See No Evil

See No Evil. Robert Baer. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002.

The attack toward the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 shocked the world. Many people died, and the scar still remains in people's hearts. Was this whole thing predictable? No, but it could have been avoided says Robert Baer in his book, See No Evil. This book is a memoir of a man who joined the CIA to satisfy his curiosity he had toward what was happening in the world, and became to realize the problems the CIA faced and the never told inside story he encountered.

Baer used to work for the CIA for 20 years. He started off at India, and went around countries that most Americans would not have heard or never will step foot on. He worked as a case officer in the Directorate of Operation, where the job was to recruit agents to gather information from the assigned country and pass it to the Directorate of Intelligence. At the beginning he made many mistakes, and sometimes he almost died. As time went by, however, he became better and better at his job, the number of mistakes he made decreased and the information he collected became bigger and more important. On April 18, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, a terrorist group attacked the American embassy. A truck smashed in to the embassy, detonating a bomb that killed 63 people, including 6 CIA officers. Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in one attack. Baer received this news while studying Arabic in Tunis. He thought it was a radical Palestinian group behind it and they would be caught in a week or so. He was wrong. The bombers did really good, that the CIA could not locate the ringleader. Baer has tried to catch them throughout his career as a CIA officer, although this case has never been officially solved.

Four months after the bombing, Baer finished up his Arabic course and traveled to the Middle East. There he started out by building connections with people, and went on collecting information for the CIA. When an attack to the American marine situated on the Lebanese coast killed 241 troops, Baer asked if he could relocate to Lebanon. At that time the world was watching the crisis unfold in Lebanon, and he wanted to go for it. Balabakk, Lebanon was the place where "every terrorist, radical, and lunatic who thought he could drive the Israelis out of Lebanon had set up shop.ЃE It had become the Sodom and Gomorrah of terrorism. There he would meet people, gather information and face many risks. He tried to dig too deep; therefore, he was transferred to Sudan and later reassigned to America. There he joined a new organization, the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which dealt with terrorism. The CTC provided the resource capabilities to retrieve more information from a multitude of governmental databases. It had all the money and equipment to operate like a high-tech command center. The truth was, because it did not have authority on case officers, it could not ask them to get the information it really needed. First of all, there were not enough agents, and the case officers did not try to recruit more. They worked safe, avoiding risks. Baer was the kind of guy people would call an old type case officer. He liked gathering information through people, and jumping into the cases. He realized this when he was sent to Paris, France. The CIA was disposing agents faster than recruiting them. Not only did they not recruit new agents, but they did not care much about keeping the old ones either. The case officer's skills on language was becoming really poor that they couldn't work well in the countries they were assigned. Off-the-field case officers received positions such as controlling officers and directing tactics. The amount and quality of information they gathered decreased. For example, the case officers in Paris once came across evidence of a secret Iranian intelligence station. Baer proposed going after it; however, the young Parisian