Wayne Madsen

New Details on Obama’s CIA-Front Employer

We have obtained additional details on Business International Corporation (BIC), the CIA front company where President Obama spent a year working after graduating from Columbia University in 1983.

BIC used journalists as non-official cover agents around the world. The firm published weekly and fortnightly newsletters for business executives, including Business International, Business Europe, Business Latin America, and Business Asia.

On February 24, 2009, WMR reported: “For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC’s financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications: “Financing Foreign Operations” and “Business International Money Report”, a weekly newsletter.

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 . . . BIC had long been associated with CIA activities. BIC was founded by Eldridge Haynes, a self-professed liberal Democrat. The BIC headquarters was located at the prestigious address of 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan.”

Through its contacts with leading liberals around the world, BIC sought to recruit those on the left as CIA agents and assets. BIC documents obtained by WMR describe a series of top level “round tables” between US business and intelligence chiefs and government leaders around the world, including Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, and 83 ministers and officials of 33 multinational organizations in Addis Ababa in 1969; Colombian President Carlos Lleras Restrepo and business and labor leaders of six Andean Bloc countries in 1968 and 1972; Argentine President General Juan Carlos Ongania and his junta in 1966; Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his cabinet in 1962 and 1967; Brazilian President Emilio Medici in 1970; and Indonesian dictator Suharto and his cabinet in 1968 and 1972.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., met at the University of Hawaii in 1960 in a Russian-language class. At the time, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 were concerned about Soviet penetration of Kenya’s independence movement. Kenya became independent of Britain in 1963.

After marrying Indonesian national Lolo Soetoro, Dunham moved with Barack Obama, Jr. to Indonesia in 1966, just as the Suharto dictatorship was consolidating its hold on power, which included the massacre of some 1 million Indonesian Communists. Dunham left Indonesia in 1972, returning to Hawaii with her son. Dunham periodically made trips back to Indonesia, as well as to Pakistan, while working for the Ford Foundation and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the latter commonly used by the CIA for official cover agents.

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.”

CIA files also contain a report on the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (1971-1973), which is possibly pertinent to the agency’s involvement in Indonesia. One of the participants in the Chicago CFR’s 1971 conference in Oak Brook was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later become President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, the chief architect of the US support for the Afghan mujaheddin, and one of Obama’s professors at Columbia University.

On April 27, 1973, the Chicago CFR sponsored a seminar titled “Indonesia Today,” according to the CFR Chicago report maintained in CIA files. Present were “four representatives of the Center for Strategic International Studies in Jakarta” who discussed in presented papers Indonesia’s role in Southeast Asia. One of the participants was Soetaryo Sigit, Indonesia’s Minister of Mines.

The CFR report also states that the Atlantic Conference series that attracted the same high-level participants as BIC, was started in 1965 under the auspices of CFR Chicago by Joseph Slater of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation employed Dunham in Indonesia.

CIA files also contain a single page from the “Chicago Buyers Guide.” Listed on the page is the address and phone number for Business International Corporation in Chicago: One IBM Plaza, Suite 1420, 60611. 321-0300.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. His latest books are Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates and Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day. His website is WayneMadsenReport.com

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