See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (2 page)

As instructed, I reported to Fred Turco’s office right at nine. I had worked for Fred in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in the mid-1980s. Now he was in charge of some new office set up to tighten up security in the CIA. Why he’d summoned me, I had no idea.

Fred took a good look at me standing in his door and didn’t necessarily like what he saw. I’d gotten back from northern Iraq the night before and hadn’t had time to get a haircut. Sunburned and wearing a sport coat that had been sitting in the bottom of a duffel bag for the past three months, I must have looked like I’d been in the field for years.

‘Sit down,’ Fred said, pointing at a chair pulled up in front of his desk. When he silently ran his fingers through his shock of prematurely gray hair, I knew it wasn’t a morning for pleasantries.

‘There are two FBI agents upstairs in the general counsel’s office waiting to interview you,’ he finally said. I didn’t have to be told what that meant: The FBI doesn’t interview CIA officers returning from an overseas assignment unless a criminal investigation is afoot.

‘Why the FBI, Fred?’

Fred moved his in box so he could see me better. As he shifted uneasily in his chair, I knew we hadn’t hit bottom yet. He fixed me with a stare he was known for all over the CIA and let me have it: ‘Tony Lake ordered the FBI to investigate you for trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein.’

Assassination? I knew what had happened in Iraq was sure to rattle windows at the White House. I knew Lake, the president’s national security adviser, was furious at the CIA. But this was insane, turning the FBI loose on the CIA. Not to mention that the accusation wasn’t true.

‘He can’t be serious’ I managed to get out.

Fred shrugged. ‘You have no idea how this town works. Stay cool, and we’ll get you through this.’

Rob Davis, a lawyer from the general counsel’s office, had been sitting so quietly at the conference table in the back of the room that I’d forgotten about him. Now he joined the party.

‘Look, Bob, you’ve been overseas for almost twenty years. Washington really has changed a lot,’ Davis said. ‘These kinds of investigations go on all the time now. Fred’s right - you’ll get through it. And, by the way, it’ll make you a better officer.’

He was right about Washington having changed, but the part about the investigation being good for my career was bullshit. I’d worked for the CIA long enough to know that it had long ago stopped backing up its officers in the field. An FBI investigation, no matter how baseless, meant my career was over. In the CIA, as elsewhere in the federal government, you’re innocent until you’re investigated.

I ignored Davis and turned back to Fred, a former case officer who had survived his own run-in with Washington’s new political correctness. Rumor had it that while he was working in counter terrorism, he had a close call with the Department of Justice. Fred was running a source, so the story went - a former terrorist who was helping track Carlos the Jackal. The source let us know when Carlos moved from Damascus to Amman and then to Khartoum, where the French, acting on our information, eventually arrested him. The problem was that the source, many years before, had been involved peripherally in an attack in which an American died. A couple of straight-leg Department of Justice attorneys heard about the source’s past and tried to nail Fred’s hide to the wall for putting a bad guy on the payroll. They didn’t care that our bad guy had helped capture a far worse one: an internationally sought assassin. Fred had lasted, though. He knew how the game was played in Washington, and I was counting on him to give me a few quick lessons.

‘I’m going up first,’ Fred said as he stood to leave. ‘Ill sit through the interview. So will Davis. But don’t forget, he’ll be there to represent the CIA - not you. The FBI agents are going to tell you you’re entitled to a lawyer. It’s your call. But if you ask for one, frankly, it’s not going to look good inside this building. See you in five minutes.’

Maybe I should have paid a little more attention to the irony of it all: I was the one being investigated, but it was the CIA who had a lawyer.

The two FBI agents were sitting at the general counsel’s oval conference table. They stood up, shook my hand, and showed me their credentials.

I recognized one of them. Mike XXXXXX and I had worked together in 1986 in Wiesbaden, Germany, debriefing Father Lawrence Jenco, a Catholic priest serving in Lebanon, a hostage who had just been released by Hezbollah. Although Mike had known me by a different name then, he remembered me now. The expression on his face seemed to say, Yeah, I too recall better times when we were all on the same side and knew who the enemy was; but his words were all business.

‘Mr. Baer, we are conducting a criminal investigation,’ he said as soon as we sat down. ‘You have the right to an attorney. Do you wish to consult an attorney at this time?’

I had decided to do without one. For a start, I didn’t have a lawyer. And even if I did, there was no way I could afford a protracted investigation on my government salary. What was the alternative? Call up the ACLU and explain that I was an accused CIA assassin who needed pro bono counsel? Besides, I didn’t need a lawyer to know that in an investigation like this, the one thing you never do is give up anything freely. I’d conducted enough of my own. Just answer the questions, yes or no.

‘We are investigating a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder - the murder of Saddam Hussein,’ Mike began.

I didn’t reply.

‘Are you aware Executive Order 12333 prohibits the CIA from conducting assassinations.’

President Reagan had issued 12333 in 1981. Since then every incoming CIA officer was obligated to read and initial it.

‘I’ve read it.’

‘Did you attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein.’

‘No.’

‘Did you ever order anyone to assassinate Saddam Hussein?’

‘No.’

‘Did anyone on your team, as far as you know, attempt to assassinate Saddam?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ever use the name Robert Pope?’

I didn’t answer.

Mike then turned around a thick manila file so I could read a three-page report he’d marked with his finger. It was about a meeting held in late February 1995 in northern Iraq, between Ahmad Chalabi, the head of an Iraqi dissident group, and two Iranian intelligence officers. According to the report, Chalabi told the Iranians the US finally had decided to get rid of Saddam - to assassinate him. To carry it out, he said, the National Security Council had dispatched an ‘NSC team’ headed by Robert Pope to northern Iraq. The NSC, Chalabi explained, had asked him to contact the Iranian government on its behalf to ask for help. The report went on to say that in the middle of the meeting Chalabi had received a telephone call and left the room, giving the Iranians an opportunity to read a letter left conspicuously in the middle of his desk. Supposedly written on NSC stationery, it asked Chalabi to give Mr. Pope ‘all assistance requested for his mission.’

That’s when I stopped reading. I knew Ahmad Chalabi well. I had been in northern Iraq when the meeting took place, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chalabi had invented this story from scratch. He must have thought that if he could swindle the Iranians into believing that the NSC and the White House were finally serious about getting rid of Saddam, they would have no choice but to throw their support behind Chalabi and his faction. There were, however, problems. There was no Robert Pope, for one. Nor was there any NSC assassination plan. No one, NSC or otherwise, had asked Chalabi to pass a message to Iran. As for the letter, it was clearly forged. Chalabi left it on his desk knowing the Iranians couldn’t resist reading it when he was called out of the room.

So far, so good. But like a lot of traps, Chalabi’s had caught the wrong hare - not the Iranians he wanted to buy into it, but the national security adviser to the president of the United States. Tony Lake apparently didn’t understand how the Middle East works - how conspiracies, lies, and double-crosses like Chalabi’s Pope scam make the place go around.

But Lake did know Washington and politics. He had been had, and someone was going to pay. In the endless Beltway turf wars, that meant the CIA, and since I was the CIA’s man in northern Iraq, that meant me.

Never mind that Lake knew Ahmad Chalabi had been tried and convicted for defrauding his own bank. Never mind that we were in the middle of the most important action against Saddam Hussein since the end of the Gulf War. I had been summoned back to Washington, and now my career, reputation, and future were in the hands of a very angry, very powerful man. Worse, the agency I had served for nearly twenty years had let it happen without a fight. Worst of all, maybe, I wasn’t really surprised. There was a reason America’s human intelligence resources had dried up like the Sahara, and it began with a lack of guts right where I was sitting now - in Langley Virginia.

After I finished with the memo, I looked back up. I knew that if the president’s national security adviser didn’t understand the Middle East, neither would the two FBI agents. Then again, that wasn’t their job.

‘None of this is true,’ I said.

It was obvious to both FBI agents that they weren’t getting anywhere. They looked at each other and nodded. Mike turned back to me and asked, ‘Would you be willing to take a polygraph?’

‘No problem,’ I said. I’d gone too far to turn back now.

Mike accompanied me to the door.

‘Frankly, Justice had a hard time with this one,’ he said when we were in the hall, out of earshot of the others. ‘They weren’t comfortable with 12333 and instead used Title 18, sections 1952 and 1958.’

I looked at Mike for a translation.

‘Federal murder-for-hire statutes,’ he said, then turned and walked back to rejoin the others.

As I later found out, the maximum penalty for a conviction under 1952 and 1958 is life imprisonment or death.

When I was nine years old, my mother, not long after she separated from my father, picked me up from school one day and announced we were leaving the following week for Europe. Up until then I’d spent my entire uneventful life in California. I didn’t see any need for a change, but I wasn’t asked. My mother said wed be away for two months. It ended up being two years.

As soon as my grandfather opened a letter of credit on a Swiss bank, we were on a plane to Zurich. We bought a Fiat convertible and spent the summer and most of the fall driving around the continent, doing the grand museum tour. It wasn’t long before I could tell a Canaletto from a Guardi. I picked up some French and German, enough to get by on my own. I learned a little about politics, too. My mother, who had once taught political theory at San Diego State University, decided that impromptu lectures on Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, and Clausewitz more than made up for my absence from grade school. I learned about realpolitik firsthand when we were caught in Berlin in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. But I think my mother hoped most of all I would take an interest in the classics. We spent months traveling around Greece and Italy, visiting every ruin she could find. We spent one snowy Christmas in Rome, touring the catacombs. She even considered depositing me at a monastery school in Austria that taught ancient Greek and Latin.

Training for a future nine-to-five job in suburban America this was not. But I was learning to adapt quickly to other cultures, and the classics my mother insisted I learn would come in extraordinarily handy: Several decades later, I parlayed my interest in them to visit places where Americans were not particularly welcome, from Lebanon’s Biqa Valley to the rugged mountains of Tajikistan.

I also learned about money during our European sojourn: about having it and not having it. The Swiss account had a bottom line. Weeks in first-class hotels - the best restaurants, the ballet or opera at night - would be followed by other weeks when we were pressed to put a roof over our heads. One time when we tried to cross the border from Germany to France, French customs turned us away because our car insurance was expired. We didn’t have a hundred francs to buy temporary insurance. The French sent us back to the German side. The Germans wouldn’t allow our reentry for the same reason, but they kindly offered to let us spend the night in their jail while we waited for a shift change on the French side. We stayed up most of the night playing cards and drinking beer with the guards. The next morning the French didn’t even bother looking at our papers.

The first place we settled for any length of time was the Swiss ski resort of Klosters. Flush with a new infusion of Grandfather’s money, Mother rented a chalet right on the slopes. To make up for my lack of formal education, she hired a tutor to teach me German, but I didn’t like learning by rote and soon dropped the lessons. The ski slopes became my classroom.

The next summer, restless and bored with stuffy Switzerland, Mother got it into her head to take a trip to Moscow - a notion that conveniently ignored the cold war and the still smoldering aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. I’ll never forget our interview in Bern with a grim Soviet consul with pale, watery blue eyes. A chain-smoker, he put out his cigarettes between his fingers and almost threw us out of his office when my mother proposed driving all the way to Moscow, camping at night, and taking along our Siamese cat. Eventually, he decided we weren’t spies and gave us visas, but only on the condition that we leave the cat in Switzerland and stay in hotels.

My grandfather eventually lost patience and recalled us. Since he was paying the bills, we caught the next plane home. The first place we put down was Salt Lake City Utah, so we could ski Alta for a season. The following year, 1964, we moved to Aspen, Colorado. The town we drove into in my mother’s MGB convertible wasn’t the glam sandbox it is today. With a permanent population of about three hundred, Aspen was pretty much a ghost town between ski seasons. Aside from the main highway, only a few streets were paved. Three restaurants stayed open year-round: Pinocchio’s pizza, parlor, the Red Onion, and the soda fountain at Walgreen’s drugstore. The Aspen Times was the only newspaper, and it came out once a week. The sole TV channel went off the air at ten PM.

Our first winter there I joined the ski team, which in those days was one of the best in the United States. (Among my teammates was Andy Mill, later the husband of tennis great Chris Evert.) From September until April we trained without a break. In the evenings, after school, we ran slalom courses under lights, no matter how cold or icy it was. We sidestepped up, made a run, and started up again. I would come home after eight, dead tired. On the weekends we trained on downhill and giant slalom courses at the top of Aspen Mountain. A few summers we trained on the glaciers outside Red Lodge, Montana. No one cared that there wasn’t any time for studying. Ski racing was everything. It became the passion of my life.

My first ski coach was Crystal Herbert, a strapping Austrian girl who had recently set the women’s Alpine speed record. Following her down a slope at thirty or forty miles an hour, day after day, taught me about taking life to the edge. I remember preparing for a race at Aspen Highlands, on the fastest downhill run in North America. Halfway down there was a Z-turn that began with an abrupt ninety-degree left, a nearly vertical drop, and then an abrupt right. If you crashed, you would end up wrapped around a thick pine tree. The turn was nicknamed the ‘Moment of Truth.’

During an inspection of the course, Crystal gave us a little advice as we stood above the Moment of Truth. In her broken English, she said that if we had any hope of winning in life, we’d have to take risks - sometimes grave ones. And if we wanted to win the race the next day, wed have to let our skis run through the Moment of Truth, not slow down as we had all been doing in the practice runs. Risk it all and you might just win, she said. Hedge your bet and you never will. In the race I let my skis run. I didn’t win, but I placed higher than I ever had in a race, and I never forgot the lesson.

Skiing wasn’t all that was going on in Aspen. While I was learning to risk it all on the slopes, the 1960s were taking the place by storm. Hippies set up camp in the mountains around Aspen. Bishop Pike, a rogue Episcopal cleric who had replaced the cross above the altar in his San Francisco church with a fish, showed up in town and led a peaceful antiwar protest in front of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s house. The mayor, Bugsy Barnard, and his drinking buddies went out one night and chain-sawed every billboard from Aspen to Grand Junction - about 150 miles of them - to do their part for the environment.

Never one to miss a political movement, my mother ran for a Pitkin County commissioner’s seat, in the same election that Hunter Thompson, the godfather of gonzo journalism, ran for sheriff. Happily for the proponents of condo sprawl and a drug-free jailhouse, neither won.

In the middle of all this turmoil, I decided that I would ski-race for a living. My plan was simple: Quietly drop out of school and train all day. Before anyone noticed, I figured, I would be a champion. It worked fine until Aspen High School notified Mother that I had attended exactly six days of school that spring and was getting straight F’s. (Okay, there was a D in art.) Mother didn’t wait for me to get home to discuss it. It took her about five minutes to find me at Pinocchio’s. I was sitting in a back booth with my girlfriend, Sue, and a couple of other friends when she stormed into the restaurant.

‘All F’s, you son of a bitch,’ she yelled across a hushed Pinocchio’s. ‘I can’t goddamn believe it. You’re going to military school!’

I was in shock at the time, though I can now see that from my mother’s standpoint, military school was about the only option she had; but, always one to put a twist on an otherwise good plan, she pulled me out of Aspen High a month early and took me back to Europe for the summer. If I was headed to military school, she would need to get my political indoctrination right beforehand.

We landed in Paris right in the middle of the May 1968 student demonstrations, the worst civil disturbance in France since the 1871 Commune. Everyone was on strike, the schools were closed, and demonstrators shut down most of the city. Unwilling to take refuge in a hotel, like a sensible tourist might, Mother dragged me into the middle of the demonstrations. One night we were charged by a phalanx of teargas-firing, baton-wielding gendarmes and came within an inch of being arrested.

Looking for a quieter place, we bought a Land Rover and set off for Moscow. To my mother’s way of thinking, it was a perfectly rational refuge. The first stop was Prague, right in the middle of Prague Spring. We spent a week mingling with demonstrators there, too, and once again got out just in time. As we crossed the border into Poland, we were forced off the road by a Soviet armored column bearing down on the Czech capital and its rebellious government.

As promised, I did enroll in military school in the fall, at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. There I learned how to make a bed tight enough to bounce a quarter off the sheet, field-strip an M-l rifle, and, to my surprise, study. I even started reading books in my spare time. My grades gradually went up to a B+ average. When the academic dean called me into his office in the fall of my senior year to discuss college, I told him I was thinking about the University of Colorado. Culver was a long way from any snow-covered slopes, and I wasn’t ready to give up on my dreams yet. But the dean was a graduate of an Ivy League college, and he had other ideas for my future.

‘I see you’ve spent a lot of time in Europe. Did you ever consider a career as a foreign service officer - the State Department?’

I hadn’t, but I promised him I would, and when Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D. C. , accepted me, I wrote back to say I was coming. Skiing would have to wait.

I managed to make it through Georgetown, but not by much. I worked nights in a Georgetown bar, spent as much time as I could in New York City, where I had friends, and lit off for Aspen on every break, often returning to school weeks late. Sometimes merely goofing off wasn’t enough. One night I rode a motorcycle with a girl I’ll never forget through the basement of Healy Hall during a reunion of the class of ‘63. The blue blazers and khaki pants parted like the Red Sea. I rode the same motorcycle through the main reading room of the library during final-exam week. For an encore, I rappelled off the top of the Kennedy Center one evening while a performance was going on inside.

A fellow student who watched my pranks from a distance was George Tenet. I wouldn’t see him for almost twenty years, and that was at a meeting in the White House. By then he was in charge of the NSC’s intelligence programs - a big fish who would get even bigger when he was named head of the CIA in 1997. 1 hadn’t forgotten Tenet, but I was hoping his memory wasn’t as good as mine. Alas, it was. ‘This is the last place I ever thought I’d run into you,’ he said when he pulled me aside. I couldn’t help but agree.

My mother, meanwhile, continued to drift to the left. She moved from Aspen to Venice, California, where she opened up a used bookstore near the pier and turned muse to a couple of lefty writers and poets who would sit around her bookstore debating Marx late into the night. One of them, Ron Kovick, had a measure of success. Paralyzed from a wound in Vietnam, he wrote a memoir entitled Born on the Fourth of July. Active in antiwar protests, Kovick and his friends periodically took over Senator Alan Cranston’s office in Washington. Kovick invariably would call my mother, just to check in. We’d laugh about the FBI wiretappers puzzling over the eccentric old lady with the used bookstore in Venice.

After Georgetown, I went to Europe to ‘refresh’ my French, which is to say I went to ski, hoping I could pick up all the French I needed after the lifts stopped. Around Christmas, though, the money ran out, and I had to come home and find a job. I considered going back to Aspen to take up acrobatic skiing, which was just coming into its own, but instead I went to San Francisco to look for a job. After all that education, I figured I should at least give it a try I picked San Francisco because an old friend from Culver, Mike Kokesh, agreed to let me camp out on his couch until I could find my own place. One Saturday morning Mike started reading out loud from the employment section of the classified ads. Since he already had a job he liked, I suspected that he wanted his couch back. When the classifieds proved fruitless, Mike patiently counted off all the professions he could think of that paid a salary you could live on.

‘How about the federal government?’ he finally offered.

I’d taken the State Department’s foreign service exam in my junior year at Georgetown. I hadn’t done too badly, either, falling short by only a few points.

‘Take it again,’ he said.

It wouldn’t be given for another year.

‘Apply to the CIA,’ Mike said, laughing.

Mike never dreamed I’d take him seriously. This was San Francisco in 1976, one of those bastions of the counterculture where it was a toss-up whether the CIA or Richard Nixon was worse. But what I didn’t admit to Mike was that I was curious about the CIA. In my senior year at Georgetown, the CIA had been on the front pages of the newspapers daily. Frank Church in the Senate and Otis Pike in the House headed up committees of inquiry that seemed to unearth a new CIA scandal every other day or so. I didn’t follow the hearings closely, but I was left with the impression that behind the dirt there must be some deep, dark, impenetrable mystery - a forbidden knowledge. Joining the CIA would be sort of like signing up with the Knights Templar. I had never read a James Bond novel, never had a single cloak-and-dagger fantasy, wasn’t in the least the sort of type-A personality who wanted to go out and charm the world. But traveling with my mother had given me a romantic view of the world, and for all the taint on it, the CIA seemed for a moment like romance itself.

Without saying a word to Mike, I called the federal center in San Francisco on Monday and asked for the CIA’s telephone number. The operator gave me a number in Lawndale, California. The woman who answered the phone took down my name and address and promised to send me a personal history statement - an application - and an admission ticket for a written exam.