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. Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside, and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged CIA efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists.On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 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. Baer was not surprised. A 21-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations who left the agency in 1997, Baer saw 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.
See No Evil is an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism. Baer reveals some disturbing details he uncovered in his work, including:
In 1996, Osama bin Laden established a strategic alliance with Iran to coordinate terrorist attacks against the United States.In 1995, the National Security Council intentionally aborted a military coup d'etat against Saddam Hussein, forgoing the last opportunity to get rid of him.In 1997 Baer received the Career Intelligence Medal, with a citation that says, "He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country." Here is Baer's frank assessment of an agency that forgot that "service to country" must transcend politics, and his forceful plea for the CIA to return to its original mission - the preservation of our national sovereignty and the American way of life.