Where have I heard the name Marc Grossman before? Oh, yeah, he's the former American ambassador to Turkey (1994-1997) who is the central subject in former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' accusations. (Here's Philip Giraldi's interview with her in 2009 in The American Conservative. I've talked to Giraldi, an ex-CIA man who is AmCon's espionage gossip columnist. He seems like a level-headed guy.)
Very, very few people in the U.S. think about Turkey much. To us, it's either the Mexico of Europe or the Canada of the Middle East, and people who follow the news in America don't pay much attention to Mexico or Canada, much less to Turkey. Yet, it's actually a very interesting and important place — look at a map.
And, Turkey is byzantine. It has always had connections to old school American deep staters like Scowcroft and Baker through Cold War NATO membership and the like. And it is of great interest to neocons due to the once strong Israeli alliance. Josh Klemons writes:
Israel has viewed Turkey as an ally since before it declared statehood. Turkey, along with Ethiopia and Iran (the latter of course being a much different story) made up Ben-Gurion's Periphery Doctrine. Recognizing that in the short-term, Israel would not be able to work with its Arab neighbors, he looked to reach out to Israel's "periphery" as a means of having allies in the region.The neocons have been uneasy about Turkey, however, since the rise of Prime Minister Erdogan a decade ago.
I don't know whether Edmonds' accusations are true, but nobody seems to deny them very much or put forward evidence against them. Instead, they are just treated as nonexistent. It's not like there's an Official Story on the subject. There's just no story.
One interesting theory a commenter put forward was that the least disturbing explanation for all this would be that Edmonds happened to stumble upon a CIA sting operation in which Grossman was just pretending to be a corrupt secrets dealer in order to lure in the bad guys.
Did some sort of memo go out to never talk about any of this? If so, who sends it and who gets it? Or are you just supposed to know about what not to think about?
By the way, speaking of knowing what not to know, here's the May 5th list of most popular stories on WashingtonPost.com:
