Obama’s CIA Pedigree

Michael Leon
Veteran’s Today
August 9, 2010

WMR [Wayne Madsen Report] previously reported on President Obama’s more than one year employment by a CIA front operation, Business International Corporation, Inc.(BIC) of New York after his graduation from Columbia University in 1983.

However, the State Department’s recent revelation in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that the pre-1965 passport files of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, were destroyed in the 1980s, has re-ignited suspicions that Obama’s mother worked for the CIA under non-official cover (NOC) cover in Indonesia while married to Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo, a retired colonel in General Suharto’s CIA-backed ranks. Soetoro and Dunham married in 1965 after meeting at the University of Hawaii. That same year, the CIA-backed Suharto launched an anti-Communist coup that saw leftist President Sukarno eventually ousted from power and up to one million suspected Communists, including many ethnic Chinese Indonesians, massacred by government troops. Obama recently lifted a ban on U.S. military support for the Indonesian Red Beret KOPASSUS special operations forces imposed after the unit committed human rights abuses in East Timor in the late 1990s. The 12-year ban, imposed by the Clinton administration, was maintained by the Bush administration.

In 1967, Dunham moved with six-year old Barack Obama to Jakarta. In 1966, as Suharto consolidated his power, Colonel Soetoro was battling Communist rebels in the country. Dunham moved back to Hawaii in 1972, a year after Obama left Indonesia to attend school in Hawaii, and she divorced Soetoro in 1980. Soetoro was hired by Mobil to be a liaison officer with Suharto’s dictatorship. Soetoro died in 1987 at the age of 52. Ann Dunham died in 1995, also at the age of 52. Obama, Sr. died in an automobile accident in Kenya in 1982 at the age of 46. Obama, Sr. attended the University of Hawaii courtesy of a scholarship arranged by Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya. Obama and Dunham married in 1961, however, Obama, at the time, had a wife back in Kenya. Obama and Dunham officially divorced in 1964, the same year Dunham married Soetoro.

Files released by the State Department on Dunham’s name-change passport application lists two dates and places of marriage to Soetoro: March 5, 1964, in Maui and March 15, 1965, in Molokai — almost a year’s difference. In her 1968 passport renewal application, Barack Obama’s name is listed as Barack Hussein Obama (Saebarkah). In passport renewal and amendment applications filed from Jakarta, Dunham uses two different names: Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro and Stanley Ann Soetoro.

Dunham again applied for a passport from Jakarta in 1981 while working for the Ford Foundation. Her New York-based boss at the time was Peter Geithner, the father of Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Dunham also worked in rural villages in Java for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was and remains notorious for conducting CIA operations around the world.

Ann Dunham and President Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., a native of the British colony of Kenya, met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii in 1959. The teaching of Russian in Hawaii, which hosted a number of US military bases and intelligence operations, is significant since a Russian language class during the height of the Cold War would normally attract a majority of U.S. intelligence professionals.

At the time Dunham met Obama, Sr. in Russian-language class at the University of Hawaii, the CIA was engaged in major covert operations in Asia, including attempted assassinations of Asian leaders. In an August 1975 article in Penthouse by former New York Times reporter Tad Szulc reported on two high-level planned CIA assassinations that were turned down by the ‘highest levels’ at the White House in the late 1950s: ‘. . . senior CIA officials proposed the assassination of Indonesian President Sukarno as part of a broader plot to overthrow his left-leaning government. At least one American pilot, employed by the CIA, was captured by Sukarno’s forces during the coup attempt. To kill Sukarno, the CIA, according to intelligence sources, planned to fire a shell from a ceremonial 105-mm cannon in front of the presidential palace while Sukarno spoke from a balcony.’ The CIA finally succeeded in ousting Sukarno in 1965, with the help of Barack Obama’s step father.

Szulc also wrote: “In 1958, a plot was concocted to kill China’s Premier Chou En-lai during a visit to Rangoon, Burma. This was at the beginning of the Soviet-Chinese split, and apparently the CIA reasoned that Chou’s death would aggravate the developing split. The notion was that Chou was a moderate and thus posed an obstacle to a possible Soviet-Chinese confrontation. Furthermore, intelligence sources said, the CIA planned, by the dissemination of ‘disinformation’ through intelligence channels, to lead the Chinese to believe that Chou was killed by the Russian KGB. This murder plot, which was also stopped by Washington, provided for a Burmese CIA agent to place untraceable poison in a rice bowl from which Chou was expected to be eating at a government dinner in his honor. This particular kind of poison, intelligence sources said, would have acted within forty-eight hours and there would be no trace of it if an autopsy were performed. The plan was countermanded at the last moment.”

As WMR previously reported, “At the same time he was attending Occidental [College in Los Angeles, 1979-81], Obama, using the name Barry Soetoro and an Indonesian passport issued under the same name, traveled to Pakistan during the U.S. buildup to assist the Afghan mujaheddin. WMR has learned from informed sources in Kabul that Obama has been extremely friendly, through personal correspondence on White House letterhead, with a private military company that counts among its senior personnel a number of Afghan mujaheddin-Soviet war veterans who fought alongside the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood.

In 1981, Obama spent time in Jacobabad and Karachi, Pakistan, and appeared to have an older American ‘handler,’ possibly a CIA officer. WMR previously reported that Obama also crossed the border from Pakistan and spent some time in India. At the time of Obama’s stay in Pakistan, the country was being built up as a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency by President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and later by President Reagan’s CIA director William Casey. Obama has suspiciously refused to release his transcripts from Occidental or Columbia University and he has remained cagey about his post-Columbia employment with BIC.”

In early 2008, when employees of The Analysis Corporation, a CIA contractor headed up at the time by Obama’s current deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan, a former CIA official, were illegally accessing Obama’s State Department passport files, WMR reported: “An informed source has told WMR that Obama’s tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old Obama, who was known as ‘Barry Soetoro,’ traveled to Pakistan in 1981. He was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro, a Pakistani Sindhi who became acting President of Pakistan after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008. WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly to go ‘partridge hunting’ with the Soomros, related to unknown CIA business. The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin was already well underway at the time and Pakistan was the major base of operations for the CIA’s support.”

WMR also reported: “Dunham Soetoro was in Indonesia when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Barack Obama visited Lahore, Pakistan, where his mother worked as a ‘consultant,’ in 1981. According to a declassified Top Secret CIA document titled ‘Worldwide Reaction to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan,’ dated February 1980, Indonesia became a hotbed of anti-Soviet students demonstrations after Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan. The report states, ‘Indonesian students have staged several peaceful demonstrations in Jakarta and three other major cities. They have also demanded the recall of the Soviet Ambassador because of remarks he made to a student delegation on 4 January and have called for a severance of Soviet-Indonesian relations.’”

Obama’s mother was in Lahore as a consultant for the Asian Development Bank, a perfect NOC job at the time the CIA, under William Casey, was beefing up its covert presence in Pakistan to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, known to Obama as “Toot”, began working for the Bank of Hawaii in 1960, a year after her daughter met Obama, Sr. and in 1970 she became one of the first female bank vice presidents. Madelyn Dunham retired from the bank in 1986. It is suspected that the Bank of Hawaii acted as a financial vehicle for CIA operations in Asia and the South Pacific.


Obama's African family

The Bank of Hawaii has, according to published reports, been linked to a number of CIA-connected operations in the Asia-Pacific region, including links to the Indonesian Lippo Group and Mochtar Riady’s contributions to the presidential re-election campaign of Bill Clinton; American International Group (AIG) — bailed out by Obama; the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia; another CIA-influenced bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and an affiliate bank in the Cook Islands, Commercial Bank of Commerce Cook Islands, Ltd. (CBCCI) in Rarotonga – which in the 1980s were funneling money to South Pacific islands to counter Soviet influence in the region; the USAID officer in Suva, Fiji, William Raupe, who was actually a CIA official cover agent; global bullion trader Deak International; European Pacific investments; and a CIA front company in Honolulu called Bishop Baldwin Rewald Dillingham Wong (BBRDW), Ltd., which maintained financial and political links to Asia-Pacific leaders, including Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan of Brunei, the chiefs of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service – which acted on behalf of the CIA in South Pacific small island states, and maintained slush fund accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Spain, and South America. The CIA cut-out, which took over the assets of the collapsed Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, also used actor Jack Lord, from Hawaii 5-0 fame, on its promotional material as a way to “open doors” and maintained close links with the US Pacific Command based in Hawaii.

In the 1960s, the Bank of Hawaii began opening up branches all over the Pacific: Palau, Guam, Yap, Ponape, and Kosrae. It also bought the Bank of American Samoa and the First National Bank of Arizona and had gained significant, if not fully controlling, financial stakes in the Bank of New Caledonia, Bank Indosuez in Vanuatu, National Bank of the Solomon Islands, Bank of Queensland, Bank of Tonga, and Bank Indosuez Niugini in Papua New Guinea, Bank Paribas Polynesia. The Bank of Hawaii also opened up branches in Suva, Saipan, and Tokyo. By the time Madelyn Dunham retired in 1986, the bank was also deeply connected to John Waihee, the first Native Hawaiian governor of Hawaii, elected in 1986. The CIA’s BBRDW and an affiliate, Canadian Far East Trading Corporation, also maintained close links with Waihee and Governor George Ariyoshi.

When Barack Obama graduated from the private Punahou High School in Hawaii in 1979 and transferred to Occidental College in Los Angeles, Eugene Welch was the CIA’s station chief in Hawaii. Punahou High School was also the alma mater of another US Senator, Hiram Bingham III of Connecticut, who was said to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones, the movie character popularized by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. At the time, the CIA was engaged in a major recruiting campaign, including on college campuses, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director, was ordered by President Jimmy Carter to clean up the agency after previous scandals.

The CIA’s Hawaii-based Asia-Pacific financial operation appears to have been the brain child of retired CIA deputy director for intelligence Ray S. Cline, a proponent of the CIA’s paying pro-American strongmen around the world large sums of cash to ensure their loyalty, including Mobutu Seso Seko of Zaire, King Hussein of Jordan, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, General Lon Nol of Cambodia, the Shah of Iran, Suharto, and Marcos. Helping to assist these operations was Madelyn Dunham who was in charge of the Bank of Hawaii’s secretive escrow account business. During her grandson’s presidential campaign in 2008, Madelyn Dunham refused all media interview requests. She died in Hawaii two days before her grandson was elected president. With the death of Toot, the early chapters of the life of Barack Obama, Jr, his father, mother, and step-father also went to the grave.

At the time Obama’s mother and father met in Russian language class in Hawaii, the CIA was embarked on an aggressive covert campaign in Asia, one that involved starting a Soviet-Chinese war and aiming to assassinate Sukarno of Indonesia. The CIA was similarly involved in an aggressive covert war with the Soviets in Africa, vying for control of the continent’s newly-independent states. In the world of the CIA there are no coincidences.

WMR has discovered CIA files that document the agency’s connections to institutions and individuals figuring prominently in the lives of Barack Obama and his mother, father, grandmother, and stepfather.

President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.

Barack Obama, Sr., who met Dunham in 1959 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, had been part of what was described as an airlift of 280 East African students to the United States to attend various colleges — merely “aided” by a grant from the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, according to a September 12, 1960, Reuters report from London. The airlift was a CIA operation to train and indoctrinate future agents of influence in Africa, which was becoming a battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and China for influence among newly-independent and soon-to-be independent countries on the continent.

The airlift was condemned by the deputy leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) as favoring

certain tribes — the majority Kikuyus and minority Luos — over other tribes to favor the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), whose leader was Tom Mboya, the Kenyan nationalist and labor leader who selected Obama, Sr. for a scholarship at the University of Hawaii. Obama, Sr., who was already married with an infant son and pregnant wife in Kenya, married Dunham on Maui on February 2, 1961 and was also the university’s first African student. Dunham was three month’s pregnant with Barack Obama, Jr. at the time of her marriage to Obama, Sr.

KADU deputy leader Masinda Muliro, according to Reuters, said KADU would send a delegation to the United States to investigate Kenyan students who received “gifts” from the Americans and “ensure that further gifts to Kenyan students are administered by people genuinely interested in Kenya’s development.’”

Mboya received a $100,000 grant for the airlift from the Kennedy Foundation after he turned down the same offer from the U.S. State Department, obviously concerned that direct U.S. assistance would look suspicious to pro-Communist Kenyan politicians who suspected Mboya of having CIA ties. The Airlift Africa project was underwritten by the Kennedy Foundation and the African-American Students Foundation. Obama, Sr. was not on the first airlift but a subsequent one. The airlift, organized by Mboya in 1959, included students from Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland

Reuters also reported that Muliro charged that Africans were “disturbed and embittered” by the airlift of the selected students. Muliro “stated that “preferences were shown to two major tribes [Kikuyu and Luo] and many U.S.-bound students had failed preliminary and common entrance examinations, while some of those left behind held first-class certificates.”

Obama, Sr. was a friend of Mboya and a fellow Luo. After Mboya was assassinated in 1969, Obama, Sr. testified at the trial of his alleged assassin. Obama, Sr. claimed he was the target of a hit-and-run assassination attempt after his testimony.

Obama, Sr., who left Hawaii for Harvard in 1962, divorced Dunham in 1964. Obama, Sr. married a fellow Harvard student, Ruth Niedesand, a Jewish-American woman, who moved with him to Kenya and had two sons. They were later divorced. Obama, Sr. worked for the Kenyan Finance and Transport ministries as well as an oil firm. Obama, Sr. died in a 1982 car crash and his funeral was attended by leading Kenyan politicians, including future Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who was murdered in 1990.

CIA files indicate that Mboya was an important agent-of-influence for the CIA, not only in Kenya but in all of Africa. A formerly Secret CIA “Current Intelligence Weekly Summary,” dated November 19, 1959, states that Mboya served as a check on extremists at the second All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Tunis. The report states that “serious friction developed between Ghana’s Prime Minister Kwame NNkrumah and Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya who cooperated effectively [emphasis added] last December to check extremists at the AAPC’s first meeting in Accra.” The term “cooperated effectively” appears to indicate that Mboya was cooperating with the CIA, which filed the report from field operatives in Accra and Tunis. While “cooperating” with the CIA in Accra and Tunis, Mboya selected the father of the president of the United States to receive a scholarship and be airlifted to the University of Hawaii where he met and married President Obama’s mother.

An earlier CIA Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, Secret, and dated April 3, 1958, states that Mboya “still appears to be the most promising of the African leaders.” Another CIA weekly summary, Secret and dated December 18, 1958, calls Mboya the Kenyan nationalist an “able and dynamic young chairman” of the People’s Convention party who was viewed as an opponent of “extremists” like Nkrumah, supported by “Sino-Soviet representatives.”



In a formerly Secret CIA report on the All-Africa Peoples Conference in 1961, dated November 1, 1961, Mboya’s conservatism, along with that of Taleb Slim of Tunisia, are contrasted to the leftist policies of Nkrumah and others. Pro-communists who were elected to the AAPC’s steering committee at the March 1961 Cairo conference, attended by Mboya, are identified in the report as Abdoulaye Diallo, AAPC Secretary General, of Senegal; Ahmed Bourmendjel of Algeria; Mario de Andrade of Angola; Ntau Mokhele of Basutoland; Kingue Abel of Cameroun; Antoine Kiwewa of Congo (Leopoldville); Kojo Botsio of Ghana; Ismail Toure of Guinea; T. O. Dosomu Johnson of Liberia; Modibo Diallo of Mali; Mahjoub Ben Seddik of Morocco; Djibo Bakari of Niger; Tunji Otegbeya of Nigeria; Kanyama Chiume of Nyasaland; Ali Abdullahi of Somalia; Tennyson Makiwane of South Africa, and Mohamed Fouad Galal of the United Arab Republic.

The only attendees in Cairo who were given a clean bill of health by the CIA were Mboya, who appears to have been a snitch for the agency, and Joshua Nkomo of Southern Rhodesia, B. Munanka of Tanganyika, Abdel Magid Shaker of Tunisia, and John Kakonge of Uganda.

Nkrumah would eventually be overthrown in a 1966 CIA-backed coup while he was on a state visit to China and North Vietnam. The CIA overthrow of Nkrumah followed by one year the agency’s overthrow of Sukarno, another coup that was connected to President Obama’s family on his mother’s side. There are suspicions that Mboya was assassinated in 1969 by Chinese agents working with anti-Mboya factions in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta in order to eliminate a pro-U.S. leading political leader in Africa. Upon Mboya’s death, every embassy in Nairobi flew its flag at half-mast except for one, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

Mboya’s influence in the Kenyatta government would continue long after his death and while Obama, Sr. was still alive. In 1975, after the assassination of KANU politician Josiah Kariuki, a socialist who helped start KANU, along with Mboya and Obama, Sr., Kenyatta dismissed three rebellious cabinet ministers who “all had personal ties to either Kariuki or Tom Mboya.” This information is contained in CIA Staff Notes on the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, formerly Top Secret Umbra, Handle via COMINT Channels, dated June 24, 1975. The intelligence in the report, based on its classification, indicate the information was derived from National Security Agency intercepts in Kenya. No one was ever charged in the assassination of Kariuki.

The intecepts of Mboya’s and Kariuki’s associates are an indication that the NSA and CIA also maintain intercepts on Barack Obama, Sr., who, as a non-U.S. person, would have been lawfully subject at the time to intercepts carried out by NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).