In the months before Turkey’s failed coup, the country’s spy agency penetrated online chat rooms and decoded millions of secret messages but found no mention of the plot, senior Turkish intelligence officials said.
Agents checked tips pointing to a coup that led nowhere. Analysts studied the video sermons of an imam who the government alleges directed the plot and speculated if the color of his robes relayed secret orders to his followers.
Turkey’s spies, juggling terrorist threats from Islamic State and Kurdish separatists, struggled to make sense of clues that never seemed to add up until the conspiracy they feared most materialized on the night of July 15.
Failure to detect the coup revealed the limitations of Turkey’s spy agency, known as MIT, which is widely seen as operating a far-reaching domestic surveillance system that government critics allege serves to protect President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The challenge of sifting through a daily avalanche of electronic communications was compounded by encryption apps used by the alleged plotters, leaving Turkey’s spy service in the dark this year for several months.
No comments:
Post a Comment