Nordic Monitor

2) In the leaked recording, then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, then-Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu, MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan & then-Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler are heard discussing military operations in Syria on March 13, 2013.

3) Intelligence head Fidan says in the recording: “If needed, I would dispatch four men to Syria. [Then] I would have them fire eight mortar shells at the Turkish side and create an excuse for war.”

4) The judicial confirmation of the scandalous content was inadvertently revealed when the public prosecutor tried to pin the leak on a group critical of the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of espionage charges.

6) “A top-secret meeting was held at the Foreign Ministry with the participation of the minister, his undersecretary, the MİT undersecretary and the deputy chief of general staff. The conversation in the meeting was illegally recorded for reasons of...

7) ...political and military espionage, and the recordings were posted online. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched this espionage case on March 27, 2014 in investigation file No. 2014/47602,” the court said in its ruling.

8) The investigation of the leak was turned into an indictment in 2016 under file No. E.2016/24769, & the same allegations were included in the indictment. The Ankara court announced its decision in 2017 but postponed the publication of its reasoned decision until January 2019.

9) The authenticity of the recording had previously been confirmed by Turkish officials, but the judicial review of the allegations and the court’s acceptance of the charges of the prosecutor in its reasoned decision could land the Erdogan government in hot water internationally.

10) And event might help build an international case against Erdogan government in the future for fueling the civil war in Syria.

11) Court underlined the 7.7 minute clip was obtained through audio surveillance of the meeting attended by the FM & military, govt officials. “It is obvious that conversations in the audio are information needed to be kept secret & are considered to be a state secret,” it said.

12) In July 2015 German weekly magazine Focus published a report on an audio recording of a high-level security meeting at the Turkish Foreign Ministry concerning possible military action in Syria by means of a false flag operation that was recorded and then leaked by the US NSA.

13) The Turkish government blamed the leak on the Gülen movement, a civic group that is highly critical of the Erdogan government, although the investigation failed to provide any evidence to that effect and found nobody from the group who might have been involved in the leak.

14) In fact, the recording exposed major security flaws in the ministry as its CCTV system and jamming devices were not sufficient to prevent illegal recordings. The then-Ankara deputy public prosecutor Veli Dalgalı submitted a file about it on July 9, 2014, saying that ...

15) ...the perpetrators were unable to be identified with the available evidence. The details of the file reveal that even the basic security measures required to be in place where top secret meetings are held were not taken.

16) Prosecutor investigation reveals there was only one CCTV camera in the hall where the meeting was held & that it covers only the entrance of the hall and the elevator. Jamming devices used to prevent mobile devices from working during meetings were also not properly operating

17) Dalgalı said in his written report that the leaked audio recording might have been made in the meeting room by means of a recording device or bugging device that could be affixed to a wastebasket, remote, multipurpose plug or easily portable items.

18) Dalgalı noted that after exhaustive searches of the meeting room by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), it was clear that the audio was not recorded from outside through an audio surveillance system but from inside the meeting room.

19) At the urging of the government, Turkish prosecutor Dalgalı derailed the probe, did not investigate the illegal schemes plotted among officials in violation of Turkish law and hushed up the investigation when he could not identify the leaker.

20) As a reward, he was promoted to membership of the 5th Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals. Dalgalı is also one of the prosecutors who helped whitewash a corruption case involving German-based Turkish charity Deniz Feneri e.V., which was run by people close to Erdogan.

21) The probe into Deniz Feneri’s fraudulent connections to Turkey began in 2008. The Deniz Feneri administration was accused of funneling money collected for charity from workers in Germany into various companies and businesses in Turkey.

22) The Frankfurt State Court sentenced 3 Turkish nationals to prison terms of up to six years in2008 for involvement in embezzling and misusing donations totaling 17 million euros. The prosecutor in the case announced that there were suspicions of connections to Turkey.

23) The Erdogan government helped derail the probe on charity on the Turkish side and freed all suspects named in the indictment.

24) Following the leak of the audio recording, the Turkish government banned YouTube in March 2013 in the face of the revelations, while the opposition accused the government of planning a “provocation” involving Syria that had been exposed on social media.

25) “Now they have banned YouTube to prevent the world from learning about it. They know they would be considered war criminals,” Gursel Tekin, then-deputy chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said.

26) The YouTube ban was lifted in June 2014 after the country’s highest court ruled that the two-month ban on the video-sharing website violated freedom of expression.

27) Then-prime minister and current president Erdoğan confirmed the security meeting at a public rally in the city of Diyarbakır, saying that the wiretapping of his foreign minister’s office was “immoral,” an act of “cowardice,” “dishonest” and “mean.”

28) Then-Turkish President Abdullah Gül, also an Islamist, sided with Erdogan and strongly condemned the audio surveillance and leaking of the conversation, calling it an act of espionage.

29) Instead of questioning the false flag that would drag NATO’s second largest army into a war in Syria, Gul said: “This is an act of espionage against Turkey’s security. Those who took part in this, those who contributed to it, will definitely be exposed [and] will be punished"

30) The political opposition did not buy Erdogan’s argument. “They [the government] want to drag Turkey into a war [in Syria]. [They are] working on plots to win international legitimacy [in the case of a Turkish intervention in Syria],” Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the CHP, said.

31) Then-independent Kütahya deputy İdris Bal said the leaking of the conversation served the national interest. “In the final analysis, this [leaking] represents the exposure of a dirty game [and] is good in that context,” he added.