Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey by Gingeras Ryan;

Author:Gingeras, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

BUILDING CASES: THE FIRST YEARS OF FBN/DPS COLLABORATION

On 20 July 1950, Charles Siragusa boarded a KLM flight bound for Istanbul. The trip had been officially cleared through the State Department in concert with the consent of the Turkish government. According to this formal agreement, Siragusa was coming to Istanbul in order “to cooperate with Turkish police in exposing narcotics traffic between the United States and Turkey.”88 In his memoirs, Siragusa is vague as to the specific goals of his first trip to Turkey in July 1950.89 Even without a grand strategy guiding his initial tour of Turkey, Siragusa’s activities and appointments clearly followed the operational approach undertaken by George White in 1948. Between 24 July and 25 August, Siragusa would send twenty-two detailed “progress reports” directly to Harry Anslinger, each detailing, in fluid and descriptive language, his experiences and impressions incurred while in-country.90 The general tone of his summaries, coupled with the accounts of the individuals he met and the information he learned, leave little doubt as to the specific purpose of his trip: to uncover the top heroin smugglers in Turkey and, if possible, to make an arrest.

His trip coincided with a momentous period in the development of the FBN. During the course of 1950, the FBN would open a permanent office in Rome, the first of many such offices established on foreign soil. Over time, Siragusa transformed the city into a central outpost in undertaking future investigations in Europe and the Middle East.91 Siragusa’s first visit to Istanbul, coupled with his immediate relocation to Italy, consummated the FBN’s transformation into a police force with a genuinely global reach (a process that clearly began with Anslinger’s active engagement of foreign governments during the interwar period). The eventual opening of an FBN field office in Istanbul in 1960 occurred as the bureau planted firm roots in such cities as Beirut (opened in 1954), Paris (1959), Marseille (1961), Hong Kong (1963), Mexico City (1963), and Bangkok (1963). The list of international offices now under the management of the Drug Enforcement Administration is now far more expansive, numbering eighty-five locations in sixty-six countries worldwide.

His first act upon arriving in Istanbul was to contact the American Consulate and to make appointments with multiple members of the consular staff. Among the first men he met was G. Joseph Zogby, the CIA officer who supplied him with his first intelligence file on the principal smugglers and producers of heroin in the country.92 While he mentions in his memoirs that he spent much of the winter and spring of 1950 poring over the FBN’s internal files from Europe and the Middle East in anticipation of his trip that summer, the information Zogby provided to Siragusa appears to have contained many new revelations.93

In the days immediately following his meetings at the consulate, Siragusa sought to meet with several individuals who had helped to lay the groundwork for George White’s 1948 investigation in Turkey. The first local contact he made a point of meeting was Rıza Çandır, a

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