A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West by Johnson Ian

Author:Johnson, Ian [Johnson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Sultan had been honing his covert propaganda skills for Amcomlib back in the United States. A typical operation was a talk he gave at Philadelphia's venerable International House, a nonprofit institution founded in 1919 as a place for international scholars to congregate and share ideas. He appeared there as a Tatar scholar, reading a nineteen-page paper, "Modern Forms of Colonialism."

Sultan started by attacking colonialism, a line of thinking with which all students from the developing world could agree. But he then broadened the idea to include the Soviet Union, which had enslaved a dozen countries. The discussion was lively. A few days later, Sultan wrote a memo on it to Ike Patch, who was heading Amcomlib's "Special Projects" department in New York, since Dreher had bumped him out of Munich.

"As far as I am able to judge, the report fulfilled its objective," Sultan wrote. "Heated discussions based upon the report took place. I was left with the impression that these students, although they are studying at American universities, for some reason have adopted the Soviet viewpoint instead of the American one. Or perhaps they have no idea of the American viewpoint." Sultan was now a U.S. citizen. He had emigrated from Munich to the United States in 1957, leaving Munich without a camera-ready Muslim able to smooth over Gacaoglu's rough spots—a crisis that in part led to Dreher's courting of Ramadan. But Sultan hadn't been completely out of the picture. He had continued to work with Amcomlib on special projects, deployed behind his own lines to fight communism on the home front. His guises were numerous and imaginative, always hewing as close to the truth as possible to create believable front organizations. During his appearance at International House, he was introduced as a fellow at the Institute for the Study of the USSR, one of Amcomlib's front operations. But he was also an authorized representative of the United Republican and Democratic Voters Club, a freelance writer for the American Federation of Labor's Trade Union Courier, and the founder of a raft of fancifully named organizations, such as the National-Liberation Revolutionary Organizations of the Islamic Peoples of the USSR and the Organization of Muslim Refugees from the Soviet Union. As head of the "Writers' Section" of the latter group, Sultan went to Cairo in 1962 to give a talk called "Soviet Asiatic Writers and the Problem of Creativity."

In a display of networking skill, Sultan finagled an invitation to the Baghdad conference by exploiting his Pakistani contacts. He wrote to Manzooruddin Ahmad at the Central Institute for the Study of Islam, asking if he would be interested in being point man for a conference on self-determination. Sultan then mailed Ahmad a $200 check from the Committee for Self-Determination, Inc., a covert propaganda organization run by Amcomlib's sister organization, the National Committee for a Free Europe. Sultan also wrote saying he'd like to attend the Baghdad conference. Ahmad answered that getting Sultan an invitation was proving tricky because the Iraqi dictator, Qassim, opposed allowing any Americans to attend.

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