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Summary: See No Evil, a book on the CIA's political correctness
Review: In See No Evil, Robert Baer explains how the US found itself dealing with international terrorism. Baer recounts how he became a CIA agent, during a time when the government was looked on as, to put it politely, worse than dung. He claims he never thought he was going to get accepted. It was amusing to read about the time anarchists'(whose apartment he shared) snake escaped, and the CIA agent, who was supposed to be checking Baer's friends, got lost and ended up at his apartment. He wrote that he tried to get rid of the CIA agent "as soon as possible" and that he was afraid that "at any moment the snake would come slithering around the corner". I found it chilling when I read about the time Baer and his fellow ground agents came across a petty criminal who was willing to help the CIA by being a liaison in a well-known terrorist group. The CIA head men refused because he was a criminal. Baer points out that the FBI has sources that are criminals, and basically says that to catch a criminal, you can't use good people. The potential liaison in the terrorist group was wasted, and you can't help wondering if we could have prevented September 11th, if the CIA wasn't so picky about its sources. This book is great read and it'll open your eyes to the political correctness that is so prevalent in today's society. If political correctness has invaded our intelligence agencies, what is next?
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Summary: Ground Soldier or Loose Cannon ?
Review: For the first few chapters, Robert Baer's tale of joining the CIA in the 1970's makes for fun reading as he recounts his training and first assignments. However, when Baer arrives at the chapters on Lebanon in the months after the 1982 Israeli invasion, his credibility evaporates. He claims to have worked out who blew up the American Embassy in 1983. Baer,though, wasn't even based in Beirut. When he does travel to Lebanon he runs around in the Biqa Valley (home to the hostage taking Shia groups then locked into conflict with the U.S.) with a wafer-thin cover story (he pretends to be Belgian but doesn't speak either French or Flemish-this in a country where French is almost universally spoken), and achieves...absolutely nothing. He can't even spell the town he visited correctly calling it Balabakk. It's Baalbek Robert. As to his theory about who blew up the U.S. embassy (Arafat in league with the Shiites), none of his so-called evidence adds up to a hill of beans. The conclusion I came to by the end is that Baer was more cowboy than agent, and no wonder that he finally got pushed out of the CIA for getting too close to one of his soldiers. The CIA deserves a better expose than this.
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Summary: Gives the truth about the problems at the CIA..
Review: The author, Robert Baer, does a wonderful job explaining the problems our intelligence agencies have in dealing with international terrorism. Drawing on his many years of service with the CIA, Baer describes his belief that political correctness and the lack of human intelligence in political hotspots have led this country to a severe want of practical intelligence. After reading this book, it will become very easy to understand how the warnings for September 11 went unnoticed and allowed the attacks to proceed. This book will frighten you as it reveals the present limitations which are hampering our intelligence services.
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Summary: A great treatise on what's gone wrong with intelligence
Review: Robert Baer does an excellent job of drawing the reader into the shadowy world of the covert world of intelligence. His elaboration (as much as he can divulge) of the training and operations of case officers is both fascinating and worrysome. Fascinating, because it allows laymen get a glimpse of what "could have been" if they too had pursued the life of being a "spy" (come on...admit it, we all have that fantasy), and worrysome because he outlines the CIA and intelligence community's not so slow drift toward reliance on technical means to get intelligence, rather than the days-old practices of the human side of the world's second oldest profession. His elaboration on names that are all too familiar now to those of us who study the mid-east weaves an incredibly complex and captivating web. Immediately after finishing Baer's book, I started on American Jihad, and the web just grows more tangled. Truly a great read, though, and is highly recommended for anyone who wants the "down and dirty" side of espionage. It is all the more important now that we are trying to rebuild it.
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Summary: A Marvelous Look at the CIA
Review: Robert Baer does us a service. He explains how the CIA operates without waving the flag in front of us. In reality, Baer explains that politics is the greatest enemy of the American intelligence community. Moreover, he cautions that unless more changes are made...the United States is vulnerable.
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Summary: Good read with an open mind
Review: If one does not fall for the rather hyped and stereotypical view of other nations, the book is an interesting reading. I was surprised to learn about the use of India as "training" grounds for some of the agents, but was equally suprised to read that India;s Intelligence agency was trained to counter the CIA and its "other enemies". Though India has been viewed as an ally of the Soviet, it was never viewed as an enemy. I do not want my name to be public with the review, but having worked there for more than 20 years, I have a better feel. A great read for those who think our country is the only smartest one! The book also provides a chilling account of Islamic fundamentalism which has now usurped an empty space left by the defunct cold war fever. It is surprising that no nations took any action until it was too late. Bu then, we nor our Europeans did nothing when the women were not treated well or Busshist relics were being destroyed for years. One thing we should keep in mind while reading the book is that every nation is selfish, and rightfully so, but almost always takes on the garb of moralistic superiority when it wants to further its interests. Overall, an interesting book, would have given higher ratings if not for the sometimes too arrogant tone of the author..
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Summary: Great Read, Won't Change a Thing
Review: I really enjoyed this remarkable book. Baer is someone we can all admire as a man who took risks, put himself in danger on numerous occasions, reported accurately to his superiors, but was ignored by burecratic place-holders, people more interested in their jobs as sinecures rather than acting on information generated by agents on the ground. As a pure adventure story, this book is without peer. It should be read as such. However, as an expose by a retired CIA officer it will do little to change the culture of complacency within that organization. Read it for the sheer adventure of it, but heads won't roll because of it, nor will policy change in a meaningful way.
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Summary: Worth Reading Critically
Review: This is definitely worth the read, but you should keep in mind that the CIA's job is to lie and break laws in order to shape (foreign) politics. Baer is a veteran agency cowboy, and his book is as much about shaping the debate over intelligence as it is about sharing any inside information with us. There are 3 main topics I see in this book. The stories of his actual operations are good stuff, and believable in terms of being congruent with other accounts of the spy game. His personal story is very sparse, little about what makes him tick, how the stress of his life affected him etc. He definitely seems to have some resentment for his mother, her left wing politics, and the chaotic way she raised him (no father). It's the policy side, the "inside information" that is most suspect. While much of it is undoubtedly true, it is clearly selective. I mean no one is going to come clean about the Vincennes shootdown, but he acts innocent and perplexed about the Beirut car bomb that is linked in the public record to the CIA. More disturbing is his bias as regards US domestic politics. He is full of suggestive tidbits and dark implications regarding Clinton, but if you think he is going to shed any light on Casey's "off the shelf" operations or what may have been in the thousands of pages of documents Ollie North shredded forget it. Even though he was working in the Middle East on terrorism throughout the 1980's, he purports to have had only the most oblique of brushes with the tangled web that became known as Iran-Contra. Of course every CIA memoir is contractually required to have one JFK red herring. While Baer's can't match the pure comic inventiveness of Ostrovsky's Mossad memoir (it was a botched assassination attempt on Gov. Connally!), it is even more confusing. Baer suggests Nosenko was kept confined at the farm for contradicting "CIA corporate thinking" on the JFK assassination, the implication being I guess (?) that he said the KGB did it. In fact according to the CIA (as in Warren) the KGB didn't do it, also according to them Nosenko confirmed they didn't do it, thus no contradiction. Not sure what he's trying to suggest. Of course post 9/11 the CIA is once again being rewarded for failure with bigger budgets and fewer restrictions. Many of Baer's criticisms are important (eg lack of language and culture skills, subordination of security to business interests, beauracratic sclerosis etc). But while this book serves as a very convenient argument for giving the agency a totally free hand, it is worth looking past his hot button "PC" anecdotes at the history and larger issues involved. The restrictions on the CIA and other agencies were put in place for serious reasons, a "free hand" approach caused as many problems as it prevented. If our elected leaders went too far in regulating the CIA in response, we should learn from that and not make the same mistake by going too far in the opposite direction now that the pendulum has swung back. Read this book, but don't accept it uncritically.
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Summary: it gets confusing -
Review: it is very interesting stuff but does get very confusing for someone who does not know the middle east inside and out. Honestly I couldn't keep track of all the different middle eastern names of people I got them confused.
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Summary: Unusual insight into the CIA Operations Directorate
Review: First of all, kudos to Baer for writing such an uncompromising expose into the internal political machinations of the CIA Operations Directorate. The rare insight into the modern day political infighting of technocrats in Washington is extremely insightful...particularly documenting the risk-averse mentality that seems to have prevailed during the 90's.
Baer's descriptions of his time in Lebanon, and of following terrorism in that region is intriguing. His tour in Tajikistan mirrors sentiments I have heard from others who have served, or who have lived in Central Asia during the immediate post-Soviet era.
His dialogue on the Kurdish issue does raise questions about the US Iraq policy in a macro sense. While Baer points to missed opportunities with the Kurds, there are many who believe that within the Iraqi opposition, the Kurds are but one facet of an overarching mosaic. To strictly focus on the one element in hopes of implementing an Iraq-wide policy is excluding other important elements within Iraq, at the peril of not creating a cohesive opposition for the country as a whole.
Overall, an interesting read. I would have liked to have seen more on his involvement with the politics of the Clinton administration, which seems to have been his ultimate roadblock. But in the published literature of ex-CIA personnel, Baer has penned a very readable overview of the growing intransigence of the system in Washington. This will be an important document for historians to reference when looking at the genesis of the US war on terrorism. A good read, and highly recommended.
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