"Zionist" Spy Ring in Iran

"Turkey is a regional power, and there are power centres which are uncomfortable with this. It's clear the aim of some is to spoil the moderate political atmosphere after Rowhani's election ... and to neutralize Turkey, which contributes to solving problems in the region and which has a relationship with Iran."
Turkish Justice and Development Party spokesman

"Such a betrayal by the Turkish intelligence community would be something that's absolutely not done. It's against all the rules which have existed for many years, the unwritten rules concerning co-operation between intelligence organizations that reveal sensitive information to one another and trust one another not to use that information to harm whoever gave it to them."
Danny Yatom, former head, Mossad

Turkey has recently been admonished by the European Union for its poor record on human rights. Citing Turkish authority under Prime Minister Recep Dayyip Erdogan's government's grip on the Turkish news media. Nor was his government's reaction to peaceful protests in the public squares and parks of Istanbul and other Turkish cities cited as one of admirable democratic values in action. Erdogan named the protesters as "riff-raff" and turned the power of the state on the demonstrators.

Riot police were called out and the indiscriminate use of teargas, on children, women and the infirm, did nothing whatever to burnish Turkey's new Islamist image. Previous Turkish governments wholly in respect of the tradition of Kamal Ataturk who turned his country away from Islamism and toward a civil society adopting Western social normatives for the most part, eschewing all vestiges in the public sphere of Islamic symbols, enjoyed a firm and friendly relationship with the State of Israel.

That time has passed. The decade during which Turkish Islamists made inroads into government, finally establishing themselves firmly as the leading political regime, decimating the leadership of the Turkish military which had always seen itself as a protector of the Ataturk legacy has eroded that relationship with its Middle East neighbour. Prime Minister Erdogan took up the cause of the Palestinians, saw Hamas as a sterling political leadership, befriended Syria and Iran and sidled ever closer to the fundamental Islamism Turkey had formerly eschewed emphatically.

The Government of Turkey under its Justice and Development Party chose to support an Islamist group challenging Israel's presence in the Middle East, which attempted to run a seaborne bust of Israel's blockade of Gaza. The ensuing chaos when Israeli commandos rappelled from a helicopter down onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara and were violently assaulted by the Islamists causing them to defend themselves leading to the death of nine Turks, represented the final break in relations between the two countries.

Earlier schisms had occurred when Prime Minister Erdogan, for example, marched angrily out of a regional conference as the Israeli President spoke, calling insults such as 'Palestinian baby-killers' after the IDF had counter-attacked Hamas in Gaza in response to continuous rocket attacks across the border from Gaza into Israeli border communities such as Sderot. Turkey, despite video footage showing the IDF under attack by the Turkish Islamists on board the Mavi Marmora, insisted on apologies and reparations.

But even after Israel had reluctantly agreed to proffering an apology at the behest of U.S. President Barack Obama, and consultations over reparations, Turkey made it abundantly obvious it had no intention of restoring past good relations with Israel. It was more intent on consolidating close relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and with Syria, both countries Turkey had previously had no contact with. Currently, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad is in Prime Minister Erdogan's churlish bad books, but even though he insists on the regime's removal, and knowing Iran's support for it, ties with Iran remain strong.

Which evidently led the Erdogan government to plot against its former ally Israel, with whom 50 years of shared military activities, intelligence craft and trade advantages were sacrificed to the trashheap of history, while intelligence betrayal took centre stage. Ankara had knowledge of Israeli agents meeting with Iranians in Turkey, who were performing undercover work in Iran on behalf of Israel. This information was relayed to Iranian intelligence services resulting in the arrest of the ten Iranians.

Now The Washington Post has reported on Turkey's venture into intelligence betrayal of the lowest order, explaining that Ankara was aware that Mossad ran "part of its Iranian spy network through Turkey, which has relatively easy movement back and forth across its border with Iran." Iran, for its part, indignantly denies any such occurrence took place: "There has been a campaign ... to discredit our 10-year experience. They wanted to see [the] old Turkey back", said Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister.

Last year Tehran announced the uncovering of a "Zionist" spy ring working for Israel. Fifteen operatives stood accused of being responsible for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists. While there is as yet no clear information on what befell these Iranians identified as spies for a foreign country identified as a 'Zionist' country, it should be readily acknowledged that they were most likely condemned to death, and likely without due process of law in a legal court of justice.

"If the Israeli spy network was indeed unveiled, it was done so at the order of Fidan [Hakan Fidan heading Turkey's National Intelligence Organization] and with the full approval of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His obsessive animus toward Israel and his anti-Semitic tendencies are known to all", wrote The Jerusalem Post's Yossi Melman, who characterized the intelligence betrayal as "a very egregious -- even unprecedented - act. In fact, this is the basest act of betrayal imaginable."