The Obama recruitment thesis
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The Obama recruitment thesis is John Kiriakou's account of how Barack Obama came to govern as he did, a reading he says he has been very public about, and which he offers in preference to the claim that Obama was a CIA creation.

The argument

What Kiriakou thinks happened begins with the raw material: a very junior, first-term senator with no exposure to national security and no experience of it at all. That, he says, is exactly the kind of young new president the CIA wants.

The mechanism is briefing rather than conspiracy. As soon as such a president sees his first blue-border or black-border report, something so many levels above top secret that officers cannot even keep track, and as soon as he is brought into his first super-secret operation, they have him hooked, and have essentially recruited him.

Kiriakou believes that is exactly what happened to Obama, who campaigned as an outsider on clean government and transparency: as soon as they brought him into the club, they had him.

The two quotations

For evidence Kiriakou points to a book published in 2014 by two reporters from Time magazine and MSNBC, who had written a book on the 2008 election and then a follow-up on 2012. Obama had agreed to be interviewed for it, so the quotations came, in Kiriakou's phrase, right from the horse's mouth.

Two of them he calls really chilling. First: I never told anybody I was a liberal, which Kiriakou found simply fascinating. Second: I never had any idea I would be so good at killing people, which Kiriakou says referred to the drone programme.

What the quotations tell him is that this is not how Obama went into his presidency; it is how he changed once he became president.

What he rejects

Kiriakou declines the stronger versions of the claim put to him. Told that a guest had described one of Obama's early employers as a classic CIA front operation, he answered that the agency does not do things like that, that this is the stuff of movies and fiction books, and simply not how it works.

Asked whether he saw anything suspect in Obama's parents, their travels and their associations, he said no, on the ground that this would require a plot beginning with the man's birth: he does not know anybody that smart or that good, able to carry a conspiracy from birth all the way to the presidency.

See also

- Barack Obama
- Tuesday morning kill list
- False flags are too hard
- Espionage Act
