A First Button Done Up Wrongly: Revisiting Philip H. Stoddard’s “Ottoman Special Organization”

ABSTRACT

The Ottoman Special Organization made its way into the literature of historical studies during the 1960s in the United States through the work of Philip H. Stoddard. Stoddard’s doctoral dissertation resonated so powerfully within academic circles that his approach to the organization, albeit flawed, was adopted extensively and thus echoed by later researchers. This also holds true for Turkish academia, where the nature, origin and historical course of the Special Organization in particular, and unconventional warfare and intelligence in general, was and remains largely misunderstood due to Stoddard’s fallacious analysis of the organization coupled with the uncritical character of conventional history-writing in Turkey. Through a critique of the paradigms and referential points Stoddard based his study on, as well as the conceptual and terminological aspects of his work, this study offers a more sound approach to both the organization and the units that fulfilled intelligence duties at the institutional level.

KEYWORDS:

• Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa
• unconventional warfare
• special warfare
• intelligence

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Different understandings of history posed threat to the Kemalist establishment during this period, when the ruling elite in Turkey did not feel obliged to deny or alienate the recent past under the effect of the winds of liberalization blowing through the country and the rest of the world. This period has also witnessed the gradual loosening of the state’s grip on the academy, and beginning of access, though very limited, to the basic source materials concerning unconventional warfare. In tandem with these developments, the subject of the SO began to transform into an academic endeavor in Turkey.

2. Archival restrictions in Turkey have also posed troubles for academic works. In this context Oktay Özel draws attention to the importance of the question of which archive on which subject is open, semi-open or completely closed, to understand the current situation of the archives in Turkey that seems to be mired in the political quagmire (Özel, 2012).

3. At this point, it should be noted that there was no organization called “Hafiye” during the reign of Abdulhamid II, as “hafiye” simply means “spy” in Ottoman Turkish. The organization is also claimed to have been named Yıldız Secret Service (Yıldız Hafiye Teşkilatı) by others. The latest studies doubt that such an organization existed either. There was, however, a systematic intelligence organization founded during the reign of Abdulhamid II and centered in the Yıldız Palace, which acted like a governmental agency responsible for both domestic and foreign intelligence (Akıncı, 2018; Gör 2019 for more detail).

4. For example, widely accepted claim that Eşref Bey was the founder and the first chief of the SO can be supported only by his own writings (Kuşçubaşı, 1962). However, all the names and inauguration dates of the SO directors are officially recorded, and Kuşçubaşı is not counted as one of them ((ATASE, ca. 19181918: F: 1846, D: 79, I: 13/4); Safi, 2020 for more detail).