A brief follow-up to the Recipe Stir Brewing Jinni series:

Late this summer, Sibel Edmonds finally had an opportunity to give testimony to what she heard in the Turkish language wiretaps during her breif employment with the FBI in 2001/2.

And, in the November 2009 issue of The American Conservative, she disclosed further details, including the following:

"The Turkish agents had a network of Turkish professors in various universities with access to government information. Their top source was a Turkish-born professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology. he was useful because he would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air Force. He would provide the list of Ph.D. students who should get these positions. In some cases, the Turkish military attache would ask that certain students be placed in important positions. And they were not necessarily all Turkish, but the ones they selected had struck deals with the Turkish agents to provide information in return for money. If for some reason they had difficulty getting a security clearance, [Marc] Grossman would ensure that the State Department would arrange to clear them."

Following this lead concerning the "Turkish-born professor of nuclear physics," the most likely candidate would be A. Nihat Berker, who is no longer at M.I.T., but is currently President of Sabanci University in Istanbul. In his CV, we find that he was on sabbatical and extended leave from M.I.T. '99-04, and notably, he is "Founder and Director, M.I.T.-Turkey Freshman Scholars Program" beginning in 2003, which suggests a continuing role of facilitating Turkish students' entry into the U.S.

Pure speculation, we should add.

Moreover, we can wonder whether some of the Ph.D. students, now professors, included Bilge Yildiz or Nuh Gedik. An examination into their areas of research might tell us something about the nature of the technologies that were spirited away through the nuclear proliferation market.

But, again, we only speculate.