My favorite conspiracy theory for the last few months has been that the young Barack Obama benefited from some CIA favors along the way, perhaps in transferring to Columbia U. or in his getting his copyeditor job at Business International, a firm with, apparently, ties to both CIA and SDS. Here's a website called Cannonfire that pulls together, in a disorganized fashion, various bits of evidence. There's nothing conclusive, but the young Obama probably had many more indirect links with CIA before the age of 25 than you didRemember, I have written before about the Obama's mother, Geithner's father (who my guess is CIA) connection.
Sailer continues:
The key thing to recognize is that the President's parents were exactly the type of non-Communist leftists whom CIA constantly cultivated. Barack Obama Sr.was a protege of the dynamic Tom Mboya, who was America's man in Kenya in the three way power struggle with Britain's man Jomo Kenyatta and Russia's man, Oginga Odinga. Mboya was publicly on the payroll of the AFL-CIO's anti-Communist outreach program and may have been on the CIA's payroll as well, according to David Horowitz's Ramparts magazine. Obama Sr. got to Hawaii on the American-funded Tom Mboya Airlift that brought young Kenyan elites to America for college. He later got his master's degree at Harvard, which was probably second only to Yale as a CIA recruiting ground during the New Frontier. Although Obama Sr. criticized Mboya's non-radical and non-racist economics in his first published paper, he later worked for Mboya, as well as for an American oil company. Indeed, if Obama Sr.'s claims were true, he may have been the last man to speak to Mboya alive, and saw him gunned down in 1969 by a Kikuyu hitman likely affiliated with Kenyatta's cronies.
Obama Sr. claimed to have been the only witness to have been able to identify the triggerman and that the Kikuyus tried to kill him for it. (Obama Jr. left all this out of Dreams from My Father, whether because the story was dangerous for his surviving Kenyan relatives 25 years later, because he didn't believe it, or because it violated his No Interesting Anecdotes policy in writing his book is unknown.)...Sailer's complete article is here.
[Obama's mother] worked for the Ford Foundation in Asia, which had a long history of ties with the CIA. My theory is that at some point, the President's father and/or mother got in touch with old CIA contacts and asked them for help with their Hawaiian slacker son's advancement, such as getting him into the International Relations program at Columbia or getting him a decent-paying job at Business International. Obama would have been exactly the kind of second generation, suave, charismatic globalized individual with lots of foreign friends (including sons of Pakistan's political elite -- and this was in the early 1980s when Pakistan was the frontline in CIA's struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan) whom CIA guys would have wanted to do favors for in return for favors down the road.
htJohnCarney
The JFK conspiracy theorist former USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty's book "JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, And the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy" is one that is worth reading even if you don't buy his conspiracy theory.
ReplyDeleteProuty provides autobiographical insights from his career as USAF air transport liaison for the "covert ops" world of the 1950s and 1960s. He includes an excellent description of the early days of US intervention in Vietnam, the origin of the Vietcong insurgency, and an insider account of how the Kennedy administration set up and milked the F-111 program for vote buying pork across the country (including planting campaign manager in the Pentagon to ensure sub-contract pork was allocated to the electoral districts where it could do the most partisan good.)
Anyhow Prouty talks of the enthusiasm for "Maoist style" social revolutionary talk and theory within branches of the CIA. This included deep study and reinterpretation of Mao's tracts. Prouty wasn't saying they were closet maoists... but that they enthusiastically absorbed the strategy they developed in post-war Italy to "out compete" the local communists with a rival social revolutionary creed that could be bent in a pro-US direction. ("Taking the wind out of rivals' sails" is a political tactic of long lineage. Bismarck and the German Social Democrats for example.)
So the idea that the CIA would foster, nurture and exploit 'radical' tendencies is not completely insane, however improbable the hypothesis may be in this case.