The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 did not mark the end of more than four decades of Cold War with the West. It merely marked the beginning of a highly dangerous new phase of aggression against a severely weakened Russia desperate to stabilize and open to the West.
For the Rockefeller Empire that had dominated the US political process since the creation of NATO in 1949, the extraordinarily weakened state of Russia presented a golden opportunity to destroy their former adversary , Russia, as a functioning nation. If they could succeed in destroying Russia, they believed that they could eliminate the only remaining serious obstacle to what the Pentagon called Full Spectrum Domination – total control of land, oceans, skies, space, outer space, and cyberspace. One sole Superpower could dictate to the entire world as it saw fit. This was the dream of David Rockefeller.
As they were deploying Al Qaeda into Chechnya and the Caucasus during the 1990s – in order to secure oil pipeline routes for the Anglo-American oil majors independent of Russian control – the CIA, working with a network of strategists in Washington, began to build their most ambitious political Islam project ever.
It was called the Fethullah Gulen Movement, also known in Turkish as Cemaat, or “The Society”. Their focus was Hizmet, or what they defined as the “duty of service” to the Islamic community. And here is where it gets funny. The movement was based out of Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. There, its key figure, the reclusive Fethullah Gulen, was busy building a global network of Islamic schools, businesses, and foundations, all with untraceable funds. His Gulen Movement, or Cemaat, has no main address, no mailbox, no official organizational registration, no central bank account, nothing! His followers never demonstrated for Sharia or Jihad – their operations were all hidden from view.
The projects sponsored by Gulen-inspired followers today number in the thousands, span international borders and are costly in terms of human and financial capital. These initiatives include over 2000 schools and seven universities in more than 90 countries in 5 continents, two modern hospitals, multiple media channels (including Zaman – a Turkish newspaper), national and international Gulen conferences, Ramadan interfaith dinners, interfaith dialog trips to Turkey from countries around the world and many other programs. In addition, the Isik insurance company and Bank Asya (among the top 500 banks in the world), an Islamic bank, are affiliated with the Gulen community. All of this “projects inspired by Gulen-inspired followers”, left the actual ownership conveniently vague and completely untraceable.
Kemal Ataturk & the Making of a Modern Turkey
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, the Rothschilds were not satisfied. They wanted to dismember Turkey completely. Using their vassal countries in Europe, they launched many small wars in order to break up Turkey, between 1918 and 1924. This was when a nationalistic military general, Kemal Ataturk, rallied the remains of the Turkish army, and fought off the invaders. After leading a series of brilliant military campaigns in the 1920s to win the Independence War that he initiated against an invasion by foreign and allied forces of British, Greek, Italian, French and other victors of World War 1, Ataturk had established the modern Turkish state. He then launched a series of political, economic, cultural and religious reforms aimed at transforming the religiously-based Ottoman Caliphate into a modern, secular, and democratic nation-state. He built thousands of new schools, made primary education free and compulsory, and gave women equal civil and political rights, and reduced the burden of taxation on peasants. Turkey, under Ataturk, became fiercely nationalistic.
The very name of Ataturk struck terror into the hearts of London’s fundamentalists in the Islamic world, especially in the patently cultivated Sufi mystical cells of Turkey. Since the 1850s, the British had worked to develop an alliance between leading Sufi orders in Turkey, such as the Beqtashi and Naqshbandi, and the “pan-Islamic” Scottish Rite of Freemasons of Afghani and his followers. Together, this British subversive alliance formed the so-called “Young Turks “movement, which briefly took power in 1908, for a very short time. They were later crushed by Ataturk.
The Sufi cults had also managed to secure a tight grip over the Kurds in eastern Turkey, a troublesome ethnic minority that spilled over into Syria, Iraq and Iran. Millions of Turks and Turkish Kurds had been enveloped in mysticism and superstition. This was the breeding ground of ignorance, and it was the backwardness that Ataturk declared war upon. Turkey, at that time, was caught up in a wide variety of practices not in conformity with true Islamic beliefs.
After taking power, Ataturk proclaimed in 1925 that from that point on Turkey would be free from “sheiks, dervishes, disciples, baba, emirs, fortune tellers, magicians, witch doctors, writers of amulets for recovering lost property or the fulfillment of wishes, as well as services, dues, and costumes pertaining to these titles and qualities.
He said, : “The aim of the revolution which we are now accomplishing is to bring the people of the Turkish Republic into a state of society entirely modern and completely civilized in spirit and form, — it is necessary to defeat those mentalities incapable of accepting this truth — the minds of the nation has been deadened. As long as superstitions are not expelled from people’s minds, it will not be possible to bring the light of the truth into men’s minds. “
“To seek help from the dead is a disgrace to a civilized community. I flatly refuse to believe that today, in the presence of knowledge and science and civilization in all of its aspects, there exists in Turkey men so ignorant as to seek their material and moral well being from the guidance of one or another Sheik “.
Ataturk enforced his policy with bullets. Free-masonic lodges and fraternity houses of British-controlled Islamic fraternities, brotherhoods and orders were closed down and their organizations dissolved. Their assets were confiscated by the state, and the military swiftly punished anyone attempting to revolt against the decree.
The Muslim Brotherhood was Britain’s answer to the Ataturk challenge. Gulen and his movement aimed at nothing less than to roll-back the remains of the modern, secular, nationalistic Turkey, and return to the Caliphate of yore.
Gulen – a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
In 1999 Gulen’s movement attracted the alarm and attention of an anti-NATO wing of the Turkish military and of the Ankara government. Turkish TV aired footage of Gulen delivering a sermon to a crowd of followers in which he revealed his aspirations for an Islamic Turkey ruled by Sharia Law, as well as specific methods that should be used to attain that goal. In the secret sermon, Gulen said, : “ You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers— You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power—until that time, any step taken would be too early. With the patience of a spider we lay our net until people get caught in it”.
In 2000, Gulen was charged by the Turkish courts of treason and sentenced to 10 years. With the help of some very powerful figures in the CIA, Gulen fled to Pennsylvania. He never left the United States after that time, even though Erdogan’s Islamic courts later cleared him of all charges in 2006. His refusal to return confirmed his CIA ties, especially to his opponents.
Outwardly, Gulen cultivated an appealing profile on his official website as a purveyor of a “modern”, peaceful Sufi form of Islam, one adapted to today’s world. Self-promoting articles were typical, all praising the sublime wisdom of Gulen, giving an aura of Sufi tranquility, peace and love.
Unlike the CIA’s Mujaheddin Jihadists, the CIA decided to give Fethullah Gulen a radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing Jihadist, Gulen was presented to the world as a man of “peace, love and brotherhood “. The Gulen organization in the US hired one of Washington’s highest-paid public relations image experts, to massage his “moderate” Islamic image. “Why is this Imam different from all other Imams?” was the essential message. Gulen, the Turkish wolf, simply had a better tailor to cut and form the sheep’s clothing.
Gulen’s CIA “Friends”
The key CIA people who had helped Gulen flee Turkey, and who had brought him into the US, and arranged citizenship were Morton Abramowitz and Graham E Fuller. Graham Fuller was an old CIA operative. He had been immersed in the CIA’s activities in steering Mujaheddin and other political Islamic organizations since the 1980s. In 1988, as the Afghan war was winding down, Fuller “retired” from the CIA, to go over to the RAND Corporation.
RAND was a Pentagon- and CIA- linked Washington think tank. Established by the Rockefeller family, and sustained by grants from various Rockefeller entities, it was a think tank that provided policymakers with strategic options, to extend the Rockefeller Empires global position. Fuller’s work at RAND was instrumental in developing the CIA strategy for building the Gulen movement as a geopolitical force to penetrate the former Soviet Central Asia. Fuller intended that their man, Fethullah Gulen, to pay a major role, perhaps the major role, in their operations to “destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence In Central Asia”.
Embarrassing ties between Graham Fuller and that network of CIA-backed Caucasus Jihadists came to light in the aftermath of the April 2013 “Boston Bombers” attack. The two accused “bomber” brothers, Tamerlin and Dzhokhar, had an uncle born in Chechnya named Ruslan Tsarnaev. Ruslan was married in the 1990s, until their divorce in 1999, to Samantha Fuller, the daughter of Graham Fuller! Fuller even admitted that “Uncle Ruslan” had lived in Fuller’s house in Washington! You just can’t make this stuff up! Ruslan Tsarnaev had worked in the past for Halliburton and various CIA front entities.
The CIA & Gulen in Central Asia
Once safely entrenched in his remote, guarded compound in rural Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen’s global political Islam Cemaat spread across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xingiang Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller called for in his 1999 statement: “destabilize what remains of Russian power, and to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia”. Gulen was one of the major CIA operations figures in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
By the mid-1990s, more than 75 Gulen schools had spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan in Russia, amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Boris Yeltsin era. The schools all followed the same “elite school” model, offering high-quality education in the native language, Russian, as well as Turkish and English, and selecting pupils only from the “best” families, whose sons would clearly become future leaders of those countries.
The mission of the Gulen schools was, nominally, to re-establish Islam but a version of Islam according to the Gulen movement. Gulen-associated Turkish businessmen, students and teachers were sent into the former states of the Soviet Union with their well-prepared strategy. A new Ottoman Caliphate was coming into view for Gulen and his backers in Washington.
The CIA’s “English Teachers”
In 2011, Osman Gundes, former head of Turkish Intelligence (MIT) published a bombshell of a book that was only released in Turkish. In the book, Gundes revealed that the Gulen schools then growing up across Eurasia were providing a base for hundreds of CIA agents under cover of being “native-speaking English teachers”. Also, the American “English teachers” had been issued US Diplomatic passports, hardly standard fare for normal English teachers. English was taught under a project code-named “Friendship Bridge”. The CIA teachers submitted reports to an arm of the Pentagon.
Gundes claimed that first contacts of Gulen with the CIA went back to the 1980s, when the then unknown Gulen associated himself with right-wing anti-communist circles in Turkey backed by joint CIA and NATO “Gladio” network. This Gladio network was a CIA-directed assassination operation, designed to eliminate anyone opposing Washington’s agenda in Europe between the 1950s to the early 1990s. The same Gladio network was responsible for a series of terror attacks in Turkey, and whose death squads were responsible for 3,500 murders in the southeast region of Turkey during the 1970s and 1980s.
Gulen’s main contact in the CIA was Morton Abramowitz, stationed in Turkey as a CIA employee before he came there as US ambassador in the late 1980s.
Gulen Builds His “Spider Web” in Turkey
The Gulen Movement made major incursions into the Turkish state institutions at the same time it was setting up CIA “schools” and madrassas across Central Asia. Gulenists inside Turkey had already begun their patient “spider web” of institutional power back in the 1980s. One analyst described the enormous religious transformation of the once secular Turkey after some 30 years of Gulen activity: “Turkey has over 85,000 active mosques – the highest number per capita in the world, and with 90,000 imams, more imams than doctors or teachers. It has thousands of madrassa-like Imam-Hatip schools and about 4,000 more official state-run Quran courses, not counting the unofficial Quran schools, which may expand the total number 10-fold. In 2009, some 75% of Turkey’s 2 million preparatory school students were enrolled in Gulen institutions. Gulen controlled thousands of top tier secondary schools, colleges, and student dorms throughout Turkey, as well as private universities, the largest being Fatih University in Istanbul.
Gulen followers targeted youth in the Fethullah schools, and prepared them for future careers in legal, political, and educational professions in order to create the ruling future Islamic Turkish state. Taking their orders from Fethullah Gulen, wealthy followers continued to open schools. Children educated in Turkey, through the Gulen system are now in the highest positions. There are governors, judges, military officers. There are ministers in the government. They consult Gulen before doing anything.
Using the new power of the then-popular pro-Gulen AK Party of Prime Minister Erdogan, Gulen got the government to change textbooks, and emphasized religious courses. They concentrated especially on controlling the national police and the courts.
Turkey was in the process of a slow motion transformation into an Islamic state. When the AK Party came into power In 2002, they collaborated with Gulen Cemaat members already in the judiciary to strip the military of its political power, weakening the military’s traditional role as guardians of the Ataturk Constitution.
By the beginning of the new millennium, the Gulen Movement was weaving its spider web into every layer of the Turkish state. The successful election of Erdogan as Prime Minister, in 2002, was due to a deal struck between the politically ambitious Erdogan and the equally ambitious, if more discrete, Fethullah Gulen. In return for urging his many followers to vote for Erdogan, Gulen was assured official “protection” for his movement in Turkey. In 2004, almost 20% of the AK Party members of the Turkish Parliament were Gulen followers who took their “orders” from Gulen and not Erdogan.
It was an uneasy pact between two cunning players, as events in 2013 would later reveal, when Gulen and Washington began to demonize Erdogan for deviating from Washington’s script with Iran, Syria, and other strategic matters.
Heroin, NATO, and Gulen
The CIA and NATO were busy creating new heroin labs and transit routes out of Afghanistan across Central Asia. Such a “religious” movement like the Gulen Movement, with schools everywhere, would provide a perfect cover for heroin trafficking.
When the known major heroin drug routes out of Afghanistan to the West were mapped out, and an overlay map of the creation of major NATO or US military airfields was superimposed, along with a map of the major CIA or US-backed Jihadist operations – whether Al Qaeda or the Gulen Movement – from Afghanistan’s Mujaheddin to Kyrgyzstan, to Kosovo, to Chechnya, a coherent picture emerges that is the heart of a drugs-Jihadist insurgency across Eurasia.
After the US invasion of Afghanistan and under US-NATO control, heroin production and sales boomed. Azerbaijan has become one of the most strategically important heroin transit hubs since it has joined and come under NATO. Just like Turkey, nations with airfields under US command have become the most important transportation hubs for heroin.
The CIA’s Gulen Movement straddled all key points in that drug and destabilization nexus across Eurasia.
Acknowledgements:
Most of the information contained in these 6-part series on the weaponization of Islam has come from 2 sources, namely Richard Dreyfuss’s book “How the West Unleashed Fundamental Islam”, and William Engdahl’s book “Whom the Gods would Destroy”. Many thanks to these two investigative analysts for their research into this timely work.
Conclusion
Here, we have seen how the West has helped unleash fundamentalist Islam, with very different results. A very important point to note is that each side feels they are getting a bargain. The West is using radical Islam to destroy and neutralize its economic competitors. While radical and political Islam is using the help from the West to spread Islam, through many ways, around the world. In short, Muslim leaders are taking whatever help they can to further the cause of their religion, even if it means dealing with the devil – the Western intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. They know that, in the end, Islam will triumph, and the West will collapse.
The majority-99%-of the followers of Islam are not sympathetic to radical and political Islam. It’s the 1% at the top who are in bed with the CIA.
Now that we have a basic understanding of the geopolitics of Central Asia/Eurasia/oil wars, and the background of Turkish politics, we now move onto the next phase in our narrative. The next topic is Turkey, and the coup in Turkey.
