The Truth Behind “Midnight Express”

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2025-01-16 16:30:08

It was one of the travel nightmares of the 1970s, along with being hijacked to Cuba or being stuck behind the Iron Curtain – being thrown into a Turkish prison and left to rot. The 1978 movie “Midnight Express,” based on a book by Billy Hayes, and adapted into a screenplay by Oliver Stone, shows Hayes’ arrest for trafficking in hashish, his beatings and the squalid prison conditions. Though originally sentenced to a relatively mild four years, just two months before his release date, a superior court overturned the decision and sentenced him to 30 years. Other prisoners try to escape (which gives the book and movie their name), while Hayes remains, going slowly insane until his girlfriend visits him and urges him to escape as well. After an attempt to bribe the guard fails, he attacks the guard, who is accidentally killed. Hayes is then able to flee prison. According to Robert Dillon, who was deputy chief of mission at the embassy, the real story was a bit less lurid. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in 1990.

DILLON: I was the Country Director from summer, 1971 to the summer of 1974. It was shortly after my return to Washington that the issue of Americans in Turkish prisons broke. I can remember it very well. I was sitting in my office in January or February 1972, when I got a phone call from a woman, who told me that the last time she had seen her daughter had been on Thanksgiving 1971. She had come home and then had left to visit a friend somewhere in the south. The woman said that she had never heard from the daughter again and she was very concerned. She called me because she had just heard on the radio that four Americans — a young man and three women — had just been arrested trying to cross the border between Syria and Turkey and she was certain that her daughter was one of three Americans. I asked how she knew that. She said that she couldn’t explain it, but she was absolutely certain that her daughter was among the group arrested. I asked her if she had heard any names; she hadn’t. Had she heard any other information which would lead her to the conclusion? No.