Al-Qaeda: From Serving Hitler to Serving the CIA

(Fragments of the speech on the Holocaust Remembrance Day – April 18, 2004)

… I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a cilantro town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. and that’s where the US Government buries its secrets – literally.

There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone saw the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark? The last scene of that movie is what the underground vaults are really like, only not as organized as they are in the movie. And in those underground vaults I discovered something horrible. I learned that many of the Nazis that I had been assigned to prosecute were on the CIA payroll…

This year [2004] a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer, wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it’s called Sleeping with the Devil. I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA … the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, “Bob, that’s wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago.” He said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word ‘banna,’ b-a-n-n-a.” He said, “Yeah.” “[Then] type in ‘Nazi’.” Bob typed the two words in, and out came (now tens of) thousands of articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, “Oh my God, what have we done?”

What I’m doing today is … educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al-Qaeda.

  

Al-Banna

Here’s how the story began. In the 1920s there was a young Egyptian named [Hassan] al-Banna. And al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that, in the 1930s, al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews, they hated democracy, and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.

When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time…

These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the “Handjar” Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler’s new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa – grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened.Instead of prosecuting the Nazis – the Muslim Brotherhood – the British government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission…

Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that [in 1948] tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could…

What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA… The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt or be imprisoned, and [they] would execute them all. During the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.

Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam – the Saudi version of Islam – is typical, but it’s not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That’s how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood, and fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools. And there was a young student who paid attention – and Azzam’s student was named Osama bin Ladin. Osama bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

In 1979 the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn’t call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al-Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.

And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn’t know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section [in the] CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.

Azzam and his assistant, Osama bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to 1989, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, “We won, let’s go home!” And we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

Saudis didn’t want to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated, apparently by Osama bin Ladin himself. The radical group – the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists – Osama called that al-Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Ladin’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the results of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as Hamas is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East, and on 9/11 it began to spread around the world.

I know this sounds like some sort of a sick fantasy, but go to your computer and type in the wordhttp://wariscrime.com/new/al-qaeda-from-serving-hitler-to-serving-the-cia/s “Banna,” B-A-N-N-A, and the word “Nazi,” N-A-Z-I, and type in the words “Hamas,” H-A-M-A-S, and the word “Nazi,” you will see all of the articles come up. Those are all the pieces of information that the CIA was trying to hide from its employees… So, when Bob Baer studied his files, he was just stunned. A whole generation, the current CIA people, know nothing about this…

We have to recognize that al-Qaeda simply didn’t spring up on its own… Al-Qaeda is nothing more than the religious expression of Arab Fascism. We allowed this branch of the Nazi trunk to survive, to flourish, and it has come back to haunt us…