DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [117]
What the Turkish authorities did not know, nor would they have cared, was that my passport was deep in the bowels of the consular section of the Chinese Embassy in London, having a visa processed. My attempts to extract the passport in order to fly to Istanbul on Tuesday were dismissed robotically by the Chinese officials. Instead, I contacted Tekirdag prison directly and begged them to allow me to postpone the interview for one day. I was informed that if they received the order to move Cha0 before Thursday, then regardless of whether or not I travelled there, I would not be permitted to see him. The hunt would be over.
So I was extremely agitated as I battled my way through the snowstorm from Istanbul to Tekirdag on Thursday morning, a day late. It was quite possible that I would arrive only to be told that I had lost the chance to meet Cha0 in person. After a long wait I was taken through three thick revolving steel gates whose mechanism had a biometric print of my hand, and was introduced to the Director of the prison. Far from the ogre one might have expected, he was charming and affable. He said that they had not received any directive from Ankara and that after lunch in the canteen I would be able to talk to Mr Evyapan.
Eventually I was led through to the small, oblong room. Çagatay Evyapan is cautious but self-confident. Just as Bilal Sen had told me, his instincts would detect immediately if I was trying to ferret out some snippet of information in a devious way. He reminded me of Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks – super-smart, but with an iron conviction in his own intellectual superiority, which at times might be taken for extreme narcissism.
When I suggested to him that Lord Cyric was Tony – the tubby, bespectacled businessman named by Mert Ortaç – he emitted a snort of the deepest contempt. ‘You’ve been talking to Turkish intelligence, haven’t you?’ he said sharply. In a manner of speaking Cha0 was correct: if Mert was lying (let’s face it, a real possibility), then the bespectacled man must have been planted in his story by MIT, Turkish intelligence.
But as we talked Çagatay confirmed some very important aspects of Mert’s story, including the location of the apartment where Mert was kidnapped and the existence of exchanges between Mert and the local American Embassy worker, Lucy Hoover. He also conceded that once again his own arrest had been prompted by a real-world error.
For all his self-possessed intelligence, Cha0 indicated he had one great fear – ironically the same unspoken worry that stalked his nemesis from the Turkish police. He claimed that during his questioning one of his interrogators offered him the opportunity to go into witness protection. In exchange, he would be asked to testify in the Ergenekon investigation. They demanded that he admit to having established a secret cyber network for the Deep State conspiracy among the military, intelligence services and media. The police flatly deny that any such offer was made.
Cha0 refused – the last thing he would want, like Inspector Sen, is to come under the wheels of a struggle between the Deep State and the government. They do things differently in cyberspace.
Throughout our chat Çagatay suggested that he and a narrow group of hackers possessed a far greater grasp of what was happening on the darkside of the Web than anybody from the authorities. He implied that his aim was merely to demonstrate the hopelessness of the attempts by the forces of law and order to police the Internet – he contended that there will always be people like him who are ahead of the game.
Remarkably, he seemed unperturbed by his incarceration and the fact that he may have to serve