The grey eminence behind Turkey’s Erdogan and AKP

By F. William Engdahl  

 
The open press statement of denial by senior reportedly former CIA official Graham Fuller in April of a link between the Boston Bombings and the CIA, labeling the reports “absurd,” may go down in history as one of the worst intelligence blunders in the past century. The public admission by Fuller, on a website reported tied to the CIA, of his relationship to the Uncle of the alleged but not ever convicted Boston bombers [1] opened a can of worms the CIA might well wish never had been opened.
In the first part, we discussed the role of CIA’s Fuller in creating the policy of using angry Jihadist Muslims as trained terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere against the Soviet Union.
A deeper look into Fuller’s role reveals him to be a key figure in what FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds terms American Deep State rogues. Edmonds worked as an FBI translator from Turkish, Azerbaijani and Farsi languages during and after September 11, 2001 when she uncovered damning email and other evidence of criminal networks linking the actors of 911, drug networks out of Turkey and terrorists in and around Al Qaeda together with senior Pentagon and other US Government officials.[2]
Fuller A Deep State Rogue
As later identified, among the people uncovered by Edmonds’ translation efforts at FBI were notorious neoconservative Richard Perle, Iraq war architect who headed Bush’s Defense Policy Board advisory committee in 2001; Douglas Feith, neocon Under-Secretary of Defense under Bush-Cheney; Anwar Yusuf Turani,[3] key figure in the anti-Beijing Uygur separatist operations under the name East Turkistan National Freedom Center in Washington DC. East Turkistan is their name for China’s Xinjiang Province where Uygur riots took place several years ago.  Turani modestly calls himself President-in-exile, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), though it’s by no means clear who if anyone elected him.

In her classified translations Edmonds discovered that a criminal network had penetrated the highest levels of the US Government including Pentagon and FBI, and were engaged in illegal sales of weapons, including nuclear, of drugs and more. Criminal activities were being protected by claims of State Secrets, she asserted. Repeated attempts to call attention inside the FBI to what she was convinced was a conspiracy against the United States from within came to no avail. Her gripping account to bring attention to an alarming rogue network inside Washington is the subject of her autobiography, Classified Woman – The Sibel Edmonds Story. [4]
Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to muzzle her under a little-used Doctrine of State Secrets. Edmonds, suffering under an unprecedented Bush Administration gag order, was banned from revealing the complicity of high-ranking US and Turkish figures uncovered by her and duly reported at FBI before she was fired in 2002 for “blowing the whistle.” She partly got around the Government gag by posting photos with no comment on her website. Others filled in the names.[5]
Graham Fuller was one of the 21 American Deep State rogues Edmonds posted.
Graham Fuller seems to be in center of every CIA operation involving ‘political Islam’
In 1995, according to investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, the uncle of the alleged Boston bombers, Ruslan Tsarnaev, “incorporated the Congress of Chechen International Organizations in Maryland, using as the address listed on incorporation documents 11114 Whisperwood Lane, in Rockville Maryland, the home address of his then-father-in-law.” [6] Father-in-law was Graham Fuller whose daughter was married to Uncle Ruslan.
Chechnya, an autonomous province of Russia deeply involved in oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea, has been the scene of Islamic jihad terrorists since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1995 when Uncle Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International Organizations from Graham Fuller’s home, the Islamist Jihad terror war against Moscow was raging full-force in Chechnya. Putin and Russian intelligence have repeatedly claimed the terrorism was being fed from outside.
As more is coming out on the role of Fuller, the evidence points to the conclusion that the Chechnya terrorists were also a project bearing the footprints of the “former” CIA political Islam expert, Graham Fuller. By 1988 Fuller had formally moved from a very senior post at CIA to the neo-conservative think tank, RAND Corporation, where he officially worked on the “Middle East, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and problems of ethnicity and religion.” [7]
While at RAND Fuller played a key role gaining asylum for a Turkish national in the USA. Fetullah Gülen, a Turkish national who was forced to flee in 1999 and seek asylum, won his US residence permit due to the intervention of two senior CIA or former men. One was Graham E. Fuller. [8]
Foreign Policy Journal describes the role of Fuller and the CIA in getting indicted Turkish fugitive Gülen asylum in the USA: “Fethullah Gülen became a green card holder despite serious opposition from FBI and from Homeland Security Department. Former CIA officers (formally and informally) such as Graham Fuller and Morton Abromovitz were some of the prominent references in Gülen’s green card application.” [9]
Jihad Spreads to Central Asia
From his new luxurious heavily-guarded estate in Saylorsburg, a remote part of eastern Pennsylvania, Gülen launched a series of fundamentalist Salafist mosques and madrasses, not only in his native Turkey where he was the alleged power behind Turkey’s AKP regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, himself a product of Gülen’s schools, but across the Islamic regions of Central Asia as they separated from the Soviet Union in the chaos after 1991.[10]
According to Edmonds, an authority on the subject, “US Islamization Operations in Central Asia via Gülen started in late 1997, early 1998. That brings me to …Graham Fuller.” [11]
A memoir by former head of Turkish intelligence, Osman Nuri Gundes, claims that Fethullah Gülen’s worldwide Islamic movement based in Pennsylvania has been providing cover for the CIA since the mid-1990s, and that in the 90s, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone. [12]

 
Gülen schools in Russian Chechnya and Dagestan regions, both locations of fanatical Jihadists since 1991, were ultimately banned by Putin. The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Gülen-linked Nurcu sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gülen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004. In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gülen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gülen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization. In Turkmenistan, government authorities placed Gülen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums.[13]
Responsible Turkish journalists I’ve met with relate that Gülen-loyal police tied to Edrogan’s AKP have infiltrated the Turkish police, intelligence services and other key state institution and are systematically arresting, purging or silencing all nationalist military, trade union and other secular figues opposed to creation of an Islamic Sharia state in Turkey, uprooting ninety or more years of Kemalist legal foundations.  More than one hundred Turkish journalists have been arrested for writing critically about the actions of Gülen’s AKP.
Gülen’s public profile is as a humble, deeply spiritual Imam of love and brotherhood. His record in practice is anything but. Gülen once stated, “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers, until the conditions are ripe.” Sounds a bit like Lenin in the old days. Certain networks in Washington including people in and around Fuller obviously have no problem with that.
Why would the CIA and US agencies want Central Asia? As Obama adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, notes in his now-famous book, The Grand Chessboard, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained…It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”
Washington has used Turkey and the AKP fundamentalist networks of Gülen to wreak havoc across the post-communist oil and mineral-rich regions of Central Asia. Graham Fuller’s foot prints are all over those covert operations as are Fetullah Gülen’s. In 2008 Fuller published a book titled, “The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World.”   As Sibel Edmonds describes, the process involved using Turkey with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’ as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army before 911. [14]
Edmonds notes regarding US operations in Central Asia, “This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.” [15]
What did Uncle Ruslan Tsarnaev, uncle of the Boston alleged bombers do when he was married to Graham Fuller’s daughter? Ruslan worked for companies connected to Halliburton, doing oil deals in the Caucasus and as “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Russia barred USAID from its soil in late 2012, alleging USAID together with CIA was attempting to influence the internal political processes in the country.[16]
Some are beginning to ask whether the Boston bombing might have been a deception operation carried out by the Rogues associated with Graham Fuller and the network within the CIA and Pentagon, to make it appear Putin was behind the ghastly events. In any case, when Graham Fuller went to the press to publicly denounce CIA links to the Tsarnaevs he made what is likely to go down as one of the greatest snafus in US intelligence history. He lost his cool, and with it, has put the spotlight on the entire CIA-sponsored Islamic Jihadist operations run through Fetullah Gülen across Turkey into Central Asia and Russia and China.
Endnotes:

F. William Engdahl

Frederick William Engdahl (born August 9, 1944) is an American writer, economics researcher, historian, and freelance journalist.

He is the author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It has been published as well in French, German, Chinese, Russian, Czech, Korean, Turkish, Croatian, Slovenian, and Arabic. In 2010 he published Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century, completing his trilogy on the power of oil, food, and money control.

Mr. Engdahl is one of the more widely discussed analysts of current political and economic developments, and his provocative articles and analyses have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and well-known international websites. In addition to discussing oil geopolitics and energy issues, he has written on issues of agriculture, GATT, WTO, IMF, energy, politics, and economics for more than 30 years, beginning the first oil shock and world grain crisis in the early 1970s. His book, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation has been translated into eight languages. A new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order describes the American military power projection in terms of geopolitical strategy. He won a ‘Project Censored Award’ for Top Censored Stories for 2007-08.

Mr. Engdahl has lectured in economics at the Rhein-Main University in Germany and is a Visiting Professor in Economics at Beijing University of Chemical Technology.

After a degree in politics from Princeton University (USA), and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm, he worked as an independent economist and research journalist in New York and later in Europe, covering subjects including the politics of energy policy in the USA and worldwide; GATT Uruguay Round trade talks, EU food policies, the grain trade monopoly, IMF policy, Third World debt issues, hedge funds, and the Asia crisis.

Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of international publications on economics and political affairs including Asia Times, FinancialSense.com, 321.gold.com, The Real News, Russia Today TV, Asia Inc., GlobalResearch.com, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Grant’sInvestor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International and Freitag and ZeitFragen in Germany, Globus in Croatia. He has been interviewed on various geopolitical topics on numerous international TV and radio programs including Al Jazeera, CCTV and Sina.com (China), CCTV (China) Korea Broadcasting System (KBS), and RT Russian TV. He is a Research Associate of Michel Chossudovsky’s well-respected Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal, Canada, and a member of the editorial board of Eurasia magazine.

Mr. Engdahl has been a featured speaker at numerous international conferences on geopolitical, GMO, economic, and energy subjects. Among them is the Ministry of Science and Technology Conference on Alternative Energy, Beijing; London Centre for Energy Policy Studies of Hon. Sheikh Zaki Yamani; Turkish-Eurasian Business Council of Istanbul, Global Investors’ Forum (GIF) Montreaux Switzerland; Bank Negara Indonesia; the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies; the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Croatian Chamber of Commerce and Economics.

He currently lives in Germany and, in addition to teaching and writing regularly on issues of international political economy and geopolitics, food security, economics, energy, and international affairs, is active as a consulting political risk economist for major European banks and private investors.  A sample of his writings is available at Oil Geopolitics.net