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Summary: Baer in the Wilderness
Review: The media has made a lot of Robert Baer's revelations about the decline of the CIA in recent years, and SEE NO EVIL certainly is illuminating in that regard. Much like some of our professional athletes, the Agency comes across as arrogant, overweight and overpaid.But the true value in Baer's book lies in his ability to take us into the field with him on one CIA adventure after another. We're with him in the car late as night as he eludes Indian agents who are chasing him while he tries to get to a dropoff point so he can return the Soviet documents he's just photocopied. We're with him when he straps on his boots and backpack and hikes into the mountains. And we're inside the chopper when he's flown across from Cyprus and inserted into Beirut during the civil war. Baer covers just about everything you might want to know about a career in the CIA--the recruitment, the training, the frustrations, the victories. Baer is a pretty good writer. I trust he'll get better in his next book. Forget all those routine special ops U.S. techno-thrillers. This is the real thing.
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Summary: excellent read
Review: Topical, pulls no punches. Bridges the events of today to those of the last fifteen years.
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Summary: Audio CD problems
Review: Warning to CD users: The CD version is formatted in such a way that it is not recognizable by all CD players. The CDs would not play in any of three car systems. The only way to play them was to copy the files to new CDs through my computer. That having been done, I discovered something else: The qualities that make someone a good author of the printed word do not necessarily make that person a good (or even competent) narrator. It is absolutely amazing how Mr. Baer can read to you how incensed he was about the CIA with the emotion of someone reading a grocery list. The listener can only conclude that he is not incensed at all, and that then leads you to doubt his sincerity and credibility. The book has several important messages, but the fact that the author cannot read his own words leads me to concede the possibility that it could have been ghostwritten.
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Summary: Where Did We Go Wrong? Baer Tells Us
Review: 'See No Evil' documents Robert Baer's career as a CIA field officer, but it also does much more. It shows us how intelligence in this country has drastically changed since the Cold War and the tragic consequences we as a nation are paying for those changes. At the beginning of his career, Baer describes himself as an extremely unlikely candidate for the CIA. He relates experiences of his training and facts from many events that we just _think_ we know about. Baer's story makes for very interesting and exciting reading as he describes the thrills and dangers of his first several years as a field officer. It was an incredibly tough and dangerous job, but a necessary one, as the author adequately demonstrates. Excitement quickly turns to anger for both the author and the reader. As the Cold War ends, the reader will learn how the CIA took a dramatic turn, seeking to gain intelligence from satellite surveilance rather than from agents in the field. Why not? The technology is available and fewer lives will be lost. Sounded like a good idea at the time, but not to Baer. You'll read about how terrorists in the Middle East and in other parts of the world were quickly ignored after the Cold War in favor or special interests in Washington. You'll also see how close we really were to putting an end to Saddam Hussein forever. You'll read about many other events that will surprise you, shock you, and make you mad as hell. 'See No Evil' made me experience all those feelings and more. How could the CIA have fallen to such a level as Baer describes in this book? What a terrible price we as a nation have paid and continue to pay for our lack of top-notch intelligence. I'll admit that twenty years ago I pretty much ignored all the fighting and disputes going on in the Middle East. I ignorantly thought that it didn't concern me, so I didn't give it much thought. The country was doing well, I was doing well, and that's all that mattered. I won't make that mistake again. I hope that Baer's book is read by millions of Americans and especially the big boys in Washington. This is not a book to be swept under the rug. It's a book to be read and heard by America, screaming at the top of our lungs, if need be.
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Summary: The Spy Who Got Left Out In The Cold!
Review: The image that most people have of the CIA is either the manipulative master spy agency which assasinates foreign leaders, and overthrows governments or an agency at home in the excting swashbuckling world of international espionage of James Bond. The truth, as Robert Baer describes it, is much less exciting. Baer was a CIA field officer for more than twenty years and by his own description, one of the last of the true adventurers. This book is part memoir and a large expose of a vital element of our national security which has gone bad. In the first part of the book, Baer describes his unnusual childhood and explains how he came to be hired by the CIA despite a lackluster college career. When he joined the agency in 1976, the old cowboys who built the CIA from the old OSS were retiring and dying off. Baer was a throwback to the old days. An officer who believed that his job was to develop useful information about the country to which he was stationed. Baer describes how a field officer in the Division of Operations works, how a foreign agent is recruited. He recounts his first jittery assignment in India. In the next part of the book Baer recalls how he came to specialize in the Middle East, having learned Arabic. It is at this point that his disillusionment began as well. He arrives in Beruit shortly after the Embassy bombing that killed 14 CIA officers. Eager to get to the bottom of it, he finds himself stonewalled by managers who seem to be interested in nothing more than not rocking the boat with the State Department. When posted to London and Hamburg in the 80's, Baer discovers that Islamic radicals, having been exiled from their home countries, have set up shop and begun to form terrorist cells. When he suggests infiltrating these groups he is told that the CIA doesn't run agents in friendly countries! This is a stunning lapse of sense as we now know all to well. Throughout the book, Baer describes himself as someone comfortable in the stealthy world of foreign espionage but a fish out of water in the murky world of Washington politics and CIA bureaucracy. No matter how much he was rebuffed in his efforts to promote the interests of the United States in the places to which he is posted, Baer seems to have never lost his Candide-like naivity. He continues to expect that THIS TIME, the agency will do the right thing. This is apparently why he stuck it out so long. The most compelling part of Baer's story comes in the 90's when he is posted to the Northern Kurdish controlled part of Iraq. Finding opportunities to support groups who might overthrow Sadaam Hussein, which he assumed to be U.S. policy, he is stunned when he and the anti-Sadaam players have the rug pulled out from under them by a venal Clinton White House. To make matters worse, Baer is recalled to Washington and falsely accused of attempted murder. ALthough cleared of this charge, he is rewarded for his valient efforts by being posted to a dead end career killer in Washington. That such an excellent field operative would be turned into a desk jockey for political reasons is a stunning indictment of the entire Washington culture. At CIA headquarters, he learns just how slimy both Washington politics and the Clinton administration are. Indeed, he documents how the overriding concern of the Clinton administration seemed to be not American security interests but protecting the business of Big Oil. He also writes about how the Aldrich Ames spy scandal basically gave the FBI the imputus to destroy the CIA from the bottom up. Virtually every field officer was harassed and investigated for espionage. Ironically, the FBI was ignorant of its own master spy Robert Hanssen who continued to operate during this period. Ultimately, after Baer's attempts to blow the whistle to Congress go nowhere he decides to resign. That a brilliant field agent could have his career destroyed by untalented mediocrities is horrifying. This is a very frightening book. In his introduction, Baer tells us how angry he is that the only thing standing between the 9/11 terrorists and the White House were the brave people of flight 93. The CIA and the entire American national security community abrogated their responsibilities and nothing seems to have improved. Baer heard from a source that a CIA bigwig believes an investigation will show that 9/11 was an intelligence triumph not a failure. Baer says that if this is a true statement then he is frightened for the future of our country. I am inclined to believe him. This book describes the destruction of a once useful agency by as Baer puts it "political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more" There is no disputing Baer's conclusion that on "September 11, 2001, the reckoning of such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see." The complete book on the failures of the national security/intelligence world to protect this nation has yet to be written. Baer's book is a good introduction to the CIA's role in that failure. I recomend this book to everyone. It was an eye opener. Every member of COngress should be compelled to read it. Congress and the President should overhall the CIA from top to bottom and recruit dedicated people like Robert Baer who want to serve and protect the United States and who will be rewarded not punished for their efforts.
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Summary: Slow Train to Nowhere
Review: I read this book the other day returning on a train from Washington, D.C. to Boston. I had been to a wedding of the daughter of a couple of long-time bureaucrats, and the guest table I sat at contained more of the same. Nobody was showing his cards about how the city was reacting to terrorism. Everyone seemed to occupy a brave little bubble. If any place was under attack, it was Israel, not America. America was still the safer place to be. But if what this writer is saying is correct, those bubbles are going to pop eventually, as will all of ours. 9/11 is unlikely to be a one-off. Just as Persian carpets repeat patterns, with variations, so will this new form of warfare. The boundaries we had believed in during the Cold War are not there anymore. And our enemies have no respect for national boundaries, so are not amenable to diplomacy. At least this is the thesis. And yet paradoxically, the author points to nation-states which occupy the shadows behind even the craziest, newest terror cell. The "axis of evil" was a purely arbitrary sub-set of the many which sponsor terrorists. Robert Baer was an operative, the kind of person the average Washington bureaucrat would not shake hands with, for fear of contagion. And yet the smell of defeat hangs heavy on the Establishment itself. Why? It's easy. "Without vision, the People perish." We get a better view from the guy in the field. But surely, he must be frustrated that it is hindsight he is able to give us, for his employers evaded the intelligence reports when they were fresh and hot. We see here only what might have been done. It is unclear as yet how to fix a broken bureaucracy, and uncertain whether a new administration can reform something so dependent on peaceful intelligence gathering when there is a hot war going on. The author also emphasizes the importance of human interaction as a way of finding things out over merely technological ones. We have now entered a realm where homeland security is as important as foreign spying. This is indeed a new world, while this book, as detailed and important as it is, has simply traced the events which led us here so unwillingly and so blindly. We need to study the history presented, and to ask why it wasn't available to us sooner. Who sat on it? Why? Are we the victims of our own secret dealings? Or have the keepers of the secrets simply used them badly? The author takes every administration to task from Reagan onward. Each seems to have a tragic flaw when it comes to responding to the information it received from the field. And those flaws finally added up to disaster.
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Summary: More Case Officrs On the Ground
Review: Baer tells what all of us who served in The Company know, and want the public to understand: You can't determine INTENT in the mind of an enemy by taking photos from 30,000 feet. You've got to have case officers on the ground. They or their agents have to be snuggled up to your target. Additionally, and this is slowly coming out in the press, those agents with access to the target are not always the folks you would meet at a tea party.
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Summary: Outstanding, riveting!
Review: This is an excellent book that describes how bureaucracy and politics (foisted by the Clinton administration) has infected and destroyed the CIA, and why we hadn't a clue before the WTC disasters. Author, Baer, was a field agent and seems to have taken pride in the job, but served under a succession of career bureaucrats who were primarily interested in making sure reports were filed on time, with very little concern regarding their content. He was one of a small handful of agents who spoke Arabic, and wasn't afraid to travel, therby putting himself in personal danger in performance of his duties. Really good book.
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Summary: SEE NO EDITOR
Review: Not too bad, improves in the second half but author shows few skills so far as gripping writing goes. The most compelling pieces are set in Iraq. The author ultimately comes off as a spoiled whining brat who happens to be right but is still...a spoiled whining brat. Frequent allusions to Apocolypse Now do not add atmosphere but only signal desperate attempts to be cool. "Dispatches" it ain't.
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Summary: ROBERT BAER'S ACCOUNT HITS HOME
Review: No other author has documented the lapse of our intelligence infrastructure as well as Robert Baer. After completing this page turner, I fully understood why the media labled the September eleven attacks as a "failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies." This author answers the questions on most American minds these days, "how could this happen to us?" As far as the next questions, "what do we know about the terrorists, what do we do now about the terrorists?" Mr. Baer offers the following, "The only way to defeat such an enemy is by intelligence...the only way to gather such intelligence is by having the political will to let those who know how to learn secrets perform their jobs, no matter how murky the swamp is." Read Robert Baer's book, then do you own research. Afterwards, decide for yourself if your country had the safety of it's peoples at mind while governing the past two decades.
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