Turkish Media Research Finds US Think Tank Links to Turkey’s Coup

Concerning the case, the Turkish official Anadolu news agency in a report has shed light on the role of the Stratfor think tank in shaping of the July 15 military coup in Turkey. It claimed that the posts published on the official Twitter account of the research institute at the night of the coup in practice paved the way for the mutineers to chase the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
 
According to Anadolu's report, the research, security, and intelligence Stratfor think tank at the night of the July 15 coup posted three times on its Twitter account in short breaks information about the flight course of plane carrying Erdogan while the coup plotters were looking for him.
 
Disclosing information about flight of the Turkish president at the plot night, Stratfor once again drew the eyes towards itself. At the coup night, the tweets of the American think tank became several times more than the number of its normal days posts, easing the work of the plotters who were desperately in search of address of President Erdogan.
 
In its first post, Stratfor reported about flying of Erdogan’s plane over the Sea of Marmara. The second post included data about a possible landing of the presidential plane in Istanbul Ataturk Airport. In addition to confirmation of the plane's landing in the airport, the third Twitter post shared data on position and coordinates of the aircraft in Ataturk international airport.
 
Anadolu news agency added that the officials of the American intelligence institute so far declined to give full and rational answers to questions of the Turkish news agency about the method of rapid tracking of the course of the flight of the Turkish president's plane, and the reasons behind sharing the information online.
 
In addition to the initial three posts, the American think tank published a false Twitter news of MSNBC network about Erdogan’s placing asylum application to Germany. By doing so, Stratfor has doubled the negative reactions coming to it from public.
 
A university professor from Turkey Biril Akgun has told Anadolu new agency that Stratfor was only ostensibly transparent, but it was not obvious which institution or persons are managing it. The professor continued that the Twitter posts of the think tank during the military coup showed that it was the backyard of the CIA. The objective behind this work was helping success of the coup, because at that night even the Turkish intelligence services had failed to get the data on whereabouts of Erdogan, according to the professor.
 
Professor Akgun added that such institutes are not founded for simply publishing neutral news. Since past, Stratfor had been known as CIA's unofficial backyard and shadow service. The think tank is ostensibly independent but it holds unofficial deep relations with the US organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency. The data at the coup night didn't come to Stratfor by accident, rather, the CIA had provide the information for the firm.
 
Earlier in 2012 WikiLeaks posted millions of Stratfor internal correspondence online. Just unlike claims of Stratfor, rather than being based on reliable sources, Stratfor analyses came from intelligence gathering by its spies all around the world.
 
"According to one of the leaked documents, Stratfor had paid a person with connections to the Lebanese army $6,000 a month for Middle East analyses," noted Anadolu new agency.
 
Having in mind that Stratfor makes money from selling its reports and analyses online, WikiLeaks documents gave a list of clients of Stratfor. They included Dow Chemical Company, the second-largest multinational producer of chemical material based in Michigan, Lockheed Martin, an aerospace company producing military and intelligence equipment,  and the world's largest weapons contractor, Northrup Grumman Corporation, a producer of military aircrafts and other defense systems, and also active in, military information technology consultation, and the US state agencies including United States Department of Homeland Security, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the United States Marine Corps.
 
This is not the first time that the US research firms are accused of involvement in some military coup attempts in foreign countries. During the color revolutions in Eastern Europe, some American institutes linked to the billionaire George Soros including Open Society Foundations and Soros Foundation, were accused of financing and security supporting pro-Western political parties and also shaping the soft and coup-style revolutions. They focused on bringing to power governments close to the West.