Baer, Robert. See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2002.

Date: 3 January 2003

Robert Baer provides a very straightforward account of the missions and events pertaining to his career as a Middle-East case officer for the CIA. I found four primary themes…

1. He describes (through his personal account) the work and methods of a front-line case officer.
2. He shares his personal memoir of exciting and significant events and interactions.
3. He comments (and offer a dissenting opinion) regarding an apparent change in the CIAs mission and concept of operations.
4. He sets the record straight regarding certain politically motivated decisions and actions that impacted his work and reputation.

I enjoyed his memoir and I learned more about the work of clandestine operatives (themes 1 and 2).

Baer subtly repeated his clearly adamant opinion (theme 3) that CIA has lost a crucial commitment to HUMINT resources, and over-relies of other forms of intelligence gathering. He describes an event (one likely factor for his opinion) in which he was largely ignored while trying to report a 1995 military coup against Saddam Hussein. He implies that the back-office refused to recognize his report because space imagery failed to confirm his reports, and the back office would not respond based solely on his report. He also provides several examples where HUMINT was successful to revealed crucial links in soft networks, which could not be obtained by other intel methods.

Baer's records several actions related to certain minor antagonist and characters related to various Clinton scandals. He does not seem to write with a great deal of bitterness so much as disappointment (and some frustration), and I get the impression that his digs are largely justified. I particular identified with one of his statements regarding how to call an end to his career after learning some of the sad consequences of politics within his agency: "I didn't want to go out bitter, but I didn't want to just slink away either." It is a common situation in large organizations for competent and well-intentioned individuals to become disenfranchised by the encroachment of self-interested bureaucrats, particularly in the absence to free and open communication channels, or the presence of weak and detached leadership. In my limited experience, there seems to be few consistently available countermeasures in such situations. The best strategy seems to be to identify primarily with those who share the same ethics and commitment to the mission, to remain guarded but friendly with everyone else, and retain some alternative situations in case the mission becomes hopeless.

J. Sprigg