Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker has a long, well-reported story filling in details on Gulen Cult that almost took over Turkey that I first wrote about 3 years ago.

TURKEY’S THIRTY-YEAR COUP

Did an exiled cleric try to overthrow Erdoğan’s government?

By Dexter Filkins

First, he controls Test Prep controls the world:

In a taped sermon from the late nineties, Gülen exhorted his followers to burrow into the state and wait for the right moment to rise up. “Create an image like you are men of law,” he told them. “This will allow you to rise to more vital, more important places.” In the meantime, he urged patience and flexibility. “Until we have the power and authority in all of Turkey’s constitutional institutions, every step is premature,” he said. But, ultimately, he promised, their work would provide “the guarantee of our Islamic future.” Keleş told me that the chief targets of infiltration were the police and the judiciary. The schools and test-preparation centers were central to the plan. At the schools, acolytes were recruited at an impressionable age; at the centers, they were prepared for entrance examinations to the country’s bureaucracy. In many cases, “brothers” within government agencies fed answers to Gülenist candidates. Once the recruits were hired, fellow-Gülenists promoted them and furthered their careers. In infiltrated police departments, each Gülenist officer had a code name, and each unit was overseen by an outside “imam,” regarded by the officers as a higher authority than the police chief. By the early nineties, Keleş said, he had become the movement’s “imam” in Central Anatolia, overseeing fifteen cities. By then, he estimated, forty per cent of the police in the region were followers, and about twenty per cent of the judges and prosecutors. “We controlled the hiring of the police, and the entrance exams, and we didn’t let anyone in who wasn’t a Gülenist,” he said.

Cults work best when the leader is believed to be the messiah:

Alpsoy said that once a man appeared at a service with a shoe that he said had been worn by Gülen. “People were so excited—they stripped the leather from the shoe and boiled it for a long time. Then they cut the leather into pieces and ate it.” Members often fought over scraps of food that Gülen had left on his plate. A Turkish intelligence official told me that one Gülenist received a package from her husband, who was living on the compound in Pennsylvania: inside was a piece of bread that Gülen had gnawed on and left behind.

Gulen appealed to be granted permanent residency in the U.S.:

Despite such official American assessments, Gülen won his appeal, in part because influential friends wrote letters in his support. They included George Fidas, a former director of outreach for the C.I.A.; Morton Abramowitz, a former American ambassador; and, perhaps most notably, Graham Fuller, a former senior C.I.A. official. During the Cold War, while Fuller was a field officer in Turkey, the C.I.A. advocated supporting the growth of Islam along the southern border of the Soviet Union, in places like Iran and Turkey, to contain its expansion, with a cordon known as “the green belt.” Fuller, who now lives in Canada, told me that he had met Gülen only after retiring from the agency, while researching a book on political Islam, and said that he was unaware of an arrangement between him and the C.I.A. He had written to the F.B.I. because he admired Gülen’s “highly progressive” vision of Islam, and wanted to help resist any attempt to extradite him to Turkey. “I’d write the letter again,” he said.

Fuller used to be the father-in-law of Ruslan Tsarni, the Uncle Ruslan of the Chechen Bomb Brothers. I presume he also helped pull strings to get the Tsarnaev family refugee status in the U.S.

In Turkey, though, the connection has fed theories that Gülen was supported in his early years by the C.I.A. Some prominent Turks have said that the assistance continued at least into the nineties, when the Muslim-majority states of the former Soviet Union declared independence and Gülen’s network began to establish itself there. In 2010, Osman Nuri Gündeş, a former senior intelligence official, wrote in a memoir that Gülen’s schools in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan had sheltered as many as a hundred and thirty C.I.A. agents, posing as English teachers. Ismail Pekin, a former head of Turkish military intelligence, told me that the agency maintained a similar arrangement with workers at schools in Africa. “They might not have been C.I.A. employees, but they were engaged in intelligence gathering and mobilization,” he said. Pekin had raised concerns about Gülen to American officials, he said, but they were routinely dismissed: “We always brought it up at nato meetings, every time. Every time, the subject of Gülen was pushed aside as ‘Turkey’s domestic problem.’ ”

Filkins believes the coup attempt last summer was largely Gulenite:

The irony of the attempted coup is that Erdoğan has emerged stronger than ever. The popular uprising that stopped the plot was led in many cases by people who disliked Erdoğan only marginally less than they disliked the prospect of a military regime. But the result has been to set up Erdoğan and his party to rule, with nearly absolute authority, for as long as he wants. “Even before the coup attempt, we had concerns that the government and the President were approaching politics and governance in ways that were designed to lock in a competitive advantage—to insure you would have perpetual one-party rule,” the second Western diplomat said.

In contrast, the American Democratic Party’s plans to lock in perpetual one-party rule by importing a new electorate are above suspicion because diversity.