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government did not make real use of his experience and knowledge. One of the continuous themes of the years to come was that Deedes was a Cassandra: his government chose to disregard his warnings and to ignore his accurate analyses of Turkish political motives.
    The minister under whom Deedes served in the Ottoman government in 1914 was Mehmed Talaat. Most of what the British government thought it knew at the time about Talaat and about the political party that Talaat led was erroneous; and at least some of it could have been corrected by Deedes. But the British embassy in Constantinople believed that it knew the truth about Ottoman politics already, and therefore that it did not have to inquire further.
    IV
    Mehmed Talaat, the Minister of the Interior and the leader of the largest faction within the governing political party, was a figure whom British diplomats did not regard as a gentleman. They believed that he lacked race and breeding; they scornfully reported that he was of gypsy origin. He had thick black hair, heavy black eyebrows, a hawk-like nose, and what one of the few sympathetic British observers described as “a light in his eyes, rarely seen in men but sometimes in animals at dusk.” 7
    Talaat was the single most important figure in Turkish politics. He was very much a self-made man. Little is known of his origins and background except that they were humble. He began life as a minor employee of the Post and Telegraph Office and is believed to have been a Bektashi , that is, a member of the largest of the Turkish Dervish orders. (The Dervishes were Moslem religious brotherhoods.) He is believed to have joined a Freemason lodge, is known to have organized a secret political society, and to have been imprisoned for a time for his underground activities.
    Joining a secret organization was a common activity in the Ottoman Empire of Talaat’s youth. Under the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, open political activity was dangerous. The Sultan, who suspended the constitution and disbanded Parliament, was intolerant of dissent and employed a secret police force to deal with it. The political life of the empire was driven underground, where secret societies proliferated. The earliest ones took their inspiration from nineteenth-century European revolutionary groups, especially the Italian carbonari , and organized themselves into cells of a handful of members, only one of whom, typically, would know a member of another cell. Many of them, including the forerunner of the Young Turkey Party, were founded by university and military academy students. The army, too, was an especially fertile breeding ground for such societies; its younger members were shamed by their empire’s disastrous showing on one battlefield after another.
    Abdul Hamid’s police forces succeeded in smashing the secret societies in Constantinople and elsewhere. Beyond their grasp, however, was Salonika, the bustling and un-Turkish Macedonian port in what is now Greece. Salonika is where a number of the secret societies established their headquarters, developing close relationships with members of the Ottoman Third Army, which had its headquarters there. The disorder and disintegration with which the Third Army had to deal in Macedonia—a frontier region of the empire—in itself was a formative experience that helped the secret societies to enlist recruits within the ranks of the army.
    Talaat, who lived and worked in Salonika, was one of the founders of one such secret society which eventually became the principal faction within a merged group that called itself the Committee of Union and Progress—the C.U.P. as it will be called hereafter. It was known, too, as the Young Turkey Party, and later its members were called the Young Turks. Upon joining it, initiates swore an oath on the Koran and a gun. Djemal Bey, a staff officer who later played a major role in Middle Eastern politics, was Talaat’s initial recruit among