Ruzi Nazar

Ruzi Nazar (; 1 January 1917 – 30 April 2015) was an Uzbek nationalist who spent most of his career working for the CIA against the Soviet Union.

Early life

Nazar was born in Margilan in the Fergana Valley in what later became Uzbekistan in 1917. He attended school in his hometown and was later educated in Tashkent. Nazar's father, Jemshid Umirzakoglu, was a silk merchant from a family that had been engaged in silk production for many centuries. His mother, Tacinissa, came from a family prominent in the Khanate of Kokand before the Russian conquest, and was sympathetic to nationalist ideas. She had been taught Arabic, Persian, and Russian literature and was influenced by the late-19th and early-20th century Jadid movement among Turkic Muslims, which advocated modernisation in order to resist Russian rule.

When Nazar was ten, his elder brother Yoldash Kari was executed by the Soviets for involvement in nationalist resistance. This event made his father decide to give his son a modern education. Nazar attended high school in Margilan and then studied economics in Tashkent, also taking night classes in chemistry. Nazar also worked in the local youth wing of the Uzbekistan Communist Party but was accused of belonging to a nationalist group and was temporarily expelled, though after a visit to Moscow to appeal against the decision, he and his friends managed to regain their membership.

During the 1930s prominent Turkestani poets and writers, and later the local Communist Party leadership, were denounced by the Soviet authorities and either exiled and imprisoned or placed on trial. Nazar followed such trials closely in his hometown.

Second World War

In January 1941 Nazar was drafted into the Red Army and when war broke out between Nazi Germany and Russia in the spring of that year he was sent to the front in Ukraine. A few weeks later, during the German rout of the Red Army, Ruzi was badly wounded and cut off from his unit. He was then sheltered nursed back to health by a Ukrainian family and given a false identity. He was eventually captured by the Germans to whom he offered his services as an intelligence asset. He was involved in establishing the Turkestan Legion comprised by Turkic captives from the Soviet Union. a joint platform for non-Russian peoples seeking independence, set up by his friends Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko.

CIA career

Having evidently been talent-spotted by the Americans perhaps because of his success in unmasking a Soviet mole among the Turkestani exiles, Nazar was invited in 1951 by Archibald Roosevelt Jr. of the CIA to go to the United States to work in a new Central Asian Unit in Columbia University. Once in New York he supplemented his income with broadcasts in Uzbek for Voice of America.

Within a few years however, Nazar had joined the CIA as a career officer and moved to Washington. On behalf of his new employers, he attended the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries in Indonesia in April 1955 and drew attention to the colonial plight of non-Russian populations in Russia and China. In September 1955 he attended the Cairo Non-Aligned Conference in a similar capacity and the Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna in July and August 1959, during which he met privately with Turkey's most famous 20th-century poet, the exiled Communist Nâzım Hikmet, who he later recalled advised him to ‘stay away from politics and politicians.’ His work on such occasions seems to have been a combination of promoting awareness of the colonial situation of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union and trying to identify Soviet infiltrators and agents.

Nazar’s years in Turkey

From the end of 1959 until 1971, Nazar worked in the American Embassy in Ankara. Shortly after his arrival in Turkey, there was a military coup in Ankara on 27 May 1960. One of its leading figures, Colonel Alparslan Türkeş, had been a close friend of Nazar's since 1955 when he served in Washington in the Turkish Permanent Delegation to NATO. He took part on the ground in the successful CIA clandestine operation 'Argo' (which in 2013 became the subject of a film though Nazar's presence is not mentioned) to rescue six American diplomatic personnel who had been stranded outside the embassy at the time of its occupation. On return he advised the U.S. government strongly against a direct military operation to rescue the hostages, but failed to convince the U.S. military who went ahead with the abortive Operation Eagle Claw.

Afghanistan

Later Nazar made several trips to Afghanistan then under Soviet occupation to recruit Uzbek deserters from the Red Army. He held talks with Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, the hardline anti-Western mujahid Islamist leader supported by the US against the Russians, and – drawing on his own moderate Muslim background – strongly advised the US government not to back radical Islamists. He says that again his advice was overruled by U.S. policy-makers.

Return to Central Asia after the fall of Communism

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of independence by Uzbekistan in September 1991, Nazar was at last free to return to his homeland after 50 years. He paid his first visit to Tashkent and Margilan in May 1992, being given a hero's reception by President Islam Karimov and the Uzbek government. He was also reunited with surviving friends and family.

Personal life

Nazar has two children, a daughter, Sylvia, a professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, best known as the author of the John Forbes Nash Jr. biographical book A Beautiful Mind, and a son, Erkin.