Turkey has no plans to invade Greece, but it is prepared
18/06/2020
On 15 June 2020, a Sweden-based think tank led by Turkish dissidents known as Nordic Monitor published a report that pointed to the existence of a secret military operation by Turkey for the invasion of Greece. The document containing details of the operation, named the Cakabey Operation Planning Directive, was dated on 13 June 2014. According to Abdullah Bozkurt, the author of the report, the documents were accidentally made public by Serdar Coskun, a Turkish prosecutor investigating a failed coup attempt in July 2016, in a court case file.
The story was unsurprisingly pumped out by the Middle East Forum, an American think tank where the author of the report serves as a Writing Fellow. It was also picked up by Ahval, a London-based Turkish opposition news portal that is funded by an Emirati businessperson and led by a team of journalists who have been accused of having links to a shadowy network the Turkish government accuses of orchestrating the aforementioned putsch attempt. Ahval’s editors Yavuz Baydar, Ilhan Tanir and Ergun Babahan have all been accused of being members of an outlawed group commonly referred to in Turkey as the Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETO), or Parallel State Structure (PDY).
Bozkurt, the author of the Nordic Monitor report, also faces the same accusations in Turkey, given that he previously worked for Today’s Zaman, a now defunct newspaper owned by loyalists of Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based cult leader believed to be the head of FETO/PDY. Similarly, Bozkurt’s Nordic Monitor colleagues Levent Kenez and Murat Cetiner are likewise deemed fugitives in Turkey because of their alleged FETO/PDY connections, with the latter being charged with leading an illegal nationwide wiretapping scandal that rocked Turkey in December 2013.
Outside of this grouping of organisations that are suspected of having ties to or sympathies towards Fethullah Gulen’s network, or Gulenists, the story was also carried by the Israel-based Jerusalem Post, the British right-wing tabloid Daily Mail, Indian newspaper the National Herald, and Al Bawaba, a Jordan-based news company with offices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A number of Greek news portals such as the Greek City Times also lapped up the story, as did CNN’s Greek-language service. Beyond that, the story generally failed to make any major ripples in the media, simply because it’s not really a story.
For any self-respecting news organisation that cares about its reputation as a trusted company, Bozkurt’s report has very little news value. Frankly speaking, the report is nothing more than click bait designed to rile up anti-Turkey fervour among cyberwarriors and trolls on social media, a chaotic sewer of human waste best suited for rats and other disease-ridden scavengers.
With over 40,000 followers on Twitter, Abdullah Bozkurt thrives on social media. His consistent and endless criticism and rants against the Turkish government has earned him many powerful allies outside of Turkey who never hesitate to retweet him and help his content to go viral. He has done well to model himself to fit the image of a champion of democracy, freedom and human rights in the face of a fascist, authoritarian regime. His tweets provide excellent material to be shared and embedded by all those opposed to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and there is certainly no shortage of those people among his target audience. But ultimately, with all the effort he puts in to making friends and being popular outside of Turkey, writing for his own think tanks and then pretty much going around various platforms quoting himself like some kind of schizophrenic patient, a lot of the time he isn’t really putting forward anything substantial. It’s all just one great big show of dazzling acrobatics, no more impressive than pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except there is no rabbit. All he’s got is fluff.
That’s exactly what this latest report was - fluff. Thankfully for his sake, Bozkurt wasn’t stupid enough to leak details of Turkey’s invasion plan of Greece. In his report, he mentions the seriousness with which Turkey’s General Staff treated the confidentiality of the files, which contained “secret documents about the national security of Turkey, classified intelligence reports and operations in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean”, noting that Lt. Gen. Ugur Tarcin, head of the General Staff Communication, Electronic and Information Systems, warned the legal department of the General Staff that “documents must be kept secret and not shared with any unauthorized persons”. Of course, the deliberate publication of these details would amount to treason, or even espionage. Instead, Bozkurt’s report merely points to the existence of the documents and shares the name of the file.
By limiting his report to this, he absolves himself of being accused of betraying his country by publishing state secrets, which he underlines are already in the public sphere due to no fault of his own. His report, however, can be interpreted as a subtle invitation for those interested in exploring Turkey’s military strategy, and a point in the right direction as to how to do so. Exposing the name of the operation could also assist foreign spies decode certain snippets of information already in their possession.
Nonetheless, Bozkurt has gone out of his way to remain within his legal parameters and not commit the same mistake as Can Dundar, editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, in exposing state secrets in early 2015 when Turkish intelligence agents said to be transporting weapons to Syria winded up in a stand-off with Turkish gendarmerie forces deployed to intercept their convoy by FETO/PDY loyalist infiltrators within the security forces.
However, there is no reason to believe that Turkey is planning to invade Greece anytime soon. By Bozkurt’s own admission, the documents only outline a “contingency plan” with regard to developments in Syria. “The Turkish military was assessing its capabilities and troop commitments according to various planning directives in effect with respect to its neighboring countries. They wanted to maintain their offensive and deterrence capabilities on the western front while moving some troops and equipment to the Syrian border,” Bozkurt writes.
This, of course, is nothing abnormal. Nearly every military of every country all over the world has a number of contingency plans regarding how to conduct wars with their neighbours just in case it ever becomes necessary, even with allies. It’s part of the regular functions of an army, just as spying is a regular function of an intelligence service. It’s absolutely normal for a country like Turkey to have pre-prepared attack and defence contingencies against Greece, just as Greece most probably has them against Turkey. These contingencies are vital for the survival of any right-minded state, and should be guarded with the highest level of confidentiality.
The accidental publication of these plans is indeed a huge act of neglect, which Bozkurt himself is not guilty of, although his highlighting of the mistake can be deemed to suggest an ill-intention towards the Turkish state. Without his intervention, the general public may have been none the wiser. Then again, some may argue Bozkurt was only fulfilling his duty as a journalist to keep the public well-informed. Where journalists draw the line between revealing what they know and keeping information to themselves for the greater good of society is an individual judgement call, one that neither I nor anyone else can impose on him, but where one draws the line is a good indication of one’s priorities and character.
In this case, I feel Bozkurt has shown himself to prioritise his personal fame as an opponent of the Turkish government over the national security of his country. Being opposition to a particular government is one thing, but acting in ways that undermine the survival of the state is another, and while some of Bozkurt’s criticisms of the Turkish government may be valid observations, albeit unfavourable in the current political climate in Turkey, they are not the real reason why he is considered a dissident.
Personally speaking, Bozkurt for me is no a champion of democracy, but a champion of treachery. What can one honestly expect of a man so eager to jeopardise the security of his nation for the sake of a few dozen retweets? News organisations that consider him a trustworthy source of information should ask themselves this question the next time they want to quote him. They might also want to consider noting the fact that when the Turkish invasion plans of Greece were drawn up, in 2014, the Turkish General Staff was under the heavy influence of FETO/PDY, and military personnel suspected of having ties to the network weren't removed from the army until after the July 2016 coup attempt failed.
Of course Bozkurt, who maintains that “many believe (the failed coup) was a false flag operation orchestrated by Erdogan and his intelligence and military chiefs to set up the opposition for persecution and a mass purge”, forgot to mention that part in his report, as well as his own alleged ties to the Gulenists.
Ertan Karpazli is the Editor-in-Chief of Radio EastMed.
Tweets @Ertan_Karpazli
All views expressed by the writer are solely his own.
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