German intelligence researcher Erich Schmidt-Eenboom challenged Ankara’s account of Turkey’s 2016 coup attempt during the March 30, 2017 edition of ZDF’s Maybrit Illner.
Schmidt-Eenboom said CIA analyses characterized the attempted coup as an operation staged by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to preempt a genuine military intervention. He also said the CIA, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service and other Western agencies had found no evidence that Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen ordered the attempt.
Asked why Erdoğan blamed Gülen and his followers, Schmidt-Eenboom said the accusation provided the government with the easiest means of criminalizing and eliminating its opponents.
No public CIA report substantiating Schmidt-Eenboom’s first claim has emerged. Western skepticism toward Ankara’s Gülen narrative, however, was documented. BND President Bruno Kahl said Turkey had failed to convince his agency that Gülen was responsible. Kahl nevertheless rejected the separate theory that Erdoğan’s government initiated the coup.
A British parliamentary inquiry reached a similarly skeptical conclusion: It found evidence suggesting that individual Gülenists may have participated but said the publicly available evidence did not establish that the movement or its leadership directed the attempt.
