Turkey’s counter-intelligence services detained seven people who allegedly confessed to spying on behalf of Israel, part of a massive espionage ring targeting the likes of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, whose tentacles extended beyond Turkey to Sweden, Jordan, Thailand and Syria, Turkish media reported Monday.
The pro-government Daily Sabah said Turkey’s national spy agency, MIT, had uncovered 56 operatives linked to nine separate networks who gathered “biographical intelligence” on foreign nationals, hacked into their communication devices and tracked their vehicles. Daily Sabah named one Israeli of Arab origin called Soliman Agbaria as one of the ringleaders.
Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency allegedly sent ethnic Arab assets in Istanbul to Lebanon and Syria to establish the locations of Lebanese Hezbollah, notably in Beirut’s Hrair Hreik municipality, with the aim of striking them with drones. All of their activities were orchestrated from Tel Aviv, Daily Sabah claimed.
The bust is the first high-profile operation to be announced since Ibrahim Kalin, former foreign policy adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took over MIT from its legendary boss, Hakan Fidan. The latter became foreign minister in the wake of presidential and parliamentary polls in May and was accused of leaking information about Israeli spies to Iran.
Daily Sabah provided an array of details about the alleged network, saying it included Turkish nationals as well. Neither the Turkish nor the Israeli governments have commented on the reports, which if accurate will have dealt something of a blow to Israeli intelligence activities in the region.
Daily Sabah reported in May that MIT had exposed another cell of 15 alleged Mossad agents in Istanbul. Six of them were arrested. Since Ottoman times, Istanbul has been a hotbed for assorted spies. Last year, Turkey and Israel together uncovered an Iranian plot to kill Israeli tourists in the city, where Russia’s state intelligence arm, the FSB, has murdered Chechen dissidents.
It remains unclear what impact, if any, the latest case will have on Ankara’s efforts to repair its frayed relationship with the Jewish state. There were earlier reports in the media that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be meeting Erdogan this month in Turkey.
Gallia Lindenstrauss is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank. “If true and such a meeting takes place, that means normalization steps embarked upon last year “will have exceeded all expectations,” she noted to Al-Monitor. Talks between Erdogan and Netanyahu are expected to focus among other things on the sale of liquefied natural gas from a field off the Gaza Strip via Turkey to Europe.
“Such a story about the spy ring is obviously an embarrassment, but if it remains unconfirmed with no practical actions or reactions on the part of Turkey, then bilateral relations can survive the negative shock,” Lindenstrauss added.
Hay Eytan Yanarocak, a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, takes a similarly sanguine view. Yanarocak recalled that when similar operations linked to Mossad were reported by the media in the past, “Israeli governments did not permit these to affect its normalization with Turkey” and “the current trajectory is similar.”
Yanarocak contends that the leaking by Turkish authorities of such counterintelligence coups to the media serves as a balancing factor in Ankara’s “ambivalent” relations with Israel, Russia and Iran, where it strives to avoid favoring one at the expense of the other.
