Barack Obama’s employment as an editor for CIA front Business International Corporation (BIC) after his graduation from Columbia University in 1983, came at a time when such small business and political risk consulting firms were mushrooming and their ranks growing with retired senior CIA personnel. The expansion of BIC and similar firms in the early 1980s also came at a time when major corporations were phasing out their internal risk departments and relying more on companies like BIC.
However, Obama’s contacts with the CIA came earlier than his work for BIC. Obama’s attendance at Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1981 is significant considering the college’s close ties with the CIA. Occidental’s President, Richard C. Gilman, who retired in 1988, was a habitué of Los Angeles’s version of New York’s Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council (WAC). As a director of the WAC, Gilman rubbed shoulders with fellow WAC directors John McCone, a former CIA director; Simon Ramo, chairman of top CIA contractor TRW, Inc.; and the wealthy oil magnate Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum, himself no stranger to intelligence-oriented intrigue.
Occidental was, for many years, a top target for CIA recruiting efforts. WMR has obtained a CIA memorandum, formerly Secret and dated February 8, 1967, that details the CIA’s “100 Universities Program,” which, as stated by the author, “originally conceived [redacted] as a recruitment technique. Its purpose was to make better known on the campuses of America the very existence of the CIA and its mission and role in Government, to illustrate the vast range of vocational opportunities in the Agency.”
A formerly Secret CIA memorandum for the Deputy Director for Administration from the acting Director of Personnel, dated February 8, 1979, discusses an active CIA recruitment effort at Occidental College on February 1, 1979. Obama reportedly attended Occidental later in 1979. The memo states, “[redacted] our [redacted[ recruiter, reports that he briefed approximately seventy students at Occidental College in Los Angeles on 1 February and was very well received. He added that while they did not interrupt his presentation, about fifteen to twenty members of the Socialist Democratic Alliance demonstrated outside as he spoke and that their chanting of "CIA, go Away" could be heard. Larry also reported that the seventy attending his briefing was the largest number ever to attend a briefing at the school by an employer." A burning question is whether "Larry" ever tried to recruit a young Barack Obama, Jr. at Occidental and whether he was successful at the enthusiastically pro-CIA campus in 1979.
