Faruk Ağa Yarman. Photograph courtesy of the author.

In the nineteen-eighties, a Turkish scientist named Faruk Ağa Yarman helped start a hugely successful defense and technology firm called Savronik; he made his name there by reverse-engineering Soviet weapons found on the battlefields of Afghanistan and improving their design. In 2003, he began running a large state-sponsored company called HAVELSAN, developing missile-defense and surveillance systems and marketing them to major corporations such as Boeing and Raytheon. A millionaire, Yarman enjoyed a close working relationship with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.); he even hosted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on a visit to HAVELSAN’s offices. Given his influence in the military-industrial complex, he could have been considered a prominent player in Turkey’s so-called deep state—the military, business, and security elite who have long been accused of secretly controlling the country. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in March, 2012, the deep state has played an important role in maintaining a secular government. But when Erdoğan, a moderate Islamist, became Prime Minister, in 2003, tensions between the secularists and the government increased. In 2010, prosecutors began ordering the arrest of generals and other putative deep-state players—about three hundred and fifty in all—on charges of having plotted a failed coup, code-named Sledgehammer, against Erdoğan’s government.

In August, 2011, as Yarman was preparing to fly to Seattle on a business trip with Turkey’s defense minister, a prosecutor summoned him to an Istanbul courthouse and placed him under arrest. He was accused of having assisted in Sledgehammer, in 2003, by compiling a list of the names of more than a thousand Turkish scientists and politicians who he believed could help form a post-coup government. Yarman, an unusually outspoken member of Turkey’s academic and business elite, denied the charges, declaring that his political opponents had fabricated evidence against him—chiefly a CD containing an Excel spreadsheet with the names and his electronic signature. In September, 2012, a three-judge panel found Yarman guilty and sentenced him to more than thirteen years in prison. Powerful groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., lobbied on his behalf, and a year later the panel reversed itself, acquitting Yarman on the basis of insufficient evidence and freeing him from prison. (Erdoğan has publicly suggested that the case might have been a conspiracy by officials in his own government.) In late June of this year, all of the Sledgehammer convictions were overturned and the prisoners released. But Yarman is luckier than some of his fellow-defendants, many of whom face retrial. At a hearing last month, I met Deniz Kutluk, a retired Turkish Navy admiral, who had spent the previous four years in prison. He had worked as the general manager of a large pharmaceutical company in Istanbul before he was incarcerated. Now, because of the “stigma,” he said, he didn’t think that the company would hire him back.

Wondering how a prominent businessman might reintegrate himself into Turkey’s economic life after a stint in prison, I went to visit Yarman at his home, a stately mansion on the Bosphorus, where his family has lived since the fifties. Yarman is sixty now, with a tangle of unkempt white hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. His safest course might be to retire or leave the country; the government he was convicted of attempting to overthrow is, after all, still in power. Yarman’s two children have left for college in the United States, and colleagues have urged him to emigrate. But Peter Diamond, an M.I.T. economist who visited Yarman in prison as part of a human-rights mission, told me, “You could tell that Turkey is his home, and I’m very aware of the pull of home. I’m not surprised he’s trying to reconstruct what he had.” Rather than return directly to the defense industry, where he might face the risk of arrest, Yarman is easing his way back into the business world. After his release, he was approached by a handful of younger colleagues whom he had hired and trained, years earlier, at Savronik. “They wanted me to come back, and I thought it’d be fun to be around a group of young, enterprising people,” he said.

Back at Savronik, Yarman is focussing on large public-works projects, mostly “intelligent highways”—also known as computerized traffic-control systems—in Turkey, Albania, Algeria, India, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia. He also hopes to develop secure information systems, with both military and civilian applications, for countries with emerging economies, like Pakistan. “We can do what the Americans or Chinese can do, but for a fraction of the price,” he said.

Yarman appears to have the implicit support of the Erdoğan-led government; Reha Denemeç, one of the A.K.P.’s co-founders and a member of Turkey’s parliament, told me that party officials had long believed Yarman to be innocent, and that he now stands to profit in Turkey’s booming defense industry. The country’s export of aircraft parts, missiles, and armored vehicles, among other items, reached an all-time high, in 2013, of about $1.4 billion. (Turkey’s chief trading partner is the United States.) “He’s brilliant,” Denemeç says of Yarman. “He has more opportunities here than anywhere else. This is a country of seventy-seven million people and a five-per-cent growth rate. He can be successful here.”

Yarman says that members of Turkey’s business community now treat him with more respect, if also a bit of wariness. “I really don’t get that,” he said. “Maybe they think I’m tougher.” But many of his old professional relationships dried up while he was in prison. He takes meetings with colleagues who only a few years ago labelled him a traitor. He has motion detectors and cameras hidden around his homes. He changes his phone number and e-mail address constantly, to trip up those who might be listening in. In May, the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet published a leaked government document that shows Yarman’s name on a lengthy list of targets for ongoing wiretaps. Meanwhile, he tries to keep his sense of humor; in an e-mail before our meeting, he told me that it would be fine to use cell phones, because all of his communications have been “legally and/or illegally tapped for almost a decade and we have no privacy either way!”

To help me understand why he chose to remain in Turkey, Yarman took me to a century-old cemetery on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, a hilly expanse filled with Mediterranean pine trees. Most of Yarman’s family, including his mother and father, are buried here. “Where am I going to go?” he asked. “If they want to arrest me, fine—but I’m not going to leave.”