President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has appointed his spokesperson Ibrahim Kalın as the head of the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), Erdoğan’s office announced late Monday.
Kalın replaced Hakan Fidan, who had been the intelligence chief since 2010 until he was named foreign minister on Saturday in Erdoğan’s Cabinet taking new shape following the May elections.
“My gratitude to our President Mr. Erdoğan for entrusting me with MIT. I thank everyone who has congratulated me and sent me their prayers for my new post,” Kalın wrote on Twitter once the news was out.
“I will continue working for a powerful, safe and independent Türkiye,” he said.
Kalın is a long-term confidant of Erdoğan and has served as spokesperson for the Presidency and been a foreign policy adviser for the president since 2014.
Born in Istanbul in 1971, he received his B.A. from Istanbul University’s History Department and his master’s degree from the International Islamic University Malaysia.
From 2002 to 2005, Kalın was a faculty member at the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He holds a Ph.D. from George Washington University on Islamic studies and was one of the founders of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), an Ankara-based think tank.
After being appointed as deputy chairperson of the Security and Foreign Policy Council of the Turkish Presidency in 2009, he became the first coordinator of the Prime Ministry Public Diplomacy Coordinatorship established in January 2010.
In 2012, he was named deputy undersecretary of the Prime Ministry.
On Dec.11, 2014, a year after Kalın earned his assistant professor title, Erdoğan announced that he would be the first official Presidential Press Secretary.
As he gave lectures on Islamic philosophy to graduate students at Ibn Haldun University between 2019-2022, Kalın earned his professorship in 2020.
Throughout his tenure, he was often sent as a spokesperson to help resolve critical issues, undertaking key responsibilities in foreign policy and security.
Erdoğan appointed him as a special representative during the plane crisis between Türkiye and Russia in 2015.
In 2017, he took the diplomatic initiative to defuse tensions between Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Kalın further played an active role in the Ukraine war by bringing the sides together, facilitating the Black Sea grain deal and the prisoner swap.
He presided over the Permanent Joint Mechanism meetings that have taken place between Türkiye, Sweden and Finland over the Nordic countries’ accession to NATO.
He made various trips on behalf of Erdoğan to the Turkic world, Balkans and Northern African nations in order to advance bilateral ties.
Kalın was also a part of the Turkish committee that partook in diplomatic negotiations for cease-fires and political solutions in the Syrian and Libyan wars, as well as talks to settle disputes in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.
He has actively participated in normalizing Türkiye’s ties with Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, Armenia, Syria and Egypt while making contributions to boosting relations with global and regional actors like the United States, EU countries, Russia, China and India.
In addition to internationally published articles and essays on Turkish foreign policy, Kalın is also the author of several books on politics, philosophy and civilization history.
Kalın is fluent in English, Farsi, Arabic and French.
He is married and has three children.
