A graduate school in the US state of Pennsylvania, along with its administrative and teaching staff, was targeted by the Turkish intelligence network between 2020 and 2023, as revealed by confidential documents obtained by Nordic Monitor.
The documents, dated January 4 and signed by a police chief in Ankara, reveal that Turkish spies have gathered intelligence on Respect Graduate School, a private school situated in the city of Bethlehem. The comprehensive intelligence report discloses that 86 individuals, including US citizens and residents associated with the school, were profiled, and that their private information was transmitted to Turkey.
The school, which offers a master of arts in Islamic studies, attracted the attention of Turkish intelligence, partially due to its emphasis on interfaith teaching and dialogue programs. This focus, perceived as a threat to Islam by the political Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made the institution a target for intelligence scrutiny.
President Erdogan has publicly criticized efforts at interfaith dialogue in the past, contending that there cannot be dialogue between Islam and Christianity. This viewpoint was expressed in a xenophobic speech he delivered to lawmakers in the Pakistani parliament in November 2016 during an official visit to the country.
At times, public prosecutors have cited participation in interfaith dialogue with Jews and Christians as criminal evidence when bringing charges against government critics.
An illustrative instance is found in an indictment submitted to a high criminal court in Istanbul on March 2, 2022. In this case, prosecutors alleged that the Gülen movement, a group opposed to the Erdogan government, had established dialogue with Jewish and Christian organizations globally rather than engaging with Muslim and Turkish entities.
Another example of this is seen in a 2015 indictment filed against Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish Muslim scholar residing in northeastern Pennsylvania who inspired the movement. The indictment listed Gülen’s 1998 meeting with the pope at the Vatican as criminal evidence.
Gülen has been a target of the Erdogan government since 2013, when he was accused of being behind corruption probes that incriminated Erdogan, his family and his political and business associates.
The investigations exposed how the Erdogan government covertly facilitated money laundering schemes through Turkish banks, channeling Iranian state funds in violation of US sanctions. They also revealed Erdogan’s personal involvement in assisting a one-time al-Qaeda financier, Saudi national Yasin al-Qadi, who was designated for a period of time by both the US and the UN under sanction regimes.
Erdogan derailed the corruption cases, ensuring the release of all suspects, while punishing the investigators, prosecutors and judges involved in uncovering extensive graft schemes. Simultaneously, he initiated a crackdown on the Gülen movement, which criticized his government on various issues, including widespread corruption within the administration and Turkey’s support for radical jihadist groups in the Middle East and North Africa.
Part of the reason Respect Graduate School was targeted by Turkish agents was its alleged affiliation with the Gülen movement.
The confidential documents suggest that intelligence on the school was compiled by “Institution V,” a code name believed to refer to the Foreign Ministry Security and Research Directorate, also known as the intelligence section (Araştırma ve Güvenlik İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü in Turkish), a secretive spy section within the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
Apparently, the foreign ministry has been uneasy over a possible leak of the documents and its potential repercussions on the bilateral relations between Turkey and the US, a NATO ally. Consequently, instead of explicitly naming the source, a code name was used for the foreign ministry’s intelligence section.
The section is currently overseen by Fatma Ceren Yazgan, a longtime operative of Turkish intelligence agency MIT who played a pivotal role in profiling Turkish ambassadors and diplomats, ultimately leading to the removal of one-third of Turkish diplomats from the foreign service. Hakan Fidan, the previous spymaster, appointed Yazgan to lead the section after assuming the role of foreign minister in the summer of 2023.
The interagency paper trail among the documents reveals that the Security General Directorate (Emniyet) conducted additional investigations into people whose names were provided by Turkish diplomats, subjecting them to criminal probes based on fabricated allegations.
According to the documents, the police conducted background checks on 85 individuals from the group of people surveilled by Turkish intelligence due to their association with the Respect Graduate School. The documents further reveal that the surveillance took place from 2020 to 2023.
The foreign ministry’s intelligence activities have increased globally since Fidan, the former chief of the notorious Turkish intelligence agency MIT, assumed the top diplomatic position. Wasting little time, Fidan orchestrated a rapid transformation of the Turkish diplomatic service into an extensive apparatus for collecting information and conducting espionage activities in foreign countries.
Fidan, a pro-Iranian Islamist, also integrated numerous individuals from the intelligence agency into the foreign service, strategically placing them in key positions within the ministry.
The individuals profiled by Turkish intelligence face the risk of unlawful arrest upon traveling to Turkey and are frequently subjected to asset seizures and freezes on fabricated charges. Additionally, their family members, friends and associates may become victims of the witch hunt carried out by the Erdogan government, which employs collective punishment to sustain its repressive regime through the engendering of fear.
The current travel advisory issued by the US State Department in July 2023 cautions Americans to “exercise increased caution when traveling to Turkey” due to Turkish authorities detaining tens of thousands of individuals, including US citizens, in politically motivated cases. Criticism of the government, including on social media, is highlighted as a factor that can lead to arrest.
Similar travel warnings have also been issued by several European countries regarding travel to Turkey.
