Address Obama, target Erdoğan

American journalist and writer David Ignatius is remembered by the Turkish public as “the moderator who infuriated Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at Davos.”

Ignatius is not only a respectable and credible journalist in his own country and in the world, but he is also famous for a feature of his that makes him exceptional: Writing spy novels…

His novels have been filmed, his last novel, Bloodmoney, was printed in 2011.

His novel “Siro,” printed in 1991, is set in 1979 Istanbul. In this novel, Ignatius tells of the ventures of CIA agents aiming to create instability in the Soviet’s Caucasus and Central Asian republics during one of the most tumultuous times of the Cold War.

Let me emphasize that Ignatius is not neo-con, Republican or rightist; he is known as a journalist with a liberal inclination.

Consequently, it is not a coincidence that the story about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government’s disclosing the identities of 10 Iranian agents spying on behalf of Mossad in Iran to the Iranian intelligence service at the beginning of 2012 was printed in the Washington Post on Oct. 17 with the byline of David Ignatius.

Ignatius also referred to Hakan Fidan’s profile that was printed on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Oct. 10 by Adam Antous and Joe Parkinson, the piece that acted as a “prelude” to his own story’s perception platform. Thereby, the two texts converged.

The compact meaning of this integrated text that I can reflect in three sentences is this:
“Mr. Fidan is the implementer of Prime Minister Erdoğan.

Since he took over, the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) in 2010, Mr. Fidan has shifted the agency’s focus to match Mr. Erdoğan’s.

The CIA spies on Turkey and the MİT runs an aggressive counterintelligence campaign against the CIA.”
And we have been talking for days about the information components that support these three sentences: That the MİT shared with Iran in 2010 valuable American and Israeli intelligence on Iran, the disclosing of the identities at the beginning of 2012 of Iranian Mossad members and the determining roles the MİT has played in delivering arms and other aid to anti-Western international Jihadists in Syria…

This will be an inverted sentence but there is no logical and valid reason existing for us to believe that all of these are not true.

On the contrary…

It was a time when the new government in Turkey had finally taken control of all the intelligence organizations… And this government has been implementing systematically a new foreign policy the substantial content of which constitutes of anti-Israel Islamism since Ahmet Davutoğlu became the Foreign Minister… Is there anything more natural than the shaping of the MİT activities in line with this new foreign policy?

Well, indeed, from now on, the CIA, Mossad and some others will not be able to operate in Turkey as easily as they did during the Cold War times. A government which has carried its relations with Israel to the Cold War format, will indeed not tolerate Mossad’s activities in Turkey.

If Ankara is in search of a military solution against the Baath regime, the MİT naturally carry out covert operations with this in mind.

It is impossible that these texts published in the WSJ and the “Post” would weaken the MİT, Fidan and Erdoğan in the eyes of the dominant nationalist-conservative public in Turkey. On the contrary, they will strengthen them.

The government and its media opted for narrowing the target to extract maximum political gain from this media operation in the United States anyway.

They are saying, “The source is Israel, the target is Fidan.”
Is it only this?
I don’t think so.
Both the source and the target are bigger.

The target of this operation is to make a “character assassination” against Erdoğan by exposing MİT’s activities against the critical interests of the U.S. and its strategic ally Israel, and thus, destroying whatever is left of the credit of the Turkish prime minister before President Obama.

It is probably the MİT’s duty to learn what is being aimed at with this.

The address is Obama; the target is Erdoğan.

Kadri Gürsel is a columnist for daily Milliyet in which this abridged piece was published on Oct. 24. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.