CIA Links to the Muslim Brotherhood Alleged

For most of us living in the United States, our first contact with extremist Islamic ideology came after the 9/11 attack by Islamic militants. Others may recall the Afghan Islamic freedom fighters, the mujahideen, against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, whom we supplied with weapons. At the time, we didn’t care a whole lot about fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. But that would change after we were attacked.

The arming by the West of the mujahideen was likely primed by the experiences of U.S. intelligence had with the Muslim Brotherhood, going back to the 1950s, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson.

In his new book, “A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West,” Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist tells a story of covert operations, Cold War rivalries, historical personalities and intrigue behind the origins of political Islam. Today, the most articulate and influential leaders of political Islam are members of the Islamic Brotherhood, which former Nazis and the CIA had a role in nurturing.

Johnson's search for the origins of the Afghan fighters begins three decades earlier, when there was a psychological war for control of Muslims living in Germany. He interweaves his story around three distinct groups: the Germans, the Americans, and the Muslim Brotherhood and their focus of interest in a mosque in Munich, known as the Islamic Center of Munich. This mosque is not famous because of its religious origins or piety, but for it political significance.

The Germans
Johnson begins with the Nazis and their realization during World War II that many ethnic minorities living under control of the communist state hated their oppressors. There were around 30 million Muslims in the Soviet Union, and the communists before and during the war had been opposed to religion, closing mosques, and persecuting those who practiced their faith. The Nazis easily recruited many of their prisoners of war, such as Tatars, Georgians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks in areas bordering Russia—the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Baltic states, and Turkistan—to fight the Soviet Union. These soldiers were also employed in the Wehrmacht’s Ostministerium, which oversaw the newly conquered East European territories. After the war, many thousands of these Muslims from Central Asia avoided being repatriated and stayed behind what became West Germany. The Ostministerium, with mostly the same people, was rebuilt after the war to fight communism.