WASHINGTON: Former CIA director James Woolsey pitched a $10 million contract to two Turkish businessmen to help discredit a controversial US-based cleric while Woolsey was an adviser to President Donald Trump’s election campaign, three people familiar with the proposal said.

Just eight days after formally joining Trump’s campaign as an adviser on national security issues, Woolsey met businessmen Ekim Alptekin and Sezgin Baran Korkmaz over lunch at the Peninsula Hotel in New York on Sept 20 last year, they said.

Woolsey and his wife, Nancye Miller, proposed a lobbying and public relations campaign targeting Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses Gulen of instigating a failed coup in July last year and wants him extradited to Turkey to face trial. Gulen has denied any role in the coup.

In an email memo, Woolsey and Miller sketched a plan to “draw attention to the cleric’s possible role in the coup attempt” and encourage an official investigation into his activities.

Alptekin, an ally of Erdogan, had already agreed through one of his companies to a $600,000 contract with the consulting firm of Michael Flynn to research Gulen. Flynn was also a Trump campaign adviser and later became his national security adviser before being fired in February.

Woolsey was a member of Flynn’s firm, the Flynn Intel Group, according to a Justice Department filing by the firm and an archive of the company’s website, although a spokesman for Woolsey disputed that characterisation, saying he was an unpaid adviser and his affiliation was “loosely defined”.

At the Sept. 20 meeting, Miller said she and Woolsey were in a better position than Flynn to influence decision-makers about Gulen’s alleged role in the coup, according to Alptekin and two other people familiar with the discussion.

Bidding for a lobbying or consulting contract with a foreign company or government is not illegal, and Woolsey and Miller did not win the contract in any event.

But the previously undisclosed meeting shows for the first time that two Trump aides were competing with each other to win the lucrative business deal with Alptekin. The deal is now being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his wider probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment.

Flynn is a central figure in Mueller’s investigation because of conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak last year and because he waited until March to retroactively register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the work he did for Alptekin.

In that filing, Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, said the work done for Alptekin’s company “could be construed to have principally benefited the republic of Turkey”.

Flynn was fired as national security adviser in February after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the extent of his conversations with Kislyak.

Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for Woolsey and Miller, described the Sept. 20 meeting as “unremarkable” and said Miller could not locate the email memo or remember writing it.

He also said Woolsey had pursued with Turkish interests an “economic development proposal in the wake of the coup that centered around reassuring folks that Turkey was a safe place to do business”, but that the project’s focus was not on Gulen.

Alptekin said Woolsey and Miller pursued his business at the Sept 20 meeting, pitching the project to target Gulen, but he decided to stick to his contract with Flynn’s firm.

Scrutiny

The disclosure in March of Flynn’s contract to discredit Gulen sparked intense media scrutiny of people who had worked with Flynn, including Woolsey.

Shortly after, Woolsey alleged in media interviews that Flynn and others had, at a Sept 19 meeting in New York, discussed with Turkey’s foreign and energy ministers the idea of covertly spiriting Gulen out of the United States and to Turkey.

Flynn has denied through a spokesman ever discussing such a plan. Alptekin also denied it was ever discussed and said Woolseys claim was “all the more astounding” because he had sought Alptekins business at a meeting the following day.

“His story is fiction,” Alptekin said.

Franks said Woolsey stands by his account of the meeting.

Woolsey first proposed the $10 million project to Korkmaz, the second Turkish businessman, at a meeting in California in August last year. The proposal was outlined in an email sent from Miller to Woolsey on Aug 18, printed out and shown by Woolsey to Korkmaz, who then forwarded it on to Alptekin.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2017