İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan's longtime foreign-policy confidant and now head of MİT, held undisclosed meetings with Greek intelligence and other Athens interlocutors last week, Ta Nea reports — at a moment when marine-park decrees, the Achilles' Shield pact with Israel, and the Mecca defense agreement have pushed Greek-Turkish relations toward their tensest point in years.
The head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MİT), İbrahim Kalın, travelled to Athens last week for a series of undisclosed meetings that included his Greek counterpart, according to a report published by the Greek daily Ta Nea on September 2. The visit, described by the paper as having taken place "under the radar, without any publicity," places one of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's most trusted advisers in the Greek capital at a moment when Greek-Turkish relations are under some of their heaviest strain in years.
According to Ta Nea, Kalın met with the director of Greece's National Intelligence Service (EYP), Themistoklis Demiris, as well as with "a series of other figures in Athens," all under what the paper called strict secrecy. The central question raised by the report is whether Kalın was carrying direct messages from Erdoğan to the Greek side — and, if so, on which of the several fronts currently straining bilateral ties.
A Visit Timed to a Combustible Moment
The timing is difficult to read as coincidental. Ta Nea places the Kalın trip squarely inside "a critical period" defined by three parallel disputes: the standoff over Turkey's newly declared marine parks in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean; the Greece-Israel defense agreement known as the "Achilles' Shield"; and the Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement, signed in Istanbul on August 7 between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The marine-park dispute alone has done more to sour the atmosphere between Athens and Ankara than almost any development since the 2020 Eastern Mediterranean crisis. On August 15, President Erdoğan signed presidential decrees establishing two "national marine parks" — one stretching along the Fethiye-Kaş coast, the other in the northeastern Aegean — that Ankara says fall within its maritime jurisdiction even where they extend beyond its territorial waters.
Greece's Foreign Ministry rejected the designations the following day as illegal wherever they overlap the high seas or the Greek continental shelf, warning that such moves "undermine efforts to maintain relations of mutual understanding between the two countries." Greek assessments suggest the southern park's boundaries reach into waters around the small Greek island of Kastellorizo, a longstanding flashpoint in Eastern Mediterranean maritime claims, while the northern zone extends toward the sea between Samothrace and Lemnos.
The dispute is widely read in Athens and in regional commentary as a rehearsal for a larger confrontation still to come: Ankara's parliament is expected to take up legislation in October that would give domestic legal codification to the "Blue Homeland" (Mavi Vatan) doctrine, the expansive reading of Turkish maritime jurisdiction across the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Turkish commentary has framed the marine-park decrees as a calculated "challenge and response" to Greece's own 2025 marine park declarations in the Ionian and the southern Cyclades, rather than a unilateral escalation — a distinction Athens does not accept.
Layered onto the maritime dispute are two developments that Ankara views, from different angles, as strategically adverse. The Achilles' Shield defense framework between Greece and Israel — deepening security and air-defense cooperation between the two countries — sits uneasily alongside Turkey's own recalibrated, and at times openly adversarial, posture toward Israel amid the region's post-October 2023 realignments. And the Mecca Mutual Defense Agreement, binding Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in a formal defense pact signed on August 7 in Istanbul, has been read across the region — and inside Greek policy circles — as evidence of Ankara's growing ambition to anchor itself as a pivotal security guarantor from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.
It is against this backdrop — maritime confrontation, competing defense architectures, and a wider contest for regional primacy — that a secret visit by Erdoğan's chief intelligence officer and closest security adviser takes on particular weight. Ta Nea notes that the central unresolved question is precisely what Kalın communicated on behalf of the Turkish president, and to whom.
What Was Discussed
Beyond the strategic questions the visit raises, Ta Nea reports that the intelligence-to-intelligence track covered more operational ground. Kalın and his team are said to have discussed the presence of roughly 300 Turkish organized-crime figures, drawn from some 15 criminal networks, believed to have been operating in Greece over the past four years. The two sides also reportedly addressed the cases of five to seven Turkish organizers of migrant-smuggling operations along the Turkish coast — a flow that, according to the report, has notably slowed in recent months.
Additional matters raised, according to the paper, extended beyond the intelligence services into police-level cooperation, where an established channel of contacts and officer exchanges already exists between the two countries. The meetings are also said to have touched on terrorism-network activity and espionage concerns following the renewed flare-up in the Middle East.
Who Is İbrahim Kalın
Kalın, 55, has led MİT — an agency with an estimated 10,000 personnel — since June 2023, when he succeeded Hakan Fidan, who moved to become Turkey's foreign minister. An academic and author specializing in Islamic philosophy, religion, history and international relations, with studies in the United States, Turkey and Malaysia, Kalın became Erdoğan's principal foreign-policy adviser in 2009. He served as deputy undersecretary for foreign relations and public diplomacy in 2012, acted as Erdoğan's special envoy in resolving the 2015 Turkey-Russia crisis following the downing of a Russian jet, and took part in 2017 diplomatic efforts to mediate the Qatar-UAE rift.
According to Ta Nea, Kalın's role has repeatedly placed him at the center of Ankara's highest-stakes diplomatic and intelligence files. In September 2024 he traveled to Tripoli to meet Libya's prime minister and convey Ankara's position on resolving the Libyan crisis. Through 2024 and 2025 he met with members of Hamas's political bureau as part of Turkish efforts toward a Gaza ceasefire, and Reuters has reported that CIA Director William Burns contacted Kalın directly during the 2024 Iran-Israel crisis to request his help in mediation efforts.
Yet Kalın's record on the Greek-Turkish file itself is more adversarial than his broader mediator profile might suggest. During the 2020 Eastern Mediterranean crisis, he was a public architect of Turkey's hardline position on Greece, Cyprus and maritime zones. In early 2021, he described the then-new round of Greek-Turkish contacts as "an important step for relations between the two countries and for balance in the Aegean" — but in earlier statements, Ta Nea recalls, Kalın was a vocal supporter of Erdoğan's hardline positions on Cyprus, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Turkey's asserted right to operate in the region.
Reading the Silence
Neither the Greek nor the Turkish government has confirmed or commented publicly on the visit, and Ta Nea itself frames the trip's purpose as an open question rather than a settled fact. What is not in dispute is the environment in which it took place: a maritime dispute that regional analysts describe as having moved the Greek-Turkish confrontation "up one deliberate rung," a defense pact reordering Gulf-Mediterranean alignments, and a Greek-Israeli security partnership that Ankara watches warily. Whether Kalın's Athens trip was an attempt to manage that escalation quietly, through the same back-channel his career has repeatedly relied on from Moscow to Doha to Gaza, or something narrower — confined to organized crime and migrant-smuggling cooperation — remains, for now, unconfirmed.