Operation Nemesis : Throughline
NPR
An estimated 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed by the Ottoman government during World War I, in what came to be known as the Armenian Genocide. The perpetrators escaped Constantinople in the middle of the night and began new lives undercover in Europe. So, a small group of Armenian survivors decided to take justice into their own hands. In this episode from Kerning Cultures, the secretive operation to avenge the Armenian Genocide, and how it changed the idea of justice in the modern world. This story originally aired on Kerning Cultures, a podcast telling stories from across the Middle East and North Africa and the spaces in between.
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NPR
RUND ABDELFATAH, HOST:

Hey, Rund here.

RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, HOST:

And Ramtin.

ABDELFATAH: A note about what you're about to hear - this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. If kids are listening or you'd rather not hear that, I'd suggest skipping this one.

ARABLOUEI: Here's reporters Alex Atack and Hebah Fisher.

ALEX ATACK: Our story begins on the last day of Talaat Pasha's life on an ordinary road in the center of Berlin. He'd been living in an apartment here, No. 4 Hardenbergstrasse, for some years now, and he'd grown comfortable in his routine. Every day, about 11 o'clock, he'd walk the few blocks into town to a tobacco shop, and that's what he was doing on the morning that we're talking about, March 15, 1921. But what he didn't know that morning is that he was being watched.

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ATACK: As Talaat stepped out of his front door, he was wearing a striped shirt and leaning on a walking stick. In the old days, he was known for his kind of trademark thick mustache, kind of like a walrus, but he shaved it off a few years back as a precaution in case anyone recognized him. As he walked through the doorway that listed his apartment number next to a fake name, a young Armenian man called Soghomon Tehlirian was waiting for him, looking down at the street from the window of an apartment on the other side of the road.

MICHAEL GAVLAK: Soghomon knows, this is it. This is the moment.

ATACK: This is Michael Gavlak. He's a movie producer working on a film about Soghomon Tehlirian.

GAVLAK: And he grabs his gun, grabs his coat, heads out. I mean, he knew this was his duty, and so he had to get it right. This has to happen correctly. I can't get the wrong guy. I'm not going to kill an innocent man. I don't want any bystanders harmed. This guy deserves to die, and I'm the one appointed to do it. Nobody else will.

So he stays parallel on the other side of the street and accelerates on the other side of the street to get ahead of him. And then he crosses the street up in front of Talaat so he can walk towards him 'cause Soghomon wants to get a positive ID. And in a split second, Soghomon put the gun right under Talaat's left ear and pulled the trigger.

And the way that autopsy describes how Talaat died, it says his brain exploded, and he fell, dropped like a rock straight down, and his skull cracked on the sidewalk, and the blood immediately started oozing.

ATACK: The blood was oozing from the head of the man who was the grand vizier of the Ottoman government during the Armenian genocide. Usually, he's known as Talaat Pasha, but Pasha is an honorific, and it doesn't feel right to use it here.

HEBAH FISHER: Between 1915 and 1917, he oversaw the Ottoman military during one of the darkest chapters in recent history. Under his supervision, his soldiers murdered over 1 1/2 million Armenians and other Christian minorities from the Ottoman Empire.

ATACK: And Soghomon Tehlirian - that was the assassin standing over Talaat looking down as his blood pooled on the sidewalk - he was part of a secretive assassination plot to avenge the Armenian lives lost in those years. Why - I suppose, like, why assassination as opposed to, I don't know, anything else?

MARIAN MESROBIAN MACCURDY: What else is there? They were tried, convicted of capital crimes. What else is there?

ATACK: This is the Armenian American writer Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Do you torture them? Do you, you know - I don't know? They wanted Talaat to die.

ABDELFATAH: When we come back, we'll introduce you to a podcast we really like, "Kerning Cultures," and their episode about Operation Nemesis, the story of a secretive group of ordinary Armenians seeking justice when governments fail to, who plotted to take out the top Ottoman officials in charge of the Armenian genocide...

ARABLOUEI: ...And how their operation changed the way the world thinks of justice. You're listening to THROUGHLINE from NPR.

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ABDELFATAH: This week, we want to bring you something we heard that really stuck with us. It's from a podcast called "Kerning Cultures."

ARABLOUEI: "Kerning Cultures" tells stories from across the Middle East and North Africa and the spaces in between. We wanted to share one of their episodes in particular.

ABDELFATAH: As you heard, it's a story about the Armenian genocide and what happened afterwards. During World War I, some estimates are that 1 1/2 million Armenians were exterminated by what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now Turkey.

ARABLOUEI: For over a century, even as genocide has become a widely used term, Turkey has refused to acknowledge what happened to the Armenian people, which means that any country that addresses it has had to risk angering Turkish authorities.

ABDELFATAH: The U.S. has wrestled with how to handle such a sensitive issue. Turkey is a longtime ally. Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president to call it a genocide. Both candidates George W. Bush and Barack Obama said they would and then both backed down when they became president. In 2019, the U.S. House and Senate passed resolutions formally recognizing it as such. Then...

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: We want to bring you some breaking news coming into us from the United States. President Joe Biden has formally recognized the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I as an act of genocide.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: And breaking news out of Washington, D.C., President Biden today became the first U.S. president to formally acknowledge the killing of more than a million Armenians by Ottoman Turks more than a century ago as being a genocide.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: This is a step that a bunch of American presidents have not taken - No. 1, because Turkey is such a strategic ally - also because Turkey has always denied that genocide as defined by international law ever occurred. So, Fred, as you asked...

ABDELFATAH: But today's episode is not about the struggle to get the Armenian genocide officially acknowledged. It's about a small number of Armenian survivors in the years right after the genocide who refused to wait for the world to pay attention and instead decided that justice meant taking matters into their own hands.

ARABLOUEI: After the break, producer Alex Atack from the "Kerning Cultures" podcast brings us the story of Operation Nemesis.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ATACK: So the first person I spoke to for this story was Marian - actually, could you just introduce yourself? Just tell me your name and, like, however you want to be introduced.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: My name is Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy. I was born in Syracuse, N.Y. and now live in Massachusetts. And I came upon this story in a very strange, circuitous way, which I guess is what we will talk about.

ATACK: And we started our interview talking about her childhood, growing up with her Armenian grandparents - their names were Aaron and Eliza Sachaklian - in Syracuse, N.Y.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: My grandfather used to bounce me on his leg, you know, singing these kid stories - kid songs, you know? What was the one that he used to do? This little horsey (ph) goes walk, walk, walk. This little horsey goes trot, trot, trot. This little horsey goes gallop, gallop, gallop.

And he would throw me up in the air, you know? I would sit on his shoulders, and he'd walk around the house, and, you know, I touched the doorframes. To me, they were like, you know, the top of Ararat. It was so - they were so tall. I loved him, and he loved me.

ATACK: Marian and her grandparents were close. She lived under their roof until she was around 6 or 7. Her grandmother, Eliza, was a singer and a homemaker and a well-known figure in the Armenian community in Syracuse. Her grandfather, Aaron, was an accountant.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: He was a gentleman and a good person, just a very good person - super smart, but in a low-key way. He didn't have to demonstrate anything to anybody.

ATACK: Marian grew up with her Armenian identity as a constant backdrop to her life in America. Her grandmother didn't speak that much English and mostly spoke to the family in Armenian, but she had a great relationship with her grandchildren. Marian remembers weekends where she'd take her to the movies and buy her caramel corn and chocolate from the vendor. And kind of throughout her childhood, her grandparents would pass down stories and folklores, probably similar versions of stories that pass through many Armenian American households at the time. And one of those stories was the story of Operation Nemesis.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: I was born knowing about Operation Nemesis. I don't think you can be an Armenian and not know about Operation Nemesis (laughter).

ATACK: The men who were behind Talaat's assassination, as well as the assassination of seven other Ottoman government officials in the two years after it, had become folk heroes in a way, but their stories were distant. They were almost like urban legends by this point, by the time Marian was growing up, because the organizers of Operation Nemesis had wanted to keep the whole thing a secret. Pieces of information had leaked out here and there, and a book was written in the 1980s, but any official records were either lost or sealed.

Marian's grandfather died in 1964, and her grandmother died in 1990. And after that, Marian and her mum began clearing out the family home and organizing her grandparents' things.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: My mother and I were going through her house, and my mother found these files in a file cabinet that was right next to my childhood bedroom.

ATACK: And at first, it just looked like it was, like, full of regular stuff that you might find in an accountant's cupboard.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Things like letters and telegrams, invoices, bills.

ATACK: Most of them were written in Armenian, and Marian's mum gathered up the documents and started cataloging them.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: And she came to me, and she said, Marian, I have something I have to talk to you about. So we sat down, and we looked at them. And I was just flabbergasted.

ATACK: Marian's grandfather wasn't just an accountant, as she'd always thought. He was one of the organizers of Operation Nemesis, one of the Armenian folk heroes that she'd grown up hearing about. And these documents were basically a treasure trove of records that were kind of a timeline of everything that happened throughout Operation Nemesis. But they'd been a secret for decades. Even her grandfather had never told anyone about his involvement in the operation, not even his wife, Eliza.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Not a word.

ATACK: Wow.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: That guy could keep a secret.

ATACK: And when you found them, they were just in a filing cabinet that - what, it had always been locked? You'd never looked inside it before? You'd never noticed it before?

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: I don't even know if it had a lock.

ATACK: Oh.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: He was an accountant. He had files. Accountants had files.

(LAUGHTER)

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: So that's what we found. And the more we read, the more fascinated I got by this story.

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ATACK: And to take the story back, I guess, all the way to the beginning, Marian's grandfather, Aaron, was born in the Ottoman Empire, modern-day Turkey, in a city called Malatya on September 9, 1879. But he left his family home when he was a teenager. His brother had emigrated to the U.S. a couple of years earlier, and Aaron wanted to join him. He had to bribe police officers to let him on the ship in Constantinople because Armenians weren't allowed to leave Turkey at the time.

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MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Armenians had lived in a second-class status world. There were these enclaves of Armenians within the Turkish population, but they were governed very differently.

ATACK: After a trip that lasted a good few months and went via Marseilles in France, he finally arrived in America and straight away moved to a place called Hartford, Conn.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: My grandfather, when he first came to the United States, went to school. He learned English. And he went to Huntzingser's (ph) - Huntsingser (ph) - Huntinger's (ph) - oh, God, I can't say that word. He went to Huntsinger's Business Academy, and he got a degree and ultimately became an accountant.

ATACK: But he would still make occasional trips back to his home country. And on one of these trips, he met Eliza, Marian's grandmother. He was 30, and she was 18. They got talking in the corner of a party one evening, and a couple of months later, they were engaged. This was 1910, so a year after the end of Adana massacres, the second wave of killings inflicted on Armenians by the Ottoman government, but before the Armenian genocide.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: And those massacres were serious because the towns that were involved were wiped out completely. It wasn't like, you know, you could escape or run away. They were done. So luckily, he got her out before the genocide.

ATACK: Gosh.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Or, you know, that would have been that.

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ATACK: Right after they got married, Aaron brought Eliza back to the U.S. with him. And although she felt homesick in America and she didn't speak the language too well, moving there with Aaron was kind of an escape from the persecution that Armenians were facing back home. In the meantime, Aaron regularly worked abroad. He worked as an accountant for the U.S. government, and he regularly made trips back to his hometown in Ottoman Turkey. It's not exactly clear when, but on one of these visits in the years before the genocide, he got involved with a group called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the ARF. They were basically a political party formed with the idea to defend Armenians from increasing oppression by the Ottoman government.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: I think my grandfather knew that the Armenians would never be safe in Turkey - never - unless they somehow or another pushed back against the Turks. They weren't looking to revolt. They weren't looking to start a new country at the time. They were looking to get granted to them the kinds of rights that other Turkish citizens had.

ATACK: But that didn't ever happen. This rising political party called the CUP, or the Young Turks, as you might know them, were increasingly pushing this idea of Turkification, an Ottoman Empire for ethnic Turks and nobody else.

ERIC BOGOSIAN: It's so parallel to what happened in Nazi Germany, it's kind of uncanny.

ATACK: This is Eric Bogosian. He's an Armenian American writer and actor. In 2015, he wrote a book called "Operation Nemesis," which is one of the most thorough recent accounts of this story that we have.

BOGOSIAN: There was a whole sort of movement to solve the Armenian problem. What's the Armenian problem? The Armenian problem is that you've got Christians with a lot of power living and thriving in the Ottoman Empire. So there was this faction, a very big faction, of the CUP that said, this is how we solve it.

ATACK: In 1915, the Armenian genocide began to unfold in stages. I won't go into too much detail, but as a trigger warning, I'm about to relay some of what happened during those years as documented by many historians and genocide experts.

On April 24, 1915, Talaat ordered the rounding up of more than 200 Armenian leaders and intellectuals and journalists and academics and had them all deported. Ottoman soldiers closed in on Armenian villages and burned them to the ground. These tapes are from a series of oral history interviews with Armenian genocide survivors.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: They came in our city, and they took everything away from us overnight. They told us next day, we have to get up and walk and leave everything behind.

ATACK: In larger villages, they targeted men first. They were rounded up and imprisoned and, in many cases, tortured. The remaining Armenians - women, children and the elderly and people with disabilities - were told that they were to be temporarily moved out of their homes and towns. They were told to make a list of everything they owned, including their livestock, and hand that list to an Ottoman official. They said that they'd make sure everything was there waiting for them when they got back, but it wasn't. And most of them never came back.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: They started killing. People running from - trying to hide someplace. But they were killing.

ATACK: They were marched out in caravans guarded by Ottoman soldiers or packed into train carriages. People who tried to resist were killed with guns and bayonets. Many people died by suicide. Others died of thirst and hunger or disease, and their bodies were often left at the side of the road.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: My baby sister died on the train there. She was only 4 years old. And my parents just buried her by the railroad tracks there. From then on...

ATACK: Those who survived were abandoned at outposts in the Syrian desert near what is now Deir ez-Zor. The people who survived the horrors that their families had not were left to die there.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: As much as I could see, this column of human beings walked behind the same thing, and nobody said anything. They knew they were going to die soon.

ATACK: There was no point in history where so many people had died in such a short period of time. The atrocities that were committed against the Armenians in those years are too awful and, frankly, just too evil for me to ever capture in a few sentences.

BOGOSIAN: In all, we don't really know how many people were killed, but the number seems to me between a million and 2 million. One thing we know for sure - Armenians were a real presence in Ottoman Turkey. And that region - those regions have almost no Armenians in them today, at least people who identify as Armenians.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ATACK: Relatively little information reached the outside world at the time. But there were survivors and diplomats and foreign ambassadors who wrote accounts of what they'd seen in the Ottoman Empire and their inability to do anything about it. Foreign governments were aware of what was happening, too.

TESSA HOFMANN: It was more than aware.

ATACK: This is the historian Tessa Hofmann. She's a scholar of Armenian studies at Berlin Free University.

HOFMANN: The German ambassador, very early - in early July 1915, wrote to his government that the persecution of the Armenians now is nationwide, not only in areas near to the front line. In reality, it is an extermination of the Armenian population.

ATACK: Overseeing all of this misery was a small group of political leaders from the CUP known as the Three Pashas - Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha.

BOGOSIAN: Talaat ran the country with Enver and Djemal. But I think everybody believed and understood that Talaat was really the guy who organized everything and was really keeping an eye on the big picture.

ATACK: After the genocide had ended, there was a shift in the empire's politics. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side of World War I. And this is a bit of a simplification, but the new Turkish government, which was run by Kemal Ataturk, they had to hold a series of tribunals or court cases to determine who was responsible for the Armenian genocide. It was part of the treaty they signed at the end of the war.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: The Turkish tribunals had more serious repercussions for those that were convicted of capital crimes. And those were the three primary culprits here, among them, of course, Talaat Pasha.

ATACK: And in these tribunals, the Three Pashas - Talaat, Enver and Djemal - along with other CUP leaders, were charged with the massacres of Armenians and Greeks and sentenced to death.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: So it looked like maybe there was going to be some kind of justice, but then they were allowed to escape.

ATACK: Before the tribunals had even started, Talaat, Enver, Djemal and some other CUP members boarded a torpedo boat called the Loreley with the help of German diplomats and escaped out of Constantinople.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: On November 1, 2 - it was around midnight, so which - you know, was it November 1 or 2 of 1918? - they escaped. And they got onto a German boat. And they went across the Black Sea, and they escaped to Germany and then other points after that.

ATACK: Some of them made their way to Moscow, others to Rome, where they all slipped into undercover identities and became basically untouchable and unfindable by British or French forces.

HOFMANN: So his court proceedings came to no end. And the death sentences that were declared were usually declared in absentia.

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ATACK: So the U.S. contingent of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation - that's the political organization Marian's grandfather was involved with - they were starting to see how the story of their murdered families was being used and told halfway across the world, and they decided they wanted to act.

BOGOSIAN: And this is where the Armenians come in, and they start knocking these guys off.

ATACK: The ARF held their general congress meeting in Yerevan in September 1919, and two Armenians traveled over from the U.S. to present their assassination idea to the group. There was an intense discussion. Many of the ARF members didn't agree that assassination was the answer. But the general congress voted, and they approved what they called a special mission - Operation Nemesis.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: My grandfather and Shahan Natalie and Armen Garo were the three leaders of Nemesis.

ATACK: The way Marian puts it, Shahan was the heart of the operation, Armen was the head and her grandfather, Aaron, was the mind.

BOGOSIAN: Armen Garo was a celebrated activist. He is a political animal.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: His family had been wiped out in the genocide. Shahan Natalie's father had been murdered by the Turks. So they all had reasons, you know? They all had personal reasons.

BOGOSIAN: And in many ways, it's kind of like you f*** with my people, I'm going to get your people.

ATACK: Their idea was to clean the debt, as they put it - to find and assassinate the Ottoman leaders who were responsible for the genocide and now hiding out all over Europe.

BOGOSIAN: These are not highly (laughter) trained agents. These are a bunch of small businessmen in New England who make a decision that this will not stand, and they must answer it.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: So that's the feeling that the Armenians carried with them, that there's nobody but us. We have to do this ourselves. So that's what they did.

ATACK: The first thing they needed to do was to recruit a team of people to carry out the operation.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: They put an ad in somewhere. I don't remember where. And it's a actually very funny ad because it talks about applicants should be bachelors (laughter) or something like that, you know? You know, so they did not think these people were coming back (laughter), right? I think that they thought that this is a, you know, not a mission that you would return from, so you better just, you know, settle your affairs and come. And people volunteer. They did.

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ATACK: And then they started to put together a list of names, the people that they would target.

BOGOSIAN: And a list is made of 100 nefarious individuals from the Ottoman government who had been making this genocide happen during World War I. And they were going to go down the list.

ATACK: So you actually have a handwritten copy of the list of 100 names, right?

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: I do (laughter). That was stunning to find. It's in Shahan Natalie's handwriting, and it's on ordinary paper. Of course, it's yellowed over the years.

ATACK: This is from one of the documents that Marian found when she was cleaning out her grandparents' house.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: So No. 1 on the list, as you can expect, was...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Distorted) Talaat Pasha.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: So that was No. 1.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Distorted) Said Halim Pasha.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: ...Was the former grand vizier, former minister of foreign affairs, ex-president of Central Committee of the Ittihad. And the third was...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Distorted) Enver, minister of war.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: ...Commander of the Ottoman Army. He was a fugitive. And the fourth was...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Distorted) General Pasha, minister of the marine.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: He was also a fugitive. And then the list goes on after that. They wanted to make sure that they got those grand viziers, and so they worked off this list.

BOGOSIAN: So they make this list, and they need the guy who's going to do the deed.

ATACK: And this is where Soghomon Tehlirian comes back into our story. He was a young guy. He was around 22 at the end of the genocide, and he'd survived it because he was fighting with the Soviet army against the Ottoman Empire on the Soviet front. But after the war ended, he made a trip back to his hometown called Erzincan and found that it was decimated. In the Armenian district, everything was just gone. Buildings had been burned down or demolished, and his childhood home had been turned into Russian army barracks. His family were gone, and he had no way of finding out what had happened to them.

BOGOSIAN: You're talking about a young soldier who enters his own hometown to find that everybody, 25,000 fellow Armenians, have disappeared. And he eventually finds out they were murdered, including his own family. And I think this is an intensely traumatic experience for him, one that he, in order to keep living, he has to answer. Otherwise, he's going to lose his mind.

ATACK: So he made his way to Constantinople, which had become kind of a safe haven for Armenian refugees at the end of World War I. By all accounts, including his own memoir, he was an introspective and quiet man, skinny with pushed-back dark hair and high cheekbones. For months after the genocide, he walked the streets of Constantinople amongst the crowds of British and French soldiers and refugees from the war, trying to find out what had happened to his family.

And then one evening, a friend told him about an Armenian man who had collaborated with the Turks at the start of the genocide. He said that he was still alive and living free in Constantinople. Tehlirian obsessed over him, and one night waited outside the man's house, watching as he ate dinner with a table of guests. Tehlirian raised a gun to the window and shot him. He found out later that the man had been rushed to hospital and died the next day. At 23 years old, Tehlirian had just made his first kill. His second, he decided, was going to be Talaat.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ATACK: We'll be right back.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ATACK: When we left off, Soghomon Tehlirian was in Istanbul, having just killed an Armenian who had helped the Turkish authorities during the genocide.

BOGOSIAN: So now we have this guy who has it in his head that his ultimate goal in life is to kill Talaat Pasha. And somehow, the guys in Massachusetts find out about this fella, Soghomon Tehlirian.

ATACK: Shahan Natalie from Operation Nemesis, who was in Boston at the time - he got word of Tehlirian and what he'd done and decided that he wanted to meet him. They had him visit Operation Nemesis HQ in Boston. Tehlirian traveled over to America in August 1920 on the Olympic, which was Titanic's sister ship. The Operation Nemesis team spent a few days vetting him...

BOGOSIAN: So he gets looked over, and he is a perfect guy for the job because he can handle a gun, and he has a great vibe. I mean, he looks very innocent. He looks very sweet. He's young. He's in his early 20s.

ATACK: ...And decided ultimately that Tehlirian was going to be the guy they were going to trust with the assassination of Talaat, the most important person on their list.

Meanwhile, Talaat was still living in Berlin. He'd actually said that he half-expected to be assassinated by Armenians seeking revenge to the point where the German secret service had recommended that he move to a manor house on the outskirts of Berlin. But he didn't want to. He stayed at his apartment, No. 4 Hardenbergstrasse, hiding in plain sight.

BOGOSIAN: Now, Talaat was known for a distinguishing feature, which was a big sort of walrus mustache, and he had shaved it off. And he was moving around pretty freely in Berlin, being protected by the Turkish Consulate there. And he was going under an assumed name and was pretty much invisible. So how do the Armenian agents find these guys? Well, they - the first thing they do is - they can all pass for Turkish, and they can all speak Turkish fluently.

ATACK: So they spend a lot of time hanging around in coffee shops where Turks were known to gather, and they'd basically just listen in. They also spread word around Armenian communities that they were on the lookout for Turk leaders, and they bribed border guards all across Europe.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: And that helped because the border guards would then tell them, you know, this guy had a Turkish passport, and this is what he looked like. And it actually was useful in tracking Talaat from Switzerland into Germany. These guys didn't have internet, you know? They didn't even have the phone. They didn't have anything except letters. How do you conduct such a deeply difficult enterprise - how do you do that? - without all the aids that we have now? How do you do that just with the mail?

ATACK: For their letters, they made up a kind of secret code so that they could communicate between the U.S. and Europe without anybody else intercepting and understanding them.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: (Laughter) Well, I found one code system. I don't know how many others they had, but this is a very strange one. So there was this document that had gibberish on it. You know, I thought, oh, that's really strange. And I kept poking around, and then I saw a folded piece of paper that had cutouts on it. And I put the folded piece of paper with the cutouts on top of the document that was gibberish, and suddenly, it's not gibberish.

BOGOSIAN: And slowly but surely, the noose tightens.

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GAVLAK: They narrowed it down to a couple of countries, and then they finally narrowed it down to Berlin.

ATACK: Again, that's film producer Michael Gavlak. After months of searching, one of their sources pulled through, and they got word that Talaat was hiding out in Berlin.

GAVLAK: And so they send Soghomon in. They put him up in an apartment, and they start doing surveillance

ATACK: Through one of their sources, they'd heard that a group of exiled Turkish leaders were meeting in Italy, and that someday soon, Talaat was going to be boarding a train from Berlin to Rome. So they began staking out the train station in Berlin. And one day, they saw somebody who looked like he could be Talaat. He had the right build, with the huge broad shoulders and the walking stick, but didn't have the big walrus mustache that he was known for. And he didn't get on the train like they'd been told he would.

GAVLAK: The other leaders got on the train to head to the conference in Rome, and this guy left. And so they followed him. And they followed him and found the apartment where he was staying.

ATACK: And as soon as they could, the team found an apartment on the same street and started using that as a base.

GAVLAK: So Soghomon moves from the apartment he had been in and moves into this apartment. And it's down the block a little ways, but he has a pair of binoculars, and he's able to just look out his window. And he determines Talaat has a routine. He goes out for a walk every day about 11.

ATACK: The team wanted confirmation before making the kill. So for weeks, Tehlirian watched through his window as Talaat took his daily walk out of his front door and off down the street towards the tobacco shop.

GAVLAK: But finally, through his channels, Shahan Natalie confirms that that's him, and they give the greenlight.

ATACK: They'd been stalking this guy for a couple of weeks now. And when Shahan gave them the go-ahead in a telegram from Geneva, Tehlirian woke up early, around 6 a.m., and sat at his window, looking down at the entryway to Talaat's building, waiting for him to leave for his 11 a.m. walk.

BOGOSIAN: He follows him out in the street, and he shoots him.

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ATACK: A few minutes later, his body lay slumped along the sidewalk of Hardenbergstrasse. He died on the spot.

GAVLAK: And Soghomon recounts how he was shocked at how easy it was, how easy this guy fell, how easy this monster fell to the ground.

ATACK: Almost immediately, a mob of passersby rushed at Tehlirian. They had no idea what was happening. All they'd seen was just this man being shot in broad daylight.

GAVLAK: You know, this is a normal day in Berlin. It's 11 o'clock in the morning, and everybody's about their business. But this mob comes at him. And his instinct is, I got to run because this mob can beat me to death, which I think was the right instinct. And he starts running. And, you know, the mob catches up to him. He starts being pummeled and people pulling out keys and stabbing him with their keys. Like, it's like a mob beating him.

ATACK: And after a few minutes, the police arrived and pulled the mob away, arrested Tehlirian and put him in the back of a police car.

GAVLAK: His face is covered with blood, and they drag him to a, you know, police car and haul him to jail.

ATACK: Which - this was actually part of Operation Nemesis' plan all along. They hadn't just wanted to assassinate Talaat and, like, get away with it without anybody ever knowing who it was. They wanted to create a public spectacle out of it. And so they'd instructed Tehlirian to wait around until the police arrived.

GAVLAK: They needed him to stand and testify, not just to kill this guy and get away. They needed him to go into the belly of the beast, go into a Berlin jail and then go on trial to testify about the Armenian genocide because the world's not going to know unless you do that. It's not just killing Talaat. It's telling the world why you killed Talaat, what he did. You killed one man. He killed a million and a half.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: It wasn't only that he was the biggest figure; it was that he was the most responsible. And therefore, what the Armenians wanted to do was to demonstrate that this was indeed justice.

ATACK: He spent a couple of months in jail, and in June, the trial began in this grand, wood-paneled courtroom in Berlin's 3rd District Court. And the room was on his side from the beginning. There were a lot of big kind of political things at play, but Germany had no interest in drawing more attention than they needed to to their complicity in the Armenian genocide.

BOGOSIAN: And what they didn't want was any more evidence of them doing nefarious things in the Middle East. And one of the things that they had done was aided and abetted the Turks during the genocide. So they didn't want that coming out in the trial. And the prosecutors were instructed, as we now know, to basically wrap it up.

ATACK: So things moved along more quickly than usual. In Tehlirian's questioning, details were missed or just intentionally ignored. Over two days, a 12-person jury listened to Tehlirian and his lawyer as they were questioned about his background and his motivations. They listened as he recounted through a translator a story about how he'd watched his entire family murdered in front of his eyes. At one point, he stopped and said, quote, "I can't remember that day anymore. I don't want to keep on being reminded of that day. I'd rather die right now than continue describing that black day."

The story he told was basically, he was an Armenian engineering student who had watched his entire family killed in the genocide. And then, when he was walking down the street one day, he just happened to bump into Talaat, recognized him and acted impulsively. At one point, the judge asked Tehlirian if the murder was premeditated. Tehlirian replied, quote, "I consider myself not guilty because my conscience is clear. I have killed a man, but I wasn't a murderer."

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BOGOSIAN: At the trial, there were some loose threads that are never followed up on. How does a student kill somebody with one shot? Where does he get the gun? How is he being financed? Why is he living across the street from Talaat? How did he end up living there? He just ended up living there? All of these questions are open and not fully investigated during the trial.

ATACK: There was one New York Times article that suggested that maybe the assassination plot was part of a broader conspiracy. But after that one article, they never followed up on the idea. Tehlirian gave his story, and the media and the court and the jury - they all more or less took his word for it.

BOGOSIAN: This guy says he was a student. He's a student. And then ultimately, well, it's some kind of temporary insanity - the reason why Soghomon Tehlirian can be let go after killing Talaat Pasha in cold blood on the street.

HOFMANN: And the court case took only 1 1/2 day.

ATACK: Oh, wow. That's so quick.

HOFMANN: Very quick.

GAVLAK: The proof is in the pudding, as they say. He never felt he did anything wrong. And the jury agreed. He did not murder a man. He killed a man that deserved to die.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: And interestingly enough, the courtroom, made up of mostly of Germans, cheered when the verdict came through acquitted. He won over the people in that room. They thought that justifiable homicide was appropriate.

ATACK: The headline in The New York Times the next day was "They Simply Had To Let Him Go!" with an exclamation mark at the end.

GAVLAK: So he's acquitted. And so instantly, he's the No. 1 hero of all of Armenia.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Yeah, that's an interesting story, too. They spirited him out of there because they didn't want him to get harassed by journalists and other people. He was in a fragile state.

BOGOSIAN: There's no happiness in Soghomon Tehlirian. This is a man who remains melancholy for the rest of his life. There's pictures of him smiling and apparently happy, but he is - he's a troubled individual.

HOFMANN: Tehlirian was immediately deported from Germany as an - unofficially declared an unwanted foreigner. He never killed again, by the way. That killing of Talaat has obviously satisfied his longing for revenge and justice. But he could not lead - how to say - a normal life.

ATACK: There were Turkish agents who wanted to avenge Talaat's murder, and they started trying to find Soghomon Tehlirian. So he kept moving for a few years, first to Manchester in England and then to the U.S., then to Siberia, then Morocco. And eventually, he settled down in San Francisco, where he lived under an alias and worked as a waiter at an Armenian-owned restaurant. He died in 1960, and we know that he was survived by at least one son, but his family have all changed their names.

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ATACK: There are a few ways to measure the legacy of Operation Nemesis. The first and, I think, the most important is a legal case study. In the 1920s, there was this law student in Poland called Raphael Lemkin, and he read about the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian and about how the court had struggled to just find the vocabulary to describe what Talaat was guilty of.

HOFMANN: And for him, the big question was, how come that man is responsible when he kills another person, but you can kill a nation and you go away with impunity?

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ATACK: He asked his law professor about it. Like, legally speaking, is there some framework to punish crimes as big as this? But they didn't know the answer. So when he left school and became a lawyer, he set about drafting an international law to cover what he called crimes of conscience. But nobody took it seriously right away. In 1933, he presented his proposal to a League of Nations conference in Madrid.

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RAPHAEL LEMKIN: On behalf of the German government, I have drafted...

HOFMANN: And he failed. Of course, the Nazi delegation in Madrid laughed about this ridiculous idea of Lemkin. They put it that way.

ATACK: Other world leaders at that conference dismissed his proposal because they said that crimes against humanity, like the Armenian genocide, were so uncommon that they just weren't worth legislating against. At the same conference in Madrid in 1933, Hitler's Nazi party left the League of Nations.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Consider that the German government, as a self-respecting regime, has no other course open to it except that of retiring from the League of Nations.

ARTHUR HENDERSON: I regret, therefore, that this grave decision should have been taken by your government for reasons which I am unable to accept as valid.

ATACK: As we know now, they would go on to commit their own atrocities the following decade. And after World War II, an updated version of Lemkin's draft was brought back for consideration. And then, on December 9, 1948...

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: The unanimous view of the assembly that this convention be signed by all states...

ATACK: ...The law was unanimously adopted at the United Nations General Assembly in Paris.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: ...In order that basic human rights be given the protection of international law for the sake of progress.

ATACK: In writing the legal framework, he coined a new word.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Genocide is a new word, combining the Greek word genos - genos meaning race or group - with the root of the Latin caedere, meaning to kill. Dr. Lemkin is the man who created the word, genocide. Dr. Lemkin, could you give us a little background on how you came to be interested in this genocide?

LEMKIN: I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians. And after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

HOFMANN: So it took another world war and a bigger genocidal crime to convince the international community that something in that direction had to be done.

ATACK: But there are darker legacies to this story as well. Over the years, it has gotten wrapped up in the mythology of genocide denial that is still today the Turkish and Azerbaijani government's position. Right after his death, Talaat's body was kept in a Christian morgue in Berlin. But then in this just really bizarre sequence of events during World War II, Talaat's body was repatriated to Istanbul by Adolf Hitler, who was trying to win the Turks' support in the war at the time.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: Yeah, this is in 1943. I think what was going on there was that, you know, they were looking for allies. So yeah, he said, let's send these remains back, and you can bury them in this lovely spot in Turkey instead of having them there. So in 1943, they go. And he - you know, he also had it sent back, the body sent back in a train with swastikas all over it.

ATACK: When I read about this story, I wrote a big WTF in the margin of my book. But thinking about it now, it feels somehow unsurprising.

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: And, of course, you know, that's another slap in the face to those that were so wounded by him, that - to have him, you know, placed in an area of glory and honor just, for the Armenians, made no sense at all.

ATACK: Two of the main perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, Talaat and Enver, are buried in marble mausoleums in a memorial site called the Monument of Liberty in Istanbul. Tessa told me that two of the other genocide perpetrators who were assassinated by Operation Nemesis are buried in Berlin.

HOFMANN: This marble and gold-painted inscriptions in three languages - it is said that these are the innocent victims of Armenian terrorists.

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ATACK: Wow.

HOFMANN: And that is still there. And it is a place of cult where the perpetrators are venerated.

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ATACK: Over the year after Talaat's death, around 10 Operation Nemesis agents tracked down and killed seven more high-ranking Turkish leaders operating in seven countries across three continents and killing them in assassinations similar to Talaat's. By the end of 1922, the ARF disbanded the mission. Not all of the organizers of Operation Nemesis agreed with the decision. Some wanted to carry on the assassinations, but ultimately they decided that they'd done what they set out to do. In one of the letters that Marian found in her grandfather's documents, one of the agents wrote to HQ after Talaat's assassination, quote, "Only now has begun the reaction of my nerves. Only now do I understand what I've lived through and how exhausted I am. But no matter what, it went off well, and that's enough."

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ATACK: And then the story was left to rest for years and decades before it resurfaced. Aaron's account of the mission just gathered dust in the basement of Marian's family home before she finally discovered it in the 1990s.

When you reflect back on, like, your grandfather's role in Operation Nemesis, like, what do you kind of - what do you think?

MESROBIAN MACCURDY: I have a mixture of feelings. You can't help but feel proud of doing something so utterly, impossibly difficult, so very difficult. I mean, who would think it was even possible? And I also think I'm very, very sorry that it had to happen, that they felt that they had to do that, that there wasn't another way. And I have to leave it with that ambiguity because I don't know what's right. I know what feels right, but I don't know if what feels right to an individual is right in the greater - for the greater good. Greater good for the Armenians maybe, is it greater good for humanity? Maybe, I don't know. Maybe the world is better off knowing that we have to take collective responsibility. We must. If we don't take it, who will? Who will take responsibility then? We must. We have to.

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FISHER: This episode was written and produced by Alex Atack, with editorial support from Dana Ballout, Nadeen Shaker, Zeina Dowidar, Shad Adushi (ph) and Nhad Dahamer (ph). Fact-Checking by Shad Adushi, sound design by Alex Atack and mixing by Mohamad Khreizat. Bella Ibrahim is our marketing manager. And Kerning Cultures is a production of the Kerning Cultures Network. That means we're a much bigger network than just this show. We have actually eight podcasts in Arabic and English underneath our network, so be sure to check them all out. Just Google Kerning Cultures Network.

ATACK: Thank you to Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Eric Bogosian, Michael Gavlak and Tessa Hofmann for speaking to me for this story and to Melk and Chuck Hoglien (ph) for listening to my early drafts. This is such a deep story, and we covered such a tiny corner of it here, so there are two books that I want to recommend. The first is "Operation Nemesis" by Eric Bogosian, and the second is "Sacred Justice" by Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy. They both go much deeper into this than we ever could. Michael Gavlak - he has a podcast and a YouTube channel where he goes deeper into Soghomon Tehlirian's story. You can find that by searching Tales of Truth on YouTube.

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ABDELFATAH: This story originally aired on Kerning Cultures, a podcast telling stories from across the Middle East and North Africa and the spaces in between. Listen to Kerning Cultures wherever you get your podcasts. That's Kerning with a K.

ARABLOUEI: And on the next episode of THROUGHLINE.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: And the government, again, kind of, you know, with its logic of the three evils...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: ...Terrorism, extremism and separatism...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: ...Is looking for people who are religious nationalists and identifying them as the problem.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: You suddenly saw police checkpoints on the highway where Han Chinese were able to go straight through, but if you were a Uighur, you'd have to go into a separate lane.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: For a year, they turn off the internet in the region.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: Around that time is when you started seeing surveillance cameras everywhere.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: They prevent all international telephone communications, and they start arresting, you know, scores, hundreds of Uighurs.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: My older sister, my older brother and my younger brother and another cousin and his two sons got arrested. It's not hard for me to remember my 15 months of torture and jail life.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: I refer to it as cultural genocide.

ARABLOUEI: Next week...

ABDELFATAH: ...The Uighur people...

ARABLOUEI: ...And their struggle for survival.

ABDELFATAH: Also, we would love to hear from you. And this week, we have a very specific question. What is capitalism and how does it affect your life? Please leave us a voicemail at 872-588-8805 and leave your name and the answer to the question - what is capitalism and how does it affect your life? We might feature your voicemail in a future episode. That number again is 872-588-8805.

ARABLOUEI: Thanks for listening.

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