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A MOSQUE IN MUNICH: NAZIS, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD IN THE WEST

BUREAUCRATS IN BAVARIA'S refugee ministry were charged with helping the local Muslims, but by 1960 they were finding it hard to sort out the competing groups -- the Americans, the politicians in Bonn, the ex-soldiers, and the Arabs like Ramadan. Then suddenly, they were faced with Ahmad Kamal. Author, adventurer, and spy, Ahmad Kamal was one of the most charismatic -- and erratic -- figures involved in Americas efforts to harness Islam. He ranged from California to Turkestan and Indonesia to Algeria, always claiming to be a champion of downtrodden Muslims. Often, though, he was working for foreign intelligence agencies. He arrived in Munich not on his own, but instead cloaked in his latest creation, a charity called Jami'at al Islam. His goal: to control the Muslim community in Munich.

In January 1960, Jami'at officials announced that they were moving their operations from Austria to Munich. German officials were immediately bombarded with pamphlets and newsletters explaining the group's founding. Social-affairs bureaucrats were confused. "I hardly think it's possible to unify the rival groups, namely the Ecclesiastical Administration [von Mende's group], 'Islam' [Gacaoglu's group], and the newly arrived Jami'at al Islam." wrote an official from the displaced persons' ministry in Bonn to his Bavarian counterpart.

Von Mende's men had been trying to undercut Ramadan by asking Bavarian officials to stifle his efforts to build a mosque. The officials now seemed too busy with Kamal to respond to von Mende. Wittingly or not, Kamal's Jami'at was running interference for Ramadan, sowing confusion among low-level bureaucrats and allowing Ramadan to move forward unhindered.

The Bavarians' confusion becomes understandable in light of the content of Jami'at's brochures. They overflowed with articles about the group's strange history -- almost surely a product of Kamal's novelistic imagination. He portrayed Jami'at as a millennial movement, a holy brotherhood forged in battle and now championing oppressed Muslims around the world. "Jami'at al Islam was founded in the years 1868 to 1869 in Turkestan during the time of the attack of czarist Russia against the defenders of Buchara and Khiva. Men of all social classes and professions united in this brotherhood, which considers as its holy task, to curb the Russian expansion in the lands of the Turkic peoples."

The story continues with the defenders losing to the czar's armies but taking Jami'at abroad and transforming it into a charity that also supported military insurgencies; for example, it sent observers to the Dutch East Indies as the region gained independence and became Indonesia. From Jakarta, Jami'at coordinated freedom fighters from Tunisia and Morocco, as well as other parts of Africa. Then the story gets even odder. Jami'at sent "expeditions" to Africa, where its associates collected 660 kilos of precious metals. This was added to the personal property of the old Central Asian warriors. By the end of 1957, Jami'at had assets worth $328,556.98 (about $2.4 million in today's terms). Then it set up operations to help Muslims in Jordan -- primarily Palestinians -- and opened an office in Vienna to coordinate aid for Muslims living there.

For all this action, Jami'at didn't seem to do much in the way of charity work. Its thirty-page newsletters included little concrete news about specific projects. Most of the essays expounded on the future of Islam and how Christian aid organizations were neglecting Muslims. The only real assistance Jami'at seemed to provide was to administer money for the US. Escapee Program, a classic Cold War project meant to encourage people to leave communist countries. This effort gave defectors money to support their resettlement once they arrived in the West. Jami'at seemed to aim at getting as many defectors and refugees as possible onto its rolls -- thereby guaranteeing steady funding from US. aid agencies in addition to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which financed one of the group's projects. But Europe's refugee situation was improving, and Jami'at struggled to find more prospects, especially Muslims. That led to refugee poaching. According to one of Jami'at's officers, while the charity was working in Italy it ran afoul of Catholic agencies when its members tried to sign up Muslims who were already on the Catholic agencies' rolls. In Austria, Jami'at got into a dispute with the Office of Refugee and Migration Affairs, an agency of the U.S. State Department, concerning the number of cases it oversaw. The office cut Jami'at's funding and then restored it after Kamal organized a protest led by Muslim leaders. When Jami'at arrived in Munich, its representative's first act was to visit the displaced persons' camps around the city. Kamal had himself photographed in front of a shack with a health warning affixed to it. Given the rapidly dwindling refugee problem, this seemed like a stunt.

Despite all this, Jami'at was taken seriously. Kamal implied that his group was endorsed by the US. government, emphasizing that it was the only Muslim charity recognized by the American Council of Voluntary Agencies. This US. advisory board registered -- but did not vet or endorse -- charities. But it sounded official and letters from Jami'at always emphasized this tie, as well as the group's tax-exempt status in the United States and its relations with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Politicians lent their backing. When Pakistan's president, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, visited Germany in 1961, he met Kamal in Munich and promised to support Jami'at. That same year, Jami'at organized a large conference in Munich on Islam and the West, featuring top Jami'at officials and sen ior politicians, such as Bavaria's labor minister, Walter Stain. Yon Mende fell for it too. His Ecclesiastical Administration encouraged its members to sign up with Jami'at. In a letter to them, Namangani said Jami'at was the only officially recognized Muslim charity in the world.

Within less than a year, Jami'at was so successful that the local media assumed it was running the mosque project. In early 1961, the Munchener Merkur matter-of-factly described the mosque as Jami'at's project and ran a picture of a Jami'at official inspecting plans for Munich's mosque.

"The Bavarian capital has recently become the center for Muslims living in western Europe," the Merkur noted, citing Jami'at's move to Munich as key proof. "The Islamic organization has taken on the cultural support of its brothers in faith. In Munich, a mosque, a culture center, and a kindergarten are to be built."

From today's perspective, all of this might seem like an elaborate hoax. But it wasn't. Jami'at was almost certainly backed by U.S. intelligence, and Kamal had most likely been sent to Munich as a backup to Ramadan -- to make sure that a U.S. organization influenced Muslim religious life in Munich. What U.S. officials didn't know is that Kamal wasn't just brilliant -- he was also unstable. They also probably didn't realize that his entire life story was as fictional as his novels.

***

Figuring out the true biographical facts about anyone involved in intelligence work is tough enough, but Kamal's public life makes it harder. While people like Dreher and von Mende hoped for nothing more than anonymity, Kamal didn't shy away from publicity -- for the better part of a decade he worked as a novelist and wanted to sell books. But he created such a bizarre public persona that the real man is almost lost.

The official story is exotic but straightforward. On the back cover of Kamal's novels -- the reprint editions, which his son published in 2000 -- is a short biography of the author. We learn that Ahmad Kamal was born on a Colorado Indian reservation in 1914 to "Turco-Tatar" nationalists who had fled persecution in czarist Russia. "Kamal's genetic makeup imprinted all his endeavors, be they as deep sea diver, combat pilot, horseman, warrior, or as exponent of national self-determination," goes the blurb.

When he came of age, according to the story, Kamal traveled to his ancestral homeland of Turkestan. There, he "commanded" the Basmaci rebellion against the Soviets, who were reasserting czarist-era colonial control over the region. Later, he fought alongside Muslim rebels in western China. He also supported the independence of Indonesia and Algeria and was "commanding general of the Muslim liberation forces of the Union of Burma in the 1980s."

This summary contains much that is true. But even a cursory glance at it raises questions. If Kamal was born in 1914,then how could he have participated in, let alone "commanded," the Basmaci rebellion in the 1920s? Archival records raise even more fundamental issues, such as Kamal's actual name and the ethnic makeup that supposedly motivated him.

According to Kamal's Federal Bureau of Investigation file, he was born Cimarron Hathaway on February 2, 1914, in the affluent Denver suburb of Arvada. His father was James Worth Hathaway and his mother Caroline Hathaway. His mother's maiden name was Grossmann, and no typical Central Asian facial features are apparent in her photo. As for his father, Kamal's passport applications stated for years that his father's surname was Hathaway. But in a 1952 application he listed his father as Qara Yusuf. According to Kamal's daughter, Kamal's father had been much older than his mother -- sixty-four years old versus sixteen for the bride -- and had wives back in Turkestan. He had left Kamal's mother and returned home, possibly to fight in the Basmaci rebellion. That could explain the presence of a man named James Worth Hathaway -- perhaps he was a stepfather whom Kamal's mother married after being abandoned or widowed by the older man?

FBI records do show that in about 1935 Cimarron Hathaway went to Central Asia. Here his fiction may provide clues to fill out the biography, or at least help us understand his motives for traveling. The autobiographical narrator in one of his novels goes to find his father and converts to Islam. By 1935, however, the Basmaci rebellion had long been extinguished. Perhaps Hathaway met some of the defeated fighters and imagined that he had participated along with them. According to his FBI file, he married while in Central Asia, but his seventeen-year-old wife died after one month, a victim of some unspecified violent act in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, where a rebellion against Chinese rule was underway. Accused of being a spy, Hathaway was arrested by Chinese authorities in the city of Hami but escaped from prison.

When Hathaway returned to the United States, he published his first book, an extravagantly imaginative work called The Seven Questions of Timur. It is a retelling of a legend about Tamerlane, the fourteenth -century Turco-Mongolian ruler whose armies conquered vast tracts of the Eurasian continent. Tamerlane poses questions about the universe and receives answers from a simple young soldier -- perhaps in this story the young Hathaway imagined a relationship with his father. Using a familiar storytelling convention, Hathaway sets himself up as the simple translator of an ancient text, adding this explanation on the title page: "From an Original Turki Manuscript by Ahmad, Descended of Karu Yusuf Ibn Kara Yakub." This Karu Yusuf echoes the Qara Yusuf on Kamal's passport application. The book, sumptuously illustrated with fanciful art nouveau-style drawings of Timur and his Tatar court, was published by a small arts press in Santa Anna. Only several hundred copies were printed, and they were hand-numbered. Aside from the single volume housed in the Library of Congress, the book is almost impossible to find. At this point, Cimarron Hathaway is well on his way to transforming himself into Ahmad Kamal. The book's copyright is held by C.A.K. Hathaway -- Cimarron Ahmad Kamal Hathaway, presumably. On November 1, 1938, a court in Hollywood approved the name change once and for all, so the former Hathaway was thereafter Ahmad Kamal.

Soon Kamal began to distance himself from his mother, coming to scorn her. When she died many years later, Kamal's daughter found him in his study, crying. She asked him why -- she thought her father had never loved his mother. ''I'm crying for what wasn't," he replied. The difficulty in their relationship probably belongs at the therapist's office, but it is telling that on one passport application later in life, Kamal put his mother's name as Caroline Kamal Hathaway -- was he imagining a Muslim identity for her? Did he resent the fact that she didn't raise him as a Muslim and that he had to leave home to find his father, who had died? Could this explain his passionate, even violent, support for Muslim causes?

In 1940, Kamal published a tough adventure story set in Turkestan. And he did so in high style, signing with one of Americas most prominent houses at the time, Charles Scribner's, publisher of Ernest Hemingway. Land Without Laughter starts as a conventional tale of hardship, with a character named Kamal traveling in the dead of winter through mountain passes from India through Tibet and finally into eastern Turkestan, known today as Xinjiang. This is probably a retelling of Kamal's own trip back to Turkestan in 1935 to find his father. He recounts in fascinating detail -- too much, it seems, to spring entirely from the imagination -- his encounter in Chinese Turkestan with the rebel general Ma Hsi-jung, who was challenging the tottering Kuomintang government for control of the region. The character Kamal serves as an officer in Ma's army and then is sent to buy weapons abroad. As he tries to make his way overland to eastern China in order to embark on a ship back to America, he is betrayed and thrown in jail, only to escape and finally make his way home. The book received a long write-up in the New York Times, which called it "swash-buckling, boastful -- and sometimes oddly ingratiating." Yet as the writing of an advocate of all things Muslim, it certainly seems odd. Like an ignorant outsider, Kamal conflates ethnic groups, calling them all Tatars. These people are invariably brutal and rough and speak in strangely stilted language -- exoticisms designed to appeal to Western readers.

Kamal claimed that in 1941 he returned to Turkestan to retrieve documents; war broke out, and the Japanese interned him. He had already met his second wife, a Tatar journalist and linguist named Amina, who had been living with White Russian exiles in Tianjin. The two spent the internment writing, an activity that Kamal hid from his Japanese guards by copying his works in a Turkic dialect and claiming that they constituted a rendering of the Koran -- at least this is the story Kamal told the Los Angeles Times when he arrived back home in 1945. A photo of Kamal accompanies the article: with an intense expression on his face, he hovers over his mother, who is inspecting the fake Koran.

Physical and mental intensity are what contemporaries remember about Kamal. Like Said Ramadan, he wasn't tall or imposing, but people always remarked on his presence -- the power that he radiated. He was about five foot eight and slender but strong. Until his thirties he had red hair that flamed from his head; he wore it trimmed so short, his head looked shaved. He eventually went bald, which made him even more intense-looking. His face was set off by a small mustache, his skull stood out prominently beneath his taut skin, and his eyes burned like the tips of two hot pokers. On his right cheek was a small V-shaped scar. He appeared timeless and hardly seemed to age through his thirties into his seventies.

Kamal brooked no opposition, not even within his family. A disciplinarian, he matter-of-factly told his children that he had killed people, including a mullah who had opposed him. His daughter, Tura, thought this was a boast or exaggeration, but she came to believe him after she left home and talked to people who knew him. "He definitely killed people." Tura Kamal-Haller said. "I thought maybe he was just telling me stories because this seems so foreign to us in our lives here. But others told me the same thing."

Whatever he had been writing in China, Kamal came back to the United States brimming with ideas. Over a four-year span he published three books. Curiously, for a man who had started out with romantic ideas of Turkestan and his ethnic heritage, he produced commercial books and signed them with mainstream publishers such as Doubleday and Random House. The works have little in common. One novel describes Greek immigrant sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Florida; another book is a memoir about a dog. The third, The Excommunicated, is a romantic thriller set in Shanghai, co-written with Charles G. Booth, a British author who had lived for years in California, writing hard-boiled fiction and screenplays. The reviews were favorable, and screenwriting jobs were coming Kamal's way. His writing career was blossoming -- and then it stopped. The 1950 publication of The Excommunicated marked the end of Kamal's popular writing career. As far as the mainstream public was concerned, he disappeared.

In fact, just two years later he produced another book, one that holds a clue to Kamal's intelligence career. The Sacred Journey was initially published in Arabic. In this book Kamal tried to describe a Hajj as accurately and undogmatically as possible. The book did not appear in English until 1961. The delay seems strange, especially because in 1953, Kamal had announced in the Saturday Evening Post that he was writing a book on Mecca. Perhaps it has to do with the book's tone. Kamal's earlier works were adventure stories. The Sacred Journey is almost anthropological in its painstaking commitment to accuracy, giving a day-by-day account of a typical pilgrimage to Mecca. Compared to his other books, it is extremely boring, a dry recitation of facts. It cannot have excited many New York editors and indeed was published by a relatively small house.

In Kamal's note to the English edition, he says he wrote the manuscript while living in Bandung, the Indonesian city that would host the famous conference in 1955. A Jami'at brochure claimed that the group used Jakarta as a base for aiding revolutionaries. That could have been true; Kamal might instead have been observing Islamist groups, perhaps for U.S. intelligence. Before he left the United States, he told a friend he was going there to work for the U.S. government. His FBI file also records a debt of $1,877.40 that he owed the U.S. embassy in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for money the government had advanced him for moving costs. He was clearly cooperating with U.S. officials before he left home.

This was the view of West German intelligence. Von Mende's files from 1955 contain a report on Indonesia. At the time, the young country was a battleground where pro- and anticommunist parties competed for influence. The anticommunists consisted of an Islamic blocked by a former government minister, who used money he kept in Swiss banks to finance acts of sabotage against supporters of the communists. The minister's overseas contact man, according to the Germans, was Kamal. The report states that Kamal suffered two assassination attempts in Jakarta and fled to Barcelona.

Interestingly, the German report says Kamal rejected an offer to work directly with the CIA because he considered the agency tainted by the infiltration of many Soviet agents. Then the U.S. government made another overture, asking Kamal to work directly for Vice President Richard Nixon, who also headed the National Security Council. Kamal accepted this position, according to the Germans. While this development might seem far-fetched, the NSC oversaw intelligence and psychological warfare through the Psychological Strategy Board and its successor, the Operations Coordinating Board. It's possible that the intelligence report simplified the chain of command, putting Kamal directly under Nixon. Although the archives of both bodies contain nothing on Kamal, this is not unusual -- agents' names are typically excised from all documents, even those approved for declassification. Kamal certainly was pursuing U.S. objectives in Indonesia. Besides helping the anticommunist insurgents, he used his influence in the government to try to cancel the Bandung Conference, according to the West German report. He showed up in Bandung during the event but stayed for only twenty-four hours because of security concerns.

By then, Kamal was living in Franco's Spain. His family learned Spanish and his son took music lessons from the celebrated Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia. Spain might seem an odd choice for a place to live, but U.S. intelligence had extensive contacts there -- Radio Liberty, for example, had situated a large transmitter in Spain. Likewise, Kamal used it as a safe base. His goal: support for the uprisings across the Mediterranean in North Africa and the Muslims of Munich. To accomplish this, he needed to recruit a loyal lieutenant.

***

Touhami Louahala grew up in a large Algerian family. His father sent him to work when he was fourteen. Good with numbers, he won a small scholarship to study aircraft design in France in 1949. There, he began to associate with other Algerian students and realized he had to help in the effort to rid his homeland of French colonial rule. He began to work as a courier, driving to Sweden to pick up propaganda material from the Algerian resistance group FLN. In 1956, he took a shortcut on his way back down to Marseille and drove through Switzerland. Swiss border police were waiting for him and he was thrown in jail.

Help soon came -- from Ahmad Kamal. After hearing from others in the FLN that Louahala had been arrested, Kamal arranged for a lawyer to represent him. This legal counsel successfully cast Louahala as a victim of an overzealous Swiss attorney general (who later committed suicide in response to allegations that he had fed information on Egyptian and Algerian spies to France). On January 1, 1957, Louahala was freed and flown straight to Libya, again courtesy of Kamal.

"We couldn't communicate because he didn't speak much French or Arabic, and I didn't speak English," said Louahala in an interview at his home outside the French city of Montelimar. "So he said, 'Look, Touhami, if we're going to communicate, you must learn English.'"

Kamal got Louahala a Libyan passport and then sent him to London to learn English. Louahala would have been at a loss in a foreign city, unable to speak the language, but Kamal had thought of that too. He flew over his Jami'at representative in Washington, James Price, to help Louahala get organized. The two spent a couple of days setting up bank accounts, renting an apartment, and registering Louahala for classes. Price even took him to Marks & Spencer to buy him a suit and an umbrella. Over time Kamal tutored Louahala in how to run an organization. "He was very strict but he was diplomatic. He wouldn't shout, but you would know what to do. He was like that."

Kamal liked good scotch and red wine. Louahala drank alcohol too, defending this behavior through his own interpretation of the Koran: it says that you cannot pray when your thinking is impaired, but not that you should abstain completely. The men shared this take on a typical prohibition of their faith, and over time Kamal became a mentor to Louahala. The younger man made his children get up at 6 A.M. and repeat Arabic, English, and Spanish phrases in a rote drill for an hour before school because this is how he remembers Kamal teaching his children in Madrid. Louahala became one of Kamal's most trusted officers. He was sent to Italy, Lebanon, Vienna, and then Munich. He is cagey about what he did. In Lebanon he claims he oversaw a sewing class, whose proceeds went to help refugees in Algeria.

A French journalist of that era saw it otherwise. Serge Bromberger, a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Figaro and the author of the 1958 book Les rebelles algeriens, wrote that Jami'at was a cover for funding insurgencies from Indonesia to Algeria. When France and Britain invaded Egypt in 1956, Bromberger wrote, Egypt was unable to supply the FLN with arms. Jami'at then stepped in and began sending weapons -- hence, perhaps, the sewing classes worked as a cover for gun running. Certainly this scenario fits the overall time frame and Kamal's ongoing agitation on behalf of Muslims. It also wasn't incompatible with U.S. aims; many in Washington thought France should leave Algeria and probably wouldn't have cared too much if Kamal was aiding the FLN. The problem with Bromberger is accuracy. He confuses Jami'at with the much more famous Pakistani group of a similar name. And none of his assertions are proven -- as a reviewer in 1959 put it, "It is difficult always to be sure what is fact and what is fiction."

Louahala categorically denies that Jami'at sent weapons to Algeria. But he does not rule out the possibility that Kamal's money was used for weapons. "He did not raise money directly for guns. He raised it for humanitarian purposes. It was sent there and ..." Louahala shrugged his shoulders. As for the CIA, Louahala stated that the agency was fully aware of Jami'at's actions. "The CIA had him [Kamal] in their sights." Louahala said.

I asked him about Kamal's reaction.

"He did something very smart. He asked a CIA agent to work for him."

Who was that?

"That was Mr. James Price."

The person who had flown over to London to help him? A CIA man was working for Kamal?

"Yes, he worked for them. But this meant nothing to Kamal. He said, 'You can see what we do. We have nothing to hide. You can send someone to work with us and see everything. Everything. See what we are doing and inform your superiors. Then you will know we are not hiding anything.'"

That is one possibility. Another is that Kamal was already working closely with the CIA, and Price was his handler. Price later worked for the Library of Congress, where he authored a favorable report on Radio Liberty after its CIA connections had been exposed. It's clear he had a close relationship with officials in Munich -- Amcomlib staff expressed relief when they heard that Price was authoring the report, and archival material shows that he discussed it with them in letters before it was released. But the larger issues are harder to confirm: the CIA refuses to release information on Jami'at, citing the blanket "national security" exemption to the Freedom of Information Act. Price is still alive but refused several requests for an interview.

***

Louahala arrived in Munich just as pro- French terrorists were targeting West German businessmen for selling weapons to Algerian rebels. On October 17, 1960, the Munich businessman Wilhelm Beisner stepped into his car, turned the ignition, and was almost blown through the roof. A bomb wired to the ignition had detonated, severing his legs and injuring passers-by. Miraculously, Beisner did not die, but a message had been sent: West German businessmen should stop selling weapons to anti-French Muslim insurgents in North Africa. Beisner was one of West Germany's most notorious arms dealers, a former high-ranking Nazi who US. diplomats believed was now delivering materiel to North African insurgents. Louahala says he had nothing to do with exporting weapons. He was there, he says, to replace Jami'at's local representative, Ahmet Balagija, who had allegedly been telling the Germans that Jami'at was a front for covert activities.

Over the next year, Kamal's group began to act more and more unpredictably. In 1961, Jami'at pulled out of Jordan, stating in a newsletter that the kingdom had banned the group because its members had cooperated with Jewish charities. This explanation does not ring true because US. government files show no other US. charity being banned in Jordan. Instead, Kamal might have been pushed out because of his work on behalf of Palestinian nationalists. In several of his writings, Kamal emphasized that he was aiding Palestinians. This would have worried Jordan, which had plans to annex the West Bank and wouldn't look favorably on a group pushing Palestinian rights. Kamal also had close ties to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He asked him to write an endorsement of The Sacred Journey and had hired a person with close ties to the Mufti, Mahmoud K. Muftic, who von Mende thought was the Mufti's man in Germany. These are far more convincing explanations for Jami'at's troubles than any ties with Jewish groups.

Then, in late 1961, Jami'at issued an angry letter "To All Members." It said that over the past few years, Jami'at had been cautious and measured in its approach, especially toward churches. But Western religious groups had spurned Jami'at. "The conditions force Jami'at al Islam-International to admit that all in all its restraint was a mistake." Jami'at's board had met on October 17 in the New York Sheraton, the letter said, and Kamal had decided "that JAI has withdrawn its declaration to refrain from extreme methods." The group also warned Western authorities to change their tactics or lose the support of the Muslim people. The next day, Jami'at announced that Balagija had been fired "for cause," effective immediately.

From the ordinary Bavarian bureaucrats' point of view, Jami'at's actions were incomprehensible. Because Balagija had been so active, everyone believed that Jami'at was running the mosque project. His barrage of letters, visits, and media activity made the Bavarians think they were dealing with a major Muslim organization and not a one-man front operation. The Germans trusted Balagija, a former soldier in one of the Muslim units in World War II. The officials were right to wonder about Jami'at's actions; Balagija's firing coincided with Jami'at's disintegration.

Perhaps trying to rein Kamal in -- or perhaps by coincidence -- Washington ordered an audit of Jami'at's management of the escapee program. The group had charged the cost of its brochures and grandiloquent histories to the U.S. Escapee Program and now had to pay it back, as well as half the salary of the European director and money used for administrative costs that didn't have to do with refugees.

Concerned officials in Munich were kept apprised of the situation and finally asked von Mende for help. He called Balagija and his successor up to Dusseldorf individually. The successor made vague charges that Balagija had been corrupt. Balagija said that Jami'at had claimed a caseload of four thousand refugees to milk money out of the U.S. Escapee Program, whereas in fact, Jami'at had handled only four hundred. Balagija also warned Bavarian officials to stop funding Jami'at "because the group will only use this money for the purposes of its propaganda, including anti- Christian." Von Mende wrote a memo saying that Balagija probably had been fired because he was more loyal to the Germans than to the Americans. As if to underscore that point, he wrote another letter a few days later saying Balagija was going to open a small restaurant for Muslims and was willing to cooperate with West German officials in providing information.

In March 1962, Jami'at made another strange announcement: just two years after the organization had arrived in Germany, it was leaving and would change its focus to sub-Saharan Africa. Effective immediately, Jami'at was closing all offices and advised that any correspondence should be sent to San Francisco. German and U.S. officials were relieved. "I think," wrote the Council of Voluntary Agencies to its German counterpart, "that we've been spared a common worry." But Jami'at didn't move to Africa; it vanished. Louahala returned to Algeria to join the FLN government. A few years later, Kamal would move back to California to continue his covert work. In 1969, he offered the Burmese opposition leader U Nu $2 million if he would depose the country's dictator, Ne Win.

It's hard to know what to make of this strange episode. Kamal probably believed in his messianic description of Jami'at and his role as a savior to the Muslims; he likely felt that taking U.S.money was just a means of helping his people. Perhaps when his actions became too erratic -- agitating on the West Bank or sending too many weapons to Algeria -- the United States pulled the plug. Yet it's also true that he didn't stop collaborating with U.S. intelligence and that in some way he helped the United States by running interference for Ramadan. Kamal might simply have been an insurance policy in Munich -- a fallback plan in case Ramadan didn't work out -- but by 1961 he either was no longer necessary or was simply out of control. In any case, the project ended and JAI vanished.

With one American down, the West Germans received more good news. Balagija wrote to von Mende, telling him that the soldiers were fed up with Ramadan and wanted to elect as mosque head Ali Kantemir, an old, widely respected fighter from the North Caucasus and a von Mende loyalist. He could unite the factions and get the mosque built. Ramadan's plans for a grandiose mosque would be scrapped and a smaller, more affordable prayer room would be built instead. The Germans were thrilled. Finally, it seemed that Ramadan and the Americans could be stopped.

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