The Pastor Who Got Between Trump And Erdogan

- Jillian Goodman

The apartment where Kenneth and Marilyn Abney once worked as Mormon missionaries sits opposite the high school for Alsancak, a lively neighborhood in Izmir in western Turkey. They were also just a few hundred yards from fellow American Andrew Brunson, the evangelical pastor now on trial for his alleged involvement in a terrorist plot to destabilize the country. A police cordon marks the home where he still lives—under house arrest.

Alsancak’s tiny world of missionaries and converts seems an unlikely setting for so vast a conspiracy. And yet, Turkish prosecutors allege that Kenneth Abney, a retired U.S. special forces major, conspired here with Brunson to coordinate a group of malefactors that included not only evangelicals and Mormons—that is, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—but also people in the Muslim Fethullah Gülen’s faith group (designated as terrorists by Ankara after Turkey’s failed 2016 military coup), the Kurdish-Marxist PKK terrorist organization, an Israeli, an Iranian, and current and former agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Abney hasn’t been indicted, but prosecutors say he is “under investigation.”

The Brunson case has taken on wide significance, becoming the focus of a dispute between two of the world’s more impulsive presidents: Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump. “You dare to sacrifice 81 million Turkey for a priest who is linked to terror groups?” Erdogan thundered at the U.S. in a speech in August. He threatened to abandon ties with the West, turning his country to “new markets, new partnerships, and new alliances.”