Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

TURNER DIARIES • 679the TPLF kidnapped Ephraim Elrom, the Israeli consul general inIstanbul, who was later murdered on 22 May.The leader of the TPLF, Mahir Çayan, escaped after briefly beingimprisoned and on 27 March 1972 kidnapped three North AtlanticTreaty Organization (NATO) radar technicians, who were later murderedby the terrorists, to force Turkish officials to release anothercomrade still in prison. Instead the Turkish police hunted down andkilled Çayan and nine of his companions in their hideout near theBlack Sea. Çayan’s widow subsequently helped found the Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Unit (MLAPU).TPLF members later hijacked two Turkish airliners, once in May1972 and again in October 1972, demanding the release of imprisonedcomrades in exchange for the hostages’ lives. On each occasionthe Turkish government refused their demands and the hijackers tooktheir planes to Bulgaria, where they sought political asylum. On 6August 1977 the group attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Istanbulwith a machine-gun assault without harm to life or limb, while on 13April 1979 they killed one U.S. soldier and injured another in a drivebymachine gun attack on the streets of Izmir. The TPLF continued tooperate until September 1980, when it was suppressed in the overallcrackdown of the Turkish military against leftist groups. In the period1991–1999 the group committed five bombings of business, tourist,and government targets, resulting in one fatality and one injury, afterwhich the group became inactive.TURNER DIARIES. Novel written in 1978 by William L. Pierce(1933–2002), a leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, under thepen name of Andrew MacDonald, which depicts an extreme rightwingrevolutionary movement against the government of the UnitedStates. The novel has been used by many U.S. domestic right-wingextremists as a sort of handbook of antigovernment extremist tactics.The leader of The Order, Robert Mathews, reportedly copied the“point system” for the killings of purported enemies of the white racefrom the Turner Diaries. The novel exults in a white supremacistand anti-Semitic assault on the U.S. government, which is portrayedas a virtual Zionist Occupation Government hostile to ordinary white,Christian Americans. Timothy McVeigh reportedly was an avidreader of this book and sold or gave copies of it to other like-mindedpeople. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch project has