The Mamdani Family’s Intelligence Connections
By PIPR
2 July, 2025
Key points: Mamdani’s anthropologist father received grant money from the CIA-linked Ford Foundation.
His mother’s charity received money from the State Department’s USAID.
His wife has worked for establishment media and corporations.
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO
The stage was set. Donald Trump’s crypto- (some would say actual) fascism was seeing hardworking people deported en masse. The Commander-in-Chief risked provoking a civil war—or, at least, mini civil wars—by sending the National Guard into Los Angeles to crush protests.
The Democratic National Committee was nowhere to be seen. Having lost the previous Presidential election, the DNC was effectively leaderless. In the New York, it allowed individuals such as an alleged molester of women and a hedge fund bigwig to run for Mayor. Voters turned away in their droves. Hopelessness set in.
Then, just when the town gives up hope, a savior—Zohran Mamdani—rides in, seemingly out of nowhere, to put things right.
Refusing to lick the Zionist boot, the 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani (yes, 33) beat the billionaires—Bill Ackman, Mike Bloomberg, Barry Diller, Alice Walton, etc., etc.—who donated to rival candidates via Super PACs.
The Republican response to Mamdani’s presumptive primary victory was predictably racist and Islamophobic. The mask also fell from certain DNC wonks—e.g., Kirsten Gillibrand—who live in fear of the supposed jihadi socialist—a concept almost as ridiculous as “anarcho-capitalist.”
But this is a distraction. While Mamdani’s promises sound good, is it really likely that the son of an Ivy League academic father and famous film director mother is going to change anything?
Mamdani issues a threat: “You can critique my views, but not my family.”
AIRLIFTED TO AMERICA
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, was brought to the US courtesy of the State Department.
In the 1950s, Kenya was struggling to rid itself of murderous British colonialism. The CIA feared that the nationalist leader, Jomo Kenyatta, would shut the doors to American investment. As a counterweight, the Agency backed Tom Mboya.
A Tulane University project describes Mboya as the CIA’s “key asset within Kenya.”
With US President John F. Kennedy, Mboya organized the migration of young African intellectuals to the United States. This was nicknamed the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa.
Famously, Barack Obama Senior was a beneficiary of the Airlift.
Author Tom Shachtman writes: “By late 1962, the airlift had almost completely been taken over by the State Department and its direct grantee organizations.”
Mahmood Mamdani arrived in the US from Uganda via the 1963 airlift. Armed with a Harvard degree, the anthropologist traveled Africa meeting warring factions. For example, he writes:
“I first went to Sudan in the mid- 1970s, when I was a young lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam and one of the Eritrean rebel movements invited a comrade and me to visit their bases.”
FOUNDATION MONEY
Despite reaping the rewards of life in the good ol’ USA, Mamdani Senior’s work has critiqued US foreign policy from an anti-colonial, leftish perspective. All well and good. But some of his research funding came from historically CIA-linked institutions.
The late Jason Epstein wrote that, from the 1950s, “the CIA and the Ford Foundation, among other agencies, had set up and were financing an apparatus of intellectuals selected for their correct cold-war [sic] positions, as an alternative to what one might call a free intellectual market.”
Dr. Mamdani’s book, Saviors and Survivors (2009) is highly critical of US policy toward Africa, particularly Sudan. Yet, as he states in the Introduction, Mamdani used a Ford Foundation grant to visit the war-torn country several times during the writing of the book:
“…I was a recipient of a Ford Foundation research grant in 2003–5 … [which] made possible earlier visits.”
In the Acknowledgements, he thanks his young boy: “our rapidly growing son, Zohran, continues to look with curiosity and concern at the world his parents’ generation made.”
The Guggenheim family’s connections to the CIA are less direct than the Ford Foundation’s.
It’s well known that the CIA funded mid-20th century Abstract Expressionism.
The Guggenheim Museum states that the Agency “deftly turned these artists into a propagandist weapon that American culture could wield against the Soviets, even subsidizing their work behind their backs.”
In the ‘40s, Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery granted one-person shows to Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollack, and Mark Rothko.
By the 1950s, CIA Director Allen Dulles was in communication with the banker, Eric Warburg. During that time, Gladys Guggenheim Straus was Vice President of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation. She was married to America’s Cuba Ambassador, Roger.
The couple were described by Warburg as “ardent Republicans.” In a letter, Warburg tries to set up a meeting between Guggenheim Straus and the theologian Kurt Hahn via CIA Director Dulles.
Between 2007 and ‘08, Mamdani received Guggenheim Foundation funding. The grants paid for “additional visits to Sudan and the United Kingdom for archival work.”
On the one hand, it is normal for academics—even lefty ones—to ask for foundation money. On the other, was it not possible to seek assistance from less blatantly establishment ones?
U.S.A.I.D.
The United State Agency for International Development (USAID) has always been closely linked to the CIA and other branches of American power.
In the 1960s, USAID funded the CIA’s murderous Phoenix Program in Vietnam: a project in which thousands of political opponents were intimidated, tortured, and assassinated.
Peter Kornbluh writes:
“As a cold war policy tool, the agency was, at times, used as a front for C.I.A. operations and operatives. Among the most infamous examples was the Office of Public Safety, a U.S.A.I.D. police training program in the Southern Cone that also trained torturers.”
And murderers, one might add.
But USAID is (or was) not just a CIA front. It acts as the velvet glove covering the iron fist of American imperialism. Its projects promote privatization, micro-loans, construction, and other devices aimed to absorb poor people into the capitalist system.
In addition to putting a smiley face on the American empire, USAID diverts the energy of poor people away from spontaneous collective organizing and into professionally-managed activities.
Saving and improving lives is an unintended, positive consequence of inherently nefarious objectives.
THE SALAAM BAALAK TRUST
After her hit film Salaam Bombay (1988) brought the plight of India’s street children to global attention, Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, set up the Salaam Baalak (Salute the Children) Trust in New Delhi.
According to Trust documents from 2003:
“…USAID supported Salaam Baalak Trust in establishing ‘Arushi’ – the shelter for girls (October 1999). Since then, USAID had been funding the Girl Child shelter. In addition, USAID has also funded the entire HIV/AIDS Prevention Program.”
Civil society publications reveal some of the Trust’s activities:
“various kinds of vocational training as well as income generation and saving schemes to make the[… children] economically self-reliant.”
The Trust was a hit with the US State Department. In 2006, it was visited by George W. Bush’s Under Secretary of State, Henrietta Fore, and later in the year by the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Ambassador, Richard Boucher.
UNCLEAR REPORTS
According to local and international media, Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji was born in Houston, Texas. Yet, according to Duwaji, she “moved to the USA” in 2016. Her Instagram account states: “…illustrator from damascus [sic].”
At the time of writing, nothing has been made public about the identity of her parents.
Duwaji says that she had studied in the Gulf states and was thought of as “the American” because of her then-lighter hair and inability to speak fluent Arabic. “[W]hen I got to America I realized I definitely was not really American in the typical sense either.”
Did she mean to say, “when I got back to America after studying abroad”?
Whatever the facts of her background, Duwaji has worked for establishment media, illustrating a BBC World Service documentary and working for The Washington Post.
Duwaji has also designed publications for Cartier.
She spent two months in Beirut with Haven for Artists, an organization courted by USAID.
One USAID study asks for “research into how change actually happens in the humanitarian sector, and for understanding resistance to change within the humanitarian system.” Haven for Artists is included under the heading Potential Partners.
CONCLUSION: THE NEW OBAMA?
None of the above is proof that the Mamdani family are intelligence assets, but their connections to the US State Department certainly show that certain of their activities have—or had—been approved by the very establishment they rightly criticize.
Is Mamdani a stalking horse for the Republican Mayoral candidate? Is he a PSYOP designed to shepherd young voters back into the fold of the status quo, à la Barack Obama? Or he is a well-meaning socialist using his relatively privileged background to try to make a change?
Time will tell.
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