Daughter of Ottoman princess: How I rejected CIA attempt to make me a spy

Middle East Eye

04-04-2025

Next week, Kenize Mourad will be receiving France's most prestigious award - the Legion d'Honneur.
But there's something else on the mind of the prominent French writer, who was born in 1939 to Ottoman and Indian royalty: a recent flurry of articles in the Turkish press claiming that she worked as a CIA agent in the 1970s.
Speaking to Middle East Eye from Paris on Friday, the journalist and best-selling novelist, now 85, says she wants to set the record straight.
In an extraordinary episode in 1973, Mourad says she briefly went along with a CIA attempt to recruit her as a spy, planning to expose the agency in a news story. But she quickly got cold feet.
"The claims in the press have been maybe more terrible than to say I killed my mother," she tells MEE. "They are a stain on my integrity."
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"But I've always been honest - I'm an idealist," adds the great-granddaughter of the Ottoman Sultan Murad V.
"I'm fighting for the Palestinians, and I've paid for it dearly in France."
Murder and intrigue
The revelations about the CIA's attempt to recruit Mourad appeared last month in a Sunday Times investigation into the murder of the paper's foreign correspondent David Holden over 40 years ago.
Having been shot from behind, Holden was found dead in the dirt near the airport in Cairo, in December 1977.
The full investigation by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo has recently been published as a book, Murder in Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery, and reveals that Holden had been recruited to the Soviet Union's KGB by his gay lover, a Soviet spy, while working at the Sunday Times.
Multiple sources suggest Egypt under Anwar Sadat, a US ally against the Soviets, was responsible for Holden's murder.
Mourad reporting in Beirut in 1982 (Supplied)
Shortly before the killing, Mourad - then a reporter for a French paper - met Holden in Damascus on 29 November, and then again in Amman, where she had dinner with him on both 2 and 3 December.
On the second night she went to his hotel room for a drink and stayed there until 1am. "Nothing romantic happened between us," she says. "To me he was a great journalist - he knew so much about the Middle East.
"I was bored when I met up with him in Amman. I was waiting for an interview with King Hussein."
Mourad was stunned to hear of Holden's murder days later. There has never been any suggestion that she was involved in the incident.
But the Sunday Times investigation uncovered secret CIA memos that alleged there was an attempt to recruit her as a CIA asset in Paris in autumn 1973, to spy on Chinese diplomats "and Near East targets".
The memos record that she initially accepted the offer but soon went back on her decision. "The idea seemed exciting,' she wrote to her case officer. "But I finally realised it was going deeply against my feelings… It would be a constant struggle in my mind."
After the Sunday Times investigation was published, many articles in the Turkish press misrepresented its findings and claimed Mourad had worked as a CIA spy in the 1970s.
So what really happened?
'How the CIA tried to recruit a left-wing journalist'
Mourad explains that she was an "ultra-leftist" journalist in 1973, the year the CIA approached her. "We were very anti-American because of Vietnam, because of Cuba. Che Guevara was our hero."
She was struggling to have her articles published, partly because editors complained that she didn't present the American viewpoint.
"My English boyfriend, who I thought was a journalist, told me he could put me in touch with someone in the American embassy."
Mourad agreed and they had lunch with a "gentleman, who was like an old uncle and was very nice".
The diplomat invited her to have coffee the next week, and they spoke some more.
'There was one week when I thought I could cheat the CIA'
But it was when he asked her to meet up a third time that Mourad became suspicious.
"I asked my boyfriend if he could be secret service. He smiled and said 'no'; that I should talk to him. I went to meet him for coffee again. This time I was on my guard, but I could not believe that the CIA was trying to recruit a left-wing journalist."
As she would soon realise, that was exactly what was happening. The diplomat revealed he secretly worked for the CIA and asked her to join the agency.
"While he was talking," Mourad remembers, "I was imagining a fantastic article on how the CIA tried to recruit a left-wing journalist."
She pretended to accept the offer, planning to go along with the process and then write a sensational story about it. "I thought this would impress my editors - I was ambitious, maybe reckless."
She pauses and reconsiders: "I was certainly reckless."
Rejecting the CIA offer
While it has been widely reported that there was a month between the CIA offer and her rejection of it, Mourad is keen to stress that in reality, her idea lasted only a week.
A journalist friend warned Mourad that the idea was risky and that the CIA could take revenge.
"I became frightened," she recalls. "I worried they would think I tried to cheat them, so a week later I wrote to them saying I had reconsidered. That was maybe a mistake because it left a trace, but I had no courage to confront the man."
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And that was that: Mourad insists she never heard from the CIA again. It was over four years later that she met KGB spy Holden.
One CIA memo quoted in the Sunday Times investigation records that "operational approval was cancelled in April 1979", years later. Mourad says she finds it bewildering. "It could be a bureaucratic mistake, or maybe they didn't want to admit they had failed in their attempt.
"There was one week when I thought I could cheat the CIA."
Mourad is best known for her 1987 novel Regards from the Dead Princess, on the life of her mother, Princess Selma, the granddaughter of Sultan Murad V. She was exiled from Istanbul with the rest of the Ottoman imperial family after the empire fell and the caliphate was abolished by the young Republic of Turkey in 1924.
Her family moved to Beirut, and Princess Selma travelled to India in 1937 to marry an Indian prince, Syed Sajid Hussain Ali, the raja of Kotwara, a princely state in the north of the subcontinent.
Ali was an Edinburgh-educated communist who drove a sports car and would later become a supporter of the ruling Congress Party in independent India.
But his wife met a tragic end. After an unhappy marriage she travelled to Paris in the summer of 1939, pregnant with her first child and accompanied only by a eunuch. Mourad was born on 11 November that year.
Selma died of sepsis in Paris in 1941, and Mourad was raised in a convent. She grew up in France and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, before entering journalism.
'The genocide happening now is horrendous'
Mourad says she feels particularly hurt by claims that she worked for the CIA because she remains an idealist, and she has suffered dearly for sticking by her principles.
Mourad's 2005 book Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict led to her being effectively boycotted by the French press.
"The book was balanced. I depicted Jews who were heroes and helped the Palestinians, standing against their government. I showed settlers who were very nasty," she says.
"Before that book I was always on television and my books were in all the papers. But afterwards it all stopped and even my next novels were boycotted."
Although Mourad is being given the Legion d'Honneur, she says she remains effectively persona non grata on French television.
She still writes and speaks extensively about the Palestinian struggle.
Revealed: Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India Read More »
"I know that if I write something excusing Israel I would be in the newspapers again. But I will never do it," she insists firmly.
"The genocide happening now is horrendous. My whole life as a writer, I have aimed to serve as a voice of the voiceless. Now, most journalists are repeating the words of the powerful instead."
For Mourad, the environment in France - the country where she grew up - has become so suffocating that she has made Turkey her home.
"In France, when you talk about Palestinians, you are told you are a terrorist. You are an antisemite. This is why I live in Turkey now," she says.
"There are many problems in Turkey but it's not anti-Palestinian, it's not anti-Muslim."
Meanwhile, she mourns what has become of the country of her birth - the nation giving her an award in recognition of her writing.
"France was the country which brought free thinking to the world," she reflects.
"And now, there is no free speech."