In the book, See No Evil, one of the CIA's top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. .
In the wake of those attacks, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long-term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. Robert Baer was not surprised. A twenty-one-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post-cold war world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere. .
Back in the days when CIA operatives got their results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world's most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence; he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency's suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground. .
In the book, Baer's turning point was the 1993 explosion of the American Embassy in Lebanon. He also gives a shocking account of how a tip he tried to give to his superiors on a plot to kidnap agent Bill Buckley, the CIA's Beirut chief, was ignored leading to Buckley's murder.
