BOB BAER IS NOT ALONE. Yes, his riveting account of life in the post-cold war CIA is devastating—yet another body blow to the reputation of an intelligence agency that failed to protect America when it needed to be protected. But Baer’s account of cowardly bureaucrats and indifferent officials in the White House will ring true to a very special audience—the dozens of distinguished and successful CIA operatives who have taken early retirement in recent years, in lieu of continuing to pretend that they were making a difference. I’ve talked to many of these men and women in recent months, and they, like Baer, are writhing with pain, anger, and frustration. Like Baer, they weren’t allowed to do their job the right way, the way it had to be done to be effective.
We’ve hit intelligence rock bottom in America. As this is being written, nearly three months after the September 11 terrorism attacks, the intelligence community still cannot tell us who was responsible, how the assassins worked, where they trained, which groups they worked for, or whether they will strike again. Did Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network pull it off by themselves, as the Bush Administration constantly claims, or was at least one other Mideast terrorist group involved, as Bob Baer suggests? We don’t know, but I’m betting that the facts, when they emerge, will back up Baer’s instinct that the attacks in America were not solely the responsibility of someone operating out of a cave in Afghanistan.
There is another way, too, of looking at See No Evil—as a recruiting poster for the spy business. We can identify with Baer’s anger at the perceived foolishness and indecisiveness of top management throughout his career, but there are also moments when Baer’s brains, energy, and aggressiveness—he was a ski racer as a teenager—led to dramatic breakthroughs and deeper understanding of the world of terrorism. Baer was always on the edge in his undercover work, and his rendition of the risks he took as an undercover CIA operative on mission—some self-assigned—in Lebanon, Tajikistan, Germany, northern Iraq, and inside the White House is the stuff of Clancy thrillers, with the added knowledge that the dangers were real.
Baer tells us, with admiration, about the superb training he received early in his CIA career, and the high standards of those who taught him. “[S]pying wasn’t something you learned from a book, a training film, or a lecture,” Baer writes. “You learned it by doing it, with someone looking over your shoulder.” Once overseas, Baer found that some of the men he worked under weren’t up to the job—we all know what that’s like—but more often he had superiors who demanded the best from themselves and their staff. He was taught very early in his career as an operative—that is, he was willing to be taught—an enviable lesson: that you can’t spy without reading. Baer tells us how he came to work early and stayed late reading files on terrorists and unpuzzling their connections until he began to see what others who did not could not. In this book, we learn, with Baer, how a good CIA agent goes about his work.
This is the story of one man’s disillusionment and anger at an agency whose effectiveness we’ve come to rely upon. It is also the story of Bob Baer’s education and evolution, and his freedom, inside the CIA, to spend the time and have the support necessary to turn himself into an expert. Can one man make a difference, even in a vast, broken agency like the CIA? See No Evil tells us yes, he can. This is a memoir that will not win friends and influence on the management floor at CIA headquarters, but it tells us that, with the right leadership, there’s still hope for the agency, if only it can learn the lessons to be had from this cautionary tale.
Get new managers who see the big picture—and who are willing to take risks—and the Bob Baers will be found. But let’s do it before we get hit again.
SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Washington, D.C.
November 24, 2001