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As they were deploying Osama bin Laden’s Arab Mujahideen “holy warriors” into Chechnya and the Caucasus during the 1990s—in order to secure oil pipeline routes for the Anglo-American oil companies independent of Russian control—the CIA, working with a network of self-styled “neoconservatives” in Washington, began to build their most ambitious political Islam project ever.

It was called the Fethullah Gülen Movement, also known in Turkish as Cemaat, or “The Society.” Their focus was Hizmet, or what they defined as the “duty of Service” to the Islamic community. Curiously enough, the Turkish movement was based out of Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in the scenic foothills of the Pocono Mountains. There, its key figure, the reclusive Fethullah Gülen, was busy building a global network of Islam schools, businesses, and foundations, all with untraceable funds.^[i] His Gülen Movement, or Cemaat, had no main address, no mailbox, no official organizational registration, no central bank account, nothing. His followers never demonstrated for Sharia or Jihad—their operations were all hidden from view.

In 2008, US Government court filings estimated the global value of Gülen’s empire at anywhere between $25 and $50 billion. No one could prove how large it was as there were no independent audits. In a US Court testimony during the hearing on Gülen’s petition for a special US Green Card permanent residence status, one loyal Cemaat journalist described the nominal extent of Gülen’s empire:

The projects sponsored by Gülen-inspired followers today number in the thousands, span international borders and are costly in terms of human and financial capital. These initiatives include over 2000 schools and seven universities in more than ninety countries in five continents, two modern hospitals, the Zaman newspaper (now in both a Turkish and English edition), a television channel (Samanyolu), a radio channel (Burc FM), CHA (a major Turkish news agency), Aksiyon (a leading weekly news magazine), national and international Gülen conferences, Ramadan interfaith dinners, interfaith dialog trips to Turkey from countries around the globe and the many programs sponsored by the Journalists and Writers Foundation. In addition, the Isik insurance company and Bank Asya, an Islamic bank, are affiliated with the Gülen community.^[ii]

Bank Asya was listed among the Top 500 Banks in the world by London’s Banker magazine. It had joint-venture banking across Muslim Africa, from Senegal to Mali in a strategic cooperation agreement with the Islamic Development Bank’s Senegal-based Tamweel Africa Holding SA.^[iii]Zaman, which also owned the English-language Today’s Zaman, was the largest daily paper in Turkey. The journalist’s description of the Gülen holdings named in the US Court document was very carefully formulated, especially with the statement “projects sponsored by Gülen-inspired followers,” which left actual ownership conveniently vague and completely untraceable.

By the late 1990s, Gülen’s movement had attracted the alarm and attention of an anti-NATO wing of the Turkish military and of the Ankara government.

After leading a series of brilliant military campaigns in the 1920s to win the Independence War that he initiated against an invasion by  foreign and allied forces of British, Greek, Italian, French, and other victors of World War I, Ataturk had established the modern Turkish state. He then launched a series of political, economic, and cultural reforms aimed at transforming the religiously-based Ottoman Caliphate into a modern, secular, and democratic nation-state. He built thousands of new schools, made primary education free and compulsory, and gave women equal civil and political rights, and reduced the burden of taxation on peasants.

Gülen and his movement aimed at nothing less than to roll-back the remains of that modern, secular Kemalism in Turkey, and return to the Caliphate of yore. In one of his writings to members, he declared, “With the patience of a spider we lay our net until people get caught in it.”^[iv]

In 1998, Gülen defected to the US shortly before a treasonous speech he had made to his followers at a private gathering was made public. He had been recorded calling on his supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state,” treason by the Ataturk constitution of Turkey.

In 1999, Turkish television aired footage of Gülen delivering a sermon to a crowd of followers in which he revealed his aspirations for an Islamist Turkey ruled by Sharia (Islamic law), as well as the specific methods that should be used to attain that goal. In the secret sermon, Gülen said,

You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers . . . until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. . . You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey. . . Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is in confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence. . . trusting your loyalty and secrecy.^[v]

Shortly after Gülen fled to Pennsylvania, Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence against him for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state.”

Gülen never left the United States after that time, curiously enough, even though the Islamist Erdoğan courts later cleared him in 2006 of all charges.^[vi] His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a then friendly Erdoğan Islamist AKP government, heightened the conviction among opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties.

Gülen was charged in 2000 by the then secular Turkish courts of having committed treason. Claiming diabetes as a medical reason, Fethullah Gülen had managed to escape to a permanent exile in the United States, with the help of some very powerful CIA and State Department friends, before his indictment was handed down.^[vii] Some suspected he was forewarned.

Outwardly, Gülen cultivated an appealing profile on his official website as a purveyor of a “modern,” peaceful Sufi form of Islam, one adapted to today’s world. It wasn’t the 16^th century harsh Islam of the Wahhabite Bedouins of the Saudi Arabian desert. Under a benign-looking portrait of a pensive, almost philosophical Gülen stood the slogan, “Understanding and Respect.” Self-promoting articles with titles such as “Islamic scholar Gülen’s poems turned into songs for international album,” were typical, all praising the sublime wisdom of Gülen, giving an aura of Sufi tranquility, peace, and love.^[viii]

In a 2008 profile, The New York Times described Gülen’s organization, by then firmly entrenched across the United States with more than one hundred state-financed Charter Schools: “The Gulen movement. . . does not seek to subvert modern secular states, but encourages practicing Muslims to use to the full the opportunities they offer. It is best understood as the Islamic equivalent of Christian movements appealing to business and the professions.”^[ix] A better press promotion was hard to imagine. Similar articles or coverage of Gülen with uncritical praise emerged from the mainstream Western media ranging from the London Economist to CNN.

Gülen’s ultra-professional website claimed that the Gülen Movement, “funds all of its activities by donations from members of the community from the general public and does not accept any help support from governments in any form. This approach has helped the Movement stay away from corruption and politics.”^[x]

Because of the movement’s large and extensive business holdings, Gülen’s Hizmet had been described as having “characteristics of a cult or of an Islamic Opus Dei.” The comparison was perhaps more than to the point, in many respects.^[xi]

Unlike the CIA’s Mujahideen Jihadists, like Hekmatyar in Afghanistan or Naser Orić in Bosnia, the CIA decided to give Fethullah Gülen a radically different image. No blood-curdling, head-severing, human-heart-eating Jihadist, Fethullah Gülen was presented to the world as a man of “peace, love and brotherhood,” even managing to grab a photo op with Pope John Paul II, which Gülen featured prominently on his website.​​​​​​​

The Gülen organization in the US hired one of Washington’s highest-paid Public Relations image experts, George W. Bush’s former campaign director, Karen Hughes, to massage his “moderate” Islam image.^[xii] “Why is this Imam different from all other Imams?” was the essential message.

In reality, he was no different in goals from Hassan al-Banna or the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem or Said Ramadan or other Muslim Brotherhood leaders of the past eighty or more years whose strategy was to establish a new Islamic Caliphate under strict Islamic Sharia law. But, unlike the projects of al-Banna and the Egyptian Brotherhood, the Gülen project centered on the creation of a New Ottoman Caliphate, retracing the vast Eurasian domain of the former Ottoman Turkic Caliphates. Gülen, the Turkish wolf, simply had a better tailor to cut and form the sheep’s clothing.

Notably, when Gülen fled Turkey to avoid prosecution for treason in 1998, he chose not to go to any of perhaps a dozen Islamic countries which could have offered him asylum. He chose, instead, the United States. He did so with the help of the CIA.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing climate of closer scrutiny of Islamic groups in the United States, the US Government’s Department of Homeland Security and the US State Department both opposed Gülen’s application for what was called a “preference visa as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of education.”

They presented a detailed Court argument demonstrating that the fifth-grade dropout, Fethullah Gülen, should not be granted a preference visa. They argued that his background,

contains overwhelming evidence that plaintiff is not an expert in the field of education, is not an educator, and is certainly not one of a small percentage of experts in the field of education who have risen to the very top of that field. Further, the record contains overwhelming evidence that plaintiff is primarily the leader of a large and influential religious and political movement with immense commercial holdings. The record further showed that much of the acclaim that plaintiff claimed to have achieved had been sponsored and financed by plaintiff’s own movement.^[xiii]

However, over the objections of the FBI, of the US State Department, and of the US Department of Homeland Security, three former CIA operatives intervened and managed to secure a Green Card and permanent US residency for Gülen. In their court argument opposing the Visa, US State Department attorneys had notably argued, “Because of the large amount of money that Gülen’s movement uses to finance his projects, there are claims that he has secret agreements with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkic governments. There are suspicions that the CIA is a co-payer in financing these projects.”^[xiv]

The three CIA people supporting Gülen’s Green Card application were former US Ambassador to Turkey George Fidas, Morton Abramowitz, and Graham E. Fuller. They headed a list of twenty-nine persons who signed statements backing Gülen’s US Visa appeal.^[xv]

George Fidas had worked thirty-one years at the CIA dealing, among other things, with the Balkans, and had held a very senior position under the CIA Deputy Director on retiring. When he left the CIA, he joined the highly secretive faculty of the US Joint Military Intelligence College.^[xvi]

Morton Abramowitz was reportedly also with the CIA, if “informally.”^[xvii] He had been named US Ambassador to Turkey in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Turkish translator and “whistleblower,” named Abramowitz, along with Graham E. Fuller, as part of a dark cabal within the US Government that she discovered were using networks out of Turkey to advance a criminal, “deep state” agenda across the Turkic world, from Istanbul into China. The network that she documented included significant involvement in heroin trafficking out of Afghanistan.^[xviii]

On retiring from the State Department, Abramowitz served on the board of the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was a cofounder, along with George Soros, of the International Crisis Group. Both the NED and International Crisis Group were implicated in various US “Color Revolutions” since the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union, from Otpor in Serbia to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, to the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, to the 2011 Lotus Revolution in Tahrir Square in Egypt.^[xix]

Journalist Diane Johnstone described Abramowitz’ International Crisis Group as, “a high-level think tank supported by financier George Soros. . .devised primarily to provide policy guidance to governments involved in the NATO-led reshaping of the Balkans.” Johnstone added, “its leading figures include top US policymaker Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of NATO’s new ‘humanitarian intervention’ policy and sponsor of Kosovo Albanian [KLA—F.W.E.] separatists.”^[xx]

The Board members and “advisers” to Abramowitz’ International Crisis Group included the former US National Security Adviser and architect of the Afghan Mujahideen strategy of the 1980s, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of Saudi Intelligence and former Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the US; General Wesley Clark, former US NATO Supreme Allied Commander who ran the USA’s illegal bombing of Serbia in 1999; and former NATO Secretary-General, Javier Solana.^[xxi]

As head of Saudi Intelligence in the early 1980s, Prince Turki al-Faisal had played a central role working with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence and the CIA to create the Afghan Mujahideen. It was Turki who personally sent Osama bin Laden, a Saudi from an extremely wealthy family close to the Saudi monarchy, into Pakistan near the Afghan border some weeks before the December 1979 Soviet invasion. Bin Laden’s mission was to establish the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) to help finance, recruit, and train Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Prince Turki had been informed beforehand by US intelligence of the imminent Soviet invasion to come at the end of 1979.^[xxii]

Abramowitz and his International Crisis Group cohorts were not really a group that could be accused of excessive love of democracy or human rights. Their name belied their actual intent—fostering international crises to advance a covert deep state Washington agenda.

Abramowitz and Graham E. Fuller, both with extensive experience and knowledge inside Turkish political Islam, were also well acquainted with each other. Abramowitz even wrote the forward to one of Fuller’s books on the Turkish Kurdish question.^[xxiii]

Graham E. Fuller, the third CIA “friend” of Fethullah Gülen, was also no low-level CIA numbers analyst. He had been immersed in the CIA’s activities in steering Mujahideen and other political Islamic organizations since the 1980s. He spent 20 years as CIA operations officer stationed in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Afghanistan and was one of the CIA’s early advocates of using the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist organizations to advance US foreign policy.^[xxiv]

In 1982, Graham Fuller had been appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at CIA. There he was responsible for Afghanistan, where he had served as CIA Station Chief, for Central Asia, and for Turkey. In 1986, under Ronald Reagan, Fuller became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.^[xxv]

Fuller, author of The Future of Political Islam, was also the key CIA figure to convince the Reagan Administration to tip the balance in the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war by using Israel to illegally channel weapons to Iran in what became the Iran-Contra Affair.^[xxvi]

In 1988, as the Afghan Mujahideen war was winding down, Fuller “retired” from the CIA with a last rank as a very senior Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, to go over to the RAND Corporation, presumably to avoid embarrassment around his role in the Iran-Contra scandal for then Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, Fuller’s former boss at CIA.^[xxvii]

RAND was a Pentagon- and CIA-linked neoconservative Washington think tank. Indications are that Fuller’s work at RAND was instrumental in developing the CIA strategy for building the Gülen Movement as a geopolitical force to penetrate former Soviet Central Asia. Among his RAND papers, Fuller wrote studies on Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria, the “survivability” of Iraq, and the “New Geopolitics of Central Asia” after the fall of the USSR, where Fethullah Gülen’s cadre were sent to establish Gülen schools and Madrassas.

In 1999, while at RAND, Fuller advocated using Muslim forces to further US interests in Central Asia against both China and Russia. He stated, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”^[xxviii]

Clearly, by all evidence, Fuller and his associates in and around a certain faction in the US intelligence community intended their man, Fethullah Gülen, to play a major role, perhaps themajor role, in their operations to “destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”^[xxix]

Since the 1990s the Caucasus, including Chechnya, were a major preoccupation of CIA insurgency and terror operations using Jihadist Muslims.

​​​​​​​

Embarrassing ties between Graham Fuller and that network of CIA-backed Caucasus Jihadists came to light in the aftermath of the April 2013 “Boston bombers” attack. The two accused “bomber” brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an uncle born in Chechnya named Ruslan Tsarnaev. Ruslan was married in the 1990s until their divorce in 1999 to Samantha A. Fuller, the daughter of Graham E. Fuller.^[xxx]

Fuller even admitted that “Uncle Ruslan” had lived in Fuller’s home in the suburban Washington area and that Fuller went several times to the Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia just as the CIA was heating up the Chechen Islamic terror against Moscow, allegedly to “visit” his daughter and son-in-law.^[xxxi]

Ruslan Tsarnaev, who changed his name to Ruslan Tsarni, had worked in the past for companies tied to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, as well as working as a “consultant” in Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea in the 1990s with the State Department’s USAID, which has been widely identified as a CIA front.^[xxxii]

Graham Fuller and Fethullah Gülen apparently enjoyed a kind of mutual admiration society. In 2008, just around the time he wrote a letter of recommendation to the US Government asking to give Gülen the special US residence visa, Fuller wrote a book titled The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. At the center of the book was a paean of praise for Gülen and his “moderate” Islamic Gülen Movement in Turkey:

Gülen’s charismatic personality makes him the number one Islamic figure of Turkey. The Gülen Movement has the largest and most powerful infrastructure and financial resources of any movement in the country. . . . The movement has also become international by virtue of its far-flung system of schools. . . in more than a dozen countries including the Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union, Russia, France and the United States.^[xxxiii]

Once safely entrenched in his remote, guarded compound in rural Pennsylvania, Graham Fuller’s Turkish friend, Fethullah Gülen, and Gülen’s global political Islam Cemaat spread across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xinjiang Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller had called for in his 1999 statement: “destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”^[xxxiv]

Gülen’s organization had been active in that destabilizing with help from the CIA almost the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, when the nominally Muslim Central Asian former Soviet republics declared their independence from Moscow.

Gülen was named by one former FBI authoritative source as “one of the main CIA operation figures in Central Asia and the Caucasus.”^[xxxv]

By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five Gülen schools had spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and even to Dagestan and Tatarstan in Russia amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Boris Yeltsin era. The schools all followed the same “elite school” model, offering high-quality education in the native language, Russian, as well as Turkish and English, and selecting pupils only from “best” families, whose sons would clearly become future leaders of those countries.

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