Tuncay Güney, a former journalist and a suspected former Ergenekon member who allegedly infiltrated the organization as a government agent and who now resides in Canada as a rabbi, has become the most curious personality in Turkey since the 2007 start of the investigation into Ergenekon, a clandestine gang rooted in the state hierarchy that is accused of manipulating the public and plotting a coup against the government.

A document published in the Sabah daily last week showed that Güney infiltrated the organization to collect information on behalf of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT).

Güney was captured by the police in 2001 on suspicion of gang membership. His testimony to the police was the first time Ergenekon was publicly exposed. According to the MİT document, Güney -- who used the codename İpek, or Silk, for MİT operations -- purposefully infiltrated Ergenekon and JİTEM, an illegal intelligence unit in the gendarmerie suspected of hundreds of murders, kidnappings and disappearances.

He was then taken out of the country and directed to the US when his identity was exposed in his police interrogation. In an interview years ago, Mehmet Eymür, a former MİT counterterrorism department chief, indicated that Güney was an MİT agent.

The MİT confirmed that the document was genuine but denied that Güney was a full-time source of information. But some mainstream newspapers, mostly those belonging to the Doğan group, which has underreported the Ergenekon trial, have been hotly debating Güney’s supposed MİT membership.

Taraf’s Yıldıray Oğur shared in a brief phone interview his opinion that the media craze over Güney is an attempt to decrease the value of information provided by Güney which is key to the Ergenekon investigation by highlighting unusual aspects about him.

"It is obvious that the information he has is vital. It is evident that he knows a lot. He walked the highest peaks of Turkey in its darkest years, 1991 and 2001. There is not a single person he has not met, no place he has not been," he said.

Oğur also recalled that there are pictures of Güney which were taken with northern Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and Hezbollah leaders Fadlallah and Hasan Nasrallah, adding that Güney's years in the secret service were also filled with foreign acquaintances and contacts. Oğur said: "They are trying to prove that the entire Ergenekon case is bogus by attacking Güney. Yes, his personality may be different, his being a rabbi, everything about him may be questionable, but he obviously stands at an important place within this network of [Ergenekon] relationships. He knows everyone and has archived all their documents. This is not the kind of person you could simply dismiss by saying, 'Are we going to believe this man?'"

He said Güney's credibility as a source was not only evident in the Sabah document. "He worked for the Akşam daily, the Sabah daily and for STV. He was being paid an equivalent of YTL 3,000 today while working for Sabah when he was only 19. Why would a 19-year-old get paid so well if he was not at all important?" he asked.

Oğur continued: "The attempt here is to play on some of the more unusual things about him and create prejudice about the information he is providing. But, of course, the people are aware of everything and no longer buy tricks like these."

Ergenekon centers on Küçük

Some analysts have noted that the discussion on Güney's MİT has given way to the critical situation that there are journalists in the media that have links to state intelligence units.

Star daily's columnist Ahmet Kekeç has noted that the incident is reminiscent of the failed coup attempt of March 9, 1971, when one of the organizers of the coup actually worked for MİT and exposed the coup. The case was taken to court, but most the suspects were released at the end of the trial because, as Kekeç puts it, "the organization extended into the depths of the military and they had to cut off tracing it at some point."

He maintains, the news stories on Güney are misinformation intended to confuse the suspects with the real victims of a planned coup, which he notes happened in the March 9 period.

Alper Görmüş, a media and newspaper critic who also writes for Taraf, also remembers the failed coup attempt of March 9, 1971. He writes, "Ergenkeon is not Tuncay Güney, but Veli Küçük, just like March 9, 1971, was not Mahir Kaynak [the MİT member who exposed the attempt] but Cemal Madanoğlu [the general who plotted it]."

He also accused various writers of the Doğan group of creating "propaganda" to make their readers believe that what Güney says he knows about Ergenekon cannot be trusted. "They published the impressions of a police chief, Ahmet İhtiyaroğlu, on why Görmüş is unreliable for two consecutive days," Görmüş writes. "And here is why İhtiyaroğlu said he didn't trust Güney, [quoting İhtiyaroğlu]: 'I can't find Güney to be credible given he is gay, he is very young and he also speaks very easily.'"

Giving other similar examples, Görmüş accused Doğan media of simply trying to shift the public discussion of the Ergenekon trial from the real subject matter to Güney or other trivial details.

Zaman's Ekrem Dumanlı also pointed to the outstanding attention some newspapers have shown Güney after Sabah published the document regarding his MİT job. He says that though Güney's MİT affiliation raised more questions than it answered, Doğan newspapers have been running stories depicting Güney as unreliable, dark and perverted and as a liar. Dumanlı says these newspapers were not being 100 percent honest because they chose to prove only Güney's dishonesty regarding accusations Güney had made about the owner of these newspapers.

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