Scandal in Turkey: Yasemin Çonger, Chris Mason, and the C.I.A.

The Turkish media are rife with speculation that a former U.S. Navy and State Department officer who is married to Yasemin Çongar, once the Washington bureau chief of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet and now affiliated with Taraf, is a C.I.A. agent. The main evidence linking the two has been provided by an April 2002 article that Çonger published in the Foreign Service Journal, in which she identified herself as being “married to FSO Chris Mason”.

Mr. Mason, it seems, has written to the Evening Gazette, categorically denying the allegations made in the original 2 Feb 2010 article about him by Oray Egin. In particular, Mr. Mason reportedly has denied ever being associated with, or having received compensation from, the C.I.A. or the RAND Corporation, as alleged in the article. He states that he is a retired diplomat with an academic interest in Afghanistan, and has demanded that the Evening Gazette retract their false and unfounded allegations, while reserving the right to further legal actions against the paper.

This may well be true but as his public curriculum vitae shows, he seems to have had and continues to have close working relationships with the U.S. intelligence community. He claims to lecture regularly at the Joint Special Operations University, the Naval Postgraduate School, the National Defense University, and to teach at the Fort Bragg Special Operations Center, Fort Carson, Fort Drum, and other military posts.

Although his curriculum vitae no longer appears on the Naval Graduate School website, Chris Mason’s research, publication, and advisory work is still amply documented on it. For example, “NPS Senior Research Fellow and retired Foreign Service Officer Chris Mason” is reported to have addressed the Conference on Culture and Counterinsurgency in Southern Afghanistan, Aug. 25-27, 2009, which was attended by U.S. Lt. Gen. McChrystal and Canadian Brig. Gen. Daniel Menard and a dozen top officers of his Joint Task Force-Afghanistan; Mason reportedly made a presentation on “using Pashtun culture for strategic advantage”.

The following readily available public information on Chris Mason’s background, interests, and activities (from the National Defense University, and the Naval Postgraduate School) is of interest:

Chris Mason

Senior Fellow
Email: chris dot mason at c4ads dot org

Mr. Mason served 23 years in the U.S. government as a Naval Officer and Foreign Service Officer. From 2001 to 2005, he was a policy officer on the Afghanistan Interagency Operations Group at the State Department and most recently served as the political officer on the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktika Province. He lectures regularly on Afghanistan and Counterinsurgency at Joint Special Operations University, the Naval Postgraduate School and the National Defense University, and teaches Afghan history, culture, and ethnography to military personnel deploying to Afghanistan at the Fort Bragg Special Operations Center, Fort Carson, Fort Drum, and other military posts. He holds a Master’s Degree in Military Studies, and is a PhD candidate in History at The George Washington University. [Source]

Earlier Mr. Mason had been a Senior Research Fellow with the Program for Culture & Conflict Studies, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Reproduced below is the content of Google’s cache of http://www.nps.edu/programs/ccs/Mason_bio.html, that has also been reproduced by Fikriyet. It is a snapshot of the page, on the Naval Postgraduate School’s website, as it appeared on 14 Jan 2010 14:26:20 GMT; the page appears to have been removed since then—a fact that does not go unnoticed by Fikriyet.

M. Chris Mason

Senior Research Fellow

M. Chris Mason is a Senior Research Fellow with the Program for Culture & Conflict Studies, focusing on the history and ethnography of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.   Mr. Mason is a retired Foreign Service Officer who served as the Afghanistan Policy Officer for the Bureau of Political Military Affairs at the State Department for four years beginning in June 2001, developing U.S. security policy on Afghanistan, ranging from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), to the Disarmament Program (DDR) and the Afghan National Army (ANA).

While at the State Department, he worked closely with the intelligence community on a number of classified projects involving tribal mapping and the tribes of Afghanistan.  He was considered the State Department’s expert on the history, culture and ethnography of the country and served on the CIA’s Pashtun Red Cell.

In 2005, he served as the Political Officer on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Paktika Province on the Pakistan border.  As the senior US government civilian in the province, he traveled widely with the provincial governor and U.S. Army maneuver elements, engaging thousands of Afghans at speeches and Shura (elders) meetings across the province.  Prior to that tour, Mr. Mason had previously traveled frequently to Afghanistan, beginning in January, 2002 on a variety of security-related projects.

He is currently also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC, and serves as the South Asia Desk Officer for the Marine Corps Center for Advanced Culture Learning (CAOCL) in Quantico, Virginia, where he developed the Marine Corps’ classroom program and distance-learning training programs for Afghanistan, wrote the Afghanistan Deployer’s Cultural Guide, and trains Marines deploying to Afghanistan.

Mr. Mason currently lectures on ethnography and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan at the National Defense University, the Joint Special Operations University, Fort Bragg, RAND, DynCorps, and the Naval Postgraduate School.

In addition, he teaches a course on Counterinsurgency for the Master of Security Studies (MSS) program at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and lectures on Afghanistan history, culture and the Taliban for the U.S. Army’s traveling Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peacekeeping (LDESP) program which trains military personnel deploying to Afghanistan.

Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1990, Mr. Mason served as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America from 1977-1979 and naval officer on active duty from 1981-1986, with tours as a gunnery officer (USS John Young, DD973), a forward observer (2d Battalion 12th Marines) and a naval gunfire officer (2d ANGLICO Airborne).  He earned Navy Master Parachutist wings, the Navy Achievement Medal, the Korea Defense Medal, the Humanitarian Service Medal, Zimbabwean Army parachute wings, the State Department Superior Honor Medal, and other awards.  He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master’s Degree in Military Studies from Marine Corps University, and is currently a PhD candidate in South Asian History at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Culture & Conflict Review Articles:

• Lessons Unlearned, Vol.1, No. 2, December 2007.

Other Publications:

• Terrorism, Insurgency, and Afghanistan (PDF) -Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason
  • Published in: Countering Terrorism and Insurgency in the 21st Century. International Perspectives. Vol 2. Combating the Sources & Facilitators. Edited by: James J. Forest. Praeger Security International, 2007.
• Understanding the Taliban and Insurgency in Afghanistan. (PDF) (Text format) -Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason
  • Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs 51, No. 1, 20072006

Material contained herein is made available for the purpose of peer review and discussion and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

Contact M. Chris Mason

The fact that Mr. Mason “served on the CIA’s Pashtun Red Cell” is of interest (blog). In a long (11-page) article in the U.S. News and World Report, David Kaplan had reported on the “Red Cell” as follows:

Twice each week, a top-secret report with distinctive red stripes lands on the desks of select policymakers in Washington. Called the “Red Cell,” it is the work of a CIA unit by the same name, set up after the 9/11 attacks to think “outside the box.” “Some of it is really wacky, even scary,” says an insider. “Like bombing Iran.” The “Red Cell,” in a very real sense, is emblematic of the trouble the U.S. intelligence community finds itself in today. Its reports, in-house critics say, are getting stale. “There’s not a lot of young blood,” an analyst says, “and there’s not enough turnover.”

In the light of this background the fact that Mr. Mason admits to having “served on” the C.I.A. Red Cell is not without significance. Further, the revelation that there was a “Pashtun Red Cell” raises questions about what kind of “outside the box” thinking Mr. Mason and his friends have been engaged in on the Pashtuns? If bombing Iran was not off the table for Red Cell thinkers, then certainly creating Pashtunistan (or balkanising Pakistan) would not be off the agenda either.

Mr. Mason’s close links to the intelligence community are plainly spelt out in his speaker’s introduction at a Jamestown Foundation event (on “Waziristan and the Uzbeks”) held on 6 June 2007:

While at the State Department, he worked closely with the intelligence community on a number of classified projects involving tribal mapping and the tribes of Afghanistan and the FATA, and served on the CIA’s Pashtun Red Cell.

The introduction also states that in March 2007 Mr. Mason had visited Quetta, Peshawar and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan.

Finally, there seems to be more to the Turkish press coverage—especially in scandalising Çonger’s marriage to an American, with alleged C.I.A. links, on the one hand, and her position at the controversial Taraf newspaper, on the other; Taraf is (1) suspected of being funded by Fethullah Gülen (a moderate observant Muslim living in self-exile in the United States), and (2) accused of being staunchly pro-AKP (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party, of the President  and the Prime Minister), and (3) of being anti-military. For those familiar with the Turkish language, unlike the present writer, the following links are provided:

Coverage in the Turkish Press:

• Taraf??n Darbe Planlar? Yoksa CIA ?malat? m?? (Trakya Net Haber, 03.02.2010, 21:26:01)
• CIA AJANI TARTI?MASI BÜYÜYOR: M.Chris Mason aç?klama yapt? (OdaTV, 03.02.2010, 09:47)
• Ahmet Altan CIA’den Mr. Mason’? tan?yor mu? (Aksam, 02 ?ubat 2010)
• Yasemin Çongar ve CIA görevlisi kocas? M.Chris Mason (Fikriyet, 02-?ubat-2010, 22:28)
• Yasemin Çongar’?n e?i CIA mensubu mu? (Gazeteciler, 02 ?ubat 2010 Sal? 15:20)
• ??TE YASEM?N ÇONGAR’IN MERAK ED?LEN E?? (OdaTV, 02.02.2010 12:14)