Journalist Veysel Ayhan argues that Hakan Fidan, then head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, stood at the center of the unanswered questions surrounding Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt, saying Fidan’s conduct points not to an intelligence failure but to what critics call a “controlled coup.”
Ayhan says Turkey’s intelligence agency has historically failed to warn elected governments before military interventions. He cites former President Süleyman Demirel, who said the agency did not inform governments about the 1960 coup, the 1971 military memorandum or the 1980 coup.
“The National Intelligence Organization reports an operation in Angola to the government but does not know what is happening in Ankara,” Demirel once said, according to Ayhan.
Ayhan says the same pattern should be examined in the case of July 15. The key question, he writes, is whether the intelligence agency did not know, failed to warn the government or knowingly allowed events to unfold.
Ayhan asks why Fidan remained in office
Ayhan says there are initially two possible explanations for Fidan’s conduct on the night of the coup attempt: either he was deeply incompetent, or he betrayed the government by failing to act.
In either case, Ayhan argues, Fidan should have been dismissed.
“Since he was not dismissed and is still highly favored, a third possibility comes into question,” Ayhan writes. “That is Hakan Fidan being the architect of a ‘controlled coup.’”
Ayhan argues that a coup attempt requiring months of preparation could not plausibly have escaped the notice of an intelligence organization with thousands of employees.
If the National Intelligence Organization knew and failed to warn the government, he says, that failure demands an explanation. If it did warn the government, then the government’s later conduct raises a different set of questions.
Why did Fidan go to the General Staff?
Ayhan focuses on Fidan’s actions after an officer reportedly went to the National Intelligence Organization on the afternoon of July 15 and warned of a planned operation by soldiers.
He asks what an intelligence chief should do after receiving a tip that soldiers planned to kidnap him that night.
“Do you go to the institution of those who are said to be kidnapping you? No,” Ayhan writes. “What does Hakan Fidan do? He goes to the General Staff without hesitation.”
Ayhan says that if Fidan understood the warning as a sign of a coup attempt, he should have informed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and then-Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım and taken refuge with the police. Instead, he went to military headquarters.
Ayhan argues that this behavior only makes sense if Fidan already had confidence in then-Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar. He notes that Fidan and Akar had met the previous evening.
“He acts comfortably because he had met with Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar the night before,” Ayhan writes. “He is not worried.”
Akar and Fidan’s meeting the night before
Ayhan compares the situation to a bank robbery. If a bank robbery were prevented at the last moment but 10 security guards were killed, and it later emerged that the bank’s security manager had met the robbers’ leader for hours the previous evening, he asks, what would people conclude?
“Would you not say that the security manager was an accomplice of the robbers?” he writes.
Ayhan says a similar question applies to July 15.
He says Akar and Fidan did something they had never done before on the evening of July 14: They spent six hours together. Ayhan adds that Fidan also met Lt. Gen. Zekai Aksakallı, then commander of the Special Forces Command, who would be portrayed as a hero the next day.
“What is the explanation for this?” Ayhan asks.
The officer who reported the coup attempt
Ayhan also focuses on Pilot Maj. O.K., the officer who reportedly went to the intelligence agency around 2:20 p.m. on July 15 and reported either a coup attempt or a plan to kidnap Fidan.
Ayhan says that under normal circumstances, the officer should have been publicly praised as a hero. Instead, he says, O.K. faced detention and arrest, in a pattern Ayhan compares to the treatment of Samet Kuşçu, the officer who warned authorities before Turkey’s May 27, 1960 coup.
Months later, Ayhan says, it emerged that O.K. had been transferred to the National Intelligence Organization, allegedly to legally prevent him from testifying and to protect him from arrest.
Ayhan asks why O.K. was not called before the parliamentary commission investigating the coup attempt and why his statements were not included in indictments or case files.
“The reason is simple,” Ayhan writes. “That officer spoiled the plot by reporting it.”
Ayhan argues that O.K. was quietly recruited into the intelligence agency to conceal the fact that what he had reported was a coup. If a coup learned about at noon could not be prevented, he says, that means the aim was not to stop it but to allow it to proceed in a controlled manner.
‘Where does Hakan Fidan stand?’
Ayhan returns to the question in the title of his article: Where does Hakan Fidan stand in Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt?
“The answer is very clear: Right in the center,” he writes.
Ayhan argues that Erdoğan could not have succeeded in what he calls a controlled coup without Fidan.
“No intelligence chief would have betrayed his country and allowed his institution to be used so much for politics,” he writes. “For this reason, Erdoğan insisted on keeping Hakan Fidan at the head of the intelligence agency.”
Ayhan says Erdoğan strongly resisted when Fidan tried to leave his post, doing whatever was necessary to keep him in charge of the intelligence agency.
He concludes that if the coup attempt is ever genuinely tried in court, Fidan would be one of the central defendants.
“If the 2016 coup attempt is truly put on trial one day, the second defendant in the dock will undoubtedly be Hakan Fidan,” Ayhan writes.
Source: Veysel Ayhan, TR724
