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Summary: Just how bad a shape is our intelligence community?
Review: After reading this book, I was horrified by how lacks the CIA has become. Their inability and unwillingness to pursue intelligence sources in key regions of the world leaves us wide open to attacks from these terrorist organizations. I only hope that there are more like Mr. Baer still within the CIA who can shake off the political correctness of today and get back to the ugly business of intelligence gathering. Our national security depends on it.
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Summary: A geat read!
Review: Robert Baer was a career CIA officer (CIA employees are officers; CIA agents are foreign citizens who spy for the CIA) who was posted to countries in and around the Mid-East. From Beirut to parts of the former Soviet Union, Baer takes you inside the headlines we have seen for the past years. Very interesting and never drags.
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Summary: Unsubstantiated Tales of Complaint
Review: Best part of the book is the map pasted into the inside front cover and first leaf. The rest is stories of woe from the field, written for an audience with either a low average IQ (say 85) or a junior high school education.
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Summary: Everybody should read this book!
Review: This is a great book. I wish everybody would read it, especially people in government.
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Summary: An Informative Read
Review: I am not a big fan of Author's racing to get published after 9.11 using the attacks of 9.11 as a spring board for their own publicity. However this book is an important exception. The events of 9.11 demonstrated that our intelligence was caught off guard that is all too obvious. This book does a good job at providing insite into various parts of the middle east and also provides some insite into what kind of elements exist in that part of the world. It also gives insite into how our CIA was in effect made weaker. It is just unfortunate that it took something as catastrophic as 9.11 to start to get our act together. The signs were already there.
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Summary: End of the United States...
Review: Isn't that a scary thought... the End of the United States? Not for millions of young men who hate America. Why do they hate the US so badly? Because they were raised that way. Its ingrained in them. They have almost no choice but to hate. If they didn't hate the US they would be.. unpopluar to say the least. So what do you do with people like that? If you don't want to die then you keep a close eye on them. They can't be killed. Not all of them. There are too many. It would take a nuclear attack of epic proportions to destroy them all and that's not going to happen. The US nuked one country and has been wrongfully villianized for it ever since. So you keep a close eye on the middle eastern demons who want the blood of your children. You foil their attempts to attack. And when you catch them in the act - then you kill them. That's the job of the CIA. It's the CIAs ONLY job. But they aren't doing it. And they haven't been doing it for a long, long time. And two of America's tallest skyscrapers were completely destroyed by terrorists because of it (along with thousands of people just like you and me). In this book the author expains how the CIA collapsed, how disgustingly corrupt the White House is, and how big oil companies call the shots. Also, he warns how terrorists are just getting started. It's mindbending. But if you live in the United States you need to read this book. -Dan
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Summary: Straight Talk from Patriot--Should Testify at 9-11 Hearings
Review:
As a former clandestine case officer, leaving the Agency in 1988 after unsuccessfully chasing terrorists for a few years, I knew we were in bad shape but I did not realize just how bad until I read this book. The author, working mostly in the Near East (NE) Division of the Directorate of Operations, and then in the Counter-Terrorism Center when it was just starting out, has an extremely important story to tell and every American needs to pay attention. Why? Because his account of how we have no assets useful against terrorism is in contradiction to what the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) told the President and his top advisors at Camp David on Saturday 15 September. According to the Washington Post of 31 January 2002, page A13, on the 15th the DCI laid out an ambitious "Worldwide Attack Matrix" and told the President that the United States had a "large asset base" from its years of working the terrorism target. One of these two men one is closer to the truth than the other. In my judgement, I believe Baer has three-quarters of the weight on his side. This discrepancy warrants investigation, for no President can be successful if he does not have accurate information about our actual capabilities. There are four other stories within this excellent book, all dealing with infirm bureaucracies. At one level, the author's accounting of how the Directorate of Operations has declined under the last three leaders (as the author describes them: a recalled retiree, an analyst, and a "political" (pal)) is both clearly based on ground truth, and extremely troubling. The extraordinary detail on the decline and fall of the clandestine service is one that every voter should be thinking about, because it was the failure of the clandestine service, as well as the counterintelligence service (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) that allowed 9-11 to happen...at the same time, we must note that it was a policy failure to not have investigated similar incompetencies when a military barracks in Saudi Arabia, two Embassies, and a naval destroyer were attacked, and it was clearly known in open sources that bin Laden had declared war on America and had within America numerous Islamic clerics calling for the murder of Americans--all as documented in an excellent Public Broadcast Service documentary. At a technical level, the author provides some really excellent real-world, real-war annecdotes about situations where clandestine reporting from trusted operations officers has not been accepted by their own superiors in the absence of technical confirmation (imagery or signals). As he says, in the middle of a major artillery battle and break-out of insurgent elements, screaming over the secure phone, "its the middle of night here". We've all known since at least the 1970's that the technical intelligence side of things has been crushing human sensibility, both operational and analytical, but this book really brings the problems into the public eye in a compelling and useful manner. At another level, the author uses his own investigation for murder (he was completely cleared, it was a set-up) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and at one point by the Secret Service, to shed new light on the complete break-down of internal security processes within the CIA. At its lowest point, he is pressured by DO management with a psychological evaluation to determine his fitness for duty--shades of Stalinism! I know this technique, of declaring officers unfit for duty based on psychological hatchet jobs, to be a common practice over the past two decades, and when Britt Snider was appointed Inspector General at CIA, I told him this was a "smoking gun" in the 7th floor closet. That it remains a practice today is grounds for evaluating the entire management culture at CIA. There is a fourth story in the book, a truly interesting account of how big energy companies, their "ambassadors" serving as Presidential appointees within the National Security Council, and corrupt foreign elements, all come together. In this the spies are not central, so I leave it as a sidenote. In my capacity as a reviewer of most intelligence-related books within these offerings, I want to make it clear to potential buyers of this book that the author is not alone. His is the best, most detailed, and most current accounting of the decrepit dysfunctionality of the clandestine service (as I put it in my own book's second edition), but I would refer the reader to two other books in particular: David Corn's "Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades"--its most memorable quote, on covert action in Laos, being "We spent a lot of money and got a lot of people killed, and we didn't get much for it."--and Evan Thomas' "The Very Best Men--Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA"--its best quote: "Patriotic, decent, well-meaning, they were also uniquely unsuited to the grubby, necessarily devious world of intelligence." There are many other books, including twelve (12!) focused on reform and recommended by the Council on Intelligence. The author is a brave man--he was brave on the fields of war and clandestinity, and he is braver still for having brought this story to the public. We owe him a hearing.
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Summary: truly insightful
Review: My husband also worked for the CIA and also worked in Dushanbe with Bob Baer. He was a true Patriot and believed in what he was doing. This book tells it like it was and is today. A great book and should be read by all who wants to know what our intelligence agencies are doing in the world before and after sept. 11. Thanks Bob for a great book!
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Summary: The most significant book about our failure to protect
Review: As odd as it may seem coming from a operative overseas, this book reveals why we were left open for attack more so than any other write on the market. Washington certainly would not let us in on what was happening with the terrorist networks, since they really did not have information they SHOULD of had. That is the one convincing message of this astounding book. Our government deliberately let our guard down. After leaving Iraq militarily inept, our government thought that was the victory and could live with a few foreseen terrorist attacks. The USS Cole type of attack, and embassies bombed considered acceptable losses. According to this book, they wouldn't care to believe 911 was a possibility so they gave up on any routine type of terrorist intelligence prevention matters. This book is worth buying, I'm sorry I cannot mention all the info here, but the book is written in a way that draws you in and interests you even if you had zero interest in the matter. I read it since my brother left it at my home, I picked it up, and was taken. The book is of high material quality as well. Another excellent book and must read concerning 911, Afghanistan, speaks of this religious deviance by saying they in fact would bring the buildings down by insane actions and deny it was terrorism but divine direction and future occurrences is SB 1 or God by Karl Mark Maddox
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Summary: See No Evil
Review: This book succeeds equally well on two levels. On the primary level it is a fascinating and action packed memoir of a CIA operative who served in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places imaginable. Its author, Robert Baer, writes from first hand experience and is not shy about sharing his opinions. His writing style is clear and easy flowing. The stories he has to tell are as relevant as today's headlines. For example, in one section of the book titled "You're on Your Own", Baer tells an appalling tale of his adventures in Northern Iraq leading a team in what turned out to be a rather half-hearted effort of the Clinton administration to depose Saddam Hussein. In this activity he even crossed paths with the Iraqi Shi'a Ahmad Chalabi who then as now was adept at fabricating stories of dubious plausibility. In sum any general reader would find this book both a good read and highly thought provoking.On a second level, Baer's book should be read by any one interested in the subject of the U.S. Intelligence process and its reform. Baer was a practicing intelligence officer for almost 20 years and became a terrorist expert the hard way by dealing directly with such terrorist associations as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizballah on a daily basis. In this account of his intelligence operations, Baer provides a good deal of evidence that Iran, at least in the 1990's, was a state sponsor of terrorism and that Shi'a and Sunni terrorist groups were at willing to make a common cause against the U.S. and Israel. If you read between the lines of this book, it is obvious that Baer has developed a pretty significant target knowledge base on Middle Eastern terrorism which is still relevant today. Yet, no where in this book does anybody talk about intelligence requirements, collection plans, the venerated intelligence cycle or any of the other jargon so dear to most writers on intelligence issues. Instead what we read is how Baer and his fellow operatives used their own initiative to exploit opportunities as they presented themselves and applied such qualities as common sense and target knowledge to decide what to exploit and what to leave alone. Unfortunately many of the opportunities Baer and his fellow operatives wished to pursue were vetoed by his managers at CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) who were becoming increasingly risk adverse especially after 1990. As a former field operative, Baer provides the reader with what I think is an accurate, but depressing account of the decline of initiative and competence within the DO in the years prior to the 9/11 tragedy. Would be intelligence reformers should take note.
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