(WMR) -- WMR
has 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 (NOC) 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 and 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
since being 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 U.S.
business and intelligence chiefs and government leaders around the world,
including 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 U.S. 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
U.S. 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 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.
Obama gave scant reference to his employment with BIC in his
2006 book, �Dreams From My Father.�
Previously
published in the Wayne
Madsen Report.
Copyright � 2009 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne
Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and
nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report
(subscription required).