Aydinlar Ocagi (The Intellectuals’ Hearth) was founded in the 1960s as an association of right-wing intellectuals in Turkey to fight against the rising tide of the Turkish left and also to break the left’s monopoly over Turkish intellectual life and debates. It reached the peak of its influence in the 1970s and the 1980s: The Ocak leadership played the most important role in convincing right-wing political leaders to form the National Front governments from 1975 to 1978; the party program of the Motherland Party grew out of a paper Turgut Ozal read at an Ocak meeting; and, although the Ocak’s political clout diminished from the late 1980s onward, its most important intellectual achievement, the so called Turkish-Islamic synthesis was adopted as the official cultural and educational policy of all right-wing governments since the 1980 coup. Surprisingly, in spite of its importance, the Ocak received attention neither in the English nor in the Turkish academic literature. In this paper, I am mainly interested in the following questions: First, what do we learn from prosopographic research on the founders of the Ocak? If we can construct a collective biography of the founders, what does this tell us about right-wing intellectuals in Cold War Turkey? Second, how can we explain the elitism of the Ocak and its elitist policies in the face of a very strong anti-elitist discourse developed by the Turkish right since the beginning of the republic? Third, what shall we make of the Ocak’s frantic anti-communism, bordering on the obsessive? Was Turkish anti-communism a homegrown phenomenon, as many right-wing ideologues wanted to have us believe? Or, was anti-communism partly—maybe principally—galvanized by American-led and funded propaganda efforts, as recent studies have shown it to be in many other cases? Do we have any evidence for contacts between the Ocak and actors across the border?