Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said he had been the target of a FETÖ campaign for uncovering the terrorist group’s secret communication methods while he was leading Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT).
The decryption of ByLock, FETÖ’s encrypted communication app, months before the group orchestrated its bloody coup attempt in July 2016, was the turning point in the fight against FETÖ, Fidan told Turkish private broadcaster Habertürk on Monday.
“Once we received the app's intelligence, we managed to decrypt it by setting up a special technical unit that tried several different methods,” Fidan recalled.
Prior to taking over as Türkiye’s top diplomat in June 2023, Fidan helmed MIT for over eight years. During this time, the agency oversaw dozens of investigations and operations to uncover FETÖ infiltrators active in Turkish institutions.
While he served as deputy secretary to then MIT director Sönmez Köksal in February 2012, Fidan was summoned by Istanbul’s Chief Public Prosecutor to be deposed in an investigation linked to the PKK terror group.
He described the summons as “one of the first moves in which FETÖ realized its intentions toward the Turkish state in a major operation.”
Fidan said he had been targeted by Israel previously, adding that FETÖ “took over the job later.”
“FETÖ saw that we would no longer allow the empire they had just started establishing in our system, the police force, intelligence and other institutions. They knew we could see where things were headed, that there could never be a parallel state in Türkiye,” Fidan said.
Before it launched the July 15 attempt, FETÖ was known as the Gülen movement, after its founder Fetullah Gülen, who embarked on a program to infiltrate his supporters into the civil service, judiciary and police from the mid-1980s.
To many, the group, boasting of being a “hizmet” ("service") movement, was seen as a faith-based group that outwardly promoted tolerance and interfaith dialogue. However, even before the attempted coup, the group had gained notoriety across Türkiye.
Judges, prosecutors and police officers tied to the terrorist group were involved in the "Sledgehammer" and "Ergenekon" trials between 2010 and 2013 that resulted in hundreds of military officers being wrongly imprisoned.
Fidan pointed out that FETÖ tried to discredit the Turkish intelligence agency by referring to the first “unmasking” of FETÖ with the discovery of its wiretaps in December 2013 when judicial and police officials linked to the group attempted a "judicial coup" by accusing ministers and their relatives of corruption.
“The Turkish state has a tradition dating back hundreds, thousands of years. It knows very well which methods to use to combat insurgents or thugs within itself,” Fidan added.
FETÖ has faced increased scrutiny following the coup attempt that killed 251 people and injured nearly 2,200 others. Tens of thousands of people were detained, arrested or dismissed from public sector jobs following the attempt under a state of emergency.
Hundreds of investigations launched after the attempt sped up the collapse of the group’s far-reaching network in the country, but FETÖ still has backers in army ranks and civil institutions who have managed to disguise their loyalty, as operations and investigations since the coup attempt have indicated.
In 2023, after spending more than six years to decipher an encrypted database seized from a top FETÖ member codenamed “Garson” ("Waiter") who was behind the group’s July 2016 coup, MIT said it found over 3,000 infiltrators of FETÖ were still active in the Turkish National Police.
New statements of “Garson,” an eyewitness in the case against FETÖ since surrendering in 2017, revealed the group maintained its surveillance on 320,000 members of the police for 16 years, up until its notorious first attempt to topple the government in December 2013.
The terrorist group faces operations almost daily as investigators still try to unravel their massive network of infiltrators everywhere. In 2024 alone, police apprehended hundreds of FETÖ suspects across the country, including fugitives on the western borders trying to flee to Europe.
Similarly, on Tuesday, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said it ordered the detention of 24 suspects linked to FETÖ’s infiltrators in the Land Forces Command of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).
The suspects wanted across nine provinces, are charged with communicating with FETÖ’s so-called “civil imams” through landlines. One of them is a “secret imam,” one is a former military student and 22 others are soldiers, including 14 who are still on active duty, the Ankara prosecutors said.
