Robert Baer

Biography

Robert "Bob" Booker Baer (born July 1, 1952) is an American author and a former CIA case officer who was primarily assigned to the Middle East. He is currently TIME.com's intelligence columnist and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Baer is a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage and U.S. foreign policy. Early life Baer was born in Los Angeles, raised in Aspen, Colorado, and aspired to become a professional skier. He spent many years of his childhood with his mother in Europe before returning to the US. After a fairly poor academic performance during his freshman year at high school, his mother sent him to Indiana's Culver Military Academy. In 1976, after graduating from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and entering the University of California, Berkeley, Baer decided to join the CIA's Directorate of Operations (now the National Clandestine Service) as a case officer. Upon admittance to the CIA, Baer engaged in a year's training, which included a four-month paramilitary course and foreign language courses. He is fluent in Arabic as well as his native English. He speaks French, German, and Persian. He is also conversant in Russian, Tajik, and Baluch. Career During his twenty-one years with the CIA, Baer has publicly acknowledged field assignments in Madras and New Delhi, India, Beirut, Lebanon, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Morocco, and Salah al-Din in Iraqi Kurdistan. During the mid-1990s, Baer was sent to Iraq with the mission of organizing opposition to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein but was recalled and investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for allegedly conspiring to assassinate the Iraqi leader. While in Salah al-Din, Baer unsuccessfully urged the Clinton administration to back an internal Iraqi attempt to overthrow Hussein (organized by a group of Sunni military officers, the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmad Chalabi, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Jalal Talabani) in March 1995 with covert CIA assistance. Baer quit the Agency in 1997 and received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998. Baer wrote the book See No Evil documenting his experiences while working for the Agency. The C.I. Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle, by Christopher Lynch (Dog Ear Publishing), describes parts of the contentious CIA pre-publication review process for Baer's first book. In a blurb for See No Evil Seymour Hersh said Baer "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." In the book, Baer offers an analysis of the Middle East through the lens of his experiences as a CIA operative. Books and media Baer's books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil were the basis for the 2005 Academy Award-winning Warner Brothers motion picture Syriana. The film's character Bob Barnes (played by George Clooney) is loosely based on Baer. For this role, Clooney won a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. To better resemble Baer, Clooney gained weight. When Baer learned of this, he was inspired to get back into shape. For the past two years, Robert Baer has worked closely with the director Kevin Toolis and Many Rivers Films, a Channel 4 production company in the UK, to present four authoritative documentary series, Cult of the Suicide Bomber I, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber II and Cult of the Suicide Bomber III on the origins of suicide bombing. Cult of the Suicide Bomber I was nominated for an Emmy in 2006. In 2008 Baer presented Car Bomb – a film history about the weapon. Baer was interviewed in the Robert Greenwald documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq. He was also one of the main participants in the 2009 documentary film Lockerbie Revisited by Dutch film director Gideon Levy. Publications Books: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Crown Publishing Group, January 2002, ISBN 0-609-60987-4. Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, Crown Publishing Group, July 2003, ISBN 1-4000-5021-9. Blow the House Down: A Novel, Crown Publishing Group, 2006, ISBN 1-4000-9835-1. The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, Crown Publishing Group, September 2008 ISBN 0-307-40864-7 The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story, Crown Publishing Group, March 8, 2011 (from wikipedia)