See No Evil
Good Fit
- Readers who want to see the real daily work of intelligence, not the movie version
- Anyone interested in Middle East politics and the years leading up to 9/11
- Those who enjoy reading about the tension between bureaucracy, career and conscience
Not a Fit
- Readers looking for a balanced historical study: this is one man's memoir
- Those who get lost among many names, agencies and acronyms
- Anyone expecting a James Bond-style adventure: little action, lots of office wars
The introduction opens in late 1994. Baer is flying between Amman and Washington for meetings with Saddam Hussein's opponents, and in between he wanders along London's Arab quarter, Edgware Road. The bookshops sell radical pamphlets openly calling for violence against the United States, with European post-office boxes as their only addresses, while the CIA's London office does not have a single Arabic speaker. This is where the author's main argument comes from: in the 1990s the agency shrank in Europe and the Middle East, most of its agents were dismissed and everyone trusted satellites and technology. So there was no source in the Hamburg mosques to report what Mohamed Atta was preparing.
The second half of the introduction is a passionate indictment. Baer writes that 9/11 was the result of many mistakes, not one. Allied services let the United States down, but worst of all, Americans let themselves down. That day the White House's only line of defence was not the CIA or the FBI but the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93. The author does not hide his anger and wants readers to share it. He also promises to write about his own mistakes and admits that his name got tangled up in a Clinton campaign scandal.
Part one opens with a dramatic scene. Langley, 15 March 1995: Baer, just back from northern Iraq and without even time for a haircut, is called to a superior's office and told that two FBI agents are waiting for him upstairs. National Security Adviser Tony Lake has ordered the FBI to investigate Baer over an alleged attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The most absurd detail: Baer is the one under investigation, but the lawyer in the room represents the CIA.
The interrogation is one of the best-written scenes in the book. One of the agents is someone Baer worked with in Germany in 1986. He is shown a report about an assassination «team» led by a man called Robert Pope. Baer answers with short yeses and noes, declines a lawyer because his salary would not cover a long case, and finally agrees to a polygraph. According to the author, there is no such person as Robert Pope.
The book then jumps back to Los Angeles in 1962. On the verge of divorce, nine-year-old Robert's mother takes him out of school and off to Europe. They get stuck in Berlin during the Cuban Missile Crisis and ask a Soviet consul for visas to drive to Moscow with their cat. Then comes Aspen: skiing becomes the passion of Robert's life, one spring he attends school for six days and gets straight Fs, and his mother finds him in a pizzeria and sends him to military school. Then the Paris protests of May 1968, Prague and Culver Military Academy. These pages are funny and also explain where the author's later gift for adapting to foreign worlds came from.
His youth is told with the same humour. At Georgetown Baer rides a motorcycle through a university hall and, during finals week, through the library reading room; one of the students watching from a distance is the future CIA director George Tenet. Job-hunting in San Francisco in 1976, a friend jokes, «Apply to the CIA». In the years of the Church Committee's CIA scandals, Baer sees the agency as a kind of secret order, fills in the endless application form and sits the exam. A month later he is called to a first interview with a man named Jim Scott in a hotel room with the curtains drawn.
- Sharp, ironic, first-person reporter's prose
- A structure that opens scenes with film-like «date, city» headings
- Visible traces of CIA censorship in the text
- A two-level story contrasting fieldwork with the Washington bureaucracy
The Pulitzer-winning history of the CIA, Afghanistan and the road to 9/11
Traces the intelligence failures before 9/11
Real espionage operations told like a novel
According to the report, in late February 1995 the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi met two Iranian intelligence officers in northern Iraq and told them Washington had decided to kill Saddam and had sent a «team» led by one Robert Pope. When Chalabi was called to the phone, a letter supposedly on National Security Council letterhead was left on the table, and the Iranians read it. In Baer's account the whole thing was invented: there was no Robert Pope, the letter was fake, and the aim was to persuade Iran to back the opposition. But it was Washington, not the Iranians, that fell into the trap. In Baer's view, Lake did not know the games of the Middle East but knew Washington well: someone had to pay, and that someone became the CIA's man in northern Iraq.
After the interview the FBI agent whispers to Baer in the corridor that prosecutors had chosen not the usual CIA ban but sections 1952 and 1958 of federal law, the «murder-for-hire» statutes. Baer later learns that the maximum penalty under them is life imprisonment or death. The chapter ends there: a man who has served the agency for twenty years realises his own institution has turned its back on him.
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