Turkey’s political history is littered with alarmingly numerous murders, ‘disappearances’ and unexplained deaths of investigative journalists, academics, officials, businessmen, and human rights and other activists of various kinds. A notable recent example was the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007. Death threats to prominent public figures such as the writer Orhan Pamuk, suspiciously-staged terrorist incidents, and unsolved violent attacks on the Alevi and other minorities can be added to this litany.1 Incidents such as these have convinced many Turks of the existence of a so-called ‘deep state’, assumed to be composed of an ultra-nationalistic, arch-Kemalist and authoritarian network of bureaucrats, lawyers, soldiers, policemen, criminals and the like. They are often drawn from, but acting in parallel to the state, immune to prosecution, acting against those judged to be in opposition to the official secularist, nationalist and authoritarian ideology of the Turkish Republic. The activities of the ‘deep state’ are often believed to spill over into criminal activity of various kinds.