Was Barack Obama “chosen” by the CIA?
Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen’s credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its “gray” and “black” activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily “witting” (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next.
Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack’s grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut’s elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham’s daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA.
Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann’s second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a “civilian employee of the Army.” But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA’s most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia’s dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible.
After the overthrow, Ann ran a “micro-financing” project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia’s most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late ’60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America’s official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore’s Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.
In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.’s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government’s then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.
People are convicted on circumstantial evidence all the time. A fascinating, and disturbing essay by Angelo Codevilla.
Why would Madelyn Dunham know, or need to know, that some of the (thousands?) of escrow accounts she was in charge of were for the CIA? Why would the CIA tell her (or anybody) that “hey, XYZ Shipping is really CIA?” Isn’t not having to disclose the whole point of using front companies?
It’s somehow shocking that, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, home of the US 7th Fleet, some Navy officers were seen meeting foreign exchange students? Back in my Navy days. I distinctly remembered being trotted out for various photo ops. It’s somehow unusual that an anthropology student gets herself invited to a ceremony to meet new foreign exchange students – students studying at the same institute she is?
And what POSSIBLE reason would the CIA have for getting him elected? Is the reasoning that the CIA is SO full of leftists, that he was there best choice for POTUS?
I’d have to pass on believing this particular chain of intel.
The CIA isn’t that competent.
A CIA infested with Leftists is entirely possible, given their open leak warfare against the Bush administration. Anything populated by so many career bureaucrats is suspect.
Three years ago, I would have relegated all this to the tin-foil-hat crowd. But these days, nothing seems too far-fetched. There’s every reason to believe that Obama’s being handled by somebody…Soros was always the easy guess for who might be at the other end of his Blackberry.
I recall watching him address the Dem convention (2000 or ’04, not sure) only because certain reporters were gushing all over him as future presidential material, before he even uttered a word.
If he is someone’s Manchurian candidate, by now they must realize how bad of a choice they made. Of course, the advantage we’ll always have over the Left is that they have no clue about how Capitalism really works. Hopefully that means their plans will always remain fundamentally flawed.
Codevilla’s American Spectator article-turned-book “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It” is absolutely brilliant.
I read this article when it first came out. Granted, Codevilla is reviewing other people’s books here. Still, Obama has the most mysterious and secretive background of any American president. Could his election be the mother of all “blowback”?
“It’s somehow shocking that, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, home of the US 7th Fleet, some Navy officers were seen meeting foreign exchange students?”
Is it somehow shocking that Chris ignores the point Ann’s FATHER was the one greeting him? Another strawman torched.
“Why would Madelyn Dunham know, or need to know, that some of the (thousands?)….”
Having worked in the banking world, a small bank like that might have one maybe two hundred active escrow accounts. out of those I would wager only a few dozen would have a lot of money moving throught them regularly. Most of those would be title companies and the like. Vice Presidents keep an eye on the big accounts, always.
The Northeast establishment, of which the OSS and then the CIA has always been the house arm, has always believed in managed capitalism, with them managing it. As the article accurately states, the CIA supported a wide range of center-left and left movements at home and abroad. It’s not implausible that a bunch of ex-CPUSA has-been like the Dunhams would be picked up by the agency and used; certainly they did the same with many such others.
I have no idea how real these claims are, but of them are the sort of things that can be readily verified. Certainly Obama’s mother’s career is well-documented, and we have a pretty good idea these days of which of the organizations she worked for were CIA fronts. I certainly hope the article causes the claims to be checked out.
If nothing else, this would make a great Oliver Stone-style movie.
My mother worked in the accounting department at GE during the 1950s. Since some of the information she handled had to do with the atomic energy division, she had to have a “Q” clearance. Just to look at receipts and invoices.
I suppose it’s possible the DOD was tougher about atomic energy in the 1950s than the CIA might have been about covert activities, but I’m disinclined to believe it. I was under the impression the CIA didn’t really start falling to pieces until the ’70s under Stansfield Turner.
Given the CIA evolved from the OSS, which itself grew out of Yale, and the asian operations of the OSS grew out of the Yale in China program. During WWII, the OSS supported a postwar policy of backing Mao against the Nationalists, and were complicit in burying the investigation of the murder of Captain John Birch by officers of Mao, an intentional assassination arranged because Birch was not OSS, but USAF intelligence, and who was siding with the nationalists and had a LOT of influence in the region. Knowing this history, I am not at all shocked at the idea of the CIA hand picking Obama, particularly given how the CIA set up the Bush administration with bad intel about Iraq and has consistently dragged its feet on catching major al qaeda figures, so much so that the job was handed over to military intelligence when the CIA disbanded their “catch bin laden” unit more than four years ago.
Having not seen the picture, I don’t know if Stanley Dunham or Stanley ANN Dunham (that’s her legal name) was at the greeting ceremony. If it was Mr. Dunham, I’m not sure how that proves Miss Dunham didn’t meet Obama Sr. in a classroom as otherwise reported – unless father and daughter are somehow in a telepathic link.
Again, Mr. Dunham was in Hawaii, his daughter was attending a then very-new and high-profile Institute (founded by Congress that year), so why WOULDN’T he be at this ceremony?
Regarding escrow accounts, the whole point of a front company is that, unless you are a member of the front company, you don’t know it’s a front. It’s NOT like the Department of Energy, where you have a big sign out on the highway that says “nuclear bombs made here.”
Not to mention that Bush 1 was also CIA. History is full of people and groups conspiring against each other. I wouldn’t be surprised by that there is some truth to this, but, as in “Young Frankenstein”, this monster while he is scary and makes the ladies tingle, is also quite stupid.
I think the bigger issue is that there is a false divide of R vs D, when they are actually the same team in terms of outcome.
Chris, there are “family” ops where the parents and children work together. Huma Abedein’s family comes to mind immediately.
This quote stands out:
“…this network was formed precisely to help the careers of kindred folk, while ruining those of others, and to move the requisite money and influence unaccountably, erasing evidence that it had done so. Exercising influence abroad on America’s behalf—the network’s founding purpose—never got in the way of playing a partisan role in American life and, of course, of taking care of its own.”
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
I don’t think we can understate the value of Mr. Codevilla’s essays. Explaining the “ruling class” beyond party divisions helps us poor saps in the “country class” understand them much more clearly.
And boy, do we have our work cut out for us. Not only do we have to soundly defeat one party, we have to continually fight a rear-guard action against the establishment interests within our own party.
This fight will never really be over.
It’s all peasants and nobles and always will be. This is why we need to hire a peasant to clean out all the nobles. Who has those qualifications?
Ask anybody, Sarah is a peasant. She cleans fish.
There is this image of the J. Edgar FBI and CIA always protecting American interests. But as we’ve seen in comments on this blog, reasonable can be wildly different for different people. Regardless of who people in the FBI and CIA are today, this ‘reasonableness’ has infected them.
We know with absolute certainty that communist have placed people in our government and have been working at it for decades. With each success it makes further success easier. Even if that were not true, the left can hardly be distinguished from them. We have a justice department that doesn’t even try to hide its anti-Americanism.
Wake up. Even if almost all the conspiracies are false this doesn’t mean we can sleep easy. Clean house, top to bottom.
We can no longer afford a good president that doesn’t contribute to our downfall. We need a paranoid that will clean house. Sarah isn’t paranoid enough, while Ron Paul is too much, but either would help to right this sinking ship. We need extremists, not go along to get alongs.
Ron Paul would be a disaster for foreign policy (McCain would be better.)
Rick Perry talks a good game about the tenth amendment and has some fight in him, but he’s not proven. Sarah is proven with the added advantage she’d make their heads explode (if only they’d follow through on threats to leave the country if she’s elected.)
I kind of wish Ross Perot would announce, good both fiscally and a proud American. He’s ALMOST got enough paranoia for the current government.
We need extremists to fix things. We need those inexperienced tea party that actually love this country even if they do make mistakes. Sarah made a mistake in giving people the power to go after government which they then used against her with frivolous suits. That kind of experience teaches you. She won’t make that mistake again.
We aren’t going to get the right person. We need to get the person that will move us in the right direction… not go with the flow.
“Only dead fish go with the flow.” – Who said that?
I don’t think we can understate the value of Mr. Codevilla’s essays.
Hear, hear.
“Only dead fish go with the flow.” – Who said that?
It was already considered an old saying in 1826 when Rev. Mr. Daly, of Powerscourt said “live fish swim against the stream, while dead ones float with it.”
Did I say she originated it? It’s imagery and it works.