Hakan Fidan


Hakan Fidan is a retired Turkish army sergeant, teacher, diplomat and the Head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization.

Career

After a first degree in management and political sciences at University of Maryland University College he got master's thesis and PhD thesis, both from Bilkent University. He was a non-commissioned officer in the Turkish Army from 1986 to 2001. He was the head of the Turkish Development and Cooperation Agency from 2003 to 2007. In November 2007 he was appointed as a deputy-undersecretary in the Prime Ministry. From May 2010 to February 2015, he was the undersecretary of the National Intelligence Organization. On 7 February 2015, he resigned from his position to run for the Turkish Grand National Assembly from the AK Parti. One month later, on 9 March 2015, he withdrew his candidacy and hours later was reappointed to his former job by the Government.

Controversies

In 2009 he was involved in secret peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Oslo, and he was later delegated to hold talks with Abdullah Öcalan and arranged the secret black marketing of Iran through Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government.
In 2014, voice recordings, where he, foreign minister Davutoğlu, Deputy Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Yasar Güler, and other military personnel discusses a potential false flag incursion into Syria, was leaked to YouTube and shared across Twitter. The event resulted in the Turkish government blocking access to Twitter, then YouTube, and finally the DNS servers of Google DNS and OpenDNS. In the voice recording, he is heard saying, to a military personnel, "... f legitimacy is an issue, I can simply send a few men there and have them launch missiles over to us. Legitimacy is not a problem. Legitimacy can be manufactured." Seymour Hersh later linked what was said in this leaked meeting with CIA–Erdoğan dealings on Syria.