- WASHINGTON (UPI) - For a
supposedly secret organization, the CIA produces a lot of memoirs.
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- But few are as informative, as revealing -- and as angry
-- as "See No Evil; the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA's
war on terrorism" by veteran agent Robert Baer (Crown Books, 304pp,
$25.95).
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- Baer was one of the CIA's few Arabic speakers, serving
throughout the Middle East and central Asia through the 1980s and 1990s,
where he built a reputation as a real expert on the terrorist networks.
He knew his way around their convoluted family trees, their even more
complex
and shifting loyalties, and pulled off some remarkable feats of detective
work in tracking down those responsible for blowing up the U.S. Embassy
and the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
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- "Baer was one of the most talented Middle East case
officers of the past 20 years," says fellow agent Reuel Marc Gerecht.
And other CIA veterans knew Baer as a natural, something of a cowboy who
liked to run his own ops without too much respect for the desk jockeys
back in Langley. One fellow veteran calls him "a throw-back to the
original CIA of the Cold War and the 1950s -- and all the better for that.
We miss those guys."
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- So the final chapters of this book cover the tragic fate
of a field agent who can stay alive and function in the war-torn streets
of Beirut, but is forced back into the even more treacherous landscape
of Washington's bureaucracy. Anyone who wants to understand how America
got into its current Middle East mess while Saddam Hussein still rules
and terrorists can devastate New York should read Baer's book.
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- Baer was in Northern Iraq in 1995, running an operation
with the Kurds and a defecting Iraqi general to mount a coup against Saddam
Hussein. Suddenly he was called back to Washington -- on the direct orders
of President Clinton's national security adviser Tony Lake -- to be
confronted
with FBI and CIA lawyers threatening him with the death penalty under the
murder-for-hire statutes, for allegedly conspiring to bring about the death
of Saddam Hussein.
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- Baer got out of that one. But this book will make
uncomfortable
reading for Lake and for one of his staff, Shirley Heslin, and for Lake's
successor, Sandy Berger, and for some senior State Department figures
running
Iraq policy. Baer's account of his time in Washington, and his brush with
the Clinton campaign finance scandals through a colorful oilman involved
in exploiting the energy wealth of the Caspian basin may just tell one
side of the story. But it makes for compelling reading as a kind of secret
history of the Clinton years.
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- To be fair to the bureaucrats, American policy was
constrained
by laws, including the one that forbids the assassination of foreign heads
of state. Moreover, Baer's experience in Lebanon convinced him -- on the
basis of personal experience -- that Iran and Yasser Arafat were up to
their necks in terrorism, hostage-taking and a mission to punish the United
States. By the 1990s, when Arafat was an honored guest and peace partner
at the White House and Camp David, Baer's suspicions were unwelcome.
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- Baer could be an infuriating subordinate, always ready
to push the envelope, skirt his orders and fudge the paperwork to get the
job done. He always insisted that his own eyeballs were more reliable than
the satellite imagery that Washington decision-makers relied on. And Baer
can be careless with the facts. Azerbaijan's post-Soviet President was
indeed a former member of the Politburo, but he never headed the KGB, as
Baer claims. This is the kind of error that casts doubt over Baer's other
fascinating asides, like his claim that German intelligence had a secret
deal to train Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
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- Baer's fundamental conclusion, that the CIA has become
too bureaucratized and too reliant on technology and satellite at the
expense
of human intelligence, is not new. But it comes, with all the weight of
personal experience, from one who has risked his life on the meanest
streets,
recruited agents in hostile cities, and built a near-legendary
record.
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- One anecdote tells it all. When Baer was running the
bureau in central Asia during the Tadjik civil war of the early 1990s,
he wanted to start running agents into Afghanistan and Iran. The CIA would
-- or could -- send him no Pashtoon or Dari speaking staff. But they then
did offer to send him a 4-person team from headquarters, to give sessions
on sexual harassment and how to avoid it. James Bond would have
wept.
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- Copyright © 2002 United Press International. All
rights reserved.
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