Yet the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) had dropped from the media's attention until last week. There could be two reasons for this. First, MİT is a secret organization and little information exists about it. Second, MİT has established an interesting relationship with media organizations and journalists, which has resulted in silence from the media on the role of the agency.
Unfortunately, if we want to analyze MİT's organizational structure, the way it conducts operations and how it perceives the world around us, there is little to go on. There are two reasons for the lack of information about MİT. First, it is a secret organization and no one is able to access the necessary information to share with the public. However, the MİT is not the only secret organization around the world that conducts clandestine operations. From the CIA to the BND, from MOSSAD to the KGB, there are many secret organizations, about which millions of books and articles have been published. The authenticity of the books and articles is a separate debate, but there are enough published works to understand how the CIA thinks and conducts operations around the world. Therefore, being a secret organization does not preclude these organizations from sharing some information about themselves. At least they share enough information to let the public they work for know what the organization is doing.
Sometimes MİT can become too generous in sharing this information if they think it might be useful for its own image and interests, particularly when they are in confrontation with other institutions, such as the military and the police. The Susurluk incident is a good example of this, in which many classified, secret and top-secret documents were leaked to the media in order to encourage a media campaign against the police in 1996 and 1997. At that time MİT did not care about national security. All it cared about was its own image and therefore had no problem with leaking many documents about its own operations, as well as police operations, against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its supporters in Turkey. Furthermore, when Abdullah Öcalan was arrested, the military's special forces were presented as if they were the ones who arrested and brought Öcalan back to Turkey from Kenya. However, MİT became jealous about the media coverage of the military's special forces, responding by leaking information to a journalist and helping them to publish a book which explained MİT's role in the arrest.
These examples show MİT does not obscure the facts when it thinks that its interests may be served by releasing information. Instead, it becomes overly generous in sharing its information with the public, even for the sake of competition with other state institutions. As a result, the reason there is very little information about MİT in Turkey is because they do very little in terms of complex operations, such as protecting the country and conducting intelligence activities in foreign countries. In Turkey, it is not a secret that they do not share intelligence with the police and gendarmerie, because they don't have this information in their hands in the first place. They simply join the police and gendarmerie after an arrest has been made and try to gain some information from the subsequent interrogations. The attitudes of MİT agents are found to be hypocritical and intimidating, if not annoying, by the police and gendarmerie who collect all the information by themselves, without the support of the MİT. Once the operation has been conducted, however, the first person on the scene is from MİT. They try to gain information which makes it look to their boss as if they are working hard and controlling the situation. On occasions when the police arrest an informant for the intelligence agency, MİT forces the police to release them because the suspect is supposed to be sharing information about terror organizations, not participating in criminal activities. Yet in the case of Turkey it is the other way around: MİT informants are involved in crime, but do not share information with the law enforcement agencies. That is what happened during the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK) investigation, in which police arrested many KCK members, including city representatives, only for it to transpire that many of those representatives were MİT informants.
I will examine the second factor –MİT's special relations with journalists and media outlets -- in my next article.
