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See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Paperback)
by Robert Baer
| Category:
American politics, War, Terrorism, Non-fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Gripping and eye-opening, this insider's account is a critical examination from within the CIA. |
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Author: Robert Baer
Publisher: Three Rivers Press, Reprint edition
Pub. in: January, 2003
ISBN: 1-400-04684-X
Pages: 320
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00211
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400046843
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
Robert Baer takes us from his experience as a new CIA recruit to the end of his career. He tells us how he learned to handle sources, and takes us to the Middle East in a tale that is well-written and engaging. His accounts of the strange alliances produced by the Lebanese civil war are enlightening and always topical. His detective work trying to get to the bottom of the Beruit embassy bombings is admirable. And the way in which he was periodically stifled by our government's prohibition on assassinations in his efforts to gather intelligence and protect American security is quite interesting.
Baer describes how field work declined in importance after the Cold War. He was stationed in Central Asia, and his stories of travelling through impoverished, civil-war-ridden former Soviet republics, and visiting border guards who had been stationed there since the Cold War and who hadn't realized that the Soviet Union had dissolved, is fascinating. He also had fantastic opportunities to develop contacts who might have given policy-makers a better view of the political situation inside Russia, who might have provided warning of a possible coup. Alas, Russia was a friendly country, off-limits to Baer's spying.
Baer also provides a great picture of Kurdistan after the Gulf War. You will likely walk away from the book with a greatly hightened respect for current Iraqi president Talabani, and some of your beliefs about other Iraqi leaders may be challenged.
Baer is careful to avoid pointing to any specific decision by the policy-makers who guided the CIA through the '80s and '90s as the moment to prevent the 9/11 attacks. However, he is able to describe several promising opportunities that were passed up for various reasons. He also points to a missed opportunity to topple Saddam Hussein without the American invasion. It's sobering.
Baer returned to Washington to a desk job after an allegation surfaced that he was involved in a plot to assassinate Saddam. Pulled from the field, he had no idea how to survive in a bureaucracy. He got out with his good name, but just barely, and after observing some disturbing things about how our political system works.
(From quoting Ian Brown, USA)
Target readers:
People interested in American politics, American foreign policy, Middle East, CIA, terrorism, and spying.
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Robert Baer was a case officer in the Directorate of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997. He served in places such as Iraq, Dushanbe, Rabat, Beirut, Khartoum, and New Delhi, and received the Career Intelligence Medal in 1997. He now divides his time between Washington, D.C., and France.
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From Publisher
In his explosive New York Times bestseller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
A veteran case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA’s inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East.
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PREFACE
In late 1994 I found myself living pretty much on airplanes. I would arrive in Amman, Jordan, in the late afternoon, check into a hotel, take a quick shower, and then spend the night talking to one Iraqi dissident or another about what to do with Saddam Hussein. Often I wouldn’t crawl into bed until well after midnight, only to get up a few hours later to catch a plane back to Washington and my office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It made for a long day. I was used to it, though, having spent nearly twenty years working the streets of the Middle East at the same pace.
Occasionally, in this covert version of shuttle diplomacy, I’d get off the plane in London and just walk around the city so I could catch my breath. I didn’t follow a particular route, but often without intending it, I’d end up in the Edgeware Road area, a part of central London taken over by Arabs and other Middle Easterners. With the veiled women, and the men walking around in flowing robes, it felt like I’d never left the Middle East, but there was one subtle difference: the Arabic bookstores.
In most parts of the Middle East, bookstores are forbidden from selling radical Islamic tracts that openly advocate violence, but in London’s Arabic bookstores there were racks of them. One glance at the bold print and you knew what they were about: a deep, uncompromising hatred for the United States. In the worldview of the people who wrote and published these tracts, a jihad, or holy war, between Islam and America wasn’t just a possibility; for them the war was a given, and it was already under way. Having spent so much of my life in the Middle East, I knew that such intense, violent hatred represented an aberration of Islam; but I also knew better than most the human toll that such hatred can take.
Often I would pick up a tract and take a look at the small print. Rarely did the publisher or the editor’s name appear on the masthead, and office addresses were never noted. But with few exceptions, they carried a European post-office box, often in Britain or in Germany. It didn’t take a sophisticated intelligence organization to figure out that Europe, our traditional ally in the war against the bad guys, had become a hothouse of Islamic fundamentalism.
Curious, I asked my CIA colleagues in London if they knew who was putting this stuff out. They had no idea, but there was really no reason why they should have. Since our London office couldn’t claim a single Arabic speaker, it was unlikely that anyone there was going to wander down Edgeware Road. Even if someone had, he wouldn’t have been able to read the venomous headlines. What’s more, the CIA was prohibited by British authorities from recruiting sources, even Islamic fundamentalists, in their country. What was the point, then, in spending time with the Arabs there?
In general, things were no better on the continent. By the mid-1990s, the CIA was shriveling up everywhere in Europe. Our offices in Bonn, Paris, and Rome were shadows of what they had been during the cold war with the Soviet Union. They lacked the officers to go after Europe’s vast Middle Eastern communities, and those they did have too often lacked the inclination, the training, and in some cases the incentive to do so.
Things weren’t much better in the Middle East. Often there was only one or two CIA officers assigned to a country. Rather than recruit and run sources - foreign agents - CIA stations in the tinderbox of the world spent most of their time catering to whatever was in fashion in Washington at the time: human rights, economic globalization, the Arab-Israeli conflict. To veterans like me, the CIA seemed to be doing little more than flying the flag.
*
A lot of us who spent time on the ground in the Middle East worried that something big and bad was in the offing. There was too much hatred out there, and too many means of destruction to keep the bubble of American innocence from bursting. But I don’t think anyone saw with any precision the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon coming. Even by the standards of the terrorists involved, the scale of the assault was almost unimaginable. The point, though, is that we didn’t even try to find out what was headed our way.
Like the rest of Washington, the CIA had fallen in love with technology. The theory was that satellites, the Internet, electronic intercepts, even academic publications would tell us all we needed to know about what went on beyond our borders. As for Islamic fundamentalists in particular, the official view had become that our allies in Europe and the Middle East could fill in the missing pieces. Running our own agents - our own foreign human sources - had become too messy. Agents sometimes misbehaved; they caused ugly diplomatic incidents. Worse, they didn’t fit America’s moral view of the way the world should run.
Not only did the CIA systematically shed many of its agents, it also began to ease out many of their onetime handlers: seasoned officers who had spent their careers overseas in the hellholes of the world. In 1995 the agency handed the title of director of operations - the man officially in charge of spying - to an analyst who had never served overseas. He was followed by a retiree, and the retiree by an officer who had risen through the ranks largely thanks to his political skills. In practical terms, the CIA had taken itself out of the business of spying. No wonder we didn’t have a source in Hamburg’s mosques to tell us Muhammad Atta, the presumed leader of the hijacking teams on September 11, was recruiting suicide bombers for the biggest attack ever on American soil.
****
This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks that have no intention of collapsing under their own weight as the Soviet Union did. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with. It is drawn from memory, investigative notes, and diaries. As the reader will soon figure out, there is too much detail, almost none of which has ever appeared outside of government files, for any one person to remember. All my life I’ve been a consummate note taker. At the same time, not surprisingly, some of the details simply can’t be told. Every CIA employee is required to sign an agreement that allows the agency to review and censor anything written for publication. I’ve left the censor’s blackouts in the text so readers can see how it works. But more than enough detail remains to give the reader an idea just how complicated the problem of terrorism is, and what this life has been like: the highs and lows, the dangerous moments in the field, and the sometimes more dangerous moments around the conference tables of official Washington, often as nasty a snake pit as Lebanon’s Biqa’ Valley.
I haven’t edited out the many mistakes I made in the field. The reader should see how painful the learning curve can be in the spy business. Nor have I hidden that I set out to understand how Washington works, with all of its special interests. I allowed myself to get sucked into the fringes of the Clinton campaign-funding scandal. I have nothing to apologize for - other than maybe my own stupidity - but if my name rings a bell, it’s likely to be from that time.
I also intend my story to be a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA that I served for nearly a quarter of a century, and for what needs to be done now. September 11 wasn’t the result of a single mistake but of a series of them. The Germans failed us, as did the British, French, and Saudis. But most of all, we failed ourselves. We didn’t have the intelligence we needed or the means for gathering it. Correcting those mistakes and regaining the upper hand in the long war against terrorism isn’t going to be easy, but it can be done. The way to start is by putting CIA officers back on the street, by letting them recruit and run sources in the mosques, the casbahs, or anywhere else we can learn what the bad guys’ intentions are before they break into horrible headlines and unbearable film footage.
This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too. In letting the CIA fall into decay, we lost a vital shield protecting our national sovereignty.
Americans need to know that what happened to the CIA didn’t happen just by chance. The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The oceans on either side of us were all the protection we needed. Afloat on this sea of self-absorption, the White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see.
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| View all 12 comments |
Seymour M. Hersh (The New Yorker) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-17 00:00>
Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East. |
Wall Street Journal (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-01-17 00:00>
See No Evil is a compelling account of America's failed efforts to "listen in" on the rest of the world, especially the parts of it that intend to do us harm.
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Scott Locklin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-17 00:00>
Robert Baer was a sort of accidental CIA operative. His mom was a rich hippie who dragged him all over creation as a child, and he was a ski-bum. He applied to the CIA as a joke while taking Mandarin at U.C. Berkeley. One of the amusing things he left out about his background (or which he never explicitly stated) was the fact that he went to Georgetown University as an undergrad. Georgetown seems to be one of those "gimme" schools for CIA recruits; if you go to school there, you're pretty much a legacy.
In fact, many have criticized this aspect to CIA recruitment: as a result of this, the CIA is made up of graduates of a fairly narrow range of academic institutions, and as such have a narrower view of the world than a more catholic group would. Then again, considering the titanic idiocies and anti-american monstrosities taught by former vietnam-war protestors in the schools these days, perhaps there is a reason for it.
In any case, Baer is a sort of class clown type guy who managed to get into the CIA. He used to ride his Harley around the Georgetown Library, to give you an idea of what type of guy he is. Since he had extensive language skills and experience living abroad, he became an "on the ground" operative. Much of his work with the CIA was involving terrorist cells in places like Lebanon in the 80s, Tajekistan, and among the Kurds in Northern Iraq in the mid 90s.
He gives what appears to be a fair account of the ways in which politically correct bureaucracy have gotten in the way of the business of spying. He claims (with some supporting evidence from the Kurdish community) that a coup against Saddam was quite possible in 95, but the National Security Council at the time more or less told the plotters to call it off. His accounts of the thought processes of the whackjob islamicists and of middle east residents in general pretty much match my observations from work: that part of the world sees everything as a giant conspiracy theory. People still don't seem to have absorbed this important fact about international politics.
I was particularly entertained at his account of his adventures in Washington. Since he had more experience with dealing with terrorists and KGB agents overseas, he applied the same lines of thinking to figure out washington, with amusingly mixed results. |
S. Haye (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-17 00:00>
This book could be said to be a rougher edged, true John LeCarre novel, and it is equally hard to put down. The author served in many of the areas in the news today from the mid 70's to the mid 90's. Baer was an on the ground operative speaking Arabic and running Arab agents. He finally quit when he saw the C IA turning into the see-no evil,, hear-no evil, do-no evil spy agency that has proved so ineffective in the new century. Agents now are mostly yuppies who cannot speak local languages and are discouraged from taking any risks. The result is no reliable intelligence.
See No Evil is a paean and an obituary for a spy agency that has no spies. It is also a history of the CIA when it did have spies and the background for events in the Middle East today. Entertaining, and educational - pretty good.
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