CIA Officer Graham Fuller
The direct linkage between Iran-Contra, The Boston Marathon bombing and the recent failed Turkish coup is CIA officer Graham Fuller
By John Titus
Once again proving that CIA officers never actually retire, Graham Fuller has been caught with his hands all over the recent coup attempt in Turkey. The July 15th attempt from within the Turkish military to overthrow the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was met by snarky comments by former Central Intelligence Agency officials. The Huffington Post reports:
“Several former spooks appearing on CNN Friday night to discuss the attempted military coup in Turkey had more than a few pointers for the seemingly amateurish military officers leading the takeover efforts. And at least one contributor seemed more disappointed in their performance than relieved that the coup has thus far failed to topple a democratically elected government.
Leading the pack was Robert Baer, a veteran former CIA officer and author ― and, apparently, a former coup participant.
Baer told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that the Turkish coup was “not professionally done.”
“I have been involved in coups before,” he said. “They should have taken CNN Turk and closed it down the first minutes, the radio station, social media, the internet. Even if they didn’t arrest [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, they should have taken care of all of that right at the beginning.”
Baer also revealed that he had discussed the possibility of a coup with Turkish military officers in the past few months.”
And this:
“James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA who has advocated for the hanging of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, offered his analysis of the Turkish coup on CNN earlier in the evening, arguing that it was a tactical failure.
“With coups, as with military operations, the plans never survive the first part of the operation,” Woolsey said. “You have to be flexible enough to change your tactics as you’re going through. And it doesn’t sound like these coup plotters had that kind of flexibility.”
While that may sound like the Agency is attempting to distance itself from the disastrous performance of the plotters, it is evident that they were involved. The motivation appears to have been Turkey’s pivot to Russia, and it has been reported that Russia and Iran provided Erdogan with intelligence that the coup was in progress.
Graham Fuller has widely been implicated in the planning and execution of the debacle, and he has a long history of screwing things up. Here is some background from Fuller’s Wikipedia page:
“State Department[edit]
Fuller joined the State Department of the United States, entering the Foreign Service for assignments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.[7]
CIA[edit]
He served 20 years as an operations officer in the CIA. Assignments include postings in: Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong.[10] In 1982, the CIA appointed him National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia.[11] In 1986, the CIA appointed him vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council.[12][13]
Iran–Contra Affair[edit]
In 1987, Fuller was identified as the author of a 1985 study that according to the New York Times was “instrumental” in the decision of the Reagan Administration to secretly contact leaders in Iran and “eventually led to the covert sale of United States weapons to Tehran in what became the Iran–Contra affair.”[3][4] The document suggested that the Soviet Union was in position to influence Iran and that the United States might gain influence by selling arms to the country.[14] According to Fuller, he had revised his opinion as the situation developed, but though he had told Government officials, a written report on the change was not circulated.[14] Fuller denied that the original “think piece” he had prepared with Howard Teicher was “tailored … to support Administration policy.”[14]
After government[edit]
Fuller left the CIA in 1988 for the RAND Corporation, remaining as a senior political scientist until 2000.[8][10] At the RAND Corporation he wrote, among many publications, on political Islam in various countries, and on the geopolitics of the Muslim world.”
F. William Engdahl writes in “New Eastern Outlook” – “Graham E. Fuller – Where Were You On The Night Of July 15?”
(Excerpts)
“As a massive nationwide investigation by police and security forces continues inside Turkey, new damning details emerge almost daily that point to the key role of the CIA behind their Fethullah Gülen Movement (termed FETÖ for Fethullah Terrorist Organization in Turkish) and the US military. Now the Turkish media reports that none other than Gülen mentor, “former” CIA man Graham E. Fuller, along with another “former” CIA person and close Fuller associate, Henri J. Barkey, were at a luxury hotel on one of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, some twenty minutes from Istanbul, on the night of July 15.”
“According to the Istanbul Yeni Safak paper, on the July 15 night of the coup Henri Barkey and a group of seventeen others, mostly foreigners, met for hours in a locked room in the Splendid Palas hotel on the tourist Princes’ Island outside Istanbul and reportedly followed coup developments on TV amid their closed-door talks, according to testimony of hotel personnel. The paper cites a source from Istanbul Police’s Intelligence, Counter Terror, Cyber Crime and Criminal Units, who reported that Barkey was holding a meeting at the hotel with 17 top figures, most of them foreign nationals, on July 15, the day of the failed coup attempt in Turkey.
According to the hotel management, Barkey had held a “meeting that lasted hours until the morning on July 16 in a special room. They have been following the coup attempt over TV channels,” the hotel personnel told police.
Graham E. Fuller too?
Other reports from well-informed Turkish independent journalists say that among the members present with Barkey the night of the coup was former CIA senior officer and mentor of Fethullah Gülen, Graham E. Fuller, former CIA Station Chief in Turkey. That would be no surprise. Fuller and Barkey are both old Langley CIA associates. Both have long involvement with affairs Turkish. They even co-authored a book, Turkey’s Kurdish Question.”
Istanbul-based Yeni Safak News confirms with more information:
“Eight soldiers, who fled Turkey after the abortive coup attempt, actually intended to help the ex-CIA chair Graham Fuller from Istanbul where he was coordinating the coup plot on July 15, an AK Party MP said.
“They were trying to whisk Fuller away that night. The helicopter was also going to take him to Greece, not only the pro-coup soldiers,” Orhan Deligöz, an AK Party deputy in Erzurum, the eastern province which is hometown of Fetullah Gülen, wanted for forming and running terror organisation.
Deligöz has given insight into what Fuller had intended to do in Istanbul before his unplanned departure from Turkey. “On that night, Fuller was holding a meeting with experts at the hotel he was staying. He even had requested technical equipment installed to make a speech to the United States via a video link. If the coup attempt had reached its aim, he would have contacted the States for discussions over the pro-coup era and unfolding events following the coup.”
Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Istanbul, is said to have fled to Turkey a few days before the failed coup plot and spent his days in Splendid Palace Hotel in Büyükada, also known as Prinkipo, the largest of the Princes’ islands near İstanbul. Fuller had reportedly checked into the hotel with a passport issued in the name of Henry Barkey.
Deligöz believes that U.S.-based terrorist Fetullah Gülen, cloaking himself as a Muslim cleric, has been collaborating with CIA for nearly five decades. “In 1964, Fuller was assigned as CIA station chief in Istanbul. Two years later, Gülen began establishing his religious community. In later years, Gülen has been given a residence permit in the States with the help of Fuller,” the MP explained. “This is not a newly-planned project, his followers had been training for this purpose since the 1960s.”
Graham, Graham, Graham, get your hands out of the cookie jar…
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Perhaps the strangest connection Graham Fuller has is to the Boston Marathon bombing. In April 2013 we reported on the relationship between the accused bombers the Tsarnaev brothers, their uncle Ruslan and Graham Fuller:
Boston Bombing: Tsarnaev Uncle Married CIA Officer’s Daughter
In an interesting twist of intrigue, “Gawker” and other sources are reporting that The uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers was married to influential CIA official Graham Fuller:
“Ex-CIA Agent Denies Rumors of Ties to Ruslan Tsarnaev”
“Graham Fuller, a retired CIA officer whose daughter was briefly married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Uncle Ruslan), has come out and flatly denied any CIA connection to the Tsarnaev’s, calling the allegations “absurd.”
Fuller’s daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan from the mid-to-late 1990’s, before divorcing. Ruslan lived with the retired CIA officer in Maryland for a year, but Fuller saw no interest in politics, policy, or the CIA, from Ruslan. “Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics,” Fuller wrote in an email to Al-Monitor.
William Engdahl, in the above linked article adds:
“Indeed, it would seem something recently has stung the 78-year old wily CIA veteran, Fuller. He claims to have retired from the agency years ago, when he went over to the CIA-tied RAND Corporation. Yet he re-emerged from the shadows during the Boston Marathon bombing to try, feeling obviously on the spot, to deny links to the two Chechyn brothers accused of that event. Fuller had then to admit that the Tsarnaev brothers had an Uncle, ‘Uncle Ruslan’, aka Ruslan Tsarnaev, a former employee of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton in Central Asia, who had lived in Fuller’s home for a stint when Uncle Ruslan was married to Fuller’s daughter. Bizarre enough, just ‘coincidence’ for sure…”
It is also known that Tamerlan Tsarnaev attending training at a CIA-sponsored operation in the North Caucasus intended to foment extremism against Russia:
Russian Report: Tsarnaev Trained at U.S.-Sponsered Seminar:
http://www.covertbookreport.com/russian-report-tsarnaev-trained-at-u-s-sponsered-seminar/
And the reports that the Tsarnaev’s had been under years of FBI surviellance:
Boston Bombing: FBI, Russian Spies, and Chechen Separatists
“One of the two men suspected of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings was under FBI surveillance as a suspected “extremist” for at least three years, according to his parents.
As questions were raised about how well known Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were to federal investigators, their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said that the FBI had spoken to the family regularly: “They were telling me that Tamerlan was really an extremist leader and they were afraid of him. They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremists’ sites.” She added that the police were monitoring her son “at every step”.
On Sunday’s “Meet The Press”, spokesmen for the agency said that the FBI had dropped the investigation, and later Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled overseas – possibly for terrorist training.
Much of this intrigue is supported by a document on the FBI website at this link:
-“Once the FBI learned the identities of the two brothers today, the FBI reviewed its records and determined that in early 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.
In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.”
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It seems there is no way it is possible that the FBI, conducting years of surveillance on the Tsarneav’s, could have overlooked the fact that their uncle Ruslan was related by marriage to a top CIA officer who was instrumental in the plan to weaponize Islam.
And further, Graham Fuller must surely feel the sting of blowing his cover on so many operations. This story is not yet over…
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_E._Fuller
http://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/coup-plotters-in-turkey-aimed-to-whisk-graham-fuller-to-greece-mp-2502886
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cia-officials-turkey-coup-advice_us_578a2d02e4b08608d334c32c?section=
http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/09/graham-e-fuller-where-were-you-on-the-night-of-july-15/
Boston Bombing: Tsarnaev Uncle Married CIA Officer’s Daughter
