BY OWEN MATTHEWS
A failed coup is pushing Turkey's increasingly autocratic president back into the arms of Vladimir Putin.
Did Vladimir Putin’s spies save Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s life in the recent attempted coup? The theory first
surfaced when Iran’s official Fars News Agency claimed that Russian security
services tipped off their Turkish counterparts after picking up “highly
sensitive army exchanges and encoded radio messages showing that the Turkish
army was readying to stage a coup.” The electronic intelligence was gathered,
according to the report, by a Russian listening station at Hmemim Airport near
Latakia, Syria, operated by the Sixth Directorate of GRu military intelligence.
The Russians reportedly overheard the Turkish military “discussing plans to
dispatch several army helicopters to the hotel [in the resort of Marmaris]
where Erdogan was staying to arrest or kill him.”
That tracks at least in part with a recent briefing by
a senior Turkish security official who said the country’s National Intelligence
Organization, also known as MIT, received reports of “unusual activity” at the
Air-Land School Command in Guvercinlik near Ankara at about 3 p.m. on July 15.
The origin of these reports isn’t clear. But they were serious enough to prompt
MIT head Hakan Fidan to warn Chief of the General Staff Hulusi Akar—panicking
the coup plotters into moving their plans forward 12 hours. Erdogan, by his own
account, left Marmaris just 15 minutes ahead of a team of commandos sent to
capture him.
Both the Turks and Russians have officially denied
that Russian spies tipped off MIT. But it is at least technically possible that
the fateful first word came from a listening station in Latakia, experts say.
Since the beginning of Russia’s official intervention
in Syria last year, Moscow’s military engineers have installed state-of-the-art
electronic interception and jamming equipment at Hmemim, as well as air traffic
control systems. Russia has made a point of showcasing all of its most
sophisticated new military technology in Syria, from cruise missiles to Ka-52
Alligator helicopter gunships to T-90M tanks, says Justin Bronk of the Royal
united Services Institute. And signals intelligence has been no exception. As
early as February 2014, Russia’s Osnaz or “Special Tasks” GRu radio electronic
intelligence agency, has been assisting Bashar al-Assad’s military in setting
up listening stations all over Syria (one, near al-Hara, was captured by the
Free Syrian Army in October 2014). According to the Israeli security-related
blog Debkafile, the extensive radar and electronic surveillance systems set up
by Russia on Syrian territory cover Israel and Jordan and a large part of Saudi
Arabia and Turkey, providing “Syria and Iran with situational awareness of the
Middle East.” In other words, Moscow has been sharing its electronic
intelligence with Damascus and Tehran for years.
That makes the story about Russia’s role in warning
Erdogan credible, but the main problem with the tip-off narrative is timing.
While it’s technically conceivable that Russians eavesdropped on traitorous
chatter at Guvercinlik, “there is no direct channel of communication between
Russian military intelligence and Turkish military intelligence” for such a
warning to be transmitted, says Pavel Felgenhauer, a veteran defense affairs
correspondent for the Moscow-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Furthermore,
“if the Russians warned the Turks, they would be disclosing their technical
capabilities of monitoring [Turkish military] movements and communications.
That is usually a no-no as far as intelligence services are concerned. It would
take a political decision on the level of Putin to make such a disclosure.”
Turkey is a member of NATO and relations between
Ankara and Moscow are only just recovering after Turkish warplanes shot down a
Russian bomber last November. In short, concludes Felgenhauer, it’s “pretty
unlikely” that such momentous decision—to warn Erdogan—could have been made in
a matter of minutes on the afternoon of the attempted coup.
The real significance of the story is its hints that
Russia and Turkey are patching up their strategic alliance.
One major consequence of the failed coup is likely to
be that Erdogan will turn to his erstwhile ally Putin for strategic support.
Two weeks before the coup, Erdogan offered a major reset in Russian-Turkish
relations, apologizing for the downing of the bomber and calling it “a
mistake.” Russia, in return, lifted a ban on charter flights to Turkey. Talks
have resumed, too, on the South Stream gas pipeline project that would bring
Russian gas to southern Europe via Turkey, bypassing ukraine. In the aftermath
of the coup, the two strongmen of Europe’s fringe agreed to a summit meeting in
Moscow on August 6.
Putin and Erdogan have a lot in common. Both have
pioneered a kind of populist authoritarianism. And both share a deep suspicion
of the united States. In one of his first addresses after the coup’s failure,
Erdogan hurled thinly veiled accusations that the Obama administration was
protecting the man he sees as the coup’s instigator, reclusive Islamist
preacher Fethullah Gulen who has been living in exile in Pennsylvania since
1999. “Whoever protects the enemies of Turkey cannot be a friend,” Erdogan
said.
That fits a narrative Putin’s media trots out often:
that the united States preaches partnership with nations while looking for the
first available opportunity to overturn any government that dares to defy
Washington’s hegemony. In 2011, when mass demonstrations against Putin’s return
to the presidency seriously challenged his authority, Putin accused
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving a “signal” to opponents to
rise against him.
The ruling style of the two leaders is also growing
similar. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan has become more like Putin as he
cracks down on opponents at home—not only on rebel soldiers and generals but on
journalists, academics, teachers and judges too. Around 60,000 Turks have been
suspended from or lost their jobs in the post-coup purge, and over 6,000
jailed. Human Rights Watch says many of those have been tortured.
Then there’s Syria, where Moscow and Ankara have been
on opposite sides since Erdogan’s government gave up on Assad in 2013 and began
backing the opposition. Now the ground has shifted against Turkey: Russia’s
military intervention in Syria has strengthened Assad’s position, while u.S.
backing has boosted Syria’s Kurds—allies in the fight against ISIS but enemies
of the Turkish government. Finally, in the aftermath of Turkey’s downing of the
Russian plane, Moscow also reached out to Syria’s Kurds, supplying them with
equipment, and even allowed them to open their first “embassy” in the Russian
capital. Suddenly, Turkey’s backing of Syria’s hapless rebels is looking like a
bad bet, and Erdogan needs Putin’s help to prevent the birth of a Kurdish state
in Northern Syria, which would encourage Turkey’s separatist Kurds to escalate
their insurgency.
All that means Erdogan and Putin have strong
incentives to resume their interrupted love-in. Russian TV reported,
triumphantly, that the pilot of the Turkish F-16 that had shot down their Su-24
had been arrested as an anti-Erdogan coup suspect, drawing a symbolic line
under the incident.
Closer ties between the two would certainly please
many in both Russia and Turkey. Veteran nationalist Alexander Dugin was in
Turkey on the day of the putsch, and met with Ankara’s mayor Melih Gokcek, a
close Erdogan ally. According to a video blog on Dugin’s
website, Gokcek explained
that Turkey was split between “patriots” and “Gulenist-American agents” and
that the shooting down of the Russian plane was a CIA-Gulenist conspiracy to
split Turkey and Russia’s natural alliance. “We underestimated the power of the
parallel state, which Gulen’s followers and Americans created inside Turkey,”
Gokcek told Dugin. “It was our mistake. But we are going to make it right now.
The first step will be a new rapprochement with Moscow.” Dugin has repeatedly
called for Turkey to leave NATO and for joint Russian-Turkish action to push
NATO from the Black Sea. Dugin’s opinions aren't official Kremlin policy, but
he is close to Putin.
Even if Erdogan does not owe his life—literally or
politically—to a Russian intelligence tip-off, the attempted coup has deepened
Erdogan’s suspicions of the West, strengthened his authoritarian instincts—and
pushed him closer to the man who is increasingly looking like his political
alter ego, Putin.
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