{"id":92781,"date":"2016-08-26T10:58:49","date_gmt":"2016-08-26T09:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/content\/?p=92781"},"modified":"2023-04-05T12:35:43","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T09:35:43","slug":"what-is-fethulla-gulen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2016\/08\/26\/what-is-fethulla-gulen\/","title":{"rendered":"WHAT \u0130S FETHULLA G\u00dcLEN?"},"content":{"rendered":"

WHAT \u0130S FETHULLA G\u00dcLEN?, by F. William Engdahl, for NEO Bakal\u0131m bunu okuyup, anlayan olacak m\u0131?<\/h2>\n

WHAT \u0130S FETHULLA G\u00dcLEN?<\/em><\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/h3>\n

by F. William Engdahl, for NEO<\/h3>\n

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 Erdo\u011fan 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 G\u00fclen. When we examine more closely \u201cwhat\u201d is Fethullah G\u00fclen 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\u2019s becoming clear is that the failed coup was in fact a dry-run, a dress rehearsal by G\u00fclen\u2019s 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 Erdo\u011fan turning to reconcile with Russia and possibly also with Syria\u2019s Assad.<\/p>\n

Fethullah G\u00fclen is not a \u201cwho\u201d but, rather, it is a \u201cwhat.\u201d 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\u2019s oil-rich Xinjiang Autonomous Province.<\/p>\n

Fethullah G\u00fclen\u2019s Spider Web<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The following draws on research for my book, The Lost Hegemon<\/em>: Whom the gods would destroy<\/em>. I begin with a quote from a G\u00fclen speech to his followers when he was still in Turkey in the 1990\u2019s:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers\u2026You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it\u2026You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power\u2026in Turkey\u2026Until that time, any step taken would be too early\u2014like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch.\u201d Imam Fetullah G\u00fclen, in a sermon to followers in Turkey<\/em><\/p>\n

As they were deploying Osama bin Laden\u2019s Arab Mujahideen \u201choly warriors\u201d into Chechnya and the Caucasus during the 1990s, the CIA, working with a network of self-styled \u201cneo-conservatives\u201d in Washington, began to build their most ambitious political Islam project ever.<\/p>\n

It was called the Fethullah G\u00fclen Movement, also known in Turkish as Cemaat, or \u201cThe Society.\u201d Their focus was Hizmet, or what they defined as the \u201cduty of Service\u201d to the Islamic community. Curiously enough, the Turkish movement was based out of Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. There, its key figure, the reclusive Fethullah G\u00fclen, was allegedly busy building a global network of Islam schools, businesses, and foundations, all with untraceable funds. His G\u00fclen 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\u2014their operations were all hidden from view.<\/p>\n

In 2008, US Government court filings estimated the global value of G\u00fclen\u2019s 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 G\u00fclen\u2019s petition for a special US Green Card permanent residence status, one loyal Cemaat journalist described the nominal extent of G\u00fclen\u2019s empire:<\/p>\n

The projects sponsored by G\u00fclen-inspired followers today number in the thousands, span international borders and\u2026include 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 G\u00fclen 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 G\u00fclen community.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bank Asya was listed among the Top 500 Banks in the world by London\u2019s Banker magazine. It had joint-venture banking across Muslim Africa, from Senegal to Mali in a strategic cooperation agreement with the Islamic Development Bank\u2019s Senegal-based Tamweel Africa Holding SA. Zaman, which also owns the English-language Today\u2019s Zaman, is the largest daily paper in Turkey.<\/p>\n

By the late 1990s, G\u00fclen\u2019s movement had attracted the alarm and attention of an anti-NATO nationalist wing of the Turkish military and of the Ankara government.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

G\u00fclen 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, \u201cWith the patience of a spider we lay our net until people get caught in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1998, G\u00fclen 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 \u201cwork patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state,\u201d treason by the Ataturk constitution of Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u2018Islamic Opus Dei\u2019<\/h4>\n

In 1999, Turkish television aired footage of G\u00fclen 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, G\u00fclen said,<\/p>\n

You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers\u2026until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this\u2026You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it\u2026You 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\u2026Until that time, any step taken would be too early\u2014like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside\u2026 Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all\u2014in confidence\u2026trusting your loyalty and secrecy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When G\u00fclen fled to Pennsylvania, Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence against him for having \u201cfounded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state.\u201d<\/p>\n

G\u00fclen never left the United States after that, curiously enough, even though the Islamist Erdo\u011fan courts later cleared him in 2006 of all charges. His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a then-friendly Erdo\u011fan Islamist AKP government, heightened the conviction among opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties.<\/p>\n

G\u00fclen was charged in 2000 by the then secular Turkish courts of having committed treason. Claiming diabetes as a medical reason, Fethullah G\u00fclen 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.<\/p>\n

CIA Gives Wolf Sheep\u2019s Clothing<\/h4>\n

Unlike the CIA\u2019s Mujahideen Jihadists, like Hekmatyar in Afghanistan or Naser Ori\u0107 in Bosnia, the CIA decided to give Fethullah G\u00fclen a radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing, human-heart-eating Jihadist, Fethullah G\u00fclen was presented to the world as a man of \u201cpeace, love and brotherhood,\u201d even managing to grab a photo op with Pope John Paul II, which G\u00fclen featured prominently on his website.<\/p>\n

G\u00fclen and the late Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1998, posing as a man of peace and ecumenical harmony.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once in the US, the G\u00fclen organization hired one of Washington\u2019s highest-paid Public Relations image experts, George W. Bush\u2019s former campaign director, Karen Hughes, to massage his \u201cmoderate\u201d Islam image.<\/p>\n

The CIAs G\u00fclen project centered on the creation of a New Ottoman Caliphate, retracing the vast Eurasian domain of the former Ottoman Turkic Caliphates.<\/p>\n

When G\u00fclen 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\u2019s Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department both opposed G\u00fclen\u2019s application for what was called a \u201cpreference visa as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of education.\u201d They presented argument demonstrating that the fifth-grade dropout, Fethullah G\u00fclen, should not be granted a preference visa. They argued that his background,<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u2026contains 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Until an open clash in 2013, Fetullah G\u00fclen (left) was the \u00e9minence grise behind Recep Erdo\u011fan\u2019s AK Party; G\u00fclen is widely branded in Turkey as a CIA asset<\/em><\/p>\n

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 G\u00fclen. In their court argument opposing the Visa, US State Department attorneys had notably argued, \u201cBecause of the large amount of money that G\u00fclen\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three CIA people supporting G\u00fclen\u2019s 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 \u201cinformally,\u201d had been named US Ambassador to Turkey in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Turkish translator and \u201cwhistleblower,\u201d 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, \u201cdeep state\u201d agenda across the Turkic world, from Istanbul into China. The network reportedly included significant involvement in heroin trafficking out of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cColor Revolutions\u201d since the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Graham E. Fuller, the third CIA \u201cfriend\u201d of Fethullah G\u00fclen, had played a key role in the CIA\u2019s 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\u2019s early advocates of using the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist organizations to advance US foreign policy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.<\/p>\n

Fuller, author of The Future of Political Islam<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

In 1988, as the Afghan Mujahideen war would down, Fuller \u201cretired\u201d from the CIA with rank as Deputy Director of the CIA\u2019s 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\u2019s former boss at CIA.<\/p>\n

RAND was a Pentagon- and CIA-linked neoconservative Washington think tank. Indications are that Fuller\u2019s work at RAND was instrumental in developing the CIA strategy for building the G\u00fclen 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 \u201csurvivability\u201d of Iraq, and the \u201cNew Geopolitics of Central Asia\u201d after the fall of the USSR, where Fethullah G\u00fclen\u2019s cadre were sent to establish G\u00fclen schools and Madrassas.<\/p>\n

In 1999, while at RAND, Fuller advocated using Muslim forces to further US interests in Central Asia against both China and Russia. He stated, \u201cThe 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.\u201d By all evidence, Fuller and his associates intended their man, Fethullah G\u00fclen, to play perhaps the major role, in their operations to \u201cdestabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n

CIA career man Graham E. Fuller was a key backer of Fetullah G\u00fclen and architect of the CIA Islam strategy since Afghanistan\u2019s Mujahideen.<\/p>\n

In 2008, shortly after he wrote a letter of recommendation to the US Government asking to give G\u00fclen the special US residence visa, Fuller wrote a book titled The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World<\/em>. At the center of the book was praise for G\u00fclen and his \u201cmoderate\u201d Islamic G\u00fclen Movement in Turkey:<\/p>\n

G\u00fclen\u2019s charismatic personality makes him the number one Islamic figure of Turkey. The G\u00fclen Movement has the largest and most powerful infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country\u2026 The movement has also become international by virtue of its far-flung system of schools\u2026in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n

CIA and G\u00fclen in Central Asia<\/h4>\n

During the 1990s G\u00fclen\u2019s 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: \u2026destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

G\u00fclen\u2019s 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. G\u00fclen was named by one former FBI authoritative source as \u201cone of the main CIA operation figures in Central Asia and the Caucasus.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five G\u00fclen 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 G\u00fcnde\u015f, former head of Foreign Intelligence for the Turkish MIT, the \u201cTurkish CIA,\u201d and chief intelligence adviser in the mid-1990s to Prime Minister Tansu \u00c7iller, published a book that was only released in Turkish. G\u00fcnde\u015f, then 85 and retired revealed that, during the 1990s, the G\u00fclen schools then growing up across Eurasia were providing a base for hundreds of CIA agents under cover of being \u201cnative-speaking English teachers.\u201d According to G\u00fcnde\u015f, the G\u00fclen movement \u201csheltered 130 CIA agents\u201d at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone. More revealing, all the American \u201cEnglish teachers\u201d had been issued US Diplomatic passports, hardly standard fare for normal English teachers.<\/p>\n

Today G\u00fclen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer. He holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.<\/h6>\n

G\u00f6nderen ZEKER\u0130YA T\u00dcMER zaman: 01:52<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHAT \u0130S FETHULLA G\u00dcLEN?, by F. William Engdahl, for NEO Bakal\u0131m bunu okuyup, anlayan olacak m\u0131? WHAT \u0130S FETHULLA G\u00dcLEN? 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[10020,120],"class_list":["post-92781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-engdahl","tag-gulen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}