# Nine Officers Incident: Turkey's 1957 Coup Plot That Failed

*History & War · Eleanor Hartwell · 2026-08-07*

## TL;DR

In late 1957, a group of Turkish officers plotted to overthrow Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Major Samet Kuşçu, a fellow officer who learned of the conspiracy, reported it to authorities through a chain of intermediaries. The government arrested nine officers, but a military court acquitted eight of them in 1958, and the whistleblower was convicted instead.

## Key facts

- The Nine Officers Incident unfolded in Turkey in late 1957, when a secret military cell planned to seize power from Prime Minister Adnan Menderes.
- Major Samet Kuşçu, an army officer who learned of the plot, alerted authorities through journalist and deputy Mithat Perin, triggering the arrests of the nine conspirators.
- Lieutenant Colonel Faruk Güventürk, identified as the plot's leader, was among those detained but was later acquitted in the 1958 military trial.
- The military court found the evidence insufficient for eight of the nine, releasing them in April 1958, while Major Kuşçu was convicted for inciting the army to rebellion.
- The incident foreshadowed the successful 27 May 1960 coup, which ultimately removed Menderes from power and ended his decade-long rule.

## A Whistleblower's Warning Nobody Wanted to Hear

In late 1957, a group of officers within the Turkish Armed Forces began quietly laying plans for a coup against the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. The plot, which would later become known as the Nine Officers Incident, never got off the ground. But the real story isn't just about the conspirators. It's about the man who tried to stop them, and how the government refused to believe him.

That man was Major Samet Kuşçu, an officer who also happened to be the military commander of Zeki Müren, Turkey's most beloved singer. Kuşçu got wind of the plot through his military connections and grew deeply alarmed. He knew he had to get word to the Prime Minister, but he wasn't a politician, and he had no direct line to the top. So he reached out to a journalist and Democratic Party deputy named Mithat Perin, hoping the politician could carry his warning to Menderes.

Perin tried, but he couldn't get through to the Prime Minister directly. Instead, he took the information to Interior Minister Namık Gedik, who listened carefully and then relayed the entire warning to Menderes. The chain of communication had worked, at least on paper. The Prime Minister now knew that officers were plotting against his government. What he did next revealed everything about how the administration would handle the threat.

Menderes instructed Gedik to summon National Defense Minister Şemi Ergin to Istanbul. The men planned to meet at the Istanbul Governor's Office to assess the situation. It seemed like a reasonable first step, a chance to take the threat seriously and investigate. But here's where the story takes an almost absurd twist.

While Kuşçu was sounding the alarm in Istanbul, the very man he had identified as the plot's leader, Lieutenant Colonel Faruk Güventürk, was sitting in Ankara with Şemi Ergin. Güventürk was making his own pitch, offering Ergin the leadership of the coup. The Defense Minister was being recruited by the head of the conspiracy at the exact same moment his government was meeting to discuss that conspiracy. Ergin reportedly refused the offer, but he also didn't immediately report it. The irony was staggering, and it foreshadowed just how badly the government would miscalculate in the months ahead.

## The Bizarre Timing: A Coup Offer to the Defense Minister

While Major Samet Kuşçu was in Istanbul desperately trying to convince the government of an impending coup, the man he named as its leader was hundreds of miles away in Ankara, coolly offering the whole operation to Turkey's own defense minister. The date was late 1957, and the Nine Officers Incident was about to expose just how dangerously close to the top the conspiracy had reached.

Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, after finally hearing Kuşçu's warnings through Interior Minister Namık Gedik, gave a curious order. He told Gedik to summon National Defense Minister Şemi Ergin to Istanbul for a meeting at the Istanbul Governor's Office. The idea was simple: bring the army's top civilian overseer into the room and assess whether these wild allegations could possibly be true.

Here is where the story takes its strangest turn. As Gedik prepared for that Istanbul meeting, Lieutenant Colonel Faruk Güventürk, the very officer Kuşçu had identified as the coup's ringleader, was sitting across from Ergin in Ankara. Güventürk was making his pitch: take command of the revolution, Minister. Lead the coup yourself.

Ergin listened. He consulted. And then he refused. The man the plotters wanted to install as their figurehead was the same man Menderes wanted in Istanbul to evaluate the threat. Two branches of the same government were dealing with the same conspiracy from opposite angles, neither yet aware of the full picture.

The audacity of Güventürk's approach is almost impossible to overstate. He was not recruiting some disgruntled mid-level officer. He walked into the office of the Republic of Turkey's defense minister and offered him a coup. That Ergin did not immediately arrest him says something about how surreal the moment must have felt, how far outside normal experience the suggestion was.

Back in Istanbul, Kuşçu's frustration was mounting. The government's initial disbelief, reflected in Menderes's cautious response, meant his warnings were being treated as rumor rather than intelligence. The coincidence of Güventürk's simultaneous offer to Ergin would later become the detail that made investigators realize the plot was real, organized, and reaching toward the highest corridors of power.

## The CIA Angle and the Arrests

Major Samet Kuşçu had a problem: he knew a coup was brewing, but nobody in power seemed to believe him. So, according to the original account, he took a dramatic step that would blur the lines between whistleblower and traitor: he walked into the CIA's Istanbul station and shared everything he knew with the Americans. The station chief listened, then made a phone call to the Istanbul police. Within hours, Kuşçu was handed over to the National Intelligence Organization, or MAH, the predecessor of today's MİT. Whether that CIA meeting actually happened the way the story claims remains a matter of dispute, but the consequences were very real.

Three days after the coup allegations surfaced, the arrests came down. Nine officers were taken into custody on charges of attempting to incite a military rebellion. The exact composition of that group is contested in the historical record, with some accounts differing on who was among those detained. What is certain is that the man Kuşçu had named as the ringleader, Lieutenant Colonel Güventürk, was arrested in Ankara. Just days earlier, he had been sitting across from National Defense Minister Şemi Ergin, offering him the leadership of the very coup that had now collapsed.

The irony of the trial that followed was almost too perfect. On January 16, 1958, the officers appeared before a military court presided over by Major General Cemal Tural. Tural was the same man Güventürk had approached to lead the rebellion. The general had refused, and now he would judge the men who had tried to recruit him. By April 5, 1958, the court acquitted eight of the accused. The only person convicted was the informant himself, Major Samet Kuşçu, found guilty of inciting the army to rebellion. The man who had tried to stop the coup was the only one punished for it.

## The Trial and the Bitter Irony

On January 16, 1958, the accused officers walked into a military courtroom to face charges of attempting to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Presiding over their case was Major General Cemal Tural, a man who knew the defendants better than anyone else in that room. Just weeks earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Faruk Güventürk had approached Tural with the same offer he had made to the Defense Minister: take command of the coup. Tural had refused.

The courtroom drama carried a surreal weight. The general sitting in judgment had been courted by the very conspirators now standing before him. Güventürk had been so confident in his recruitment pitch that he had approached not one but two senior military figures, never suspecting that both would reject him and that one would later preside over his trial. The irony was not lost on the officers as they faced the man who could have been their leader.

For nearly three months, the trial dragged on through the cold Ankara winter. Witnesses were called, testimonies were heard, and the officers maintained their positions while the court weighed the evidence of a plot that had been exposed through a most unexpected channel. Then, on April 5, 1958, the verdict came down, and it stunned everyone in the courtroom.

The accused officers were released. All of them. The court found no grounds to convict a single one of them for the coup attempt. But there was one conviction that day, and it landed on the man who had tried to stop the whole thing. Major Samet Kuşçu, the whistleblower who had risked everything to warn the government, was found guilty of inciting the army to rebellion and sentenced to prison.

The man who had sounded the alarm became the only person punished in the entire affair. The conspirators walked free while the informant was branded a criminal. President Celal Bayar had warned Menderes to take the plot seriously, but the government had dismissed the warnings with a shrug, insisting that no such officer could come from the Turkish army. The bitter lesson of the Nine Officers Incident was that the system had punished the messenger while letting the message die unanswered.

## The President's Warning and the Road to 1960

President Celal Bayar did something in early 1958 that, looking back, should have changed everything. He sat down with Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, laid out the details of the Nine Officers Incident, and then raised it formally in a cabinet meeting, urging everyone in the room to take the threat seriously.

Bayar's warning landed on deaf ears. Menderes and several of his ministers waved it off with a dismissive phrase that would haunt them: "Such an officer would not come from the Turkish army." They simply could not believe that men in uniform, men sworn to protect the republic, would turn against their own government. The room moved on to other business, and the plot was filed away as an overreaction.

Years later, after the dust had settled and the government had fallen, Bayar reflected on that moment with bitter clarity. He stated plainly that if the Nine Officers Incident had been properly evaluated, the 27 May 1960 coup would not have occurred. The warning signs were all there, documented, investigated, and then dismissed by the very men who should have acted on them.

The pattern is almost painful to trace. A major named Samet Kuşçu had come forward with detailed information about the conspiracy, risking his own career to sound the alarm. The officers involved had been arrested, tried, and mostly acquitted. The machinery of the state had worked exactly as it should have. But the political leadership, blinded by their own confidence, chose to see the whole affair as an anomaly rather than a harbinger.

When the coup finally came on 27 May 1960, it was led by a different group of officers, but the seeds had been planted years earlier. The government's failure to reckon with the first plot sent a clear signal to the military: the civilians in power would not, or could not, defend themselves against a determined conspiracy. Bayar's hindsight was not just regret; it was a precise diagnosis of how a warning, left unheeded, becomes a prophecy.


## Frequently asked questions

**What was the Nine Officers Incident in Turkey?**

The Nine Officers Incident was a failed coup plot uncovered in late 1957 against the government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his Democrat Party. A group of military officers allegedly planned to overthrow the elected government, leading to arrests and a military trial in early 1958 that ultimately acquitted all but one of the accused.

**Who exposed the 1957 coup plot against Adnan Menderes?**

Major Samet Kuşçu, an army officer who also served as commander to the famous singer Zeki Müren, learned of the plot and tried to warn Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Unable to reach Menderes directly, Kuşçu contacted journalist and Democrat Party deputy Mithat Perin, who passed the warning to Interior Minister Namık Gedik in 1957.

**Why did the Nine Officers Incident fail?**

The plot collapsed because of a remarkable coincidence. While Major Samet Kuşçu was reporting the conspiracy to government officials in Istanbul, Lieutenant Colonel Faruk Güventürk was in Ankara simultaneously offering the coup's leadership to National Defense Minister Şemi Ergin, who refused. The government then arrested the conspirators before they could act.

**How did President Celal Bayar react to the Nine Officers Incident?**

President Celal Bayar took the threat seriously and personally warned Prime Minister Adnan Menderes about the plot. He raised the matter in a cabinet meeting and urged the government to grasp the situation's gravity, but Menderes and several ministers dismissed it, reportedly saying such an officer could not come from the Turkish army.

**Who was Major Samet Kuşçu and what happened to him?**

Major Samet Kuşçu was the whistleblower who exposed the coup plot in 1957, and he was also the commander of Turkey's legendary singer Zeki Müren. Ironically, when the military court delivered its verdict on April 5, 1958, Kuşçu was the only person convicted, receiving punishment for inciting the army to rebellion while the other accused officers walked free.

**Did the Nine Officers Incident lead to the 1960 coup?**

President Celal Bayar believed so. He later stated that if the government had properly evaluated the Nine Officers Incident, the 27 May 1960 coup would never have happened. The government's failure to take the plot seriously reportedly emboldened later conspirators, making the successful 1960 military takeover inevitable.

**What role did the CIA play in the Nine Officers Incident?**

According to the original account, Major Samet Kuşçu, unable to convince the Turkish government of the impending coup, reportedly went to the CIA's Istanbul station chief and shared what he knew with the Americans. The Americans then allegedly handed him over to the National Intelligence Organization, known as MAH, the predecessor of today's MİT. This specific sequence of events is not consistently documented in mainstream historical accounts.

Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/nine-officers-incident-turkey-s-1957-coup-plot-that-failed/