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Robert Baer
SEE NO EVIL NY. Three Rivers Press. 2002. xix. 292 pp. paper. ISBN I-4000-4684-X Reviewed by Patrick Killough NOTE: I rated the book * * *
(readable but just average) in all three cases. The titles variously
referred to mistakes in the early stages of Islamo-Terrorism.
I. For www.barnesandnoble.com Author Robert Baer made a career in CIA operations from 1976 to 1997. His memoirs, SEE NO EVIL, went into print weeks after the 9/11/2001 terror attacks by air against Manhattan's Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Baer blames their success largely on the deterioration in American government intelligence gathering which he had observed and protested. *** SEE NO EVIL highlights Robert Baer at work in CIA headquarters in Virginia, training and learning languages (especially Arabic) and spying abroad in India, Lebanon, Cyprus, Tajikistan and Iraq. The book's cover says that SEE NO EVIL is "the true story that suggested the major motion picture "Syriana." *** Like Syriana the film, SEE NO EVIL draws attention to the power of American petroleum multinationals. Baer asserts that more than one oil giant, such as AMOCO and EXXON, have their own advocates at work in sensitive positions within the U.S. Government. It is not just Congress that has a revolving door of people leaving for well paid jobs in the private sector. So does the CIA, asserts Baer. He gives the example of Ed Pechous, who made a meteoric career in the Agency then the next day joined petroleum barracuda Roger Tamraz as an employee, having just had official responsibility for liaison with Tamraz while heading the CIA office in Manhattan. *** The book is a good review of the successful end of the cold war and the repeated American ball dropping that occurred in the early phases of international Islamo-terrorism. Familiar names pop up: Ahmed Chalabi, now in the government of Iraq, national security advisors Tony Lake and Sandy Berger and others. Baer's book adds a colorful tessera to the evolving mosaic of what went wrong with American intelligence gathering of terrorist plans and capacities. RELATED READING: Allen Dulles, THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE, MARSHALL PLAN. -OOO- Kerrville, TX 02/10/2007 =-=-=-=-=-= II. For www.amazon.com Two names that recur in Robert Baer's spy memoir, SEE NO EVIL, are Ahmed Chalabi and Roger Tamraz. Tamraz, the petroleum entrepreneur, is a name no longer mentioned on the talk shows. But Ahmad Chalabi, equally colorful, was for a time "our man in Iraq" and later, briefly, Deputy Prime Minister in the interim Government of Iraq. Baer brings them to three dimensional life. His briefer sketches of such notables as National Security Advisors Tony Lake and Sandy Berger are also deftly and credibly done, as well as the blazingly successful CIA bureaucrat Ed Pechous who went to work for Tamraz the day he left CIA. From 1976 to 1997 author Robert Baer was a career spy for the CIA. His personal obsession became to find out who was responsible for blowing up the US embassy and a marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983. He repeatedly shakes his head over a CIA and FBI which year after year sluggishly fail to identify those obviously skilled, dangerous terrorists. In his spare time Baer threw some light on who they were and found important connections, especially to post-Shah Iran. He also laments throughout the lack of Arabic speakers like himself in U.S. intelligence and the Government's timid replacement of on-the-ground operatives by electronic surveillance. Robert Baer speculates that better human intelligence and stronger pursuit of the Beirut bombers might have prevented the 9/11/2001 attacks against the U.S. mainland. Better intelligence, he asserts, might, of course, have failed to prevent 9/11. But unwillingness to pursue every lead virtually insured that the terrorists would succeed. -OOO- Kerrville, TX 02/10/2007 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= III. For www.epinions.com From 1976 to 1997 author Robert Baer was a career spy for the CIA. His personal obsession became to find out who was responsible for blowing up the US embassy and a U.S. marine corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983. I was a U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer for three decades, with varying amounts of time time spent in Iraq, India, Lebanon and other Near and Middle East countries mentioned by Robert Baer in his 2002 memoir SEE NO EVIL: THE TRUE STORY OF A GROUND SOLDIER IN THE CIA'S WAR ON TERRORISM. Baer gave me glimpses of the later careers of at least two persons whom I had known personally: Harvard Professor Richard Frye (p. 158) and CIA career officer Ed Pechous (p. 223). From Frye I had bought in Afghanistan a car he had driven from Europe through Turkey and Iran. From Robert Baer I learned that Frye had been with the OSS in World War II and was later a rare American hiker into Yaghnob in the high Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan near the borders of China and Afghanistan. Ed Pechous and I had served together at the American Consulate General in Karachi, Pakistan. I had seen him go on to a spectacular career in the CIA. From SEE NO EVIL I learned that Ed had ended his government service shortly after being in charge of the CIA's Manhattan office, going directly to work for the controversial petroleum entrepreneur Roger Tamraz. SEE NO EVIL is that kind of book. Full of names, faraway places and encounters, sometimes merely fleeting, with people who still make headlines: President Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and onetime exile, more recently Iraqi interim Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi. Beyond the straightforward chronology of Robert Baer's life, SEE NO EVIL is unified by the author's self-described obsession to find out who the perpetrators were of the hugely successful attacks in 1983 on the U.S. Embassy Marine barracks in Beirut and why the CIA and FBI so soon seemed to give up on pursuing them. He spent some time himself in this quest and by the time he retired in 1997 had not only linked some old dots in the puzzle but discovered some new dots as well. He thinks that, if more operatives had spent more time emulating his methods, the 9/11/2001 terrorist successes in Manhattan and at the Pentagon would probably not have happened. Much of SEE NO EVIL is justified hand wringing about the decline of American human intelligence (the running of foreign agents with access to guarded secrets) in favor of reliance on satellites, radio intercepts and other forms of technical surveillance. The CIA in particular he saw as losing its nerve after growing Congressional impatience with the rough and clumsy side of human intelligence gathering. Mr Baer has a gift for highlighting character in a few words. He does so person after person. One example: Ziyad Samir Jarrah was a young Lebanese who was among the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11/01. That was the passenger plane targeted at the White House or Congress. The airplane was almost recaptured by passengers before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Robert Baer, several years retired, but working as a private consultant in Beirut, met with a relative (code named Salah) of Jarrah. Baer heard that Jarrah had been educated at La Sagesse, a French-speaking Jesuit high school in Beirut. "It was Salah's way of saying that ZIyad Jarah came from a secular Sunni family" (p. 276). Baer appeared unsettled to learn that this was not the profile of the "typical" fanatic Islamic terrorist, i.e. someone unemployed, destitute, ignorant. Why would such an apparently normal, secular, in many ways Westernized young man of good family kill himself and so many others? That is one of many unanswered questions in SEE NO EVIL. Still, every bit of insight into the Near and Middle East helps us come to terms with apparently never ending and evolving threats to U.S. national security. Pros Displays more clues than the US acted upon in the beginnings of Islamo-Terrorism. Cons One man's limited perspective. Stays on the surface of events. The Bottom Line This is not a masterwork of spying as, say, Allen Dulles's THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE. It is not "big picture." But it does have its nuggets of golden insight. Kerrville, Texas 02/13/2007 -OOO- http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/baer_evil.html |