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

IN THE SUMMER OF 1957, Bob Dreher finally got his chance to return to Munich, charged with shaking up Amcomlib and making more aggressive use of emigres, especially Muslims. He had yearned for a chance to implement rollback and score some propaganda points against the Soviets. But he was driven by other impulses too. Behind the hard-driving CIA man was a nonconformist who disliked the confines of 1950s America. Thumping the communists was satisfying, but Dreher also saw Europe as a place to quench other desires.

His route to Munich reflected these impulses. Instead of flying directly, he landed in Paris and then traveled by train and boat to the Ile du Levant, a nudist colony off the coast of France. He met old friends and made some new ones. Best of all were the photos: "Received my Kodachromes yesterday, and there are some prizes among them!"

He seemed to have little trouble attracting women. At six foot two and a trim 180 pounds, Dreher had the conventional good looks of 1950s Hollywood -- slicked-back dark hair, a smooth handsome face, and a quick sense of humor. In every picture he is smiling, his perfect white teeth giving him a passing resemblance to Cary Grant.

''I'm not a one-woman man." he jokingly warned Karin West, a Baltic refugee who worked for Amcomlib's think tank on the Soviet Union. West wasn't bothered by Dreher's promiscuity; she was a platonic friend and confidante who posed as his wife in order to get the two of them into Germany's famed FKK nudist resorts. FKK -- Freikorperkultur -- was not meant for snap-happy singles like Dreher. It was an offshoot of the nineteenth-century back-to-nature movement, and visitors were meant to be sober, serious, and married. For Dreher, the spiritual context meant little.

At times, his lifestyle tortured him. In letters home, he would regale his family with studiously careful accounts of all the cute girls he'd met. The tone was of Bob in Europe, having fun, the eternal bachelor. But once, in a fit of remorse, he wrote, "Deep down inside I realize that it's I who am not in step, and I'm determined to get back to God's country and to do something about it."

During his second stint in Europe he seemed, according to the memories of his employees and colleagues, oddly split: wanting to pursue a tough path that few believed would be effective and often preoccupied with the travails of his exhausting bohemian life. His main problems seemed to be finding the right convertible (a Mercedes was too expensive; a VW was too plain), hi-fi system (German systems looked good but sounded bad), and women (all they want is to marry).

Many Amcomlib employees became specialists in the emigres' cultures and languages, earning their respect. Not Dreher. When asked, on his CIA application, to rate his hobbies, he wrote that he was "very good" at dancing, dramatics, and Ping-Pong, "good" at tennis, sailing, and photography, but only "adequate" at reading. Language was another weak area: on paper he knew Russian and German, but he spoke broken German even after years of living in the country. What he had in abundance -- and liked to show off to bewildered emigres -- were his Kodachromes. Some recall being repelled by the pictures. Dreher apparently didn't notice; they stayed framed on his desk. Strangely, it was this model of 1950s hedonism who decided to shake up Amcomlib. His method: partnering with Said Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood.

***

By Eisenhower's second term, the administration had decided to get more serious about Islam. In 1957, the Eisenhower Doctrine was announced; it promised U.S. armed intervention against aggression, actual or threatened. This was a response to what U.S. policy makers saw as growing Soviet influence in the Middle East, especially in Egypt. Privately, President Eisenhower seemed concerned about how to reach the Muslim world. He wrote to his confidant, the Presbyterian church leader Edward Elson, that Islam and the Middle East were always on his mind. "I assure you that I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationships. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism."

In White House meetings he was more blunt. Speaking with the CIA covert operations czar Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower said that Arabs should dip into their own religion for inspiration in fighting communism.

"The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect," according to a memo outlining the conversation. "Mr. Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a 'holy war' they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism."

The Operations Coordinating Board -- the body set up to implement covert plans by the CIA and other agencies -- took up Islam. It had already produced a detailed study of Buddhism and how that religion could be used to further U.S. interests. In 1957, the board established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam that included officials from the U.S. Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. According to a memo on the group's first meeting, its goal was to take stock of what public and private U.S. organizations were doing in the field of Islam and come up with an "Outline Plan of Operations." The plan had two main components, both of which were echoed in CIA actions in Munich. First, the United States would shun traditional Muslims in favor of "reform" groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, as today, the Brotherhood's radical political agenda of a return to a mythic state of pure Islam was obfuscated by its members' use of modern symbols, such as Western clothing and rhetoric. "Both the Chairman and the CIA member felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found profitable to place emphasis on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups."

In May, the coordination board passed the inventory and plan of action. Its statements were clear and simple: Islam is a natural ally, communists are exploiting Islam, and Islam affects the balance of power. The paper listed a dozen recommendations for strengthening ties with Islamic organizations, especially those with a strong anticommunist bent. As always, the operations were to be covert. "Programs which are indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the charge that we are trying to use religion for political purposes;' the report concluded. "Overt use of Islamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be avoided."

This was exactly the strategy pursued by Dreher and Amcomlib. Because the CIA files are still closed, it is impossible to say definitively that Amcomlib was directly financing the Muslim Brotherhood and Ramadan. But short of a CIA pay stub, every other indication points to the fact that Dreher and Amcomlib were using financial and political leverage to give the Brotherhood's man in Europe a leg up.

***

Before he left the United States for Munich, Bob Dreher worked as special assistant to Amcomlib's president. His task was to organize covert propaganda to convince Americans that a strong, independent movement of Soviet emigres existed -- when in fact it did not. He also sat in on Amcomlib board meetings.

This positioned him perfectly for his new job as coordinator of emigre relations at Radio Liberty. He was relieving Ike Patch, who had been sent over a few years earlier to unite the feuding Soviet ethnic groups and build a credible front to hide the CIA's financing and control of the operation. A career diplomat, Patch was seen as an affable consensus-builder, a family man who was well liked but lacked Dreher's aggressive ideas. Dreher was eager to reinvigorate emigre relations. Instead of using emigres merely as on-air talent for Radio Liberty, he wanted to push covert propaganda measures like the operations in Bandung and Mecca.

Dreher's new colleagues were unimpressed. Amcomlib's New York headquarters was replete with intelligence types like Dreher, but Munich was different. There, people were mostly interested in running a radio station; they considered themselves journalists whose organization happened to have an unusual owner. Dreher was a reminder that they were participating in a CIA front operation. Staffers suspected his role was to make sure ideology didn't take a back seat to journalism. They were also suspicious of his tactics. During the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Radio Liberty's sister station, Radio Free Europe, had encouraged the rebels, only to watch the Soviets crush the revolt. To most in the Munich office, that failure exposed the concepts of liberation and rollback as empty rhetoric. Dreher didn't seem to learn that lesson. "We all thought the Soviet system would bring about its own downfall," says one of Dreher's deputies, Will Klump. "I'm not sure, however, that Bob Dreher did."

Dreher began to agitate for more aggressive use of the emigres. He divided his tactics into "offensive" and "defensive." The latter meant defending against Soviet efforts to repatriate former Soviet citizens -- the USSR had launched an aggressive publicity blitz to win back the refugees, promising amnesty and a job. Many were homesick and some went home; Moscow heralded their return as proof that the allure of the West was hollow.

Dreher's real interest, however, was offense. Early attempts in this vein -- for example, by parachuting Soviet emigres into the Soviet Union -- had ended in disaster, but now, frustration with the pace of the Cold War led to a new emphasis on bold operations. Dreher's boss, Walpole Davis of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, strongly advocated such measures. Most emigres were eager to go along -- and Dreher clearly had the resources. He set up automatic payments, ensuring that money flowed regularly to emigre groups. The people who got the cash might have been unsavory -- some possibly were killers -- but the payments were made on time. Everyone knew that the paymaster was the CIA, and Dreher was its man in Munich.

In 1958, a second Bandung Conference was held. Unlike its predecessor in 1955, this meeting was a disaster for Washington. Although in hindsight Washington's fears seem overblown, the second meeting proved that the event in 1955 wasn't a one-off and that some sort of permanent grouping of nonaligned nations was inevitable. Indeed, the Non-Aligned Movement exerted some influence in the middle years of the Cold War. Although its relevance would fade, Washington saw the 1958 conference as the start of a dangerous new alliance, especially because it included a key role for communist China.

U.S. diplomats spent that year assessing why their country had done so poorly. They concluded that one of the saving graces had been their old reliables, such as Said Shamil, who wired to conference delegates petitions against the Soviet suppression of Islam. And Rusi Nasar, who had worked for Amcomlib on a Hajj as well as during the first Bandung Conference, attended this second meeting too; he had presented a blistering attack on the Soviet delegation, forcing it into a defensive posture. But the Americans needed more credible spokesmen. Shamil and Nasar were hardly at the leading edge of the Muslim world.

That was where Dreher came in, according to his assistant at the time, Edward A. Allworth. Now a professor emeritus at Columbia University, Allworth was then a budding scholar of Central Asian history who took off a year from his studies to put his language skills to work in Munich for Amcomlib. Allworth confirmed that Dreher was trying to make use of Ramadan, with Nasar function ing as a liaison between the two. (Nasar declined to comment on this.) "Rusi Nasar tried to link the World Muslim Congress with Munich and events in Southeast Asia," Allworth said in an interview.

It's not clear if this alliance was in place when Ramadan made his grand announcement at St. Paul's Church in 1958. Around this time, West German intelligence stated plainly in separate reports that the United States had secured Ramadan a Jordanian passport, allowing him to flee to Europe, while Swiss intelligence claimed that he was a U.S. agent. Ramadan's family will not comment on this, and the CIA still has its Ramadan file locked up. What is definite is that soon after Ramadan settled, he and Dreher were working together.

A clear sign of this arrangement came in February, when two people close to Amcomlib visited von Mende. One of the visitors was Ahmet Magoma, a long-time political activist and former Ostministerium employee. A few years earlier, he had asked Amcomlib's Eric Kuniholm for a job when Kuniholm made his big trip through Germany and Turkey. Accompanying him was Said Shamil, the venerable Dagestani leader with long-standing ties to Amcomlib. The two presented von Mende with an open letter. It called for Namangani's Ecclesiastical Administration to broaden, embracing not only the old soldiers but also all Muslims, especially Ramadan's students. The two also demanded a European congress on Islam, to be led by Said Ramadan. Magoma and Shamil said Namangani wasn't up to the task. Students who turned to him for religious instruction found that they knew more about Islam than did the ex-SS imam. Said Ramadan, they said, had a similar impression of Namangani.

Von Mende was outraged at the Americans' plan to back Ramadan at Namangani's expense: "I have the impression that this criticism was leveled on purpose and avoids the whole truth in order to limit Namangani's responsibilities and impact." As for Ramadan, von Mende put him down, saying -- in a colossal misjudgment -- that he had no influence in the Muslim world.

Shamil told von Mende that his concerns were irrelevant; the plan was already underway. He said that Dreher was willing to pay for the congress. All they needed from van Mende was his support in getting West Germany's Foreign Office to issue visas to Muslims traveling to Munich to attend. Van Mende sent his notes on the meeting to the Foreign Office, writing that Shamil was known throughout the Middle East as a U.S. agent and that West Germany should be skeptical of the congress led by Ramadan "because it is obvious that the goal of Shamil's efforts is the creation of a new platform from which he [Ramadan] on behalf of the Americans can operate in the Near and Middle East." Apparently van Mende's concerns were ignored; Amcomlib was powerful in West Germany, and the Foreign Office issued the visas.

The West Germans were losing control of the situation. Van Mende got a report from a source that the Soviet embassy was recruiting Arab students and planning a party for Muslim students in Cologne at a popular beer hall, the Franziskanerkeller. East Germany was offering scholarships to Egyptian students and other Arabs. If van Mende didn't act, the Soviets would move into this large pool of potential recruits.

Then, almost at the same time, the Soviets struck at one of von Mende's key men. A certain Professor Abdullah arrived in Hamburg from Syria and phoned Namangani, asking whether he would like financing for his mosque. All it would take was a trip to Cairo. Namangani called Kayum for help, and he relayed the message to von Mende. Van Mende quickly pulled Namangani out of Munich and brought him and Kayum to Dusseldorf for a consultation. Van Mende figured the offer was Moscow's response to the Americans' bid to organize the congress. The Soviets wanted to undercut the Americans by funding the mosque themselves. Namangani was told not to go to Cairo.

To counter the superpowers, van Mende launched his own covert operation in the Middle East. During the Hajj season of 1959, he sent Namangani and Hayit on a trip through the Middle East to distribute anticommunist and pro-West German propaganda. What he heard back bothered him. Thanks to Ramadan's involvement, the Muslim world was gaining the impression that the Munich mosque was the Americans' project, not the West Germans' -- yet another sign that Ramadan was doing significant work on behalf of Amcomlib. Namangani reported to his boss that "we have difficulties with the 'American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism'" that seemed "insurmountable." In this game, the West Germans were out of the superpowers' league. At heart, the Germans wanted the Muslims to playa role in a vaguely defined, quixotic quest -- to help a united Germany recover its lost territory someday in the future. The superpowers, by contrast, had broad, strategic, and immediate goals for Islam. West Germany was simply their battleground.

***

Around this time, Ramadan was at the peak of his influence. While winning strong allies in Europe, he remained a force in the Muslim world too; for example, he revived the Muslim World Conference in Jerusalem. This body had been formed to unite Muslims around the world, but by the 1950s it had degenerated into a forum dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Few other Muslims attended, and its influence was stunted. But then Ramadan called the conference's third general meeting for January 1960 and scored a resounding success. In addition to the exiled Brotherhood members, the Indonesian premier Muhammad Nassir attended, as did representatives of twelve other Muslim countries. In addition, the meeting was backed by a group of notable intellectual and cultural leaders, including Said Shamil. Topics included Palestine and communism. The group condemned "Muslims under Communist rule" -- a far cry from the 1955 Bandung Conference and its successor meeting in 1959, which produced only a grudging criticism of communism through the efforts of U.S. employees like Rusi Nasar. Ramadan's ideological sympathy with the American position can also be detected in a letter he wrote to one of the CIA's front organizations in Munich, the Institute for the Study of the USSR. Ramadan wrote to the institute's Arabic Review, saying how much he enjoyed the magazine and offering to distribute it throughout the Arab-speaking world. He said to send as many copies as possible to the World Muslim Congress's offices in Jerusalem.

Ramadan's base, though, was clearly shifting to Europe. Although a powerful figure among the Muslim populations of the Middle East, he felt unsafe there. He was living in Sudan in 1959 when he finally decided to move his family once and for all to Geneva. In a letter to Professor Kegel, he said he had had his fill of coups detat and dictators.

His appearances in Germany multiplied. A month after his family arrived in Geneva, Ramadan participated in the European congress that Dreher financed, which was meant to represent all Muslims in Germany and Europe. Gacaoglu wrote a letter about it in April 1959; given his close ties to Amcomlib, it's no surprise that the content reflects Amcomlib's thinking. Gacaoglu describes Munich's future as the world center of Islam. Its mosque would be for all Muslims, not just followers of von Mende's Ecclesiastical Administration. "The mosque to be built shouldn't be aimed at an existing group; it should be above all a meeting point for Muslims of the entire world, a center of Islamic thinking, and a place where Islamic and German art can flow together." Gacaoglu wrote.

These goals were reflected in a new structure that Ramadan established. When the soldiers and students met in Munich on Christmas Eve in 1958, they set up the Mosque Construction Commission, with Namangani as chairman and Ramadan as honorary chairman. It remained an informal group until 1960, when it was registered at the local courthouse as an official organization. In Germany, that meant the group's name ended with the abbreviation "e.V." -- eingetragener Verein, "registered association" -- giving the commission certain legal rights and obligations. The benefits included official standing as a legal entity, meaning it could sue. The obligations entailed articles of association, an elected board of directors, minutes of its meetings, and a chairman -- and that person was Ramadan.

It's not exactly clear how this happened. The commission was Namangani's idea, and he signed the letter notifying the court that Ramadan was the chairman. It could simply reflect the fact that early on, the two men were not opponents. Namangani may also have believed that the mosque commission was simply an appendage of the Ecclesiastical Administration, which he was still running. A few years later, however, Namangani acted as if he hadn't realized the implications of officially registering the commission -- which is quite possible, given his low level of education. Ramadan, by contrast, had just completed his doctorate in law with Professor Kegel. In any case, Ramadan was suddenly at the helm of the legal entity charged with building the mosque -- another sign that the Americans had backed the right man. (Namangani stayed in charge of the Ecclesiastical Administration, which was not in charge of the mosque.) The Germans, who had brought over Namangani and come up with the idea of a mosque, were suddenly on the outside.

Ramadan quickly took advantage of his new position. When Namangani first raised the idea of a mosque in 1958, no one had a plan for raising the hundreds of thousands of marks needed to finance such a building. Now, in mid-1960, Ramadan announced that he was off on the annual Hajj and would bring back money. The cost of building the mosque was now estimated at 1.2 million marks ($2.2 million in today's terms), and an architect had drawn up plans for an Arab-style building, complete with dome and minaret.

Ramadan continued to try to approach von Mende and win him over -- probably a sign that the Americans were advising him to cultivate their old intelligence contact. Otherwise it isn't clear why Ramadan would have taken the initiative to do so. After the first meeting of the Mosque Construction Commission at the church, he had sent a young aide to seek von Mende's support. Now he met with Hayit, trying to push for the establishment of a broader organization to include all Muslims. Hayit reacted angrily. "Germany is a gate that no one controls because no gatekeeper exists." he wrote in a frustrated letter to von Mende in March 1960. "Everyone comes in and does what he pleases."

The next month, Hayit reported that the United States was again trying to change the focus of Namangani's group -- broadening it so it could address global Islamic issues. The mosque was supposed to become an organ that would criticize Soviet Islam. Hayit wrote to von Mende, "One comes to the conviction that the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism is trying through its people to use this religious office for its propagandistic purposes."

The more the intelligence agencies looked into Ramadan, the less they understood him. Hayit wrote in one report to von Mende that Ramadan was planning a meeting with Sijauddin Babachanow, the mufti of Turkestan and a Soviet functionary. Babachanow promised money for the mosque. The plan went nowhere, but it underscored the difficulties surrounding the person Amcomlib had decided to back.

***

Dreher kept trying to bring the West Germans on board. He telephoned von Mende in May 1961 and advised him to see Ramadan. Von Mende was baffled because he knew Amcomlib had originally rejected Ramadan as "too reactionary-conservative" -- as reflected in CIA comments some years earlier about Ramadan's being a "fascist." Dreher argued that there was no point in having competing Muslim organizations in West Germany, so why not back the better man? Ramadan had excellent contacts in the Middle East, and this could only benefit the free world's fight against communism.

Von Mende reluctantly agreed to see Ramadan, who traveled up to Dusseldorf. The two had a long discussion in von Mende's grand offices. The German was shocked at Ramadan's proposal, which was to send a "Muslim delegation" to the next meeting of the UN General Assembly. The delegation could plead for religious freedom -- and, of course, attack the USSR. Ramadan would head the delegation, with two assistants, Gacaoglu and Shamil. Von Mende thought the idea ludicrous. He wrote, "The two gentlemen have not always been known positively from their work in Munich -- Shamil's activities during and after the war are topics of conversation in the emigration. Therefore, the two men proposed by R. are not usable for the purposes he has for them."

He then wrote to his contact man in West German intelligence, saying he wondered "for which American agency Mr. Ramadan is active." Perhaps he didn't know Dreher's position as liaison to the CIA, although von Mende's files are full of notes from Amcomlib moles describing other aspects of the organization's internal workings.

Von Mende was also concerned about Ramadan's plans for the Hajj; he believed that the fund-raising work was just a platform to gain attention so Ramadan could more easily supplant Namangani. For Amcomlib, it would be a chance to attack the Soviet Union; Ramadan could also lobby on behalf of the oppressed Brotherhood and for his dream of a united Muslim world.

After Ramadan left, a worried von Mende wondered what to do. He had told "the gentlemen" from Amcomlib on several occasions that they hadn't chosen well in the Muslim emigres they had backed. But if Dreher thought Ramadan had such great contacts and was worth backing, maybe von Mende himself should change his mind -- perhaps he had been too hasty in writing off Ramadan?

Von Mende could think of only one way to test Dreher's judgment: break into Ramadan's office and steal his files. So he did what every good bureaucrat would: he wrote a memo outlining the problem and the solution. Ramadan, "who continually cooperates with Amcomlib," had "a small fanatical following among the Arabs" but was widely pigeonholed as a foe of the Egyptian strongman Gamal Nasser. His files, though, would show his influence in the Muslim world.

Von Mende spent some time figuring out the logistics of a burglary, writing that "Dr. H." -- presumably Hayit -- would organize the operation. He ran the idea past his contact man with West Germany's BND, its foreign intelligence agency, and he confirmed in writing that Ramadan was indeed working closely with the Americans: "At the same time, his expenses are financed from the American side." In the end, the burglary was called off, but von Mende had reason to worry. Ramadan had all but taken over the mosque project. As usual, it was his trusty right-hand man, Hayit, who brought the issue to von Mende's attention -- and, as usual, the message was cast in his inimitably direct but broken German.

"It is astounding that yet another Islamic group has appeared, this time with Said Ramadan at the top. Too many societies but too little useful work seems to be the fashion." And then Hayit mentioned yet another group angling for control of Munich: JAI. It stood for Jami'at al Islam, a strange Muslim charity based in Washington and led by a rambunctious author, Ahmad Kamal.

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