By Nazlan Ertan
In Turkish, casus is the spy who slips through keyholes and whispers down telephone lines. In Ottoman Turkish, the word appears as câsûs, borrowed from Arabic, and, under Sultan Abdülhamid II’s watchful reign, it had a cousin, hafiyye, the “secret investigator” who made surveillance an imperial art.
Like most Turks and Europeans, I love a good spy story, the sort with a dashing figure darting through salons where the women are as sharp as the tailoring. I am less moved by conspiracy theories, particularly when they try to stitch jailed presidential candidates onto the payrolls of foreign intelligence services with the subtlety of an orangutan writing pulp fiction.
CITY OF SPIES
Istanbul and espionage are long-standing companions. The city, capital of three empires, has always been where continents, conflicts, and conspiracies meet. Novelists noticed: Graham Greene sent characters rattling eastward in “Stamboul Train,” and 007 has staged showdowns from Hagia Sophia to the Grand Bazaar in “From Russia with Love” and “Skyfall.” Istanbul is no backdrop of spies; it is a recurring character.
In the great spy-theatre of Istanbul, three cameo performers waltz through the curtain: there’s Markus Penckner, the 16th-century Transylvanian renegade who swapped allegiances and converted to Islam as “Ahmed” to spy for the Ottomans and the Habsburgs alike—proof that double lives pre-date double agents; then Konstantin Volkov, the Soviet vice-consul in Istanbul who, in 1945, knocked on the British door offering dossiers on Soviet moles only to disappear after his unwitting handler proved to be his Soviet superior (yes, that Mi6/Kim Philby mess); and finally Despina Storch, the WWI-era Ottoman-Greek socialite who stepped out of the café in Istanbul in a scandalous swoosh and into spy-literature as “Turkish Delight.”
And then there’s “Cicero” in Ankara. The British ambassador’s valet Elyesa Bazna photographed secret files in 1943–44 and sold them to Germany. Hollywood dramatized it as “Five Fingers” (1952); Turkey revisited it with “Çiçero” (2019). The lesson endures: sometimes the leak isn’t a trench coat in an alley but the trusted man polishing the silver.
(If this section keeps you wanting more, read Murat Yetkin’s book “The Book of Spying for the Curious” or Barcin Yinanc’s interview here)
PULP FICTION
Fast-forward to today and the spies are allegedly back – and no, I am not talking of recent arrests of MOSSAD-linked spies in Istanbul. An Istanbul “political espionage” investigation has drawn in Ekrem İmamoğlu, the opposition mayor of Istanbul and a likely future presidential contender.
As you have already read earlier in the newsletter, the inquiry centers on businessman Hüseyin Gün, arrested earlier this year on suspicion of conducting intelligence work for foreign states.
Prosecutors claim he “transferred intelligence on Turkey, the Middle East and Africa to operatives working for a foreign state while posing as a businessperson.” Gün’s devices allegedly contained encrypted Wickr messages, images of Turkish officials, and analyses labeled “digital intelligence.”
In their filings, investigators assert that Gün collaborated with members of İmamoğlu’s 2019 mayoral campaign, including his strategist and political mastermind Necati Özkan, to analyze voter data and mobilize volunteers. Some pro-governmental Turkish outlets went further, claiming that portions of this data or analysis were shared “with foreign intelligence intermediaries.” These remain allegations, not judicial findings, but would that ever get in the way of Yeni Akit?
İmamoğlu has rejected the accusations outright. Speaking to Medyascope, he called them “the most absurd and serious charge that could ever be directed at me,” adding that linking him to spycraft or encrypted apps was “as absurd as saying I burned Rome,” – aaah, from Bond to Nero…
A PHOTO LAUNCHING A THOUSAND HEADLINES
No spy story is complete without a winking reference to “Cherchez la femme,” in the form of a glamorous woman. In this case, the image splashed across pro-government papers shows Seher Alaçam, known in some reports as Hüseyin Gün’s “adopted mother” or “cici anne” as we Turks call it. She appears beside İmamoğlu in a lavish pre-WWI outfit crowned (no pun intended) by an enormous hat, said to have been taken in 2019 at Istanbul’s municipal offices.
Yeni Akit’s Ankara News editor Muhammet Kutlu posted the picture on X, pairing it with a century-old portrait they claimed showed Gertrude Bell, the British traveler, archaeologist, and (depending on whom you ask) spy who helped redraw the map of the Middle East. “Names change but clothes don’t,” said the Yeni Akit headline of the news they proudly called an “exclusive article.”
Except the woman in the old photograph isn’t Gertrude Bell at all. Archival records identify her as Lilian “Judith” Doughty-Wylie, the wife of Bell’s married paramour Charles Doughty-Wylie, a British diplomat. Judith was a registered nurse. (To read more about Bell, do look up Pat Yale’s “Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell.”)
So where does that leave casus this week? With two reminders:
First, Istanbul’s espionage lore is real: sometimes glamorous, sometimes grubby, but modern spy sagas live or die on evidence, not innuendo.
Second, keep the popcorn ready for Greene and Bond. But when today’s headlines arrive, handle them with gloves, check the provenance, and wait for evidence.
After all, it might be the wrong picture.
