See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Robert Baer
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 140004684X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
“Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field
officer in the Middle East.”
–Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
From The Preface
This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. 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.
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.
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 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.
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror
Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam
once I started to open up my fat mouth about foreign money oozing around American politics, there’d be no way to close it. Instead of an appearance, the CIA wrote up a one-page stipulation of fact that said basically nothing. How do you call an end to a career that has taken you so far into the heart of darkness and shown you so many of the secrets that lie there? I didn’t want to go out bitter, but I didn’t want to just slink away, either. I’d spent a quarter century building up a body of
all seem cut-and-dried, but a CIA cover wasn’t always airtight. During the Gulf War, one case officer was back in Washington minding a group of Arab trainees who had been put up at the West Park Hotel in Rosslyn. About midnight on their first night in town, one of the Arabs decided he was lonely. Never having been to the US before and not knowing much English, he opened up the telephone book to emergencies, dialed 911, and told the dispatcher in his broken English that he needed a woman. The
of forms from their briefcases for Hank and me to read and sign. The first was a secrecy agreement stipulating that in return for a paycheck every two weeks, we agreed not to write a book, magazine article, movie script, or to go on television without clearance from the CIA. True, it covered only subjects related to the CIA and intelligence, but if you spent your life in the agency, that pretty much included anything you might consider writing or saying. Another agreement we signed was never
group known as Islamic Amal, and what amounted to his extended family seized the Shaykh Abdallah barracks from the Lebanese gendarmerie. Clearly acting on Tehran’s orders, Musawi immediately turned the barracks over to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Pasdaran, as the Iranians themselves call it. The Syrian troops, who had occupied the area since 1976, watched and did nothing. The Lebanese central government couldn’t do anything, or at least wouldn’t. Iran now had a sovereign
checkpoints manned by the Lebanese Forces. Everyone knew Jean and waved him through. The last was a four-by-five hole dug in the rubble. Two grunts jumped up when they heard the truck approach and looked at us as if we were ghosts. We left the Range Rover with them and walked. We were in no-man’s-land now, only about a hundred yards from Hezbollah’s pickets. This was the sector Mughniyah fought in, for Fatah, in the 1970s. Although I wasn’t supposed to know about it, we were following a route
