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Intro­duc­tion: Authored by Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Ian John­son, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the West is essen­tial for under­stand­ing the polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal back­ground of con­tem­po­rary Islamism, its Nazi and fas­cist roots, in par­tic­u­lar. Titled after, and drawn from, this impor­tant new book, this pro­gram details the oper­a­tions of Ger­hard von Mende, a Baltic Ger­man who presided over the use of Soviet Mus­lims as oper­a­tives for the Third Reich’s Ost­min­is­terium. (FTR #518 draws on a Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle by John­son, which pre­views this mar­velous volume.)

Build­ing on an activ­ity base begun well before the Sec­ond World War, von Mende uti­lized mem­bers of the Prometheus net­work on behalf of the Third Reich and, later, for the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Germany.

Assid­u­ously recruited by U.S. intel­li­gence, von Mende refused work for the Amer­i­cans (who cov­eted his Soviet emi­gre net­works, the Mus­lims in par­tic­u­lar.) Instead, von Mende reca­pit­u­lated his Third Reich net­works for the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, mobi­liz­ing them under the stew­ard­ship of Nazi war crim­i­nal Theodor Ober­lan­der. Ober­lan­der was forced to resign his posi­tion as a West Ger­man cab­i­net min­is­ter when his wartime record came to light. Oberlander’s posi­tion had put him in charge of the ver­triebene groups, expellees Ger­mans under the polit­i­cal of post­war SS networks.

Many of von Mende’s for­mer Ost­min­is­terium employ­ees did make the jump to U.S. intel­li­gence, work­ing under the aus­pices of Amcomlib.

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance in von Mende’s net­works were Turko­phone minori­ties, cov­eted and uti­lized by pan-Turkist activists. Pos­ing as Uighurs from the Xin­jiang region of China, many of these Tur­kic minori­ties were thus able to escape ret­ri­bu­tion for their mil­i­tary ser­vice to the Third Reich. Those of von Mende’s pro­tegees who didn’t jump to Amcom­lib con­tin­ued to work for von Mende under the aus­pices of the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Germany.

Of the Tuko­phone activi­tists, one of the most promi­nent was Ruzy Nazar, whose career stretched from ser­vice to the Third Reich, to work for U.S. intel­li­gence and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and WACL.

Per­pet­u­at­ing a dis­turb­ing pat­tern of using fas­cist ele­ments, U.S. intel­li­gence (specif­i­cally State Depart­ment and CIA) have con­tin­ued their use of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the sec­ond half of this decade! Ini­ti­ated under the Bush admin­is­traion, the use of the Broth­er­hood (por­trayed as “mod­er­ates”) has con­tin­ued under Obama.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Von Mende’s close post­war asso­ci­a­tion with SS intel­li­gence offi­cial Wal­ter Schenck; the involve­ment of von Mende and his Ost­min­is­terium charges with the Holo­caust; Oberlander’s links to the OUN/B; Schenck’s wartime work in the Lvov area, site of the mas­sacres per­formed by Oberlander’s charges; Nazar’s work for CIA pro­pa­gan­diz­ing among hajjis in Saudi Ara­bia in 1954; Nazi offi­cial Johann von Leers’ post­war net­work­ing with Mus­lim emi­gres in the Ham­burg area for the pur­pose of anti-Semitic agi­ta­tion; review of von Leers’ links to the milieu of the Bank Al Taqwa.

1. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the Prometheus (“Promethee”) net­work, the pro­gram notes the involve­ment of vet­er­ans of that net­work with Ger­hard von Mende ‘s orga­ni­za­tion. An anti-communist net­work bankrolled by a num­ber of coun­tries, the Prometheus orga­ni­za­tion uti­lized pan-Turkist ele­ments and other [for­mer] Soviet eth­nic minori­ties as agit­prop agents, in order to desta­bi­lize the for­mer Soviet Union.

Many of the Prometheus League’s ele­ments served with the Third Reich.

. . . . Von Mende was given con­trol of the ministry’s Cau­ca­sus divi­sion, report­ing to his old con­tact in the Nazi party, Georg Leib­brandt. Von Mende recruited a group of men who had been in exile for years. Most were part of an anti-Soviet move­ment called Prometheus–named for the mytho­log­i­cal hero who cham­pi­oned human­ity by defy­ing the god Zeus. It was founded in 1925 by men who had hoped the destruc­tion of the czarist empire would free their peo­ples from Russ­ian rule. When that didn’t hap­pen, the Prometheans pub­lished and agi­tated against Moscow from War­saw and then Paris. By the 1930’s, the group was being backed by French, Pol­ish, British, and Ger­man intel­li­gence. The Ger­man con­quest of France brought the group com­pletely under Ger­man control.

Von Mende had known and cul­ti­vated some of these men even before he worked for the Ost­min­is­terium. After the war, Prometheans such as Mikhail Kedia of Geor­gia and Ali Kan­temir of Turkestan would play major roles in von Mende’s entan­gle­ment with the United States. Kan­temir would also become a key player in the Munich mosque.

One man would top them all in impor­tance dur­ing and after the war: Veli Kayum, the polit­i­cal activist who had addressed the Mus­lim sol­diers, includ­ing Syul­tan, in the camp. . . . The Ger­mans were delighted with Kayum’s rise in influ­ence because he had been help­ing the Nazis since the 1930’s. They con­sid­ered him loyal and trust­wor­thy. They embraced the same vision: to build Turkic-Muslim armies that would fight the Soviets.

Von Mende was a civil­ian, but as the war pro­gressed he was seen as essen­tial to the Nazis’ mil­i­tary suc­cess. In 1943, the SS chief Hein­rich Himm­ler engi­neered the ouster of Leib­brandt, von Mende’s boss in the Ost­min­is­terium. Himm­ler installed one of his loy­al­ists, hop­ing to gain con­trol of the rival min­istry. But von Mende emerged from the shakeup unscathed. Indeed, he got a promotion–advancing from head of the Ostministerium’s Cau­ca­sus divi­sion to head of the “For­eign Peo­ples” division–essentially over­see­ing the Ostministerium’s entire pol­icy toward Soviet minorities. . . .

A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA and the Rise of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the West by Ian John­son; Copy­right 2010 by Ian John­son; Houghton Mif­flin Har­court Pub­lish­ing [HC]; ISBN 978–0-15–101418-7; pp. 24–25.

2. Von Mende and his Ost­min­is­terium oper­a­tives were involved with the imple­men­ta­tion of the Holo­caust in
East­ern Europe.

. . . At a 1942 con­fer­ence held at a villa on Lake Wannsee in a Berlin sub­urb, plans for the Holo­caust took shape. Although the mur­der of Jews began ear­lier, the meet­ing brought the full might of the bureau­cratic, total­i­tar­ian state into align­ment against them. Key min­is­ters and Nazi offi­cials attended. The meet­ing lasted just ninety min­utes, but its mes­sage was clear: the state would now coor­di­nate efforts in a sin­gle, awful focus.

The Ost­min­is­terium was rep­re­sented at the con­fer­ence: von Mende’s boss and pre-war con­tact in the Nazi party, Leib­brandt, attended on behalf of the min­istry. Its offi­cials had called for a def­i­n­i­tion of who counted as a Jew, so the Ger­mans could prop­erly pre­pare the east­ern ter­ri­tory for Ger­man set­tlers by elim­i­nat­ing Jews and other undesirables.

Nine days later, the Ost­min­is­terium held the first of a series of meet­ings to iron out legal details stem­ming from the Wannsee con­fer­ence. Although the Nurem­berg race laws pre­cisely spec­i­fied who was to be con­sid­ered a Jew, the sit­u­a­tion in the east pre­sented com­pli­ca­tions: poor record keep­ing made trac­ing a person’s ori­gins more dif­fi­cult, but the Nazis desired to kill quickly with­out care­ful delib­er­a­tion. Many wanted a flex­i­ble guide­line that would allow offi­cials on the ground to kill as they saw fit. Von Mende was one of a dozen midlevel bureau­crats who par­tic­i­pated in the meet­ing. The min­utes do not set down any of his com­ments. Sur­viv­ing Ost­min­is­terium records show no effort on von Mende’s part to use his power to slow down the process or raise objec­tions. And he cer­tainly knew of the geno­cide against the Jews by Jan­u­ary 1942. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 27–28.

3. After the war, Amer­i­can pro­pa­ganda efforts against the Soviet Union spawned an ele­ment of CIA called “Amcomlib.”

. . . The group’s name would change repeat­edly as it strug­gled to find a title that would define its mis­sion. Later in 1951, it became the Amer­i­can Com­mit­tee for the Lib­er­a­tion of the Peo­ples of Russia—it was bad form to men­tion the USSR, which some of the group’s mem­bers con­sid­ered ille­git­i­mate. But the word Rus­sia itself became a prob­lem. It seemed too nar­row because it excluded non-Russians, who made up nearly half the country’s pop­u­la­tion. So in 1953, the group changed its name again, to the Amer­i­can Com­mit­tee for Lib­er­a­tion from Bol­she­vism. That in turn seemed a bit quaint—even in the 1950’s no one but the hardest-core anti­com­mu­nist spoke of Bol­she­vism, a term out of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. So the last two words were dropped in 1956, leav­ing the group with a bizarrely generic name: the Amer­i­can com­mit­tee for Lib­er­a­tion. Out­siders often knew it sim­ply as the Amer­i­can Committee—which gave it a whole­some, patri­otic ring. Inter­nally, it was known by the acronym Amcom­lib. The term has a deli­cious jar­gony mys­tique, per­fect for an era that coined obscure and clipped nomen­cla­ture for mil­i­tary and espi­onage mis­sions. Amcom­lib could have been a code word for a para­chute oper­a­tion behind enemy lines.

Over time, Amcom­lib would com­mand a large bud­get and a staff of thou­sands. Its main duty was to run Radio Lib­erty. But it had two other impor­tant tasks. It oper­ated a sup­pos­edly inde­pen­dent think tank, the Insti­tute for the Study of the USSR, which pub­lished papers by Amcom­lib employ­ees and peo­ple close to intel­li­gence agen­cies. It also had an émigré rela­tions depart­ment that recruited agents, mostly in Munich, and sent them around the world on covert pro­pa­ganda mis­sions. U.S. gov­ern­ment involve­ment was care­fully masked. Amcomlib’s board mis­led lis­ten­ers and sup­port­ers in the United States into think­ing it was run by émigrés and promi­nent jour­nal­ists, instead of the CIA. When leaflets were printed, lis­ten­ing radio broad­cast times and fre­quen­cies, the Amer­i­can role in the endeavor was pur­posely obfus­cated, accord­ing to min­utes of Amcom­lib board meetings. . . .

Amcom­lib might have been rel­a­tively unknown, but it never lacked money. Its exact bud­get is hard to recon­struct, although some infor­ma­tion has escaped the CIA’s infor­ma­tion block­ade. Records show that in 1955 its bud­get was $2.8 mil­lion (roughly $23 mil­lion in 2010 terms). It grew to $7.7 mil­lion in 1960. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 42–43.

4. Much of von Mende’s Ost­min­is­terium found post­war work with Radio Lib­erty and Amcom­lib, repeat­ing and rein­forc­ing the dis­turb­ing, preva­lent trend of U.S. intel­li­gence employ­ing World War II fas­cists for post­war anti-communist activ­ity. Note the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations’ employ­ment of some of the for­mer Third Reich combatants.

. . . In the 1940’s, [Garip] Sul­tan had joined the Scot­tish League for Euro­pean Free­dom. Backed by Britain’s for­eign intel­li­gence agency, MI6, the league tried to line up mem­bers of Soviet minor­ity groups such as the Tatars to com­bat the Soviet Union. It led to a more durable orga­ni­za­tion, which Sul­tan also joined, called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Both were largely the cre­ation of British intel­li­gence ser­vices and rife with von Mende’s ex-Ostministerium col­lab­o­ra­tors. Now Sul­tan was look­ing for some­thing that paid a real salary but would allow him to keep fight­ing com­mu­nism. He found what looked like a per­fect fit: Radio Liberty.

One rea­son Sul­tan found it easy to choose Radio Lib­erty is that he already knew most of its employ­ees. The sta­tion was orga­nized into “desks,” each with a spe­cific nationality—Russian and non-Russian. Pro­gram­ming con­cepts and guide­lines were devel­oped in New York, but the desks in Munich had auton­omy to pick top­ics to cover and peo­ple to inter­view. This is not in itself unusual for broad­cast­ers. The non-Russian desks, how­ever, dupli­cated the Ostministerium’s nation­al­ity com­mit­tees in many ways, hir­ing sim­i­lar per­son­nel and even using Nazi eth­nic terms such Idel-Ural to refer to Tatars from the Volga River region.

The peo­ple on the desks had almost all worked for von Mende in the Ost­min­is­terium. Besides Sul­tan, other top-level Ost­min­is­terium employ­ees included Aman Berdimu­rat and Veli Zun­nun on the radio’s Turkestani desk, Hus­sein Ikhran on the Uzbek desk, and Edige Kir­i­mal on the Tatar desk. The Ost­min­is­terium stal­wart Fatal­ibey ran the Azer­bai­jani desk. . . .

Ibid.; p. 49.

5. Next, the broad­cast sets forth the back­ground and activ­i­ties of von Mende asso­ciate Theodor Ober­lan­der, one of the prin­ci­pal archi­tects of using non-Russian Soviet nation­al­i­ties as com­bat­ants and agit­prop agents against the for­mer Soviet Union.

Leader of the Nightin­gale Ein­satz­gruppe (com­prised of ele­ments of the OUN/B), Ober­lan­der was forced to resign his posi­tion as West Ger­man Min­is­ter of Expellees when his role in the wartime slaugh­ter of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion of Lvov came to light.

When work­ing for the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment, von Mende reported directly to Oberlander.

(In FTR #556, we exam­ined Oberlander’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the ICDCC–a German-based intel­li­gence net­work which also fea­tured Nel­son Bunker Hunt of the famous, ultra-right wing Hunt fam­ily of Texas. As we saw in that pro­gram, Hunt was also asso­ci­ated with Ali bin Musalim, who ran an account for Al Qaeda with “unlim­ited credit” at the Bank Al Taqwa. It is inter­est­ing to spec­u­late how far back some of the Islamist/Western fas­cist net­work­ing goes.)

. . . Ober­lan­der was the chief spokesman for these Ver­triebene, the “expellees” or the ‘dri­ven off.” In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, they fought a rear­guard action against those West Ger­mans who wanted to estab­lish diplo­matic rela­tions with the Soviet Union or rec­og­nize the Oder-Neisse bor­der. Ober­lan­der headed a key polit­i­cal party that kept atti­tudes firmly fixed on loss and grievance.

This was the same Ober­lan­der who had par­tic­i­pated in Hitler’s failed beer-hall putsch of 1923 and who had led one of the first Wehrma­cht units made up of Soviet minori­ties. Born in the Baltic, he real­ized the value of non-Russian minori­ties. He had par­tic­i­pated in pogroms against the Jews but opposed the Nazis’ pol­icy toward the occu­pied territories—like von Mende, he thought Ger­many should be the non-Russians’ ally. For that he had lost his posi­tion in the party and his mil­i­tary com­mand. That set­back became a bless­ing after the war, allow­ing him to posi­tion him­self as a vic­tim of the Nazis instead of a party insider who had fallen out because of infight­ing. That, along with his party’s vot­ing power, was enough to con­vince West Germany’s first chan­cel­lor, Kon­rad Ade­nauer, to make Ober­lan­der the cab­i­net min­is­ter in charge of refugees.

Ober­lan­der was prob­a­bly the farthest-right mem­ber of the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment, and in later years he came to be con­sid­ered the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the young democracy’s Nazi roots. The memo he sent to von Mende illus­trated this far-right bent: he wanted Germany’s bor­ders redrawn and von Mende’s coop­er­a­tion in keep­ing a firm grip on the assets he thought could help achieve that—the for­eign­ers liv­ing on West Ger­man soil who had fought for Ger­many dur­ing the war.

Von Mende had most of the émigré groups firmly in hand. He financed Bul­gar­i­ans and Ruma­ni­ans, Ukraini­ans and Czechs. But the pre­vi­ous year’s events showed that he was los­ing con­trol of the Mus­lims. Com­pared to Amcom­lib, his bureau was puny, and most of the Mus­lims were work­ing for the Amer­i­cans. Kuniholm’s trip to Turkey and Europe empha­sized Washington’s more ambi­tious goal: using Mus­lims in its global pro­pa­ganda wars. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 92–93.

6. Among the key employ­ees of von Mende’s appa­ra­tus employed by the Fed­eral Repub­lic was Wal­ter Schenk. For­mer mem­ber of the Sichere­its­di­enst (the SS intel­li­gence ser­vice), Schenck was head of the SD’s office in Lvov/Lemberg, site of the mas­sacre by Ober­lan­der, the OUN/B and their Nightin­gale group.

Much of the Third Reich’s exter­mi­na­tion mech­a­nism was cen­tered in the Sichereitsdienst.

. . . Round­ing out von Mende’s team was a Ger­man, Wal­ter Schenk, who func­tioned as von Mende’s deputy. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] Schenk had not worked in the Ost­min­is­terium, but von Mende knew him from the war, when he headed the Lem­berg office of the Nazis’ Sichere­its­di­enst, or Secu­rity Ser­vice, where one of his respon­si­bil­i­ties was Desk IIIB, which ovr­saw Poles, Ukraini­ans, and Jews. Lem­berg (known between the wars by its Pol­ish name, Lvov, and today by its Ukrain­ian name, Lviv) was at the time in east­ern olanc, mean­ing Schenk was at the epi­cen­ter of the Holo­caust. Schenk had quit uni­ver­sity to join the Nazis, mak­ing him even less employ­able than von Mende after the war. He put in long hours help­ing von Mende design his evolv­ing organization. . . .

Ibid.; p. 60.

7. Next, the pro­gram ana­lyzes part of the post­war career of Johann von Leers. In charge of anti-Semitic pro­pa­ganda for Goebbels’ pro­pa­ganda min­istry, von Leers even­tu­ally set­tled in Egypt and became head of [then Egypt­ian pres­i­dent] Nasser’s Insti­tute for the Study of Zion­ism, which func­tioned in a mat­ter anal­o­gous to Goebbels’s ministry.

Even­tu­ally, von Leers con­verted to Islam. One of the men­tors to Bank Al Taqwa’s Achmed Huber, von Leers (aka Lahars) net­worked with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the first leader of the Pales­tin­ian national move­ment and a gen­eral in the Waf­fen SS.

In Ham­burg, von Leers net­worked with a group of Mus­lim immi­grants with the ulti­mate aim of pro­mot­ing anti-Semitism. Are there any links between von Leers’ Ham­burg con­tacts and the asso­ciates of Mohammed Atta and company?

. . . Hus­saini con­tin­ued to asso­ciate with ex-Nazis, such as the pro­pa­gan­dist Johann von Leers, who had moved to Cairo and changed his name to Amin Lahars. Von Mende’s intel­li­gence reports show that Lahars had con­tact with mem­bers of the Ger­man Mus­lim League, a Hamburg-based group of immi­grants. One report stated that Lahars “intends through this soci­ety to start an anti-Semitic move­ment in the Fed­eral Repub­lic. Ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajji Hus­saini finances the plans of Amin Lahars . . . His goal: Anti-Semitism.” . . .

Ibid.; pp. 112–113.

8. Many of the for­mer Soviet Mus­lims who fought for the Nazis suc­cess­fully avoided repa­tri­a­tion by pois­ing as Uighurs from Xin­jiang. As seen in FTR #549, the Uighurs have received sup­port from Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Under­ground Reich asso­ci­ated ele­ments in their push for auton­omy in the fossil-fuel rich Xin­jiang region.

. . . For most of the war, Turkey had remained neu­tral and main­tained nor­mal diplo­matic and aca­d­e­mic exchanges with Ger­many. A Turk­ish stu­dent union had been formed to rep­re­sent Turks study­ing in Ger­many dur­ing the war. Nation­al­is­tic and pan-Turkic in their think­ing, the stu­dents hit upon a sim­ple solu­tion to save their fel­low eth­nic Turks: declare the sol­diers Turk­ish and issue them stu­dent iden­tity papers.

The idea wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Most of the sol­diers were in their late teens or early twen­ties. If they had had the pres­ence of mind to ditch their Wehrma­cht or SS uni­forms and papers before enter­ing the DP camps, no proof existed of their nation­al­ity or pro­fes­sion. Their mother tongues were Tur­kic dialects. With a bit of pol­ish they could pass as Turk­ish students.

The Turk­ish stu­dent union had been based in Berlin, but when the bomb­ing got too fierce, it moved to the medieval uni­ver­sity town of Tub­in­gen in south­ern Ger­many. That put the stu­dents in close range of the refugee camps, espe­cially in the U.S. sec­tor. Within months, they were issu­ing Turk­ish iden­tity papers whole­sale. To vary the story and thus throw sus­pi­cious offi­cials off their trail, they also claimed that some of the young men were from Xin­jiang, China, a west­ern province with a large Tur­kic minor­ity [the Uighurs].

That became Garip sultan’s new home­land. After the war ended, he was sent to a DP camp. There, the stu­dents gave him a new first name, Garip, instead of the Rus­si­fied name he had pre­vi­ously, used, Garif. “We became eth­nic Turks,” Sul­tan said. “They gave me an iden­tity from Kash­gar in Xin­jiang. So that’s why I survived.:

It was a ruse used by many of von Mende’s top deputies, includ­ing two who would play a key role after the war: the polit­i­cal activist Veli Kayum and the mil­i­tary liai­son Baymirza Hayit. They made their way to Czecho­slo­va­kia and sur­ren­dered to the U.S. Army. They were imme­di­ately sent to be debriefed by the army’s Counter Intel­li­gence Corps, or CIC, and then to a DP camp. The Turk­ish stu­dent group in Munich vouched for Hayit and Kayum, and the UN did not repa­tri­ate them. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 46–47.

9. Next, we revisit the career and activ­i­ties of Ruzy [Ruzi] Nazar. A long-time US intel­li­gence oper­a­tive, Nazar fought in an SS unit in World War II and sur­faced as part of the milieu impli­cated in the shoot­ing of the Pope. Recall that Nazar rep­re­sented the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations at the 1984 WACL con­fer­ence in Dallas.

Nazar was employed by CIA to agi­tate against the Soviet Union at the hajj pil­grim­age in 1954.

. . . For some pil­grims, the 1954 Hajj was a bit dif­fer­ent. Armed with ripe toma­toes and strong lungs, two CIA-sponsored Mus­lims turned Mecca into the site of a Cold War show­down. Two eager young men, Rusi Nazar and Hamid Raschid, had fol­lowed the now-familiar path to the West: born in the Soviet Union and cap­tured by the Ger­mans, they col­lab­o­rated with the Nazis and finally were recruited by U.S. intel­li­gence. Their tar­get: Soviet hajjis, who, they claimed, were engaged in spread­ing pro­pa­ganda. Spon­sored by Amcom­lib, Nazar and Raschid flew to Jed­dah, the Saudi Ara­bian city clos­est to Mecca. They claimed to be Turks, got seats on a bus car­ry­ing twenty-one Soviet pil­grims to Mecca, and began their work, talk­ing to the Soviet Mus­lims and try­ing to sow seeds of doubt about their home­land. When that didn’t work, they tailed their prey in Mecca, heck­ling them. . . .

Ibid.; p. 65.

10. More about Nazar’s post­war activ­i­ties on behalf of U.S. intelligence:

. . . Nazar’s role in the Mus­lim pro­pa­ganda war was at times opaque. Although he appeared in the media dur­ing the Hajj and the Ban­dung episode, he dis­ap­peared from pub­lic view after­ward. He would reap­pear only after the fall of the Soviet Union as an Aksakal, or com­mu­nity leader, of Uzbeks liv­ing in the United States. . . . When the war started, he avoided ser­vice and hid with a Ukrain­ian fam­ily. After the Ger­mans over­ran the region he heard that the great Tur­kic leader Mustafa Chokay was try­ing to unite Tur­kic peo­ples and form a gov­ern­ment in exile. He found out that Chokay had died of typhus while inspect­ing a Ger­man prisoner-of-war camp. Still, Nazar joined a Tur­kic unit and fought for the Ger­mans. He was wounded twice and sent to offi­cer train­ing school in the Ger­man province of Lothrin­gen (Now the French province of Lor­raine). Nazar was later attached to the Oberkom­mando der Wehrma­cht, the Ger­man army’s supreme com­mand. . . .In 1946, he served as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations but declined an offer from his old friend Baymirza Hayit to leave the U.S. sec­tor for the British sec­tor and work for the National Turkestani Unity Com­mit­tee. In the early 1950’s he was recruited by the leg­endary CIA spy­mas­ter Archibald Roo­sevelt Jr. to go to the United States. . . . Nazar might have looked down on Amcom­lib, but evi­dence sug­gests he worked for it. In their arti­cles about Nazar’s Hajj in 1954, both The New York Times and Time mag­a­zine reported he had been sent by Amcom­lib (which was depicted as a pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion). Min­utes of Amcom­lib board meet­ings show that group mem­bers viewed Nazar as a key to their covert pro­pa­ganda strat­egy, call­ing him a “damn good man, use­ful in sev­eral oper­a­tions of the Amer­i­can Committee.” . . .

Ibid.; pp. 73–74.

11. The con­clud­ing part of the pro­gram turns from the Nazi back­ground of many of Amcomlib’s Mus­lim employ­ees to the Bush and Obama admin­is­tra­tions’ recent pro­mo­tion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. In the last half of this decade, the State Depart­ment began openly pro­mot­ing and advanc­ing the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, reflect­ing [per­haps] the lob­by­ing efforts engaged in on that organization’s behalf by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove.

. . . . A State Department-sponsored con­fer­ence on Novem­ber 15 and 16, 2005, called Mus­lim Com­mu­ni­ties Par­tic­i­pat­ing in Soci­ety: A Belgian-U.S. Dia­logue, brought together sixty-five Bel­gian Mus­lims and U.S. tutors from the Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica. The U.S. diplo­mats thought so highly of ISNA that it seems to have been appointed as a co-organizer of the conference.

From a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, this was almost comical—a case of tak­ing coal to New­cas­tle. ISNA, as seen in Chap­ter 14, was founded by peo­ple with extremely close ties to Nada and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood lead­er­ship in Europe. The State Depart­ment was import­ing Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Islamists with roots in Europe to tell Euro­pean Mus­lims how to orga­nize and inte­grate. Even more inter­est­ing, some of those Euro­pean Mus­lims invited to the con­fer­ence were them­selves part of the cur­rent Mus­lim Broth­er­hood net­work. . . . State Depart­ment offi­cials acknowl­edged that they had invited peo­ple accused of extrem­ism, but said they did not care about track records. Instead, all that mat­tered were the groups’ or indi­vid­u­als’ cur­rent statements. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 223–224.

12. In 2007, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion ‘s State Depart­ment under­took a sim­i­lar project in Germany.

. . . . In 2007, a sim­i­lar project took place in Ger­many. The U.S. con­sulate in Munich actively backed the cre­ation of an Islamic acad­emy in the town of Penzberg. The group behind the acad­emy had close ties to Milligorus–essentially a Turk­ish ver­sion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, which reg­u­larly appears on lists of extrem­ist orga­ni­za­tions in Germany. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 224–225.

13. Bush’s CIA began pur­su­ing a sim­i­lar pro­mo­tion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood dur­ing the sec­ond half of his sec­ond administration.

. . . . By the sec­ond half of the decade, even the CIA–reflecting its mind­set of the 1950’s–was back­ing the Broth­er­hood. In 2006 and 2008, the CIA issued reports on the orga­ni­za­tion. The for­mer was more detailed, lay­ing out a blue­print for deal­ing with the group. Called “Mus­lim Broth­er­hood: Piv­otal Actor in Euro­pean Polit­i­cal Islam,” the report stated that “MB groups are likely to be piv­otal to the future of polit­i­cal Islam is Europe . . . They also show impres­sive inter­nal dynamism, orga­ni­za­tion, and media savvy.” The report con­ceded that “Euro­pean intel­li­gence ser­vices con­sider the Broth­er­hood a secu­rity threat and critics–including more plu­ral­is­tic Muslims–accuse it of hin­der­ing Mus­lim social inte­gra­tion.” But the report nev­er­the­less con­cluded that “MB-related groups offer an alter­na­tive to more vio­lent Islamic movements. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 227.

14. The iner­tia gen­er­ated by the Brotherhood’s advo­cates and spear-carriers dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion extended into Obama’s tenure. Note that one of the peo­ple work­ing for State in this episode was Jamal Barz­inji, closely asso­ci­ated with Grover Norquist and Karl Rove’s Islamic Insti­tute.

. . . . In Jan­u­ary 2009, for exam­ple, the State Depart­ment spon­sored a visit of Ger­man Mus­lim lead­ers to one of the bas­tions of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the United States, the Inter­na­tional Insti­tute of Islamic Thought–the orga­ni­za­tion set up after the epochal meet­ing in 1977 at Himmat’s home base near Lake Lugano. The Ger­man vis­i­tors were key gov­ern­ment offi­cials in charge of inte­gra­tion or recruit­ment of minori­ties into the police. One of the briefers (or “one of those giv­ing the brief­ing”) was Jamal Barzinji–who as seen in Chap­ter 14 had worked for Nada in the 1970’s and later was one of the tri­umvi­rate who set up a num­ber of key Brotherhood-inspired struc­tures in the United States. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 227–228.