- The CIA has been widely feared and despised - even since
it supposedly cleaned up its act. But from the point of view of one insider
who joined in the agency's old, free-booting days, it is not interventionist
enough. Robert Baer, who recently left, disillusioned, argues that if the
CIA had more on-the- ground agents and information, the disaster of September
11 might have been averted...
-
-
- As a teenager in Aspen, Colorado, Robert Baer wanted
to be a professional ski racer. His mother, dismayed at his low academic
grades, packed him off to military school. Eight years later, in 1976,
after graduating from Georgetown University School of Foreign Services
in Washington DC, he decided to join the CIA, which in those days was much
in the news as scandal followed scandal. For Baer, the CIA "seemed
for a moment like romance itself". The agency is divided into two
houses, a Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and a Directorate of Operations
(DO), the latter made up of information collectors, "case officers".
Baer was accepted into the DO and began a year-long training cycle, including
a four-month paramilitary course.
-
- The purehearts in Washington blanch at the description,
but case officers are in fact second-storey men, thieves who steal other
countries' secrets. The DO is the only arm of the federal government dedicated
to breaking the law - foreign law, but still the law. The last thing the
DO wants is for its officers to run around setting off explosions and shooting
it out with the bad guys in some eastern European capital. Even back then,
before political correctness had taken deep root at Langley and all around
Washington, management was painfully aware that, whenever the guns came
out, the CIA got itself into trouble: Iran, Chile and the Congo, countries
where the CIA was accused of overthrowing governments. Better to operate
in the shadows and leave the bang-bang to others.
-
- Another thing I learned about the DO was that, like any
other professional criminal organisation, it lived according to a strict
code of secrecy. Every document generated in the DO was classified, from
a requisition order for toilet paper to invitations to office parties.
All communications were encrypted and super-encrypted. Case officers used
pseudonyms in place of their true names. Cryptonyms replaced the names
of agents. Even geographical places were renamed. Most case officers spent
their careers in perpetual fear that their cover wouldn't hold up at a
crucial moment.
-
- After training, Baer's first posting was to India, where
he began the business of of recruiting agents, a bit shakily at first.
Next, he was offered a two-year Arabic course by the CIA's Near East Division.
He accepted without a second thought. It was during this time, on April
18, 1983, that a pick-up truck was driven into the lobby of the US embassy
in Beirut and exploded.
-
- At ground zero, the centre of the seven-storey embassy
lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained suspended for what seemed
an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of dust, people, splintered
furniture and paper. Sixty-three people, including 17 Americans, were killed
in what was then the deadliest terrorist attack against the US ever, but
the CIA was hardest hit. Six officers died, including the chief, his deputy
and the deputy's wife. Bob Ames, the CIA's national intelligence officer
for the Near East, was killed, too. Bob had stopped by the embassy on a
visit to Beirut. His hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding
ring still on his finger. It was a tragedy from which the agency would
never recover.
-
- I was in Tunis studying Arabic when the news of the bombing
hit like a sonic boom. All of us, the students and the instructors, knew
someone working in the embassy in Beirut.
-
- I figured that some radical Palestinian group was behind
the explosion, that it would be only a matter of weeks before someone was
caught and the plot exposed. I turned out to be wrong. I had no idea the
bombing would never be officially solved or that it would become for me
a lifelong obsession.
-
- The following year, in March 1984, Bill Buckley, the
CIA chief in Beirut, was kidnapped. The Islamic Jihad Organisation (IJO),
one of the groups that had claimed responsibility for the embassy bombing,
said it had seized him, but in seven months no leads to his whereabouts
were uncovered. Baer, by now stationed in a secret Middle East outpost,
decided, unbeknownst to his station chief, to visit Lebanon. He thought
Baalbek, in the Bekaa valley, was a good place to start looking.
-
- Baalbek had become the Sodom and Gomorrah of terrorism.
Every terrorist, radical and lunatic who thought he could drive the Israelis
out of Lebanon had set up shop there. The real turning point had arrived
on November 21, 1982, when Hussein Al-Musawi, the head of a radical Islamic
group, seized the Sheikh 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. Without any opposition from the Lebanese or
the Syrians, Iran now had a sovereign piece of Lebanese soil, and every
source we had indicated that the Pasdaran was about to go to war against
the west.
-
- Thanks to a chain of contacts with well-placed friends,
including a Lebanese army captain, Baer made his way to Baalbek and actually
found himself having lunch at the house of one of Hussein Al-Musawi's cousins.
-
- Things were going fine until one of the guests took a
particular interest in me. With his long, ungroomed beard and armband that
read "We Crave Martyrdom", he made me nervous. After staring
at me a few seconds, he asked, "What brings you to Baalbek?"
-
- Rather than drag out the classicist spiel I'd used before,
I went for the big lie. "I'm Belgian. I work for an aid organisation,"
I said. I kept my fingers crossed that no one spoke French or, worse, Flemish.
I didn't speak a word of Flemish, and my French was definitely rusty.
-
- "Sir, may I ask your name?" the ungroomed beard
persisted.
-
- "Er, RÈmy."
-
- "That's your family name?"
-
- "No, it's Martin," I said before I could stop
myself. It wasn't as if RÈmy Martin cognac wasn't sold in Lebanon.
Fortunately, he went back to eating.
-
- Afterwards, the captain took me to the Temple of the
Sun, the Roman section of Baalbek. When we were driving out of town, I
casually asked him about the compound on the hill, which I knew was the
Sheikh Abdallah barracks. He stopped the car by the outside perimeter wall,
and I had a chance to take in all of the buildings. It was remarkable how
different they looked from the ground than they did from satellite photography.
One building in particular caught my attention. Two Pasdaran soldiers were
guarding the front door, and either cardboard or blankets covered the inside
of the windows. A wooden sign on the wall identified it as the married
officers' quarters.
-
- It wasn't until years later that I would learn Bill Buckley
was inside, blindfolded and chained to a radiator, along with five other
western hostages. Nor would I know for years that this same building was
a key link in my search for the embassy bombers. But, in truth, I wasn't
really surprised by either revelation. Everything in the Middle East is
interconnected.
-
-
- Shortly afterwards, Baer was transferred to Khartoum,
Sudan, and then, after only four months, recalled to CIA headquarters in
the US because Libya was apparently targeting him for assassination. Back
home, he was enrolled by Duane "Dewey" Clarridge in Counterterrorism
Centre (CTC).
-
- Dewey had all the money he wanted. The CIA director,
Bill Casey, promised him carte blanche; he could cannibalise the DO and
the DI to stock CTC. He even recruited a handful of Los Angeles cops. He
was planning to deploy them around the world and start hauling in terrorists
in handcuffs.
-
- Expectations were high, but it wasn't long before the
politics of intelligence undermined everything Dewey tried to do. He couldn't
even recruit the staff that he had been promised. After six months, he
could put his hands on only two Arabic speakers, one of whom was me, although
about 80% of CTC's targets spoke Arabic. There were no Persian, Pashtun
or Turkish speakers at all.
-
- About a month after I joined, CIA in Bonn cabled that
a leader of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood who was living in Germany wanted
a meeting with the CIA. Bonn, of course, refused to meet him for fear of
irritating the Germans, but it grudgingly agreed to let someone from CTC
fly out to see what he wanted. I took the cable to Dewey. "What's
in it for us?" he asked.
-
- Good question. The Muslim Brotherhood was an amorphous,
dangerous, unpredictable movement that shook every government in the Middle
East to its bones. Founded by an Egyptian, Hasan Al-Banna, in 1929, it
was dedicated to bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. The Egyptian Muslim
Brothers had unsuccessfully tried to kill Egyptian president Abdul Nasser.
The Syrian branch had tried to kill Syrian President Hafiz Assad a couple
of times. The Muslim Brothers are also distant cousins of the Wahabis of
Saudi Arabia, the most puritanical sect of Islam. Underwritten by the Saudi
royal family, the Wahabis spawned Osama bin Laden. They also served as
the inspiration for the Taliban in Afghanistan and other radical Sunni
movements.
-
- I knew, in short, that dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood
was playing with fire. These guys were programmed for trouble. But if the
Reagan administration really was determined to fight it out with our enemies
in Syria and Lebanon, we couldn't have found better surrogates. The only
question was what they were prepared to do for us, and to find that out,
we had to talk to them.
-
- Dewey agreed that I should meet with them, and I was
on an airplane to Frankfurt the next day.
-
- Not bothering to check in with Bonn, I took the train
directly to Dortmund. The plan was for me to wait by a designated kiosk
at Dortmund railway station until I was signalled by a Brotherhood cutout.
At the stroke of two, a dark, bearded man with a paunch, about 45 years
old, walked up to me and, without saying a word, motioned me to follow
him. [A fast drive in a Mercedes ensued along the autobahn and into a "modest,
scrubbed German suburb".] Almost no one was on the street when the
driver turned into the driveway of a house identical to all the rest. I
never would have been able to find the place again.
-
- Waiting in a small office was a frail, elegant man with
a neatly trimmed beard. He was in his late 50s, I guessed, wearing a soft,
grey flannel suit. For the next hour, the Muslim Brotherhood leader vilified
the regime in Damascus. He described Hafiz Assad as a heathen, the incarnation
of evil, and in other terms you didn't hear even in Washington, where Assad
was never particularly popular.
-
- Finally, I interrupted to ask what could be done.
-
- The man smiled. "We are ready to go hand in hand
with the United States and remove this cancerous sore from God's sight."
-
- "How?" I asked, suspecting the worst.
-
- "We have buried in Ghuta, near the Damascus airport,
an SA-7 missile," he said matter-of-factly, as if telling me he'd
planted a bed of petunias in his garden back home. "What we need is
for you to inform us when Assad's airplane is ready to take off and he
is on it."
-
- My first thought, as a case officer, was, 'Damn, this
is hot information'. The sourcing couldn't be better - this man was a boss
in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and he was talking about capping Hafiz
Assad, the biggest hurdle to a Middle East peace. Since our new friend
was proposing an assassination, in violation of Executive Order 12333,
I'd have to report it to Dewey, but I still hoped that we could keep meeting
this man and maybe redirect his energies to a common goal. Even if we couldn't,
I didn't see any harm in keeping our lines of communication open. Who could
tell when we might need the Muslim Brotherhood?
-
- Back in Washington, Dewey listened carefully as I told
him about the meeting, from the moment I was picked up at the Dortmund
rail station until I had told the Muslim Brotherhood leader I'd have to
consult with my bosses.
-
- "Go write it up," Dewey said.
-
- "Wait," he added as I was heading out the door.
"Nothing on a computer. Use a typewriter instead. Destroy the ribbon
afterward. And don't make a copy. I want to keep this between Ollie [Oliver
North], you and me." As instructed, I gave Dewey the only copy of
my contact report - the last I was ever to hear about it.
-
- Bonn was unimpressed with the cable I sent about the
meeting (minus the part about the SA-7). Bonn was sticking to its original
position: it did not want to meet anyone from the Muslim Brotherhood. I
didn't have the time to go back, and the CIA wouldn't meet the Syrian Muslim
Brothers again. But the Muslim Brother I met in that innocuous suburban
house in Dortmund would pop into my life again, in the days after September
11, 2001, when the FBI came calling to tell me that one of the Syrian's
associates was a suspect in the global network that had supported the attacks
on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
-
- The really bad guys - the ones capable of doing great
harm for or against our side, depending on which way God is talking to
them that day - don't just go away. It was better, I always figured, to
have a line into them, even if it meant keeping our hands a little dirty
in the process. There is, of course, no guarantee even if we had kept communications
open that the Syrian I met in 1986 would have led us to Mohamed Atta or
any of the German cells of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network that may
have played a role in the September 11 attacks. But closing down the channel
assured that the Syrian wouldn't lead us to anyone. For Bonn and the CIA,
it remains an unforgivable error.
-
- Meanwhile, the White House was still on Dewey's back
to do something about the hostages. He hailed me into his office one morning.
"You have good instincts," he began. "What's the craziest
idea you can come up with to free the hostages?"
-
- For a year after Buckley's kidnapping, the CIA had no
idea who had taken either him or the other IJO hostages. A break wouldn't
come until Algeria stepped forward to inform us that a young Shi'a Muslim
from southern Lebanon named Imad Fayez Mughniyah had kidnapped Buckley,
as well as CNN's Jeremy Levin and the clerics Benjamin Weir and Laurence
Martin Jenco. Before 1982, Mughniyah worked for PLO chairman Yasser Arafat,
the Algerians told us; now, he operated on his own. A well-placed agent
identified Mughniyah, too, as the mastermind of the hijacking of the TWA
Flight 847 out of Athens on June 14, 1985. All this was on my mind as I
stood in Dewey's door.
-
- "No limits?" I finally asked.
-
- "Yeah, anything," Dewey said.
-
- "We hit Mughniyah where it hurts: his family,"
I said.
-
- Dewey didn't see what I was getting at.
-
- "Look, Dewey," I said. "Let's assume three
things are true: Mughniyah really controls the hostages, Mughniyah is devoted
to his family, as most people in the Middle East are, and, finally, this
administration would consider anything to get the hostages back. If all
of these are, in fact, true, then we might consider grabbing some of Mughniyah's
family to trade for the hostages."
-
- The idea, of course, was over the top, but back then
the CIA was expected to operate on the edge, to do things no other government
agency would consider. One of the instructors at the Farm [the CIA's main
training base] had told us a story of how, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war, the agency's skunk works had come up with the idea of filling a captured
Soviet transport plane - Soviet markings and all - with live pigs and dropping
them over Mecca, Islam's most holy city. The idea was to light the Middle
East's fuse and direct the blast toward the Soviet Union, whose influence
had been growing in the area. Compared with that, what I was suggesting
to Dewey sounded almost sane.
-
- "Fine, go find me Imad's family," he told me.
-
- I knew better than actually to get started; Dewey would
still have to run it by Ollie North or someone else at the National Security
Council (NSC). When I never heard anything back, I forgot about it. Only
when the Iran-contra story broke did I learn that North had circulated
my idea around the White House via one of his infamous messages on PROF,
an internal White House email system.
-
- April 1986, Washington, DC. Before I was sent to my next
posting, in Beirut, I had time to give myself a crash course in terrorism.
There wasn't a better place to do that than in the CTC. I had complete
access to all of the CIA's files and databases on terrorism. I was like
a kid in a candy store. The first thing I turned to - inevitably, I suppose
- was the embassy bombing. Imad Mughniyah was as good a place as any to
start.
-
- He was an enigma. According to his passport application,
he had been born in 1962. We knew he had grown up in a makeshift cinder-block
house with no running water in 'Ayn Al-Dilbah, one of the poorest parts
of Beirut's southern suburbs. Mughniyah, we had confirmed, joined Yasser
Arafat's Force 17 (Arafat's elite personal security organisation) at an
early age, maybe 14 or 15, but was always a low-level bang man, one of
dozens who spent their days and nights sniping at Christians across the
Green Line. It didn't add up. How did a poor boy from 'Ayn Al- Dilbah rise
out of the ashes of the 1982 Israeli invasion and in less than a year put
together the most lethal and well- funded terrorist organisation in the
world? Was this the man who kidnapped and held dozens of foreign hostages?
Was this the man who, as I had come to believe, blew up the American embassy
in April 1983 and covered his tracks so well that there wasn't a single
lead tying him to it? The more I got into the files, the more convinced
I was that the Algerians were wrong about Mughniyah operating independently.
-
- Maybe it sounds wacky, but I loved working in Beirut.
However, picking up the trail of the embassy bombing was like putting together
a Roman mosaic scattered in an earthquake and scorched by fire. Sitting
in Christian East Beirut meant we were working in the dark. We couldn't
cross into West Beirut, where most of our best remaining agents were. That
left us making do with what the CIA calls access agents - those who don't
know secrets themselves but can access people who do.
-
- One of my best access agents was a freelance journalist
I'll call Farid. Although he was a Christian, Farid's job allowed him to
travel back and forth across the Green Line. A slight, balding man with
a winning smile, Farid could pass unnoticed almost anywhere in the world.
He had friends and contacts all over Lebanon, and could talk to pretty
much whomever he liked, with the exception of Mughniyah or Hizbullah.
-
- Where Farid left off, telephone taps picked up. In Beirut,
everyone's phone was tapped. You could walk down almost any street and
see jerry-rigged telephone wires draped across the street. Part of it was
a practicality. If you were to move into an apartment in, say, Hamra -
Beirut's old business district - and find that there was no telephone line,
you couldn't ask the telephone company to install a new line. The telephone
company no longer existed. What you did was find a working line and tie
into it, legally or illegally.
-
- I had five other agents like Farid. Piece by piece, I
put together a picture of Mughniyah's group. Everyone was either related
by blood, had fought together in Fatah, or hailed from 'Ayn Al-Dilbah neighbourhood.
-
- One name that kept popping up alongside Mughniyah's was
Hussein Khalil, who was the Lebanese man in charge of the married quarters
at the Sheikh Abdallah barracks in early 1985 - at the same time the IJO
hostages were held there.
-
- The only conclusion a reasonable person could make was
that a Fatah cell, with or without Arafat's knowledge, blew up the American
embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Mughniyah and Khalil were almost definitely
involved. There was only one significant question: who gave the orders?
-
- To get to the next step, a lot of details needed filling
in, such as who actually drove the truck through the front door. If we
could find that out, it might well lead us to the bombers. The break came
in October 1987. I was at my desk late in the afternoon when the embassy
security officer came to say that a Mr Walker wanted to see me. Mr Walker
was the code for a walk- in who wanted to see a CIA officer. The man waiting
for me was probably about 35, although he could have passed for much older,
and scarred all over. His sandals flagged him as a Muslim. (Lebanese Christians
usually opted for stylish European shoes).
-
- After he passed through the metal detector, I led him
along the embassy's metal labyrinthine sandbagged trenches, down a hill,
and out a back exit, where I had prepositioned a car.
-
- As soon as we turned on to the coastal highway, I asked
Mr Walker for his national identity card. When he pulled it from his shirt
pocket and showed it to me, I almost drove off the road. He had the same
family name as a member of Mughniyah's group. I held my breath when I asked
Mr Walker - I'll call him Hasan - if he was related to the terrorist of
the same name. "He's a first cousin," he told me.
-
- My objective became putting our relationship on a clandestine
footing as quickly as possible. As the first cousin of a notorious IJO
terrorist, Hasan had a half-life in Christian East Beirut of about five
seconds. I needed to find a secure place to let him off and another secure
spot to pick him up for the next meeting. I headed to Sinn Al-Fill, the
same neighbourhood where I met Farid. As I was about to drop Hasan off,
I asked him why he had decided to meet with the CIA. "I can't stand
the murder of innocent people," he said. "What Hizbullah does
is wrong."
-
- "But it's risky," I said. "You have children.
If you're caught, you'll be tortured to death."
-
- "I know. But God protects me." I waited for
him to explain. I thought I knew where the conversation was going. I was
wrong. "I play Russian roulette," Hasan said sheepishly.
-
- I'd heard the rumour that fanatic Muslims had taken up
the sport to test divine determination. A round in the chamber was God's
way of letting you know your time was up. But I never took the rumour seriously,
at least until now. Before I let Hasan out, I made him promise to stop
playing Russian roulette. Just meeting me, I told him, was all the fate
he wanted to tempt.
-
- Hasan joined Hizbullah, found a job in one of its offices,
and turned into a fantastic agent, the CIA's first in the group.
-
- The analysts back home sent me reams of questions about
what sheikh so-and-so thought about sheikh so-and-so, how much Hizbullah
was spending on its social welfare programmes, or when it was going to
enter mainstream Lebanese politics. But what interested me was Imad Mughniyah
and the IJO.
-
- Since you had to be recruited to the IJO, I asked Hasan
to work the problem on the edges. He started praying at a mosque whose
imam was close to Mughniyah. Hasan went every Friday and soon joined a
religious study group. Because the imam knew Hasan was related to an IJO
terrorist, he accepted him as one of the faithful.
-
- One day when Hasan was alone with the imam, he decided
the time was right to bring up the bombing. As we'd agreed, Hasan started
with a ploy. Instead of charging ahead and asking who the suicide bomber
was, he mentioned the name of a young man who had been in the imam's congregation
for many years but had disappeared. Lowering his voice conspiratorially,
Hasan said he'd heard the young man was the suicide driver who blew up
the US embassy in April 1983.
-
- "Where did you hear that?" the imam asked.
-
- Hasan responded vaguely that he'd heard it from his IJO
cousin. He knew the imam would never check back with his cousin.
-
- "No," the imam answered. "No, he was not
the blessed martyr who destroyed the American spy nest."
-
- Hasan insisted he was right.
-
- "No, you're wrong." The imam didn't appreciate
having his authority challenged. "It was Brother Hassuna. I know very
well."
-
- "Who?"
-
- "Mohamed Hassuna."
-
- Hassuna was not a common name in Lebanon. That helped.
I had all of my agents look into the Hassuna family. One of them, Samir,
knew a Major Hassuna, and promised to check with him to see if any members
of the family were missing. A week later he dropped the bombshell on me
- one of Major Hassuna's brothers, Mohamed, had died on the Iraq front
in Iran.
-
- "Iran?" I asked incredulously. "How's
that possible? Lebanese don't simply pull up stakes and fight for Iran."
-
- Samir shrugged. "I'll find out."
-
- At the next meeting, Samir said that Major Hassuna had
told him that his family were non-practising Muslims, but that Mohamed
was different. In his search for a deeper faith, he had embraced Shi'a
Islam, and in early 1983 he had unexpectedly informed his family that he
was going to Iran to fight in the war with Iraq. That was the last they
heard of him until they received a letter from the Iranian embassy that
Mohamed had died in a battle on the front.
-
- I had Farid dig up the official records on Mohamed Hassuna.
Although Hassuna had a passport, there was no record that he had ever travelled
out of the country. I wrote up what I knew about Hassuna in a long, detailed
intelligence report - the first in a series I would do on the bombing.
-
- A few days later, headquarters advised that the report
would not be disseminated: "While the information is compelling, it
is only of historical interest." In plain English, the national security
community no longer gave a damn who had bombed our embassy in Beirut.
-
- In a way, I could almost understand Washington's not
caring. The CIA was falling into the hands of people who had never put
their lives on the line to learn about terrorism in places such as Beirut.
The embassy bombing for them wasn't just ancient history; it was a distraction
from their career ambitions. Why mess up a spotless record by bearing news
of one of the agency's darkest hours? I saw my job differently. If we didn't
know who we were up against, we wouldn't know what they were capable of,
and might not learn until they showed up on our shores, armed to the teeth.
-
- Besides, there was still an outstanding arrest warrant
for Mughniyah. All I needed was someone with the balls to exercise it.
-
- I'll call the man I found Jean, who in turn put me in
touch with with a man I'll call Isam. I told Isam straight off that I wanted
to grab someone who lived in 'Ayn Al-Dilbah.
-
- "Do you know anything about 'Ayn Al-Dilbah?"
Isam asked. I don't think he was daunted by the prospect; he was just taking
my measure.
-
- I ignored him. "It's Imad Mughniyah I want."
-
- He turned to Jean: "Is he serious?" Jean nodded.
-
- Isam turned back to me and said: "I'll kill him
for two thousand dollars. A thousand in advance."
-
- "I want him alive."
-
- "Then find someone else."
-
- "How do I know you can do anything in 'Ayn Al-Dilbah,
anyhow?" I asked.
-
- Isam laughed. "Mr Jean didn't tell you who I am?
I've killed more people than your marines and the New Jersey put together."
-
- The next week, Isam arrived carrying a sheaf of notes
and an envelope of pictures. It was obvious he was well plugged into the
'Ayn Al-Dilbah gang. He had it all - cars, addresses, telephone numbers.
-
- At our third meeting, Isam had a plan: "This week,
Mughniyah is going to be back at the school. He has to be. Someone from
Tehran is coming to see him there. We may never have another chance...."
Isam said. "In front of the school there is a parking lot, and in
the back an alley. What I propose is to put a car on each side and detonate
them simultaneously. I figure a thousand kilos of Semtex will tidy up your
little problem."
-
- It was what we call a muffler charge, and Isam was right.
Two car bombs on either side of a two-story building would definitely bring
it down and kill everyone inside.
-
- "Can you be sure Mughniyah will be there?"
I asked.
-
- "My cousin will tell me."
-
- "What do you need to start?"
-
- "Two thousand up front and ten thousand afterward
- after Mughniyah is dead."
-
- It didn't take me long to decide. I'd joined the CIA
as a prank. And, yeah, somewhere along the line I was converted and became
an information junkie. I was obsessed with finding out who bombed the embassy.
But none of it meant I'd been handed the moral authority to decide who
needed to be killed. I'd leave that up to the politicians in Washington.
-
- I told Isam to go back and collect more information.
I never reported the incident to headquarters, and I would never see Isam
again. Do I regret it now? Sure. Whether Imad Mughniyah is in league with
Osama bin Laden, I really don't know, but I am certain there's not a dime's
worth of real difference between the two of them. If we had accepted back
then that we were at war with terrorists, Washington might have been more
inclined to approve the operation Isam proposed, and I would have been
more inclined to force the issue with my superiors in Langley. But we didn't,
and like so many other problems, we let this one fester in place.
-
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,630664,00.html
-
- One angry spy (Part 2)
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- Robert Baer Saturday January 12, 2002 The Guardian
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- Baer's next posting was to Paris. He was not impressed
with the CIA operation there. To be sure, Paris went through the motions
of spying, but it was only for appearances' sake. And then there was the
language problem [for CIA operatives]. The older officers spoke good French;
the younger ones didn't. French agents, like their countrymen, hate slowing
down for someone who can't bother to learn the language properly. French
snobbery was another barrier: Hush Puppies, Brooks Brothers trench coats,
and neon fanny packs offended the host sensibilities. Paris's case officers
were frozen out of French society. All they could do at night was watch
videos.
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- Something else I noticed: as the DO went into decline,
satellites, not agents, became the touchstone of truth in Washington. Few
things are more satisfying for a policymaker than to hold in his hand a
clean, glossy black-and-white satellite photo, examine it with his very
own 3D viewer, and decide for himself what it means. Not only could he
do without analysts, he could do without agents, too. And thank goodness.
Agents were messy. They sometimes got things wrong, even occasionally lied.
And they definitely had the potential to cause ugly diplomatic incidents.
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- As a fatal malaise settled over the CIA, case officers
began resigning in droves, and some of the best left first. In Paris -
beautiful, bewitching Paris - the attrition rate was running at about 30%.
Convinced by all the outward signs that spying was no longer a serious
profession for serious people, they went home to find a job in investment
banking or any other profession that America took seriously.
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- America is at war as I write, and the enemy's recruits
are like water. Arrest or kill hundreds of them, and hundreds of others
will flow into their places. We can't kill them all, but we can figure
out what their plans and intentions are by talking with them. We can figure
out the direction of their war by infiltrating people in the mosques who
might tell us how bad things are and how many young men are devoted to
taking their own lives. That's what we didn't have. That's what we were
forfeiting all over the CIA and the intelligence community generally, in
the pursuit of goals I still can't fully understand.
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- Baer returned to head office, to a desk job.
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- It wasn't long before I began to realise just how lost
I was in the current culture of Washington and the CIA. For decades, I
had unpacked my bags in places such as Tajikistan and the Sudan and begun
learning the ins and outs of the local culture, and that's what I did now.
I started talking with all sorts of people, anyone who could teach me how
Washington works. I would eventually learn far more than I had bargained
for.
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- I would see how committee hearings and press leaks can
be almost as effective as suicide bombers in promoting narrow, parochial
causes. I would find that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian
Sea to the White House. I'd also see how money, not lives or national security,
skews so much of what takes place in the very places most charged with
protecting us all.
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- I was called down to the NSC in December 1995 for an
unscheduled emergency meeting on Georgia. When I walked into the NSC's
stately conference room, I found the usual downtown nomenklatura: Rand
Beers, head of intelligence programmes for the NSC, Jennifer Sims, from
the State Department, and a few others from Defence and State, there for
decoration.
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- Sims didn't waste any time making her pitch: we absolutely
had to give Georgia's president Eduard Shevardnadze a Matador air- defence
system to protect his planes and helicopters. (The Matador detects things
such as radar lock-ons and approaching missiles.) Shevardnadze was the
only Caucusus leader who had committed to the main oil-export pipeline,
connecting the Caspian to the Mediterranean; America could not afford to
lose him.
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- I vaguely wondered why, if he was so important, the oil
companies didn't pay to protect his life. Then Sims dropped her bomb: the
money for the Matador would come from the CIA. At first I thought I'd fallen
asleep and was dreaming.
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- The State Department couldn't have forgotten already
that after Fred Woodruff [the CIA man in Tbilisi] had been murdered just
outside the Georgian capital, Shevardnadze had stonewalled the investigation
at every turn. Now the CIA was being asked to reward Shevardnadze by ponying
up $2 million-plus to protect his life - all so that Amoco, Exxon, and
Mobil could have some extra reserves for their yearly financial statement.
Had the inmates finally taken complete control of the asylum?
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- At least I knew exactly how to drive a stake in this
deal.
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- "Can't be done," I said, interrupting.
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- Everyone in the room stopped talking, surprised I'd said
anything.
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- "Bob, what seems to be the problem?" Beers
said, bracing himself for the worst.
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- "The man Ms Sims proposes turning the Matador system
over to is a murderer."
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- "Sorry, Bob, I'm not sure we all understand what
you're getting at," Beers said.
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- I explained. The relevant KGB man - the one who would
operate the Matador system - was a murderer. "We have a video of him
shooting six handcuffed prisoners in the back of the head. It's rather
gruesome, but I'd be happy to go back to Langley and bring you back a copy.
In any case, he's violated human rights. As much as we'd like to, there's
nothing the CIA can do for you."
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