See No Evil by Robert Baer

Picked up this in Port Isabel,Texas, February this year at a library sale, one of the library books cleared  from the shelves, a lucky find for me. This  2002 memoir by Robert Baer about his career in the CIA as a case worker/operative, is a paperback, 279 pages and reads as a good intrigue.  Once again this book proves that there are many good books out there not on current best seller lists, books from the past that I have not read. Fascinating, well written intrigue, timely today just as when it was written an released 15 years ago  If anything the political maneuvering by federal bureaucrats and politicians has likely become worse than what the author encountered.  It is frightening to think that we no longer have an effective CIA.   

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.

The film Syriana (2005) was loosely based on the book."

I gave this 5 *****

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

When I saw the first mention of this book in a review last year it sounded like something I wanted to read; although I mentioned it to my local book club twice, they were not interested.  When I saw it newly released June 2013  in the First Vintage Books Edition, paperback,  I scanned it in the store and picked it up immediately.  I adored this book for so many reasons, first very well written by this new author who is no stranger to literature and the publishing world; second the tale is heart touching of an adult son  accompanying his mother who has terminal pancreatic cancer to  her chemo treatments  at Sloan Kettering; third, it is really about books, their lessons and the characters. It is a keeper in my home library as a reference when I want something different or new to me to read.  I was about to make a list of all the books and authors  he and his mother were reading and discussing when I found the author was astute and  made such a reference of each book mentioned in the Appendix.  Their first book, "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner, is new to me but was first published in 1987 and I related to Will immediately when he wrote on Page 5, after Mom recommends he read it,  "..I have a copy...which was in fact true.  There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside.  I even take them on trips.  Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent flier miles, they've traveled so much.  I take these volumes on flight after flight with the best of intentions and then wind up reading anything and everything else, SkyMall, ..."  Oh he is clever in describing traits and activities we book or reading addicts all share.  In my career days I always traveled with a book.  Today in our motor coach I always have a book to read but there are a few out there that have traveled the country without my opening them.  

Both Will and his mother are inveterate readers; his career in publishing and as a journalist affords him immediate
access to new books, but their tastes range from old to new, novels, to memoirs. On page 7,  "We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do. Still one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it the opposite of dying."  I gained an appreciation of novels and learned that I do not miss out by reading fiction,  that non-fiction is not the only way we can learn.  This book about books and what they teach us ends with  the fact that the characters and people and the connections we can make through books is vital.   

As the book begins, Mary Anne Schwalbe 73 years old has been an active person in her own career and in working with and for refugees through the International Rescue Committee. She is an inspiring lady whose last major achievement was to build a library in Kabul Afghanistan.  She had traveled the world and  was deeply involved and caring keeping in touch with former students, and friends through out her life. This memoir is a  testament to her through the eyes of her son, Will but it also describes his journey with her illness and touches briefly on how the rest of the family copes although in his introduction he claims this is his story and they (his father , brother and sister) have their own stories to tell "if and when they choose."  He does not document the family through his own opinion, but shares a personal view.  I enjoyed that  rather than his opinion extending to others actions, he sticks to himself.  

There is mention about the difference between books Mary Anne says he "must read" compared to those she merely wants him to read. as well as physical books vs. e-books on Pgs 42-43.  Mary Anne is a unique person for always feeling lucky and always seeing the best in every person and situation.  He  is blessed to have been her son.  I share the perspective about gratitude and writing prompt thank you notes on page 211.    

I could go on and on about this book, but really, if you are a reader and enjoy books, this is one you must read.   This is a fast read at only 326 pages.  A 5 ***** and  a keeper for me.