Two Western diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity told me that they found the government’s accusations against Gülen’s movement compelling, if not entirely convincing. One said, “Undoubtedly, Gülenists played a credible role in it. But there were also anti-Erdoğan military opportunists mixed in.” Many people in the armed forces, and in Turkish civil society, were enraged by Erdoğan’s growing authoritarianism. Brigadier General Gökhan Sönmezateş, one of the plotters who went to Marmaris to capture Erdoğan, said in a confession, “I am absolutely not a Gülenist.” But when one of the plotters called on a secure line to recruit him, he thought that things in the country were bad enough that he agreed to go along.

Some former American officials said it was likely that Gülenists played the leading role. After the purges of the preceding decade, they argued, no other group in the Army was large enough or cohesive enough. “The Gülenists are the only people who could have done this,” Jeffrey said. One officer, identified only as Lieutenant Colonel A.K., testified that he was informed of a coup plot a week before, by a man who he assumed was a Gülen leader. The man spoke of the troubles that the movement had been facing, and said that some three thousand officers were going to be purged during the meeting of senior generals in August. “Gülen didn’t want this meeting to happen,” the man said. “We can’t lose our last fort.”

Erdoğan’s government has given the U.S. tens of thousands of pages of documents, tracking the Gülenists’ history in Turkey. According to American officials, little or none of it is relevant to the question of Gülen’s direct involvement in the coup. General Akar, the chief of the general staff, said in a statement that while he was being held captive, one of the senior plotters said, “If you wish, we can put you in touch with our opinion leader, Fethullah Gülen.” One of the Western diplomats, who has followed Akar throughout his career, told me, “Akar has been, since he took the position, a guy defined by integrity.”

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The most compelling account came from Lieutenant Colonel Levent Türkkan, one of the officers who took Akar captive. The son of a poor farmer, Türkkan dreamed as a boy of joining the Army. His family couldn’t afford to send him to a test-preparation school, so he started studying in the homes of Gülenist “brothers.” On the eve of the exam to get into an élite military school, the brothers gave him the answers—taking care to include a few wrong ones, to avoid arousing suspicion. He has remained a follower ever since. “I believed that Fethullah Gülen was a divine entity,” he told his interrogators. In his confession, he identified seventeen colleagues as Gülenists, including Erdoğan’s personal military aide, Colonel Ali Yazıcı. (Aslandoğan disputes Türkkan’s testimony, but says that he can’t speak to specific claims.)

In 2011, Türkkan was promoted and became an aide to General Necdet Özel, the chief of the Turkish Army. “I started carrying out assignments given by the sect,” he said. For four years, he planted a small “listening device” in Özel’s office every day and removed it every night. “The battery lasted one day,” he said. “I would take the full device to my ‘sect brother’ once a week and get an empty one from him.”

The night before the coup, Türkkan said, a fellow-Gülenist, a colonel, asked him to step outside for a cigarette. Once they were alone, he described a plan: “The President, the Prime Minister, the ministers, the chief of general staff, other chiefs of staff and generals would be picked up one by one. Everything would be done quietly.” Türkkan’s assignment was to help find Akar and “pacify” him. Disturbed, Türkkan went to see his “brother” in the Gülen movement, who lived in a house behind a nearby gas station. He wasn’t there, but several others were, and they confirmed the operation.

Türkkan has suffered since the coup. In a photograph released with his testimony, he is wrapped in a hospital gown, with his face visibly battered and his rib cage and hands swaddled in bandages. In his confession, he expressed bitter remorse. “When I learned from the TV that the parliament was being bombed and civilians were being killed, I started regretting it,” he said. “What was being done was like a massacre. This was done in the name of a movement that I thought worked for the will of God.”

Three weeks after the coup, Erdoğan, addressing a group of local officials in Ankara, apologized for having once been Gülen’s ally. “We helped this organization with good will,” Erdoğan said. He said that he had trusted Gülen, because of his apparent reverence for education and his organization’s aid work. “I feel sad that I failed to reveal the true face of this traitorous organization long before.”

For Erdoğan, though, retribution has always come more easily than apologies. The state of emergency that he declared after the coup gave him dictatorial powers, which he used to carry out a far-reaching crackdown that began with Gülenists but has grown to encompass almost anyone who might pose a threat to his expanded authority. The figures are stupefying: forty thousand people detained and huge numbers of others forced from their jobs, including twenty-one thousand police officers, three thousand judges and prosecutors, twenty-one thousand public-school workers, fifteen hundred university deans, and fifteen hundred employees of the Ministry of Finance. Six thousand soldiers were detained. The government also closed a thousand Gülen-affiliated schools and suspended twenty-one thousand teachers.

It’s difficult to know whether those targeted were hard-core followers of Gülen, or sympathizers, or not related to the movement at all. Public criticism of Erdoğan has been almost entirely squelched, either by the outpouring of national support that followed the coup or by the fear of being imprisoned. Erdoğan has closed more than a hundred and thirty media outlets and detained at least forty-three journalists, and the purge is still under way. “The Gülenist cult is a criminal organization, and a big one,” Kalın, the President’s aide, told me. “You know, over eleven thousand people participated in the coup, according to our current estimates. We’re going after anyone with any connection with this Gülenist cult, here and there, in the judiciary, the private sector, the newspapers, and other places.”

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.

Erdoğan has solidified his power, but he has also put himself in the awkward position of denouncing a man who enabled his rise. Talking about Gülen and his movement, he can seem almost to be in pain. “They came asking for seventeen universities, and I approved all of them,” he told a crowd in 2014. “He asked for land for schools, we gave it to him,” he added. “We gave them all kinds of support.” Erdoğan rarely spoke Gülen’s name in these speeches, but this time he addressed him and his followers directly. “So this is treason?” he asked, sounding dismayed. “What did you ask for that you couldn’t get?”

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The day after the coup, Gülen emerged from seclusion. He spoke to reporters who had gathered at his compound and denied any involvement.* As he watched his followers being arrested en masse—and as he became a national pariah—an edge crept into his voice. He told his followers that Erdoğan had staged the coup, and that no one outside Turkey believed that Gülen was responsible. In a sermon recorded a few days later, he said, “Let a bunch of idiots think they have succeeded, let them celebrate, let them declare their ridiculous situation a celebration, but the world is making fun of this situation, and that is how it is going to go down in the history books.

“Be patient,” he told his followers. “Victory will come.”

Gülen is old and ailing; it seems unlikely that he will be able to keep up the fight for much longer. Listening to his sermon, I thought back to my meeting with him last year. Even then, his movement was being dismantled, his followers on the run. I asked how he thought he would be remembered, and he gave me an answer the like of which I’ve never heard from another leader in politics or religion. “It may sound strange to you, but I wish to be forgotten when I die,” he said. “I wish my grave not to be known. I wish to die in solitude, with nobody actually becoming aware of my death and hence nobody conducting my funeral prayer. I wish that nobody remember me.” ♦

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Gülen summoned reporters to his compound.