A NATO Ally on American Soil: The Unsettling Truth About Turkish Intelligence Operations in the US
Imagine you fled Turkey after the 2016 purges. You got a visa, found an apartment in Virginia, enrolled your kids in school, and started rebuilding your life. You're careful about what you post online. You don't go to protests. You're just trying to stay quiet and stay safe.
Then your sister back in Ankara gets a visit from police, asking questions about you. Your old employer in Istanbul receives an inquiry about your work history. A Turkish acquaintance you barely know in your new city keeps showing up at community events, asking pointed questions about your finances.
This isn't a hypothetical. Variations of this story have been documented by human rights organizations, reported by journalists at outlets including Reuters and the New York Times, and raised in congressional testimony. Turkish government pressure on its nationals living in the United States is real, it's ongoing, and it sits at the heart of one of Washington's most uncomfortable alliance management problems.
What We Actually Know
Let's start with what's been documented, because this conversation sometimes gets swamped by speculation.
In 2021, the Justice Department indicted several individuals — including people with ties to Turkish government entities — on charges related to illegal lobbying, witness tampering, and obstruction in cases connected to Turkish interests in the US. The Halkbank case, which involves allegations of sanctions evasion tied to Turkish state interests, has dragged through American courts for years amid extraordinary diplomatic pressure from Ankara to make it go away.
Beyond the courtroom, organizations like the Stockholm Center for Freedom have documented dozens of cases in which Turkish nationals living in the US reported being approached by individuals they believed to be acting on behalf of Turkish intelligence — MIT, the Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı. The approaches vary: sometimes it's a request for information about other community members, sometimes it's more direct pressure to return to Turkey, sometimes it's implicit threats involving family members who remained behind.
The Gülenist network is the most frequently cited target of these operations, but it doesn't stop there. Kurdish activists, secular journalists, academics who signed peace petitions before the purges — the surveillance net is wide.
The Alliance Headache Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here's the diplomatic problem in plain language: Turkey is a NATO member with access to alliance intelligence-sharing frameworks, joint military infrastructure, and decades of institutional relationships with American defense and intelligence agencies. That membership creates enormous pressure on both sides to manage friction quietly rather than loudly.
When Turkish intelligence runs operations on American soil, Washington faces a genuinely ugly choice. Respond forcefully and risk a rupture with a partner that controls the Bosphorus, hosts Incirlik Air Base, and sits on NATO's southeastern flank. Respond weakly and signal to every other allied government that there's no real cost to treating the US as an operational theater for domestic security work.
So far, the American response has been mostly the second option. There have been prosecutions of specific individuals, yes. But there's been no systematic diplomatic reckoning, no formal démarche that says: stop running operations against your nationals on our soil or there will be structural consequences.
That silence has a cost. It emboldens Ankara. And it tells the Turkish diaspora community — people who came here, in many cases, specifically because they believed American institutions would protect them — that the protection is more theoretical than real.
The Erdoğan Playbook, Exported
What makes this particularly worth examining is the degree to which it mirrors Erdoğan's domestic strategy. The architecture of control he built inside Turkey — media pressure, legal harassment, social surveillance, the weaponization of family relationships — has been adapted, imperfectly but recognizably, for export.
You can't shut down a Substack newsletter published from Maryland the way you can shut down a newspaper in Ankara. You can't arrest a podcaster in Houston. But you can make their relatives nervous. You can create uncertainty about whether it's safe to travel back. You can fund counter-narratives through diaspora-facing media outlets that have undisclosed government connections. You can work community networks to isolate and discredit vocal critics.
None of this requires a James Bond operation. It's more mundane and more deniable than that. Which is partly why it persists.
What Congress Is — and Isn't — Doing
There have been hearings. There have been letters. A handful of members of Congress, particularly those with significant Turkish-American constituencies, have raised these issues with some consistency. The Helsinki Commission has published reports. The State Department's annual human rights documentation includes relevant material.
But legislative action that would actually change the operational calculus for Ankara? That's been thin. Part of that is the perennial problem of Turkey's strategic importance crowding out human rights concerns. Part of it is effective Turkish government lobbying, which — despite the legal troubles around some of its practitioners — remains active and well-resourced.
The diaspora community is watching all of this carefully. They know the difference between being heard and being protected. And they're increasingly clear-eyed about which one they're actually getting.
