Unintended Consequences

Abstract

From the involvement of a radical ayatollah in the 1953 Iranian coup to American support for the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, stories of “blowback” from Cold War U.S. covert operations in the Muslim world have become a staple of recent books and newspaper reports. Few, though, have been told with the attention to historical complexity and sober judgment that characterize Ian Johnson's new study of the Islamic Center of Munich, a beachhead for the expansion of Islamism into western Europe that got its start in the 1950s, thanks partly to clandestine backing from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Johnson's story begins in World War II with a sudden change in fortune experienced by thousands of captured Soviet conscripts in Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camps. Berlin had decided that Turkic Muslims, who had clear religious and political reasons for resenting Communist rule, could be persuaded to fight against rather than for the Red Army. The job of turning these POW's into a military force was entrusted to senior Nazi official Gerhard von Mende, an academic “Turkologist” who had long argued that Muslims in the “minority” nations were the Achilles Heel of the Soviet Union. The plan received the personal blessing of the Führer himself, who stated, “I don't see any risk if one actually sets up pure Mohammedan units.”