Volume IV, Issue 4/ April 2010
Welcome Letter
Welcome back! We are excited to bring you Turkey as our focus this month. This historic and pivotally placed land plays an extremely important role and will increase in influence with the increase of trade barriers. Under such conditions, trading blocs will form and Turkey will become a key player as the most European of the Middle-eastern countries and the most Middle-eastern of European countries. The collapse of the Eurozone, which is now a near certainty, will favor Turkey as many of the overseas Turks will return home or at least send back capital for safe keeping.
I first went to Turkey in the early 90s. Although I passed through Ankara and Istanbul briefly, I spent the majority of my time living in a warehouse outside of Batman with a group of Brits and Americans. A casual observer might have thought us a group of oil company employees or aid workers as we were all under 40 and only referred to each other by first name. But a closer look would have revealed we were neither commercially oriented nor terribly interested in providing aid.
If you know what to look for you can spot a clandestine military or paramilitary team from 100 meters. First, ¨relaxed grooming standards¨, as the military calls long hair and beards, do not hide military bearing. You can spot the mannerisms of a field soldier by the preciseness of his actions which make him look uncomfortably alert when compared to civilians. An aid worker will completely ignore the hustle and bustle of a third world city as soon as the novelty wears off. They wander around alone with their hands stuffed in their pockets on a cold day or wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt in summer. Most special operators, unless they have lots of field time and complete disdain for their professional culture, never truly blend in. Operators almost always move in ¨buddy teams¨ even when going to the local market for provisions.
There is a standard issue ¨non uniform¨ uniform for special ops types. If you see a group of thirty something athletic guys with cargo pants, wrap-around sunglasses, big watches and black backpacks with at least one snap link attached there is a better than 50% chance they are special operators or wannabe´s. If most of them are also wearing black nylon fanny packs the odds are better than 90% they don´t hold passports and tour books but rather 9MM pistol in a tear away pouch.
The informality of our group was not borne of familiarity but rather necessity as we were all operating under alias. I had never seen any of the others before arriving but first names are standard operating procedure when you are using throw away identities. At first encounter the first name only thing may not jump out at you but after a short while it feels forced and is noticeable.
I begin with these random musings for two reasons. The first is to point out one of the problems with western intelligence and Special Forces human intelligence or HUMINT capabilities. All the agencies have become mature bureaucracies and mature bureaucracies are founded on regimented systems. There is an organizational bias against any operative who ¨goes native¨ or blends too well. They cannot be fully trusted and a whiff of renegade or individual spirit will remove an operative from an attractive career path. Hence nine times out of ten the best field operatives are either forced out or choose to leave after only a few years in the clandestine services. The guys that actually get pretty good at running agents and gathering information are promptly rewarded by being removed from the field to dwell in a cubicle. Note: in the spy business the guy in the employ of an Agency is called a clandestine service officer, case officer or intelligence officer. Never an Agent. An Agent is a foreign national that is either wittingly or unwittingly committing treason by sharing classified information or otherwise providing services to a foreign intelligence service. In the spy trade Agents are thought of as necessary evils and disposable tools most of the time. It should not be that way but it is the case more often than not. Unfortunately, the hubris of the US government is now so widespread that the us vs them mentality has all but destroyed the effectiveness of the US intelligence agencies.
The second reason I bring this up is to introduce you to one of the rare exceptions to the rule. I first met ¨Nick¨ in Batman. Batman is an oil town on the border of Kurdish Iraq. We were there ostensibly to support Kurdish refugees in Turkey but in reality we were there to meddle in other people´s business. I was new to the game and had carefully packed my cargo pants, fanny pack and black ¨civilian¨ rucksack…eh I mean backpack with snap links. I synchronized my big watch and was ready to go. Nick picked me up at the airport in a beat up Toyota pickup with a goat in the bed. A picture of a Syrian pop star hung from the rear view mirror. Nick looked like a cross between The Dude from the Big Lebowski and Sam Elliot´s character in Roadhouse. He was wearing white linen pants and slip-on Turkish sandals. Real operators wear Merrill hiking boots. There were tea and tobacco stains on his loosely fitting hemp shirt. Were it not for his American accent he could have been from anywhere. He certainly did not look Turkish or Kurdish but his origins could have been Lebanese, Southern European or even Indian. At the time I thought his picking me up reinforced the fact that I was below ground on the totem pole. I thought they sent some administrative local hire pogue from accounting to pick me up. This middle aged washout with a potbelly and scraggly beard was the boss´ way of saying, ¨mind your business junior and stay out of the way”. They probably found this driver slash fixer hanging around the US embassy in Ankara and figured he was harmless. But I was wrong…Very Wrong. Nick was the boss. And Nick was the man.
Nick is a legend in certain circles, famous and revered by some and infamous and despised by others. Nick is a trust fund baby. He was born rich. He didn´t have to work. He was thrown out of several snotty but not terribly academic eastern colleges before he joined the Navy to piss off his family. He served with the SEALS in Vietnam. He then left the navy and traveled the world in search of enlightenment. Enlightenment in those days involved a lot of cannabis, sex and communal living which he found along the hippie trail that roughly followed the old silk road through Turkey, keeping in close proximity to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, before continuing on to Tehran and Nepal for enlightenment. Doug Casey recently sent along an Arabic proverb,
“Paradise can be found on the back of horses, in books and between the breasts of women.”
I´m not sure about paradise but Nick is living proof that this form of enlightenment is possible and his quest took the better part of a decade in which he became a student of eastern philosophy and an accomplished linguist. At one point he lived like a Pasha and had a palace complete with harem just over the Uzbek border in Iran. He claims Jimmi Hendrix and Jim Morrison both stayed at his place. He has pictures of the model ¨Twiggy¨ bathing nude in his fountain. Sometimes local Uzbek men would drop off their eligible daughters because the ¨pasha¨ did not require a dowry. When he talks of those days you can see the wistfulness in his eyes. But that ended badly when the Shah was deposed.
A more enlightened Nick found himself back in the US in the early 80s where he taught European literature and eastern philosophy at an elite (read expensive) prep school for nearly six years before being fired when someone noticed his college transcript was a forgery and closer investigation revealed that the enlightened one was still a university sophomore in the eyes of academia. Alas Nick was thrown from the ivory tower once more. Luckily for him the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and Nick not only spoke Pashto, Farsi, Arabic and Urdu but he was once a SEAL and would work on the cheap. When a fancy prep school throws you out where do you go? To the CIA of course. It’s easy if you have an old navy buddy trying to round up a crew of ¨advisors¨ willing to live in Peshawar.
The rest as they say is history or, as is often the case amongst shadow dwellers and door kickers, one part history and one part exaggerated legend. Legend has it that Nick was the first westerner to link up with the Mujahidin inside Afghanistan. Legend has it he lived in the midst of the Soviet occupation for two years inside Kabul. I don´t know exactly how much of the legend is true but I have seen a picture on his wall of a young Nick and a young General Rashid Dostum arm in arm standing over the wreckage of a Soviet helicopter. I´d heard Nick and Dostum knew each other during Nick´s stint as a Pasha and Dostum´s early days as an Uzbek smuggler. I´ll leave what Nick consumed and what Dostum may have supplied up to the imagination. I asked Nick once but he just deflected the question and I let it drop.
After Afghanistan he became the black ops journeyman equivalent of the surfer always in search of big waves. Whenever there was an interesting hot spot in some place and it was hard to recruit from the cocktail party crowd that runs the clandestine service, Nick would be there. But if and only if the job piqued his interest. He was never officially a CIA officer because he could not pass a polygraph. However, he was what is referred to as a diversified cover officer (DCO). An independent contractor. In practice this means he can work in the field but can never have access to classified information beyond what he generates. When I first met him I knew none of this but as luck or misfortune would have it our paths crossed several more times and we became friends.
Nick no longer does any work for the government and, as he tells it, shortly after the Northern Alliance arrived in Kabul he made a trip to DC and outlined in painful detail what would happen should the US try to install Karzai or another puppet and call it democracy. Two days after he told anyone who would listen that the US would never find bin Laden and the occupation would only move the radicals into Pakistan and destabilize a fragile nuclear power he was visited at his parent’s home in Connecticut by two young men in blue blazers and cheap shoes who ¨looked like they should be working at the mall¨. They were polite and respectful. It was obvious they had never heard of him a day or two before and this was just one of their daily errands. During the conversation Nick learned that a ¨Burn Notice¨ had been issued on him. A burn notice is a directive that goes out to all CIA and DOD stations stating that an individual has become unreliable and there can be no further contact with him. This is normally reserved for dodgy office boys who peddle fabricated information and suspected double agents. It is very rare for a burn notice to go out on an American. But according to Nick the ¨careerists and their Neocon overlords¨ were afraid he would subvert their plans by arriving in Kabul and linking up with old friends. Who knows?
We remain close and I have learned many valuable lessons from Nick over the years. He and his girlfriend, a thirty five year old liberal Turkish woman, have a house on the Turkish Riviera where they spend three to four months a year. With his help we take a peek behind the headlines this month and explore the social and cultural scene in Turkey. In a coming edition we will explore the Turkish financial and political situation in greater depth with another friend, this time a Turkish entrepreneur that has made a fortune several times over in Central Asia and has recently returned with an eye towards politics.
Also in this issue we explain how to profit from investing in Turkey from the comfort of your home or office. Turkey flies under the radar and is certainly not without problems but there is real value to be found in the Turkish bazaar and the Turkish capital markets. We will also touch on the property market but our advice is to hold off on any investment in Turkish real estate.
We will close out this issue with further evidence that Greece is merely a skirmishing action by the economic scouts. The real battle lines will be drawn in Spain. We suspect the problems are set to accelerate this year and we will discuss how to position your portfolio to profit.
On another note, our friend Carlos Andres, who brought last month´s stock pick to our attention, has extended a compelling offer to Without Borders subscribers. Carlos is a rare breed of analyst who in similar fashion to the folks at International Speculator and Energy Speculator provides some of the best coverage of the resource industry. His letter is The Frontier Research Report. While there are many letters that concentrate on Canadian resource shares, Carlos concentrates on companies listed in the UK, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. That doesn´t mean he won´t recommend a US or Canadian listed company but he feels the lack of coverage in other places creates opportunities. Almost everything he recommends can be bought easily through a US online broker. We have been very impressed with his work to date and we think you will be too. You need not do anything to receive his letter for three months free of charge. We will send it to you automatically next Wednesday unless you tell us you do not want it. Read it for three months and if you want to keep receiving The Frontier Research Report then, as a Without Borders subscriber, you will receive 50% off the annual subscription price.
Finally, we have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age and are now taking a giant leap (for us anyway) forward. We now have a Linked In profile and group. So if you use Linked In and you want to connect there and communicate with other members of the Without Borders community you can ¨link in¨ with Fitzroy McLean and the Without Borders Group.
Yours in Exploration,
Fitzroy McLean
Chief Bon Vivant and Speculator
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