The Turkish capital, Ankara, has been witnessing yet another bizarre development that took place when an İstanbul prosecutor decided to question Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MİT) head Hakan Fidan; his predecessor, Emre Taner; and former deputy head of MİT Afet Güneş in connection with an investigation into the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK), an umbrella organization that includes the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The prosecutor also summoned Fidan and other former senior intelligence officials to answer questions about secret talks MİT held with the PKK. MİT refused the prosecutor's order and Fidan has so far failed to appear. The former senior officials also failed to appear, prompting the prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for them on Friday.
İstanbul Chief Prosecutor Turan Çolakkadı removed from the case the prosecutor responsible for calling for the questioning of the MİT head and two others, Sadrettin Sarıkaya, on the weekend in a move to ease tension between the government and the judiciary.
Çolakkadı later told the media on Sunday that prosecutor Sarıkaya was removed from his post over charges that he had violated the confidentiality of the KCK investigation while keeping information about the investigation secret from his superiors.
Soon after the arrest warrants were issued for the MİT officials, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) submitted a bill to Parliament, due to be debated Feb. 14, that will limit investigations into MİT.
It is hard to read correctly what lies behind the judicial process launched against MİT, whose duties also include infiltrating illegal organizations. But what is clear is that the prosecutor had apparently failed to carry out a thorough investigation into whether the MİT agents who had infiltrated the KCK were fulfilling their duty to prevent violence carried out by the organization or whether they were committing crimes.
Bekir Bozdağ, one of the deputy prime ministers, told me that prosecutors should be able to differentiate between what is a crime and what is not.
“The intelligence agents who infiltrated the KCK cannot expose themselves. Otherwise they will be killed by the organization. They should pretend they are part of the group. Confidentiality about the KCK investigation's links to MİT has been broken by the prosecutor as the allegations were publicized. How can we expect agents to infiltrate terrorist organizations now that their operations are being exposed to the media?” Bozdağ rightly asks.
There are also speculations that the investigation into MİT has targeted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and that it intends to undermine any future peace process initiated by the government with the PKK in an attempt to end the Kurdish question.
Cevat Öneş, former deputy undersecretary of MİT, believes that by preventing the interrogation of MİT Undersecretary Fidan and the other senior spy agency officials, the government has in fact prevented a civilian coup.
In an interview with the Yeni Şafak daily on Feb. 12, Öneş said: “Infiltrating the KCK is a success for MİT. … There have been speculations made recently that the PKK has a link with MİT and that Fidan refrains from disclosing this fact. And these speculations are obviously being leaked to the media by circles within the security organization. There is a power that seeks to besiege the AK Party via Fidan and MİT.”
Security sources, in the meantime, believe that the KCK investigation has created an opportunity for the government to clean MİT from what they call illegal elements who they say are hampering the intelligence service's successful completion of any possible operations. One senior security source stressed that having democratically minded bureaucrats like Fidan and former MİT chief Taner does not fully clean the organization of its alleged illegal elements.
On the one hand, prosecutor Sarıkaya, who has been removed from the case, has most possibly acted in an amateur way. On the other, rare public imposition on MİT when Fidan and other senior intelligence officials were summoned by the prosecutor, has brought to the surface an ongoing power struggle between the intelligence organization and the security directorate. This spy row has also brought MİT into the spotlight, giving the organization an opportunity to clean itself of its alleged illegal elements.
