Chapter 6: LEARNING THEIR LESSON
By THE MID-1950s, most of the displaced persons in Germany had found homes. Foreign prisoners had been sent home, Jewish survivors had emigrated, many to the United States or Israel, while millions of ethnic Germans had been resettled, mostly in West Germany. Only one major group remained living in camps: stateless foreigners with no place to go. A German newspaper dubbed them "homo barrackensis," people consigned to live in camps. And they were, by and large, Muslims. One social worker visiting a group of two hundred Albanians in the southern Munich suburb of Ottobrunn said they lived eight to a room, without electricity and with the only source of water a six-hundred-meter walk away. Tuberculosis had infected several of the children. A sign outside the building said DILAPIDATED: ENTER AT OWN RISK.
Not all Muslims in Munich lived in such conditions. Many had found homes, started businesses, or begun working with the American Committee. But many others needed help. To their rescue came Ibrahim Gacaoglu, a gruff, poorly spoken, but honest imam. During the war, Gacaoglu had been a trusted Muslim headman. Born in the North Caucasus in 1903, he was fiercely loyal to the Germans. Most of the Germans' Muslim soldiers had been young, many of them teenagers. But Gacaoglu was old enough to be their father. Simple and poorly educated, he relied on friends to write letters for him. Yet he was pious and his age commanded respect.
In 1953, he founded a religious group called Islam: The Moslem Religious Society in Western Europe. Its goal was to keep the religion alive among the estimated three thousand Muslims still living in German camps for displaced persons. When Gacaoglu formed the group Islam, he said his goal was to prevent the soldiers from losing their loyalty to Germany; the camps, he thought, were so squalid that they were causing many to give up and return to the Soviets.
Von Mende initially supported Gacaoglu's new group, but for reasons that are not clear he distanced himself relatively quickly. It could be that Gacaoglu seemed too crude and unsophisticated to lead Munich's Muslims or simply that von Mende didn't yet see the importance of cultivating Islam as a force to use in the Cold War -- although he had helped many Muslims, he had done so as part of a broad effort to help all emigres. Or perhaps U.S. officials offered Gacaoglu more money and lived closer at hand -- von Mende was up in Dusseldorf, while Amcomlib was right there in Munich. Within a couple of years, Gacaoglu was handing out food packages from the U.S. humanitarian organization CARE. Some Muslims said he had received the packets from the U.S. consulate in Munich. He was also distributing goods from the Tolstoy Foundation, a charity aimed at helping Soviet refugees that also had links to the intelligence community. By 1955, Amcomlib was funding Gacaoglu directly. It paid for the community's Bairam, a major event on the Muslim calendar. Gacaoglu held the festival in the Deutsches Museum, a cavernous building of exhibits that trumpeted German industrial and scientific prowess. He invited scores of Muslims and attracted local media attention.
Gacaoglu seemed like a good catch. A Chechen who taught at the CIA school in Bavaria strongly backed his fellow Caucasian. Gacaoglu also commanded a wide following because of his charitable work. Alex Melbardis, who was Amcomlib's deputy head of emigre relations at the time, said Gacaoglu once called him at 4 A.M. to ask for a lift to visit a dying man outside Munich. Melbardis was impressed by his dedication and hopped in his car to pick up Gacaoglu for a two-hour drive to the village where the man lived. "Gacaoglu administered the last rites;' he said. "He was a decent man."
Soon, Gacaoglu was firmly in the U.S. camp. "We helped him and he helped us," Melbardis said. "He did propaganda for us." The United States now had a man who could lead Munich's Muslims -- a counterbalance to the Muslims used by the Soviets. There was an inherent absurdity to this effort: Moscow controlled millions of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars, and Azerbaijanis; at best, Bonn and Washington might claim a few hundred or thousand in Munich as under their sway. But in the media age all that mattered was to have a spokesperson who could attend the Hajj or a conference, declare himself a Muslim leader from the West, talk up the freedoms back home, and criticize Soviet repression. Gacaoglu was at least credible and clearly had a following in Munich, where hundreds had signed up as members of his group.
But dissatisfaction lingered. Gacaoglu might have been a decent man and able to connect with the Muslims in the camps, but did he have the authority to credibly represent Western Muslims on the world stage? Could he stand up as their leader and attack the Soviets? The staff at Amcomlib's headquarters in New York were skeptical. They began casting about for other options --looking for a quick-witted, charismatic figure who could work in the fast-paced propaganda wars.
***
At first, Robert H. Dreher had little use for Muslims, but by the late 1950S, he would become the man most closely identified with cultivating them in Munich. Early in the decade he was a confirmed Russophile, reveling in aspects of that culture that matched his own interests. Tall and good-looking, he had joined Amcomlib as a way to get back to Germany and the good times he had known there as a CIA man. He spoke Russian, liked vodka, and could keep up with the best of his Russian friends at dancing. But Islam? Like most Amcomlib officials, Dreher had no idea what to make of it.
That would soon change, thanks to the influence of one of his colleagues, B. Eric Kuniholm. Kuniholm was senior to Dreher and, initially at least, more influential. He headed Amcomlib's political wing, one of its three main branches of operations, along with the radio station and the institute. The political operations oversaw Amcomlib's covert propaganda efforts, which were increasingly directed toward Muslims around the world.
Kuniholm had been born to Swedish and Finnish parents and was fluent in both those languages as well as German and Russian. His cosmopolitan background -- both his facility with languages and his outlook -- made him special among Amcomlib's U.S. staff. Kuniholm was skeptical of Russians and doubted they would overthrow the Soviet Union. He thought the minorities were the key. He often spent time with non-Russians, inviting Tatars, Uzbeks, and others back home for dinner, drinks, and stories about the homeland. West German intelligence pegged Kuniholm as a "splittist" -- eager to split the Soviet Union by pitting the non-Russians against the Russians.
Kuniholm had long experience in intelligence work overseas. While working for the U.S. government, he had observed and reported on the Nazis' anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938, called Kristallnacht, and witnessed antimonarchy riots in Tehran, where he had supervised Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union during the war. Later he had observed protests in Palestine as the state of Israel was being born. At Amcomlib his work was more strategic, and he rarely went abroad. Staffers recall him as involved in setting policy and parameters.
Dreher was Kuniholm's opposite, an odd combination of glad-handing charm and ideological fervor. Born in 1916, Dreher had grown up in a Pennsylvania family of German descent. The Great Depression shaped him: he was thirteen when it started, and he remembered counting every penny. He put himself through Lafayette College, working forty hours per week. He graduated with honors in 1938. Like many Americans who faced hardship during this era, he was attracted to the Soviet Union's promise of justice and welfare. He took a job with Standard Oil in New Jersey. The next year, he was awed by the World's Fair in New York. His favorite pavilion was the Soviets'. "From that time on, I followed things Soviet with an extremely 'educated' interest." he later wrote, "devouring the current press accounts and books, practically all of which were strongly -- even ridiculously, as it later appeared -- pro-Soviet in their slant."
Dreher began a graduate degree in engineering at Columbia University but joined the navy when World War II began. His engineering skills landed him a desk job in Jacksonville, Florida, where he worked for the supervisor of shipbuilding. As the war wound down, the navy issued a circular soliciting volunteers to learn Russian. Dreher signed on and went to language school in Boulder, Colorado. He completed the course in 1946. By then, the war was over and he could have been discharged. But just then, the navy's liaison with the Soviet Union in the port of Odessa resigned. Dreher was asked if he'd extend his service.
"Would I?" Dreher replied, and he was off to the Soviet Union -- just as the Cold War was gaining momentum.
It was there that Dreher became briefly famous. Odessa was the Black Sea port through which most of the United Nations' humanitarian aid to the Soviet Union was channeled. The country was devastated by the war. U.S. ships delivered most of the supplies -- hence the navy's role in supervising its flotilla. But tensions were rising rapidly between the two former allies. While in Moscow, wrapping up some paperwork before returning home, Dreher was detained after a brief scuffle and quickly expelled from the Soviet Union. The incident was front-page news in the New York Times. The United States claimed Dreher had been set up. Pravda said he was a spy.
The Soviet allegations can't be dismissed as propaganda. Dreher had served in the Office of Naval Intelligence and by his own account had spent much of his time in Odessa driving around the countryside, picking up hitchhikers, and generally befriending anyone he could find. In Moscow he romanced a medical student, getting a tour of her research facility. He gave accounts of his forays to the top naval man in the embassy, Admiral Leslie Stevens.
"I had more direct, intimate contact with more people over a wide range of education, occupational, economic, and political strata in the Soviet Union during these critical post-war years than any other American, or possibly any other foreigners from any country. My dossier with the MGB [forerunner of the KGB] was undoubtedly the fattest of all contemporary foreigners;' he wrote in the opening chapter of an unpublished account of his Russian adventures.
Years later, when he wrote of his arrest, he said he was sure the hitchhikers had been later interrogated -- in other words, he knew he had been tailed. As for the medical student, he figured she would be arrested for her indiscretion, and in fact she was. She spent eight years in the gulag, fixing roads and eating barley gruel. Dreher blamed the arrests not on his own indiscretions but on the Soviets.
The experience turned him into one of Amcomlib's most hardened cold warriors. After his expulsion, he returned to Washington to head naval intelligence's USSR desk. Three years later, in 1951, he joined the CIA. On his CIA application, his reason for leaving the navy is stated as a wish "to contribute more directly to liberation" -- the new U.S. policy of aggressively overturning, not containing, communism. He joined the CIA at a time when it was still the front line of the next great struggle. A Roosevelt Democrat, his political liberalism wasn't at odds with covert operations. He saw it as a means to defeating a totalitarian state.
His resume seemed tailor-made for a job in covert operations. It wasn't just his Russian and, to a lesser degree, his German language skills or the background in military intelligence. It was his personal life, which on the application seemed a blank slate. He had only three relatives: father, mother, and sister, all born in the United States. He never married. He had never joined a political party or anything more controversial than Phi Beta Kappa and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He had never even taken a loan. Under "credit references" in his CIA application he apologetically explained that he'd plunked down cash for his 1948 Chevy.
CIA background checks, however, apparently weren't too thorough back then. On his CIA application form, Dreher wrote no in answer to the question about anything in his life history that might be potentially compromising. Yet Dreher was an inveterate womanizer, often boasting about his conquests with staff and friends. That in itself wasn't disqualifying, but during an earlier trip to Munich, he had started a special affair: a long-running relationship with an ethnic Chinese woman from Southeast Asia. She bore him a daughter, a secret both kept until Dreher was an old man. Women and liberation were the twin poles of his life.
The CIA sent Dreher back to Munich for a year, but he soon returned to the United States. He had been given a job in New York with the newly formed Amcomlib, which was headed by his old boss from Moscow, Admiral Stevens. He was essentially seconded to Amcomlib as its CIA liaison man -- he kept his CIA rank and pay and a few years later would return to the agency. At Amcomlib, Dreher was given a high-ranking job -- head of the Radio Programming Support Division -- vetting what was produced in Munich and making sure the right message got out. The salary was also generous for that era: $10,000 a year, one of Amcomlib's highest.
Dreher joined Kuniholm, working out of Amcomlib's headquarters in New York. The offices were located on East 45th Street, just off the advertising center of the world, Madison Avenue. Down the street was the Roosevelt Hotel, where staffers sometimes went for a drink after work. The offices themselves were anodyne: outside, a fourteen-story gray brick building; inside, subdued carpets, quiet secretaries, and humming fluorescent lights. Everyone wore a conservative suit. One Jewish staffer remembers it looking like a "WASPish bank." which made him feel uncomfortable.
Although Amcomlib officers in Munich had considerable leeway, New York -- especially Kuniholm and Dreher -- set the tone and strategy. That led to an almost inevitable cleft between on-the-ground operations in Munich and headquarters in New York. Staffers in Munich thought the New York bureau was out of touch -- too hard-line anticommunist and unable to understand the complexities of dealing with people from other cultures. That would become especially pronounced as Amcomlib turned its attention to Islam.
But Dreher chafed at living in 1950s America. He took a flat in a brownstone walkup in Greenwich Village, living a bachelor's life and angling to get back overseas. He also had professional reasons for returning to Europe. The radio, he thought, was doing well, but the covert operations there were weak. They needed beefing up. Exactly how he would accomplish this wasn't yet clear. It would be up to his boss, Kuniholm, to chart Amcomlib's strategy.
***
In the early years of the Cold War, CIA men like Bob Dreher were far from unusual. The agency comprised two factions: the professionals, who had served in the wartime intelligence agencies, and the eccentric newcomers. Of the second group, many had seen action in World War II but were recruited to the CIA with a specific purpose in mind: to jump-start an agency that was already seen as staid and overly bureaucratic. Dreher was firmly in the latter camp.
This group's founder and inspiration was Frank Wisner, one of the legendary figures in U.S. intelligence. Wisner came from a wealthy family in Mississippi and worked as a Wall Street lawyer before joining the navy in World War II. He quickly switched to the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency, and witnessed firsthand how the Soviets overran southeastern Europe in the waning days of the war. After he was demobilized, he went back to Wall Street, where the former OSS officer Allen Dulles was also working. The two would meet regularly for lunch and bemoan the U.S. government's dismemberment of its intelligence services. A friend who sat in on one lunch remembers them as "pining to get back ... They were both great romantics who saw themselves as saviors of the world."
In 1947, Secretary of State Dean Acheson recruited Wisner to join the State Department and keep an eye on Soviet activity in eastern Europe. Wisner bought a farm in Maryland and a townhouse in Georgetown. Compact, powerfully built, and uniformly described as brilliant, he became a star of dinner parties among the Washington elite, where he argued vigorously for action against the Soviets. Like many in Washington, he felt that the United States needed a new agency to do this, one beholden to no politician or civil servant, one that could match the Soviets dirty trick for dirty trick.
In fact, the United States had just such an agency -- the newly formed CIA had an Office of Special Operations, made up of wartime intelligence veterans. But the CIA reported to the National Security Council, meaning it was held accountable by, and its actions could be traced to, the U.S. government. Even though the OSO had just successfully intervened in Italian elections to prevent that country from going communist, it was seen as engaging in espionage, not political activism. Maybe more important, Wisner despised the OSO, saying its agents were too staid -- perhaps because they were accountable for their actions. He called them a "bunch of old washerwomen exchanging gossip while they rinse through the dirty linen." He wanted action.
Wisner began to lobby for his new agency and in 1948 he got it -- the innocuously named Office of Policy Coordination. The office was housed in the CIA but reported only to the secretaries of state and defense. Wisner was put in charge, instantly becoming one of the most powerful men in the U.S. government. He raced to recruit emigres in Europe -- an army of disgruntled anticommunists, or so Wisner imagined them, eager to fight in the hot war just around the corner. To run the operation, Wisner sought out unusual men. He recruited many from Wall Street, believing they had the risk-taking mentality needed to get things done. He also recruited extensively from Ivy League schools and paid accordingly. Wisner convinced Washington officials that his team was composed of the elite, and they automatically got higher pay grades. The CIA's parking lot reflected this distinction: the old-school agents drove Chevrolets and Fords; Wisner's men drove Jaguars and MGs.
Improbable plans were hatched and sometimes carried out. At the height of the Korean War, Wisner's OPC men hijacked a Norwegian freighter heading for North Korea. But Wisner was sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful. Once, he spent $400,000 on a Polish officer who pledged to fly the latest-model Soviet fighter over to Munich. Instead, the officer spent the money in a Munich hotel on champagne and prostitutes. Bizarre undertakings were commonplace. For example, just to show that they could do anything, two OPC agents blocked off the intersection of Madison Avenue and 42nd Street, dug a giant hole, and walked off. "It was prankster stuff." one veteran recalled. Wisner boasted that his OPC was like a "mighty Wurlitzer." an organ on which he could play anything, from diplomacy to military action. His Wurlitzer was amplified and blasted through two giant speakers: Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, the largest covert operations of their era.
The organization Wisner headed was no secret cabal. The small group of politicians, officials, and journalists who held sway back in 1940s Washington were all in broad agreement that the United States had to fight the Soviets. This was not the age of George Smiley, the fictional spy in John le Carre's novels, a jaded and spent figure working in a milieu of ambiguities. This was a confident and ambitious group of men sure that they could fight Stalin just as U.S. citizen soldiers had defeated Hitler. Now enthusiastic amateurs were ready to go up against the KGB. All they needed were the right allies among the emigres.
***
In September 1955, Eric Kuniholm arrived in Istanbul and reserved a berth at Cook Wagon-Lits for the night train to Ankara. Then he set off for the famous Restaurant Abdullah for a quick supper. ''And then all hell broke loose," he wrote back to his colleagues in New York. Protests against Greece's presence on the island of Cyprus had morphed into xenophobic, anti-Christian riots. At first only Greek businesses were torched, but by the end of the evening six churches had been gutted. The cathedral next to the Naval Museum burned all night, lighting up the Bosporus. Just as he had many times before when witnessing violence, Kuniholm wrote up a coolly analytical report. The protests, he wrote, had not been as spontaneous as the government claimed. They had been highly organized by rabid anti-Greek nationalist groups. His proposed solution was more police.
It was an attitude much appreciated by Kuniholm's contacts in the Turkish secret police, who likewise thought more law and order was needed. Kuniholm was in Turkey on a sensitive trip. He wanted to line up Muslims to join Amcomlib's covert propaganda battle in the third world. But Turkey was worried that U.S. support could embolden emigres to demand that the Turkish government help them. The Turks supported the anticommunist goals of Kuniholm's work but wanted to be sure that the emigres didn't get out of control and start their own riots. Kuniholm assured them that the work would be discreet, covert, and quiet. The Turks were especially concerned about religion. After the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey had adopted a militantly secular ideology. When Kuniholm met the interior minister, he was warned against getting involved with the Muslim Congress -- one of several bodies being formed at this time, by mostly Arab Muslims. Acceptable, the general said, would be a "research institute" that would mask a CIA-run "Action Committee" to push more vigorous anti-Soviet actions. The Turks also congratulated Kuniholm for having sent Rusi Nasar to Bandung earlier in the year. That Nasar's success was mostly due to his emphasis on Islam was left unspoken.
Kuniholm's six-week trip occurred after Amcomlib had basically given up on the old paradigm of coercing Russian and non-Russian emigres to work together. The goal had been to set up a front group to run Radio Liberty, making it seem like a grassroots creation rather than an intelligence construct. That had failed spectacularly, despite the efforts of seasoned diplomats such as Ike Patch. Clearly the United States needed to spend more time thinking about how to harness Islam -- and this, without a significant Muslim population of its own to be recruited. Kuniholm's trip was a chance to take stock and formulate new ideas. He spent nearly six weeks on the road and apparently met nearly every emigre leader in Paris, Munich, Istanbul, and Ankara. Most were Muslims.
One such key leader was Said Shamil, whose family was one of the most famous Dagestani clans. In the nineteenth century Said Shamil's grandfather, Imam Shamil, had led the resistance to Russian expansion into the Caucasus, fighting a bitter civil war. He eventually surrendered, was placed under house arrest, and was later granted permission to retire to Mecca. The elderly Shamil bought huge tracts of land in Medina, which the family kept after he died. By the twentieth century the land was worth a small fortune, and the family was rich. They moved to Switzerland and had little contact with those back home in the Caucasus.
Said Shamil had also participated in the Nazi efforts to harness Islam. After the war, he returned home to Geneva and was active in efforts to unite Muslims around the world. By 1955, he was close to the Americans. The Amcomlib officer Alex Melbardis summarized how the Americans viewed him: "The family was really famous and wealthy. We wanted him on our side."
U.S. intelligence documents indicate that Shamil provided information on emigre leaders, indicating he was at least cooperating with, if not working directly for, the Americans. Shamil's expat lifestyle, however, led many to question whether he could really help the United States. Kuniholm reported that Shamil had lived in the Caucasus but since the communist takeover hadn't been back home; hen floated between Medina, Mecca, Beirut, Cairo, and, of course, Geneva. On Kuniholm's last night in Istanbul, Shamil hosted a big dinner for him. It was fun, but hardly a meal one would expect from a serious Muslim leader.
"I do not mind a succession of vodkas," Kuniholm wrote back home. "But I object to vodka being served in water tumblers, full."
In Munich, Kuniholm again met with Muslims. Almost all the people involved in efforts to harness Islam were present, including Ali Kantemir, whom Kuniholm humorously described as "as astute as ever, with the same nose for intrigue;' and Ahmet Nabi Magoma, "an old revolutionary, who was in the British pay for long years." Both also had long-standing contacts with U.S. intelligence. He also met Garip Sultan and other Amcomlib employees with Radio Liberty. They pleaded for more leeway to take "political action" -- Amcomlib code for covert propaganda action -- like the operations that had succeeded during the Hajj and at Bandung, instead of just broadcasting anti-Soviet propaganda. Kuniholm told them that political action would be coordinated through Istanbul, where Amcomlib was establishing better contacts.
Gacaoglu was next on Kuniholm's list of influential emigres. Even though Amcomlib had begun to back him, Kuniholm was unimpressed. "Mr. Gacaoglu of the 'Islam' Society then called, along with a couple of his henchmen, to plead for help for his group. I gave him little encouragement. I do not believe that we should have anything to do with this unsavory character, whose past is filled with much that is suspicious, and whose reputation in the Middle East is definitely bad. He is an uncultured 'low-brow' who is trying to capitalize on his religion."
Kuniholm was probably unfairly harsh in this assessment. But clearly, like von Mende, Kuniholm was looking for someone more modern in style, more charismatic. Gacaoglu, poorly educated and simple, didn't present the face the Americans felt could take their case to the Muslim world. Kuniholm also mentioned how Munich's Muslims espoused a particular dream: to build a mosque. It was the first mention of this goal, but Kuniholm considered it a pie-in-the-sky plan and dismissed it.
***
The clubroom of Munich's Bayerischer Hof hotel was, in the 1950S, wood paneled and lined with beer steins and hunting trophies -- the sort of place guests would frequent for a light meal, a heavy Bavarian beer, and a bit of rustic Germany in the middle of a bustling city. In August 1956 it was set up for another kind of theater. Alex Melbardis and other Amcomlib employees spent the better part of a day hanging Central Asian rugs on the walls and replacing the beer steins with porcelain plates decorated with Islamic motifs. Tables were set with exotic fruit. Even the napkins had been chosen with care: they were green, the color representing Islam.
More than forty-five journalists crowded into the room for the show. The host was Gacaoglu, who greeted the guests and then introduced Garip Sultan as a member of his society. Gacaoglu said, in his barely comprehensible German, that he had just been on the Hajj and had information to report about the sorry state of Soviet Islam. Then he turned the floor over to the smooth-talking Sultan.
Sultan told of his trip to Mecca, accompanied on the Hajj by Gacaoglu and another Radio Liberty employee, Veli Zunnun, of the station's Uzbek desk. Sultan ripped the Soviets for misusing the Hajj for propaganda purposes. He claimed that the Soviet hajjis were government employees and that some of them were sent as spies.
Of course none of the journalists in the ballroom could know that Sultan was not really a member of Gacaoglu's group, or that it, in turn, was funded by Amcomlib, which in turn was a CIA front. Instead, they did as expected: they relayed the propaganda to the public. The two most important Munich newspapers printed articles on the Hajj, including a long feature that recounted Sultan's exploits. A few weeks earlier, on their way back to Munich via Istanbul, Sultan and Zunnun had been interviewed by the newspaper Milliyet, which also published a long piece on their trip.
Amcomlib was happy with Sultan's performance. Robert F. Kelley, Amcomlib's boss in Germany, gave him a glowing commendation for "an outstanding contribution to the anti-Bolshevik struggle" that "provides us with a much better understanding of the growing communist menace in the Near East."
Behind the scenes, however, Amcomlib was concerned. In an internal account of his trip, Sultan reported that public opinion was firmly in the Soviet camp. "Here one should cite the notion of a simple, old Arab who works at the Hajj Administration as a servant, about the USSR," Sultan wrote. "When I told him from where I had come, he said at once, 'Moscow is good. There are also our Moslems there. The Hajjis from the USSR comes [sic] to Mecca every years [sic]. England, France, America are all unbelievers. They are our enemies:" More serious was Amcomlib's dearth of "assets." Sultan and Zunnun had almost not made it to the Hajj because they'd started late and had to be bailed out by Said Shamil, who was in Saudi Arabia at his family's home. He had intervened with local authorities to allow the two men to proceed to Mecca. Without his assistance, the propaganda pilgrims would have returned home.
The press conference was another near debacle. Sultan had been recruited to lead it because Gacaoglu's German was too poor. But Sultan didn't look like a religious leader. He came across to everyone who met him as secular. He dressed sharply and was clean-shaven; everyone knew he loved to dance and drink the occasional vodka. Plus, he would soon be sent back to the United States to work in Amcomlib's "Special Projects" department. Amcomlib needed someone new. Men like Ike Patch were supposed to be marshaling the emigres for covert action, but he didn't seem to get the job done. Back in New York, Kuniholm and Dreher watched him impatiently. Dreher, especially, was eager for another stint in Munich, where he hoped to put rollback theories into practice. The problem was more urgent than ever.
Von Mende, Amcomlib's one-time friend, was developing his own plan to win over Munich's Muslims. Unlike Kuniholm, von Mende wouldn't ignore the Munich Muslims' desire for a mosque. It would be his top priority.