The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

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The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11

Martin A.Lee
RAZOR Magazine September 2004

Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.

The CIA often works in mysterious ways - and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly - an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.

“The Muslim Brothers are at the root of a lot of our troubles,” says Col. W. Patrick Lang, one of several US intelligence veterans interviewed for this article . Formerly a high-ranking Middle East expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency Lang considers al-Qaeda to be “a descendent of the Brotherhood.

For many years, the American espionage establishment had operated on the assumption that Islam was inherently anti-communist and there fore could be harnessed to facilitate US objectives. American officials viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as “a secret weapon” in the shadow war against the Soviet Union and it’s Arab allies, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA case officer who was right in the thick of things in the Middle East and Central Asia during his 21 year career as a spy. In Sleeping with the Devil, a book he wrote after quitting the CIA Baer explains how the United States “made common cause with the Brothers” and used them “to do our dirty work in Yemen, Afghanistan and plenty of other places”. This covert relationship; unraveled when the Cold War ended, whereupon an Islamic Frankenstein named Osama bin Laden lurched into existence.

Described by ex-CIA analyst Graham Fuller as “the preeminent international Islamist organization,” the Muslim Brotherhood currently has a huge following with autonomous branches, all in close contact, spread across the Arab world.
But it is banned in several countries, including Egypt, it’s birthplace, for being an alleged front for terrorists - a claim its supporters adamantly deny even though bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders had close personal ties to the Brotherhood prior to September 11, 2001



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