August 30-31, 2010 -- SPECIAL REPORT. The Story of Obama: All in the Company. Part V -- final report in a five-part series
publication date: Aug 28, 2010

August 30-31, 2010 --
SPECIAL REPORT. The Story of Obama: All in the Company. Part V -- final report in a five-part series
In this, the last of a five-part series on how Barack Obama, Jr. is a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, WMR delves into the behavior modification, creative leadership, and phenomenological research programs that were at full throttle while Obama was an employee of CIA front Business International Corporation (BIC).
In 1984, while Obama was working as an editor at BIC in Manhattan, CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert Gates, who Obama retained as his Secretary of Defense from the Bush administration, renamed the CIA's Political Psychology Division the Political Psychology Center (PPC) and transferred the group from the Office of Global Issues (OGI) to the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR).
The CIA's political psychology program is directly linked to its overall psychological and behavioral science programs. In fact, the CIA continues to send CIA officers for training to the Stanford Institute for Political Psychology program at Stanford University. Stanford and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) figure prominently in the CIA behavioral science and modification programs that enabled Barack Obama to hurdle into political office.
A CIA memorandum from the chief of OSWR/PPC to the Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence, dated 1984, reqiests that a consultant member of the PPC's Senior Behavioral Science Panel be permitted to publish an unclassified paper prepared by the PPC at the University of Chicago. At the time of Gates's push for political psychology programs at the CIA, Obama was working on the very same psychological-propaganda "journalism" projects at BIC, a CIA front. The paper in question sought to depict Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini as intent on bringing down "'Western' supported regimes and to establish in their place one 'united Islamic Nation' guided by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini." The paper suggests Khomeini would accomplish his goals by stirring up the Shi'a populations of "Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iraq" and maintain "the Gulf and the Arab world in a state of crisis."
The CIA's push for political action on the international and domestic media is seen in a formerly SECRET/SENSITIVE agenda for a meeting on "Political Action," dated August 5, 1982 and attended by Secretary of State George Schultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, CIA Director William Casey, US Information Agency director Charles Wick, and National Security Adviser William Clark.
The CIA's Project MOCKINGBIRD, developed under the aegis of Cord Meyer, was a Cold War-era program designed to influence the foreign and domestic media and its successor programs governed the CIA's use of BIC journalists, of which Obama was one, to push propaganda and disinformation at home and abroad. With the approval of the new Political Action doctrine by the Reagan administration, there was a major push to use companies like BIC and other private sector operations to push U.S. propaganda abroad. The cover for the Reagan administration had to be in the private sector for, as the memo states, "Obviously as a government we cannot and should not simply emulate Soviet methods. Nor will our political parties be able in the foreseeable future to play the international role of European parties. But there is much that we can do."
The memo states that there should be a private sector campaign to challenge the Soviets abroad and states that "even the New York Times" supported such an effort. The private sector propaganda effort was called PROJECT TRUTH and its details are outlined in a formerly Confidential memorandum from Wick to Clark dated April 23, 1982.
A major propaganda effort against the Soviets, using U.S. and foreign private -- unions, parties, youth, church, business, etc. -- and public persons and elements, is described. Particular targets for the initiative included the May 13-16 Bilderberg meeting in Norway, the Fall UN General Assembly meeting, the April 28 Washington meeting of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations, and a contrivance known as "International Afghanistan Day."
The Reagan national security team was clearly intent, using cut-outs like BIC and others, to increase the U.S. "ability to generate political initiatives and conduct political campaigns, using overt and covert resources and combining government and private efforts here and abroad."
The CIA, Business International Corporation, Looking Glass, and nurturing future leadership
CIA files indicate the PPC was partially involved with a project called LOOKING GLASS, which involved a group of CIA and top business officials whose mission included "cultivating talent" from an early age.
WMR has obtained an agenda from the "Conference on Cultivating Talent" held in Greensboro, North Carolina from January 17-18, 1984, and co-sponsored by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). CCL was founded in 1970 by H. Smith Richardson, founder of the Vick Chemical Company.
Among the participants were the CIA's director of training and education, former National Security Agency (NSA) director Admiral Noel Gayler, and William Verity, Jr., the former chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a director at BIC in Manhattan. Gayler also served as Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii from 1972 to 1976, succeeding Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., the father of Obama's 2008 challenger, Senator John S. McCain III of Arizona.
Verity, who was also chairman of Armco steel corporation, later succeeded Malcolm Baldrige, Jr. as Secretary of Commerce in the Reagan administration. Verity became Commerce Secretary after Baldrige died in a freak rodeo accident in California. During his directorship at BIC, Verity also served on the boards of Eli Lilly and Chase Manhattan Bank, as well as serving as chairman of the board of trustees of Ford's Theater in Washington, DC.
Most of the CCL participants at the two-day conference were behavioral scientists. In our previous report on Obama and the CIA, WMR revealed that CIA director Richard Helms considered the University of Hawaii, the alma mater of Obama's mother and father, as one of five top centers for the CIA's behavioral science research work. The others were MIT, Yale, University of Michigan, and UCLA.
Speaking at the CCL conference, in addition to Verity, were Billie L. Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd., an international consultancy. Alban was a core faculty member at UCLA and previously served on the staff of the Tavistock Institute in London. Currently, she teaches at Columbia University. Part of Alban's biography held in CIA archival files, which states her clients included the CIA-linked Bankers Trust, is redacted. Today, CCL's board of governors includes faculty members from Columbia and Harvard universities.
Verity was joined at the conference by two executives of Armco. One cartoon from the conference found in the CIA archives depicts two men with one pointing to a group of people representing the bottom rungs of society and exclaiming, "There is the raw material for a new, dynamic world!" The presence of Verity of BIC at the conference attended by the CIA's chief of education and training raises the specter of BIC's role in supplying "raw material" from its ranks, individuals like Obama, for the CIA's "new, dynamic world."
The CIA and Tavistock
Also known as the "Freud Hilton," Tavistock has long been involved in brainwashing techniques and CIA work since its foundation. The institute also has links to the Harvard Psychology Clinic, the CIA, and Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major contractor for CIA psychic warfare activities in the 1970s and 80s. Alban told the 1984 CCL seminar, "talent should be nurtured and developed for tomorrow not today. If one focuses on today's requirements, by the time talents are nurtured one will find they are the talents required of yesterday. The focus must be visionary and look to the needs of the future."
The Tavistock Institute has long been linked with the CIA's MK-ULTRA and Projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE mind control and brain-washing operations, conducted by the CIA's top scientist for such matters, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Much of the records about MK-ULTRA and other CIA programs was destroyed on the order of Helms in 1972. BLUEBIRD documents describe what the CIA was trying to accomplish with behavioral modification in the early 1950s: "Can we 'alter' a person’s personality? Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs?" In other words, the movie "The Manchurian Candidate," was not purely a fictional account within the CIA's research and scientific community.
Considering Obama's penchant for homosexual encounters in Chicago and Washington, DC, the question of a continuation of Gottlieb's OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX continues to the present day. A sub-program of MK-ULTRA, MIDNIGHT EXPRESS employed prostitutes in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City to lure targeted individuals into CIA safehouses where they would then be plied with drugs like LSD. They would then be tested for their susceptibility to sexual blackmail. The program was "officially" halted in 1966, but the continuing use of prostitutes by the CIA for blackmail purposes has been verified to WMR by workers in the sex industry.
Twelve pages in the CIA's director for training and education's January 25, 1984, report to the deputy director for administration remain classified to this day, but in a hand written note on the CIA transmittal sheet, he states "I think you will find Tab B to be very interesting." The deputy director for administration replies, also in a handwritten note, "I did -- though I don't [subscribe]? to call the community on Tab C."
Tab B is the training and education director's comments to the CCL. The talking points include:
"- Pleased to be invited to participate and to exchange ideas on the cultivating and nurturing of talent.
- Our recent visibility has been both an asset and a liability in this regard. More people know of the CIA and its activities than when I joined (tell the labor union story), and this attracts some good people. By the same token, it brings out the weird ones.
- We have an exceptional screening process involving security investigation, testing, (assessment - OSS-CCL) psychological screening, medical review, interviewing, polygraph, etc. (and a long processing time!) [Ed. note: it cannot be determined if this reference is to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA or the CIA's Special Security Office. CCL, however, appears to indicate a past and on-going relationship between the CIA and the Center for Creative Leadership.]
- So, the pepole who come to us are, for the most part, exceptionally talented, thoroughly screened, and represent a real challenge for us to stretch, nurture and retain.
- Eventually reach the point where at least some people are identified early on as having high potential for senior agency-wide positions and are consciously developed toward that end.
CIA university recruitment the year Obama graduated from Columbia
A September 11, 1984 memo to Dan Carlin, the assistant director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) from the CIA's executive assistant/executive director to director William Casey points out the academia sources for the past year's CIA undergraduate recruits. Two recruits came from Columbia University. Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983 after reportedly studying under Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security Adviser to President Carter. The chairman of the PFIAB at the time of the stepped-up CIA college recruiting campaign was Anne Armstrong, the Ford administration's ambassador to London from 1976 to 1977 and a major backer of George H.W. and George W. Bush. A one-time board member of Halliburton, Armstrong was a mentor for Karl Rove when she served as co-chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1971 to 1973.
By way of comparison, one undergraduate was recruited from Harvard, one from Occidental College (where Obama attended before transferring to Columbia), one from Claremont Men's College, one from Pepperdine. Topping the list are five each from Georgetown and Dartmouth. Graduate recruits include one from Harvard Law, where Obama attended law school after his "community service" work in Chicago; three from the University of Michigan (one of Helms's favored behavioral science research campuses), and, trumpeting other graduate schools, American University in Washington, with five new recruits.
CIA archival records also indicate an on-going relationship between Obama's former college, Occidental, and the CIA in 1983. A MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour transcript shows a guest, Lawrence Caldwell of Occidental, as having been a scholar in residence at the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis for two years.
Behavioral science, the CIA, and SRI
A formerly Secret NOFORN [not releasable to foreign nationals] proposal for the CIA, dated December 31, 1992, and prepared for the CIA by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) describes in great detail the agency's behavioral science programs, which included anomalous cognition (AC) and anomalous perturbation (AP). AC is defined as "the awareness of information that is considered otherwise shielded from all known sensory channels" and AP is "the perturbation of physical matter under conditions of complete physical and sensorial isolation."
The document states that research into both field began in 1973 with the CIA engaged in such research and was followed by U.S. military service and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) research with SRI through fiscal year 1990. The document also states "beginning in 1986, the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) [Fort Detrick, Maryland] initiated the first coordinated long-term examination of AC and AP phenomenon."
SAIC proposed to conduct various research projects for the CIA are similar to some of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and other CIA "black sites" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The experiments, conducted by SRI since 1974, included exposing individuals to flashing light or no light to discover how their central nervous systems reacted to the visual stimuli. Experiment subjects were fitted with EEGs (electroencephalogram) monitors to measure their reaction to the flashing light stimuli. Part of the SAIC proposal remains redacted.
A sub-contractor to SAIC was the Lucidity Institute of Napa, California, founded in 1987 by Dr. Stephen LaBerge for the conduct of "research on lucid dreams and to help people learn to use them to enhance their lives. Lucid dreaming means dreaming while knowing that one is dreaming and allows people to consciously guide the direction of their dreams." Ironically, one of this summer's blockbuster movies, "Inception," dealt with the subject of invading people's dreams to steal secrets. Leonardo DeCaprio plays a secretive agent named Dorn Cobb who is an "extractor" agent operating in the para-psychological dream invasion program. What may be fiction in Hollywood was far from it in the CIA research with SAIC, SRI, and the Lucidity Institute.
One of the methods used by the SRI and SAIC program to determine "the differences between effective and ineffective liars" was called the Q-Sort technique. The technique was used to separate "highly talented" individuals in test "clusters."
The paragraph on the intelligence applications of anomalous cognition is 90 percent redacted from the SAIC proposal as are at least three reference works cited in the document. Academic institutions involved in the project included, in addition to SRI, Stanford University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, and UCLA (one of Helms's favorite CIA behavioral science research centers).
The CIA-SAIC-SRI project principals had either worked at or attended the Biofeedfack Institute of San Francisco; SAIC; Yale (another of Helms's favored research centers); Columbia University; Harvard; Bellevue Hospital in New York; the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the Stanford Hypnosis Research Laboratory; Carnegie-Mellon University; MIT (another one of Helms's favored behavioral science centers); the World Bank; the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; University of Minnesota; the Brain Research Institute; the Behavioral Research Foundation of St. Kitts, West Indies; the Tavistock Institute in London; the A.K. Rice Institute of Rainier, Washington, an off-shoot of the Tavistock Institute; Sleep Disorders Clinic, Provo, Utah; Neurology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland; Tibetan government-in-exile, Dharamsala, India; U.S. Veterans Administration; University of Wisconsin-Madison; US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC; and perhaps, most interestingly, the University of Hawaii (also designated by Helms as one of the CIA's favored behavioral science research centers and where two of the principals involved in the SAIC-CIA project had an affiliation).
The research director for the CIA-SAIC program was Dr. Edwin C. May, an internationally-recognized parapsychology expert who is the executive director for the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research in Palo Alto, California. May was a lead researcher for the CIA's STARGATE remote viewing and ESP project until it was closed down in 1995. WMR has previously reported that the program moved from the CIA to the National Security Agency and involved research carried out with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia, south of Charlottesville The Monroe Institute was also heavily involved in the STARGATE program. The current research is also linked to the Parapsychology Foundation of New York City.
Other members of the team included a retired Army Major General who now specializes in human bionics a radio astrophysicist; an expert who maintains that sexual orientation may be influenced by experiences in childhood; a counselor for survivors of the People's Temple cult of Reverend Jim Jones (itself linked to a CIA MK-ULTRA behavioral modification and mind control operation); a current specialist with the Farsight Institute of Atlanta, a remote viewing research center; a neuro-linguistic programming expert; a toxicology specialist; a principal of the Pentagon's PANDORA project on the use of electro-magnetic weapons to roboticize human beings; an expert in the imaging and computer mapping of the human brain; an inventor of the cochlear implant; an expert on the mass popular opposition of Okinawans to the U.S. military presence on the island; a future warfare expert for the Pentagon and member of the National Security Agency Scientific Advisory Board and Defense Intelligence Agency Scientific Advisory Committee; a former Army Undersecretary for acquisition; a Defense Intelligence Agency psi-tech officer who worked on electro-magnetic weaponry for battlefield psychological purposes -- PROJECT SLEEPING BEAUTY -- who worked with another Army Intelligence psi-tech officer who was partially the inspiration for the movie "Men Who Stare At Goats;" a specialist on the brainwashing techniques, including sleep deprivation, by the North Koreans on American prisoners of war and the Church of Scientology who was an expert witness on the brainwashing techniques of the Symbionese Liberation Army on heiress Patty Hearst; and, lastly, a University of Hawaii-linked specialist on the psychological effects of prison and prison brutality on prisoners who later defended, as an expert witness, one of the prison guards at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.
The presence of a Jonestown de-programmer on the CIA-SAIC team in noteworthy. On August 31, 2007, WMR reported: "During the time of the Jonestown massacre, the People's Temple's ship, the 'Cudjoe,' was en route to Trinidad with members of the Temple on board. Temple members soon set up operations in Trinidad and Grenada, where [Prime Minister Eric] Gairy, a CIA client, who, in a 1977 speech before the UN General Assembly, called for the UN to establish an Agency for Psychic Research into Unidentified Flying Objects and the Bermuda Triangle, was in charge. According to the Oakland Tribune, the St. George's University Medical School in Grenada had on its staff one Dr. Peter Bourne, the son of the university's vice chancellor Sir Geoffrey Bourne. Peter Bourne is a graduate of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), where he studied the psychological effects of stress on those in combat. He also served one year in Vietnam as the head of the Army's psychiatric research team. Bourne later became an Assistant UN Secretary General and an adviser to then-Congressman Bill Richardson. It was under the guise of rescuing American medical students at the university, that the Reagan administration launched a 1983 invasion to overthrow Bernard Coard, who had ousted and executed Bishop in a coup. Both Bournes said the medical students were never in any danger. [Some believe that author Robert Ludlum got the idea for CIA mind-controlled assassins in his novel "The Bourne Identity" and its sequels from Geoffrey Bourne's work.]
The Jonestown connection to the U.S. war in Southeast Asia does not end there. The U.S. ambassador to Guyana at the time of the Jonestown massacre was John Burke, who served with his Deputy Chief of Mission Richard Dwyer, were allegedly working for the CIA in Bangkok during the Vietnam war. Dwyer was wounded in the Port Kaituma shootings where [Representative Leo] Ryan and the others were killed. On Sept. 27, 1980, Jack Anderson reported that Dwyer was a CIA agent and a friend of Jones. Anderson reported that on one of the tapes made during the mass suicide Jones was heard saying, 'Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him.' Dwyer reportedly left Guyana for Grenada after the massacre. The US Consular Officer at the embassy in Georgetown, Guyana was Richard McCoy, who allegedly liaised with Jim Jones and was a U.S. Air Force intelligence official. Another alleged CIA employee, operating under State Department cover, was Dan Webber, who also visited the Jonestown the day after the massacre. Joe Holsinger, Ryan's assistant and friend, later said that he believed that Jonestown was a massive mind control experiment and that the CIA and military intelligence was involved in the program."
The nexus of Obama's almae matres: Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, as well as that of his parents, the University of Hawaii, in the CIA's mind control, behavioral modification, and mass hypnosis projects is deeply troubling. The fact that Obama has failed to provide a full accounting of his past academic and professional employment history, coupled with the presence of a major CIA presence within his and his parents', grandparents', and step-father's backgrounds opens up the real possibility that Obama was, to use the CIA's own term, "nurtured," for a higher calling. Obama told the nation that his would be the most open and transparent in recent recent history. However, Obama's biography and those of his parents and guardians are full of more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese. It is well past time for the President to make good on that promise and fully release his past academic, passport, employment, and overseas travel records.
After eight brutal years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the nation was ready for any change. Unfortunately, the CIA, through LOOKING GLASS, MK-ULTRA, ARTICHOKE, PANDORA, and other behavioral science programs were ready to answer the call. The CIA answered the call with Obama and most of us bought him and his "Hope and Change" propaganda fecundity "nurtured" by CIA programs going back some sixty years.