Turkey's MİT towards 2023–2071

The capture of Yusuf Nazik, one of those who organized and carried out the 2013 terrorist attack in Reyhanlı that cost the lives of 53 of our citizens, in a breathtaking operation and his being brought to Turkey naturally turned attention to MİT, which carried out this successful operation. In terms of operational capacity, skill and effectiveness, it was an operation that has made the Agency's name ever greater in recent times.

By the nature of their existence, intelligence agencies cannot, or should not, push themselves very much into the foreground. Being as little on the agenda as possible is their most successful communication strategy. So they generally speak through their deeds, these come to be on people's lips, and that is how their reputation spreads.

In our country, until recently, MİT's reputation spread generally as the executor of operations that gathered information against its own people, profiled people, and when necessary prepared the ground for the coups of coup plotters.

In fact, this is the general problem of all the intelligence services in the Middle East. Far from being institutions that develop the rational strategies of an independent country standing on its own feet, they have structures shaped rather to keep the people under control on behalf of rulers distant from the people.

In Turkey, because of its relations during the Cold War years with the coup plotters, and from there with Gladio and the intelligence services of international powers, MİT was an institution far from inspiring public confidence, one that the people always looked at with suspicion and worry. MİT was no more than an organization that simply watched the various movements among the people and reported them to the relevant authorities. It was the most influential actor of the structure called the "deep state", but with this style of activity it was far from adding depth to the state; on the contrary, it represented all of the state's shallowness and darkness.

Yet an intelligence agency should claim to be an institution in which a vision, a reason and a strategy are produced that will make felt all the depth of a state truly integrated with its nation and broaden its horizon.

It is no coincidence that Turkey's becoming independent, coming to stand on its own feet and growing took place in parallel with the intelligence agency's acquiring these qualities. Therefore it is likewise no coincidence that MİT is among the primary targets of the resistance shown in the world against the development of the new Turkey.

In the attacks and coups aimed at Turkey since 2011, MİT has been assigned a role either as a target to be struck or to be captured. Before 7 February, when MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan was summoned to testify by the Special Authority Court prosecutor, and also in the Uludere tragedy of 28 December 2011, when no detail about the incident was yet known, the FETÖ media had already begun its broadcasts targeting MİT as the party responsible for the incident. In fact, even this was an element betraying the FETÖ fingerprint in the making of the Uludere incident.

FETÖ, which had begun to portray Hakan Fidan, who had been appointed to his post a short time before, as pro-Iranian as soon as he was appointed, based on CIA reports or gossip, began with this incident to target MİT as an institution.

Right after the Reyhanlı attack as well, a campaign led again by the FETÖ media pushed the thesis that intelligence about the attack had been neglected by MİT. Yet all the data that emerged later said that the police intelligence, then under FETÖ's control, had brazenly dared to be a part of the attack in this incident, to be used against MİT.

In fact, what was meant by targeting MİT was only the person of Hakan Fidan, who had been appointed to the head of the Agency. Because this was not enough for the FETÖ members who were already organized at many levels of MİT and who had the capacity to prevent the head of the agency from getting anything done. An agency headed by Fidan was always a problem for them and left a broad area that could not be controlled. Frankly, an outsider, and at the level of the director at that, had "infiltrated" an institution they thought they dominated.

Turkey's intelligence agency was in this condition until 17-25 December. Although until 15 July a struggle that was not effective enough was waged, with that intelligence neither a proper terrorism operation nor any analysis that could be a balm for Turkey's chest could be carried out.

We owe the existence today of an intelligence agency able to carry out countless operations to be proud of largely to the purge of treason that was begun at all levels of the state after 15 July.

Our intelligence, which we thought was national, was busy profiling the people of its own country on behalf of other countries and handing over all the data it compiled to the intelligence services of those countries. The FETÖ elements within MİT were informing the terrorist organizations of MİT personnel who were not of their own and had infiltrated those organizations, and getting them destroyed.

A significant part of the army that we thought was ours was playing cat and mouse with the terrorist in the field where we thought it was fighting terrorism, dazzling people by bombing mountains and rocks.

That is why, after years of not having advanced an inch in the name of fighting terrorism, and indeed having regularly gone further backward, with the genuine struggle waged since 15 July the back of terror has officially been broken, and Turkey's security and intelligence institutions have gained the self-confidence they deserve.

This is the picture of the fact that the most important institutions that a Turkey, which has set out its 2023 and 2071 goals and has the determination to march toward those goals, needs for this march are secure and in a position to do their part.