A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: HIGHLIGHTS

Former Nazi soldier and mosque founder Garip Sultan, on Hajj as part of an Amcomlib covert propaganda operation. Amcomlib’s efforts to sway the Muslim world is one of the original findings in A Mosque in Munich.

The existence of a freelance West German intelligence operation with strong ties to the Nazi past: • Nazi official Gerhard von Mende’s “Research Service Eastern Europe” recreated key elements of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory (“Ostministerium”). • The operation hired almost exclusively former Nazi employees. • It was funded by the West German foreign office and other ministries in Bonn. • A key goal was revising eastward the border with Poland. • Von Mende was recruited by U.S. intelligence, even though his Nazi past was well known. • West Germany conceived of the Islamic Center of Munich as a way to bind local Muslims to the West German state. How “Amcomlib” (the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism) tried to sway the Muslim world through covert propaganda: • Amcomlib’s use of Muslims to counter Soviet expansion in the Third World, including sending Muslims on the Hajj. • Amcomlib’s sponsorship of Muslim Brotherhood figures exiled in Europe, especially of Said Ramadan, son-in-law of the founder of the Brotherhood. • Amcomlib’s rivalry with West German intelligence for control of the Muslims in Munich. • Details of the U.S. retreat from the mosque project, probably due to a growing emphasis on Vietnam, which left the field to the Muslim Brotherhood. The existence of a rogue intelligence operation surrounding a popular U.S. author, Ahmad Kamal: • Kamal’s real name and identity. • Kamal’s background as an author of books published, among others, by prestigious U.S. publishing houses. • Kamal’s creation of Jami’at al-Islami, a charity that was a CIA front operation. • Kamal’s likely involvement in gun-running to anti-French Algerian rebels. • Kamal’s involvement in Islamist causes in Indonesia. • Kamal’s efforts to hijack the Munich mosque project from Amcomlib. • The self-destruction of Jami’at and Kamal’s subsequent intelligence career in Burma. The expansion of the Brotherhood from Munich to France and the U.K. • Details of key previously unknown Brotherhood strategy meetings in the 1970s and ‘80s that set a course for expansion. • The Brotherhood’s influence of religious life through a fatwa council in Ireland, an umbrella group in the U.K. and a lobby group in Brussels. All these groups are direct descendants to the Munich mosque. • The involvement of people associated with the Munich mosque in terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Continued U.S. flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood through the Bush and Obama administrations. • Classified CIA documents from the Bush administration showing a benevolent view of the Brotherhood. • Classified State Department from the Bush administration documents showing a clear plan to use radical Islam to further U.S. foreign policy. This includes backing meetings of Brotherhood figures. • Efforts by the State Department to undermine skeptics in Allied countries who do not want to work with Islamists. This includes sponsoring Islamists in Germany. • Initial moves by the Obama administration to court Islamists.

Excerpt from the initial

Wall Street Journal article:

THE BEACHHEAD

HOW A MOSQUE FOR EX-NAZIS BECAME CENTER OF RADICAL ISLAM DOCUMENTS REVEAL TRIUMPH BY MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN POSTWAR MUNICH

By IAN JOHNSON

Staff Reporter of

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

July 12, 2005

MUNICH, Germany — North of this prosperous city of engineers and auto makers is an elegant mosque with a slender minaret and a turquoise dome. A stand of pines shields it from a busy street. In a country of more than three million Muslims, it looks unremarkable, another place of prayer for Europe’s fastest-growing religion.

The Mosque’s history, however, tells a more-tumultuous story. Buried in government and private archives are hundreds of documents that trace the battle to control the Islamic Center of Munich. Never before made public, the material shows how radical Islam established one of its first and most important beachheads in the West when a group of ex-Nazi soldiers decided to build a mosque.

The soldiers’ presence in Munich was part of a nearly forgotten subplot to World War II: the decision by tens of thousands of Muslims in the Soviet Red Army to switch sides and fight for Hitler. After the war, thousands sought refuge in West Germany, building one of the largest Muslim communities in 1950s Europe. When the Cold War heated up, they were a coveted prize for their language skills and contacts back in the Soviet Union. For more than a decade, U.S., West German, Soviet and British intelligence agencies vied for control of them in the new battle of democracy versus communism.

Yet the victor wasn’t any of these Cold War combatants. Instead, it was a movement with an equally powerful ideology: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1920s Egypt as a social-reform movement, the Brotherhood became the fountainhead of political Islam, which calls for the Muslim religion to dominate all aspects of life. A powerful force for political change throughout the Muslim world, the Brotherhood also inspired some of the deadliest terrorist movements of the past quarter century, including Hamas and al Qaeda.

The story of how the Brotherhood exported its creed to the heart of Europe highlights a recurring error by Western democracies. For decades, countries have tried to cut deals with political Islam — backing it in order to defeat another enemy, especially communism. Most famously, the U.S. and its allies built up mujahadeen holy warriors in 1980s Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union — paving the way for the rise of Osama bin Laden, who quickly turned on his U.S. allies in the 1990s.

Munich was a momentous early example of this dubious strategy. Documents and interviews show how the Muslim Brotherhood formed a working arrangement with U.S. intelligence organizations, outmaneuvering German agencies for control of the former Nazi soldiers and their mosque. But the U.S. lost its hold on the movement, and in short order conservative, arch-Catholic Bavaria had become host to a center of radical Islam.

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