WHAT İS
FETHULLA GÜLEN?
by F. William Engdahl, for NEO
Since the failed coup attempt in Turkey of July 15 there
has been much speculation in western media that it in fact was all engineered
by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to provide him with the pretext to impose
emergency rule and to jail any and all opposition to his rule. At this point
evidence still suggests that that was not at all the case. Rather, as I wrote
at the time when it was clear the coup attempt was collapsing, it was a coup
initiated by the CIA acting through their primary asset inside Turkey, the
networks of their fugitive Turkish asset Fethullah Gülen. When we examine more
closely “what” is Fethullah Gülen he is anything but the grandfatherly image of
a 75-year-old soft-spoken Islamic moderate, scholar and Imam. His networks have
been called the most dangerous in Germany by Islamic experts and have been
banned in several Central Asian countries. Now, too, in Turkey. What’s becoming
clear is that the failed coup was in fact a dry-run, a dress rehearsal by
Gülen’s controllers in Langley to see how Erdogan would react, in order to
recalibrate and prepare for a more serious attempt in the future. Washington
was not at all happy with the foreign policy turn of Erdoğan turning to
reconcile with Russia and possibly also with Syria’s Assad.
Fethullah Gülen is not a “who” but, rather, it is a “what.”
The what is one of the most extensive and elaborate surrogate warfare networks
ever created by the United States intelligence community, spanning countless
nations including the United States and Germany, as well as the historic Turkic
regions of Central Asia from Turkey up to the Uyghur peoples of China’s
oil-rich Xinjiang Autonomous Province.
Fethullah Gülen’s
Spider Web
The following draws on research for my book, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy.
I begin with a quote from a Gülen speech to his followers when he was still in
Turkey in the 1990’s:
“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone
noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…You must wait for
the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder
the entire world and carry it…You must wait until such time as you have gotten
all the state power…in Turkey…Until that time, any step taken would be too
early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to
hatch.” Imam Fetullah
Gülen, in a sermon to followers in Turkey
As they were deploying Osama bin Laden’s Arab Mujahideen
“holy warriors” into Chechnya and the Caucasus during the 1990s, the CIA,
working with a network of self-styled “neo-conservatives” in Washington, began
to build their most ambitious political Islam project ever.
It was called the Fethullah Gülen Movement, also known in
Turkish as Cemaat, or “The Society.” Their focus was Hizmet, or what they
defined as the “duty of Service” to the Islamic community. Curiously enough,
the Turkish movement was based out of Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. There, its key
figure, the reclusive Fethullah Gülen, was allegedly busy building a global
network of Islam schools, businesses, and foundations, all with untraceable
funds. His Gülen Movement, or Cemaat, has no main address, no mailbox, no
official organizational registration, no central bank account, nothing. His
followers never demonstrated for Sharia or Jihad—their operations were all
hidden from view.
In 2008, US Government court filings estimated the global
value of Gülen’s empire at anywhere between $25 and $50 billion. No one could
prove how large as there were no independent audits. In a US Court testimony
during the hearing on Gülen’s petition for a special US Green Card permanent
residence status, one loyal Cemaat journalist described the nominal extent of
Gülen’s empire:
The projects sponsored by Gülen-inspired followers today
number in the thousands, span international borders and…include over 2000
schools and seven universities in more than ninety countries in five
continents, two modern hospitals, the Zaman newspaper (now in both a Turkish
and English edition), a television channel (Samanyolu), a radio channel (Burc
FM), CHA (a major Turkish news agency), Aksiyon (a leading weekly news
magazine), national and international Gülen conferences, Ramadan interfaith
dinners, interfaith dialog trips to Turkey from countries around the globe and
the many programs sponsored by the Journalists and Writers Foundation. In
addition, the Isik insurance company and Bank Asya, an Islamic bank, are
affiliated with the Gülen community.
Bank Asya was listed among the Top 500 Banks in the world
by London’s Banker magazine. It had joint-venture banking across Muslim Africa,
from Senegal to Mali in a strategic cooperation agreement with the Islamic
Development Bank’s Senegal-based Tamweel Africa Holding SA. Zaman, which
also owns the English-language Today’s Zaman, is the largest daily paper in
Turkey.
By the late 1990s, Gülen’s movement had attracted the alarm
and attention of an anti-NATO nationalist wing of the Turkish military and of
the Ankara government.
After leading a series of brilliant military campaigns in
the 1920s to win the Independence War after World War I, Kemal Ataturk
established the modern Turkish state. He launched a series of political,
economic, and cultural reforms aimed at transforming the religiously-based
Ottoman Caliphate into a modern, secular, and democratic nation-state. He built
thousands of new schools, made primary education free and compulsory, and gave
women equal civil and political rights, and reduced the burden of taxation on
peasants.
Gülen and his movement aim at nothing less than to
roll-back the remains of that modern, secular Kemalism in Turkey, and return to
the Caliphate of yore. In one of his writings to members, he declared, “With
the patience of a spider we lay our net until people get caught in it.”
In 1998, Gülen defected to the US shortly before a
treasonous speech he had made to his followers at a private gathering was made
public. He had been recorded calling on his supporters to “work patiently and
to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state,”
treason by the Ataturk constitution of Turkey.
‘Islamic Opus Dei’
In 1999, Turkish television aired footage of Gülen
delivering a sermon to a crowd of followers in which he revealed his
aspirations for an Islamist Turkey ruled by Sharia (Islamic law), as well as
the specific methods that should be used to attain that goal. In the secret
sermon, Gülen said,
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone
noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…until the
conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this…You must wait
for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can
shoulder the entire world and carry it…You must wait until such time as you
have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the
power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey…Until that time, any step
taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty
days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside… Now, I have
expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence…trusting your
loyalty and secrecy.”
When Gülen fled to Pennsylvania, Turkish prosecutors
demanded a ten-year sentence against him for having “founded an organization
that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a
theocratic state.”
Gülen never left the United States after that, curiously
enough, even though the Islamist Erdoğan courts later cleared him in 2006 of
all charges. His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a
then-friendly Erdoğan Islamist AKP government, heightened the conviction among
opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties.
Gülen was charged in 2000 by the then secular Turkish
courts of having committed treason. Claiming diabetes as a medical reason,
Fethullah Gülen had managed to escape to a permanent exile in the United
States, with the help of some very powerful CIA and State Department friends
before his indictment was handed down. Some suspected he was forewarned.
CIA Gives Wolf Sheep’s
Clothing
Unlike the CIA’s Mujahideen Jihadists, like Hekmatyar in
Afghanistan or Naser Orić in Bosnia, the CIA decided to give Fethullah Gülen a
radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing, human-heart-eating
Jihadist, Fethullah Gülen was presented to the world as a man of “peace, love
and brotherhood,” even managing to grab a photo op with Pope John Paul II,
which Gülen featured prominently on his website.
Gülen and the late Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1998,
posing as a man of peace and ecumenical harmony.
Once in the US, the Gülen organization hired one of
Washington’s highest-paid Public Relations image experts, George W. Bush’s
former campaign director, Karen Hughes, to massage his “moderate” Islam image.
The CIAs Gülen project centered on the creation of a New
Ottoman Caliphate, retracing the vast Eurasian domain of the former Ottoman
Turkic Caliphates.
When Gülen fled Turkey to avoid prosecution for treason in
1999, he chose the United States. He did so with the help of the CIA. At the
time he US Government’s Department of Homeland Security and the US State
Department both opposed Gülen’s application for what was called a “preference
visa as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of education.” They
presented argument demonstrating that the fifth-grade dropout, Fethullah Gülen,
should not be granted a preference visa. They argued that his background,
…contains overwhelming evidence that plaintiff is not an
expert in the field of education, is not an educator, and is certainly not one
of a small percentage of experts in the field of education who have risen to
the very top of that field. Further, the record contains overwhelming evidence
that plaintiff is primarily the leader of a large and influential religious and
political movement with immense commercial holdings.”
Until an open clash in 2013, Fetullah Gülen (left) was the
éminence grise behind Recep Erdoğan’s AK Party; Gülen is widely branded in
Turkey as a CIA asset
However, over the objections of the FBI, of the US State
Department, and of the US Department of Homeland Security, three former CIA
operatives intervened and managed to secure a Green Card and permanent US
residency for Gülen. In their court argument opposing the Visa, US State
Department attorneys had notably argued, “Because of the large amount of money
that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he
has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There
are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects.”
The three CIA people supporting Gülen’s Green Card
application in 2007 were former US Ambassador to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz, CIA
official George Fidas and Graham E. Fuller.
George Fidas had worked thirty-one years at the CIA dealing, among other
things, with the Balkans. Morton
Abramowitz, reportedly also with the CIA, if “informally,” had been named
US Ambassador to Turkey in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush. Sibel Edmonds,
former FBI Turkish translator and “whistleblower,” named Abramowitz, along with
Graham E. Fuller, as part of a dark cabal within the US Government that she
discovered were using networks out of Turkey to advance a criminal, “deep
state” agenda across the Turkic world, from Istanbul into China. The network
reportedly included significant involvement in heroin trafficking out of Afghanistan.
On leaving the State Department, Abramowitz served on the
board of the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and
was a cofounder, along with George Soros, of the International Crisis Group.
Both the NED and International Crisis Group were implicated in various US
“Color Revolutions” since the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union.
Graham E. Fuller, the third CIA “friend” of Fethullah
Gülen, had played a key role in the CIA’s steering Mujahideen and other
political Islamic organizations since the 1980s. He spent 20 years as CIA
operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Afghanistan and
was one of the CIA’s early advocates of using the Muslim Brotherhood and similar
Islamist organizations to advance US foreign policy.
In 1982, Graham Fuller had been appointed the National
Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at CIA, responsible for
Afghanistan, where he had served as CIA Station Chief, for Central Asia, and
for Turkey. In 1986 Fuller became Vice-Chairman of the CIA’s National
Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic
forecasting.
Fuller, author of The
Future of Political Islam, was also the key CIA figure to convince the
Reagan Administration to tip the balance in the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war
by using Israel to illegally channel weapons to Iran in what became the
Iran-Contra Affair.
In 1988, as the Afghan Mujahideen war would down, Fuller
“retired” from the CIA with rank as Deputy Director of the CIA’s National
Council on Intelligence, to go over to the RAND Corporation, presumably to
avoid embarrassment around his role in the Iran-Contra scandal for then
Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, Fuller’s former boss at CIA.
RAND was a Pentagon- and CIA-linked neoconservative
Washington think tank. Indications are that Fuller’s work at RAND was
instrumental in developing the CIA strategy for building the Gülen Movement as
a geopolitical force to penetrate former Soviet Central Asia. Among his RAND
papers, Fuller wrote studies on Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, Sudan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria, the “survivability” of Iraq, and the “New
Geopolitics of Central Asia” after the fall of the USSR, where Fethullah
Gülen’s cadre were sent to establish Gülen schools and Madrassas.
In 1999, while at RAND, Fuller advocated using Muslim
forces to further US interests in Central Asia against both China and Russia.
He stated, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them
against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the
Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of
Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central
Asia.” By all evidence, Fuller and his associates intended their man,
Fethullah Gülen, to play perhaps the major role, in their operations to
“destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the
Chinese influence in Central Asia.”
CIA career man Graham E. Fuller was a key backer of
Fetullah Gülen and architect of the CIA Islam strategy since Afghanistan’s
Mujahideen.
In 2008, shortly after he wrote a letter of recommendation
to the US Government asking to give Gülen the special US residence visa, Fuller
wrote a book titled The New
Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. At the
center of the book was praise for Gülen and his “moderate” Islamic Gülen
Movement in Turkey:
Gülen’s charismatic personality makes him the number one
Islamic figure of Turkey. The Gülen Movement has the largest and most powerful
infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country… The
movement has also become international by virtue of its far-flung system of
schools…in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the
former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States.
CIA and Gülen in
Central Asia
During the 1990s Gülen’s global political Islam Cemaat spread
across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xinjiang
Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller had called for in his
1999 statement: …destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially
to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”
Gülen’s organization had been active in that destabilizing
with help from the CIA almost the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,
when the nominally Muslim Central Asian former Soviet republics declared their
independence from Moscow. Gülen was named by one former FBI authoritative
source as “one of the main CIA operation figures in Central Asia and the
Caucasus.”
By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five Gülen schools had
spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, and even to Dagestan and Tatarstan in Russia amid the chaos of the
post-Soviet Yeltsin era. In 2011, Osman Nuri Gündeş, former head of
Foreign Intelligence for the Turkish MIT, the “Turkish CIA,” and chief intelligence
adviser in the mid-1990s to Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, published a book
that was only released in Turkish. Gündeş, then 85 and retired revealed
that, during the 1990s, the Gülen schools then growing up across Eurasia were
providing a base for hundreds of CIA agents under cover of being
“native-speaking English teachers.” According to Gündeş, the Gülen movement
“sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone.
More revealing, all the American “English teachers” had been issued US
Diplomatic passports, hardly standard fare for normal English teachers.
Today Gülen’s spider web of control via infiltration of the
Turkish national police, military and judiciary as well as education is being
challenged by Erdogan as never before. It remains to be seen of the CIA will be
successful in a second coup attempt. If the model of Brazil is any clue, it
will likely come after a series of financial attacks on the Lira and the
fragile Turkish economy, something already begun by the rating agency S&P.
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