I read this years ago but from what I remember, it was a fascinating insight into the workings and recruitment methods of a CIA clandestine agent. It can be a little clunky to read at times because he allowed the CIA to redact a lot of the content as it related to certain operations that are still classified (at least they were at the time of publishing). But overall it is a solid book.

A compelling and insightful memoir of a very colorful intelligence career.

Baer describes joining the CIA basically as a prank, his posting in Lebanon as Hezbollah began targeting Americans there, his involvement in efforts to find out who bombed the US embassy in 1983, his involvement in investigations into Iranian connections to Hezbollah attacks, his time at the new CTC (where he was one of only two Arabic speakers), efforts to track Imad Mughniyah, his posting in Tajikistan during a civil war, his involvement in CIA operations in Kurdistan (where he was recalled to the States and investigated by the FBI for alleged attempts to assassinate Saddam), and his time in Washington (a world he understood less) This later section also involves his personal experience with shady oil companies, their Washington lobbyists, and the sketchy Roger Tamraz. He also describes his frustration with an Agency that seemed to value technological methods over more riskier HUMINT, a key factor in his decision to leave the Agency.

The tone sometimes comes off as a bit self-congratulatory or rambling. There’s often not much insight into Baer’s own motivations. Like some other CIA memoirs, some of the redactions are pretty easy to figure out (at one point they censored the word “station” in “station chief”) Still the book is interesting and keeps you reading simply due to all of the dangerous postings Baer found himself in (the sections on Kurdistan and Tajikistan are particularly surreal)

An engaging and well-written work.

This guy was CIA, so you probably are not going to find any big truths here, more party line.

I am keeping it, to maybe read when gas gets over $4 per gallon here in Texas.

At last, I got around to reading this book. The events covered might be over thirty years ago now, but to me it still seems like yesterday!! Anyhow, I've read various takes on Robert Baer's story over the years. Is this the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I've no idea. It is a riveting read, though. I think the big picture that the CIA lost its way a little after the Cold War is a reasonable conclusion. But the folks that work on the frontlines, so to speak, are really quite remarkable people. Their bravery and sacrifices are off the charts. This book certainly hits that point home. Even today, it's a worthwhile read.

This great book gives the reader insight into the life of a CIA agent operating in North Africa and the Middle East. The life of a real spy is somehow crazier and yet more boring than the movies.

Amazing.

Great book about the CIA of 70's and 80's. Important if you want to know what is going on in the world.

SEE NO EVIL—Robert Baer
I didn’t like this story at all, but I loved the book. Baer was “there.” Spent his life “there”—that being the place where none of us (most of us) would ever want to go. It’s the shadow world that resides behind the veil, where it all goes down, for real.

You see, it is my view that there is a movie that continually runs in our heads. It’s a narrative about how the world works, the way the stars align, how progress happens, how one gets from Point A to Point B and connects the dots along the way. Just as this movie runs in my head and your head, it runs in our collective head. It’s the mirror within which you see yourself and assess whether or not you measure up. It’s how we’re wired.

As we have ideas and experiences and come across various words of wisdom, we collect these meaningful vignettes—the stuff that manages to stick within our memory—and we plug this stuff into our movie, out of which the brain constructs scenes and characters and scenarios emerge. Somehow all this stuff takes on a life of its own. The brain stores it in some kind of narrative format. You ask a question, and the brain plays back the answer—the movie.

As we go through life, we constantly test what we experience and observe against the movie in our head. When things happen to not jibe, there’s a problem, a discrepancy. So what do we do? Well, sometimes the observed data out there causes us to “change our mind.” Hmmm. We edit the movie to correspond with the facts as we perceive them. Other times denial pervades and we go with our movie version. Sometimes we can get away with that, and other times we don’t. I’ve often heard it expressed in the context of, “Sometimes the bear eats you.” And that’s not good. You chose denial and lost. Now you gotta pay the price.

But that’s just me talking, not Baer. Let’s get on to Robert Baer’s book.

What we get in See No Evil is not Baer’s movie. Rather, it’s Baer’s account—remember, he was actually “there”—of what actually happened along the way from the 1980s to the present—while the rest of us were watching the movie in our head. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan (according to the movie in their head) and got severely bitten on the ass by the bad bear of denial, after which they paid the price when their country fell apart ten years later. On our side, we've got the Charlie Wilson’s War perspective, where we aided various Afghan tribes and militias in their struggle against the big Red Bear. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988, our side had cake, blew horns, did high-fives and went home. Game Over according to the movie in our head. And then in 1991 we did the party, hats and horns thing yet again when the USSR faded away. All this fading away according to the movie in our head.

Following Iran-Contra and a bunch of other nefarious schemes, and after we consulted with the movie in our head, we determined that the CIA was not our friend any more. Anyway, the big, bad Red Bear was supposedly dead. So “we” dismantled the CIA. [“We” really fits here, because all political parties got a chance to wade in on the CIA witch hunt. In essence, we blinded ourselves, pulled down the shades and turned “intelligence” gathering over to the bean counters. And while we were eating our collective popcorn at our collective movie and dreaming our collective dream, the walls crashed down upon us.

Afghanistan crapped out. Al-Qaeda blossomed. The Taliban became the stars in somebody’s crazy movie. And what did we do? We took out no-payment loans and invaded Iraq. Talk about “intelligence” now. All of the easy fixes failed us while we were at the movies—and “they” took care of everything.

I believe everything Baer said in his book. I thought the facts lined up. Everything he said made perfect sense to me. I’ve not finished the book. I’ve been busy shoveling snow. Anyway, we all know how it ends. [SPOILER ALERT] ========>> We’re living it and we’re still paying the price in so many hideous ways.

One last thing: Baer had to submit his book to the CIA so they could black out various “sensitive” and secret passages. Baer left all the blacked-out passages in the book—sometimes entire paragraphs—looking like some weird fill-in-the-blank test. Most of this book is chilling and disgusting—especially the blacked-out stuff you are not supposed to know about. Oh, please!

Thank you, Robert.

This book was the perfect book for me. As much as it's fun to read about the exploits of the CIA as an organization, reading about it from the perspective of one agent is so much more fascinating. I'm sure some people glazed over when they read about navigating Beltway politics, or the minutiae of reports and duty assignments, but to me that's the best stuff. It's the most real. Above all else, I love to read about people for whom the most exotic, dangerous, and mysterious assignments in the world is their day-to-day, pain-in-the-ass job. Tear away all the mystique tell me what it's really like on the ground. Because works like this help you understand that these folks aren't strange or special; they're just doing their job every day, like you and me. And the face hurdles and office politics the way we do. The hurdles are different, and the stakes are higher. But to me, putting a human face on intelligence gathering was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in a long time.

I have a much better understanding of how the CIA functions now. What their obstacles are, and how fallible the system is. Which is incredible because I think to most, the CIA seems like this omnipotent, omniscient force that's tapping your phones and looking at you through a camera on a satellite right now. Turns out that couldn't be further than the truth. It's every bit the stereotypical Federal Government bureaucracy. Baer outlines the shortfalls, and the underlying causes that led, in part, to 9/11 without pulling any punches.

Vince Flynn it ain't, but that's exactly what I wanted. I'll read everything Mr. Baer has published.

So incredible to read! Love the inside scoop. Politics are as dirty as terrorism.

Really enjoyed authors candid stories, locations described, and the action that played as fiction at times but is certainly non-fiction. Really enjoyed this read.

Not great, not bad, just a typical DC memoir where people are more concerned with settling scores than telling a story. Keeping in the areas where the CIA redacted his book seemed especially petty.

Baer clearly shows that we - America - has been involved in a secret war with the radical edge of the Islamic world for many years.  This radical edge, is not a mere fringe, however.  It cuts deep, including the governments of many nations we do far too much business with.  This both ties our hands and corrupts many members of our own government - in both major political parties.  Baer writes an absolutely infuriating account of how under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, the CIA was gutted of human intelligence gathering and turned into a cover-your-ass bureaucracy.  The lost opportunities to have circumvented some of our worst foreign policy disasters, including 9/11 and the disastrous Iraq war lie at the feet of all those politicians, and lickspittle bureaucratic climbers who seemed to believe that if we ignored this terrible problem, it would go away.  No, Islamic terror is not a "law enforcement" problem, as the naive would have it. It is clearly a war we are in.  But without the correct intelligence, we cannot make intelligent decisions on how to fight.   

Very interesting