Baer has publicly acknowledged that he worked field assignments in
Madras and New Delhi, India, Beirut, Lebanon, Dushanbe, Tajikistan,
Morocco, and Salah al-Din in Iraqi Kurdistan during his twenty-one years
with the CIA. 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.[3][4] 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.
Through his years as a
clandestine officer, he gained a very thorough knowledge of the Middle
East, Arab world and former Republics of the Soviet Union. Over the
years, Baer has become a strong advocate of the Agency's need to
increase Human Intelligence (HUMINT) through the recruitment of agents.
Baer, long a supporter of the theory that the PFLP-GC brought down Pan
Am Flight 103, has recently begun to promote the theory that Iran was
behind the bombing.[clarification needed]
In 2004, he told a reporter
of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the
CIA deals with terrorism suspects, "If you want a serious interrogation,
you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you
send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them
again - you send them to Egypt."[1]
In June 2009, Baer commented
on the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President
and the protests that accompanied it. "For too many years now, the
Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's
liberal middle class -- an intelligentsia that is addicted to the
Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western
press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los
Angeles; but do they represent the real Iran?"
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