I was a cowboy for the CIA

A tough-guy field agent blasts wimpy pencil pushers and "politics" for keeping him from lassoing terrorist evildoers. He's right -- but you wouldn't want his kind in charge, either.

By Laura Miller

Jan. 15, 2002 | The charges leveled in Robert Baer's memoir of his years working for the CIA will come as no great surprise to anyone who has followed the decay of the agency over the past 25 years -- but unfortunately that's not very many people. Baer is part of a loose group of dissident former CIA men, including Reuel Marc Gerecht, Howard Hart and the pseudonymous Edward G. Shirley, who have been warning the public about the perilous state of the agency since the mid-1990s. Until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 slapped the nation out of its complacency, though, they had reason to feel that their complaints were falling on deaf ears.

Baer's book, a rambunctious account of his 21 years working in such uncomfortable locales as Beirut, Tajikistan, Khartoum and Iraq, offers the usual tidbits of intelligence scuttlebutt expected of such volumes -- particularly about the National Security Council's shameful handling of an attempted military coup d'itat against Saddam Hussein in 1995. But what's likely to linger with most readers is its portrait of an agency in crisis as seen by one of its front-line hotshots. Seymour Hersh, who used Baer as a source for his reporting on the CIA in the New Yorker, describes him as having been "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East."

"See No Evil" provides a first-person view of just what a great intelligence field officer can accomplish, as well as a frustrating depiction of how higher-ups increasingly thwarted Baer's efforts as the agency grew ever more deeply mired in a culture of bureaucratic timidity. For those shocked to learn after Sept. 11 that the CIA has few Arabic speakers and virtually no sources of "humint" (information gleaned from people rather than high-tech equipment) inside the societies in the Mideast and Central Asia where anti-American terrorism percolates, Baer describes how this came to be. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to swallow Baer's vision of the way the CIA ought to be hook, line and sinker; he's both an example of the kind of quality operative the agency is driving away and a demonstration of why it takes more than great soldiers to make a great army.

Film director Stephen Soderbergh is already developing "See No Evil" as a vehicle for George Clooney, which suggests how perfectly Baer conforms to Hollywood notions of heroism. In his own version of the story, Baer (a self-described "cowboy") is a familiar figure: the daring, committed maverick who's always pushing the envelope in his quest to get the job done. Sometimes his counterpoint is the gruff, experienced, by-the-books chief (like the men who ran the CIA posts at his first couple of assignments) who will nevertheless back the kid in a pinch -- in short, the stuff of a zillion cop shows and Dirty Harry movies. Sometimes, however, the boss is one of those pettifogging paper pushers who doesn't have the balls to risk getting his hands dirty in catching the bad guys. That describes John, chief in "a small but important outpost in the Middle East" (Baer's book was vetted by the CIA, and the author has allowed the censor's blackouts, including the name of this outpost and many individuals' last names, to stand), a man with "an account-book mentality about spying" who "refused to take risks."

But far worse than any interfering immediate superiors is that ultimate sinkhole of contemptible self-interest and ignorance, Washington, D.C. Baer did a few stints at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and got embroiled in the Clinton campaign financing scandal as well as some other vile messes, causing him to state, somewhat predictably, that "the conference tables of official Washington" are "often as nasty as a snake pit in Lebanon's Biqa' Valley."

In spite of (or, hell, perhaps because of) the hokiness of this setup, "See No Evil" packs a distinctly unwonky punch; Baer is a marvelous raconteur. He starts out by relating the old-school methods of CIA espionage and his own early and sometimes inept attempts to master them. As a case officer, Baer had the job of gathering intelligence, primarily through the recruiting of agents, which is what the CIA calls the foreign nationals who supply it with information. Agents are, as one of Baer's mentors bluntly puts it, "traitors," and cultivating their trust and protecting their lives was once the case officer's highest priority.

Some agents must be approached with great delicacy; others walk right into the American embassy and ask for the CIA, like one of the most useful contacts Baer had in Lebanon during the 1980s, a man who eventually joined Hezbollah and became the CIA's first inside source in that terrorist group. Most agents get paid, but a few, the best, have volunteered their services "simply because they loved America." Baer prides himself on the skill he developed in recruiting agents and the lengths he went to to do so, from learning to hunt partridges in the Punjab in order to cozy up to Indian military officers to engaging in vodka-soaked target practice sessions in the wilds of Tajikistan with a colonel in the Russian army.

Once recruited, agents feed intelligence to their case officers, and some of the most entertaining passages in "See No Evil" describe Baer's exploits as he shakes off tails, ducks into shrubbery to grab document drops, sneaks through Beirut's no-man's-land and successfully bluffs his way to the gates of a Lebanese terrorist stronghold. "We were all adventurers," he writes of his breed of case officer, and even though he's preening, it's also clear that doing the job well requires a bold temperament.

Nevertheless, Baer wasn't above doing unglamorous homework when necessary. He gives almost as much attention to the meticulous detective work involved in his job, particularly the mountains of reports, phone tap transcripts and other papers he pored over while trying to piece together a theory about the crime that became his personal obsession -- the still unsolved bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. That attack killed 63 people, 17 of them Americans and six of those CIA officers.

Baer thinks he knows who gave the orders to bomb the embassy, and much of the bitterness he feels toward CIA headquarters comes from the fact that they didn't seem to care. "While the information is compelling," they wrote back in response to his report, "it is only of historical interest." Again and again he found that CIA staffers -- as is typical in cases of advanced bureaucratic decay -- opted to do nothing rather than to risk getting into trouble or being the bearers of bad news. "Garnering promotions and pleasing political masters became more important than collecting secrets," Baer complains. Outpost chiefs would rather he kept his nose clean and filed reports padded with worthless "intelligence" than tempt fate in order to get the good stuff.

John, his boss on that unnamed Mideast assignment, is the quintessential "see-no-evil, hear-no-evil model for the new CIA." When Baer, working in the unnamed Mideast country, discovered a secret office for the Abu Nidal Organization (a renegade Palestinian group that broke with the PLO in 1973 and was once considered to be "at the top of the CIA's hit parade"), he wanted to find a way into the adjoining building so he could run a bug through their shared wall -- your basic meat and potatoes CIA activity, what we pay these guys to do. John put a quick stop to the plan, however, scolding Baer for not having "the slightest idea what political sensitivities are involved. This country is important to the United States. No one wants to risk alienating it by undertaking a risky operation." Baer's suggestion that the Paris office conduct similar surveillance on two Abu Nidal-affiliated students was also sandbagged for fear of alienating the French.

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