A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Covert Action Magazine
Despite his liberal pretensions, Obama’s foreign policy was dreamed up at Langley—which should not have been surprising given his background
In the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama signed a secret order authorizing the CIA and other U.S. agencies to support rebels in Syria seeking to oust Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad—a nationalist who had allied with Iran and stood up to U.S. proxy Israel.[1]
Costing more than $1 billion, Operation Timber Sycamore evolved into the largest covert operation since the arming of mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
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The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”[5] an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.
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The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Additionally, the Obama administration a) protected longtime CIA assets from prosecution, like Rwandan mass murderer Paul Kagame; b) waged war by proxy in Yemen through the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to which it sold nearly $27 billion worth of arms; c) provided weapons to drug cartels in Mexico under the Operation Fast and the Furious while ramping up the War on Drugs through the Plan Mérida; and d) oversaw establishment of a clandestine arms pipeline from Libya to Syria by Ambassador Chris Stevens as part of Operation Timber Sycamore.[7]
CIA Family Connection—Ann Dunham
Obama’s record as president should not have been surprising given his family background.
His mother, Ann Dunham, worked for U.S. government agencies and allied NGOs—the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives Inc., and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—in Indonesia in the 1960s and 1970s as well as Ghana, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Thailand.
Ann had training in the Russian language which, with everything combined, made her a “CIA recruiter’s wet dream.”[8]
The microfinancing projects that she worked on to help turn traditional craft industries into sustainable businesses were designed to “tether third world masses to the mentality of finance capitalism,” as Obama’s unauthorized biographer put it.
Dunham’s boss at USAID in Indonesia, Dr. Donald Gordon Jr., author of Credit for Small Farmers in Developing Countries for USAID (1976), was identified in Julius Mader’s 1968 book, Who Who’s in the CIA, as a CIA agent.[9]
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Ann went to Indonesia in the mid 1960s at the time that the CIA supported a military coup led by General Suharto against the left-wing regime of Sukarno.
Over two million suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were rounded up and massacred in its aftermath and thousands more were imprisoned—many for decades.
The CIA at this time employed anthropologists and development workers as undercover agents to gather information on villagers’ political affiliations, in which Ann, according to her thesis adviser, Alice Dewey, had taken an interest.
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While Ann’s recruitment as a CIA agent has never been openly acknowledged, she was among the few U.S. government employees with the language skills and access to fulfill this role effectively. Development projects in the region were explicitly designed to pry villagers away from the PKI orbit, and Ann’s work would have contributed to this.
In March 1965, Ann married an Indonesian Lieutenant Colonel, Lolo Soetoro, whom she met at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center, a “kinder, gentler version of the School of the Americas,” according to one writer, and “cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to create agent nets,” as U.S. Information Service (USIS) Director Frank Scotten described it.
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CIA Family Connection—Stanley Armour Dunham
Obama’s grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham—who helped raise him—served with the 9th Air Force Division in World War II.
Another photo featured his daughter Ann, with the insignia of an elite school in Lebanon on her shirt in the 1950s, where Stanley may have worked with the CIA or another U.S. government agency. In the early 1960s, Stanley Dunham was part of a group photo taken with Barack Obama, Sr., on his departure from the University of Hawaii.
Obama Sr. had been part of a State Department/CIA exchange financed in part by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation that brought future African leaders to the U.S. who were being groomed to serve U.S. interests in the Cold War.
According to his official biography, Dunham worked as a furniture salesman for the Standard-Grunbaum Furniture Company, which led to his frequent travel and family moves.
Independent researchers believe, however, that this job was a cover for his work as an intelligence agent, who surveilled radical groups, or military or Air Force production facilities, which is what brought him to Hawaii.
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Barack Obama, Sr.
Obama’s purported Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama, Sr., had met his mother in 1960 when he was twenty-three and she eighteen in a Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii.
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Far-fetched as it sounds, Obama Sr. may not have been Obama’s real father.
Obama Sr. and Ann never lived together or had a real wedding, and Obama Sr. had no contact with his son, except for a short two-week visit to Hawaii when Obama was ten, which may have been for the purpose of securing Obama a spot in the coveted Punahou Prep School.[12]
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There is evidence to suggest that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, an African American journalist, sexually libertine poet, political radical and alleged target of Grandpa Dunham’s surveillance.
Obama’s friend Keith Kakugawa told an interviewer that Ann had had an affair with Davis because she was angry that the family had to move to Hawaii, away from her high-school friends who were all attending the University of Washington.
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Ann became pregnant and, to hide the truth, Dunham paid Obama Sr.—whom he knew through the University of Hawaii exchange—to marry Ann, giving him the opportunity to extend his visa to attend Harvard.
Barack eventually found out the truth, writing in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, that “the visits to Frank’s house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t understand.”[13]
Obama paid tribute to his actual father in a 1981 poem published in the Occidental College Literary Journal called “Pop,” which attributes to him features that resemble Davis, and references “Pop’s poetry, written before his mother died.”
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Madelyn Dunham
One other connection between Obama and the U.S. national security state lies with his grandmother Madelyn—whom Obama called Toot.
Though lacking a college degree, Madelyn rose to the rank of Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii—which suggests she had high level personal connections.
In that job, Madelyn handled escrow accounts used to pay American Cold War clients in Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere—including through CIA proprietaries.
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Covering Up the Truth
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Regarding his own story, Obama has promoted falsehoods at every step.
In A Promised Land, he neglects to mention that, after graduating Columbia University in 1983, he worked for about a year for Business International Corporation (BIC), a Manhattan-based consulting house to multinational corporations, where his job was to edit newsletters on business conditions in countries around the world.
Headed by a close friend of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Jr., the former Governor of Minnesota who was involved with Humphrey in the purge of suspected communists in the Farmer-Labor Party, BIC had functioned as a CIA front.
Its sub-specialty was in recruiting left-wing organizers to use as assets, and in infiltrating foreign labor unions with the goal of promoting disruptions in targeted economies.
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Besides underplaying his employment with BIC, Obama in his writings omits the fact that his work as a community organizer was for the Gamaliel Foundation, a satellite of his mother’s old employer the Ford Foundation, whose underlying aim was to prevent class solidarity and the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inter-racial poor people’s movement.[19]
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Obama’s timeline for his life story, meanwhile, is often wrong. In A Promised Land, for example, he claims to have spent three years in New York after transferring from Occidental College to Columbia after his sophomore year; however, it is believed that Obama spent the 1981-1982 school year in Pakistan and only studied at Columbia for one year.[20]