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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST |
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Chapter 12: LOSING CONTROL IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and the party celebrating Bob Dreher's forty-fifth birthday was coming to an end. Several dozen friends and colleagues had danced and drunk for a few hours. Then Dreher's old nudist-colony buddy, Karin West, stood up and began to recite a bit of doggerel she had written for the occasion.
It was at this point that most people realized that the gathering was also a farewell party. After four years in Munich as head of emigre relations, Dreher had decided to call it quits and go back to "headquarters" -- the CIA in Washington. He preferred the lifestyle in Munich. He loved the city, the people, and his annual ritual of growing a beard for carnival. But his tour was up.
Various emigres stood up to thank Dreher. Most were from the old crowd -- the Soviet exiles who worked at Radio Liberty. Ramadan and Dreher's new Muslims probably wouldn't have felt at home at such a fete. Eventually Dreher tried to find the right words, using his clumsy German. "I think that we are all people with the same goal." The audience groaned. A Georgian duke interjected with a laugh, "I didn't want it to get political!"
It was a question many of Dreher's colleagues had wondered about. Unlike his predecessor, Ike Patch, Dreher had cultivated new groups as part of a more aggressive strategy. The Muslim students and Ramadan -- all had been supported in ways unimaginable a few years earlier. Only weeks before the farewell party on December 16, 1961, Ramadan had survived von Mende's ex-soldiers' attempted takeover and was now the unchallenged head of the Mosque Construction Commission. That was in some measure due to Dreher's help: he had financed Ramadan's conferences and backed him, creating a platform for the Egyptian Islamist in Europe while also enlisting the support of former German collaborators, such as the Caucasian leader Magoma and the old Dagestani leader Said Shamil. In the past, the United States had tried to recruit von Mende to run the emigres, but Dreher had essentially brushed von Mende aside. And then there was Dreher's probable role in helping Ramadan get settled in Europe -- his visa, for example. That showed initiative and energy -- exactly what one would have expected from Bob Dreher, the cold warrior, the veteran of Odessa and Moscow, the CIA man eager to shake up the wannabe radio journalists in Munich. Yet what had all this accomplished for America? Dreher had clearly won over an important ally. In terms of fighting communism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the United States were on the same page. In late 1961, for example, Ramadan sent a letter to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a key adviser to the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy. "When the enemy is armed with a totalitarian ideology and served by regiments of devoted believers, those with opposing policies must compete at the popular level of action," Ramadan wrote Schlesinger, "and the essence of their tactics must be counter- faith and counter-devotion. Only popular forces, genuinely involved and genuinely reacting on their own behalf, can meet the infiltrating threat of Communism." The letter was most likely a request to the new Kennedy administration to continue the strategic partnership between the United States and Islamists like Ramadan. But the events unfolding in Munich cast doubt on the value of such an alliance. Ramadan was now in charge of the mosque project, but he was operating independently of the United States. The Germans and the Americans had the same idea: control the mosque, control the local Muslims, and then use them to fight communism. The local Muslims were still in Munich and to that extent could still be used for covert propaganda purposes, but Ramadan was not going to be their leader on the world stage. It seems that Ramadan hadn't cared about uniting Muslims to fight communism, as the Americans had intended. The CIA analysis from 1953 put it best: he was mostly interested in grouping people around him for power -- power that he wanted to use to spread the Muslim Brotherhood's vision of Islam. He pushed aside those who didn't help him achieve this goal. Most of the Muslims in Munich were useless to him. They were old ex-soldiers with limited religious knowledge. More important, they were mature men, too worldly, too focused on their homelands, and too stubborn. Ramadan wanted a cadre of impressionable young men to spread his world revolution. He was leading a new movement, one that sought to heal the world's problems through religion. No wonder he didn't unite Munich's Muslims; that had been the furthest thing from his mind. He didn't want an umbrella group; he wanted a cell. The Americans, meanwhile, were pulling back. Amcomlib decided not to replace Dreher. Instead, his new deputy, Will Klump, would keep up the payments to the old emigre groups but would cultivate no new talent and lose contact with Ramadan, who was focused on the Brotherhood. The Americans in Munich were of no more use to him, and no one there took the initiative to rekindle the relationship. Ramadan's letter to Schlesinger went unanswered. The emigre relations department would eventually be disbanded, and Amcomlib would make a symbolic but telling change. In 1964, like so many times in the past, it would be renamed: the Radio Liberty Committee. From then on, its emphasis would be broadcasting. Later, when the CIA'srole in the organization was exposed in the early 1970s, Radio Liberty was separated from the CIA and merged with its sister radio station, Radio Free Europe. The two stations were put under the supervision of the Board for International Broadcasting, which in turn was run by the State Department. Symbolic of Americas changing priorities, Dreher was deployed to Vietnam. There, he helped the South Vietnamese run covert radio stations as part of the clandestine CIA-backed special forces unit, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group. Dreher worked in the unit's covert propaganda unit, serving one tour. As in Munich, Dreher seemed out of touch with his surroundings and unaware of the impact of his work. He spoke no Vietnamese and had no idea of what was being broadcast. He was stationed there as an adviser, helping to channel millions of dollars into an effort he didn't understand. In 1972 Dreher retired at age fifty-six, after more than thirty years in government service. He kept his stunning apartment in Virginia, with its distant view of the Capitol. His trips overseas stopped, a phase of his life that had dwindled away. He died in 2004 at a nursing home from complications related to a fall. *** In September 1962, the Middle East Institute in Washington held a star-studded meeting on Islam in the Soviet Union. This field of study, once obscure, was growing in importance. Held at the luxurious Statler Hilton, the event was partly financed by the State Department and was meant to "open the door to the study of Central Asia" in the United States. Everyone important in the field was there -- Sultan, Hayit, and key academics from around the world. Everyone except Gerhard von Mende. "I myself didn't receive an invitation, presumably for the reasons that you told me." von Mende wrote to Sultan, hoping he could use his Amcomlib contacts to get an invitation. "On the other hand, Herr Dr. Hayit was invited, who is an employee of Research Service East Europe, which I, as an allegedly big Nazi, run ... I find this course of action at least unfair." Fair or not, it marked the beginning of a new era, one in which it was increasingly difficult to overlook the strong Nazi sympathies of someone like von Mende. Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, had just been executed in Jerusalem, and Raul Hilberg had recently published his pathbreaking book The Destruction of the European Jews. In the 1940s and '50s, the Holocaust had been an almost taboo topic -- a strange embarrassment that most people ignored or chose to forget. Now it had become a serious field of study and people were becoming aware of who had participated. "He was known as a Nazi and definitely that's why he wasn't invited," recalled Richard Pipes, then a young Harvard professor who helped organize the conference. "His reputation was pretty clear." Von Mende was increasingly cut out of the mosque project as well. He now had no contacts in the Mosque Construction Commission. In early 1963,the ex-soldiers announced their withdrawal from the group, formalizing what had been a fact for over a year. Ramadan, meanwhile, moved forward. Underscoring his broader ambitions for the group, he changed its name from the Mosque Construction Commission to the Islamic Community of Southern Germany. In 1963, von Mende suffered another loss. Ali Kantemir, the seventy-five-year-old leader from the Caucasus who had been put up as a candidate against Ramadan and had lost by a few votes, died. For years, von Mende had been helping the half-blind leader. Now he sent a note to his intelligence contacts, asking them to help erase traces of this assistance. "Mr. Alichan Kantemir, with whom I was personally befriended, worked for several years with German agencies and for this was also financed by the German side. Therefore in my view a direct German interest exists to obtain and search through the part of his estate that touches on this cooperation." Von Mende's impotence was underscored by a query about Turkish "guest workers," or Gastarbeiter. Since the 1960s, West Germany's booming economy had been attracting foreign laborers. Now, with their numbers rising, one of von Mende's intelligence contacts was writing to ask about their potential for unrest. It was an ironic question: for years, von Mende had been formulating grand strategies to use Islam without having many Muslims at his disposal. Now numerous Muslims were arriving in West Germany, but he had lost control of the mosque, the instrument that would allow him to influence them. Von Mende tried to establish new contacts. Hayit infiltrated a Muslim student group in Cologne, and von Mende began channeling money there. But he was working on the periphery. Ramadan had won. The Stasi seemed to take note of von Mende's marginalization. On January 16, 1962, its agents stopped Operation Asiatische Emigration, their seven-year surveillance of von Mende's organization. Perhaps the Stasi was satisfied at taking down von Mende's old boss, Theodor Oberlander; maybe the organization had simply gotten enough mileage out of bashing the Ostministerium group. In any case, von Mende was no longer important. Even his own government had changing priorities. West Germany was hoping to improve relations with the East -- the first seeds of detente. Hayit would be sent to another congress, this time in Delhi, but the West German Foreign Office told him to tone down the rhetoric. A few years earlier, such instructions would have been unthinkable. Von Mende's nerves began to act up. He had suffered a serious stroke in 1956 and his doctor had ordered him to stop smoking. In 1963 he took it up again. The strain of running what was essentially a two-man show -- himself and Hayit -- was taking its toll. On a Monday in mid-December, von Mende was in his office overlooking the Rhine, reading one of the many intelligence reports that came across his desk. This one was a summary of recent events in the Soviet Union. With the file open before him on his desk, he suffered a massive heart attack and died immediately. *** As an intelligence entrepreneur, von Mende didn't fit the usual paradigms. He didn't work for West Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, or its domestic counterpart, the Office for Protection of the Constitution. Instead, he had money coming from all sides. The Office for Protection of the Constitution funded him, but so did West Germany's Foreign Office. His operation was more akin to a typical German Mittelstand company -- such midsize family businesses formed the backbone of the West German economy. His office was located just downstairs from his apartment. His wife, Karo, played a big role in his work, especially when it came to dealing with the English-speaking world or the all-important socializing with the traditional folk of the Soviet Union. His children helped with clerical work. The foreign ministry agreed to pick up the tab for von Mende's funeral "in consideration of the great service that the deceased gave as head of the Office for Homeless Foreigners and the Research Service Eastern Europe." But the ministry required one condition: "It is requested to treat this affair confidentially and to take special care that the Foreign Office does not appear publicly as financial backer." Finding a successor to von Mende proved tricky. The federal government considered his old BND contact, Siegfried Ungermann, but this possibility was rejected as too complicated to organize -- von Mende's institution was supposed to give the appearance of being independent of the government, and Ungermann had been a civil servant. Many emigre groups lobbied for Ungermann -- or indeed anyone -- to replace von Mende. Eventually, the government decided to close the operation. That precipitated an ugly scene: it turned out that von Mende's children had been on the payroll, and now they demanded compensation. His son also claimed that family goods had been taken from the office. Later, his wife asked if she could use the name Research Service Eastern Europe -- apparently she wanted to keep the organization going as a family business. The foreign ministry said no. Even von Mende's files were subject to dispute. Nearly a year after he died, the papers remained in unsecured filing cabinets in his grand office overlooking the Rhine. Officials worried that the mass of papers, most of them marked Geheim, "secret." would fall into enemy hands. His children kept his personal papers, even though many were related to work. Von Mende's working papers, about one hundred thick binders in all, ended up not in the intelligence services' archives - where, like CIA files, they would have been kept under lock and key, if not outright destroyed. Instead, after complicated bureaucratic wrangling, they ended up with the German Foreign Office. After a few decades they were declassified and are now part of the public record. *** With Dreher's departure and von Mende's death, the two western competitors had exited the stage. U.S. interests had shifted elsewhere -- especially to Vietnam. Its interest in Islam as a Cold War weapon would not be revived until fifteen years later, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Then, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment would commission the Rand Corporation to write a report on von Mende's use of Muslims. An enterprising research fellow named Alex Alexiev wrote about the Ostministerium in a classified report. He pointed out the obvious implications for the United States as it embarked on arming Soviet Muslims against Moscow. "This study should be of interest to military and strategic planners who are beginning to address the Soviet nationality issue in a strategic perspective," the report stated. Alexiev recounted the story of the Ostministerium and how the Germans had been effective in exploiting the Soviet Union's ethnic divisions. Since many of these ethnic groups formed part of the Soviet army that had just invaded Afghanistan, the United States had a chance to repeat the Germans' tactics and avoid their mistakes. He also noted that many of these Muslim ethnic groups were also living in Afghanistan, giving them a potent reason to fight Moscow. Alexiev's study was part of a larger discussion that led to the arming of Muslim holy warriors to fight the Soviets. It was very similar to the Germans' pioneering use of them; the Germans had cultivated the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, set up imam-training schools, and tried to appoint religious leaders in Soviet Muslim areas, all with an eye toward motivating Muslim troops to fight. On another level, Washington had an even clearer precedent for its support of Afghani holy warriors -- its support of the Mufti's allies, the Muslim Brotherhood. In backing Said Ramadan, Washington had allied itself with the ur-Islamist group, the inspiration for the holy warriors in Afghanistan who would become known as the mujahideen. Lacking access to the CIA files, we can't draw a causal link between Munich and Afghanistan, but it is probable that the earlier use of the Muslim Brotherhood made it easier for U.S. intelligence to arm the Afghanis. When that support ran its course two decades later after the 9/11 attacks, most would look to Afghanistan for the historical basis of that assault. That was not incorrect -- but few realized that its prototype was Munich. West Germany was already moving toward rapprochement with the eastern bloc, and its officials had little use for Muslims. Von Mende's death effectively ended West German surveillance of radical Islamic groups until the 1990s, when the rise of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism caused united Germany's domestic intelligence to refocus on those groups. Only then did the Munich mosque and its Arab students -- now adults -- again come under scrutiny. But one group was left onstage: the Muslim Brotherhood. Its members did not lose interest or focus. They grasped the small foothold prepared for them by West German and U.S. intelligence. Quietly, they turned the Munich mosque into a beachhead for expansion into the Western world.
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