Pages 229- 230, discuss the downward spiral consuming the CIA beginning with the FBI arrest of Rick Ames on February 1994...."I was in Dushanbe. Watching on CNN as Ames stood handcuffed by the side of his new Jaguar XJ-6, my first reaction was that no one at the CIA owns a Jaguar......The officers who once could have afforded one--the investment bankers and lawyers who fought with the OSS in World War II and the few who'd stayed on to establish the CIA in 1947 were all gone. Ames Jaguar must have been the only one in the CIA parking lot. How could security have missed it? But the lapse of internal security was just the beginning of the misery. Rick Ames wasn't your average spy. When he gave away a dozen Soviet agents at one liquor soaked lunch, he established himself as one of history's greatest traitors, in the company of Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, and Kim Philby. Just as Britain's M-16 would never live down Philby, so the CIA would never live down Ames. He had ratted out our crown jewels, the reason we existed. ......The CIA had screwed up so badly with Ames that it could no longer be trusted to clean its own house..... Woolsey, turned the CIA over to its worst enemy in Washington--the FBI. Way back at the beginning of the cold war, J.Edgar Hoover had wanted to keep all national security operations domestic and foreign under his heavy thumb. Now it looked like his ghost was about to get its way......The executioner the FBI picked for the task was Ed Curran, a serving FBI agent.......His first act was to fire anyone who knew anything, especially the little old ladies in tennis shoes--the CIA's institutional memory on Soviet espionage...The idea was to spread fear and paranoia through out the CIA and in that he couldn't have been more successful." ."
it was difficult to read all the Arab names, but his story is centered in that part of the world and the author is very specific about names along with iterating the culture of tribalism and family clans. It is just one of the reasons why we are failing against the terrorists, their bloodline alliances are entrenched.
Page 279, the last page last paragraph is haunting still today, 2017.:" ..concerns me that I hear so little talk about doing something about future Ziyad Jarrahs and the groups they belong to. They are our real problem. ...compounded by the fact that we know so little about these groups and have virtually no intelligence on how they are structured.......No doubt going after Saddam sounds like a good idea around the conference tables of Washington's think tanks and in the hallowed office suites at the National Security Council, but is he that enemy? Are we not hitting the target we can rather than the target we should? Shouldn't we be pulling from the roots the people who hit us on September 11 rather than going after the Gulf's bogeyman? It seems to me it's always the evil we refuse to see that does us the greatest harm."
There are many reviews online and I have copied this from Wikipedia :
"See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism is a 2003 memoir by Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations. Baer begins with his upbringing in the United States and Europe and continues with a tour of his CIA experiences across the globe. Approximately the first two-thirds of the memoir focus on the various experiences of Baer's two-decade (1976–1997) career at the CIA, while the last third depicts the growing cynicism brought on by the corruption and obliviousness encountered in Washington.
One of the main focal
points of the story is Baer's obsession with uncovering the perpetrators of the
unsolved 1983
United States Embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. Baer's memoir
describes his own solution of the mystery.
The overall theme around
which the memoir is built is his view of the CIA losing its prowess due to
increasing diplomatic sensitivity in Washington's foreign policies in the
aftermath of political fiascoes from active American involvement in foreign
politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Baer describes how he believes the CIA
steadily degenerated from a potent human-intelligence resource that often saved
or spared lives, to a people-shy, satellite-obsessed, and politically oriented
branch of a centralized government.
Other topics Baer
discusses in the book include: the extent to which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been involved in
anti-American terrorist activity, most publicly in the 1983 Beirut
barracks bombing (a death toll of over 300), but allegedly in a
far more diverse range of terrorist operations. Baer also writes about how he
believes the CIA failed in forecasting the September 11 attacks on
America. Baer's story clearly lays out how the CIA came to the point of not
even having a useful agent in the Middle East in the period leading up to the
attacks. He goes on to describe the loss of effectiveness of the CIA in the
mid-1990s, in the wake of the catastrophic treason of CIA agent Aldrich Ames, and the CIA's failure to
identify the mole before lethal damage had been done to many of their
operations worldwide.
The final section of the
memoir deals with Baer's experience with oil politics in Washington, and the
extended reach granted to oil's agenda by the politically fixated and
strategically oblivious American government. At one point, Baer is stunned at
being asked to approve the sale of a sophisticated American defense weapon to a
former Soviet-bloc country as an incentive for participating in an oil deal,
while that same country had recently obstructed the investigation of the murder
of an American diplomat on their soil. Baer recalls his unwilling association
with infamous oil businessman Roger Tamraz and the uneasy realities he
extracts from his period of involvement in Washington politics.
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