An Interview with Retired CIA Agent Robert Baer

[im10ashus]

Interesting. Depressing. He's the author of "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism" (Crown Publishers, 2002), which was the basis for "Syriana."

The first time I went to see Syriana, the friend who accompanied me left after the first half hour. We haven't really talked about why.

Three years of watching friends' eyes glaze over while spewing the multitudinous minutia of knowledge I have acquired working in Iraq have silenced me.

Talk about torture. I loved the film, went to see it a second time—alone—and want to see it again. It felt familiar, as one's home does when returning to it after an absence. And it made me want to talk about Iraq with Robert Baer, a former case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. It is Baer's memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism (Crown Publishers, 2002), that Syriana is based upon. Baer served mostly in the Middle East—Beirut, Lebanon and Iraq—as well as in Sudan, Morocco, and one tour in Paris. His job was to "run agents or sources across the Middle East gathering Intelligence." An Arabic speaker, he was considered one of the best on-the-ground field officers in the Middle East. In See No Evil, Baer says that there is evidence linking Iran to attacks on American interests, including the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 US soldiers in 1996. He says that Iran has been mishandled by US diplomats since the 1980s, and that American foreign policy regarding the Islamic Republic is based on myths and misinformation.

I spoke with Baer by phone from his home in Colorado. —LT

cont'd...

http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2006/02/news/index.php

[Octafish]

1. One heck of an interview.

Knowing the Big Picture helps.

EXCERPT:

LT: You raise a lot of questions about the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, that the US is locked in a "harmony of interests" that set the stage for 9/11. Give some evaluation of Saudi Arabia, the US's interests, and why were there 15 Saudis on the planes. Why were Saudi families whisked out of the US? Why do we have this connective tissue?

RB: What's not mentioned in my book, or in Syriana, is Israel. As far as those people are concerned, Israelis are Americans. Look at the Israelis. They sound American. They've got the same sense of humor, the same sense of irony, they dress like Americans; they are like efficient Americans, especially the military.

LT: They're backed by lots of American dollars.

RB: And American dollars. It's sort of like if you took a Ku Klux Klan colony and placed it in Detroit and you paid for it. Look at the 9/11 commission. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind, said it's all about Israel. We have to pay attention.

LT: Osama Bin Laden, in a speech that was released in 2004, said that his soul directed him after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982—

RB: And flattened Beirut. This is an irritant. Not an irritant—this is the cause.

LT: In terms of US connective tissue with Saudi Arabia, you talk about the money, oil, Saudi fundamentalism, and about how the Saudis fund these fundamentalist groups through charitable organizations—

RB: In the book my ideas become simpler and in some cases more refined. The point is that most Muslims—largely, you can't put a percentage on it—think that we, the US, are at war with Islam. The other fact is that they've got 70 percent of the world's oil resources, so our economic welfare is in their hands, and yet we're at war with them. That's the contradiction, that's it comes down to.

Thanks, im10ashus.

[im10ashus]

2. You are welcome.

It gets better too:

LT: The LA Times published an article recently about how more than half of the Arab fighters in Iraq are Saudis, how millions of dollars continue to flow from wealthy Saudis through Saudi-based Islamic charitable and relief organizations to Al Qaeda and other groups, and that the Saudi government has not come through on any promises to monitor this or to really do anything—

RB: They haven't done anything. Who are the clerics that recruited the 15 Saudis that were recruited in Saudi Arabia? Who ultimately paid for 9/11? They haven't given us even the basics.

LT: What about the responsibility of our country to extract those answers from the Saudis?

RB: Well, it's like the administration's approach to global warming: Just deny it's happening and get through the 2006 elections.

LT: A lot of people attached to politics who are ignoring these situations have some level of economic interest.

RB: Well, they do, and getting elected. Any politician that proposes putting 50 cents' tax on a gallon of gasoline or working up to that will be defeated. We're addicted to cheap oil—Democrat or Republican. The American people don't want to know. They say, "What do you mean we have to pay five dollars for a gallon of gasoline? It violates our constitutional rights. You can listen to our phones, but you can't make us pay five dollars for gasoline. It's written right there in the Constitution."

[seemslikeadream]

9. "The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11"

Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.

The CIA often works in mysterious ways - and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly - an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.

.............

To understand what happened on that fateful day when terrorist strikes leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, one must revisit the turbulent changes that took place a half century earlier in the land of the sphinx. After seizing power in a 1952 military coup Egyptian Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser quickly threw prominent Communists in jail. This raised eyebrows among US cloak-and-dagger operatives who were eager to oblige when Nasser requested help in upgrading Egypt's ineffectual secret service. But the US government "found it highly impolitic to help him directly," the late CIA agent Miles Copeland acknowledged in his memoirs, The Game of Nations , so the CIA subcontracted more than a hundred German Third Reich vets, who specialized in Nazi security and interrogation techniques, to do the job.

..............

Copeland was off and running. He visited several Egyptian mosques in search of an Islamic preacher who could sway the Arab masses in a manner most congenial to US interests. Although Copeland never found the CIA's messiah, his furtive machinations were not without impact. While on the prowl for a Muslim Billy Graham, Copeland reached out to leaders of the religious revival movement known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to build an Islamic society from the bottom up. The seeds of a clandestine relationship between the CIA and the Ikhwan were planted by Copeland, who surmised that the Muslim Brothers, by virtue of their strong antipathy to Arab nationalism as well as Communism, might be a viable counterweight to Nasser in the years ahead, US intelligence would become a defacto partner of the Brotherhood as it evolved from a mass-based social reform organization into the wellspring of Islamic terrorism.

...

"Any contact Miles had with the Muslim Brotherhood was not official policy," insists retired CIA officer Raymond Close, a colleague of Copeland in the Middle East. "It was strictly solo work on his part. There were an awful lot of things that Miles did that were totally off the board."

Whether Copeland's efforts were "off the board" or otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood was certainly a force to be reckoned with. Since its inception in 1928, the Society of the Muslim Brothers sought to restore Islamic law and values in the face of growing Western influence. Launched as a social welfare association, it became a focal point of resistance to British colonial rule. The Special Order Group, a secret paramilitary wing set up by the Brotherhood, carried out guerrilla raids in Egypt during the 1940's, bombing British installations and killing British soldiers and civilians. By the time Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna was assassinated in 1949, the fast-growing Ikhwan, with its distinctive green flag crossed with white swords and a red Koran, had a half million Egyptian members and affiliates in several other countries.

...........

American intelligence formed a three-way tryst with the Saudis and the Muslim Brothers, according to Robert Baer, the former case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. With the CIA's implicit approval, the Saudi royals channeled funds to the Brothers who joined a US-backed, anti-Nasser insurgency in Yemen in 1962. "Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off the books," explains Baer. "There was no CIA funding, no memorandum of notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. All the White House had to do was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim Brothers."

Yemen was just a warm up. To give a boost to Islamic proselytizing the Saudis with CIA encouragement, founded the Muslim World League in 1962. Underwritten initially by several donors including the Saudi-based Aramco oil consortium (then a CIA collaboration, the League established a formidable international presence with representatives in 120 countries. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood occupied key staff positions at the League while it disseminated anti-communist religious propaganda and sponsored the construction of mosques and Islamic center's around the world.

....

RAZOR Magazine September 2004

[kineneb]

14. For background info on CIA-Nazi-Egypt connection,

read "The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists" (1997) by Martin A. Lee.

While looking through the book I found this quote, which is truly scary:
"...the potential for fascism was embedded in the fabric of mass consumer culture, which typically engender weak personalities with high dependency needs that could easily be manipulated by commercial advertisers and political demagogues. Seen from this perspective, fascism has persisted as a permanent possibility in advanced industrial societies, including a post-Cold War Germany." (p. 391, trade paper edition)

Little did the author know, writing in the 90's, that it would not be modern Germany that would succumb to the lure of fascism, but America, instead.

[seemslikeadream]

15. a little more from the article

Exiled Ikhwani were also employed as teachers and imams in Saudi mosques, schools and government agencies, where they promoted the extremist doctrine of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood's leading scribe and theorist. Executed in 1966 after 10 years of confinement in Egyptian torture chambers, Qutb is arguably the most influential religious scholar in modern Islam. He fashioned a lethal variant of political Islam that provided a Koranic justification for violence as the only way to rid the Muslim world of corrupting Western influences. Qutb's hostility toward the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, was born during two years of study at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in the late 1940's. He returned to Egypt mortified by decadent, sex-crazed America, which he likened to a brothel.

The Muslim Brotherhood underwent a significant shift with the radicalization of Qutb in prison. What had been essentially a reformist organization in its formative phase veered off in a dangerous new direction. In addition to intro ducting a harsh anti-American perspective to the Brethen, Qutb called for the formation of a revolutionary Islamic vanguard to spearhead the violent overthrow of secular Arab regimes. Qutb's martyrdom bestowed instant credibility upon his message, which posthumously filled the ideological void left by the huge Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, a defeat that shamed Nasser and discredited the Arab nationalist cause.

Qutb's inflammatory writings would decisively influence a generation of young militants, including the future spear-carriers of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, the tall, handsome scion of a wealthy Persian Gulf family, was first exposed to Qutb's nostrums while attending King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah. One of bin Laden's instructors in religious studies was Egyptian Professor Muhammed Qutb, the exiled brother of Sayyid Qutb, who taught classes on the imperatives and nuances of Islamic jhad.

...

After Nasser died in 1970, the Muslim Brethren, buoyed by Saudi petrodollars, resurfaced in Egypt. The newly emboldened Ikhwani were wooed by President Anwaar Sadat, Nasser's successor, who freed Islamic activists from jail, lifted some restrictions on the Brothers, and turned them loose against the Nasserite die-hards and leftist student groups who disapproved of Sadat's decision to make amends with the United States. Sadat's courtship of the Brotherhood elicited more winks and nods from US intelligence. Right under the CIA's nose, the officially-banned by semi-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood was going through a momentous transformation in its country of origin.

French scholar Gilles Kepel, the author of Jhad: The Trail of Political Islam, describes how Qutb's theories found a receptive audience at Egyptian university campuses, giving rise to a potent radical wing with in the Islamist movement. When the older leaders of the Ikhwan, chastened by years of repression, repudiated armed confrontation in favor of gradual efforts to reform the system, renegade Brothers created several violent splinter groups and vowed to wage holy war against an authoritarian Egyptian regime, which they saw as corrupt, anti-Islamic, and a US puppet. The heads of two Brotherhood breakaway factions - the Egyptian Islamic Jhad of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Islamic Group of Sheik Omar Abdei Rahman - were among those implicated in the 1981 assassination of President Sadat.

Today Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, is serving a life sentence in the United States for plotting to blow up the United Nations, Manhattan's FBI building, the George Washington Bridge and other New York City landmarks, while Dr. al-Zawahiri, a squat, bespectacled zealot with a round head and owlish face, appears in post-9/11 video footage sitting on the right-hand side of Osama bin Laden. Dubbed "the brains behind al-Qaeda," al-Zawahiri became bin Laden's top deputy after the Egyptian physician had matriculated through the ranks of the Muslim Brother.

RAZOR Magazine September 2004

[TheGunslinger]

22. BBC's The Power of Nightmares

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm

[im10ashus]

29. There's so much the average American doesn't know.

But if they read something other than a magazine or watched something besides "American Idolotry" like say, "Frontline" or anything on PBS, they may have a clue.

Thanks for that post, seemslikeadream! :yourock:

[FreedomAngel82]

11. Ding ding ding

Israel is in PNAC's plans.

[H2O Man]

18. Interesting, indeed ....

I think it is worth people's time to also look very closely at the areas of overlap between the Saudi's Prince Turki and the ISI. As the Franklin/AIPAC scandal shows, there are other countries that have compromised US intelligence.

[TacticalPeek]

3. K & R

:kick:

[im10ashus]

4. Thanks! n/t

:-)

[TacticalPeek]

5. Kicking.

Because it's a very interesting interview.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

6. Bookmarked to read later - thanks

His memoir - and book on the House of Sa'ud & US foreign policy "Sleeping with the Devil" - are well worth reading.

[upi402]

7. Baer said Qaeda is not the source of future attacks, Saudi is

[FreedomAngel82]

12. Exactly

Do Saudi and Isarel work together?

[upi402]

16. God! or should I say Jesus?

America, Israel, and Saudi Arabia
The absolute ultimate disfunctional family.

[H2O Man]

20. Not to the extent

that the Saudi intelligence works with Pakistani intelligence.

[im10ashus]

27. The hijackers on 9/11 were all Saudis so I won't be surprised.

The Bushies and the Saudis make very strange bedfellows.

[Nothing Without Hope]

8. K & R. Excellent - thanks! n/t

[EVDebs]

10. Rent the old video 3 Days Of The Condor and ask yourself.....

If the U.S. is ultimately leaving Iraq, why is the military building 'permanent' bases?
http://www.fcnl.org/iraq/bases.htm

And a new poll shows Iraqis support attacks on US troops specifically because they believe the US troops are there permanently"

New WPO Poll: Iraqi Public Wants Timetable for US Withdrawal, But Thinks US Plans Permanent Bases in Iraq--Half of Iraqis Approve of Attacks on US Forces, Including 9 Out of 10 Sunnis
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/165.php?nid=&id=&pnt=165&lb=hmpg1

This is btw why the Quakers are being spied upon domestically...

Then go rent 3 Days of The Condor, and ask yourself 'Did the NYTimes print or not' ?

Then see in real life WHEN the NYTimes printed the story...thirty years late !

Document reveals Nixon plan to seize Arab oil fields
'70s embargo sparked 'last resort' measure, says British memo
Lizette Alvarez, New York Times

Friday, January 2, 2004

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/200...

The thirty year old plans were then 'dusted off' and tweaked in order to be used to seize the Iraq oilfields, in deference to the now 'wised up' Saudis, our 'allies'.

If R's were smart, a BIG 'IF', they'd have followed the advise in www.oilendgame.com a long long long time ago.

But again, that big IF looms large...

[FreedomAngel82]

13. And it's all so disgusting

how all of this is for oil and to control the markets. Ugh. The Iraqi military aren't standing up also because they know we're not leaving and they don't want to die for us. I wouldn't die for a country either that wanted to take over my country.

[H2O Man]

19. Good points!

Very important issues ......

[EVDebs]

26. We must now all become 'movers and Quakers' it seems

Even though we know the MIGs will be all over us as 'wartime dissenters', DUers are probably already, by infiltration and military access to the servers, in the main database by now. Oh well, they'll just have to figure out what to do with the over 50% of the country that disagrees with Bush and this crazy war he's gotten us into.

[im10ashus]

32. Very good points!

I've been saying the same thing all along. We aren't leaving Iraq. Why else build those bases? :shrug:

PNAC has had their eyes on that prize for a very long time.

[mogster]

17. Interesting thread

Kick! :kick:

[leveymg]

21. This $2 trillion vicious circle of contractor corruption stood out for me

Baer: Beware the Iraq War contractors -- they'll end up owning us or killing us.

RB: But it's also in their interest. Obviously, Syriana was over the top in terms of conspiracies, but they can get away with it because Americans don't want to pay the real price of oil—no American does.

LT: So you're saying it's ultimately—

RB: The people of America's fault. The irony is, we're dumping billions and billions of dollars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that's killing American soldiers. I've read, "One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hummer." And what's more, the money's coming from Japan and China, and in a certain sense from the Middle East, and then it's filtering back. Blackwater, SAIC, Custer Battle—all these companies just basically got the 20 billion dollars that was supposed to go into construction. Construction was never going to happen.

LT: Why?

RB: You can't dump 20 million dollars in a country in the Middle East and have even a tiny fraction going into real projects. That's not the way the place works. So when Congress voted for that money, it was out of stupidity. It was either going to go into the hands of the American contractors or into the hands of Iraqi crooks. Iraq is a corrupt system. The only way you can really get around this is simply line the contractors up and shoot them if they stole the money, which of course is not acceptable to Americans. It goes back to Ottoman corruption, corruption under Saddam, where his family was stealing vast amounts of money, taking the oil profits. For us to go in and turn this around overnight was insanity, to think we could do it—nationbuilding.

LT: You opposed the war in Iraq. Why?

RB: I didn't know about the weapons of mass destruction, whether had them or not; I knew there was no evidence that he had them. The point is, you can't have us going in and removing the Arab leader. People forget history. Saddam was the shield of the Arabs, which protected them against the Persians. I knew that if we destroyed the Iraqi army, the only thing that'd hold that country together were American forces, which would mean a lifetime commitment. I don't want to spend my retirement on building a nation in Iraq. There's one study that came out that said it would cost two trillion dollars if we stay there until 2010. I don't think if Americans had been told the truth—that we'd have to spend 10 years there and two trillion dollars—that they'd be really excited about this.

[hippywife]

25. This was a good interview

and the exerpts you posted also interested me and the idea that we have to simplify the way we live in order to curb this or at the very least to survive after it has all blown to hell.

[im10ashus]

30. It is all so bloody criminal. "A lifetime of commitment."

I sort of blame all of Congress too. Those who voted yes to invading Iraq and not doing their homework. I mean, what the hell do we pay them for, if they aren't actually reading what they are voting on. But if anyone ever wants to know the real evil bastards of this world, they need look no further than the roster at PNAC and trace their individual history's and business connections.

[wookie294]

23. Iran has been "mishandled" since the CIA toppled its government in 1954

http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no2/article10.html

[Toots]

24. A very apt description of why Arabs hate Israel

"And American dollars. It's sort of like if you took a Ku Klux Klan colony and placed it in Detroit and you paid for it."
Israel is well known for it's racist policies.

[happydreams]

28. K&R!

I have some stuff on Baer in my notes I'll try to dig it up for later.

[im10ashus]

31. I would love to see it.

Thanks!