Atlas Monitor | 18 June 2016

On Saturday morning New Zealand time it was reported that a military coup was underway in Turkey. A minority faction within the Turkish military had conspired to overthrow the government of the much maligned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. By Sunday morning it was reported that the coup had failed.

News of the coup did not come entirely as a surprise given the long history of coups in Turkey as well as the widespread public dissatisfaction with the Erdogan regime which has conducted a full frontal assault on Turkish civil liberties including press freedom.

Erdogan has blamed the Gulen movement, a group loyal to US based cleric Fethullah Gulen, as being responsible for the coup. Erdogan has called on US President Obama to arrest and extradite Gulen to Turkey. Who is Fethullah Gulen and where does he fit into the history of Turkey’s political landscape and how does Turkey fit into the geopolitical terrain?

What we find is a different sort of coup. One so insidious that it slips under the radar of the average citizen, infiltrating by stealth and corrupting a society’s institutions. For a better understanding one must look into the perhaps most underreported story of the Cold War; CIA covert operations and the international arms and drugs trade.

Fethullah Gulen

Fethullah Gulen is an Islamic fundamentalist who controls one of the most powerful and effective Muslim networks in the world. He has amassed a fortune of US$50 billion in assets and controls schools, political action groups, universities and a media empire in over 130 countries. Gulen worked with Gray Wolves (a right-wing paramilitary group connected to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II) and the CIA against the Kurdish PKK and other Communist groups in the 1980s. Gulen was a key CIA asset who established mosques and madrassahs throughout Turkey and Central Asia funded with the proceeds from the CIA’s international drug trade. He was the central figure in what is known as “Gladio II” the sequel to “Operation Gladio”.[1]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnCp1OfQ_5s&w=640&h=360]

Operation Gladio

As Paul L. Williams writes, in Operation Gladio: The unholy alliance between the CIA, the Vatican, and the Mafia, at the conclusion of World War II Germany negotiated a “separate peace” with the US. The purpose of this arrangement was to recruit select Nazis into Operation Gladio. Ostensibly, this operation was conducted to combat the (new) Soviet threat of Communist invaders. However, in practice it involved the staging of terrorist attacks by right-wing operatives to be blamed on Communist and leftists. It was a psy-op on the European populace designed to elicit manufactured consent for greater government powers under the pretext of security. It is perhaps the prototype for the modern false-flag operation often characterized as the Hegelian dialectic expressed as “problem-reaction-solution”.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE94KUYcglk&w=640&h=360]

Ultimately the operation set up a “shadow government” within Europe, predominantly Italy (but eventually also, Austria, France, Germany, Belgium and other Western European countries as well as Turkey), that commanded “secret armies”. Theses armies were referred to as “stay-behind units”; a motley crew of radical right-wingers, neo-Nazis and fascists that were mobilized against so-called Communists and the putative Soviet threat. It was NATO’s clandestine paramilitary operation against the Warsaw Pact that officially ran from 1956 until 1990.

The key players involved in this operation included the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) – the forerunner to the CIA headed by “Wild” Bill Donovan, James Jesus Angleton and Allen W. Dulles; Nazis – General Reinhart Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff; as well as the Vatican along with its allies within the “Black Nobility” such as Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

Initial funding came from private Wall Street coffers such as Rockefeller and Mellon controlled banks. However, subsequent funding came from the proceeds of drug trafficking. This is where the Mafia connection came in, as funding for covert operations such as these could not be approved overtly by acts of Congress for obvious reasons. As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair noted in Whiteout: The CIA, drugs and the press

 

What cannot now be denied is that US intelligence agencies arranged for the release from prison of the world’s preeminent drug lord, [Charles “Lucky” Luciano a Sicilian-American Mafioso and kingpin of the international heroin trade] allowed him to rebuild his narcotics empire, watched the flow of drugs into the largely black ghettoes of New York and Washington, DC, escalate and then lied about what they had done. This founding saga of the relationship between American spies and gangsters set patterns that would be replicated from Laos and Burma to Marseilles and Panama.

Fugitive in America

In 1998 Gulen fled to the US after being charged with attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government. A year later authorities in Uzbekistan accused him of attempting to assassinate president Islam Karimov. The authorities also discovered his CIA connections and that 70 teachers employed at his schools held US diplomatic status. Gulen’s madrassahs in Uzbekistan were ultimately all closed down by Uzbek authorities and eight journalists that graduated from his schools were found guilty of sedition. Attempts by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to deport Gulen were blocked by a federal court that ruled he was an esteemed educator which warranted him permanent residence in the US. This despite having no high-school education, limited English and having never published any literature on education. CIA and diplomatic officials appeared in court to testify on Gulen’s behalf.[2]

Gulen’s mountain fortress in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania is reported by his neighbours to be a paramilitary training ground and that the compound is under CIA protection.[3] He has called for the establishment of a New World Islamic Order, a step beyond a sharia state or caliphate, and has promoted infiltration and deception as legitimate methods of achieving this goal.[4]

While living in Pennsylvania, with the assistance of the CIA, Gulen was instrumental in the establishment of Turkey’s current ruling party AKP led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Gulen and Erdogan (while Prime Minister) fell out over the Marmara Flotilla-Gaza blockade incident. Gulen was opposed to the action of the flotilla. In 2014 Erdogan requested Gulen’s extradition from the US on charges that he was undermining the government of Turkey. Under Gulen’s influence Turkey has transformed from a secular to an Islamist state with the most mosques per capita.[5]

Gulen schools in Central Asia are staffed with CIA operatives posing as English teachers. This has forced countries including Russia and Uzbekistan to ban them. Even the Netherlands has cut funding to Gulen schools on the basis that they are subversive. The US on the other hand has allowed the proliferation of Gulen schools despite the ban on the open promotion of religion in schools. The schools in the US are run by Turkish administrators and educators who travel into the US on visas designated for highly skilled, high demand foreign workers. Students are indoctrinated into the view of the Ottoman Empire as the golden age of global civilization and denial of the Armenian holocaust. All this is done at the US tax payers expense and is part of the covert agenda behind Gladio II.[6]

The International Heroin Trade

The funding of the Gulen movement and Gladio II came from the international heroin trade. After the disruption within the Sicilian Mafia, the CIA and the babas (Turkish criminal underground) expanded the network of drug laboratories and distribution channels into Turkey and Central Asia. Turkish drug smuggler Yasar Oz, an employee of Abdullah Catli (Gray Wolves vice chairman and CIA assassin), brought drugs into the US under State Department and NATO protection. NATO cargo planes transported drugs from Turkey to Brussels before finally arriving in the US at Andrews Air Force Base.[7]

The Cold War was fought and ultimately won by NATO using the CIA-Vatican-Sicilian Mafia nexus; funded by the proceeds of illicit goods and services; administered through the Vatican banking system. The network also involved the Corsican Mafia which had the expertise in refining opium into heroin. A major source of opium was Indochina which found its way to the ports of Marseilles. Turkey and Lebanon were also connected into the network. Raw opium from Turkey flowed through Lebanon on its way to labs in Marseilles for processing then onto Cuba and eventually the US.

These networks operated under CIA protection. The Southeast Asian leg of the route was enabled by the CIA’s relationship with Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), whose soldiers were predominantly from the Muslim minority (the Haw) in southwestern Yunnan. At the time KMT were fighting a civil war with Chinese Communists and were also being considered by the US for use as an auxiliary army to be mobilized in the Korean War against the North and its allies. An arms for drugs arrangement was forged between the CIA and KMT.

 

Transactions would be conducted through Bill Donovan’s World Commerce Corporation (WCC), registered in Panama, which collected surplus US arms and shipped them to underworld groups such as the Mafia and KMT. An “intelligence subculture” evolved out of the informal cooperation between well connected lawyers and businessmen. This subculture facilitated the rise of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and American International Group (AIG) who supported the concealed the flow of money from the heroin trade.

According to Alfred W. McCoy’s book The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia, in 1958 a second drug supply line was established linking the mountains of Laos with Saigon to the eventual destination of Europe and the US. This was conducted with the full cooperation of the government of South Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem, a devout Roman Catholic was instructed by the Pope to cooperate with the US. American Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York led a pro-Diem lobby. Support for Diem continued, despite being overthrown by a CIA-supported military junta.

With the fall of Saigon and the US military withdrawal from Southeast Asia, Afghanistan became the new focus for the CIA. The fertile fields of the Helmand Valley were ideal for the cultivation of opium poppy. The only obstacle was the Afghan government of Nur Mohammed Taraki whose modernist-Westernized secular and comparatively liberal regime was offensive to the more extreme elements on the Pashtun tribes.[8]

By 1975 clashes were occurring between government forces and fundamentalist tribal militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who after killing a student at the University of Kabul fled to Pakistan where he became an agent of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Hekmatyar also become the leader of Hezb-e-Islami a takfiri mujahideen organization dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic state that perpetrated acts of terrorism. By 1977 he was building an arsenal courtesy of the CIA who was also funneling millions into the ISI.[9]

The CIA saw in Hekmatyar and his mujahideen army, despite its atrocities, an ally in its plan to overthrow the Taraki government and commandeer the opium growing fields of the Helmand Valley as well as the vast mineral resources of the geostrategic Eurasian landmass. Between 1971 and 1979 opium production tripled.[10] Six months before the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan the US State Department announced its commitment to the mujahideen and that

 

The United States’ larger interest…would be served by the demise of the Taraki regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reform in Afghanistan…. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviet’s view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.” [11]

Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

In September 1979 Taraki was murdered in a coup by military officers and Hafiizullah Amin a US educated CIA asset was installed. The Soviets, perhaps cognizant of the US support for both the new Kabul regime and the mujahideen and the geopolitical implications of a conflict on its southwestern borderlands, decided to intervene and accordingly invaded in December 1979. It was a cynical plot by the US to draw the USSR into a quagmire that would ultimately contribute to its demise. It would also unleash a virulent strain of political Islamic extremism that endures today.[12]

Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI)

In 1972 the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI) was established in Pakistan (registered in Luxembourg) by financier Agha Hasan Adebi with deep ties to the Pakistani and Turkish underworld as well as Gulf state oil sheikhs. It evolved into a mass criminal enterprise servicing the global trade in illicit goods and services. By 1985 it was the seventh biggest financial institution in the world handling the financial affairs of dictators (Saddam), drug lords (Noriega) and terrorist leaders (Osama bin Laden & Abu Nidal).[13] BCCI collapsed in 1991 exposing its widespread fraudulent practices despite its “A rating” by auditing firm Price Waterhouse (PW). PW’s complicity in BCCI’s criminal operation was confirmed by the Kerry Commission. The Kerry commission noted that

The relationships involving BCCI, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of BCCI. [14]

Out of pocket creditors brought legal action against PW. The matter was ultimately settled out of court.[15]

Turkey

The shift from Southeast Asia to the Middle East as the crossroads of the opium trade was a smooth transition. Turkey became the new operational base. The country’s “deep state” apparatus served at a critical junction in the operation. By the 1970s the CIA had infiltrated the Turkish intelligence agency (MIT). Turkish Gladio units such as the Gray Wolves and the babas integrated with MIT and were assisted by considerable CIA backing. Gladio units were trained by US Special Forces (Green Berets) in carrying out attacks to be blamed on Communists.[16]

The Turks were eventually able to forge alliances with Sicilian Mafia and a drugs and weapons trafficking ring was established. This new network also involved the Albanian Mafia who were used to courier raw opium from Afghanistan to the US through the Balkan route. The Albanians quickly developed a fierce reputation. In 1985 Italy’s top prosecutor suggested they were not only a threat to Italy but to Western civilization. In 2004 the FBI noted that this “Muslim Mafia”, which had been imported into the US by the Gambino crime family, had surpassed La Cosa Nostra as the leading organised crime group in America.[17]

Turkey became a major theatre for Gladio due to the Kurdish and Armenian nationalist and liberation movements. The Gray Wolves were the prominent stay-behind unit. CIA support of the Gray Wolves was also necessary to secure the Balkan route for drugs and weapons trafficking. Turkey was also important geostrategically due to its central location on the Eurasian land mass and shared Turkic ethnicity as well as Islamic religion with its south-Asian, Soviet republic neighbours. Control of the Eurasian land mass necessitated control of those areas. [18]

The Gray Wolves became so integrated into the drugs-for-arms enterprise that they became almost indistinguishable from the Turkish Mafia and the intelligence service (MIT). These three entities interlocked within Ergenekon which operated as the Turkish “deep-state” or “shadow government”. Ergenekon was a clandestine, secularist ultra-nationalist organization in Turkey with possible ties to members of the country’s military and security forces. The group is named after Ergenekon, a mythical place located in the inaccessible valleys of the Altay Mountains. It was a product of Gladio, the CIA and the Turkish babas and it became a key player in events in Turkey and South Asia into the 21^st century.[19]

One of the Gray Wolves’ most notorious members was Mehmet Ali Agca who attempted the assassination of Pope John Paul II. In February 1979 Agca had been jailed for the murder of a prominent Turkish journalist. He spent seven months in jail before escaping. Three days after escaping he wrote a letter to the newspaper whose editor in chief he had murdered saying he would not hesitate in shooting the pope.[20] A message was transmitted to the Gray Wolves leadership to kill the Pope and blame it on the Communists. ‘The arrangements had been made by members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Masonic P2 Lodge, and the Safari Club; a covert organization that had been established by Henry Kissinger’. [21]

 

CIA and The Mujahideen

By 1985 the CIA was funding the mujahideen to the tune of US$250 million a year to fight 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The money was generated from illicit trade and by 1988 had reached US$1 billion a year. It was the CIA’s most expensive operation.[22]

 

In order to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan the CIA imported and installed members of the proselytizing orthodox Sunni Islam movement Tablighi Jamaat into black communities and American mosques. The Tablighi Jamaat missionaries objective was to recruit fighters for the jihad to liberate their Muslim brothers from Soviet occupation. Sheikh Mubarak Gilani was able to persuade members of a Brooklyn mosque to attend guerrilla training camps in Pakistan.[23] Camps were also set up in the US including New York, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, California, Alabama and Oklahoma. By 1985 international press was reporting that African-American Muslims connected to these camps had joined the ranks of the mujahideen and that some had been killed in action. When interviewed many testified they were agents of the CIA.[24]

To increase support to the mujahideen the CIA used Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam to set up an Al-Qaeda cell within the Masjid al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. The cell was known ostensibly as the al-Kifah Refugee Centre and served as a front for the transferring of funds, weapons and recruits to Afghanistan. This organization received over US$2 billion a year during the 1980s. Azzam can be seen in a 1988 videotape telling a large crowd of black Americans that blood and martyrdom are prerequisites for a Muslim society. Masjid al-Farooq was a recruitment centre for the Arab-Afghan foreign legion and by 1992 the mosque became a haven for Arab jihadis from the Afghan campaign who were granted special passports by the CIA.[25]

CIA and Latin American Drug Cartels

Gladio’s metastasizing expansion in Afghanistan, on top of the support for guerrilla units in Latin America and its secret armies in Europe, put a major strain on the CIA’s resources. In 1980 the CIA did a deal with Honduran drug lord Juan Matta Ballesteros, who operated the SETCO airline, to transport narcotics to gangs in the US and arms to warehouses in Honduras operated by Oliver North and Richard Secord (of Iran-Contra notoriety). The CIA made deals with other drug lords including Miguel Angel Felix Ballardo (the godfather of Mexican drug dealers) whose ranch was used as a training camp for right-wing guerrilla armies. Miguel Nazar Haro, the boss of Mexico’s most powerful Guadalajara Cartel was another CIA asset. By 1990 over 75% of all cocaine entering America transited through Mexico and was earning the CIA US$50 billion a year. With this new alliance and revenue source, combined with the CIA’s work with the Sicilian Mafia and the Turkish babas, the CIA was able to launch new and more ambitious operations.[26]

Gladio Exposed

Gladio began to wind down towards the end of the Cold-War. Official figures from the Italian operation reveal that 14,591 incidents of political violence had killed 491 people and injured 1181 between 1969 and 1987, including the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. An Italian Senate investigation-parliamentary commission launched in 1988 found documents proving the existence of a secret military operation involving underground armies supported by government sources and foreign agents. The documents referred to Gladio specifically and showed that it had been created by US intelligence to engage in asymmetric warfare in Italy.[27]

In 1990 Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti was ordered to provide the Senate commission with a detailed report about the structure and activities of SISMI (military intelligence). The release of the report was blocked by the commission chairman on the grounds that it would breach NATO security and a censored report was released. However, the report did disclose the fact that a secret army known as Gladio had been deployed within Italy by the CIA during the Cold-War. News of this operation caused a scandal in Western Europe as revelations came to light of similar operations in Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands. Investigations were launched in these countries during which it was revealed that leading government officials were co-conspirators in a campaign of false-flag terror.[28]

 

In 1990 the European Parliament issued official condemnation of Gladio. Joint resolution replacing B3-2021, 2058, 2068, 2078 and 2087/90. [29]

Turkey Exposed

Details of Turkey’s involvement in Gladio surfaced when Abdullah Catli, a Gladio hitman and Gray Wolves member involved in the Papal assassination plot, was killed in a car crash. Investigators at the scene discovered a cache of weapons and forged documents including national ID cards and diplomatic passports. This discovery was proof that Catli was connected to the highest offices of Turkish government. A commission was set up which found evidence of the Turkish government’s links to organised crime and the National Security Council’s use of the police to launch a series of attacks against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) including attempts to assassinate its leaders. Aside from these shocking revelations the commission was only able to scratch the surface.[30]

After the failed assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square, Catli ended up in a Swiss maximum security prison for drug convictions in 1987. He was able to escape after his cell door inexplicably opened and was spirited away on a NATO helicopter. In 1989 he arrived in England and was granted a British passport. In 1991 he arrived in the US and was issued a green card despite being a fugitive, terrorist and notorious baba who ran an international drugs-for-arms racket. From the US he was sent by the CIA to former Soviet republics in Central Asia to enact a strategy of tension involving acts of terrorism and armed insurrections. He was involved in the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Azerbaijian and destabilizing campaign in the Chinese province of Xianjiang. [31]

Ultimately Catli’s task was to implement the CIA’s geopolitical agenda of transforming these Muslim-Turkic regions into new Islamic republics that they could manipulate in order to control the massive reserves of oil and other rare earth minerals. Control of Central Asia was a geostrategic imperative for controlling the Eurasian landmass. This was to be done using Turkey as a proxy in a Pan-Turkish movement in a similar way to the Pan-Arab movement deployed in Afghanistan.[32]

Conclusion

Fethullah Gulen along with other fellow Turks were a apart of the deep state-shadow government apparatus that played a central role in some of the most significant events in the 20th century. Gulen and company have functioned as pawns in a US geopolitical agenda going back to the Cold War. Turkey has been the theatre of some political intrigue which continues today.

Turkey has a long history of military coups including four during the Ottoman period and perhaps 12 (including coup attempts) during Turkey’s modern history as the Turkish Republic. This recent coup happened immediately after US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov. It is inconceivable that US and Russian intelligence did not have advance knowledge of the coup; therefore it is reasonable to speculate that the coup could have been discussed at their meeting.

Both Russia and the US are fed up with Erdogan whose airforce shot down a Russian bomber. It is also well documented that Erdogan has allowed Turkey to function as a gateway for ISIS into Syria through the Jarabulus corridor on the Turkey-Syria border.

Robert Fisk astutely points out that when a leader like Erdogan can no longer trust his military then the writing is on the wall and Erdogan’s days are numbered. Given Turkey’s history it’s just a matter of time before there’s another attempt to overthrow the regime so watch this space.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect to this unfolding drama is not the overt military coup trying to overthrow Erdogan but the silent coup that has seized control of Turkey’s institutions by insidious influence and intrigue. The deep state-shadow government apparatus created by Gladio was a post-modern coup orchestrated by US intelligence and done by stealth to pursue an imperial agenda.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA&w=640&h=360]

 

Notes:

[1] “Global Muslim Networks: How Far They Have Traveled,” The Economist, May 6, 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/10808408; Chris Morris, “Turkey Accuses Popular Islamist of Plot against State,” The Guardian (UK), August 31, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/sep/01/1; Edward Stourton, “What Is Islam’s Gulen Movement?,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13503361;  “Fethullah Gulen v. Michael Chertoff, Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, et al.,” Case 207-cv-02148-SD, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, http://www.novatv.nl/uploaded/FILES/Karin/IN%20THE%20UNITED%20STATES%20DISTRICT%20COURT.doc; Suzy Hensen, “The Global Imam,” New Republic, November 10, 2010, http://www.tnr.com/article/world/magazine/79062/global-turkey-imam-fethullah-gulen?page=0,2; Rachel Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition: Turkey’s Islamist Danger,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2009, http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition; Fethullah Gulen, “Fethullah Gulen ‘den Ibretlik Vaaz,” Haber 5, November 20, 1979, http://www.haber5.com/video/fethullah-gulenden-ibretlik-vaaz; Sibel Edmonds, “Additional Omitted Points in CIA-Gulen Coverage, A Note from ‘The Insider,’” Veterans Today, January 11, 2011, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/01/11/additional-omitted-points-in-cia-gulen-coverage-a-note-from-%E2%80%98the-insider%E2%80%99/; Joseph Brenda, “The Neo-Ottoman Trap for Turkey,” Executive Intelligence Review, September 10, 1999, http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1999/eirv26n36-19990910/eirv26n36-19990910_045-the_neo_ottoman_trap_for_turkey.pdf

[2] Chris Morris, “Turkey Accuses Popular Islamist of Plot against State,” The Guardian (UK), August 31, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/sep/01/1; Brenda, “The Neo-Ottoman Trap for Turkey.”; Sibel Edmonds, “Turkish Intel Chief Exposes CIA Operations via Islamic Groups in Central Asia,” Boiling Frogs Post, January 6, 2011, http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/01/06/turkish-intel-chief-exposes-cia-operations-via-islamic-group-in-central-asia/#more-2809; Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition.”

[3] Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition; Paul L. Wiliams author of Operation Gladio: the unholy alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia has paid several visits to the Gülen compound at 1857 Mt. Eaton Road in Saylorsburg, PA, but was denied entrance into the compound by Turkish sentries. He has conducted interviews with nearby residents, who have complained of the gunfire and the surveillance helicopter.

[4] “Bill Clinton on Fethullah Gulen’s Contribution to the World,” Hizmet Movement (the official website of the Gülen Movement), January 1, 2011, http://hizmetmovement.blogspot.com/2011/01/bill-clinton-on-fethullah-gulens.html; “Fethullah Gulen: Infiltrating the U.S. through Our Charter Schools,” Act! for America, April 9, 2009, http://www.actforamerica.org/index.php/learn/email-archives/1069-fethulla-gulen-infiltrating-us-through-our-charter-schools/; Sermon aired on Turkish channel ATV (General Television Station), June 18, 1999. See also, Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition.”; Second Sermon aired on Turkish channel ATV, June 18, 1999; Erick Stakelbeck, “The Gulen Movement: A New Islamic World Order,” CBN, June 4, 2011, http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2011/May/The-Gulen-Movement-The-New-Islamic-World-Order/

[5] Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition.”; Soner Cagaptay, “Behind Turkey’s Witch Hunt,” Newsweek, May 15, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/05/15/behind-turkey-s-witch-hunt.html

[6] Sharon-Krespin, “Fethullah Gulen’s Grand Ambition.”; Stephanie Saul, “Charter Schools Tied to Turkey Grow in Texas,” New York Times, June 6, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/education/07charter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; “Turkish Olympiad Kicks Off with Glorious Opening at Dolmabahce Palace,” Fethullah Gulen: A Life Dedicated to Service (a Gulen website), June 17, 2011, http://www.fethullah-gulen.net/news/turkish-olympiad-dolmabahce/; See also, Mehmet Aslan, “The International Turkish Language Olympiad: Educating for International Dialogue and Communication,” Sociology and Anthropology, 2014, http://www.hrpub.org/download/20140525/SA1-19602237.pdf

[7] Robert Paulsen, “Synopsizing Sibel Edmonds: The Evolution of Gladio—Part Four,” American Judas, March 28, 2013, http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2013/03/synopsizing-sibel-edmonds-evolution-of_28.html; Sibel Edmonds, “Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B—Part 4” (video), Corbett Report, February 22, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOCYMU3zYH0; Philip Giraldi, “Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?” American Conservative, November 1, 2009, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-sibel-edmonds/

[8] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003)

[9] Ibid; Robert Pelton, The World’s Most Dangerous Places (New York: Harper Resource, 2003), p. 342; Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 264; McCoy, Politics of Heroin, p. 474

[10] Jeffrey Lord, “Jimmy Carter’s Dead Ambassador,” American Spectator, October 23, 2012, http://spectator.org/articles/34550/jimmy-carters-dead-ambassador

[11] US State Department memorandum reproduced in Cockburn and St. Clair’s Whiteout, pp. 262–63

[12] Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 259-263; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 20, 40; Jagmohan Meher, America’s Afghanistan War: The Success That Failed (New Dehli, India: Gyan Books, 2004), pp. 68–69

[13] Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, “BCCI: The World’s Dirtiest Bank,” Biblioteca Pleyades, July 29, 1991, http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalbanking118.htm; David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, “Follow the Money: How John Kerry Busted the Terrorists’ Favorite Bank,” Washington Monthly, September 2004, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

[14] Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, “The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations,” US Senate, December 1992, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm

[15] Lucy Komisar, “The Case That Kerry Cracked,” Alter Net, October 21, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/the_case_that_kerry_cracked; Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Heart of the BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 228; Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, “The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations,” US Senate, December 1992, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm; Steve Lohr, “Auditing the Auditors—A Special Report: How BCCI’s Accounts Won Stamp of Approval,” New York Times, September 6, 1991.

[16] Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 230–31.

[17] Thomas Garrett, “Mafia International? Organized Crime in Central and Eastern Europe,” New East, October 7, 2011, http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/mafia-international-organised-crime-in-central-and-eastern-europe/; Anthony M. DeStefano, “The Balkan Connection,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 1985; Jerry Capeci, “Zef’s Got Staying Power Too,” Gangland, September 4, 2003; Xhudo, “Men of Purpose: The Growth of the Albanian Criminal Activity,” Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, The University of Pittsburgh, Spring 1996; Bozinovich, “The New Islamic Mafia,” Serbianna, February 21, 2005, http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/028.shtml; Terry Frieden, “FBI: Albanian Mobsters ‘New Mafia,’” CNN, August 19, 2004

[18] Hussein Tahiri, The Structure of Kurdish Society and the Struggle for a Kurdish State (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publications, 2007), pp. 232; Pico Iyer, “Long Memories,” Time, August 8, 1983; Sibel Edmonds, “Court Documents Shed Light on CIA Illegal Operations in Central Asia Using Islam and Madrassas,” Let Sibel Edmonds Speak, July 11, 2008, http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/court-documents-shed-light-on-cia.html

[19] Frank Bovenkerk and Yucel Yesilgoz, The Turkish Mafia: A History of the Heroin Godfathers (London: Milo Books, 2007), chapter 6, Kindle edition; Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe (Palm Desert, CA: Progressive Press, 2012)

[20] Bovenkerk and Yesilgoz, Turkish Mafia; Cottrell, Gladio, pp. 288–90

[21] Bovenkerk and Yesilgoz, Turkish Mafia.

[22] Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 19998), p. 273; Robert Young Pelton, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Sixth Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 327–28

[23] Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 308; Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 75–77

[24] Gordon Gregory and Donna Williams, “Jamaat ul-Fuqra,” Special Research Report, Regional Organized Crime Information Center, 2006; “Afghanistan Update,” Daily Telegraph (UK), August 5, 1983; Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1983

[25] Peter Lance, 100 Years of Revenge (New York: Regan Books, 2003), pp. 38–42; Peter L Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2002), p. 136; Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 137

[26] Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, pp. 279–82; Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 4; Peter Dale Scott, “Washington and the Politics of Drugs,” Variant, Summer 2000, http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue11/Variant11.pdf

[27] Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 5; Ali Ihsan Aydin, “Gladio Prosecutor Casson: Parliamentary Commission, a Must,” Deep Politics, November 28, 2013, http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2013/11/28/gladio-prosecutor-casson-parliamentary-commission-with-special-powers-a-must/

[28] Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, pp. 8–9; Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 2002), Kindle edition, Chapter Eight, “Operation Gladio.”

[29] Parlamentum Europaeum, “Resolution on Gladio,” Strasbourg, France, November 22, 1990, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Parliament_resolution_on_Gladio

[30] Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe (Palm Desert, CA: Progressive Press, 2012), p. 16; James Corbett, “Who Is Marc Grossman?” The Corbett Report, October 1, 2013, http://www.corbettreport.com/who-is-marc-grossman/; Sibel Edmonds, “Digging Deeper in Years into Wikileaks’ Treasure Chest,” Boiling Frogs Post, December 3, 2010, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2010/12/03/digging-deeper-in-years-into-wikileaks%25E2%2580%2599-treasure-chest-part-i/; Wayne Madsen, “The United States and Ergenekon ‘Deep State’ in Turkey,” Washington Review of Turkish and Eurasian Affairs, September 2010; Kemal Baki, “State Gangs Like a Garbage Dump Waiting to Explode,” Hurriyet (Turkish Daily News), August 30, 1998, http://arama.hurriyet.com.tr/arsivnews.aspx?id=-509399; Frank Bovenkerk and Yucil Yesilgoz, The Turkish Mafia: A History of the Heroin Godfathers (London: Milo Books, 2007), ebook edition, Chapter Five, “The Susurluk Incident.”

[31] Sibel Edmonds, “Sibel Edmonds on Gladio B—Part 1” (video), Corbett Report, February 19, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AARtO88G5Ag; Eugene Rumer, Dmitri Trenin, and Huasheng Zhao, Central Asia: Views from Washington, Moscow, and Beijing (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), pp. 141–43

[32] The Government in Exile of East Turkistan Republic, website, http://eastturkistangovernmentinexile.us/resources.html; Christoph Germann, “The New Great Game Round Up: China’s Central Asia Problem,” Boiling Frogs Post, May 30, 2013, http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/05/30/the-new-great-game-round-up-chinas-central-asia-problem/; Staff Report, “Central Asia: A Major Player in the Oil and Gas Energy Industry,” World Finance, January 16, 2014, http://www.worldfinance.com/markets/central-asia-a-major-player-in-the-oil-and-gas-energy-industry; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 125; Luke Ryland, “Court Documents Shed Light on CIA Illegal Operations in Central Asia Using Islam and Madrassas,” Oped News, July 11, 2008, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Court-Documents-Shed-Light-by-Luke-Ryland-080711-771.html; Debbie Hamilton, “East Turkistan Is Not a Real Country, although It Receives Millions in Foreign Aid from the United Nations and the United States,” Right Truth, July 19, 2010, http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2010/07/east-turkistan-is-not-a-real-country-although-it-receives-millions-in-foreign-aid-from-the-united-nations-and-the-united-sta.html; Sibel Edmonds, “Friends-Enemies-Both? Our Foreign Policy Riddle,” Boiling Frogs Post, October 13, 2010, http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2010/10/13/friends-enemies-both-our-foreign-policy-riddle/