‘Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian: Book Review

‘Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian: Book Review – 

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By JOSEPH KANON

The New York Times

On March 15, 1921, a 25-year-old Armenian in Berlin, Soghomon Tehlirian, shot and killed Mehmet Talat Pasha, who had been the Ottoman minister of the interior during World War I. After the Ottomans’ collapse, Talat had fled into secret exile and was now plotting a return to power with the other Young Turks (or, formally, the Committee for Union and Progress) who had led Turkey into its disastrous wartime alliance with Germany. To Tehlirian, however, Talat was something infinitely worse than simply one of the leaders of a defeated empire. He was a member of the central committee, with a key role in authorizing the Armenian genocide, the series of deportations and massacres in 1915-16 that under the fog of war had murdered much of Tehlirian’s family and some one and a half million other Armenians.

In the sensational trial that followed the assassination, Tehlirian, apparently a lonely misfit seeking to avenge his mother’s death (he said he had seen her beheaded), played David to Talat’s Goliath. And as the world (and the German jury) learned more about the horrors of ­the period, Tehlirian began to seem not so much a murderer (though he freely admitted killing Talat) as an agent for justice. Talat, after all, had been tried in absentia for war crimes and sentenced to death. Tehlirian was avenging not just his family but an entire people. After a stunning verdict to acquit was reached, The New York Times ran a headline that read “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”

When the actor and playwright Eric Bogosian came across Tehlirian’s story he initially thought it would make a good film, and he decided to devote a few months to writing the screenplay. His dramatic instincts were right: The assassination and trial, the core of “Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide,” make absorbing reading. But the few months stretched into seven years of research and writing as Bogosian discovered that Tehlirian was only part of a larger story — not about a hapless loner seeking to avenge his mother (whom he had not seen decapitated) but about a trained member of a group called Operation Nemesis, a band of assassins whose agenda was to draw attention to the Armenian genocide. (As part of the plan, Tehlirian had been ordered to stay with Talat’s body after the shooting to ensure an arrest and public trial.)

Operation Nemesis’ parent organization was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, one of the radical societies formed in the late 19th century to fight Ottoman oppression. It was violent from the start, staging a spectacular bank raid in 1896, an attempt on the sultan’s life in 1905 and similar operations. But it was only after the Armenians watched the Turkish perpetrators of the massacres slip away unpunished following the conclusion of World War I that the decision was made to form a secret organization of assassins.

Founded in Boston in July 1920, and named Nemesis, the group managed in three years to track down and kill seven high-level targets. It employed at least 10 armed assassins and numerous lookouts, spies and diplomatic supporters, as well as contacts in Paris, Geneva and (yes) Watertown, Mass., where it established its headquarters. Many of the assassins were never brought to trial (although one luckless gunman in Tiflis was captured by the Soviet secret police and shipped to Siberia). Their exploits were applauded by most Armenians at the time and make for exciting reading even now. The crimes they were avenging were horrific, their targets hardly sympathetic, and anyone might feel a certain gruesome satisfaction in watching vigilante justice in action. (Imagine a similar group picking off Hitler, Himmler, et al.)

Its legacy, however, can be said to have lasted much longer, and is now a permanent feature of the political landscape. The Nemesis operators didn’t see themselves as terrorists. They were consumed by the need to remember their dead and to have the world remember. But the pattern is now painfully familiar — the personal tragedy (a family killed), the bottomless sense of being aggrieved, the recruitment into a new “family,” the expatriate fund-raisers, the eye-for-an-eye ethos that promises no end but only more death. We could be in Belfast in the late 20th century or Gaza in the 21st.

Operation Nemesis was closed down after 1922, but its example has lingered, often among people so removed in time from the original events that they have been operating in the neverland of collective memory. As recently as the 1970s and ’80s, another underground group, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala), furious because the Turkish government still refused to accept the term “genocide” to describe the events of 1915-16, dedicated itself to the assassination of Turkish diplomats and politicians. It succeeded in assassinating 36 (including family members) in France, Canada, Iran, even the United States, before it discontinued its operations in the 1990s. An Asala bomb at Orly airport in 1983 killed eight and injured another 55, most of whom had no connection either to Turkey or Armenia. Bogosian tells us that the group received “training and inspiration” from the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later forged ties to Abu Nidal, a ruthless Palestinian terrorist. We are a long way from “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”

To his great credit, Bogosian recog­nizes this and refuses to portray Tehlirian or any of the other members of his group as heroes. He’s aware of the gravitas of his story and the need to set it in context. But the Armenian experience is so unwieldy and multifaceted that he has a job just wrestling it all into some coherent shape. He assumes (rightly) that most of his readers won’t know Turkish, much less Armenian history, so he provides a brief overview. But historical narration isn’t his strong suit. A section on the Armenian genocide’s parallels with the Holocaust seems unnecessary after we’ve been told about the roundups and the cattle cars and the camps. He likes to chase down intriguing loose ends (was British intelligence complicit in fingering Talat?), but then he can’t resist off-the-point excursions (like his discussion of the rise of nativism in 1920s America).

Still, where it matters most he delivers: in his gripping action accounts of Nemesis at work, and in the sober assessment of its terrible aftermath. In an opinion piece that followed its “Had To” headline, The Times called the verdict on Tehlirian “a queer view of moral rightness [that] opens the way to other assassinations less easily excusable than his or not excusable at all.” And so it did.