Robert Baer

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Robert Booker Baer (born July 11, 1952) is an American author and former CIA case officer who was mostly devoted to the Middle East.

He is Time's intelligence columnist and has written for Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Baer has earned the CIA career intelligence award and is a regular commentator and writer on topics relating to foreign affairs, espionage, and US foreign policy.

Currently, he is a reality television host on Hunting Hitler's History program.

He is a CNN Intelligence and Security Analyst.

Stephen Gaghan's book "See no evil" was adapted by Stephen Gaghan and used as the basis for the film Syriana, with George Clooney playing Baer's character.

Early life

Baer was born in Los Angeles. His parents divorced at the age of nine, and he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he aspired to become a professional skier. After a weak academic results in his first year at high school, his mother, a wealthy heiress, took him to Europe, including Paris during the 1968 riots, Germany, Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and Russia. As he returned to the United States, his mother took him to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana. He graduated from Georgetown University's Foreign Service in 1976 (where future CIA director George Tenet was a classmate). He applied to the CIA's Directorate of Operations while a Berkeley graduate student, initially as a prank. Baer continued to study for a year after arriving in the CIA, which included a four-month paramilitary course, parachute preparation, and several foreign language courses.

He speaks Arabic, Persian, French, and his native English. He is also fluent in Russian, Tajik, and Baluch.

Personal life

Baer has been married twice before. He has two daughters and a son from his first marriage to a State Department secretary. Dayna Williamson, a fellow CIA agent, was his second marriage.

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Career

Baer served field assignments, beginning in Madras and New Delhi, India, and then in Beirut, Lebanon; Damascu, Sudan; and Salah al-Din in Iraqi Kurdistan; during his twenty-one years with the CIA, he served in Iraqi Kurdistan; Baer was sent to Iraq with the intention of mobilising resistance to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the mid-1990s, but the Federal Bureau of Investigations had him arrested and charged for allegedly plotting to assassination of the Iraqi leader. Baer unsuccessfully advised the Clinton administration in Salah al-Din that the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmad Chalabi and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Jalal Talabani) attempted to overthrowrow Hussein in March 1995 with clandestine CIA assistance. Baer retired from the service in 1997 and was awarded the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998.

Baer wrote the book See No Evil, detailing his experiences while working for the Agency. The C.I. Conticle 2: Counterintelligence and Intrusion As Seen From My Cubicle, by Christopher Lynch (Dog Ear Publishing), discusses various aspects of Baer's first book's contentious CIA pre-publication review process. Baer "was considered "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East" by Seymour Hersh in a blurb for See No Evil. Baer's book brings an examination of the Middle East through the lens of his CIA experience.

"If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan," he told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman regarding the way the CIA treats terrorist suspects. If you want them to be tortured, take them to Syria. If you want someone to die, you should never see them again. You send them to Egypt."

He remigrated to Silverton, Colorado, where he was born.

In January 2002, Baer wrote about the events of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in The Guardian. "D]id bin Laden acted alone, not through his own al-Qaida network, when launching the attacks? Yes, I'm much more positive and emphatic than that: no." "For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives," Trump said, or that a rocket rather than an airliner struck the Pentagon." I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, but I wasn't very good at it, and certainly wasn't able to do 9/11. "I had the pleasure to work with the true pros."

"I know the guy who went into his broker in San Diego," Baer said on 'We Are Change.org' in Los Angeles, in 2008, and said, 'Cash me out, it's going to fall tomorrow'."

Baer wrote about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed as President in June 2009 and the demonstrations that followed it. "The Western media have examined Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class, an intelligent society that is addicted to the internet and American music, and is more willing to talk to the Western media, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles; but does it represent the genuine Iran?" Baer said he doubted that Iran had attempted to assassinate the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the US from Tehran, according to Die Zeit, since there was no apparent motive and Iran had been more cautious in previous collaboration with terrorists.

Baer has long been a promoter of the belief that the PFLP-GC shot Pan Am Flight 103 down. Later, he began to promote the belief that Iran was behind the bombing. Baer said that the CIA had suspected Pan Am Flight 103 was orchestrated by Iran from the start and that a classified dossier proving this was to be submitted as evidence in the final appeal by imprisoned Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Megrahi's dismissal of the appeal in exchange for a remission on humanitarian grounds, according to Baer, was encouraged to hold this information confidentially.

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