To begin the interview and provide some background, could you talk a bit about your career with the CIA, where you served and how long?

 

 

Baer: I joined in 1976 the Directorate of Operations, which is all based overseas, generally, and what we did in those days was recruit spies, mainly against the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. We had a very definite target, just like the Russians did; there were very clear rules, and the mission was pretty much the same on both sides. We wanted to find out if the Russians were going to fold the gap, attack Europe; and the Russians wanted to know whether we were going to launch a nuclear strike, invade, or something like that. After two years of training, I was assigned to India, and spent three years there, studied Arabic two years, and then was assigned to the Middle East pretty much constantly from there on. I stayed in the CIA for 21 years.

 

 

What was it that piqued your interest in the CIA?

 

 

Baer: Foreign countries, I found them very curious because I was dragged around Europe. I lived in France a long time, I lived in Switzerland; I was intrigued by foreign cultures. I didn’t particularly know them very well, and when I got the opportunity to go back overseas, I had that curiosity. And also, I’m a reader. I read a lot; any time I can. I’m not well read, but I like to read a lot. And once I got in the CIA, you had these huge databases, even history…They intrigued me, not so much the Soviet Union, but Iran and Lebanon and Hezbollah and Qaeda and things like that…

 

 

What sparked your interest in that part of the world?

 

 

Baer: I was actually in India, and it was accidental, like most things in my life. I asked to study Chinese, and they said ‘no’, because they had enough Chinese speakers, but they said, ‘how about Arabic?’ They couldn’t get enough Arabic speakers. So the Near East Division said, ‘we’ll put you through Arabic for two years.’ And it was a skill, and I understood I needed a skill. So once you start down the path of Arabic and you stay in the Middle East, you never stop. I got to the point where I was reading a lot of books; I studied the Koran when I was in Tajikistan. I never mastered the language, but I always tried hard to understand it.

 

 

During the years you served, what was the CIA’s way of doing business like? Did it change significantly following the Cold War?

 

 

Baer: The goals were much clearer until the end of the Cold War: that was really to spy on Moscow. If you were assigned to Rwanda in Africa or some place like that, no one cared about Africa, they cared about recruiting Soviet diplomats or Soviet military officers, who would go back to Russia and presumably report out what the Russians were doing…

 

 

When did you first notice a change?

 

 

Baer: I felt [it] in the mid-90’s when the bureaucracy sort of took over the place. I was assigned to Beirut in 1986, and of course it had nothing to do with the Cold War; it had to do with terrorism. It was right in the middle of the civil war. We had hostages, we were worried about the Iranians. It was a time when we lost all of our Iranian assets; we had none in the 80’s. The CIA was in decline even before the end of the Cold War.

 

 

In your judgment, has the CIA fundamentally changed since 9/11?

 

 

Baer: Oh yeah, I think it’s a broken organization. It remains a broken organization. I talk to a lot of people coming out; they complain about-- you know the guy that headed Iraqi operations during this recent war, he said he had 38 people working for him who have never met an Arab overseas.

 

 

Do you think they are trying to do something to address—well, first of all, what do you think they should...

 

 

Baer: It’s the culture…. You have a failing culture; you have a White House that’s asking it to do things it can’t, like against the insurgency in Iraq. You don’t have enough people who speak the language. You have a lot of Americans that are coming out of a ‘mall culture’…We had a lot of ‘White Russians’ inside the CIA up into the 80’s, and 90’s even, and I had case officers whose parents had been born in Russia and they grew up in the United States speaking Russian at home (they were pretty much all gone by the 90’s), so I could send one of these guys out to Almaty or some place like that, and they spoke native Russian. Now all of a sudden, you’ve got people that are coming in and they put them in these quick courses where they’ve got nine months of Russian, which isn’t long enough to study the language. They’ve never been to Russia or Central Asia, and then you drop them into one of these countries in the middle of nowhere and say: ‘don’t get in trouble’. It’s pretty hopeless. And you don’t have Kazakh speakers, you don’t have Chinese speakers, and you pull people that grew up in suburban malls and who can’t deal with the world.

 

 

So what I’m hearing is that they are still unprepared for…

 

 

Baer: Yes, that they screwed up on the war in Iraq didn’t surprise me, you know, that they completely got the weapons of mass destruction wrong. They’ve got a station in Baghdad, it’s about 400 people, but they never go out. They don’t speak Arabic, they don’t speak tribal Arabic. They’re floundering. This is a symptom of American culture…. People go to Europe, they go in tour busses, with vinyl jackets and white tennis shoes, and you don’t get to know the French that way or the Germans, or anyone else.

 

 

What kinds of recruitment challenges is the CIA facing?

 

 

Baer: They’ve got a lot of institutional problems. To get into the CIA you have to have no suspicious contacts. Let’s say you spent ten years in France and you had a French girlfriend, or a French wife even, and whose brother was in the French police or something -- that would exclude you from the CIA. Or if there’s a Saudi who has grown up in the United States and wants to go back, you can’t hire him to go be a case officer in Saudi Arabia and go sit in the mosques.

 

 

So essentially people are being ruled out who are needed the most because they know the culture the best?

 

 

Baer: Yes, and you also have a problem in that for a lot of Muslims, we look like we are at war with Islam. And if you’re a Muslim and you work for the CIA in the Middle East, it’s a traitorous act for them. So it’s even harder than it was before to recruit.

 

 

Is the situation pretty much the same across the intelligence services of all Western democracies? Do they all work similarly?

 

 

Baer: I’ve worked with a lot of intelligence services, including Russian… I don’t know how they work but it remained a profession, even after the Cold War, in Moscow…I think that intelligence was a much more highly prized profession in the Soviet Union and in Cuba than it ever was in the United States. So you tended to get better people in the KGB, simply because it was a way to rise in society. If you were educated, you could join the GRU or the KGB, or the FSB. In the United States, it was never considered a top-shelf profession. You go to Wall Street, you teach philosophy at Columbia, a lot of other things; so, generally, you didn’t get as good people inside the CIA.

 

 

In your book “See No Evil,” you write about a number of contacts you made with members of the Russian military during your time spent in Tajikistan. In the 90’s, do you believe it would have been beneficial for the U.S. intelligence community to work closer with the Russians? Would it have made a difference in rooting out dangerous terrorist organizations in Central Asia, for example?

 

 

Baer: Well, no, not really, because the Russians, first of all, don’t understand American politics. They don’t understand that Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest supporters of Chechnya, the whole resistance there. So it doesn’t matter who was in the Kremlin – whether it was Yeltsin, or Putin or Gorbachev – they looked and said, ‘now wait a minute, here’s America’s best ally in the Middle East and yet they are funding the Chechen resistance.’ And they knew that our interests didn’t coincide. The United States only cared about Saudi oil, getting it cheaply, and drawing on Saudi Arabia for money, and the Russians said that’s not exactly fighting terrorism.

 

 

Is there any residual Cold War effect going on?

 

 

Baer: The Russians pay much more attention to national security because they don’t have private interest groups that take over foreign policy. You look at the pro-Israeli lobby in this country, whether it’s evangelical Christian or Zionist, and the Russians don’t understand that, how a minority group can hijack a foreign policy. And they are very mistrustful. The Russians are very mistrustful about what’s happening in Syria today, because we are doing everything to unseat a secular regime, which ultimately will affect everybody’s interests in the Middle East.  The Russians don’t understand why we attacked Iraq, where we unseated a secular regime, and essentially turned it over to fundamentalists…They don’t get it. Although there are some Russians that do, but in general, it’s an irrational foreign policy, so you could never have a close alliance between the Russians and the Americans.

 

 

Do you think that since 9/11 there has been any closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russian intelligence communities at all?

 

 

Baer: Oh sure. But they have different interests. Remember that during my days in the CIA, the CIA had nothing to offer on Chechnya. And that is a driving interest of Russia. So there’s not that much really to exchange. And the Russians don’t really care about Saudi Arabian royal family…

 

 

What about the Uzbek Islamic Organization…

 

 

Baer: The CIA doesn’t know anything about it. What are you going to trade the Russian government with? If they arrested some Uzbeks… I simply don’t know what’s happened since 9/11. You’ve got a coincidence of interests in some places, but… When I was in Tajikistan, the Russians just found it implausible that we knew next to nothing about the Arab fundamentalists in Afghanistan. Their attitude was: ‘look, they’re coming through Pakistan, that’s your ally, you guys sent them there in 1979, you paved the way for the crazies to come into Afghanistan to fight us, and now this is 1992 and they’re causing a civil war in Tajikistan, what do you mean you don’t know who they are?’ They don’t realize that there’s this sort of laissez-faire that the CIA carries out in intelligence. I mean, it’s true; I kept on asking questions when I was in Tajikistan: ‘what’s happening? Who is sending the rebels across the border and killing Russians?’ They weren’t our friends. And we got the answer: ‘we don’t know.’

 

 

If you had the chance to do it all over again knowing what you do now, would you have joined the CIA?

 

 

Baer:  Yeah, I would. It’s a good way to see the world, you know, ‘Join the Navy, see the world’, ‘Join the CIA, see the world’. You know, the CIA is never as bad as people think, or never as good. And it was vehicle for me to go places and see things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Yeah, absolutely, I’d do it again.

-- 02/17/2006