Name: See No Evil
ISBN: 9781400046843

See No Evil

top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A veteran case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA’s inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East. “Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.” –Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker From The Preface This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with. This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again.

What Hacker News says

shantnutiwariSep 2021

Thats a very weak list-- most of the books are cold war related.

Nothing about the last 10-20 years?

I groan when I see yet another book on World War 2/Enigma/Early cold war-- hasnt this topic been done to the death? Or have I read too many books?

For me, See no Evil by Robert Baer, though it came out in 2003, is a good book about how politics interferes with intelligence work.

I Spy by Tom Marcus, though it was about counter intelligence, is also a great book.

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arethuzaSep 2021

See no Evil is excellent as it covers both CIA training and what intelligence officers actually spend their time doing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)

Something like Paddy Ashdown's auto biography covers how he got into MI6 (Royal Marines and SBS) and what his cover story was but carefully avoids the intelligence side of his work.

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arethuzaDec 2020

Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil gives a fairly detailed account of what it's like to be an intelligence officer (in his case for the CIA) - you are basically identifying people who have useful information and then persuading them to do that, by whatever means necessary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)

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arethuzaOct 2016

Have you read Bob Baer's "See No Evil" - it goes into a lot of details about his experiences being recruited and working in the CIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(Baer_book)

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arethuzaApr 2016

Bob Baer's books are rather good - particularly See No Evil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_%28Baer_book%29

Quite interesting to compare Baer's experiences at the CIA with high profile members of MI6, particularly Paddy Ashdown - the latter being very careful not to say what he actually did on the espionage side while at MI6 although he does mention his "day job".

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poloticsFeb 2016

Start with "see no evil" by Bob Baer

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