The Power Strip

 

Let’s start with the corridor, because that is where the story starts, and because corridors are where the most important things in this world seem to happen while nobody is paying attention.

It was the night of November 24, 2011, and a man named Hasan Narmanlı was working. That was all. He was a technician at the official residence of the Turkish prime minister in Çankaya, in Ankara, and he had the kind of job nobody notices until something stops working. Around seven in the evening, a team came to inspect the rooms. This was routine. Rooms in buildings like that get inspected the way teeth get cleaned. You don’t think about it. You sit in the chair.

Narmanlı went along with them, as did Volkan Korkmaz, the residence’s head of security. Two men whose job was to know what was in those rooms and who was in them.

Then the team reached the prime minister’s office, and two of the officers asked the technician and the security chief to step out. The reason was noise. The noise, they said, was interfering with the inspection.

Think about that. Noise.

It is such a small, reasonable-sounding thing to say. It is the sort of excuse that slides right past you, the way a coin slides into a vending machine. Narmanlı and Korkmaz went out and stood in the corridor with another officer, and the door of the office closed on the two who remained.

They waited about ten minutes. Ten minutes is long enough to read a few pages of a paperback or to check your phone twice. It is long enough to change a power strip.

After that, the two officers came out and moved on to other rooms, and nothing happened. That was the beauty of it, if you want to call it beauty. Nothing happened for a very long time.

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Here is what prosecutors would say, three years later, in a thick indictment that would be accepted by the Ankara Heavy Penal Court on December 1, 2014: those ten minutes were the whole job. The inspection was the cover story, and the power strip standing in the prime minister’s office was no longer the one that had been there when the team arrived. They alleged it had been swapped for a copy with microphones inside it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The corridor, the noise, the closed door: all of that came out later, as testimony and as pieces of a case. In the moment there was only a technician and a security chief standing in a hallway, and a feeling that, if it was there at all, was probably nothing more than boredom.

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A month passed, or nearly.

In late December of that year, the prime minister’s office had decided it was time to make sure no one was listening. Talk had gone around about the need for a technical sweep of the places Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used. MIT, the National Intelligence Organization, said its own equipment was good enough, and the office approved the inspection. It would run from December 28 to 30, 2011, and it would cover a lot of ground: the private residence in Keçiören, the headquarters of the AKP, the central government building, and the official residence in Çankaya. Mustafa Varank, then the prime minister’s chief adviser, walked along with the team.

On December 28, in the prime minister’s private office, an MIT team found something that should not have been there.

It was a hidden radio transmitter, sitting inside an electrical terminal. The newspaper Yeni Akit would later report that its signal had been picked up at around 416 MHz. The terminal sat near four telephones. One of them was Erdoğan’s encrypted phone.

Let that sit for a moment. The most carefully protected line in the building, the one meant to carry the things that couldn’t be said anywhere else, and the thing next to it was breathing.

They put the terminal under X-ray, and the X-ray showed components inside that had no business in an ordinary piece of electrical hardware.

The next day, in Erdoğan’s office at the Çankaya residence, they found a second one. This one wasn’t transmitting when they got to it. Maybe it was sleeping. Machines don’t sleep, of course, but that is the word your mind reaches for when you’re staring at a thing that was put somewhere in the dark and told to wait.

The laboratory work found what the eye might have suspected. The two devices had similar designs and similar methods of installation, two children of the same parent. On December 30, the MIT team went back over four rooms at the Keçiören residence and found nothing more.

Both devices, the estimates said, had been in place about a month. Two microphones each, a radio transmitter, power drawn straight from the building’s own electrical system, so there was no battery to run down. They would keep listening as long as the lights stayed on. Tests put their range at no less than fifty meters indoors and three hundred outdoors.

And here is the part that should keep you up at night, if anything should: nobody knew who had been on the other end. Nobody could say whose ears those signals had reached, or which conversations, if any, had been carried out of those rooms and into someone else’s.

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You would think a discovery like that would set off alarms. It didn’t. There was no public investigation, no sirens. On February 24 and March 6, 2012, a person named Mehmet Kaya emailed complaints to the Ankara Public Prosecutor’s Office. Toward the end of the year, the office asked the prime minister’s office for information. The Prime Ministry Inspectorate didn’t begin its administrative investigation until early January 2013.

That is a long time. In a story like this one, time is always the thing that does the real work.

When the findings finally came together, they pointed inward, at police personnel assigned to the routine security sweeps around the prime minister. Some belonged to the Directorate for the Protection of the Prime Minister. Others served in the Police Intelligence Directorate. According to the indictment, they were suspected of using those sweeps as cover. The inspectors, in other words, were the thing being inspected for.

The court’s reasoning described a patient piece of craftsmanship. The devices had been prepared in advance, somewhere else. The electronics went inside extension power strips, and then a filler material was poured in, along with a special mold, so that anyone who opened the casing wouldn’t see anything wrong. TÜBİTAK, Turkey’s scientific research council, identified the filler as thermoplastic polyurethane and estimated that it cured on December 4 and 5, 2011. Somebody had stood over that plastic and waited for it to set.

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The indictment named thirteen defendants from the Police Intelligence Directorate, the Directorate for the Protection of the Prime Minister, and TÜBİTAK itself. Six were charged as primary perpetrators and seven as helpers.

According to the indictment, as published by T24, Ali Özdoğan, head of the Technical Section of Police Intelligence, organized the operation. Serhat Demir, head of the Security Systems Bureau of the Directorate for the Protection of the Prime Minister, directed the work in the field. Sedat Zavar, Enes Çiğci, and İlker Usta were alleged to be the ones who actually installed the devices. Ahmet Türer was alleged to have supported and directed the operation.

Then came the matter of the plastic. After MIT sent the evidence to TÜBİTAK to be examined, prosecutors alleged that Hasan Palaz, a former TÜBİTAK official, influenced the process to blur the time of installation. A chemical engineer named Hamza Turhan received the request to analyze the filler and passed his notes up to Palaz. The notes went on to Gökhan Vıcıl, a mechanical engineer, who wrote the report for MIT.

A second estimate, from TOBB, put the first use of the filler material around November 20, 2011. TÜBİTAK’s testing put the curing at December 4 and 5. From those two dates and the testimony of a technician who had been asked to wait in a hallway, the indictment concluded that the devices had gone in on November 24 and 25.

The corridor again. The noise. The ten minutes.

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Prosecutors alleged it was political espionage, with the information meant to benefit an organized network inside the police. Later investigations looked at a wider circle. In 2015, Ömer Altıparmak, a former head of the Police Intelligence Directorate, appeared on a list of suspects in a separate indictment about the alleged FETÖ/PDY organization. That indictment, however, did not establish that Altıparmak or Fethullah Gülen had personally ordered the devices installed. The distance between suspected and proven is wide, and it was never closed.

The courts moved the way courts do. At a hearing on May 4, 2015, Sedat Zavar said he might have taken part in a security inspection at the prime minister’s office once or twice. He denied installing anything and named Ali Özdoğan as the man who gave him orders. İlker Usta denied everything. On June 26, 2015, the court sentenced each defendant to seven years and six months.

That did not hold. The 16th Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court overturned the verdict on August 2, 2016. After several case files were consolidated, the Ankara Second Heavy Penal Court issued a new verdict on April 19, 2018: Zavar got fifty-four years, six months, and seven days, Usta fifty years, six months, and seven days. Ten of fourteen defendants were sentenced. In December 2020, a re-examination acquitted Palaz and Vıcıl of charges of concealing or destroying evidence, and Zeki Bulut of violating the confidentiality of communications.

The 2018 verdict also carried charges of membership in the organization the Turkish government calls FETÖ/PDY, the Gülen network. The case came out of the rupture between Erdoğan and Gülen, a break that widened after the corruption investigations of December 2013. The government accused Gülen’s followers of building a parallel structure in the police and the judiciary. Those accusations, though, did not prove that every official involved shared one affiliation or one motive.

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Scholars have tried to name what this was. Özgün Topak, in a 2019 Security Dialogue paper, called the Turkish surveillance system an “authoritarian surveillant assemblage,” a web of institutions and informants and monitors that work together to control a society. His research did not address this case. But the shape fits: the access that was given to protect the head of government was allegedly used to watch him instead.

Mehtap Söyler, writing about the Turkish deep state in 2015, put it this way: “The state emerges in a democracy that lacks civilian-democratic oversight of the security sector.” The people with the keys are the people who can copy them.

Then, in July 2016, not even five years after two devices were found in two offices, soldiers tried to overthrow the government, and failed. The government blamed the Gülen movement. Gülen denied it. The British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee judged that the public evidence was not enough to show the movement as an organization had planned the coup, though it left open the involvement of individuals who might have been connected to it.

So there it is, and there is no tidy ending, which is how these things usually go. A power strip. A hallway. Ten minutes of noise that someone said was in the way.