The original deception was carried out simply to give an inconvenient offspring an ID. He wouldn't have known about it until after high school. Poor fella thought his father was the black native from Kenya and his mother was SAD, he believed the Dunham elders were his grandparents.
Can't ask him because he's RIP, but Frank Marshall Davis knew who he was, and it was probably Frank who told him. From that time on, his entire demeanour changed. He became bitter. So would you, if you had been lied to, to that extent.
The real deception began when he met up with William Ayres at the Bank Street School, where both Genevieve Cook and Ayres were teaching. Zero says he was at Columbia, and sleeping on a fire escape until Hal Siddiqi found them both accommodation.
What an opportunity that was for Ayres, the failed terrorist, who bragged One day we will have the Presidency of the United States of America...with drawings of Malcolm X all over his office door.
The fact that the elder Ayres, who was on the Board of The Bank Street School paid for zero's education at the time, was the subject of the story told by Mr Hulton. I posted that on THIS THREAD.
William Ayres was zero's Svengali.