Operation Nemesis

Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (2015), a history book by American actor and playwright Eric Bogosian, tells the story of the Armenian revolutionaries who set out to assassinate the Turkish perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. The focus of Bogosian’s account is Soghomon Tehlirian, a student who succeeded in assassinating the former Turkish leader Mehmet Talat Pasha in Berlin.

The first section of the book discusses the history of the Armenian people. As citizens of the officially Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Christian Armenians were second-class citizens. Not permitted to hold official positions or to marry Turks, they were also subject to additional taxes.

In the late 19th century, several Armenian revolutionary societies were formed to resist the oppression of their rulers. One of these, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) rose to prominence through a series of violent attacks, including a bank raid and an attempt to assassinate the sultan.



The activities of the ARF formed part of broader unrest in the Ottoman society. In 1908, a group known as the “Young Turks” decided to overthrow the sultan and establish democracy in the Ottoman territories. They forged an alliance with the ARF, and together, the groups successfully organized a bloodless coup.

Once in power, however, the Young Turks had no further need of the ARF or the Armenians. Rather than institute democracy, the one-time revolutionaries established an autocratic rule as cruel as the one they had displaced. At its head was the “Committee of Union and Progress,” lead by three men: Djemal Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Enver Pasha.

By 1913, their rule was absolute, and with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, they instituted further oppressive measures.



The genocide of the Armenians began in early 1915, with the disappearance of many Armenian community leaders. The killing rapidly escalated. Eventually, the whole community was forcibly removed from its traditional homeland and marched into the Syrian desert. Thousands were tortured, raped, and killed along the way. Finally, the Committee issued orders for the displaced Armenians to be murdered.

With the end of the war, the British took control of the region, establishing tribunals to try the members of the Committee for war crimes. Almost all of those tried were found guilty and sentenced to death, but the most prominent, including all three Pashas, fled the country before the sentence could be carried out.

The second part of the book turns to Armenian efforts to achieve justice through extra-legal means. Bogosian focuses on the story of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian student who was fighting the Turks as a volunteer in Russia when the genocide began.



When he returned to his hometown of Erzincan in eastern Turkey, he found it desolate. He fainted at the sight. He would later learn that 85 members of his family had been killed, including his mother and sister. Tehlirian became fixated on the idea of revenge. In Constantinople, Tehlirian came across an Armenian traitor and murdered him. But he was determined to track down the real perpetrators of the genocide.

Since his flight from Turkey, Talat Pasha had been in hiding in Germany, plotting a return to power. Tehlirian tracked Talat down to his house on Hardenbergstrasse, Berlin, where he rented a nearby apartment and began to study Talat’s routine. Already exhausted by the effort of finding his target, Tehlirian began to suffer from epileptic seizures and terrifying nightmares as he contemplated his deed.

On March 15, 1921, Tehlirian followed Talat as the former Turkish leader left his home. Tehlirian crossed and re-crossed the street, passing Talat several times to confirm his identity beyond any doubt. After his last pass, he turned and shot Talat in the nape of the neck. Then he waited patiently by the body as witnesses tackled him and summoned the police.



His trial was a sensation. Tehlirian presented himself as a lonely, grieving misfit, haunted by the ghost of the mother he claimed to have seen beheaded in front of him. He pleaded a form of insanity, brought on by the horrors of the genocide, and as a result, the trial focused on Talat and his guilt for the crimes which had driven Tehlirian to murder.

Expert witnesses made it clear that Talat was indeed guilty of horrific crimes, for which he had been sentenced to death. The jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of “not guilty.” The headline in the New York Times ran: “They Simply Had to Let Him Go.”

However, Tehlirian was not the lone operator he presented himself as. Rather, he was an assassin recruited by the ARF to participate in a coordinated operation codenamed “Nemesis.”



Headquartered in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, the goal of Operation Nemesis was to draw attention to the overlooked plight of the Armenian people by assassinating those responsible for the genocide. Nemesis recruited and trained ten assassins and built a network of contacts within the diplomatic corps and intelligence services of multiple countries. Bogosian devotes a lengthy passage of his book to investigating the possible involvement of British intelligence in Talat Pasha’s killing, concluding that the British were indeed involved, as they were the only intelligence service that knew Talat’s whereabouts.

This intelligence had been used to send Tehlirian to Berlin. Tehlirian was ordered to stay with the body and plead insanity at trial to create a sensational story and bring the world’s attention to the genocide.

Within three years, Operation Nemesis managed to find and kill a further six Turkish figures who had been prominently involved in the genocide. Most of the assassins were never caught or tried (although one was tracked down by Soviet intelligence and sent to the gulag).



Tehlirian married and settled in Serbia, where he became a recreational handgun shooter. Turkish agents found him in 1945, but he fled with his family to San Francisco.

Though the operation ceased in 1922, it has had a long afterlife. Nemesis inspired the PLO-trained Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala) to carry out 36 assassinations of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 1980s. Asala also carried out a bomb attack that killed 55, most unconnected to Turkey.

More broadly, Bogosian suggests, the assassinations carried out by Operation Nemesis have become a pattern for terrorist organizations ever since.