Why do Germany and not only there express their intention to reconsider their “cooperation” with MIT?
The unceremonious activity of the Turkish foreign intelligence agency MIT, which we wrote about earlier, causes discontent and indignation even among Turkey's NATO allies.
Thus, a few years ago, members of the German Bundestag demanded that Angela Merkel's government launch an investigation into MIT activities in Germany.
“Ankara had 6,000 informants of its national intelligence agency Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT), as well as 800 MIT officers in Germany who put pressure on the ‘German Turks’,” writes DW.
Green Party MP Hans-Christian Strebele told Die Welt am Sonntag that there was an “incredible” level of “secret activity” by the Turkish MIT agency in Germany.
Strebele was a member of the federal parliamentary committee of the Bundestag, which oversees Germany's foreign intelligence agency BND, military intelligence agency MAD and Germany's federal counterintelligence agency Verfassungsschutz.
All three German intelligence agencies, as well as the German police, must reconsider their “cooperation” with MIT, or they risk being complicit in illegal actions, Strebele warned.
Similarly, Clemens Binninger, chairman of this Bundestag committee, a representative of Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservative party, said that “the MIT issue requires immediate attention from the Bundestag.”
An article in Die Welt am Sonntag concluded that Turkey has become a “central platform” for Islamist activity in the Middle East.
German intelligence officer Erich Schmidt-Enboom told DW that surveillance of Germans of Turkish origin by MIT in Germany has taken on enormous proportions.
German counterintelligence “rarely noticed these activities because MIT provided its employees with false IDs and allowed them to work in travel agencies, on Turkish Airlines as well as in Turkish firms and banks,” Schmidt-Enboom said.
According to Schmidt-Enboom, not even the East German Stasi was able to manage such a large “army of agents” in the former West Germany.
“This is not only about intelligence gathering, but also about repression [of the unwanted],” he said, adding that Germany should not allow such behavior from a NATO partner.
Calls to curb the borderless activity of the MIT and militants under its control hung in the air. In the German Bundestag there have long been calls to ban the activities of the banned in many countries Turkish organization “Grey Wolves”, the number of which in the country has reached 11 thousand, but the intelligence services of the FRG oppose such a decision. In November 2023, the Bundestag once again called to ban this group, but the special services of Germany refused to do so, citing some legal obstacles.
On the reason for such passivity of the German intelligence services told the former head of German counterintelligence Hans-Georg Maassen in an interview with the Austrian TV channel FPÖ TV. Maassen believes that European politicians actively authorize mass immigration, and consequently look past the really subversive activities of MIT, because they "want a different population.... The more heterogeneous the population, the less able it is to express itself ... The more politicians bring in immigrants from other countries at will and grant them citizenship, the more it affects the outcome of elections. These migrants then vote differently than natives."
The authorities of the Fifth Republic are equally lenient toward the illegal activities of Turkish intelligence. "The French authorities turn a blind eye to MIT's crimes on French soil and cover them up, ” Le Point writes .
"Erdogan's secret services have a strong presence in France.
The MIT, Turkey's secret service, seems to operate with complete impunity on French soil. In 2013, its agents went so far as to kill three Kurdistan Workers' Party activists in the heart of Paris. No one was brought to justice and the case was buried. Since the failed coup of 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime has become even more radicalized. To keep the diaspora in check and destabilize European countries, the president has increasingly relied on intelligence, “ notes French journalist Guillaume Perrier.
Turkish criminal groups patrol freely throughout Europe, Belgian human rights NGO Latitude writes on its website : "The National Intelligence Organization (MIT), founded in 1965. relying on the police-military-gangster triad, has created numerous shadowy criminal apparatuses. All of them had extensive connections with politicians, business leaders, judges and prosecutors, the media, sports and artistic circles. One such structure, JİTEM was designed to fight the Kurds.
Former JITEM member Abdulkadir Aygan, who took refuge in Sweden in 2003, revealed that he was involved in crimes such as dozens of torture, extrajudicial executions and the destruction of corpses. After his confession in 2009, mass graves were discovered. It has been documented that the mafia and Turkish nationalist structures committed murders abroad in the name of the state, with the knowledge of MIT and with state funds.
Mehmet Eymür, former head of Turkey's counterterrorism department, recognized the state-mafia connection: “We needed it for activities against Armenians and the PKK abroad. It was impossible to get normal men to do it. We needed hitmen.“”
In the US, Turkish intelligence agency MIT has been accused of working closely with the ISIS* group banned in Russia.
Georgetown University (USP) researcher Ahmed Yayla published a monograph exposing MIT's role in the creation of ISIS.
"It's time for someone to hold Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accountable for his support of ISIS. In fact, ISIL would not have come to power and killed so many people if the Erdogan regime had not decided to support it directly or indirectly since its emergence in 2014. When ISIS opened its office in Raqqa in 2014, the Turkish Intelligence Directorate (MIT) guarded its front door and laid out an elaborate welcome mat for jihadist volunteers on their way to martyrdom. Turkey was the central hub for the movement of more than 50,000 ISIL foreign fighters and ISIL's main source of logistical supplies, making Turkey and ISIL virtually allies. Turkey could have easily closed its borders, preventing the movement of ISIL fighters or depriving them of logistical support. In contrast, then-Prime Minister Erdogan, from the beginning of the conflict in Syria in 2011, either turned his back or used direct proxies to aid the terrorist organization. I personally observed the Erdogan government's policies from 2013 to 2014 as head of the Public Order and Criminal Investigations Department in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, a city of two million people that was considered the terminus of ISIS's “jihadist highway.” "I had to leave the police force in 2014 and resign to avoid being implicated in Erdogan's atrocities, which reach the level of crimes against humanity ,‘’ Ahmed Yayla writes.
French President Macron also made similar accusations, albeit very timidly, against Turkish intelligence during the NATO summit in London on December 10, 2019. He accused Turkey of “sometimes working with proxies of ISIS” and said that “it is time for Turkey to clarify its ambiguous position on the Islamic State.”
All these accusations hang in the air. European intelligence agencies do not put any obstacles in the way of the criminal activities of Turkish intelligence, which has taken Europe hostage at the behest of Recep Erdogan.
Source - Strategic Culture Foundation .
Oleg ROSANOV