The revelation was made by Aydın Köstem, a Turkish arms smuggler who had long worked with the Turkish military and intelligence agency, at a court hearing in Ankara in February 2023. As he tried to explain his background to a panel of judges to prove his patriotism, Köstem provided details of a secret visit by a North Korean general to Turkey in the 1990s.

He said the assignment to approach North Korea was given to him by Gen. Ahmet Çörekçi, the then-deputy chief of general staff, with whom he had been working since Çörekçi was serving as secretary of the National Security Council (MGK), the highest security body in Turkey which is also described as a shadow government.

“He invited me to meet with him when he was deputy chief of general staff, so I went to the general staff headquarters. He said they were experiencing shortcomings in the fight against terrorism and were facing problems. He asked me if I could explore where we could get weapons and ammunition that would help our troops. I said I would be happy to do it,” Köstem said during his testimony at the Ankara 28th High Criminal Court.

“I was involved in an effort to acquire other things [for the Turkish army] with a view to transferring technology from abroad. One of them was to bring a major general in charge of the North Korean missile program to Turkey. He came with special permission [from the government] by obtaining a special visa from our embassy in Beijing. I greeted him at the airport and escorted to the airport when I sent him back home,” Köstem added.

He did not provide the name of the North Korean general nor the exact date of the trip or what came out of the secret meetings he had with the Turkish generals. But given the fact that Çörekçi was the general staff’s number 2 at the time, it had to have been some time between 1993 and 1995. Çörekçi became commander of the air force in August 1995 and retired from the military two years later.

Source: The Nordic Monitor