Intelligence failure questions from a spy chief

Emre Taner ran the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT) from 2005 to 2010. A veteran intelligence officer who had been recruited as a young student in Ankara University, Taner was the one who had proposed and launched a move to establish dialogue with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in 2008-2009. 

He was the one who conducted the operations to talk to members of the PKK in the Norwegian capital Oslo facilitated by a U.K.-origin institution and talked to the imprisoned founding leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, and the Iraqi Kurdish leaders from 2009. 

The talks started to fail before the secret recordings of the Oslo talks were broadcast on the internet in 2011, when a group of PKK members who agreed to surrender upon their arrival were supposed to be released but were instead arrested in late 2009.

During the Oslo talks, Hakan Fidan was appointed as Taner's deputy. In 2010, when Taner retired, Fidan became the head of the MİT; he still holds the position.

Described by President Tayyip Erdoğan as "my black box," Fidan and Taner were both the targets of prosecution on Feb. 7, 2012. A group of prosecutors wanted to interrogate them for being in contact with the PKK. 

Actually, Taner was retired and Fidan was trying to re-establish the contact under the instructions of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan for another attempt at dialogue. The dialogue would start in September 2012 in order to end acts of terror and pursue a lasting solution to Turkey's chronic Kurdish problem. 

All of the prosecutors and police officers involved in that probe, which was stopped by Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government through a snap amendment in the law, are either in jail or on the run on...