Turkey planned on downgrading relations with Israel even before the May 2010 flotilla incident, documents published Wednesday by WikiLeaks suggest.And this was even more interesting, if poorly sourced:
A leaked email from George Friedman, the head of US-based global security analysis company Stratfor, reveals that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger that at some point he would burn bridges with Israel in favor of a closer relationship with the Islamic world.
According to the Turkish newspaper Sunday Zaman, Friedman also wrote in the same email that Turkey does not get along with Israel and the United States. An attack by Israel on Iran would provide a good opportunity for Erdogan to finally cut Turkey’s ties with Israel and the US and to expand Turkey’s power, he further wrote.
The flotilla to Gaza — in which nine Turkish citizens aboard a ship heading to Gaza were killed after attacking the IDF commandos who intercepted it – was not the cause of Turkey’s new strategy but rather the opportunity Erdogan had been waiting for, Army Radio said.
Israel may already have the codes to crack into Iran’s anti-aircraft missile defense systems, according to WikiLeaks, which on Tuesday continued to publish email conversations by employees from the Texas-based Stratfor global intelligence firm.A Mexican source? Sounds more like a game of telephone again - some Georgian wonders why the UAVs aren't working well, assumes it isn't because of operator error and spins a conspiracy theory where Russia got Israel's codes, has to come up with a plausible reason how that could happen, and tells his Mexican buddy over drinks.
The Stratfor email conversation took place in 2009 and focused on an alleged deal between Israel and Russia, in which Israel would supply codes to hack into the unmanned aerial vehicles that Israel had sold to Russia’s neighbor, Georgia, in exchange for the codes for Russia’s state-of-the-art TOR-M1 anti-aircraft system stationed in Iran. If the codes are indeed in Israeli hands, they could prove helpful in a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.
According to the WikiLeaks document, in 2009 a Stratfor analyst claimed to have been told by a Mexican source of the Israel-Russian deal. It was speculated in the email conversation that after Russia invaded Georgia over a land dispute in 2008, Georgia found that its Israeli-made UAV’s were not performing as successfully as they should, possibly because their communication codes were hacked, leading the country to seek to purchase UAV spy planes from other countries.
Reading these documents is fun, and some might be true, but their veracity is really shaky.
UPDATE: Here's the email about the UAVs. Looks like Georgia wanted Mexican UAVs because they felt the Israeli ones were compromised. one had been taken down intact. (h/t Yoel)