CIA tried to recruit French writer born to Ottoman and Indian royalty

Middle East Eye

10-03-2025

Prominent French journalist Kenize Mourad was born in 1939 to an Ottoman princess and an Indian prince.
She worked for almost 15 years as a war correspondent and has since written several books, including a best-selling novel based on her mother's extraordinary life in exile.
But a stunning new investigation published in the Sunday Times into the killing of a foreign correspondent decades ago has revealed that Mourad, now 85, was recruited by the CIA while she was a journalist in the Middle East in the 1970s.
Mourad says she initially agreed to work for the US intelligence agency in order to write a story about its operation, before getting cold feet.
Mourad is best known for her novel Regards from the Dead Princess, on the life of her mother, Princess Selma, who was 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.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Over the next few years, strong ties developed between Ottoman royals and wealthy potentates in the Indian subcontinent.
The seventh nizam of Hyderabad, a billionaire prince and the richest Muslim ruler in the world, financially supported the exiled last caliph, Abdulmecid II, who lived on the French Riviera.
In 1931, Abdulmecid's daughter Princess Durrushehvar married the nizam's heir apparent, Prince Azam Jah. She went to live in Hyderabad with her cousin Princess Niloufer, who had married the nizam's younger son, Prince Moazzam Jah.
Revealed: Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India Read More »
It was in this context that Princess Selma, Mourad's mother, travelled to India in 1937 to marry another Indian prince, Syed Sajid Hussain Ali, the raja of Kotwara, a princely state near Lucknow in northern India.
Ali - despite his royal position - was a Scottish-educated communist who drove a sports car and would later become a supporter of the ruling Congress Party in independent India.
But his wife Selma 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, where she was buried, just three years before the exiled Caliph Abdulmecid died in the same city.
Mourad grew up in France and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, before entering journalism.
"I became a journalist and later a writer to try to explain the societies of West Asia and subcontinent to the western people who have a lot of misperceptions and prejudices," she told the New Indian Express in 2013.
"It is, I suppose, because I am part of these two worlds, born and brought up in France but from an Indian father and Turkish mother."
The killing of David Holden
The revelations about her entanglement with the CIA appear in a recent Sunday Times investigation into the murder of the paper's foreign correspondent David Holden in 1977.
Having been shot from behind, Holden was found dead in the dirt near the airport in Cairo that winter. The mystery of his killing was never solved.
The full investigation by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo will be published as a book, Murder in Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery, later this month.
Is it a fake? The mystery of the last Ottoman caliph's secret plan Read More »
The Sunday Times had originally sued the CIA after the killing in an unsuccessful bid to force it to reveal information it had on Holden.
The US intelligence agency first denied it had a file on Holden, then later admitted its existence while insisting its release "would endanger the security of the United States".
In November 1978, Gillman, deployed by the paper to investigate the murder, published an article speculating that Holden had been a spy who was killed for betraying an intelligence agency.
Decades later, Gillman and Midolo have concluded that Holden had been recruited to the Soviet Union's KGB by his gay lover, a Soviet spy, while working at the paper.
They also reveal that Holden later joined the CIA, likely working as a double agent - concluding that this was probably why he was killed.
Multiple sources they cite point to Egypt under President Anwar Sadat, a US ally against the Soviets, as responsible for Holden's murder. The head of Cairo's police even allegedly confessed to the killing, reportedly saying: "We did it. Holden was working for the KGB."
Bond creator Fleming and a cast of spies
The story has thrown up even more revelations.
At the same time as Holden, the investigation reveals, multiple spies were working as journalists at the paper. They had been hired by Ian Fleming, the Sunday Times foreign manager and legendary writer of the James Bond novels.
'Never in my life did I work or think to work for an American secret service'
- Kenzie Mourad
Fleming, himself a former intelligence officer, had hired them knowing that they were spies.
However, the "most startling revelation" concerned Kenize Mourad.
After Holden's murder, Mourad told reporter Peter Gillman that she had bumped into Holden in Damascus on 29 November 1977, 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. She said she saw him last on the morning of 4 December before he left to travel to the occupied West Bank. Mourad then went to Damascus.
"I came to the view she was an eager young journalist admiring of an old Middle East hand," Sunday Times editor Harold Evans concluded at the time.
'Operational approval'
But secret memos from the CIA station inside the American embassy in Tehran, retrieved after the 1979 revolution, list Mourad as a CIA asset, recruited in Paris in autumn 1973 to spy on Chinese diplomats "and Near East targets".
The memos record that she changed her mind a month later. "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."
However, one memo shows that the memo recorded that "operational approval was cancelled in April 1979".
Operational approval was granted for covert operations.
Yet Mourad insisted to the Sunday Times that she "was neither following David Holden nor gathering any information".
"Never in my life did I work or think to work for an American secret service!"
Iran and the US: When friends fall out Read More »
She recalled meeting a US diplomat in 1973 and said she had been "stunned" when he tried to recruit her for the CIA.
Initially she planned to agree, so she could write a story on the CIA recruiting left-wing journalists. But later, "I realised I was a fool and that I could not write about the CIA without risking a terrible revenge.
"I should not even let them know that I played a game by letting them believe I could work for them. I was even afraid to confront the man, that is why I sent a letter pretending that I was sorry, that I thought I could, but I could not."
Mourad was then asked why her "operational approval" was recorded as having lasted for nearly six years.
"I suppose it was just a bureaucratic mistake," Mourad said. "Or maybe they did not want to acknowledge their failure?"
There is no suggestion at all that Mourad was involved in the murder.
But the episode - one in a series of many in the writer's dizzyingly cosmopolitan life - illustrates the remarkable extent to which European journalists were entangled in espionage during the height of the cold war.