Summary
"In See No Evil, one of the CIA's top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists." "On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the wake of those attacks, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long-term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. Robert Baer was not surprised. A twenty-one-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post-cold war world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere." "A throwback to the days when CIA operatives got results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world's most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence, he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency's suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Robert Baer was born in Los Angeles, California on July 1, 1952. He graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and in 1976, decided to join the CIA's Directorate of Operations. He worked for the CIA for 20 years as a case officer assigned to the Middle East. He has written several books including Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, and The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story. His book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism was the basis for the acclaimed film Syriana. He writes regularly for Time.com and has contributed to Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
(Bowker Author Biography)