See No Evil: Confessions (And Warnings) From An Old Spy
Written: Apr 28 '02 (Updated Jan 29 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Probing, entertaining account of a veteran field officer in the CIA
Cons: A few confusing details; a little stingy on personal stuff
The Bottom Line: Read Review
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| green1's Full Review: See No Evil the True Story of a Ground Books |
“Apply to the CIA.”
Those words, spoken by Robert Baer’s post-college roommate in the mid-1970s, were the beginning of his 20-year odyssey through the bowels of America’s intelligence apparatus. The son of an adventurous, impulsive mother, Baer traveled the world as a child and attended Georgetown University, ending up without any real clue as to what his career goals were. It’s ironic that Baer really joined the CIA, at least initially, almost as a goof. In time, as he states in his absorbing memoir, “See No Evil”, he came to cherish and love the agency and its mission. He also came to be disturbed and distressed as the agency began to step onto bureaucratic and politically correct landmines throughout the 80s and 90s, seeming not to notice its ever more muddled state.
Baer says that when the CIA first took him on in the late 70s, he expected the agency to revoke his employment at any moment when they discovered his past, which included his rides through the halls of Georgetown University on a motorcycle (wearing only a towel), a leftist mother who liked to discuss Marxist theory with fellow travelers, and some of his more colorful roommates (a couple he once stayed with had anarchist leanings and a pet Boa Constrictor that would occasionally run loose). For some reason, they never did.
Baer recounts his adventures at “The Farm”, the CIA’s training facility in rural Virginia, and his eventual placement in the Middle East. His job was to recruit spies from certain countries and get them to acquire information for him. Essentially, he was supposed to get people to betray their own governments. Some, of course, didn’t need all that much persuasion. Many were eager to do it, either for money or hatred of their leaders.
In the 1980s, Baer sifted through documentation and information gained from informants to find the parties responsible for embassy bombings and kidnappings as well as the devastating attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. The agency, growing increasingly enthralled by, and dependent on, computer and satellite technology, began to neglect its other operational asset - human intelligence. Baer implies, quite correctly, that one cannot succeed without the other.
Things only got worse in the 1990s as the agency became demoralized by politically correct policies, careerism and the witch-hunt conducted against CIA field officers by the FBI after the arrest of the spy Aldrich Ames (while at the same time, the FBI’s own Robert Hanssen was selling state secrets to the Russians in garbage bags). In one instance, in 1994 Baer called CIA headquarters from Tajikistan to request a debriefing officer who was fluent in Pashtun to speak to refugees coming across the border from Afghanistan. HQ gave Baer this interesting little tidbit: CIA no longer saw the need to collect any information on Afghanistan since the end of its war with the Soviets, and instead offered to send a four-person team to brief him about the dangers of sexual harassment on the job.
Baer also recounts how Washington badly fumbled a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein in 1995. According to Baer, the time and opportunity to take Saddam out presented itself more clearly than ever, but it was aborted at the last minute. There’s no guarantee that it would’ve worked, or that we could’ve replaced the dictator with someone more sympathetic to Western democracy, but there was at least a chance that we could’ve gotten rid of Saddam and avoided a war that, as of this writing, has cost nearly 4,000 American lives.
One gripe I have about the book is Baer’s stinginess with details of his personal life; around the mid-point he abruptly reveals that he was married for a short time and had three children, then just as quickly dismisses the subject. It’s understandable, in a way, given the secrecy that has been necessary for Baer to conduct his job properly (and I’m sure he’s made his share of enemies, so it has to be partly to protect his family). I just would’ve been interested to see how his loved ones lived with his rather unusual occupation and his tight-lipped attitude towards it. I also would’ve liked to read how his left-leaning mother reacted to her only son’s dedication to an agency she undoubtedly saw as a den of pure malevolence.
There are also parts of the book that are a little hard to follow for a layman, including Baer’s attempt to find the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983. Baer’s investigation is a bewildering labyrinth of details that fly by at blinding speed. It’s so confusing I had to read it about three times and still wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to his conclusions. Baer himself, as if sympathetic to the reader, admits to the story’s dizzying complexities.
Baer's moral is that our best protection is vigilance, strength and a dedicated, persistent commitment to the truth at all costs. Baer makes a common-sense appeal for precisely that kind of defense in “See No Evil”, an entertaining and enlightening chronicle of lessons he acquired as a ground soldier in the clandestine war against terrorism - lessons that, for many in our government, have yet to be learned.
Recommended:
Yes
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green1
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