Erdoğan made another defiant anti-Western gesture. This time, about the interaction of Western and Turkish secret services. What exactly has happened and why it so much offended both the Turkish intelligence and Türkiye’s President Erdoğan personally, and how will the relationship of Western intelligence agencies with Türkiye evolve?
Western intelligence officers will not be able to deploy their operations in Türkiye until they inform its authorities, reports the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet citing an unnamed diplomat. According to the newspaper’s source, ‘some Western intelligence organisations do their work in Türkiye, they come and go whenever they want. For example, a Western intelligence plane can fly in, then it stays for some time before it leaves’.
The Turkish official is highly concerned, as Western intelligence officers ‘do not provide any information about what and who was in these planes and, most importantly, what they did in the country at all’. The plane origin remains unreported, but, most probably, it was American. Starting from now, ‘such operations, arrivals and take-offs cannot happen with no relevant information provided’, claimed the Turkish authorities.
The situation is more complex than what we can learn from the words of the unnamed Turkish diplomat. The Turks themselves are stating with regret that, with the new escalation stage of the conflict in the Middle East, with the creeping involvement of other countries in the conflict, Türkiye has once again become ‘a hunting area’ for various intelligence services, especially, Western ones.
The country has had such a profile for quite a long time, which irritated both its leader Erdoğan and all involved agencies and persons in general. Traditionally, there were several countries in Europe, which were used by foreign intelligence units as such ‘free areas’ (Sweden, Portugal, sometimes Finland) and Türkiye was among them. Even the action of the second film about James Bond featuring Sean Connery, the renowned ‘From Russia with Love’, was set in Istanbul.
Besides, when Türkiye was considered ‘NATO’s southern flank’, Western intelligence officers felt at home there indeed and were happy to share some exotic details of their ‘Turkish adventures’. Even the famous Soviet MI6 agent Kim Philby, in his Moscow memoirs, did make a few pungent remarks about his Turkish colleagues (‘the first thing my Turkish peer did was to suggest going to a brothel’). And this was when Philby ‘sent’ agents to the Soviet Transcaucasia sitting in Istanbul and Kars.
But times changed. As of now, no one in Ankara agrees with the dubious role of ‘a hunting area’ for intelligence services.
Amidst the New Year celebrartions, the Turkish counter-intelligence conducted a large-scale operation to arrest Israeli agents. The value of these 55 Mossad agents, detained across the whole country, can be discussed further. But many experts swiftly noticed that the arrest of the Israeli agents happened right in the midst of the war in Gaza, as well as during the undeclared confrontation of US and Israel with Iran.
Western intelligence units started complaining to Ankara. ‘What are you really up to, our brothers, Turks, you should be ‘on the good side’, and you stab us in the back right in the midst of the fight? Like, arresting any Mossad or CIA agent or official in the Middle East is yet another ‘drop of water on Iran’s mill”.
It can well be assumed these complaints were quite harsh, as Tel-Aviv now responds to any resistance like blasphemy. Erdoğan’s reaction was also brisk as usual. ‘This was just the first step’ and ‘you will get to know Türkiye’.
Turkish commentators underline that Erdoğan is talking not only and not so much about today. All this is not because the current relationship between Türkiye and Israel are almost breaking up. Erdoğan is cursing the Jewish state for its actions in Gaza.
Erdoğan says: ‘Contrary to what is being said, there was no axial shift in our country, rather, our country found its real axis after a long quest and this axis is called Türkiye Axis’. If we interpret these colourful Eastern language into a European wording, this means the restoration of Türkiye’s sovereignty, which was seriously restricted both by almost forced accession to NATO and informal pressure of the US, which continued for decades. In his various statements, Erdoğan speaks of the sovereignisation of Türkiye’s economy, political system and, last but not least, of its foreign politics.
Restoring the national intelligence and counterintelligence framework was part of this sovereignisation.
Uncontrolled footprint in Türkiye of foreign intelligence networks and using Istanbul and Ankara as ‘a hunting area’ is no longer treated as a fancy paper story like it was during the Cold War and the fame of Hollywood spy films. The same unnamed Turkish diplomat cited by Hürriyet demands: ‘And can our Intelligence Office do its work in their countries not giving any information?’ This is a rhetorical, yet quite a reasonable question.
The process of Türkiye’s intelligence sovereignisation has been taking place for quite a long time triggered by the 2007 disappearance in Istanbul of the Iranian general Ali-Reza Asgari, who was in charge of the nuclear program in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. He arrived in Istanbul on a flight from Damask and disappeared leaving no trace on the way from the airport to the hotel. There are different versions regarding what happened, from abduction by Mossad agents to voluntary disappearance. The currently prevailing opinion in Türkiye is that Asgari was abducted in Istanbul by the American and Israeli intelligence units together. It is also being debated whether Asgari was a double agent looking for political asylum or he was just abducted and taken, as some evidence suggest, to Germany or directly to Israel. The Turks were exasperated by the mere fact they had not been informed about the secret Istanbul operation organized by third-country intelligence units. And this could have worsened the relations between Türkiye and Iran.
This incident showed the Turks that the times of James Bond and Lawrence of Arabia are not gone, that no one treats them as humans or respects Türkiye’s sovereignty even in its own territory. From this moment, the relationships between the Turkish intelligence community and Western intelligence services (especially with CIA and Mossad) have started to degrade quite rapidly. If before, the West considered Türkiye’s foreign policy actions something like a light opposition or a form of oriental ingenuity, today the Turks have taken the path of direct confrontation with US and Israel in the intelligence domain. This makes both Washington and Tel-Aviv angry. Ankara’s manifestation of sovereignty is taken not just like a one-off incident which they can address through talks (well, let’s just give it a rest, nothing will happen if you inform the Turkish intelligence of your plans in its territory), rather like ‘a mutiny aboard the ship’.
It is hard for Tel-Aviv and Washington to understand that any longing for sovereignty of any state is not ‘a mutiny’ against ‘the forces of good’, rather an essential right of this state. Well, they will have to accept it sooner or later. Or, at least change the attitudes of their intelligence services and make their approaches more respectful of their allies.