Did Zbigniew Brzezinski blame CIA for Turkey’s coup?

In recent days, an impressive article regarding Zbigniew Brzezinki, political guru and former U.S. National Security Advisor, has been circulating on Turkey’s social media. “Top U.S. National Security Official Admits Turkey Coup,” its title reads. It then explains:  

“The first admission that U.S. intelligence had a hand in the anti-Erdoğan coup, a coup launched just days after Erdoğan announced a major strategic shift away from NATO and towards Russia, came from Zbigniew Brzezinski … In a Twitter tweet from his own blog, Brzezinski wrote a precis of a new article he wrote for The American Interest magazine: ‘The U.S. backing the attempted coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was a grave mistake that could deliver a major blow to the U.S.’s reputation.’ Given what has been unfolding in Turkey since July 15, that is definitely putting it mildly.”

These are, of course, very impressive details — until you figure out that the piece is completely fake. There is no such article either on The American Interest magazine’s website or on Brzezinski’s Twitter feed. (You can check for yourself at: https://twitter.com/zbig.) I also checked Mr. Brzezinski’s Facebook page, and saw that the supposed article there about the CIA role in Turkey’s coup simply does not exist. 

So, here we have a forgery, apparently intended to make Turks believe that the failed coup of July 15 was a CIA job. 

The question is, who is producing this “information”? The author of the article, which has “quotes” from the mythical Brzezinski text, is a writer named F. William Engdahl. He most frequently appears on Russia Today and is known for depicting the whole Arab Spring as an American conspiracy, which sounds quite in line with the Kremlin’s view of the world. Moreover, the website on which Mr. Engdahl published the article in question is called “New Eastern Outlook,” which is based — guess where — in Moscow. 

Now, of course there is no problem in being based in Moscow, or in seeing the world with the Kremlin’s eyes, or in blaming the CIA for the Arab Spring and Turkey’s failed coup. But if you do all of these at the same time, and also invent unabashedly fake information to prove your conspiracy theory, then others will rightly suspect that something strange is going on. 

This latest fake story on Brzezinski comes on top of another Moscow-based fake story that I criticized in my previous piece in the Hürriyet Daily News (“The Russian libel against the Ecumenical Patriarch,” Sept. 3, 2016.) As I explained there, Turkey’s Ecumenical Patriarchate is accused of being behind Turkey’s coup and of being a CIA “Trojan Horse,” in another shameless lie published by another Moscow-based website.

In fact, the libel against the Ecumenical Patriarchate is repeated in Mr. Engdahl’s Brzezinki-focused article. Apparently plenty of the lies about Turkey’s failed coup go together these days. 

So something creepy is going on here. Turkey is already swamped with anti-American sentiment, and some Russian sources are pumping in more propaganda to make Turks even more suspicious toward the United States. It is a fact that has to be noticed by all those who are interested in Turkey’s place in the world — especially by some Turkish journalists who jump onto such bilge without the slightest hint of questioning or fact-checking.