Latest Fad in Turkey: Counting U.S. Planes

It is cold out on the rim of war and journalism. When Mahmut Celik returns after 11 hours as a reporter-in-hiding, his face is pinched and as raw as the official nerves he rubs the wrong way.

Only a few weeks ago, Celik was a police reporter in Adana for the Turkish national newspaper Hurriyet. Now he counts American warplanes for Hurriyet. He has become skillful at eluding some of the police he used to interview.

“We go out singly so that we are harder to spot,” Celik said, shrugging out of a three-sizes-too-big raincoat that concealed a camera. He handed Hurriyet bureau chief Ceyhun Ozgonul the day’s take: a crumpled bit of cross-hatched yellow paper listing the movements of more than 150 American jets.

“I knew nothing about planes. Now I can identify 10 different types, by day or night. It was exciting at first; now it is only routine,” Celik said after a week of watching enigmatic glimpses of war flash past overhead.

Turkey and the United States have raised a thick curtain of silence around their joint use of Incirlik Air Base outside Adana as a major springboard for American air attacks against northern Iraq.

Every day, flights of American jets dressed for war take off and land again at Incirlik’s 10,000-foot-long Runway 05. Their passage is as plain as the missiles they carry to anyone in Adana willing to look skyward. Neither is it a secret to the Iraqi government, which has threatened retaliation against Turkey for allowing American use of the big base on the city’s outskirts.

What is happening at Incirlik? All Turkey wants to know. Cold and lonely reporters like Mahmut Celik offer an imprecise and incomplete answer, but it is the only one. No one in authority is talking.

Every day, the base’s American spokesmen say: “I can’t comment on operational matters, sir.” Every day, the base’s Turkish military spokesmen say nothing.

For a city of 1 million that is at once alarmed and proud of its contribution to the war, the base is a paramount fact of life. In the streets of Adana, there are many rumors about Incirlik, but the only thing approaching news comes from fresh-minted plane counters as diverse as nearsighted night watchmen and retread police reporters.

Reporters in Saudi Arabia get briefings at which they are regularly dosed with pellets of information. At the last briefing at Incirlik--before the war--reporters were told there were 98 American warplanes at a base that would be used only for logistic and humanitarian purposes. Then they were bundled into a bus for a tour that showed not a single one of them.

In Saudi Arabia, there are military-organized news pools in which some reporters are shown things with the obligation to report back to all the other reporters. Here, at the threshold of the air war’s second front, there is also a news pool, and Turkish and foreign lurkers dutifully count takeoffs without the slightest inkling of which planes are going to war and which are going for coffee.

In the age of the electronic battlefield, the scene at Incirlik is a throwback to one of those black-and-white movies in which pomaded World War I spies peer around corners to count ships leaving harbor. If there are Iraqi spies around Incirlik today, they have literally thousands of chill vantage points from which to observe base operations.

Counting is an expertise easily acquired.

“The F-111s are the ones that are long and nasty looking. The F-15s have two tails and the F-16s are the other ones,” a veteran of two days explained to a newcomer one recent afternoon from the cover of a wheat warehouse. Returning raiders, some still laden with unfired bombs and missiles, thundered close enough overhead for their tail numbers to be easily read.

U.S. attacks from Incirlik began Jan. 18, the counters say, but it was not until late last week that the Turkish government finally acknowledged publicly what everybody knew. By then, Iraq had formally protested use of the base and made its threats.

What one senior Turkish official who opposed it calls “a ridiculous silence” is a function of government information policy in a Muslim country of 57 million that has no sympathy for its Arab neighbor but no wish to fight Saddam Hussein in a ground war.

Bellicose President Turgut Ozal marches lock-step with the United States but against the instincts and beyond the wishes of the majority of Turks who tell pollsters they want no part of war.

The most charitable observers say the government remained silent on Incirlik until a new U.S. Patriot anti-missile system was up and running there. A more common view, though, is that Ozal’s government did not want to further alarm Turkish public opinion that thinks he is calculatingly dragging his nation to war.

One day last week, 20 members of an opposition Social Democratic Party occupied the offices of the state-run national television network to protest what they called one-sided news reporting. The network had been translating Cable News Network live but cut away to nature films at any mention of Incirlik.

Ozal, who insists that Turkey will fight only if attacked, is never far from a television set: “a CNN junkie” in the words of one foreign diplomat. Indeed, after witnessing his frequent appearances recently on the American network, one political foe called Ozal “the CNN Ankara correspondent.”

The autocratic Ozal, though, likes what he likes. The British Broadcasting Corp. is in the presidential doghouse for regularly reporting raids from Incirlik, one BBC correspondent noted.

At a meeting with senior Turkish journalists Thursday, Ozal asked them to avoid precise information about military movements. Pointing to piles of clips, he said, “I know who supports the war and who doesn’t,” according to Bekir Coskun of the newspaper Sahab, who was present.

Anyone can count the arriving aircraft. Imset remembers one day when a rookie German correspondent counted 41 planes while experienced Turks recorded 42. After a lot of palaver the German was brought around to 42.

All of this is grist for a Turkish press that invariably goes to bed hungry for information about Incirlik, and for a procession of likewise frustrated foreign correspondents who have turned up in Adana in recent days to join the counters’ watch.