Much is being made of Thursday’s Washington Post piece by David Ignatius asserting that Turkey supplied Iran with the names of several Iranians cooperating with the Mossad. It is not clear whether these were the same “Israeli spies” whose executions were reported last April by Iran’s state media.
It is certain, however, that Turkish intelligence has been keeping a close watch on Mossad activity in Turkey, where Israel has been operating for decades. It is also a fact that the regime in Tehran is quick to use the noose for far smaller offenses than espionage on behalf of the “Small Satan.”
Though Israeli officialdom is not responding to the report, former Mossad chief Danny Yatom told Israel Radio that if the information in the Ignatius article was true, “it’s against all the … unwritten rules concerning cooperation 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.”
Meanwhile, Ankara is angry at the mere suggestion of any wrongdoing on its part. This is not to say that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies denied the veracity of the Washington Post article. Nor did they counter claims made last week in The Wall Street Journal — in a profile of Turkish Intelligence head Hakan Fidan — about the spymaster’s close ties with his Iranian counterparts.
Instead, anonymous officials in Erdogan’s government went on the offensive, calling the media reports part of an overall campaign in the West to discredit Turkey.
“It’s clear the aim of some is to spoil the moderate political atmosphere after [Iranian President Hasan] Rouhani’s election … and to neutralize Turkey, which contributes to solving problems in the region and which has a relationship with Iran,” they told Reuters.
This is utter nonsense, of course. If anything, there has been a campaign in the West to give both Rouhani and the Islamists in Ankara every benefit of any doubt. Even Israel, under incessant attack from Erdogan, continues to treat Turkey with kid gloves.
When Erdogan took office in 2003, his radical Islamic past was ignored by Western and Israeli pundits and politicians. Skeptics were told not to worry: Turkey wasn’t like other Muslim countries; it was modernizing and it had a tradition of democracy, safeguarded by the military.
It didn’t matter to all the optimists that Erdogan had served a prison term for attending a rally and reciting an outlawed poem which included lines such as: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”
Indeed, in spite of Turkey’s move to Islamism — and Erdogan’s increasingly brazen show of his true anti-Western colors — it is still considered to be an ally worth cultivating. From Israel’s point of view, Turkey may no longer be as friendly as it used to be, but it has geographical access to Iran and therefore must be catered to — at least while the nuclear threat remains high.
It is thus that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to apologize to Erdogan, at U.S. President Barack Obama’s behest and in his presence, for the “Free Gaza” flotilla fiasco in 2010. Though Turkey was behind and to blame for the events that led to Israeli commandos killing nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara ship, Netanyahu opted for prudence over truth.
The problem is that Erdogan does not share Netanyahu’s sense of realpolitik; he does not consider Turkey to have common interests with Israel. He most certainly isn’t going to assist Netanyahu in an operation against Iran. As the Ignatius article illustrates, Ankara is happier helping Tehran than Jerusalem.
The only thing remotely surprising about this revelation is that Israel continues to use Turkey as a meeting place for Mossad operatives. According to Ignatius, “Several years ago, Israeli intelligence officers are said to have described [Fidan] facetiously to CIA officials as ‘the MOIS station chief in Ankara,’ a reference to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”
In other words, Israel has known all along that Erdogan’s Turkey is neither trustworthy nor an ally. What it does not know is when to bow out of a bad arrangement. Now would be as good a time as ever to go cold turkey.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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