Robert Baer

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Robert "Bob" B. Baer (born July 1, 1952), is an author and former case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Baer was raised in Aspen, Colorado and aspired to become a professional skier. After a poor academic performance during his freshman year at high school, his mother sent him to Indiana's Culver Military Academy. In 1976, after graduating from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and entering the University of California, Berkeley, Baer decided to join the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) as a case officer. Upon admittance to the CIA, Baer engaged in a year's training, which included a four-month paramilitary course.

During his twenty year CIA career, Baer has publicly acknowledged field assignments in Madras and New Delhi, India; in Beirut, Lebanon; in Dushanbe, Tajikistan; and in Salah al-Din in Kurdish northern Iraq. While in Salah al-Din Baer unsuccessfully urged the Clinton Administration to back an internal Iraqi attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein (organized by a group of Sunni military officers, the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmad Chalabi, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Jalal Talabani) in March of 1995 with covert CIA assistance. Baer quit the Agency in 1997 and received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998. Baer wrote the book See No Evil documenting his experiences while working for the Agency.

Baer offers an analysis of the Middle East through the lens of his experiences as a CIA operative. His political outlook does not hew exclusively to either conservative or liberal viewpoints. Through his years as a clandestine officer, he gained a very thorough knowledge of the Middle East, Arab world and former Republics of the Soviet Union. He speaks Arabic fluently. He has been over the years a strong advocate of the Agency's need to increase Human Intelligence (HUMINT) through the recruitment of agents.

In 2004 he told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the CIA deals with terrorism suspects, "If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt."^[1]

Baer's books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil were the basis for the 2005 Academy Award winning Warner Brothers motion picture Syriana. The film's character Bob Barnes (played by George Clooney) is loosely based on Baer. For this role Clooney won a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. To better resemble Baer, Clooney gained weight. When Baer learned of this, he was inspired to get back into shape.[2] Baer has a cameo appearance in the film. For the past two years Robert Baer has worked closely with Many Rivers Films, a Channel 4 production company in the UK, and presented two authoritative documentary series The Cult of the Suicide Bomber I and Cult of the Suicide Bomber II on the origins of suicide bombing. Cult of the Suicide Bomber I was nominated for an Emmy in 2006.

Baer was also interviewed in the Robert Greenwald documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq.

In a 2003 interview, Baer supported the premise that 9/11 was planned and executed by Osama bin Laden. However, when asked by Thom Hartmann in 2006 whether he was "of the opinion that there was an aspect of 'inside job' to 9/11 within the U.S. government?", Baer responded, "There is that possibility, the evidence points at it."

[edit] Books

See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Crown Publishing Group, January 2002, ISBN 0-609-60987-4.
Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, Crown Publishing Group, July 2003, ISBN 1-4000-5021-9.
Blow the House Down: A Novel, Crown Publishing Group, ISBN 1-4000-9835-1.