Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 58

In November 1921 the British tribunal found Torlakian guilty of murder but “unconscious and not responsible.” He was released to the Armenian patriarch in Constantinople and a few days later boarded a steamer headed for Greece. The trial had barely touched on whether or not Torlakian had committed first-degree murder. In this way the Tashnags effectively made use of the defense strategy from Tehlirian’s Berlin trial.11

Said Halim Pasha (Rome, December 5, 1921)

Nemesis struck again late that fall in Rome, a mere month after Torlakian’s acquittal. Said Halim Pasha, the grandson of Egyptian leader Muhammad Ali and the acting Ottoman Grand Vizier throughout most of the war, was assassinated as he emerged from a horse-drawn coach only a few blocks from the Borghese Gardens. The killer was Arshavir Shiragian, only twenty-one years old, born and bred in Constantinople. Shiragian, like Tehlirian, was an experienced killer, having already carried out the Nemesis assassination of an Armenian collaborator named Vahe Ihsan (Yesayan), a man who had provided Turkish police with the names and locations of activists, and who, according to Shiragian, had a role in the April 24 arrests. In that killing, Shiragian had been assisted by Arshag Yezdanian, a veteran assassin who, on his own, had gunned down another “traitor,” Hmayag Aramiantz.

Shiragian was the most dynamic of the Nemesis operatives. Barely a teenager when the war broke out, he was an active member of the underground resistance effort in Constantinople. Shiragian’s boyishness was a useful cover as he moved weapons and fugitives from one clandestine location to the next in the wartime city. His family home was often used to hide young men from the relentless search for army recruits by the police. These young Armenian fugitives were the so-called “Army of the Attics.”

In all the Armenian districts of Constantinople, the attics, the cellars, the spaces between outer and inner walls, the deep storage closets, and the indoor wells became hiding places; it was a kind of subterranean world, inhabited by thousands, into which the Turkish police, guided by damned Armenian traitors, would at times penetrate. Then the people in hiding—as well as the people who had offered them shelter—would be dragged off to jail, and there would be tortured and killed, or else they would be sent into the interior to become victims of the massacre that was in progress.12

During the war, many Armenians led desperate and frightened lives, and were careful to keep their heads down. But some Tashnags, like Shiragian, a born fighter who took delight in clashing with the police and their allies, relished the conflict. Where Tehlirian was sickly, Shiragian was robust. Where Tehlirian was hesitant, Shiragian was cocksure. Shiragian had no experience as a soldier, but he was a good shot and was comfortable around firearms. Also, he was well known to the Tashnag leadership. Years of experience outwitting the police while running weapons and fugitives had made him a wily asset in the Tashnag camp. When the possibility was discussed among Tashnag inner circles of an operation to assassinate former Ittihad leaders, Shiragian was one of the first to volunteer. The Tashnag bosses were reluctant to give such an important job to someone so young, but after several fruitless attempts on the life of Vahe Ihsan, Shiragian was given the order to stalk and kill the former policeman.

In his autobiography The Legacy, Shiragian describes shooting the informant Ihsan:

My second bullet got Ihsan in the arm. When he realized that he would not be able to use his gun, he started to run. I fired two more bullets after him as I chased him. There was quite a commotion in the street. Pedestrians were screaming and trying to take cover, and from nearby windows people were throwing things at me—flowerpots, shoes, anything. But no one dared to get in my way or grab me. Ihsan fell; his head struck a stone. My third and fourth bullets had hit him, but he didn’t seem human. He was still alive. He got to his knees and tried to stand. We were both being struck by the various objects which people were throwing at us from the shelter of their homes. Taking advantage of the confusion, Ihsan managed to get his revolver out of his pocket. He started to take aim. I jumped on him and fired my last two bullets into his head. Then I started to run away. But I couldn’t leave. I had to turn back to make certain that he had stopped breathing. In my nervousness and because of my inexperience, I had done a sloppy job. His skull was shattered and his brains had splattered on the stones.13

Over the next few years, Shiragian would develop a more elegant killing technique.

Shiragian was later identified by Ihsan’s bodyguard (who had run off when the shooting started), and a warrant was issued for the young man’s arrest. Meanwhile, the “organization” gave him a new assignment: Find Enver Pasha and kill him. He was provided with a false alias and a “Nansen” passport (passports issued after World War I by the newly formed League of Nations, providing stateless refugees a means to travel). Strapping a Russian-made revolver to his leg, Shiragian was smuggled onto a Black Sea steamer heading for the Crimea, where the civil war between the Red and White Russian armies continued to rage. From there, he crossed into the newborn Republic of Armenia. From Armenia, he planned to sneak into Azerbaijan via Georgia, on the trail of Enver Pasha.

Though Enver Pasha, like Talat, had abandoned Turkey, once he eluded the British and French authorities, he formed the “Army of Islam” and entered Azerbaijan with his men. Enver was intent on uniting the pan-Turanistic and pan-Islamic forces in the region, after which he could take on the role of their leader within the new Soviet system. Or not. It would depend on which way the cookie crumbled. Once he had control of Azerbaijan, he could just as well form an alliance with the Turkish nationalists fighting in eastern Turkey. Either way, his presence in the region was of great concern to both the Russians and the British.

Having arrived safely in Armenia, Shiragian was paired up with Aram Yerganian, a veteran Nemesis operative who had assassinated Fatali Khan Khoyski, another high-level Azerbaijani minister, in Tiflis, Georgia, earlier that year. With Armenian diplomatic passports in their pockets, Shiragian, twenty, and Yerganian, twenty-five, headed for Tiflis. Once in Georgia, they would exchange diamonds, gold, and cash for Azerbaijani rubles. They would assume Muslim aliases and present themselves as Turkish caviar merchants. They would then cross the border into Azerbaijan and travel on to Baku, where Enver had been sighted.

The two Tashnag would-be assassins of Enver Pasha arrived in Tiflis in November 1920. No sooner had they settled into their hotel room than police burst in and arrested them. In a matter of days, the two young men were swallowed up by the state apparatus of Georgia, at the time on unfriendly terms with Armenia. There was tension among the three “Transcaucasian” nations: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three were struggling with their delicate geographical position as buffer zones between Turkey and Soviet Russia. Though they maintained relations with one another, each nation was fighting for its own survival as its agents moved from one territory to the next.

Once in prison, the young men lost contact with their confederates in the outside world. As far as their Armenian comrades back in Yerevan and Constantinople were concerned, the two were either dead or soon to be executed. Shiragian and Yerganian were brutally tortured and condemned to solitary confinement in a rat-infested dungeon. The night arrived when they were roused from bed and marched to the prison yard. It was time for their final disappearance. As they were being led to a crumbling wall where they would be lined up and shot, Shiragian grabbed hold of an old pump in the middle of the prison yard and began to scream, waking the entire inmate population. A riot ensued, and the clandestine execution was postponed. The incident was reported via the prison grapevine, and the news that the two men were still alive and in this prison made it back to their comrades in Armenia.