Eruption of a volcano. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Eric bogosian recounts a group of armenian patriots who in 1921 set out to assassinate former turkish leaders to avenge the 1915 Armenian Genocide. They ended up killing six former leaders and then disbanded and disappeared forever. [inaudible conversations] ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to welcome Eric Bogosian to our stage this morning. Eric bo bogosian is an actor playwright and novelist. Hes an author and actor known for talk radio and sub youurbia. He has published three novels. Eric bogosians a guggenheim fellow from the. National endowment of the arts. We are here to celebrate the release of his new book, operation nemesis. Without any further ado please welcome Eric Bogosian. [applause] thank you. Thanks for showing up, and on this beautiful late afternoon. I will read a little bit from the book and then i will say a few things. I might say them while im reading the book. I never know what im doing exactly. And then well do some questions, which im actually, i actually like questions. I like answering questions. When i was a little kid, there was nothing i loved better than hanging out at my grandparents house. In her sunny kitchen, my grandma lucy would fashion armenian pastries while out in the backyard grandpa roasted lam shish kebab under the apple trees. After dessert grandpa might knock back a tiny glass of [inaudible] and tell me stories. I was held rapt by the horrific narratives he dredged up from his faraway past. In his sweetlyaccented english he would describe burning churches and sadistic horsemen. The stories would always end the same way. My grandfather would instruct me if you ever meet a turk kill him. [laughter] i was no more than 4 years old when i first heard those words. Yeah. So 4yearold little eric learning about the bad stuff that happened over there. My grandfather was a refugee from that, those hard harsh times and the violence, and he miraculously escaped with his life, and he was about 20 years old. Im not going to make this into a lecture about what the book is about tonight tonight because theres just too much in here. In fact, when i was getting ready to put this little reading together tonight, i realized one of the reasons why i liked doing this project so much is because it was made out of dozens of little pieces that all fit together into a bigger whole. And i like working with lots of pieces to make a bigger whole. It appeals to me. Its the way i used to put my solo shows together, and i feel when you can put something together that way, you can youre like guarding me is that what youre doing . [laughter] do you mind him standing there . Just having somebody behind me all the time is a little [laughter] very good. You know, of course, this bookends up coming out this week as we celebrate the 100 years since the Armenian Genocide began. It actually began we use the date april 24th to signify the beginning of the Armenian Genocide because on april 24th hundreds of armenian intellectuals and jurists and doctors, lawyers were arrested in constantinople. And now youre upstaging me. Dudes, you gotta chill. Sit down. And so oh, this is great. This is for like, cspan, me doing all these extra things. All right, hey. So is 100 years ago all these intellectuals, jurists doctors pharmacists, any armenian older man who could in some way create an insurrection against the turks were arrested and murdered. And around that time the beginning of the vast killings of armenian christians all over asia minor began. And so thats why we celebrate that date. For me its also significant because its my birthday. So its an odd thing that im sort of marked as an armenian. I have this significant birthday before i go any further and before i start telling you about operation nemesis and what they did, i want to read some testimony from the Armenian Genocide when people were actually being killed. This is testimony from children who were, ended up growing to be they were orphans during the genocide, and when they were in their 80s, they gave testimony. Its a very disturbing thing to watch a video of an old man tell stories from his childhood and literally be crying for his mother as hes telling the story. The reason that i felt it was very important to have sort of testimony in this book is because we have to understand what motivated these men to collaborate and murder these turkish leaders. There are many collections. I read vast numbers of books on the, on the genocide and on the history of the period. But this particular collection by an armenian woman is distinctive, i think because she was just is so thorough, and she found people. And the testimony they give is very very specific. And i think its in those specific details that we hear the truth. There have been many accusations over the years that people are fabricating information about the genocide. And i would say that in some cases things do get passed on from one person to the next and start to become more mythic than truthful. But in this case, these are undeniable. A little boy was 7 years old when he was deported. He says we heard afterwards that together with 17 other armenian young men they had massacred them by night and had thrown them under the bridge. Thus when we were deported, there were no males left in our family. They took away my five aunts, later they cut off their heads, impaled their heads with their bayonets to show them to us, and then they threw their corporations in the you grates corpses in the euphrates. My mother buried her aunt in the earth. They massacred everyone. My mother wept so much, she lost her eyesight. This is somebody born in the town where my family is from in 1905. She was 10 years old at the time of the deportations, 1915. They confined all the young people in a cavelike place poured kerosene from an opening in the roof and set fire to them. Then they gathered all the women and smashed their heads with stones. They killed my mother and grandmother with stones too. They separated the children like lambs from their mother sheep. I had a 3yearold sister. They took her also together with other children near the Euphrates River bridge, cut their throats and threw them in the river. I mean, sometimes theres a misunderstanding that children were always spared and were then abducted or taken as slaves or used in prostitution or whatever. But often the children would just be killed. One boy with the same name as my grandfather born in 1910 was 6 years old. They separated us the children, and took the adults towards the valley and made them stand in a line. There were about 3400 adult and we, the children were nearly as many. They made us sit on the green grass, and we didnt know what was going to happen. Breaking from the line my mother came several times to us. She kissed and kissed utz and went back, us and went back. We my elder brother i and my 1yearold brother saw from afarah line of women moving forward. Our mother was among them. On coming out of our house mother was dressed in her National Costume a velvet t dress embroidered in gold thread. Her head was adorned with gold coins. On her neck was a gold chain 25 gold coins were secretly sewn inside her dress on both sides. When mother kissed us madly i remember she was clad only in her underwear. There were no ornaments, no gold and novell vet clothes. We the children, were unacquire of the aware of the events happening there. The way the ottoman government which was at the time run by the committee for union and progress which was itself sort of headed by pasha the way they affected their genocide was to, first of all, induct all the young armenian men into the army. There was a war going on. Once the men young men were in the army, they were disarmed and they were put into labor battalions and worked as slaves until they died. Or they would be just taken off to some remote area and murdered. That got rid of all the young people. That got rid of anybody who might cause a start a rebellion. The next group were the possible leaders, the potential leaders, and that was the sort of arrests that happened in constantinople on april 24th but actually kept happening all over the country. Wherever there was a town, the turkish soldiers would arrive, they would find whoever the leaders were in the town, the priests, the mayors, the doctors, anybody educated. They would arrest them and they would take them away. The people in the town didnt always really know where everybody was going but they would be taken somewhere and killed. And then finally, what was left of these towns if it was a small village and it was armenian, they would simply come and kill everybody. But if it was a larger place they would evacuate the area that was the armenian section. For instance, in the city that one of the assassins came from, that city had 25,000 armenians living there at the time, 1915. And, basically everybody was taken away and either was murdered along the deportation caravans or in some cases a speedier killing would occur like they would throw them off cliffs into the Euphrates River and drown them. There were different methods used all over the empire. In the major, major cities like in constantinople, it wouldnt be as direct because they knew that western observers would see what was going on. Theres no question there was a crime committed and there were trials after the war. And during those trials run by the turks in 1919 it was proven that war crimes had been committed, and a number of turkish leaders were convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. That included pasha and other major leaders. But they had already left turkey at that point because they knew at the end of the war they would be arrested, and so they escaped to europe. And this is where operation nemesis comes in. Now, for a second i just have to step back and tell you how i came to learn about operation nemesis, because oddly this is an amazing and remarkable story that isnt very well known. The part of the story that i had heard about and which is in the first part of Samantha Powers book problem from hell, is the story according to the story usually told and the story he told in court was an engineering student who had survive ised one of these deportation caravans by pretending to be dead. He had escaped the region. He ended up five years later in berlin, and he was a student. The war was over pretty much, and as far as the killings, that was pretty much over at that time too. And hes walking down the street one day and who does he see but pasha, the leader of the turkish government at the time of the genocide. That night he has horrible nightmares, and his mother comes to him who he had seen beheaded, he said in court and his mother said how can you let this man live . He got his hands on a pistol, he followed him and he, with one bullet, shot him down, and talat died. He was then immediately arrested. This was a huge court case that was reported all around the world. And during the court case he basically said, yes, i killed this man but i had to kill him because he killed hes responsible for killing my people and killing my whole family. The court felt that well they were very sympathetic, and as people learned more and more about the genocide at that time, it wasnt called the genocide at that time, people were shocked by the facts they were hearing. And the court became sympathetic. And because he had physical ailments, this notion was presented that he, basically they didnt have the word ptsd then, but thats what they were saying. He was traumatized by the experience. It was well, he was acquitted. He was acquit acquitted. And so he was set free. That is the story of the shooting of pasha and thats the story that most people know. I thought i would write it in i had heard this story about ten years ago. I sort of had my interest in being an armenianamerican sort of ignited by hanging around adam [inaudible] when we were making the movie ararat and also the book black dog of fate. And i wanted to do something and i thought this will make a movie. This is an easy movie to do, i can imagine writing this in a couple months. The first act will be the caravans and this horror show of what was happening. The second act will be bearin and this young student berlin and this young student who survived, and the third act would be the trial. Of course, its very easy to see that structure. Theres only one problem. Everything that was said in court was a fabrication. He was not a student he didnt just happen to see talat pasha walking down the street. In fact, he was a member of a international assassination squad that was operating out of massachusetts and had sent agents all over europe and succeeded in killing at least six major turkish leaders from the period of the ottoman of the Armenian Genocide. Well, i was astounded when i found this out. This was reported in a book in the 1980s. It was published in france. There is a book in translation in the United States, but its a kind of a difficult book to realize, and i just felt that i had to dig into this. And as i drilled down and i learned more and more, i realized the more i learned the less i knew. I didnt really know anything about armenians and i didnt really know anything about turks, and i didnt know anything about the Ottoman Empire, world war i, or the Russian Revolution or oil politics, all these things that are tangential to story. And so is i made it my mission to learn as much as i could and then try and figure out a way and this was one of the hardest things about putting this book together to present it to the reader in an entertaining way so that they would be engaged with the story and want to know what happened next. And thats what this is whats resulted. Let me read you one of the other assassins. Tetlerian was a kind of morose depressed guy. One of the more romantic of the assassins. Another man was more of a hot spur. He was ready for action all the time. This is his story. He killed the [inaudible] in rome about six months later. The assassination was the most flamboyant of the nemesis kills. After arriving in rome, he befriended a young war widow named maria who invited him to live with her. While stringing her along he located the villa at 18 bart low mayo, only a short train ride from the citys center. I have to say, i did audio book for this book which was five hours a day for five days, and its one thing to write words its another thing to have to pronounce them i have to say. [laughter] especially armenian names are not easy. The former leader had established the life of an italian gentleman with an entourage, having hired a fulltime italian chef, a swiss woman as a housekeeper, a bodyguard as well as a young man halim had adopted in turkey who was always at his side. Loitering in the neighborhood renowned as a lovers lane he began to woo a young greek girl who lived nearby, curbing any suspicions as to his perpetual presence in the neighborhood. He made himself familiar with halims habits and schedule, particularly when he was likely to leave or return to his villa. He was impatient to act, but unlike his fellow avenger, he was not going to wait forever for approval from higherups. He was plagued by a fear of failure, but his solution was to move forward. Perhaps because he had not been a soldier, he was not as obedient to the chain of command. Fearing that halim might suddenly decide to leave rome, he made a decision to act. Unlike the man who had spent the night before talats assassination weeping his sad songs, he went shopping. He bought eyecatching new clothes designed to create drama and distract observers from his personal features. He found a widebrimmed black hat and a large black overcoat. Practice anticipating a possible inspection of his corpse by the Police Coroner he made sure that everything he wore was brand new from his underwear outward. The next morning he cleaned and checked his pistol, caught the train out to halims neighborhood and posted himself out the villa. Helena his neighborhood girlfriend happened by, and before he could avoid it, he found himself engaged in amorous conversation. Trying to keep his distance he claimed his father was arriving any minute and that he couldnt stop and talk to her. Helena was confused. Hadnt he told her his father was dead . Also why would he be meeting his father in this neighborhood . Hardly paying any attention to her, he kept a lookout for the approaching horsedrawn carriage. According to his memoirs having spied the carriage, she stepped away from helena into the middle of the street and placed himself directly in its past. In one deft move, he raised his hand, forcing the horse to rear, then slipped around to the the side stepped up onto the running board, and face to face with the startled man fired once. The bullet caught halim square in the middle of his forehead, killing him instantly. He then turned his gun on the bodyguard and ordered him to throw his weapon out the window as the startled horse with the carriage in tow and the assassin hanging onto its side raced down the avenue. He was not only an able assassin, but an effusive nehr narrator describes the moments after with the imagery of a movie. He sees himself in the starring role the strong wind had caught my coat. It was flying straight up from my back, and it made me look like a huge, blackbird. Thats from the legacy which was his memoir of these events. I feel like im kind of getting kind of professor yall here, and i would rather be talking in response to any questions people have. The important point to just keep in mind about this group of can killers is that of killers is that this is 1921. They have almost no way the communicate with each other other than using ciphered telegram or letters there were no telephone calls going back and forth from the u. S. To europe. They are stationed all over europe. They are tracking these turkish leaders, and they succeed in basically removing the almost the entire government of the ottomans during the war which is kind of astounding, i think. Furthermore, they are not trained, they are not secret agents. Half these guys are well one man was a cpa in syracuse, new york, another was an insurance salesman from hartford, another was a newspaper editor in boston mass. They made the decision that due to the incredible loss of life in the at toman empire in the Ottoman Empire of armenians they had to do something. Especially the one who did lose his mother. He basically couldnt live if he didnt do something, and if you look at the photographs in the book of what he looks like a couple of years after the killing because he was acquitted, and as did most of these men, most of them did not go to jail. They ended up old men in california. He looks very peaceful. He came to terms with something in himself by killing a man he called the monster. I had to write this book b