further down the parapet. Meanwhile, Yusuf would be spirited down a staircase hidden from view by the wall and off to a waiting boat at a nearby marina.

The other members of the team were responsible for confirming the tail (that is, those from the other side following us). We had to do this slowly, since adequate surveillance requires multiple actors and we knew the opposition could devote only a bare minimum to this. We needed to draw their small contingent out of Izmir, along the over fifty miles on the D300 highway to Ҫeşme, on a leisurely walk through town, lunch at an outside café by the water, then on to the castle and our switch. I handled the debriefing, money exchange (and receipt) while in route inside the car.

It was successful. Once Yusuf was out to sea on a slow boat north to the Straits of Ҫanakkale, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and then Istanbul, our team quickly disbanded, dumped the tail and his crew, and then took two separate cars by different routes back to Izmir.

I never saw Yusuf again. He made it to Istanbul (where he became somebody else’s problem). Never found out if what he knew was worth the sightseeing in Ҫeşme.

Dr. Kent Moors

This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it.

Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations). After moving through the inner circles of royalty, oligarchs, billionaires, and the uber-rich, he discovered some of the most important secrets regarding finance, geo-politics, and business. As a result, he built one of the most impressive rolodexes in the world. His insights and network of contacts took him from a Vietnam veteran to becoming one of the globe’s most sought after consultants, with clients including six of the largest energy companies and the United States government.

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