Obama’s Russia Problem: Obama's Links to Soviet-era Spy Rings and Terrorist Networks

Since Obama has raised the alarm about alleged Russian espionage activity, it’s appropriate to shine a spotlight on his own administration’s connections to Soviet-era spy rings and terrorist networks. Obama and two of his key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, were raised by families with members who are known either to have been in contact with Soviet agents or to have belonged to the Communist Party (CP) at a time when the CP was controlled by the Soviet Union. Associates of Obama’s campaign team and Jarrett’s family interacted with agents linked to the famous pair of spy rings known as the Golos-Bentley Network and the Soble Apparatus, identified in Soviet diplomatic cablegrams intercepted by U.S. Army intelligence during World War II and deciphered by the NSA’s Venona Project. In addition, individuals who played a pivotal role in Obama’s rise to power belonged to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO or Weathermen), a terrorist group that had been trained by Soviet and Cuban intelligence and Vietcong representatives. Others belonged to the Committees of Correspondence (CoC), a spinoff of the original CP that emerged after the Soviet Union broke up.

[NOTE: These arrows are visual aids meant to help the reader follow a complex discussion of how Obama’s social network intersects with Soviet-era Communist and espionage networks, but they do not imply that every individual along a given pathway was or is involved in Communist or espionage activity, except where specifically indicated in the text of the article.]

Barack Obama -> Stanley Ann Dunham -> Stanley Armour Dunham -> Frank Marshall Davis -> Communist Party (CP) -> Soviet Union

Barack Obama -> Frank Marshall Davis -> Gerald Kellman -> Thomas Ayers -> Bill Ayers -> Weather Underground Organization -> Cuban and Soviet intelligence and Vietcong

Obama campaign logo -> David Axelrod -> Sol Sender -> Margolins -> Silvermaster group -> Golos-Bentley network -> Soviet KGB

Barack Obama -> Valerie Jarrett -> James Bowman -> Robert Rochon Taylor -> Alfred Stern -> Soble apparatus -> Soviet KGB

Valerie Jarrett -> Vernon Jarrett (CP) -> Frank Marshall Davis (CP) -> Soviet Union

Michelle Robinson (Obama) -> Susan Sher -> Valerie Jarrett -> Harold Washington/Richard M. Daley -> Richard J. Daley -> Thomas Ayers

Barack Obama -> Project Vote -> Betty Lu Saltzman -> Marilyn Katz -> Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq -> Carl Davidson -> Committees of Correspondence (CP spinoff)

Barack Obama -> David Axelrod -> Mode Project -> Sol Sender -> Victor Margolin -> Benjamin and Olya Margolin -> Silvermaster group -> Golos-Bentley network -> Soviet KGB

To set this discussion in context, some preliminaries will be helpful. The numerous Soviet connections to Obama’s administration that will be elaborated below are best understood in the context of Obama’s lifelong association with Marxism. Obama was introduced to Marxism by the woman who raised him, Stanley Ann Dunham, through her father, Stanley Armour Dunham. Stanley Ann Dunham had a curious relationship with both the Communist Party and U.S. government institutions associated with the CIA.

In 1955, the Dunham family had moved to Seattle, Washington. Communism had a bigger impact on Washington than on any other state, rooted in the appeal of Marxism to laborers in the state’s logging and shipping industries. German intelligence supported International Workers of the World (IWW) labor strikes in Washington during World War I. After the war, the IWW and the Socialist Party formed the nucleus of the Communist Party (CP), which quickly became entrenched. An attempted state purge of Communists began in 1947, prompting the 1948 Canwell Committee hearings by the state’s Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. The hearings included an investigation of CP influence at the University of Washington. This influence extended to the high school level of Seattle’s educational system. In the late 1920s and 1930s, future actress Frances Farmer was indoctrinated into Communism while attending West Seattle High School.

The Dunham family arranged a similar upbringing for Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. The FBI maintained a file on Stanley Armour Dunham, which was destroyed in 1997, researcher Cliff Kincaid was told when he attempted to obtain the file. Stanley Armour Dunham enrolled his family at East Shore Unitarian Church, known as the Little Red Church on the Hill, where Communist Party member John Stenhouse was church president, and where members debated topics such as admitting Communist China into the UN. Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from My Father mentioned that attendance at East Shore Unitarian was Stanley Armour Dunham’s “only skirmish into organized religion”, but he later claimed in a 2006 speech that the Dunhams were “non-practicing Baptists and Methodists”.

By the time the Dunhams began attending East Shore Unitarian in 1956, the family had moved from Seattle to the suburb of Mercer Island so that Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island High School. At the time, Stenhouse, who was also Mercer Island School Board chairman, was under pressure to resign after testifying in 1955 to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that he had been a Communist Party member. But while other families were calling for Stenhouse’s resignation, the Dunhams decided to move to Mercer Island specifically to send Stanley Ann to Mercer Island High School. There, she gravitated towards a wing of the school known as “anarchist alley”, where philosophy teacher Jim Wichterman taught students The Communist Manifesto next to the room where English teacher Val Foubert guided students through Margaret Mead’s writings on homosexuality. Wichterman recalled Dunham asking questions such as, “What’s wrong with communism?” Her best friend Maxine Box recalled that Dunham was a vocal atheist.

In 1960, the Dunhams moved to Hawaii, where Stanley Armour insisted that Stanley Ann attend the University of Hawaii. There she took a Russian foreign language course and met Barack Obama, Sr., the school’s first African student. She wrote her friend Susan Blake in spring 1961 that she had been married and was expecting a baby, according to Blake; no official record of the marriage has been found to date. After Barack Jr. was born in August 1961, Stanley Ann moved back and forth between Seattle and Honolulu over the next couple years, visiting Blake in Seattle in late August 1961 and enrolling at the University of Washington from September 1961 to June 1962. She enrolled at the University of Hawaii in the spring semester of 1963 and began attending the East-West Center, a State Department-funded educational center designed to promote exchange between American and Asian culture. This would begin a long series of associations between Stanley Ann and institutions affiliated with the U.S. government.

At the East-West Center, Stanley Ann began a relationship with Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, whom she married in 1965 (according to her passport, which contradicts Obama’s claim of 1967 in Dreams from My Father). After completing her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics (according to the University of Hawaii, in contrast to other reports ascribing her a B.A. in anthropology), she and Barack moved to Indonesia to live with Soetoro in 1967. From 1968 to 1969, Stanley Ann taught English while serving as the assistant director of the Lembaga Persahabatan Indonesia Amerika (Indonesia-America Friendship Institute).

The institute was subsidized by the U.S. government with support from United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the administration responsible for administering civilian foreign aid, which frequently served as a cover for CIA activity. During the 1950s, the CIA had been operating in Indonesia through the joint Harvard-MIT Modjokuto Project, conceived by Harvard anthropologist Douglas Oliver (who moved to the University of Hawaii in 1969) and led by then-Harvard graduate student Clifford Geertz; and the Modern Indonesia Project, directed by Cornell scholar George McTurnan Kahin (George McT. Kahin). Both projects were funded by the Ford Foundation, a primary funding source for CIA covert operations. One way the CIA used these projects was deploying anthropologists to collect information on Communist activity in Indonesia. However, Communists could also divert such projects to their own ends. For instance, Modern Indonesia Project director Kahin had been guided towards Indonesian studies by alleged Soviet agent Owen Lattimore, and used his expertise to promote Soviet anti-colonial policies in Indonesia and Vietnam. Vietnamese Communists also used meetings in Indonesia to network with American antiwar groups, gathering in Jakarta in 1965 to form the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam (COLIFAM, aka COL), a group cochaired by Cora Rubin Weiss, a future collaborator of Obama associate Bill Ayers.

Apart from a return to Hawaii from 1972 to 1975 to complete her Master’s degree in anthropology, Stanley Ann remained in Indonesia for most of the rest of her life until her death in 1995. She often worked for other projects affiliated with USAID and the Ford Foundation. During her years in Indonesia, she encountered Subud, an Indonesian-based spiritual movement that Geertz had discussed in his 1960 book on Indonesian religion, The Religion of Java. Subud is centered around a spiritual training exercise called latihan. It was sometimes used as a cover for CIA activity in Indonesia. A photograph of Subud’s Jakarta headquarters dated to the 1970s shows a group that appears to include Stanley Ann Dunham. Contacts developed through Subud’s international network would come to play a significant role in Barack Obama’s future.

Meanwhile, in 1970 or 1971, Stanley Ann sent Barack back to Hawaii to live with her parents so that he could attend fifth grade at the prestigious Punahou School, a private preparatory school favored by Hawaii’s upper class. Deciding that Obama needed a black role model, Stanley Armour Dunham promptly introduced nine-year-old Obama to Frank Marshall Davis, a black member of the Communist Party, who would become Obama’s mentor.

Born in 1905, Davis had grown up 50 miles from Dunham in Kansas. After studying journalism in college, he moved to Chicago in 1927 to work in the newspaper business. In 1931, he relocated to Atlanta. There he became interested in Communism through coverage of the Scottsboro Boys trial, where the CP used the trial of nine black teenagers accused of rape to highlight racial discrimination and attract black recruits. Davis became increasingly involved with Communist front groups over the 1930s.

Upon returning to Chicago in 1934, he became a disciple of William L. Patterson, a high-ranking black Communist Party member. Patterson had traveled to the Soviet Union, and he ran the Chicago CP’s training school, the Abraham Lincoln School. In 1944, the FBI became aware that Davis was a CP member and began keeping a file on him, which it maintained until 1963. During that period, Davis was considered dangerous enough that the FBI placed him on its security index of subversives to be detained in the event of a national emergency. Davis remained involved in Communist activity the rest of his life.

In 1948, CP leaders Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges sent Davis to Hawaii, where he made contact with CP leadership. The previous year, governor Ingram Stainback had warned citizens that there was a Communist plot to take over Hawaii, then on the verge of becoming a state. Subsequent investigation led to the firing of John Reinecke, a Farrington High School teacher, and his wife Aiko, a Waialae Elementary School teacher. The Hawaii CP went underground in 1950 and was divided into groups of three for purposes of maintaining a network of secret contacts. Davis was assigned as the leader of one of the groups. He remained in this role until about 1956, when Khrushchev’s speech against Stalin prompted many members to leave the party and the Hawaii CP effectively broke up. The FBI learned of this in 1963, which is why the Bureau stopped actively monitoring Davis as a security risk at that time.

While no longer officially classified as an active security threat, Davis continued to associate with Communists. Meanwhile he pursued his writing career. In 1968 he published a pornographic novel in which he admitted to being a bisexual swinger. For extra income, he sold marijuana and cocaine.

This was the black role model to whom Stanley Armour Dunham introduced nine-year-old Barack Obama in 1970 or 1971. From that time until 1979, Davis served as Obama’s mentor, increasingly so as Obama attended high school. Obama consulted Davis before leaving Hawaii to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979. At Occidental, Obama would publish a poem which graphically describes a gay encounter with “Pop”, identified by some interpreters as Davis.

At Occidental College, Obama became involved in radical student politics, deliberately networking with activist students and professors, as he mentions in his autobiography. In 1981, he joined a student protest against South African apartheid, organized in coordination with the Democratic Socialist Alliance. Alliance cofounder John Drew remembers Obama as a committed Marxist who believed that the economic distress of the Carter administration years would soon trigger a revolution. Drew recalls Obama developing a close relationship with wealthy Marxist Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, whom he and others assumed was Obama’s gay lover based on the way they dressed and behaved. Chandoo’s well-connected family was related to Pakistan founder Ali Jinnah, his mother Gulshan Chandoo being Jinnah’s grand-niece. Obama visited Chandoo’s family in Karachi when he traveled to Indonesia, Pakistan, and India with another Pakistani student, Wahid Hamid, in 1981. In the process of his trip, he met Ahmed Mian Soomro, a member of the Pakistani Senate, later to be Acting President of Pakistan and Chairman of the Senate of Pakistan during Obama’s administration. Stanley Ann Dunham would work in Pakistan from 1987 to 1992, and Obama would return to Pakistan to visit her during this period.

Transferring to Columbia University, Obama continued his activism. In March 1983, he published an article in the student newspaper promoting upcoming anti-nuclear protests by the student activist group Arms Race Alternatives (ARA), and also spotlighting another group, Students Against Militarism (SAM). ARA’s protest was in support of the nuclear Freeze movement, which was infiltrated and supported by Soviet intelligence. SAM networked with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), an organization created in 1980 by El Salvador Communist Party members and Cuban intelligence agents, which worked in coordination the American CP and the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council.

After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama remained in New York for about a year. In summer 1983, he began working as a researcher and writer for Business International Corporation (BIC), a prestigious publishing and advisory firm dedicated to assisting American companies operating abroad. Founded in 1953 by former journalist Eldridge Haynes and his son Elliott Haynes, BIC occasionally served to provide cover for CIA employees. Allegedly, it was also used to recruit CIA members from other countries. Obama worked as a research associate in the company’s financial services division, editing a global reference service called Financing Foreign Operations and writing for a financial newsletter called Business International Money Report. He was responsible for researching market developments and foreign exchange trends, interviewing business experts, writing about currency swaps and leverage leases, and writing financial reports on Mexico and Brazil. Wayne Madsen reported that “an informed source” claimed BIC paid off Obama’s tuition from Columbia.

Obama then worked from February through May of 1985 as an organizer for the City College chapter of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), a group founded by Donald K. Ross. Ross was the coauthor of consumer activist Ralph Nader, a frequent fellow traveler with Communist groups such as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

Moving to Chicago later in 1985, Obama began working for the Development Communities Project (DCP), where he was trained by former antiwar and civil rights organizer Gerald Kellman, an associate of Frank Marshall Davis. Kellman had in turned been trained by Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky, a Communist fellow traveller who had been identified by the FBI as a major security risk after he began organizing race riots around the country. Obama became the DCP’s director.

In 1988, Obama’s DCP joined the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs Coalition), a group which had been formed by Chicagoans United to Reform Education (CURE). CURE’s founders included Thomas Ayers, former chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison. Ayers was a powerful Illinois political figure who had been connected to the machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Ayers’ son Bill was the contact person for the ABCs Coalition.

In the 1970s, Bill Ayers had been a terrorist for the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a revolutionary terrorist group that split off from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was trained in Cuba by Cuban and Soviet intelligence and Vietcong representatives. Ayers worked closely with his future wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who was instrumental in founding a related terrorist group, the Venceremos Brigade (VB). He and Dohrn were wanted by authorities in connection with bombings, riots, and armed robberies, and they spent the latter half of the decade hiding from the FBI. Thomas Ayers used his influence with Daley family to arrange a plea bargain for his son and Dohrn after they emerged from hiding in 1980, following the election of Daley’s son Richard M. Daley as Cook County State’s Attorney. Bill and Bernadine then began working to rejoin the political system. In 1987, Bill got a job teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he would remain until 2010.

In 1994, Bill, Bernadine, and their old radical associate Michael Klonsky, who had formed a Maoist offshoot of SDS, would be listed on a "Membership, Subscription and Mailing List" for the Chicago Committees of Correspondence the Chicago chapter of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC, renamed the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism or CCDS in 2000). CoC was an offshoot of the CP that began forming in 1991 as the Soviet Union broke up. Its official founding conference was held in Chicago in 1994.

Obama’s performance for the ABCs Coalition was successful enough that in 1995, Thomas Ayers hired him to be the first chairman the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a project based on a grant proposal coauthored by Bill Ayers, which distributed funds from the Annenberg Foundation, an endowment left by Philadelphia newspaper publisher Walter Annenberg. Under Obama’s chairmanship, $600,000 of CAC funding went to Klonsky.

Also in 1995, a small group that included Obama gathered at the home of Ayers and Dohrn to hear an announcement that Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer was stepping down to run for Congress, according to long-time Communist fellow traveler Quentin Young, who was present. Palmer had worked with Soviet front groups throughout her early career, and she and her husband Edward “Buzz” Palmer were now on the membership mailing list of the CoC. Palmer announced that Obama would be her successor during the 1995 meeting at Ayers’ house, according to Young. Palmer and Obama then began receiving support from the CoC and other left-wing groups through the New Party, an electoral alliance designed to get radical candiates elected. Palmer and Obama subsequently fell out after she lost her primary run for State Senate and Obama refused to step aside for her to resume her seat.

After Obama won his State Senate seat, he and Ayers served together from 1999 to 2002 together on the board of the Woods Foundation of Chicago, a spinoff of the Woods Charitable Fund established by philanthropist Frank Woods. In 2002, the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife Dohrn worked. Ayers donated to Obama’s political campaigns during that period, and the Woods Fund distributed funds to radical grassroots political organizing network ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which supported Obama’s political activity.

Obama and the Ayers family also shared a cozy relationship with the Northern Trust Bank, where members and associates of the Ayers family sat on the board. Northern Trust extended the Obamas a below-prime-rate home loan, and its members have contributed to Obama’s political campaigns. There are also financial trails connecting the Ayers family to Trinity United Church of Christ, a radical church Obama attended; to the Joyce Foundation, a philanthropy where Obama sat on the board from 1994 to 2002; and to Obama political campaign contribution bundlers Penny Pritzker and Crown family members Lester, Jim, Paula, and Susan Crown.

This background information sets the stage for understanding why Obama’s network came to include individuals associated with Soviet-era spy rings. Two particular spy rings figure into the backstory of Obama’s network: the Golos-Bentley network, which included the Silvermaster group; and the Soble apparatus.

The Golos-Bentley network was one of the major Soviet espionage networks that operated in the United States during World War II. It was named for Jacob Golos, who initially ran it, and his assistant Elizabeth Bentley, who took it over after Golos died of a heart attack in 1943.

Golos, a Ukranian immigrant, had helped found the predecessor of the Communist Party’s American branch in Chicago in 1919, and he worked as an organizer for the Chicago headquarters of the CP in 1922 and 1923. He became a liaison between the CP and the KGB. In 1927, now operating out of New York City, Golos set up a CP-controlled travel agency called World Tourists. Initially set up to subsidize CP’s press operations, World Tourists increasingly began working with the Soviet travel agency Intourist to coordinate propaganda tours of the Soviet Union. One of the functions of World Tourists was providing fake identification documents for Soviet agents. One method used to forge identification was requesting replacement birth certificates for dead babies. Bill Ayers would later use this method to forge identification for WUO members.

In 1941, after World Tourists had become exposed as a Soviet front, Golos set up a second front company, U.S. Shipping and Service Corporation, which subcontracted out to World Tourists.

Bentley joined the CP in 1935 after attending meetings of one of its front groups at Columbia University. Columbia was then an active center of Communist activity under the influence of faculty members such as John Dewey, who had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1928 before becoming disillusioned with Stalin, and Corliss Lamont, a CP financier from a wealthy family. After joining CP at Columbia, Bentley became Golos’ lover, and he began using her as a courier in 1939. Bentley managed U.S. Shipping and Service Corporation for Golos and helped him evade FBI surveillance by meeting with his sources, who were now operating out of Washington, DC. When Golos died in 1943, Bentley continued carrying on his operation.

In 1941, Golos assigned Bentley to take over a CP network that Communist leadership had decided to assign to espionage activity, the Silvermaster group. The Silvermaster group was named after its leader Gregory Silvermaster, an employee of the Department of Agriculture later transferred to the Treasury and Commerce Departments. The Silvermaster group had members throughout various agencies of the Roosevelt administration, including White House aide Lauchlin Currie and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White. Silvermaster group member J. Peters specialized in forging passports for Soviet spies, using methods such as requesting replacement birth certificates for dead babies. Soviet intelligence began directly handling the Silvermaster group in 1944, taking supervision over from Bentley.

One Washington agent of the Silvermaster group was Robert T. Miller, who had been recruited through the CP. Miller had begun working as a Moscow correspondent for an American newspaper in 1934. He then relocated to become a press agent for the Communists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. After the civil war ended, he and an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Jack Fahy, formed Hemispheric News Service to report on Latin American affairs. In this capacity, he spent World War II working for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA, renamed the Office for Inter-American Affairs or OIAA in 1945), a U.S. government agency headed by Nelson Rockefeller to coordinate American intelligence activity in Latin America. After the war, the OCIAA became the basis of the CIA’s Latin American division. Miller’s agency worked out of Washington, DC for the OCIAA, first as a contractor starting in 1941 and eventually as a full subsidiary, using the name Export Information Bureau. Meanwhile, Miller, his wife Jenny, and another OCIAA member at his agency, Joseph Gregg, reported to the Golos-Bentley network for the KGB, while Fahy reported to the GRU, a Soviet military intelligence agency.

Two members of the Silvermaster group were Russian immigrants Benjamin and Olya (Olga) Margolin. Benjamin was an attorney from the New York district attorney’s office who began working for the OCIAA in 1941. At the OCIAA, he worked closely with Miller. After the war, he began a private practice in Washington, periodically returning to government service and also teaching law. Olga died in 1990, while Benjamin lived to 2005.

From Communists to Communes: Red Diaper Babies, the Subud Movement, and Obama’s Campaign Logo

The Margolins’ son Victor studied English and film at Columbia University before eventually earning a doctorate in design history. He edited a book on World War II propaganda techniques in 1976 and completed a dissertation on Soviet propaganda graphic design techniques in 1981. From 1982 to 2005, he taught art and design history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has lectured on art in Cuba and China, and has been interviewed by Felix Beltran, who served as head graphic designer for the Cuban government’s propaganda department. In addition to a University of Illinois address, Margolin’s curriculum vitae lists the same Chicago mailing address (1307 S. Wabash #702) used in the incorporation papers of Subud United States of America (Subud USA), the American branch of the Subud movement.

Subud is an Indonesian-based spiritual movement centered around a spiritual training exercise called latihan. It was sometimes used as a cover for CIA activity during the Indonesian civil war that broke out when a Communist-inspired military insurgency tried to seize power in 1965. A photograph of Subud’s Jakarta headquarters dated to the 1970s shows a group that appears to include Stanley Ann Dunham, the woman who raised Barack Obama. Hawaii State Department of Health Official Loretta J. Fuddy, whose Subud name is “Deliana”, coauthored an academic paper with University of Illinois at Chicago collaborators before she was appointed Subud USA national chairperson from 2006 to 2008 and Hawaii Director of Health in 2011. As Hawaii Director of Health, she authorized the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate. In 2013, Fuddy died in a plane crash off the coast of Hawaii, the only fatality alongside eight survivors.

Victor has been involved in Subud for over 50 years, since he was 22. His wife Sylvia, whose Subud name is Shoshanah, became Subud USA national chairperson in 2012. Sylvia’s Facebook friend Suzanna Dayne is a leader in the World Subud Association (WSA), an international umbrella for Subud registered in Washington, DC; Subud USA is affiliated with WSA. Dayne has organized Subud events and done graphic design work for Subud Worldwide in Jakarta. From 1994 to 1999, Dayne headed the Indonesian branch of Voice of America, working in coordination with USAID. Voice of America and USAID are both frequently used as covers for CIA activity.

The Margolins are listed as donors in the 2006 annual report of the Crossroads Fund, a public foundation that supports community organizations working for social and economic justice in the Chicago area. Also listed as donors in the same report are Victor’s fellow University of Illinois at Chicago faculty member Bill Ayers, along with Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn. The spring 2006 issue of the Crossroads Fund’s newsletter shows Ayers and Dohrn hosting a group of Crossroads Fund donors.

In Chicago and China, Victor Margolin has lectured at events with Chicago graphic designer Sol Sender. Sender designed the Obama 2008 campaign logo for Mode Project, a Chicago motion design studio that had been hired by Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod.

Sender is the grandson of Spanish novelist Ramon J. Sender, who fought for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, where his wife and brother were executed. Ramon J. Sender became an American citizen in 1948 and eventually died in San Diego in 1982.

Sol’s father Ramon Sender, also known as Ramon Sender Barayon, studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music from 1959 to 1962. He then founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, devoted to integrating electronic music into composition. During this period, Barayon was breaking away from involvement with the Woodcrest Community, founded in Rifton, New York by the Bruderhof movement, a branch of the Anabaptist movement that advocated a communistic form of Christian communal living and disregarded U.S. travel bans to Cuba. Disillusioned with this group, Sender drifted towards the Hippy and New Age movements. Sender helped launch the Hippy movement in January 1966 by coproducing Ken Kesey’s seminal Trips Festival. That April, he took up residence at the Morning Star Ranch, a Sonoma County commune run by the Diggers, an anarchist group. There he lived with Subud members Ben and Rain Jacopetti, who were renamed Roland and Alexandra by their Subud master. When Morning Star was closed down, Sender and other residents relocated to the Wheeler Ranch in nearby Occidental, California. At Wheeler Ranch he took up with musician Alicia Bay Laurel, who had been studying Hawaiian music in Maui, where there was a commune called the Banana Patch. Laurel published a book on communal living, which sold out. She and Sender then published a 1973 sequel laying out a guide to making your own religion, titled Being of the Sun. Laurel moved to Maui in 1974, while Sender used proceeds from the book to buy land near the Morning Star and Wheeler ranches, where he initiated people into a religious organization he called the Order of the Morning Star.

The Silvermaster-Margolin-Sender connection is one link between the network used by the KGB in World War II and Obama’s network in Chicago. Another link is through a spy ring known as the Soble apparatus.

The Soble appatus was named after brothers Jack Soble and Robert Soblen (birth name Sobolevicius). Born in Lithuania in 1903, Jack Soble joined the German Communist Party at the age of 18 while attending college in Leipzig. He became a follower of Stalin’s rival Trotsky and was expelled from the party in 1929, but the KGB recruited him in 1931 to infiltrate Trotsky’s network. The German Trotskyists soon caught on to him, but his brother was able to continue spying on the Trotskyists under a fake name, and the KGB gave him other assignments. In 1940, the KGB sent both brothers to America to spy on Trotskyists and other Russian exiles there. Soble’s network also infiltrated the OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) and created business covers for Soviet intelligence operations.

One pair of agents in Soble’s network was Alfred and Martha Stern. Alfred K. Stern was born in 1897 and graduated from Harvard. In 1921, he married Marion Rosenwald, an heiress of the Sears Roebuck fortune, which was being used to fund Communist causes. After the couple had two children together, they divorced in 1936, and Alfred received a million-dollar divorce settlement.

In 1938, Alfred married Martha Dodd, daughter of America’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, William Edward Dodd. Martha had been recruited to the KGB after her father took their family to Berlin in 1933. After the couple married, they began using their wealth and influence to promote left-wing causes.

Alfred and Martha worked with her brother William Edward Dodd, Jr, a former Congressional candidate who belonged to various Communist front groups from 1936 on. William, Jr. worked for the Roosevelt administration in the Works Progress Administration and Federal Communications Commission. In 1939, he was briefly engaged to Dr. Susan B. Anthony II, great-niece of the famous suffragist and an active member of the CP underground in Washington, DC, who would herself provide housing for another spy in Soble’s network, Jane Foster. In 1940, William, Jr. set up a fund, the William E. Dodd Foundation, which came under fire for financing left-wing groups. His activities attracted the attention of HUAC in 1943, costing him his job at the FCC.

Meanwhile, also in 1943, KGB agent Vasily Zubulin persuaded the Sterns to invest $130,000 in a Soviet front company run by KGB recruit Borris Morros, a Russian immigrant with contacts in Hollywood. The next year, Soble replaced Zubulin as Morros’ KGB contact, bringing the Sterns into Soble’s network. The Sterns came to believe that Morros was squandering their money, and refused to donate any more to his business. Soble was assigned to mediate the dispute, and forced Morros to repay the Sterns $100,000. Morros grew bitter, and went to the FBI in 1947 to become a double-agent for the Bureau. From then on, he began providing information on Soble’s network.

Alfred and Martha Stern were subpoenaed by HUAC in 1953. They fled to Mexico to avoid testifying. They were convicted of espionage in absentia in 1957, and they moved to Czechoslovakia to avoid extradition. From 1963 to 1970, they stayed in Cuba. They then returned to Czechoslovakia. The Department of Justice dropped charges against them in 1979 because key witnesses had died by then. Alfred died in Czechoslovakia in 1986, and Martha died there in 1990.

Even after the Sterns had left the country, the CP financing networks their family had helped set up continued to serve Soviet ends. The Stern family’s financial resources included the Rosenwald Fund, set up in 1917 by Sears Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald, who donated millions to Communist front groups and became Alfred’s father-in-law when Alfred married Marion Rosenwald. Rosenwald’s fund became depleted in 1948. It was identified as a CP funding mechanism during the 1952-1954 Cox Committee (aka Reece Committee) investigations into Communist use of tax-exempt foundations.

Part of Rosenwald’s fortune was inherited by his daughter Edith, Marion’s older sister and Alfred Stern’s sister-in-law. Born in 1895, Edith married New Orleans cotton magnate Edgar Bloom Stern. In 1936, the couple used money from the Rosenwald Fund to help establish the Stern Fund, which was scheduled to continue operating until 1986.

Edgar and Edith also gave money to start philanthropy funds to their three children Edgar Stern, Jr., Audrey Hess, and Philip Maurice Stern. Philip M. Stern, born in 1926, was Alfred K. Stern’s nephew. He became a journalist and Democratic Party financier and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Kennedy administration. In 1963, he became president of the Stern Fund, a position he occupied until 1976, with former Ford Foundation official David Romeyn Hunter serving as executive director. One of the first projects he supported was the 1963 launch of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Marxist think tank that became one of the major channels of Soviet, Cuban, and Vietcong influence in the United States. In 1969, he used his inheritance to set up the Philip M. Stern Family Fund, which he continued to operate until his death in 1992. His son David took over as president of the Stern Family Fund, which has recently funded such recipients as MoveOn.org (via the San Francisco Foundation Community Initiative Funds), the Tides Foundation and Tides Center, and ACORN.

The legacy of the Stern financial network has several significant points of intersection with the Obama administration’s network. One Alfred K. Stern contact who was of interest to the FBI was Robert Rochon Taylor, maternal grandfather of Obama chief advisor Valerie Jarrett. Taylor, born in Alabama in 1899, studied architecture at Howard University in Washington, DC before moving to Chicago in 1925. There he shifted his focus from architecture to real estate, helping design the first housing complex on Chicago’s South Side geared towards middle-class blacks, as well as joining with black business leaders to form a savings and loan institution that would extend mortgage loans to prospective black homeowners. He also became an advocate for slum removal and the construction of public housing projects. He was appointed vice chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority in 1935 and chairman in 1939, a position he retained until 1950.

Taylor had some worthy goals, but unfortunately, his activism brought him into the orbit of Communists who were seeking to exploit black grievances to promote class warfare. In 1939, Taylor served on the Sponsoring Committee to the Illinois Conference on Social Legislation, according to the records of International Labor Defense (ILD), a Soviet front group that provided legal aid in high-profile cases to attract recruits. Taylor was acquainted with William Patterson, Communist mentor of Frank Marshall Davis, helping Patterson organize the 1939 Chicago Conference on Race Relations. Taylor also sat alongside prominent Communists on the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, the Chicago branch of the ACLU.

In 1945, Alfred K. Stern attempted to contact Taylor at a hotel in New York. The FBI informant who reported this information stated that Stern and Taylor were old friends from Chicago. Taylor and his Chicago address appeared on a list of names and addresses Stern maintained, another informant observed. In 1948, Stern referred a contact to Taylor for employment in the Chicago area. In 1950, Taylor and Stern became business associates through a company called Midwest Development Company, the FBI’s files record.

The FBI observed that Stern was in contact with both Taylor and his son-in-law James Bowman, future father of Valerie Jarrett. Bowman, born in Washington, DC in 1923, had earned medical degrees from Howard University and served in the Army before coming to Chicago to intern and eventually settling there. FBI files note that while Bowman was in residency at Chicago’s Provident Hospital between 1948 and 1950, he belonged to the Association of Internes and Medical Students, a Communist front group designed to attract medical workers.

In 1950, Bowman married Taylor’s daughter Barbara. During the Korean War, he was redrafted, and from 1953 to 1955 he served as chief of pathology for the Medical Nutrition Laboratory at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado.

In 1955, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover took a direct interest in Bowman due to his simultaneous involvement in the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) while he was in contact with Stern. The FBI instructed its Chicago office to provide a report detailing pertinent contacts between Taylor and Stern, who had fled the country to evade authorities.

After leaving the military in 1955, Bowman and his wife grew upset over discriminatory pay and decided to try seeking employment outside the United States. In 1956 they moved to Iran, where Bowman and other American physicians helped found Nemazee Hospital as part of a project where American physicians and agricultural experts sought to help developing nations’ health and farming systems. The project was funded by Iranian businessman Haj Mohammad Nemazee, who had made his fortune in his family’s opium trade. During World War II, Nemazee lived in America, where he set up the Iran Foundation. He was attached to the Iranian embassy in the 1950s. His son Hassan Nemazee would later become a major fundraiser for the Clintons, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama before being convicted of bank fraud in 2009.

Bowman’s daughter Valerie was born in Iran at Nemazee Hospital in 1956. She lived in Iran until she was five, when the family moved to London before returning to Chicago in 1961. After earning degrees in psychology from Stanford and law from the University of Michigan, in 1983 Valerie married William Jarrett, son of journalist Vernon Jarrett.

Vernon Jarrett was born in Paris, Tennessee in 1918. After graduating from Knoxville College, he moved to Chicago in 1946 to work as a journalist at the Chicago Defender, the most important black-oriented newspaper of the day. He belonged to several Communist front groups in the 1940s, and the Party assigned him to its propaganda division, with the task of communicating Communist messages to middle-class audiences. He also became one of the party’s key fundraisers. At the June 1946 meeting of the CP front group American Youth for Democracy, he was elected to the group’s leadership, according to 1947 HUAC testimony. In 1947, the CP assigned Jarrett to a publicity committee supporting the election of candidate Pete Brown as alderman of Chicago’s 2nd Ward, according to an FBI informant. The FBI considered Jarrett a potential saboteur and placed him on the security index of individuals to be detained in the event of a national emergency until the end of March 1953, when the Korean War began to wind down.

In 1948, Jarrett was fired from the Defender for his Communist activities. He then began a black-oriented radio show called Negro Newsfront in collaboration with composer Oscar C. Brown (Oscar Brown, Jr.), a fellow CP member. In 1948, Jarrett and Brown also served together on the CP-controlled Citizens' Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers, a group formed to support a strike led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a labor union then under Communist control. Brown was the group’s treasurer. His assistant treasurer was Louise Thompson Patterson, wife of William Patterson, the mentor of Obama’s mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Jarrett chaired the group’s publicity committee, which also included Frank Marshall Davis himself. In the 1950s, Jarrett and Brown also cofounded the DuBois Theater, named after NAACP cofounder W. E. B. Du Bois, a lifelong Communist fellow traveler.

Jarrett went on in the 1970s to become the first black syndicated journalist for the Chicago Tribune and a cofounder of the National Association of Black Journalists, which sent a delegation to the Soviet Union in 1985.

On November 2, 1979, Jarrett’s Chicago Tribune column reported that Arab nations were planning to build closer ties to American blacks by financing black leaders and institutions. In the article, Jarrett quoted Black Panther cofounder Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour (Donald Warden), who was now a lawyer for OPEC at his law firm of Holmes and Warden and was in contact with Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Al-Mansour had presented OPEC with a proposal to provide $20 million a year for 10 years to aid 10,000 minority students annually. Civil rights leader Percy Sutton later said he was introduced to Obama by al-Mansour when al-Mansour wrote to him about Obama’s Harvard application, asking him to write a letter of recommendation for Obama. Obama and al-Mansour later denied Sutton’s story. But although Obama denied even knowing al-Mansour, al-Mansour claimed that he knew Obama when researcher Ken Timmerman contacted him. Timmerman was prompted to follow up on the story after Sutton’s 2009 death when one Kevin Wardally claimed to deny Sutton’s story on behalf of Sutton’s estate. Timmerman contacted Sutton’s son and daughter, who stated that no one in their family knew Wardally or had authorized him to speak on their father’s behalf.

In 1983, Jarrett and other CP members played an instrumental role in the election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. From 1983 to 1995, Jarrett worked at the Chicago Sun-Times. At the Sun-Times, Jarrett pushed Obama’s career from 1992 on, starting with coverage of Obama’s role in the election of Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun. When Jarrett died in 2004, Chicago CP member wrote a tribute to him in the party’s official newspaper, mentioning his role in supporting the elections of Mayor Washington and Senator Obama.

Jarrett’s connections to Washington helped propel Valerie Jarrett to a role in Obama’s career. After marrying Jarrett’s son in 1983, Valerie entered Chicago politics in 1987, becoming Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development in Harold Washington’s administration. When Washington died after winning re-election that year and was replaced by Richard M. Daley, Jarrett became Daley’s chief of staff.

In 1991, Jarrett’s City Hall colleague Susan Sher introduced Jarrett to an associate from the law firm of Sidley & Austin, Michelle Robinson, the future Michelle Obama. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born in 1964 to Fraser C. Robinson III, a city water worker, and Marian Robinson, a secretary. She went to high school with Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson, who has a half-brother named Noah Robinson. Michelle Robinson was a frequent guest at the Jacksons’ home, Santita later recalled. Some sources have alleged that the marriage between Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama was arranged by Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the church the couple attended, Trinity United Church of Christ. When Hillary Clinton began running against Obama in 2007, her opposition research team--led by Sidney Blumenthal--uncovered evidence that Wright arranged marriages for gay men who wanted to remain in the closet. Members of the church are reluctant to talk about this following the murder of the church’s gay black choir director Donald Young, killed by gunshot in his apartment on December 24, 2007. Larry Sinclair, who claims to have had two gay encounters with Obama, claims that Young and Obama also had a close relationship.

From 1992 through 1995, Jarrett served the Daley administration as commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development. From 1995 to 2003, she chaired the Chicago Transit Board. During this period, former Students for Democratic Society radical Marilyn Katz, a friend of Susan Sher, introduced Jarrett to Daniel Levin, cousin of Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin and Representative Sander Levin. From 1995 to 2008, Jarrett worked in Levin’s real estate firm, the Habitat Company, where she became president and CEO in 2007. Two of Habitat’s property complexes were seized by inspectors due to poor conditions, but Jarrett became a multi-millionaire during her time at Habitat, with one of her properties enjoying a tax rate at one-fourth of its estimated value. She also served as a board member of the Chicago Stock Exchange and held positions in a number of other organizations during this period.

After Obama's victory in the 2008 Presidential election, Jarrett served as co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project. She was then appointed Obama’s Senior Advisor to the President of the United States and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. In that position, she holds immense influence over the administration. Obama has stated that he never makes a major decision without consulting Jarrett, and that she speaks for him.

Seeking Support from Chicago’s Commie Community: David Axelrod, Betty Lu Saltzman, and Marilyn Katz

During Obama’s first term, another influential figure in his administration was David Axelrod. Axelrod was born in Manhattan in 1955 to Joseph Axelrod, a psychologist whose family immigrated to Canada and the United States from Russia to escape Czarist persecution of Jews, and Myril Davidson (Myril Bennett), a journalist. Joseph “listed his party affiliation as ‘Communist’” in the 1930s, according to David’s biography. David tries to explain this away, but researchers have located records from the 1936 election that list his father as a member of the Communist Party. Joseph attended Columbia University at a time when it was an active center of CP activity. Meanwhile, Myril worked at the left-wing magazine PM, whose staff included Soviet agent I.F. Stone.

David graduated from New York’s Stuyvesant High School in 1972. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Chicago, where he met his future wife Susan Landau. He wrote for the Hyde Park Herald as an undergraduate. His Herald work caught the attention of David Simon Canter, a second-generation CP member working in the publishing industry, and Don Rose, a former publicist for the CP-controlled National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). Canter and Rose began mentoring Axelrod.

With Canter and Rose’s help, Axelrod earned an internship at the Chicago Tribune, where he was hired and worked for eight years. He became the paper’s City Hall Bureau Chief and was its youngest political columnist. In 1984, he joined Senator Paul Simon’s campaign as its communications director, and was soon promoted to co-campaign manager. The next year, he formed his own political consultancy firm, Axelrod & Associates, which came to specialize in campaigns for black politicians after Axelrod worked on Harold Washington’s 1987 re-election campaign, joining Canter and Rose, who had worked on Washington’s previous campaign.

Axelrod first met Obama in 1992, when they were introduced by Betty Lu Saltzman (aka Bettylu Saltzman, Betty Lou Saltzman), an Illinois ACLU official. Saltzman and Obama were working together on Project Vote, a political organizing community geared towards low-income and minority voters, which Obama directed in Illinois. In 1994 Saltzman and Barack Obama were listed on the Friends of Alice Palmer committee, which also included several members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Obama consulted Axelrod before giving a 2002 anti-war speech at a demonstration organized by Saltzman and Katz. Katz had formed a protest group called Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq. The group’s cofounder was Carl Davidson, an old associate of Katz, Bill Ayers, and Mike Klonsky who had worked with Cuban intelligence and the KGB in the 1970s and had become a leader in the Committees of Correspondence in 1992. Obama later asked Axelrod to read drafts of his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.

While serving as Obama’s chief strategist during the 2008 campaign, Axelrod hired Mode Project to design Obama’s campaign logo. Mode Project assigned the job to Sol Sender, the associate of Subud USA official Victor Margolin mentioned earlier.

Axelrod served as Obama’s Senior Advisor until leaving the White House in 2011. In 2012, he was again Chief Strategist for Obama’s Presidential campaign.

While the social interconnections discussed in this article are complex, what they all have in common is a prevailing pattern connecting Obama to second- or third-generation social descendants of Communist Party members and Soviet agents. In Obama’s case, his connection to the CP network came through the Dunham family’s introduction to Frank Marshall Davis and through Davis’ Chicago associate Gerald Kellman, whose network opened doors for Obama to connect with New Left figures such as Bill Ayers. In Valerie Jarrett’s case, her father-in-law, father, and maternal grandfather were all linked to the same Chicago Communist Party network surrounding Frank Marshall Davis and Soviet agents such as Alfred Stern. In David Axelrod’s case, his father was a Communist Party member, and he was in direct contact with CP members such as David Canter, forming a bridge between Obama’s campaign team, veterans of the Communist Party and New Left networks, and the emerging Committees of Correspondence successor to the CP. So if Obama wants us to be concerned about the influence of espionage agents, let’s start by rooting out the ones that have been surrounding him since the day he was born, and the ones that have infested our government since he took office.

Aaron Klein with Brenda J. Elliott, The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists, and Other Anti-American Extremists, New York: WND Books, 2010.

Jerome R. Corsi, “FBI destroyed file on Obama's grandfather: Dunham befriended communist Frank Marshall Davis, mentor of future president”, WND.com, April 12, 2010, http://www.wnd.com/2010/04/139805/.

Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.

David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Paul Kengor, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, New York: Mercury Ink, 2012.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Jodi Kantor and Monica Davey, “Crossed Paths: Chicago’s Jacksons and Obamas” The New York Times, February 24, 2013,

David Axelrod, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Obama and the democrats are evil communists... severely upset at Russia's turn to capitalism and Christianity.

Don't be fooled by outward appearances. Don't forget, the Russians are masters of the art of deception.

From the Russian Orthodox Church's website...

WCC welcomes meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill for unity and peace

12 February 2016

Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), has issued a statement on behalf of the Council hailing the historic meeting of Pope Francis, pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, and Patriarch Kirill, primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The two leaders met on 12 February in Havana, Cuba.

The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest member church in the WCC..."

https://www.oikoumene.org/en/press-centre/news/wcc-welcomes-meeting-of-pope-francis-and-patriarch-kirill

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Got that? The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest member of the (far left) World Council of Churches!

That is all you need to know to understand that it is a sham operation. Reverend Wright’s fake church United Church of Christ (UCC) is also a member. In fact, his (communist) “Black Liberation Theology” was concocted by the KGB.

The Russians must laugh their butts off at how easily westerners can be tricked and deceived. They are great chess players, thinking many moves ahead of their opponents, while most of us, unfortunately, suck at simple checkers.

The Russian Orthodox Church is a member of the (communist) World Council of Churches:
https://www.oikoumene.org/en/member-churches/russian-orthodox-church
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From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
Profile: WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES (WCC)

Long-time proponent of Liberation Theology
Infiltrated by the KGB during the Cold War
Funded Marxist insurgent groups throughout the world
Calls for capitalism’s “reform” according to socialist principles

[lots more at link...]
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7514
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August, 2006

North Korea Builds an Orthodox Church
The first-ever Russian Orthodox church will open in Pyongyang, North Korea this weekend.
It’s an odd project considering that freedom of religion exists almost exclusively on paper in the closed communist country.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il is supposed to be a communist atheist. So why has he made promoting the Russia Orthodox Church his latest pet project?
On August 13, the country’s first Orthodox church is to be opened in the capital city of Pyongyang.
Russian Metropolitan Bishop Kyrill, second in command within the Church after the Patriarch, will travel to Pyongyang to christen the new house of worship. ...”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/kim-jong-il-and-religion-north-korea-builds-an-orthodox-church-a-431310.htm

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

September 2014

(excerpt from a long, detailed article)

First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.

It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.

But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.

In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.

Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, "Blackbird"), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin's KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates - Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) - also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.

Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:

According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.

Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin's cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.

Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin's Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ..."

much more at link

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality

__________________________________________________________________

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

Christians in Russia Refuse to Stop Sharing the Gospel Despite Putin’s Ban on Evangelism

By Stoyan Zaimov , Christian Post Reporter
Aug 3, 2016 | 1:32 PM

Christians in Russia have said they are determined to preach the Gospel and fulfill the Great Commission despite tough new laws signed by President Vladimir Putin that ban evangelism outside of churches. ...”

http://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-russia-refuse-stop-sharing-the-gospel-despite-putins-ban-evangelism-167442/
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July 2016...

FAITH UNDER FIRE

Russia puts lid on Christians sharing faith

‘Will require any sharing … even a casual conversation, to have prior authorization from state’

http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/russia-puts-lid-on-christians-sharing-faith/#34c1Fo2QT9xudcrR.99
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July 2016...

“Activities as diverse as holding prayer meetings in homes, posting worship times on a religious community’s website, and giving a lecture on yoga have all been interpreted by police and prosecutors as “missionary activity”, thanks to the broad definition now enshrined in the Religion Law.

Despite a clear predominance of prosecutions brought against those who see their faith as requiring them to publicly share their beliefs, such as Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses, people from at least 15 different religious traditions have faced charges.” ..."

On 6 July 2016, President Vladimir Putin signed amendments to the Religion Law imposing harsh restrictions on the sharing of beliefs, including on where and by whom they may be shared. ..."

http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2305

Something to consider as a real possibility...

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
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Link to read "New Lies for Old" online:
https://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes
_______________________________________________

Link to read "The Perestroika Deception" online:
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-TVvzZzfXiMBkMdvD

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WCC welcomes meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill for unity and peace

North Korea Builds an Orthodox Church

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

Christians in Russia Refuse to Stop Sharing the Gospel Despite Putin’s Ban on Evangelism

Russia puts lid on Christians sharing faith