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Churchill's Secret War: Diplomatic Decrypts, the Foreign Office and Turkey by Robin Denniston. Stroud: Sutton Publishing; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp.xv + 208, bibliography, index, illustrations. L25.00 (hardback).
The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-state Ethnic Conflict by Kemal Kirisci and Gareth Winrow. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1997. Pp.xvi + 237, bibliography, index. L32.50 (hardback); L17.50 (paperback).
The story of Turkey's position and policies during the Second World War has been fairly well known for some time. In spite of the tripartite alliance which President Ismet Inonu's government signed with Britain and France in 1939, it succeeded in keeping Turkey as a defacto neutral throughout the conflict. inonu and his colleagues had no interest in dragging their country into a war from which they had virtually nothing to gain and for which their armed forces were very ill-prepared. During 1941-41, there seemed to be a serious danger that Hitler might invade Turkey, but these were the only circumstances in which it was likely to become a participant. Later, inonu resisted strong pressure from Britain to join the allies, and his government's declaration of war on Germany in February 1945 was no more than a formality.
Given the fact that we already have a fairly substantial body of scholarly literature on the subject, it would seem on the face of it that a new study could not add very much to our knowledge. Robin Denniston, however, has a potential ace up his sleeve. Ever since 1922 the British had been reading the correspondence of the Turkish government with its envoys abroad, by the simple expedient of intercepting its cables as they passed through the Istanbul office of the Cable and Wireless Company, in which the British government was a major shareholder. These and other intercepts known as 'BJs' from the fact that they were distributed in blue jackets - were part of Churchill's daily reading, to which he apparently attached great importance. In theory, also, they should give us exceptional insights into Turkish foreign policy making since, as Robin Denniston points out, reports from Turkish embassies abroad were the chief source of information for foreign policy decisions in Ankara.
Unfortunately, this potential pot of gold turns out to be something...