Obama was, is, and remains the most enigmatic figure in American politics. In his largely fictionalized autobiographies, Obama described his parents as a white girl from Kansas and a scholar from Kenya who succumbed to an “unlikely love.” And the rest of his biography is equally hard to swallow. Consider that just four years into a mediocre first term as a junior senator from Illinois, he wins the White House. Let me just point out that in the Senate people sometimes miss “roll-call votes” or times when they are supposed to show up and cast a ballot. The median for missed roll-call votes in the Senate is 2.2% of the time. Obama hit 24.2% in his first term and he never even completed the term. He was a no-show kinda Senator. Not the sort of guy who rises to the nation’s highest office on his first try.
To say this guy came out of nowhere is a major understatement. And how can a mediocre Senator who can’t even be bothered to show up for work a quarter of the time win the Presidency in his first try?
Well, that’s a little puzzling.
When you want to investigate a story, sometimes the best strategy is to come at it sideways and look at the surrounding cast of characters. Obama’s mother is possibly even more mysterious although less accomplished than he is. Ann Dunham—her real name was Stanley Ann Dunham, but she rarely used the Stanley—is often reported to have been born in Kansas and her parents (her father, another Stanely Dunham and mother Madelyn Payne Dunham) were born there. But some say that Ann Dunham was born in the Paris of the Middle East or Beirut, Lebanon. Born in Lebanon or not, Ann probably spent some of her childhood there, although she never talked about it. This is a photo of her with her parents and eagle-eyed people say she is wearing a uniform with the insignia of a posh preppy diplomat school in Beirut.
I have no way of verifying this. But there are reports that her parents were working in intelligence during and after World War II, despite her father’s cover story that he was a furniture salesman. As a furniture salesman, his career took his little family all over the country—from Kanas to Oklahoma to Washington state and then to Hawaii. That seems an unlikely trajectory for a furniture salesman.
Despite Madelyn’s lack of a college degree, she eventually rose to the ranks of Vice President of a major bank in Hawaii back in the 1960s when a married woman could not even get a credit card without her husband’s permission and did not have the right to her own credit score. In an age when women were never running banks, Madelyn Dunham was a rarity. Some of the transactions she handled involved organizations believed to be affiliated with the CIA. Does that mean she was intelligence? No, but her career path was just as unlikely as that of her husband.
Here is a picture of Barack Obama’s grandparents: this is Stanley Armour Dunham and his wife Madelyn, from World War II. Notice Stanley’s uniform does not have any sort of insignia or identify a branch of service. That’s typical for intelligence officers.
Once the Dunhams settled in Hawaii—where Stanley allegedly moved his family in order to pursue his career selling furniture—there was a CIA-promoted program designed to bring future African leaders to the United States for education and training. One might even add indoctrination. But the program may not have been anything sinister, since lots of countries do this sort of thing to woo hearts and minds. It was into one of these types of programs that Barack Hussein Obama, Senior, was invited to Hawaii to study. It is where he met Ann Dunham. Now check out this picture of Obama Senior’s arrival in Hawaii. He is the guy near the center wearing the leis. Next to him is Stanley Dunham. Because .. furniture salesmen are involved in these educational programs run by U.S. intelligence?
Ann Dunham allegedly met Barack Senior at the East-West Center in Hawaii, which has CIA ties. They were both studying Russian, because, you know, teenage girls all like to study Russian. She was just 17 years old at the time and she wound up pregnant. It was 1961 and interracial couples were very rare.
The story gets even stranger, because Barack Obama, the future President, was born on August 4, 1961 and Ann was already enrolled in her first year at the University of Washington in Seattle by the end of August 1961. It is not clear how she managed to launch her academic studies with a newborn, but most reports place her in Seattle in late August 1961. So regardless of where Barack Obama was born, his mother was in college a few weeks later and she likely brought the baby with her.
Ann was always very academic. She got her degree in anthropology and continued her studies throughout her short life (she died at age 52), earning her PhD just a few years before her untimely death from cancer. A few years after the birth of her only son, she divorced Barack Hussein Obama, Senior, but it is hard to say if this was necessary. She did take his surname for a while but there is no record that they were ever legally married. They never lived together. Even after the baby was born, Barack Senior took no interest in the child and met him only once, very briefly. (Another sticking point to the story is that Barack Senior already had a wife and baby in Kenya at the time.)
After that divorce, Ann Dunham met another man from the East-West Center, this time an Indonesian guy named Lt. Col. Soetoro, nicknamed Lolo. When he was called back by the Indonesian military, Ann married him and followed him there with her little son. Ann and Lolo soon had a child of their own, Maya, who stated in her mother’s biography, A Singular Woman, that her parents’ marriage was “not really” a typical marriage. It is hard to understand why Ann Dunham would marry a man and uproot herself in this way but remain distant from him. But she embarked on what would turn out to be a lifelong anthropological adventure in Indonesia.
Ann’s son took on his stepfather’s name, enrolling in a Muslim school as Barry Soetoro, the son of Lolo Soetoro. This poses some challenges in the Obama narrative, because under Indonesian law, if an Indonesian father adopts a child, that child automatically takes on Indonesian citizenship. However, like a lot of other parts of the Obama story, there is no paperwork to confirm or refute this theory.
A couple of things about the CIA and other intelligence agencies are worth mentioning here. Many agencies like to work within families because family ties promote loyalty and allow individual agents extended reach. Thus, it would be natural for agencies to want to recruit the child of Stanley and Madelyn Dunham into intelligence work. During the 1960s to 1980s, the CIA often used anthropologists as agents. (And intelligence units used all sorts of unusual people to gather data, including famous chef Julia Child!) Anthropology offered a great cover story.
Anthropologists could work in far-flung places without arousing suspicion—they were doing “field work.” They could live in big cities or remote villages, they usually learned the local language and dialects, and they struck up friendships with ordinary people but often knew community leaders and politicians as well. Intelligent, gregarious, sociable anthropologists like Ann Dunham could make friends that normal Americans could not. This isn’t the Spy-vs.-Spy cloak and dagger intelligence work. It’s an American agent finding out at a very local granular level what local people thought about politics, religion, America, and so on. If Ann was working intelligence, she was probably just reporting on the political and social inclinations of Indonesian citizens in all walks of life. Indonesia at the time was in a major battle suppressing communist forces.
And to be sure, Ann Dunham also did real field work as an anthropologist, some of which has been published. A little of it is even at the Smithsonian.
But anthropologist Ann Dunham, who lived most of her adult years in Indonesia and later Pakistan, had ties with at least five agencies that have CIA ties: the Ford Foundation, Agency for International Development, Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives, Inc., and East-West Center in Hawaii. Her lifestyle in some of these remote outposts was relatively affluent considering she often had no visible means of support and spent her entire career doing anthropologic field work. Her work for these various agencies likely paid the bills and required some cooperation on her part.
So was she CIA? It would be hard to believe she wasn’t, but this raises the interesting issue of her children. Ann Dunham divorced Lolo after a few years of marriage, but she kept custody of her daughter by him, Maya Soetoro (today Maya Ng). But when Barry was about nine years old, Ann sent him back—all by himself—to Hawaii to live the rest of his childhood with her parents. Why would Ann do this Sophie’s Choice routine and keep one child and send the other away? There are a few theories floating around.
One maintains that Lolo abused his stepson, although stepsister Maya disputes that account. In other words, Ann was just trying to protect the boy, but she wasn’t quite ready to leave Indonesia for him.
Another is that Indonesia was a very racist country against Blacks and Ann wished to spare her child this abuse. Maya looked and acted Indonesian and did not face the same prejudice. Again, this explanation is predicated on the fact that Ann wanted to stay in Indonesia even though she was no longer married to Lolo.
A third story is that Ann wanted an American education for Barry—although she did not feel the same way about Maya, apparently, which is a little puzzling.
Whatever the story, the man who grew up to be President Obama was never really cared for by his biological father and was abandoned by his mother at age nine to live with an elderly white couple in Hawaii. Stanley and Madelyn Dunham were Barry Soetoro’s biological grandparents but at the time he went back to live with them, they were virtually strangers.
This is another part of the Obama biography that does not make sense. Why was he shipped back to get an American education?
But there is another piece to the puzzle. In Rising Star, a biography of Barack Obama, it is reported that two of Barry Soetoro’s elementary school teachers remember him from different classes. That’s not hard to believe—he was likely the only Black kid in the class and he was an English-speaking American to boot. Both teachers said Barry wrote compositions in class that stated he wanted to be president of the United States when he grew up. This sort of remark was so unusual in Indonesia that these teachers never forgot it. Most kids in Indonesia have no such aspirations. And it makes one wonder if Ann was not grooming her child for this destiny, which is why she sent him back to Hawaii to become Americanized enough to fulfill this plan.
So was Obama a CIA plant, born and groomed to hold high political office?
Intelligence agencies often work within families—it’s a good way to assure loyalty. And Obama’s family ties to intelligence operations and their unusual and exotic lifestyle certainly indicate they were not Ozzie and Harriet. Remember, not all intelligence work is Jason Bourne stuff. Ann Dunham was far from athletic, hardly a daredevil spy. She was probably just gathering local data from the ground to feed up the chain.
This is a photo of Ann Dunham during her anthropological heyday. Not the sort of person who would pass as a secret agent.
Little Barry’s dream to become president may have just been a harmless inspiration planted by a proud mother who wanted to protect her son from other kids who may have bullied him at school for looking different and being foreign. Or maybe it was always the plan—to groom a man for the Oval Office who had three-generations of ties to intelligence.
But the birth certificate is the least of it. After all, a person can’t help where they are born, it’s just something that happens to you. But a person can help who they work for.