“This is a fascinating--and frightening--autobiography by a CIA field operative who spent over 20 years in the Middle East and Central Asia. He details the slow but steady disintigration of the CIA’s effectiveness to gather intelligence, inexorably erroded by an ever increasing risk aversion and political correctness that ultimately led to the total failure of intelligence that the 9/11 attacks represent. A key event in this chronicle is that which ended his field career. Posted in Northern Iraq, the Kurdish no-fly-zone, he was contacted by an Iraqi general who had just defected from Saddam Hussein’s forces and informed Baer that there was a plot by him and other Iraqi generals to assasinate the dictator and take over the country--the very thing that the first Bush administration and ostensibly the Clinton administration had been hoping for. Before they acted, however, they wanted assurances from the US government that they would receive immediate rocognition so as to help quell the possibility of civil war. Baer immediately relayed this to Sandy Berger who replied simply, “that’s no plan.” In a matter of days Baer was ordered back to Washington to find that he was under investigation by the FBI for conspiracy to commit murder--of Saddam Hussein! He was ultimately cleared, but the fact that he had been investigated by the FBI ended any chances of promition to upper administration within the agency. He later learned that Saddam was tipped off to the planned coup by the State Department. All the principals in the plan were arrested by Saddam’s secret police, horribly tortured, and executed.
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Don M wrote this review Friday, October 26 2007.
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