He’s frail, 77 and lives in Pennsylvania. Turkey says he’s a coup mastermind.

Ankara has asked for Gulen’s extradition as both a legal matter and a profession of loyalty and respect.
A Justice Department team is currently sifting through what U.S. officials say are some 85 boxes of evidence that Turkey says describes the infiltration of Gulenists into every part of Turkish society, including the judiciary, the police, and the military faction that launched the coup attempt, and proves Gulen’s direct role as mastermind of the plot.
Turkey sees the matter of Gulen’s extradition as one of trusting a NATO member and a leading partner in the fight against the Islamic State. “For God’s sake, we’re talking about a country that has been a loyal ally to the United States for 60 years,” Serdar Kilic, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. “They have to give unreserved support to Turkey.”
“Imagine if a group of generals had decided that Obama was not taking the right course of action in Syria or in Europe or wherever,” he said, and had commandeered aircraft to bomb Congress, ordered civilians to be shot at, took the military chief of staff hostage, and come within 15 minutes of trying to kidnap or assassinate the president — all of which happened during the coup attempt. What, Kilic asked, would the immediate U.S. reaction be?
At the very least, he said, Turkey deserved the U.S. “benefit of the doubt.”
The United States, which spent years trying to send Gulen home after his 1999 arrival here as a tourist before a court granted him a green card, says the process is a legal one in which politics — and alliances — have no role.
“President Erdogan and Turkey have a strong belief that Mr. Gulen, who is in Pennsylvania, who is a legal resident of the United States, is somehow behind some of these efforts,” President Obama said a week after the coup attempt.
“We have a process here in the United States for dealing with extradition requests made by foreign governments,” Obama said. “It’s governed by treaties, governed by laws, and it is not a decision that I make but rather a decision that our Justice Department and investigators and courts make alongside my administration in a very well-structured and well-established process.”
Gulen denies involvement. “If one-tenth of this accusation is correct . . . let them take me away, let them hang me,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.

A "No trespassing" sign is seen at the entrance to the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, run by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, in Saylorsburg, Penn., on Dec. 19, 2014. (Charles Mostoller/Reuters)

A powerful network

The son of a small-town imam in Turkey, Gulen is revered by millions around the world, even if few Americans have heard of him. In 2008, readers of Foreign Policy magazine and Prospect, a British publication, voted him the world’s top public intellectual.
His U.S. network — to which his organization says he is only loosely tied through his teachings — includes some 160 schools, the vast majority of them government-funded charters. A nationwide federation of Gulen-linked Turkish American civic and business organizations competes effectively with similarly named groups tied to the Turkish government.
What is globally known as the Hizmet movement — “service” in Turkish — was already taking root here by the time Gulen arrived in 1999 and converted a former summer camp into what is now known as the Gold Generation Worship & Retreat Center.
Here, the movement has replicated elements of a pattern it established in Turkey and in other countries across Central Asia and beyond. First were the Concept Schools, a chain of charters that opened in Cleveland in 1999 followed by Harmony Public Charter Schools launched in Texas in 2000. Today, 160 Gulen-inspired schools operate in at least 20 states.
Many of them are high-performing. Harmony, in Texas, won a $30 million grant from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.
But some schools have also had problems. In Oklahoma, state auditors earlier this year found evidence of financial fraud and contract bidding violations in the network of Dove charter schools. In Georgia, state authorities in 2014 shut down two Gulen-inspired charter schools after an audit found that they had violated rules for awarding contracts and that they had defaulted on bonds. In 2013, the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia denied a charter application, citing curriculum, management and budget problems, and a lack of community support.
Most of the charter schools, which do not teach religion, deny any formal connection with Gulen’s movement. (“There are no ties of any kind to any religious movement,” reads a line on the Harmony website.)
But all have the same distinguishing features: they were opened by Turks and focus on math, science and technology, as per Gulen’s emphasis in education. Many use identical mission terminology in their handbooks, and offer opportunities to learn the Turkish language or culture.
Other elements of the Hizmet network have carefully cultivated political influence, hosting conferences and luncheons across the country. Some are sponsored by the Rumi Forum, which opened in Washington in 1999 to “foster interfaith and intercultural dialogue.” Others with similar missions, which describe themselves as Gulen-inspired, include the Pacifica Institute, which opened in the San Fernando Valley in California in 2003, and the Niagara Foundation, established in 2004 in Chicago.
Several are overseen by the Alliance for Shared Values, Hizmet’s New York-based umbrella organization, which also facilitates access to Gulen and his retreat. Gulen serves as “honorary president” of some of the groups and is cited as the “inspiration” to them, according to their Web sites.
Their members attend state and White House dinners, and host government officials for conferences and ceremonies. The annual dinner of the Turkic American Alliance, an umbrella for regional Turkish groups also linked to the Alliance for Shared Values, draws high-level Americans — including former president Bill Clinton, who addressed the 2008 event by video.
In recent years, individuals and organizations linked to Gulen’s movement have donated tens of thousands of dollars to political campaigns, including those of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), former Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry (R), and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), among others, according to federal filings.
Since 2007, more than a dozen organizations with ties to Gulen’s movement have also sponsored 289 congressional trips, nearly half of all congressional visits to Turkey during that time period, according to an examination of those filings by The Washington Post.
The lack of transparency in terms of how the various Gulenist organization are run — with many contributors unnamed in federal filings, and the hierarchy and sources of funds unclear — has given rise to suspicion.

[Graphic: How the Turkish government regained control]

The FBI has launched a number of past and current investigations into possible financial irregularities at a number of Gulen-tied enterprises, ranging from individual schools to business associations, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of the anonymity to discuss the cases. No charges have ever been filed.
A USA Today investigation last year found that some Gulenist groups that identified as nonprofits for the purpose of funding congressional trips never actually registered as nonprofit organizations with the IRS, or misrepresented their spending on tax forms.
Emre Celik, the president of the Rumi Forum, where Gulen is the honorary president, said the movement is far too loose to exercise oversight over the various entities that adhere to Gulen’s ideology. “All institutions have a board, and the boards are legally responsible for what they do and don’t do,” Celik said when asked about the irregularities.
“Gulen,” he added, “doesn’t hold any official office or any official position. And his day-to-day duties, beyond writing and speaking, do not involve the running of any single institution in any country.”