Turkey blows Israel’s cover for Iranian spy ring

[Magda Hassan]

This come from David Ignatius a loyal hack for the US empire, and may well be his 'un-named' source, so this may need to be handled with care. And I don't see any US outrage at this either.....just crickets.

Turkey blows Israel's cover for Iranian spy ring

The Turkish-Israeli relationship became so poisonous early last year that the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to have disclosed to Iranian intelligence the identities of up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their Mossad case officers.By David Ignatius, Thursday, October 17, 10:41 AM E-mail the writer

Knowledgeable sources describe the Turkish action as a "significant" loss of intelligence and "an effort to slap the Israelis." The incident, disclosed here for the first time, illustrates the bitter, multi-dimensional spy wars that lie behind the current negotiations between Iran and Western nations over a deal to limit the Iranian nuclear program. A Turkish Embassy spokesman had no comment.


Israeli anger at the deliberate compromise of its agents may help explain why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became so entrenched in his refusal to apologize to Erdogan about the May 2010 Gaza flotilla incident . In that confrontation at sea, Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish-organized convoy of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Nine Turks were killed.
Netanyahu finally apologized to Erdogan by phone in March after President Obama negotiated a compromise formula. But for more than a year before that, the Israeli leader had resisted entreaties from Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to heal the feud.
Top Israeli officials believe that, despite the apology, the severe strain with Erdogan continues. The Turkish intelligence chief,Hakan Fidan, is also suspect in Israel because of what are seen as friendly links with Tehran; several years ago, Israeli intelligence officers are said to have described him facetiously to CIA officials as "the MOIS station chief in Ankara," a reference to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The United States continued to deal with Fidan on sensitive matters, however.
Though U.S. officials regarded exposure of the Israeli network as an unfortunate intelligence loss, they didn't protest directly to Turkish officials. Instead, Turkish-American relations continued warming last year to the point that Erdogan was among Obama's key confidants. This practice of separating intelligence issues from broader policymaking is said to be a long-standing U.S. approach.
U.S. officials were never sure whether the Turkish disclosure was done in retaliation for the flotilla incident or was part of a broader deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations.
Israeli intelligence had apparently run part of its Iranian spy network through Turkey, which has relatively easy movement back and forth across its border with Iran. The Turkish intelligence service, known as the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, conducts aggressive surveillance inside its borders, so it had the resources to monitor Israeli-Iranian covert meetings.
U.S. officials assessed the incident as a problem of misplaced trust, rather than bad tradecraft. They reasoned that the Mossad, after more than 50 years of cooperation with Turkey, never imagined the Turks would "shop" Israeli agents to a hostile power, in the words of one source. But Erdogan presented a unique challenge, as he moved in 2009 tochampion the Palestinian cause and, in various ways, steered Ankara away from what had been, in effect, a secret partnership with Jerusalem.
The Israeli-Turkish intelligence alliance was launched in a secret meeting in August 1958 in Ankara between David Ben-Gurion, then Israel's prime minister, and Adnan Menderes, then Turkey's prime minister. "The concrete result was a formal but top-secret agreement for comprehensive cooperation" between the Mossad and Turkish intelligence, wrote Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their 2012 book, "Spies Against Armageddon."
The groundwork had been laid secretly by Reuven Shiloah, the founding director of the Mossad, as part of what he called a "peripheral alliance strategy." Through that partnership, Israelis provided training in espionage to the Turks and, ironically, also to Iranians under the shah's government, which was toppled in 1979.
Fidan, the Turkish spy chief, is a key Erdogan adviser. He became head of the MIT in 2010 after serving as a noncommissioned officer in the Turkish army and gaining a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a doctorate in Ankara. After Fidan took over the Turkish service, "he rattled Turkey's allies by allegedly passing to Iran sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel," according to a recent profile in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal also noted U.S. fears that Fidan was arming [URL="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/10/turkey-must-control-jihadists-entering-syria.html"]jihadist rebels in Syria
[/URL].



The Netanyahu-Erdogan quarrel, with its overlay of intelligence thrust and parry, is an example of the kaleidoscopic changes that may be ahead in the Middle East. The United States, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are all exploring new alliances and struggling to find a new equilibrium overtly and covertly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/d...story.html

[Magda Hassan]

Then there is this article on the same subject covered in the Jewish press. They seem to be inciting someone to blow up the Turkish intel chief with a car bomb. They are also trying to link Fidan to 'jihadists' and other enemies of the west.

Turkey Exposed 10 Israeli Agents in Iran Yet Erdogan remains among Obama's key confidants. By: Yori Yanover Published: October 17th, 2013

Turkish spy chief Hakan Fidan is basically an Iranian agent. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed to Iranian intelligence the identities of as many as 10 Iranians who had been meeting with their Mossad case officers in Turkey, The Washington Post's David Ignatius reported Thursday.

The move was described by "knowledgeable sources" as causing a "significant" loss of intelligence and "an effort to slap the Israelis." A Turkish Embassy spokesman had no comment.

Ignatius thinks this was the reason Netanyahu was waiting for so long to apologize to Turkey for the 2010 Gaza flotilla fiasco he was furious. For more than a year, Bibi had resisted appeals from Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to say I'm sorry to the Turks and bring the feud to an end.

But regardless of the apology, there's no love lost between Erdogan and Israel. In fact, Israeli intelligence sources have no doubt that Turkish intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, is basically an Iranian agent. They've described Fidan to CIA officials as "the MOIS (Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security) station chief in Ankara."

Nevertheless, the United States is still dealing with Fidan on sensitive matters, Ignatius reports. U.S. officials were so sorry to see ten good men die as a result of Erdogan's treachery, but they didn't protest to Turkish officials. Turkish-American relations continued warming last year, writes Ignatius, to the point that Erdogan was among Obama's key confidants.

The practice of separating intelligence issues from policy issues is supposedly a long-standing U.S. approach. We keep our friends far and our enemies up close. It all makes sense when you think global.

Israeli intelligence had apparently run part of its Iranian spy network through Turkey, Ignatius speculates, saying Turkey has relatively easy movement back and forth across its border with Iran. The Turkish intelligence service, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, was probably monitoring Israeli-Iranian covert meetings.

The Mossad is probably to blame here, say the Americans, who believe that after more than 50 years of cooperation with Turkey, the Mossad simply couldn't imagine the Turks would "shop" Israeli agents to a hostile power. So, it turns out the Mossad can also be naïve.

If anyone deserves to find a special surprise in his car one morning, it's Fidan, the Turkish spy chief. He is a key Erdogan man, who was handed the MIT in 2010, after serving as a noncommissioned officer in the Turkish army and getting a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a doctorate in Ankara. After Fidan took over the Turkish service, "he rattled Turkey's allies by allegedly passing to Iran sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel," according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also mentioned that Fidan was arming jihadist rebels in Syria.

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking...013/10/17/

[Magda Hassan]

Advisor to Erdogan says it is psychological warfare against Turkey:

Mustafa Varank

Hükümete ve istihbarata karşı uluslararası psikolojik harp harekatından önümüzdeki uzun seçim döneminde vazife çıkaranlar mutlaka olacaktır.

[Magda Hassan]

This was from the WSJ just a week ago. Emre Uslu who is quoted below is also in the Gulen community. Once Erdogan's friend and now enemy but still popular with the US.

Turkey's Spymaster Plots Own Course on Syria

Hakan Fidan Takes Independent Tack in Wake of Arab Spring

• JOE PARKINSONin Istanbul
  

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Obama and John Kerry met with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and Turkish intelligence chief Fidan, second and third from left, in May.



On a rainy May day, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan led two of his closest advisers into the Oval Office for what both sides knew would be a difficult meeting.
It was the first face-to-face between Mr. Erdogan and President Barack Obama in almost a year. Mr. Obama delivered what U.S. officials describe as an unusually blunt message: The U.S. believed Turkey was letting arms and fighters flow into Syria indiscriminately and sometimes to the wrong rebels, including anti-Western jihadists.
Seated at Mr. Erdogan's side was the man at the center of what caused the U.S.'s unease, Hakan Fidan, Turkey's powerful spymaster and a driving force behind its efforts to supply the rebels and topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, Mr. Fidan, little known outside of the Middle East, has emerged as a key architect of a Turkish regional-security strategy that has tilted the interests of the longtime U.S. ally in ways sometimes counter to those of the U.S.







"Hakan Fidan is the face of the new Middle East," says James Jeffrey, who recently served as U.S. ambassador in Turkey and Iraq. "We need to work with him because he can get the job done," he says. "But we shouldn't assume he is a knee-jerk friend of the United States, because he is not."
Mr. Fidan is one of three spy chiefs jostling to help their countries fill a leadership vacuum created by the upheaval and by America's tentative approach to much of the region.

One of his counterparts is Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, who has joined forces with the Central Intelligence Agency in Syria but who has complicated U.S. policy in Egypt by supporting a military takeover there. The other is Iran's Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, commander-in-chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps that operates outside of Iran and whose direct military support for Mr. Assad has helped keep him in power.



Mr. Fidan's rise to prominence has accompanied a notable erosion in U.S. influence over Turkey. Washington long had cozy relations with Turkey's military, the second-largest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But Turkey's generals are now subservient to Mr. Erdogan and his closest advisers, Mr. Fidan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who are using the Arab Spring to shift Turkey's focus toward expanding its regional leadership, say current and former U.S. officials.
Mr. Fidan, 45 years old, didn't respond to requests for an interview. Mr. Erdogan's office declined to elaborate on his relationship with Mr. Fidan.
At the White House meeting, the Turks pushed back at the suggestion that they were aiding radicals and sought to enlist the U.S. to aggressively arm the opposition, the U.S. officials briefed on the discussions say. Turkish officials this year have used meetings like this to tell the Obama administration that its insistence on a smaller-scale effort to arm the opposition hobbled the drive to unseat Mr. Assad, Turkish and U.S. officials say.
Mr. Fidan is the prime minister's chief implementer.
Since he took over Turkey's national-intelligence apparatus, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, in 2010, Mr. Fidan has shifted the agency's focus to match Mr. Erdogan's.
His growing role has met a mixture of alarm, suspicion and grudging respect in Washington, where officials see him as a reliable surrogate for Mr. Erdogan in dealing with broader regional issuesthe futures of Egypt, Libya and Syria, among themthat the Arab Spring has brought to the bilateral table.
Mr. Fidan raised concerns three years ago, senior U.S. officials say, when he rattled Turkey's allies by allegedly passing to Iran sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel.
More recently, Turkey's Syria approach, carried out by Mr. Fidan, has put it at odds with the U.S. Both countries want Mr. Assad gone. But Turkish officials have told the Americans they see an aggressive international arming effort as the best way. The cautious U.S. approach reflects the priority it places on ensuring that arms don't go to the jihadi groups that many U.S. officials see as a bigger threat to American interests than Mr. Assad.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe Mr. Fidan doesn't aim to undercut the U.S. but to advance Mr. Erdogan's interests. In recent months, as radical Islamists expanded into northern Syria along the Turkish border, Turkish officials have begun to recalibrate their policyconcerned not about U.S. complaints but about the threat to Turkey's security, say U.S. and Turkish officials.
There is no doubt in Turkey where the spymaster stands. Mr. Fidan is "the No. 2 man in Turkey," says Emre Uslu, a Turkish intelligence analyst who writes for a conservative daily. "He's much more powerful than any minister and much more powerful than President Abdullah Gul."
Still, he cuts a modest figure. Current and former Turkish officials describe him as gentle and unpretentious. In U.S. meetings, he wears dark suits and is soft-spoken, say U.S. officials who have met him repeatedly and contrast him with Prince Bandar, the swashbuckling Saudi intelligence chief.
"He's not Bandar," one of the officials says. "No big cigars, no fancy suits, no dark glasses. He's not flamboyant."
Mr. Fidan's ascension is remarkable in part because he is a former noncommissioned officer in the Turkish military, a class that usually doesn't advance to prominent roles in the armed forces, business or government.
Mr. Fidan earned a bachelor of science degree in government and politics from the European division of the University of Maryland University College and a doctorate in political science from Ankara's elite Bilkent University. In 2003, he was appointed to head Turkey's international-development agency.
He joined Mr. Erdogan's office as a foreign-policy adviser in 2007. Three years later, he was head of intelligence.
"He is my secret keeper. He is the state's secret keeper," Mr. Erdogan said of his intelligence chief in 2012 in comments to reporters.
Mr. Fidan's rise at Mr. Erdogan's side has been met with some concern in Washington and Israel because of his role in shaping Iran policy. One senior Israeli official says it became clear to Israel that Mr. Fidan was "not an enemy of Iran." And mistrust already marked relations between the U.S. and Turkish intelligence agencies. The CIA spies on Turkey and the MIT runs an aggressive counterintelligence campaign against the CIA, say current and former U.S. officials.
The tension was aggravated in 2010 when the CIA began to suspect the MIT under Mr. Fidan of passing intelligence to Iran.
At the time, Mr. Erdogan was trying to improve ties with Tehran, a central plank of Ankara's "zero problems with neighbors" policy. U.S. officials believe the MIT under Mr. Fidan passed several pieces of intelligence to Iran, including classified U.S. assessments about the Iranian government, say current and former senior U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.
U.S. officials say they don't know why Mr. Fidan allegedly shared the intelligence, but suspect his goal was relationship-building. After the Arab Spring heightened tensions, Mr. Erdogan pulled back from his embrace of Tehran, at which point U.S. officials believe Mr. Fidan did so, too.
Officials at the MIT and Turkey's foreign ministry declined to comment on the allegations.
In 2012, Mr. Fidan began expanding the MIT's power by taking control of Turkey's once-dominant military-intelligence service. Many top generals with close ties to the U.S. were jailed as part of a mass trial and convicted this year of plotting to topple Mr. Erdogan's government. At the Pentagon, the jail sentences were seen as the coup de grace for the military's status within the Turkish system.
Mr. Fidan's anti-Assad campaign harks to August 2011, when Mr. Erdogan called for Mr. Assad to step down. Mr. Fidan later started directing a secret effort to bolster rebel capabilities by allowing arms, money and logistical support to funnel into northern Syriaincluding arms from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf alliescurrent and former U.S. officials say.
Mr. Erdogan wanted to remove Mr. Assad not only to replace a hostile regime on Turkey's borders but also to scuttle the prospect of a Kurdish state emerging from Syria's oil-rich northeast, political analysts say.
Providing aid through the MIT, a decision that came in early 2012, ensured Mr. Erdogan's office had control over the effort and that it would be relatively invisible, say current and former U.S. officials.
Syrian opposition leaders, American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats who worked with Mr. Fidan say the MIT acted like a "traffic cop" that arranged weapons drops and let convoys through checkpoints along Turkey's 565-mile border with Syria.
Some moderate Syrian opposition leaders say they immediately saw that arms shipments bypassed them and went to groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Erdogan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party has supported Muslim Brotherhood movements across the region.
Syrian Kurdish leaders, meanwhile, charge that Ankara allowed arms and support to reach radical groups that could check the expanding power of Kurdish militia aligned with Turkey's militant Kurdistan Workers' Party.
Turkish border guards repeatedly let groups of radical fighters cross into Syria to fight Kurdish brigades, says Salih Muslim, co-chairman of the Democratic Union of Syria, Turkey's most powerful Kurdish party. He says Turkish ambulances near the border picked up wounded fighters from Jabhat al Nusra, an anti-Assad group linked to al Qaeda. Turkish officials deny those claims.
Opposition lawmakers from the border province of Hatay say Turkish authorities transported Islamist fighters to frontier villages and let fighter-filled planes land at Hatay airport. Turkish officials deny both allegations.
Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, a lawmaker for Hatay's largest city, Antakya, and a member of the parliament's foreign-relations committee, says he followed a convoy of more than 50 buses carrying radical fighters and accompanied by 10 police vehicles to the border village of Guvecci. "This was just one incident of many," he says. Voters in his district strongly oppose Turkish support for the Syrian opposition. Turkish officials deny Mr. Ediboglu's account.
In meetings with American officials and Syrian opposition leaders, Turkish officials said the threat posed by Jabhat al Nusra, the anti-Assad group, could be dealt with later, say U.S. officials and Syrian opposition leaders.
The U.S. added Nusra to its terror list in December, in part to send a message to Ankara about the need to more tightly control the arms flow, say officials involved in the internal discussions.
The May 2013 White House encounter came at a time when Mr. Obama had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the Turkish leader's policies relating to Syria, Israel and press freedoms, say current and former U.S. officials.
Mr. Obama told the Turkish leaders he wanted a close relationship, but he voiced concerns about Turkey's approach to arming the opposition. The goal was to convince the Turks that "not all fighters are good fighters" and that the Islamist threat could harm the wider region, says a senior U.S. official.
This year, Turkey has dialed back on its arming efforts as it begins to worry that the influence of extremist rebel groups in Syria might bleed back into Turkey. At Hatay airport, the alleged way station for foreign fighters headed to Syria, the flow has markedly decreased, says a representative of a service company working at the airport.
In September, Turkey temporarily shut part of its border after fighting erupted between moderate Syrian rebels and an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Turkish President Gul warned that "radical groups are a big worry when it comes to our security."
In recent months, Turkish officials have told U.S. counterparts that they believe the lack of American support for the opposition has fueled extremism because front-line brigades believe the West has abandoned them, say U.S. and Turkish officials involved in the discussions.
In September, Mr. Davutoglu, the foreign minister, met Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him Turkey was concerned about extremists along the Syrian border, say U.S. and Turkish officials. The Turks wanted Mr. Kerry to affirm that the U.S. remained committed to the Syrian opposition, say U.S. officials.
Mr. Kerry told Turkish officials the U.S. was committed but made clear, a senior administration official says of the Turkish leaders, that "they need to be supportive of the right people."
Also in September, Mr. Fidan met with CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, say Turkish and U.S. officials, who decline to say what was discussed.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official says Mr. Fidan has built strong relationships with many of his international counterparts. At the same time, a current U.S. intelligence official says, it is clear "we look at the world through different lenses."

[David Guyatt]

If anyone deserves to find a special surprise in his car one morning, it's Fidan, the Turkish spy chief. He is a key Erdogan man, who was handed the MIT in 2010, after serving as a noncommissioned officer in the Turkish army and getting a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and a doctorate in Ankara. After Fidan took over the Turkish service, "he rattled Turkey's allies by allegedly passing to Iran sensitive intelligence collected by the U.S. and Israel," according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also mentioned that Fidan was arming jihadist rebels in Syria.

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking...013/10/17/

My bolding.

CIA recruiting news generation of spies at College Park


Women, ethnic minorities favored among applicants


November 12, 1999|By KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
LANGLEY, Va. -- WANTED: Smart, clean-living college and graduate students fluent in non-Romance languages. Minority group members and Turkish and Iranian U.S. citizens are especially welcome. A taste for foreign intrigue is required.
That's the Central Intelligence Agency's pitch for its biggest recruiting drive since the Cold War ended. And it's working even better than spymasters expected. Applications more than doubled to 39,000 in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. They're expected to double again next year, and the drive should continue up to four more years.




Although the number of new spies remains classified, the flood of job offers also doubled, overwhelming the CIA's background checkers, who fell so far behind that the agency failed to meet its 1998-1999 hiring target. Now that more checkers have been added, the agency plans to increase its job offers by another 30 percent for 1999-2000.
Rather than Ivy League males, women and ethnic minorities -- particularly Asian and Arab Americans -- are favored. George Tenet, director of central intelligence, also wants more recruits with advanced degrees, foreign language proficiency and experience living and working abroad.
These days, the University of Maryland, just inside the Washington Beltway, is the CIA's most productive recruiting ground.

Snip...

(See full article HERE)

The University of Maryland also hosterd a covert NSA facility where Edward Snowden worked.

Spook central?

[Magda Hassan]

Did Israel Leak Story about Turkish Intelligence Betraying Mossad Cell in Iran

by RICHARD SILVERSTEIN on OCTOBER 18, 2013 · 0 COMMENTS
in MIDEAST PEACE

David Ignatius and the Wall Street Journal reported this week that after the Mavi Marmara massacre, in which the IDF executed nine Turks aboard the vessel, Turkey took its revenge by betraying a cell of Iranian agents of the Mossad. The Israeli intelligence agency, since David Ben Gurion first signed a bilateral accord with the Turkish government in 1958, has used that country as a neutral, if not friendly, country in which to host meetings with agents from Middle Eastern countries like Iran.
Keep in mind that it's here that IRG general Ali Reza Asgari disappeared (in Istanbul in 2007) after arriving from Iran.
The Israeli source whom I've relied on for many of my previous security-related stories, confirmed Ignatius' account.
Turkey exposed the cell in 2012, amid Israel's ongoing refusal to meet a package of Turkish demands calling for an apology, compensation to surviving families of the victims, and easing the Gaza siege. To my mind, Prime Minister Erdogan, believing Israel would never accept Turkey's terms, decided that breaking the spy cell would show Israel that there would be a price for its intransigence.
Further, Turkey's leader was signaling an Arab-Muslim pivot in its relations. It was transferring its energy from a western/Israeli direction, in light of the EU's ongoing refusal to admit Turkey as a member, to an easterly direction. East faces Iran, among others. Another signal of this pivot was Turkey's teaming with Brazil to propose a compromise solution to the Iranian nuclear dilemma. Those two nations had sealed a deal with Iran that the U.S. initially received favorably, but then abandoned. That action, by the Bush administration, further persuaded Turkey that it needed to look elsewhere for allies than the west.
One of Erdogan's major foreign policy themes related to Israel is that it pays a price for its ongoing refusal to end the Occupation and recognize a Palestinian state. When he saw that Israel had drawn blood with the killing of his citizens, he decided, after waiting for some Israeli movement, to offer tit for tat and harm Israel's intelligence interests in a fundamental way.
I don't agree with Ignatius' view that Israel's intransigence in the negotiation was a result of Turkey betraying its agents. After all, Israel had been refusing to meet Turkey's demands since the 2010 massacre. It wasn't like Israel's position had hardened since 2010. It refused then and it refused in 2012.
There are some issues that trouble me and reveal, I think, the Mossad's blundering in this matter. If your country has just killed 9 citizens of a putative ally and has refused to offer any significant reparation, why would you send your agents and spies to meetings in such a place? What would you expect? That because the relationship had existed for 50 years nothing you did would harm it? Did the Mossad think that Turkey wouldn't blame it; wouldn't harm its interests just for old time's sake?
The biggest question is who leaked this story to the Post. An internal Turkish opposition source might have, but I think this is doubtful. The Iranians would have no interest in revealing that they'd gotten the better of the Mossad, since the current nuclear negotiations appear quite promising. Israel, at first glance, gains little by this leak. It would be telling the world it was exploiting Turkey's hospitality by running its agents there. It would be revealing that Iranian intelligence had gotten the better of the Mossad and destroyed a major component of its espionage capability inside Iran.

Hakan Fidan: Iran's man in Ankara, if a wounded Israel is to be believed.

But if Israel wanted desperately to hurt both Turkey and Iran due to the current warming of relations between the latter and the west, then it might expose the story. Doing so, in the mind of the leaker, might evoke some sympathy in the west for the lives of the Iranians who were arrested. It might show the Turks to be cruel and duplicitous in betraying their agents. And it would display Iran's ruthlessness in rooting out traitors to the regime.
This passage in Ignatius' story is the biggest giveaway of the true source:

Top Israeli officials believe that, despite the apology, the severe strain with Erdogan continues. The Turkish intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, is also suspect in Israel because of what are seen as friendly links with Tehran; several years ago, Israeli intelligence officers are said to have described him facetiously to CIA officials as "the MOIS station chief in Ankara," a reference to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The United States continued to deal with Fidan on sensitive matters, however.

This is the only part of his report where the reporter specifies a source, and it is Israeli. The Israelis clearly have an axe to grind with Turkey's intelligence chief, so they all but label him Little Ayatollah, Iran's inside man in the Erdogan regime. But do the Israelis think that anyone will believe such a claim? That Erdogan's intelligence chief is an agent of Iran? Preposterous.
More likely the Americans who were offered this assessment believed just the opposite: that Fidan was a dangerous enemy who Israel sought to discredit. In fact, the only strongmen Israel likes are the ones it can control. And Israel can control neither Erdogan nor Fidan.
In Turkey's foreign minister's rebuttal to this report, he noted that Ignatius was the moderator of the infamous Davos panel in which Erdogan walked out when Shimon Peres droned on and on about how no nation had any right to dispute Israel's right to do whatever the hell it wanted in Gaza. In other words, Israel saw Ignatius as being a willing conduit, because he might have his ownpersonal ax to grind against Erdogan.
The new Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer is both Bibi's political soul mate and the sort of political knife-fighter who might leak such a story.
If instilling sympathy for Israel was Bibi's goal, it can't have been more misguided in this case. The world is no longer singing from the Israeli hymn book. Iran is no longer the big bad bogeyman. The train's left the station and Bibi's still standing on the platform with suitcase in hand.
To those pragmatic Israeli officials who want to preserve a relationship with Turkey (which includes my source), this news is water under the bridge. They'd argue that Israel, more recently has found common cause with Turkey in supporting the Syrian rebels against the Assad dictatorship. The Israeli source I mentioned above had reported weeks ago that the reason why Israeli war planes came from an unusual direction and surprised Syria's air defense during one raid, was that Turkey had allowed the jets to operate from its own air base. To these pragmatists, who think not only about past slights and bad blood, but about the future as well, the Turkish relationship is too important to give up on.
Israel hawks (and perhaps Ignatius shares some of their views in this matter) see enemies everywhere. Wherever there is an Arab or Muslim is yet another potential enemy. Erdogan has proven himself, in their view,to be a shrewd, wily enemy. Because of his country's rising role in the region (despite missteps along the way like the internal Gezi Park protests), he's another potential Haman rising up to threaten the Jews, to use the terminology of the religious tradition, and Israel in more contemporary terms.
So the hawks see Turkey as perhaps a slightly more moderate version of Iran. But an enemy who can't be trusted and can never be accommodated. For them, relations with Turkey have soured.
This is the view of whoever leaked the story. It's a cynical, nihilist perspective in which everyone is an enemy and Israel is justified in single-handedly, Samson-like toppling the walls of the temple (in this case Iran).
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/10/18/did-israel-leak-story-about-turkish-intelligence-betraying-mossad-cell-in-iran/?