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.[1]
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.[1][2] That, he says, is exactly the kind of young new president the CIA wants.[2]
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.[2][3]
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.[3]
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.[3][4]
Two of them he calls really chilling. First: I never told anybody I was a liberal — which Kiriakou found simply fascinating.[4] Second: I never had any idea I would be so good at killing people, which Kiriakou says referred to the drone programme.[4][5]
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.[5]
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.[5][6]
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.[6][7]