14 Oct, 2024

A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA

Despite his liberal pretensions, Obama’s foreign policy was dreamed up at Langley—which should not have been surprising given his background

[This essay is another in CAM’s series on the history of the CIA. Obama has been in the news this week for overseeing groundbreaking on his presidential center. This center has sparked controversy because it will not house any actual documents and is being built on the supposedly protected Jackson Park on Chicago’s southern lakefront. Hugh Iglarsh wrote in Counterpunch that the main tower—which resembles a giant upraised cell phone—will be “a Great Tower of Nothing, a monument to hubris, chutzpah and Chicago-style clout…which rivals the Pyramid of Khufu in its brutal, enigmatic grandiosity.“—Editors]

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.

U.S. Special Forces under Timber Sycamore again trained Islamic fundamentalists, this time in Jordan, who again carried out a reign of terror.[2]

A picture containing ground, sky, outdoor, person Description automatically generated
U.S. Special Forces operative training Syrian fighter at terrorist training camp financed by the Obama administration in Jordan. [Source: worldinwar.eu]

A voracious consumer of intelligence, Obama’s trademark throughout his presidency was to move war into the shadows, a light-footprint approach designed to expand U.S. power covertly.

General Joseph Votel, head of the special operations command (SOCOM) characterized the Obama era as a “golden age for special operations.” Green Berets were deployed to 133 countries—70 percent of the world—in 2014 alone.[3]

In a meeting about Afghanistan, Obama told CIA Director Leon Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted.”[4]

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.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”[6]

Image may contain John O. Brennan Furniture Chair Human Person Sitting Plant Lamp and Table Lamp
President Barack Obama with John Brennan in the Oval Office, May 1, 2009. [Source: politico.com]

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.

More than 2,400 dead as Obama's drone campaign marks five years — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (en-GB)
[Source: thebureauinvestigates.com]

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.

[Source: courant.com]

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]

Obama and Rwandan President Paul Kagame who killed three heads of state and whose forces ran open air crematoria to more efficiently dispose of the bodies in the Rwandan killing fields. [Source: chimpreports.com]
US envoy Chris Stevens speaking to local media in Benghazi in 2011. (photo credit: AP/Ben Curtis)
Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi in 2011 before he was killed by terrorists. Described as having a “talent for breaking bread with men in camouflage fatigues,” Stevens oversaw an illegal arms pipeline from Libya to Syria as part of Operation Timber Sycamore designed to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. [Source: timesofisrael.com]
Ukraine crisis: Timeline - BBC News
Obama shakes hands with the “butcher of Eastern Ukraine,” Petro Poroshenko, who gained power after an Obama administration backed coup in Ukraine. [Source: bbc.com]

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.

Stanley Ann Dunham at Borobudur in Indonesia, in the early 1970s.
Ann Dunham at Borobudur in Indonesia in the early 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

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]

Another boss, Peter Geithner, was future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s father.

 Peter Franz Geithner
Peter Geithner [Source: findagrave.com]

Ann obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii, writing a thesis which argued that Indonesian villagers were dynamic and could produce greater wealth if they had access to market incentives and capital.

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.

Indonesian leftists being herded off to public execution. [Source: Unknown]
Indonesian leftists being sent to their deaths during mass pogroms supported by the U.S. [Source: timorarchives.wordpress.com]
Ann Dunham winning the “hearts and minds” of Javanese villagers. [Source: voltairenet.org]

Much of Ann’s anthropological and consulting field work was carried out in East and Central Java, which provided a hotbed of support for the PKI—including among members of the Javanese women’s association and labor federation.

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.

After her arrival in Indonesia, Dunham taught English at the American Embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations in Surabaya in eastern Java and Medan on Sumatra.

Dunham also worked for the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute in Jakarta, a suspected CIA front. One of her closest colleagues, Adi Sasono, had been the leader of the Muslim students during the overthrow of Sukarno.

Ann in Indonesia in the later 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

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.

eastwest road66 | EastWest Center Sept. 7, 1966. Honolulu Ad… | Flickr
[Source: flickr.com]

The head of the East-West Center in 1965 was Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia from 1958 to 1965.[10]

Jones was present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, who was seen, along with the PKI as an ally of China.

Jones later defended the coup in The Washington Post, writing that Suharto was merely responding to a communist coup against Sukarno led by Colonel Untung—which was actually set up by the CIA.[11]

Howard P. Jones with Sukarno against whom the U.S. plotted. [Source: larouchepub.com]

A friend of Ann’s told her biographer that the marriage to Lolo was arranged, suggesting that Ann may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets and help them obtain U.S. citizenship.

Obama's Young Mother Abroad - The New York Times
Lt. Col. Lolo Soetoro, left, with Ann Dunham, and Maya Soetoro, and Barack Obama, aged 6, in Indonesia in 1967. [Source: nytimes.com]

Hailing from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno’s land reform, Soetoro was recalled to active duty in July 1965 before General Suharto’s right-wing coup and worked as an army geographer in Java and Papua New Guinea, where the Indonesian army brutally suppressed popular revolts.

Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose economic policies Dunham praised.

CIA Family Connection—Stanley Armour Dunham

A group of people sitting together Description automatically generated with low confidence
Ann Dunham with her father, Stanley, and her children, Maya and Barack. [Source: npr.org]

Obama’s grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham—who helped raise him—served with the 9th Air Force Division in World War II.

FILE - This undated photo provided by the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows Obama's maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, in Cambridge, Mass., during World War II. Dunham was a 26-year-old supply sergeant in the Army Air Force when the Allied invasion of Normandy at last began. (AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign, File) ** FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY, NO SALES **
Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during World War II. [Source: sfgate.com]

He was pictured in a military uniform with no insignia, which suggests an intelligence unit.

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.

A picture containing person, outdoor, old, black Description automatically generated
Stanley Armour Dunham, center, with his wife Madelyn, right, in the early 1950s and young Ann. The insignia on Ann’s uniform reads NdJ which is thought to stand for College Notre-Dame de Jamhour, a private Jesuit Catholic French language school in Beirut—whose graduates included three former presidents of Lebanon—Amine Gemayel, Bashir Gemayel and Charles Helou who were all close to the U.S. [Source: algora.com]

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.

Barack Obama, Sr., with leis, with Stanley Armor Dunham to his right. [Source: eslkevin.wordpress.com]

The photo would suggest that Dunham was one of the coordinators of the exchange, indicating work for the State Department or CIA.

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.

William J. Lederer [Source: nytimes.com]

 

Dunham’s favorite bar in Honolulu, to which he brought young Barry, perhaps not coincidentally was owned by William J. Lederer, a known CIA agent who wrote the Cold War classic, The Ugly American.

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.

Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham.
Barack Obama, Sr., and Ann Dunham [Source: politico.com]
Tom Mboya - Wikipedia
Tom Mboya – Wikipedia

The leader of the opposition Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) condemned the exchange Obama was part of for favoring certain tribes—the majority Kikuyu and minority Luo—over other tribes to support the Kenyan African National Union (KANU).

The latter’s leader, Tom Mboya, was a favorite of the CIA and opposed the Pan-Africanist currents on the continent. He was the one who selected Obama Sr. for the scholarship.

Obama Sr. returned the favor by going back to Kenya to work for the Kenyan Finance and Transport Ministries and an oil firm in Kenya before dying in a car crash in 1982. Mboya himself was assassinated in 1969.

Barack Obama with his father, Barack Obama Sr., in an undated family photo from the 1970s released by Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.
Barack Obama, Sr., and Barack some time in the 1970s. [Source: nytimes.com]

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]

Punahou School in Honolulu. [Source: punahou.edu]
Frank Marshall Davis - Wikipedia
Frank Marshall Davis [Source: wikipedia.org]

The photo of Stanley and Obama Sr. is suspicious because what father in his right mind would be pictured smiling with the man who impregnated his teenaged daughter and then abandoned her?

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.

 

Obama's childhood best friend charged in brutal rape
Keith Kakugawa, left, and Obama, right, in Punahou high school yearbook. [Source: nypost.com]

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.

Ann in her yearbook at Mercer Island High School in Seattle in 1959. [Source: seattletimes.com]

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.”

Barack Sr. was not a poet and, although Stanley dabbled in poetry, Barry called him “gramps” and his mother committed suicide before his eighth birthday.[14]

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.

The Bank of Hawaii further had dealings with Nugan Hand Bank of Australia through which the CIA funded the constitutional coup d’état against Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.[15]

Madelyn Dunham on right with the future president. [Source: alchetron.com]

Covering Up the Truth

Obama and his handlers effectively covered up the truth about Obama’s family history.

They marketed Obama as a multi-racial candidate whose sensitivity to divergent cultures around the world would help restore America’s international reputation following the Bush years.

In his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, Obama presents his mother as a 1960s rebel and beatnik who partook in civil rights protests, opposed the Vietnam War, married outside her race twice, and decided to devote her career to setting up micro-lending projects for poor women in Indonesia and later Pakistan whose language and culture she absorbed.[16]

Obama claimed that his mother did not know about the countless atrocities that were committed by the Suharto government, which is implausible given her background and the fact that they were reported on by mainstream newspapers at the time—favorably.

Of further significance, Obama underplayed his stepfather Lolo’s army rank in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.[17]

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.

Hubert Humphrey, with Kennedy and Johnson Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, Jr., the former governor of Minnesota and BIC head, during the 1968 presidential election. [Source: outlet.historicimages.com]

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.

An activist with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) described BIC as the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress (Marshall Plan for Latin America): “They’re the left-wing of the ruling class.”[18]

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]

The End of Community Organizing in Chicago? – Chicago Magazine
Obama as a community organizer. He actually worked for a large corporate foundation. [Source: chicagomag.com]

Obama further leaves out that as an Illinois state senator, he partook in pay-to-play schemes granting favors to political donors like slumlord Tony Rezko who helped him purchase his Hyde Park mansion for below market value, and the CEO of a technology firm, Robert Blacwell Jr., who paid Obama $112,000 in legal fees for work that appears impossible for him to have done.

Obama's Rezko ties escape national radar - POLITICO
Obama embraces Tony Rezko, one of his earliest and top fundraisers who was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2011 for participating in political kickback schemes. Obama helped Rezko secure more than $14 million in taxpayer subsidies to build low income housing facilities of poor quality after promoting the privatization of public housing. [Source: politico.com]

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]

Obama: Defender of the U.S. Empire

Obama’s abysmal foreign policy record was telegraphed in his three major books where he promotes a defense of U.S. foreign policy while maligning and advancing stereotypes about the 1960s movements and critics of U.S. foreign policy.

In his first memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes 1960s Black Power icon and anti-imperialist Stokely Carmichael as a “madman” and claims to have witnessed two women selling literature outside a lecture hall where he heard Carmichael speak calling each other names like “Stalinist pig” and “reformist bitch.”

Whatever You Think of Stokely Carmichael, You're Probably Wrong | History News Network
Anti-imperialist Stokely Carmichael. Obama ridicules him in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father. [Source: historynewsnetwork.org]

Obama editorialized that movement activists who clung to the ideals of the 1960s had become completely “removed from the struggles of those they purported to serve” or “just plain crazy.”[21]

In his latest memoir, A Promised Land, Obama pats himself on the back for “questioning his own assumptions,” which he writes “inoculated me against the revolutionary formulas embraced by a lot of people on the left at the dawn of the Reagan era.”[22]

Obama goes on to recount arguments he allegedly had with friends in college who insisted that “the American hegemon was the root of oppression worldwide.”

Obama writes that he knew better, having “lived overseas,” and would extol the “idea of America, the promise of America.”

Amazon.com: A Promised Land (9781524763169): Obama, Barack: BooksObama’s second memoir is filled with falsehoods and omissions, yet it received glowing reviews in major newspapers and has made Obama even richer than he already was. [Source: amazon.com]

According to Obama, the argument “would usually end with some smug bastard dropping a newspaper in front of me, its headline trumpeting the U.S. invasion of Grenada.”[23]

These arguments could not actually have taken place in the way Obama suggests because Obama graduated from Columbia University in May 1983, and the U.S. invaded Grenada in October 1983.

At the time of that invasion, Obama was actually working for the CIA front corporation, BIC, whose employees were unlikely to have insisted that the American hegemon was the root of worldwide oppression or to have condemned the U.S. invasion of Grenada—which had been based on false pretexts.

Obama’s Ties to the Crowns and Pritzkers

One other thing omitted by Obama is his close connection to the Crown and Pritzker families.

The Crown family—whose net worth stands at over $10 billion dollars—has long owned a significant stake in General Dynamics, manufacturer of Trident missiles, Stryker troop carriers, bunker buster bombs, LAV-25 amphibious armored vehicles, Abrams tanks, sniper rifles, and nuclear-powered submarines and naval destroyers.

US Army's Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) Programme – Global Defense Corp
[Source: globaldefensecorp.com]
Lester Crown reflects on buying Aspen Skiing Co. on dawn of induction into Hall of Fame | AspenTimes.com
Lester Crown [Source: aspentimes.com]

During Obama’s presidency, General Dynamics bought out 11 firms specializing in satellites, geo-spatial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and amassed contracts from 16 intelligence agencies after investing $10 million in annual lobbying.

The company further embraced “every intelligence driven style of warfare,” developing small target and identification systems and equipment that could intercept insurgents’ cell phone and lab-top communications and computer software used for cyber and psychological warfare.[24]

The Crown family gave at least $86,636 to Obama campaigns between 1990 and 2012 and raised an additional $3,205,233 between 2007 and 2012 while paying $135,000 for Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

Susan Crown | Crain's Chicago Business
Susan Crown [Source: chicagobusiness.com]

Susan Crown, Lester’s daughter, sat on the board of Northern Trust, which gave Obama a sweetheart loan for purchase of a $1.65 million Georgian revival mansion in Chicago’s Hyde Park complete with a thousand-bottle wine cellar.

James Schine Crown
James Crown [Source: aspeninstitute.org]

James Crown, who was the target of a congressional and criminal probe as chairman of the J.P. Morgan Chase & Company’s risk committee, was Obama’s fundraising chair in his 2004 campaign for the Senate.[25]

The Crowns’ investments in Obama paid off —General Dynamics’ revenues shot up to over $30 billion in 2016, a three-fold increase from 2000. The Crowns’ net worth doubled in the Obama years, causing the family to rise in the Forbes ranking to the 27th richest family in the United States.[26]

Obama’s Hyde Park mansion. [Source: enjoyillinois.com]
A picture containing tree, outdoor, snow, road Description automatically generated
The Crown mansion in Winnetka, Illinois. [Source: chicagomag.com]

Penny Pritzker of the Pritzker banking dynasty—ranked number 9 on the Forbes list with a fortune of $32.5 billiongave $500,000 to Obama’s second inauguration—earning her appointment as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

Pritzker had helped finance Obama from the beginning of his political career, having allegedly met him in the early 1990s when her kids were playing on a basketball team coached by Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson.

During Obama’s 2008 White House run, Pritzker served as the national chairwoman of his campaign finance team, which shattered fundraising records, and in the 2012 reelection effort, she was a top bundler.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Obama announces Penny Pritzker’s nomination as Commerce Secretary in May 2013. [Source: harvardmagazine.com]

The Pritzker family—which made its fortune through ownership of Hyatt hotels—had long ties to the CIA. They were leading depositors in the Bahamas-based Castle Bank, a CIA outfit founded by one of the CIA’s mob liaisons, Paul Helliwell, which specialized in off-shoring money.[27]

The Pritzkers were also war profiteers. In 1953, family patriarchs Jay and Robert Pritzker founded the Marmon Group, an industrial holding company which includes the subsidiary Marmon Aerospace and Defense which manufactures wires and cables for aerospace, military vehicles, combat systems, radar installations and naval shipboards.

The Pritzkers—like the Crowns—thus personally profited from Obama’s mammoth military budgets, which outstripped those of President Bush by an average of $18.7 billion per year, Obama’s naval buildup in the South China Sea and his overseeing more sales of military weaponry than any other president—$60 billion more than President Bush.[28]

Obama military.
Obama flanked by military Generals. He pleased his donors with large military budgets that outstripped those of war hawk George W. Bush. [Source: slate.com]

Conclusion

As the first Black president, Obama is often placed on a pedestal as a moral beacon and compared to such historic figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

These comparisons are off base, as Obama is an opportunistic and often deceitful politician who has shown a lack of moral integrity throughout his career.

In blow to Obama Presidential Center backers, judge allows lawsuit challenging Chicago's Jackson Park location to proceed - Chicago Tribune
Blueprint of Obama presidential center. Chicago writer Hugh Iglarsh characterized the central tower as a “Great Tower of Nothing, a monument to hubris, chutzpah and Chicago-style clout… which rivals the Pyramid of Khufu in its brutal, enigmatic grandiosity.” [Source: chicagotribune.com]

Obama’s deep ties to and support of the CIA and offshoot agencies like the NED fueled great foreign policy disasters which ravaged numerous countries.

After he left the presidency, Obama worked through his consigliére John Brennan to help conjure up the “Russia Gate” scandal, which revived Cold War-era demonologies, poisoned U.S.-Russia relations and greatly increased the threat of nuclear war.

Media outlets including those on the Left continue to perpetrate many myths about Obama and to assume a defensive posture in the face of right-wing attacks.

While these attacks may be nefarious, they should not preclude sober and critical analysis about America’s forty-fourth president and the dark forces behind his rise to power and reign.


  1. Mark Hosenball, “Exclusive: Obama authorizes secret U.S. support for Syrian rebels,” Reuters, August 1, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-syria-obama-order/exclusive-obama-authorizes-secret-u-s-support-for-syrian-rebels-idUSBRE8701OK20120801
  2. See Mark Taliano, Voices From Syria (Montreal: Global Research, 2017). 
  3. The size of SOCOM expanded by almost 25 percent during Obama’s presidency, increasing from 55,800 people to 69,700. 
  4. Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 252. 
  5. Peter Baker and Mark Mazetti, “Brennan Draws on Bond with Obama in Backing CIA,” The New York Times, December 14, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/us/politics/cia-chief-and-president-walk-fine-line-.html 
  6. Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2019), 21. Brennan was head of the Analysis Corporation, a CIA contractor firm during the period before the 2008 election when employees of it rifled through Obama’s passport file at the State Department. This may have been a major factor behind Brennan’s closeness to Obama and promotion.
  7. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 100, 135, 267. In Libya, the Obama administration supported the overthrow of pan-Africanist Muammar Qaddafi, who resisted the establishment of a giant AFRICOM military base in Libya. Libya’s first president after Qaddafi’s overthrow, Mohammed Magariaf, was recruited by the CIA in the 1980s into a counter-revolutionary force in Chad. The Obama administration also supported General Khalifa Hiftar, who had coerced people into joining the CIA’s anti-Qaddafi Contra army in the 1980s by putting them in hot, windowless, crowded rooms with floors ankle-deep in sewage for long periods of time if they did not agree
  8. Mondo Frazier, The Secret Life of Barack Hussein Obama (New York: Threshold editions, 2010), 113. 
  9. Gordon helped barricade the U.S. embassy during the 1965 Suharto coup. Julius Mader, Who’s Who in the CIA (Berlin: Julius Mader, 1968), 139. In the latter book he is listed as Dr. Gordon Donald Jr. He is said to have been a U.S. naval veteran who served as special advisor of the Office of Analysis and Research for the Soviet Bloc in the Department of State and in Djakarta and Lahore, where Dunham followed him. 
  10. The section on Ann Dunham is drawn from Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars; Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President (self-published, 2012); Webster Tarpley, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2008). For more on Dunham’s background, see also Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 
  11. Wayne Madsen, “The Story of Obama: All in the Company,” Wayne Madsen Report, August 18, 2010, https://eslkevin.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/43457/ 
  12. After Barack was born, Ann moved to Washington State for a period while Barack Obama Sr. completed his studies at the University of Hawaii before going to Harvard. 
  13. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995); discussed in Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, ch. 2. 
  14. See Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars
  15. After the bank’s collapse, its founder, Frank Nugan, was shot to death near Sydney. Nugan Hand had been used to launder CIA drug money at the end of the Indochina War. 
  16. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Publishers, 2020), 6, 7. Ann’s mentor at the University of Hawaii, Alice Dewey, described her as a “garden variety democrat” and not a leftist radical. There is no evidence of her having attended civil rights or anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, which were rare when Ann was a student in the early 1960s. 
  17. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006). Obama claimed that the “story of the coup and purge was slow to appear in American newspapers,” which was not the case.
  18. James Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970), 112; Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars. Kunen notes that BIC supported the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on issues related to civil rights and student control of universities but differed on the question of imperialism. An informed source told journalist Wayne Madsen that Obama’s tuition debt at Columbia University was paid off by BIC.
  19. Tarpley, Barack H. Obama, 62.
  20. Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President, 145, 146. University Clearinghouse records indicated that Obama only attended Columbia University in 1982-1983, though the school later claimed there was a “computer error,” which appears rather dubious, and that Obama attended in 1981-1982. Obama himself refused to release his college transcripts or name a single classmate or associate from his time at Columbia. There are no photos and very few people, students and faculty, remember him at the school, prompting suspicion and conspiracy theories. Obama’s passport records meanwhile have been destroyed. During his time in Pakistan, where his mother was then working, Obama stayed at the home of the family of Muhammed Soomro, who became acting president after the resignation of Pervez Musharraf in August 2008. According to unidentified sources, Obama and his stepfather partook in unknown CIA business. At the time, Pakistan was a major hub for the recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Andrew Kreig, Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters (Washington, D.C.: Eagle View Books, 2013), 23, 24.
  21. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 139, 140. 
  22. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown Publishers, 2020), 13. 
  23. Obama, A Promised Land, 14. 
  24. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20, 21, 37, 38. Henry Crown, Lester’s father, established Material Services Corporation (MSC), which was one of the government’s largest World War II contractors but was sued for over $1 million by the Office of Price Administration for price gouging. In 1962, its successor, General Dynamics, in which Crown remained the largest investor, was target of a major influence-peddling investigation by the Senate Government Operations Committee after being awarded a $7 billion Pentagon contract for TFX fighter bombers (later F-111) that was quashed after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In the 1970s, Crown was implicated in a major bribery scandal in the state of Illinois which led to the imprisonment of some state legislators. In the 1980s, the firm was fined over $650,000 for paying bribes to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Director of Naval Submarine programs, over a 16-year period
  25. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 37, 38. 
  26. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20, 21. 
  27. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 36, 37. 
  28. Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars, 20; Bryan Schatz, “The Obama years Have Been Very Good to America’s Weapons Makers,” Mother Jones, March/April 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/obama-international-arms-weapons-deals/. 
Please follow and like us:

34 thoughts on “A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA”

  1. Pingback: Homepage
    1. Thanks for the link Brad. Don’t we find it funny that Jack Ryan candidacy was destroyed by similar sex allegations as Barry. And you’re quite right about the juxtaposition of Bill Clinton rag to riches story. Another CIA protégée if you ask me. Let’s not forget the famous JFK handshake. And supposedly having a Rockefeller assist you in avoiding the draft and attending Oxford. And the rabbit hole goes deeper.
      https://millercenter.org/president/clinton/life-before-the-presidency

      moderated
      1. SaltySailor, do you or any other readers know if this was a legitimate Kenyan web page? Being a former Illinois resident for many years, the political facts mentioned look 100% accurate to me. Thanks…

  2. I have a web page that I had saved from some time ago. It was dated 27 June 2004 and the web page was from the Sunday Standard (Kenya, AFRICA) news web site. The opening of the page proclaims: “Kenyan-born Obama all set for the US Senate”

    The info on the web page having to do with politics in Illinois looks to me as being very accurate, as I used to live in northern Illinois until a few years ago.

    The “run-down” on Obama looks to be a near exact carbon copy of Bill Clinton’s rags-to-riches story. IMO, we have not had a decent and honest president since John F. Kennedy. I have not voted these past few years and I am no longer taking part in the charades called “elections.”

    Thank you.

    moderated
  3. Good research and references. I’ll be honest and state that I didn’t vote for Barry Soetoro and I haven’t voted for a so called elected President in 28 years. They’re all selected folks and your vote don’t count.
    A few things I’ll add to this research is :
    1. The Prizter family and their off shore accounts in the Bahamas thru Castle bank was facilitated by the Deltec Bank & Trust who was the same group that help the Clintons started their foundation.

    https://www.deltecbank.com/?locale=en

    2. I agree with Don ,Barry has no European or African American heritage in him and Frank Marshall Davis ain’t his daddy. He is pure Java Indonesian and for some of you who have never met one they look very African to most European or white Americans who don’t assimilate or travel to Oceania. It is one of the reason he had many Pakistani friends or lovers and a Aussie girlfriend. https://www.newsindiatimes.com/barack-obama-called-three-pakistani-male-friends-pakis-did-cocaine-with-them-says-biography/
    3. Barry was a alphabet agencies creation and this also mean MI6 , keep in mind folks that USAID (Grandmother Mother and Step-father ) is just another arm or tentacles of the CIA. And was modeled after Oxfam of the UK. And this was done thru the Tavistock Institute.
    4. He was a gay man married to a tranny. Lawrence Goldyn former professor at Occidental College went on record and stated that a year before his first campaign. And how many heterosexual men you know visit bathhouses.
    5. The photo above of military officers are incorrect and those are Public Health Officers and the East Indian gentleman to his right is the 19th & 21st Surgeon General. And Vivek Murthy started Vision Worldwide a HIV/AIDS education program as a undergrad at Harvard university. Guess who help with funding ? NIH
    https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/a-vision-realized/
    6. Former Judge Joe Brown reveals all on a old interview about Barry and none of it has ever been disputed. Barry Soetoro was a CIA created gay trust fund baby and everyone got hoodwink !
    https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=M5KWRNMOW3GB
    And let’s not forget his Jewish half brother who lives in China moving there after 911. And the rabbit hole goes deeper… https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-were-not-a-normal-family-says-obamas-jewish-half-brother/

    moderated
    1. Michelle Obama is not a tranny. She has a rare DNA disease. She has the type that gives her a male appearing body yet she is still a female …who is sterile.
      Obama’s Chicago minister Rev Wright knew the family history and thought Michelle would make a good wife for Barack.

      File: Michelle as a child.

      Attachment

      moderated
      1. When did she have breast implants and who did it?

        The comment by Joan Rivers is one her typical smears. She provided no proof of anything…..just talk.

        Michelle’s book says that she has had IVF which is another untruth. The ”daughters” were adopted from her Dr. the Nesbitt family. Has Michelle ever admitted anything about all of this? The Internet articles I read about her DNA problems have been scrubbed.

        Attachment

      2. Did you watch my expose on “Michelle”? If not, bad on you. I lay it out. You have been played BIG TIME. Deal with all the evidence that I lay out! One of us has done his homework.

      3. Jim: I did see Michelle in a tight fitting I believe blue dress which showed nothing except people’s imagination.

        Michelle’s bio type books reveal more lies than Barack’s books.

  4. Being Australian I can’t vote for any of them. I will probably vote for Clive Palmer’s party because he says you can’t trust Liberal or Labor . He may turn out to be a lemon (ie. no good) but I have no other real choice exept throw the ballot in unfilled, which I have done before.

    moderated
  5. I strongly believe that Frank Marshall Davis is actually Barack’s biological father. The physical resemblance is absolutely astonishing. He bares no resemblance to the Kenyon and the idea of an Indonesian biological father is preposterous. It’s like the stores of Amelia Earhart ending up in the Marshall Islands. There is no evidence. I lived in Hawaii a long time and have met pure blooded Hawaiians who were ironically very knowledgeable about Obama’s grandmother and her friendship with the lady in charge of the State of Hawaii birth records who allegedly died in a strange airplane accident where all the other passenger survived. I’m convinced he does not have a Hawaii birth certificate and was most likely born in Kenya, and given the name “Obama.” He did come to Hawaii as a newborn. Everything points to Davis as being his true biological father. This is a really good article and very accurate in my opinion. I’m a former US Peace Corps Volunteer from 1966-68. I voted for Obama twice and would do it again. We didn’t learn how bad he was until after the start of his second term when an endless series of mass shootings began.

    moderated
    1. @GRB
      We knew exactly how bad Obama was one week after he hit the Oval Office. In that week he SEALED forever all of his personal papers. In 2021 they’re still sealed. Anyone who seals all of his personal papers has a lot to hide.

      moderated
  6. Obama’s bio father is a total unknown Indonesian man who was a customer of his bio mother who was a ”bar worker” at Lederer’s Bar. The building is still there. Dunham [ Ann’s father] was a steady customer at Lederer’s Bar and knew practically everyone. He arranged for the baby Barack to be handed over to his daughter Ann. She always wanted to raise a child of color. She left Hawaii and landed in Indonesia and married Lolo Soretoro and they had a daughter [who is still living]. Ann tired of Barack and sent him back to her father in Hawaii to raise and put him through high school.
    One of Barack’s constant gay bar/bath house hopping companion was ballet dancer Rahm Emanuel.

    File: Rahn Emanuel the former ballet dancer and Mayor Chicago ’11-19

    Attachment

    moderated
    1. I’ll reply to you on your tread Don. Michelle is Michael and Dr. Espinoza wasn’t the only person that confirmed that she is a tranny. A former African American female US Navy Corpsman (HMC) retired chief confirmed that Michelle never allowed medical staff ( all US Navy Corpsman) in her private quarters and he had his own physician do her/his physicals. And that all active duty personnel assigned to the White House was given an additional National Security Letter.
      And then there’s the White House doc that really love their job…
      https://www.courthousenews.com/report-former-presidents-doctor-was-a-toxic-leader-of-white-house-medical-staff/

      moderated
  7. I have to smile. This Post is finally getting down to the nitty gritty darkness that IS Obama. I did about ten years of research after he was elected. His life story is the exact opposite if what his bio books report. His bio books are mostly fantasy fiction written by others. Its no wonder his personal papers are sealed for life.

    Oh btw whatever happened to that little folded up mystery Birth Certificate that he tucked away in that book? Its NEVER been seen.

    moderated
  8. Told to me by Jerome Corsi….both of Obama’s parents were Indonesian. The bio mother was a ”bar worker” at Lederer’s Bar. There is one not drop of white blood in Obama. He pretends to be ”black”. His birth name is a deep, dark secret. His favorite hangout in Hawaii? Gay bars. Fave hangout in Chicago? Gay bathhouse [Wednesday night]

    File: woman at left, Ann Dunham…at right is woman who told Corsi the entire Obama story.

    Attachment

    moderated
  9. Jim, would you consider voting for that piece of trash twice one of your greatest mis-judgments?
    Of course, I voted for Trump twice…one of my greatest mis-judgments….especially the 2nd time knowing he endorsed the jab.

    moderated
    1. You mean Obama? The problem was that the GOP candidates opposing him were weak. John McCain and Sarah Palin? Give me a break. Mitt Romney? Egad! If I had to do it all over again, I would probably still vote for him. They were awful.

      moderated
      1. I guess that is where we differ. I am sick and tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.
        I do believe he did much damage…..especially in regard to the Smith-Mundt Act which now allows these endless false flags. There is not a politician alive that can be trusted. They can and will ALL be compromised one way or another….let’s face it, even JFK, as holy as his image was, was a relentless womanizer.
        So, you will still vote for a gay president and his transgender wife. Well, not I.

      2. Will, give me a break! We have a two-party system. As long as that’s the case, we have to decide between (what we all recognized to be) the lesser of two evils! At the time, Obama looked pretty good. But he turned out to be pretty bad, as this article reflects. Did you vote for John McCain? or for Mitt Romney? When you don’t even have a TV, my guess would be that you didn’t vote at all. Obviously, I no longer regard Obama in a favorable light. To fault me on grounds that have subsequently come to light–which I myself have widely published–is grossly unfair.

      3. Will, who did you vote for? Did you vote at all? Christ! I have no real idea what I would have done had I known. None of us knew. I have done a lot to expose the fake Obama and his fake “wife”. Who has exposed “her” more? You are usually fair-minded.

      4. Jim…there was no fault intended. I simply asked a question and said. I would not take the same path. I have been without a TV for about 10 years (possibly longer). BUT, I don’t see how that would have anything to do with my voting.
        In 2008, I voted for Nader. In 2012, I am not sure if I voted. But as I look back at who ran, I likely did not, as no one there would have interested me. The first time I voted for Trump was simply because I did not see him as a politician.
        The second time was because I knew Biden was a politician for many, many years and was obviously demented. None of those choices relied on my watching TV.
        I very seriously doubt I’ll vote again within an electronic voting system. I see that changing no time soon.

      5. Jim….Could be you missed my reply at 12:26. But I honestly do not see where I am being unfair. It’s not like I called you anything or even criticized your choice. All I said was that it would not be my choice.

      6. OK, Will. No problemo. I certainly understand where you are coming from. All is well. Keep on truckin’!

      7. The GOP candidates were horrible. Few if any knew who Obama was. I thought he was an African American with a White mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Obama, I came to find out is NOT African American and there is not one drop of White blood in his veins. He’s 100% Indonesian Muslim from the Java Tribe. BTW he can even jive talk to the right audience.

        I suspect the CIA knows who he is and his real name but they’re not sharing that with anyone..

        Two weeks after he took the Oval Office he SEALED all of his Records by EO. Right at moment I knew we were in big trouble with that phony in the White House.

        Attachment

      8. One day I helped my mother-in-law (outlaw really) move. I ended up getting fined (and my wife) for not voting, because I had run out of time to vote. The outlaws had probably post voted. It was election , local government. I wrote to them, and said I had helped the outlaws move, they wouldn’t let me off, the fines were about $100 or so each, by memory
        Last year I did a soil test for a lady and somehow it came up that she used to run the voting for the state or nation, anyway some type of head poncho. She said nobody ever gets fined. I said that I did. She didn’t believe me. So I told her the story. She was shocked I got fined. I said I thought the outlaws was a reasonable excuse, it was true. She said I should have lied and concocted a better excuse.

      9. Don “Jive Talkin”
        Wikipedia: The song was originally called “Drive Talking” in its early stage. The song’s rhythm was modelled after the sound their car made crossing the Julia Tuttle Causeway each day from Biscayne Bay to Criteria Studios in Miami. According to Maurice, while hearing this rhythmic sound, “Barry didn’t notice that he’s going ‘Ji-Ji Jive Talkin’ ’, thinking of the dance, ‘You dance with your eyes’…that’s all he had…exactly 35 mph…that’s what we got.” He goes on to say, “We played it to [producer] Arif [Mardin], and he went ‘Do you know what “Jive Talkin'” means?’ And we said ‘Well yeah, it’s, ya know, you’re dancing.’ He says ‘NO…it’s a black expression for bullshitting.’ And we went ‘Oh, Really?!? Jive talkin’, you’re telling me lies…’ and changed it.” Maurice goes on to describe how Arif gave them “the groove, the tempo, everything.” Robin Gibb then goes on to mention that, because they were English, they were less self-conscious about going into the “no-go areas”, referring to musical styles that were more black in styles, etc.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oALKAh_bL5g
        Also as there is one Bee Gee still alive ” I have changed the words I sing to “Sayin Alive” to “ah.ah,ah, nearly all dead, nearly all dead….”
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNFzfwLM72c

      10. BillAu.

        Obama’s jive talk has nothing to do with that song you referenced. Even Hillary can jive talk. Ever hear her?

Leave a Reply

James Fetzer

Good Day!

Would you like to get my latest blog posts and other news and updates?

It's FREE! Simply enter your best email below and you will get notified as soon as they are published.

* We never share your information or spam you. Unsubscribe at any time.

James Fetzer

It's FREE! Simply enter your best email below and you will get notified as soon as they are published.

Good Day!

Would you like to get my latest blog posts and other news and updates?

* We never share your information or spam you. Unsubscribe at any time.
 

THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?

Jim Fetzer

Welcomes You To Join