The Turkish president, who in recent months has repeatedly threatened an invasion of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, plans to deploy a secretive, specially trained unit attached to intelligence agency MIT to escalate tensions with Greece, a NATO ally and neighbor.

The MIT unit, the existence of which has never been publicly admitted, is a relatively new tool in the arsenal of Turkey’s intelligence agency and will be put to use for the first time in setting up a clandestine, military-style operation against a Western country.

The plot includes several options, ranging from sabotage in Greek islands close to the Turkish mainland to raising a Turkish flag on one or several uninhabited islets and rock formations as well as conducting a false flag operation to justify a Turkish response. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is still considering the alternatives submitted to him by his confidant, Hakan Fidan, the head of MIT, and has not yet decided which course of action he wants to take.

According to information obtained by Nordic Monitor from sources familiar with the plot, it will be up to this special unit created within the intelligence agency to carry out the operation in the Aegean Sea with logistical support from the Turkish military’s air and naval assets. The plot, kept strictly confidential on a need-to-know basis within Erdoğan and Fidan’s close circle, will be put into motion sometime near the general election in 2023 to rally the nation behind Erdoğan and bring a windfall vote for his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its nationalist allies.

For decades, MIT had no military-type operational capability, and its mandate had been mainly confined to information gathering operations to provide the best intelligence to policymakers in Turkey.

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When MIT needed muscle on the ground, it used to rely on several elite units in the military such as Combat Search and Rescue (Muharebe Arama Kurtarma, or MAK), a part of the Special Forces Command (Özel Özel Kuvvetler Komutanlığı); the Turkish navy’s Underwater Offense (Su Altı Taarruz, or SAT), the equivalent of the US Marines; and Underwater Defense (Sualtı Savunma, or SAS). Occasionally the police department’s Special Operations Police Force (Özel Harekat Polis) was also tapped by the intelligence agency to conduct domestic operations.

That started to change when Fidan, a hard-core pro-Iran Islamist who had no experience in intelligence, was appointed to lead the agency in May 2010. Fidan set out to transform the agency in line with instructions from his boss, transferring new people from other government agencies and at times recruiting some from the outside, especially from Islamist groups.

Read more: Nordic Monitor