Did Obama Work for the CIA?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Aug. 8, 2025) — On Tuesday, August 4, “X” account “The SCIF” posted a lengthy narrative making striking claims about the background of Barack Hussein Obama, many of which have been rumored for years but never proven.

The post, captioned, “OBAMA & THE CIA CONNECTION,” claims Obama’s “entire family’s history” involved “working for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The post claims that Obama’s first employer after graduating from Columbia University in 1983 was the now-defunct Business International Corporation, frequently referred to as “Business International.”

Questions have arisen as to whether Obama actually attended Columbia, particularly from radio host, commentator, former politician and author Wayne Allyn Root, over more than 13 years.

In a column published July 29 on the subject, Root wrote:

I’ve been Paul Revere for 17 years now. Always screaming from my horse, “Obama is a fraud. Obama is a fraud. Investigate Obama at Columbia. It all started there.”

Why 17 years? That was the year Obama ran for President of the United States- 2008. I ran against him on the Libertarian presidential ticket that year. And that’s the first time I found out Obama was my Columbia University classmate, Class of ’83.

Before that, I’d never known Obama attended the same class as me at Columbia.

But neither had anyone else. I asked all my classmates. Not one had ever met him, heard of him, or seen his face in four years at Columbia.

…my gut says the only way for Obama to beat the system was to apply to Columbia as a foreign aid student.

Shortly before the presidential election of 2012, Donald Trump suggested Obama was either born in a foreign country or presented himself as a foreigner to attend college. In a very public display, Trump challenged Obama to release his college transcripts and passport applications in exchange for $5 million to go to a charity of Obama’s choosing. There was no response from the White House, including after Trump increased the offer tenfold.

If Obama were born overseas, many argue, he was not constitutionally qualified to serve as president, given that Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires that the president and commander-in-chief be a “natural born Citizen.”

Moreover, a “long-form” image purported to represent Obama’s original birth record from Hawaii and released by the White House on April 27, 2011, was deemed by a criminal investigation authorized by then-Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio to be a “computer-generated forgery.”

According to Wikipedia, “Business International Corporation (BI) was a publishing and advisory firm dedicated to assisting American companies in operating abroad. It was founded in 1953. It organized conferences, and worked with major corporations. Former president Barack Obama worked there as a financial researcher after graduating from Columbia University. In 1986, Business International was acquired by the Economist Group in London, and it eventually merged with the Economist Intelligence Unit. Business International was linked to the Central Intelligence Agency…A 1977 New York Times article mentioned Business International as one of the lesser known of 22 news organizations found to have employed journalists who were also working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).^[8][a] Elliott Haynes ‘said his father, Eldridge Haynes, had provided cover for four C.I.A. employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.’^[8]“

According to “The SCIF“:

President Obama, as well as his mother, father, step-father and grandmother were connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, possibly explaining why the President praises the “Agency” and declines to prosecute its officials for their crimes, because they were all involved in them as well.

Obama’s mother Ann Dunham worked on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development(USAID), and the Ford Foundation. The East-West Center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., arrived in Hawaii from Kenya as part of a CIA program to identify and train Africans who would be useful to the Agency in its Cold War operations against the Soviets, Madsen says. Obama Sr. divorced Ms. Dunham in 1964. Ms. Dunham married Lolo Soetoro the following year, a man Madsen says assisted in the violent CIA coup against Indonesian President Sukarno that claimed a million lives.

“Madsen” is most likely Wayne Madsen, editor of waynemadsenreport.com, an online publication more than 20 years old, who has reportedly written for dozens of publications and outlets over a long journalism career.

Madsen is author of “The Manufacturing of a President” published in 2014, whose Amazon introduction reads:

This book covers Barack H. Obama, Jr’s rapid rise in American politics and the role that the Cia played in propelling him into the White House. Research is based on formerly classified Cia and State Department files, personal interviews, and international investigations. Obama’s birth certificate has never been the issue. The real issue, which affects his eligibility to serve as President of the United States, is his past and likely current Indonesian citizenship. The reader will be taken through the labyrinth of covert Cia operations in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and other regions. The real history of President Obama, his family, and the Cia quickly emerges as the reader wades into the murky waters of America’s covert foreign operations.

According to columnist William Blum, writing for Foreign Policy Journal in 2012:

In his autobiography, Dreams From My Fathers, Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations” in New York City, and his functions as a “research assistant” and “financial writer”.

Oddly, Obama doesn’t mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of October 30, 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.[1]

…In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say exactly when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)[4] — it’s reasonable to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

Adding to the wonder is the fact that his mother, Ann Dunham, had been associated during the 1970s and 80s — as employee, consultant, grantee, or student — with at least five organizations with intimate CIA connections during the Cold War: The Ford Foundation, Agency for International Development (AID), the Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives, Inc., and the East-West Center of Hawaii.[5] Much of this time she worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Hawaii, being in good position to gather intelligence about local communities.

The SCIF further wrote in its post:

Obama’s mother taught English for USAID, which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia.

That USAID was a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos was admitted by its administrator Dr. John Hannah on Metromedia News. The organization was also a cover for the CIA in Indonesia.

Ms. Dunham worked in Indonesia at a time when Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities(MUCIA), a group that included the University of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Minnesota and Indiana, and was accused of being a front for CIA activities in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Toward the end of the post, The SCIF wrote, “This is only the tip of the iceberg and the whole picture. Barack Obama’s future and present role was to infiltrate the U.S. government as president as the United States and destroy the country from within, one institution at a time which he was almost completely successful at.”

Below the commentary is a 20-minute embedded video from the account’s Rumble channel beginning with a review of the 1965 “coup” in Indonesia in which the nation’s first president, “nationalist” Sukarno, was deposed in favor of Suharto.

Obama’s mother allegedly participated in Indonesian internal affairs by collecting intelligence for the CIA while she was married to Lolo Soetoro and reportedly working in her chosen field of anthropology.

At 4:08 in the video, the speakers appear on-screen with their names in each lower-left corner, though difficult to decipher. Some of the footage appears to originate with PressTV, an Iranian outlet with which Madsen was reportedly associated.

At 7:34, the speakers are identified as Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert.

Hunley is host of “Unstructured,” a podcast which seeks to “chat with people who are changing the world around them, through teaching, creating, or just living as an example.”

Groubert, a multi-faceted film producer and investigative journalist, was a one-time editor of National Lampoon, his bio states.

According to Groubert (Warning: strong language), Soetoro was a “colonel to a guy named Suharto, who’s a general in Sukarno’s military in Indonesia…Sukarno is like the ‘Nasser‘ of Indonesia; he’s a nationalist who’s playing both sides of the coin. He’s the first democratically-elected leader of Indonesia…so we (the U.S.) are backing Sukarno…”

“Obama’s mother taught English for USAID, which was a major cover for CIA activities in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia,” The SCIF further wrote in Tuesday’s post. “That USAID was a cover for CIA covert operations in Laos was admitted by its administrator Dr. John Hannah on Metromedia News. The organization was also a cover for the CIA in Indonesia.”

One of the second Trump administration’s earliest efforts was to largely defund USAID, place its operation under State Department purview, and promote “trade over aid” with countries USAID previously supported.

The SCIF reported Dunham-Soetoro as “on assignment” in Indonesia.

Hunley and Groubert record a regular podcast under Hunley’s “Unstructured” and “America’s Untold Stories” series. A related video the The SCIF’s featured broadcast can be viewed here.