Marie Bossaert and Emmanuel Szurek invited me twice, to İstanbul and Hamburg, for presenting earlier versions of this article and encouraged me all along.
Finally, I will conclude by discussing what the TKAE episode teaches us in understanding Cold War Turkey. Next, I will provide information about the foundation of the TKAE, its institutional structure, membership, aims and activities.
Proving the convergence of American interests and the interests of right-wing Turkish elites is going to be my goal here. I will first describe the Cold War environment in which the TKAE was born by putting this institution into its international and domestic contexts in two separate sections. Ostensibly, the TKAE was an academic institute, doing research on the Turkic world however, its political objectives, as I attempt to show, went far beyond the scholarly confines of academia. This article focuses on the Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü (TKAE), founded in Ankara in 1961. The study of the cultural Cold War, the untold story of how the USA and the USSR employed and often exploited the academia and the arts for war purposes, is now a particularly fruitful line of inquiry, but it has scarcely reached the field of Turkish studies.
