A lot, it turns out. For the three elements, separated by decades, geography, and outlook, are the unlikely building blocks of the contemporary crisis posed by radical Islam and terrorism. Here’s how it happened: In their bitter war with the Soviets, the Nazis recruited alienated Muslims from the faraway Islamic territories of Stalin’s empire. When the conflict ended, the CIA sought to turn them into an underground advance guard against world communism. Neither the Nazis nor the operatives from Langley cared a whit that their willing agents of resentment had an allegiance to a higher master than the Axis powers or NATO — the tenets of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a movement dedicated to a worldwide religious revival, tolerant if not supportive of terrorism, and sometimes regarded as a precursor to Al Qaeda.
Johnson meticulously assembles a narrative all but unknown in the West, setting out how, long before the United States supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan as holy warriors against Soviet aggression, the Americans harnessed the anticommunist Islamic diaspora in West Germany to undermine the Soviet Bloc after World War II.
The locus of the book involves the building of a Munich mosque, which was conceived in the late 1950s but wasn’t completed until 1973. The decadeslong struggle to construct this center provided a focus for the former Nazis, cold warriors, and radical Islamists who used it for their sometimes-convergent purposes.
This is a story full of men with Nazi ties and sympathies —“bitter anticommunists,’’ Johnson describes them, “who would prove valuable to the West.’’ They would number as many as 250,000. First they would fight the Soviets in a hot war (at Stalingrad, for example) and then they would fight them in the more subtle battles of the Cold War.
