Baeriana: a chat with Robert Baer

Robert Baer, a CIA officer stationed mostly in the Middle East from 1976 to 1997, is the author of the newly released Blow the House Down , a novel that proposes an alternative theory for who was behind the 9/11 attacks. According to Kirkus, Baer has put “his decades of intelligence work to good use in this predictably hard-boiled but unflaggingly entertaining tale.”

This is Baer's third book, but his first stab at fiction. His first book, See No Evil , skewered the machinations of American oil companies operating overseas and was the basis for the film Syriana (with George Clooney playing a Baer-inspired character). His second book, Sleeping with the Devil , was a withering attack on the U.S.–Saudi relationship.

I recently spoke with Baer about the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration's confrontation with Iran over the Iranian nuclear program, and his new book. Baer's views are eclectic and don't hew to any particular party line—and he's always interesting and provocative.

Baer offered a variety of reasons for writing Blow the House Down. First, he recounted how he and another former colleague at the CIA had been hired by a law firm after 9/11 and asked to confirm that hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague in 2001. The Bush Administration had claimed that this meeting suggested a link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the law firm, which was planning a terrorism-related lawsuit, was hoping that Baer and his colleague could uncover admissible evidence that the meeting had occurred.

“You always want to be able to give people the answer they want to hear,” Baer told me, “but we couldn't because there was no Prague meeting. The attack dogs in the administration were pushing the Prague story because they were trying to justify a war that they wanted.”

Baer also said that he has found a number of tantalizing leads that point to an Iranian role in the 9/11 attacks, and this Iranian connection is a central theme of Blow the House Down. For example, said Baer, circumstantial evidence suggests that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, likely met with Iranian officials in Qatar in 1996, and that Osama bin Laden and the Iranian regime began to cooperate in some ways that same year. And while the 9/11 Commission found no direct evidence to support an Iranian role in 9/11, it did report, Baer noted, that eight to ten of the hijackers transited through Iran between late 2000 and early 2001.

Baer acknowledges that he lacks definitive facts to support Iranian involvement, which is one reason that he wrote a novel. “It's a theory,” he said. “The plausibility part was easier to do as fiction.” Furthermore, a fictional approach made it easier to get clearance for publication from the CIA, which still has the right to censor what he writes.

Baer is—to put it mildly—not a fan of the current Iranian regime. He describes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “an apocalyptic Shiite” who may be mentally unstable. “Some of the things he says, like the denial of the holocaust, show he's not connected,” Baer said. “Everyone is rightly terrified of him having control of a nuclear bomb.” If Iran does develop nuclear weapons, he said, “the Saudis are going to quickly follow in their footsteps.”

But Baer does not advocate military force against Iran. “We can't afford it,” he said. “It would require one million soldiers on the ground. It's a large country with a large army and there's an ongoing revolution. It would be like hitting a hornet's nest.” Air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities are hugely problematic because “Iran could retaliate in multiple ways, from sabotage in Iraq to targeting Persian Gulf oil facilities. If that happens, we could be seeing oil prices go to $300 a barrel.”

He said the best approach would be tighter economic sanctions on Iran, blocking European countries from sending in oil equipment, and further isolating the country diplomatically. “It's not in our interest to invade and the administration looks like it's sobering up, but you never know because [it] is irrational. There's also the Israelis, who are most threatened by Iran and who are a wild card.”

As for the American position in Iraq, Baer calls it “unwinnable.” “A representative democracy,” he said, “and restoration of order is not going to happen, no matter how long our troops stay there. We're substituting a majority tyranny for a minority tyranny. The Shias are not going to let bygones be bygones. Are they going to say to the Sunnis, ‘You've been repressing us since 680 A.D. but that's OK?’ Once they've established themselves more securely and we're gone, they're going to clean the clocks of the Sunnis and maybe the Kurds too, and try to impose a Shiite theocracy. [New Prime Minister Nuri] al-Maliki is not going to change his nature overnight. We can try to redefine him but he's a radical. The language he uses with us and the language he uses at home is completely different.”

Like other analysts, Baer says Iran has been by far the biggest winner of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which has also increased Teheran's standing in other parts of the Middle East, especially where there are large Shiite populations. Meanwhile, the Saudis and other Gulf states “lost their shield against Iran, which was Saddam Hussein.”

“The Shiite have been subservient to the Sunnis since 680 A.D. but that's no longer the case,” Baer said. “They have hardliners in [key posts] in the Iraqi government and they own southern Iraq. At some point U.S. troops will be out of Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran will be the policemen of the area.”

“The Perles and the Rumsfelds didn't intend to benefit Iran,” said Baer. “But that's what happened.”

Note: For readers in the Washington, D.C., area, Baer will be speaking at the Politics and Prose bookstore on June 22 at 7 p.m.

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