So are Turkish ex-maos crack hackers? I don't think so but I do know that some of them are intelligent professionals, intellectuals, and artists, although their "intelligence" is of an unconventional sort, like the cephalopods mentioned in another thread :-) Consider that Perincek's Paper Aydinlik once sported a star on a red background and was the mouthpiece of TIKP (Turkish Workers and Peasants Party), which predicted a red maoist dawn for Turkey. TIKP's armed wing (with and -ML extension) was busy shooting rival lefties or staging provocations (like the 1977 May 1 parade) that would lead to their death en masse, while Aydinlik was publishing lists of their names for the benefit of the security services. Nowadays, Perincek's militants stage protests in front of the churches in Istanbul ("churches have no place in an Islamic country"), indimidate Kurds, start campaigns against the dollar, and generally do all the racist and xenophobic things the fascists would love to do if they weren't trying to keep up centrist appearances (the burdens of government and all that). The cephalophod readers of Aydinlik believe all this makes perfect sense.
Let me tell you how he started, it's entertaining: In 1969, students in Istanbul threw the sailors of the visiting US 6th fleet into the Bosphorus. That very same day, The CIA's new Ankara station chief Duane Clarridge arrived in Istanbul from India, where he had been busy infiltrating the maoist CPI M/L and stepping up its activities against the pro-Moscow CPI, which was backing Nehru. Clarridge watched from the window of a CIA safe house as the student crowd milled around the quay of Dolmabahce palace, hurling insults at the US fleet anchored there.
In 1970, a focoist paper called Kurtulus announced that immediate guerilla action was necessary to ignite the struggle against US imperialism. A few anti-US actions were staged by some young men with guns, but nobody was killed. The army took over in 1971. Some of the young hotheads were caught, sentenced, and tried. Or rather sentenced, caught, and tried. Some of their friends held the Israeli consul hostage in exchange for their freedom but the army wouldn't negotiate and the "zionist agent" was killed. 3 NATO technicians were abducted with the same objective, but this time it was the abductors who were killed. The young men who died were members of the focoist fraction of Dev-Genç (Revolutionary Youth). Another fraction was Perincek's PDA (No he didn't invent the Palm Pilot; PDA stands for Proleter Devrimci Aydınlık: Proletarian Revolutionary Light, as in Shining Path).
The funny thing is, the 1971 coup was supposed to be a _leftist_ coup and some of the young hotheads - the popular Deniz Gezmis in particular, whose bravery at the gallows became a legend - had been recruited by the coup leaders. At the top of the junta were Army chief Gurler and Air Force chief Batur, who later became the famous beneficiary of Lockheed's largesse. Among those promised ministerial porftfolios by the generals were most of Turkey's leftist luminaries like Mumtaz Soysal, Dogan Avcioglu, Ugur Mumcu, and - who else - Perincek. The generals and Perincek promptly switched sides and the CIA's redesign of Turkey's politics and constitution began on March 12, 1971. Perincek submitted a list of all the participants of the failed coup, including his own outfit, whose Istanbul leaders were arrested at the home of Professor Hiller Boyt (UK) of Robert College, prompting comments that Perincek had abandoned MI6 for a more prestigious employer.
After the coup, Perincek relaunched Aydinlik and pursued a line of action similar to that of the Indian CPI M/L, splitting and subverting the left and frequently publishing classified material from "inside" sources. In his memoirs "A Spy for All Seasons", CIA station chief Claridge never mentions what he was up to in Turkey. Before the 1980 coup in Turkey, Claridge moved on to Rome, where he framed Bulgaria for the Pope shooting and set the stage for Reagan's "evil empire". He was then assigned to another Reagan project, the Contras.
Hakki