The indictment tells the tale of a gang within the Turkish naval forces that was charged with running a prostitution ring, blackmail and spying. The gang had stolen more than 165,000 highly confidential documents and obtained dozens of surveillance records and detailed maps that the Turkish military says would put state security at serious risk if they fell into the wrong hands.
Though most documents were sealed by the court because they include sensitive information and may jeopardize Turkey's foreign relations, it nevertheless explicitly names three foreign countries as collaborators with this gang. Based on the evidence and testimonies of the suspects, Israel is the number one suspect country on the list. Greece comes in second, especially with regard to an attempt to obtain classified information on naval assets in the Aegean and Marmara seas. For example prosecutors believe that suspects were selling or intended to sell leaked maps and aerial photographs of the Erdek Naval Base, the İzmir radar installation bases and the İstanbul Shipyard Command to Greece. Finally, Russia, the old Cold War-era foe and newfound friend of Turkey, was also mentioned as a customer looking for NATO-related sensitive information.
It is not unusual for countries to spy on each other, and Turkey is no exception to that. The rules do not distinguish between friends and foes in this intelligence game. For example Israel was named as the number one US ally to conduct aggressive espionage operations against the United States, and Israeli intelligence agents have been most active in that country for decades. Readers may recall the case of US citizen Jonathan Pollard, who worked as an Israeli spy in the Naval Anti-Terrorist Alert Center and was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. Modern examples include Anna Chapman, the Russian “femme fatale” spy who was gleaning the US government information from the high-society participants of trendy events in New York City.
The rule of thumb in the spy business is to thwart the efforts of foreign agents trying to penetrate your defenses to collect sensitive information or, better yet, to convert them into double agents or feed them with erroneous information. Judging from the 250-page indictment and long list of suspects, I understand there was some serious damage to Turkish national security. I do not expect the government to disclose the extent and the scope of the damage, but I do hope it will be contained as much as possible. Counterintelligence authorities should look into how they missed clues for this gang's penetration of national defense documents, which seems very extensive.
We learn from the indictment that the gang has been active since 2006 and was especially interested in defense projects currently being developed in Turkey. The prosecutors determined that the espionage gang stole information about various projects from agencies such as the Turkish Undersecretariat for the Defense Industry (SSM), the top defense procurement agency in Turkey, as well as Roketsan, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), ASELSAN, the Air Electronics Industry (Havelsan) and Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), which develops national military projects. They also had moles in the top secret General Staff's Electronic Systems Command (GES). The gang had amassed a large database of information on thousands of officers in these organizations and even surveilled the lowest-ranking civil servants working there.
It is no secret that Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd. (IAI) and Israel Military Industries, Ltd. (IMI) were very interested in winning multi-billion dollar deals for the modernization of the Turkish army in the past. It should come as no surprise that Israel kept close tabs on the military projects developed by Turkey's own industries. We should recall how the countries were at odds with each other over the delivery of the Heron unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for reconnaissance flights because Turkey wanted to incorporate its own optical eye mechanism in the Heron's body. Frustrated with delays, Turkey decided to develop its own Heron project.
According to the indictment, a document found on suspect Lt. Emrah Küçükakça's computer lays out ways to stall or completely halt six major national defense projects. On the subject of the Herons, the document says that “[the Heron project] should most certainly be impeded.”
The gang, which has made millions of dollars in kickbacks, used to “motivate” its members to obtain top secret state documents by paying extra to those who leaked the most sensitive information without problem and rewarded those who obtained the “highest quality” recordings in the prostitution ring with holiday packages. The gang profiled admirals and other high-ranking naval officers to possibly extract information from them as well. The documents seized from the suspects list the names of a number of military officers alongside the names of various women and explanatory tabs. “He drinks too much,” “He is a womanizer,” “He is a drug addict,” “He is involved in suspicious affairs” and “He has ties with Kurdish terror groups” were among the descriptive phrases used by suspects.
The suspect list is quite large, and we do not have a single individual spy here. In that sense, it differs from the ones we see in other countries. The gang's alleged leader is retired Col. İbrahim Sezer, who was arrested and jailed in 2010. The indictment mentions 55 other suspects -- 40 of whom are active duty military officers, including admirals Şafak Yürekli and Fahri Can Yıldırım. The head of the intelligence unit at Gölcük Naval Command, Maj. Kemalettin Yakar, and the head of the SSM's international cooperation department, Ahmet Lütfi Varoğlu, are also among the suspects. Yakar was accused of passing navigation charts for Turkish naval vessels to Greek intelligence services via handlers.
When asked by the prosecutor's office, the General Staff briefly described the topics of the thousands of classified documents seized during the police search. Because of the scope and depth of these documents, it would be terrifying if they made their way into the hands of foreign governments, which was quite likely in this case. The repercussions are far greater than a limited risk to one country's, namely Turkey's, national security, because some of the documents reveal NATO rules of engagement, for example, for the alliance's counter-piracy mission in Somalia, as well as IFF (friend or foe identification) codes. It includes restricted NATO messages and command orders and cryptic key cards, while disclosing the performance reports of navy drills such as Operation Active Endeavour, which authorizes NATO ships to patrol and monitor the Mediterranean Sea against terrorist activity.
The evaluation reports for the NATO immediate reaction force called Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2) were also among the documents seized during the prosecutors' investigation. The SNMG2 force was established to perform a wide range of tasks, from participating in exercises to crisis response and real world operation missions. The planning meetings for multi-nation naval exercises such as Exercise Phoenix Express 2009, held in the Mediterranean among regional allies from the US, Africa and Europe, were also disclosed.
One can only fathom the damage, considering the fact that the seized documents involved detailed information on navy capabilities, fleet composition and assets, weapons systems, electronic warfare systems, and the weaknesses and holes in systems as explained in performance reports. Information on radar installation systems, frequencies and their locations, complete with aerial photos, was among the information seized from suspects. Most shockingly, all Turkish military personal and attachés working abroad with their detailed profiles were made available to the enemy. We must note that these are not old documents but recent ones, some of them dated as late as 2010.
The leak was certainly set to deal a blow to Turkey's efforts in the fight against terror, as electronic intelligence capabilities of the top secret assets belonging to the GES were revealed. The cell-phone tracking systems, Internet monitoring programs, called Volkan, and electronic intelligence gathering capabilities were also discussed in these documents. The intelligence gathering reports on other countries were also disclosed, providing a competitive edge to foreign intelligence services.
I remember reading a US memo issued in 1995 by the multi-mission agency Defense Investigative Service (DIS), part of the US Department of Defense, which warned American military contractors that "Israel aggressively collects [US] military and industrial technology." The report stated that Israel obtains information using "ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of the individual frailties" of US citizens. The espionage indictment in Turkey very much echoes the findings of the DIS report, albeit with more flavor and including multiple countries. This is a colossal failure of counter intelligence in Turkey, and we simply do not know how much damage this spy gang has inflicted on Turkey's national defense.
In a sense, we have a Turkish version of the WikiLeaks scandal on our hands, the only difference being that the documents are not publicly accessible, yet.
