See No Evil

See No Evil. Robert Baer. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002.

The attack toward the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 shocked the world. Many people died, and the scar still remains in people's hearts. Was this whole thing predictable? No, but it could have been avoided says Robert Baer in his book, See No Evil. This book is a memoir of a man who joined the CIA to satisfy his curiosity he had toward what was happening in the world, and became to realize the problems the CIA faced and the never told inside story he encountered.

Baer used to work for the CIA for 20 years. He started off at India, and went around countries that most Americans would not have heard or never will step foot on. He worked as a case officer in the Directorate of Operation, where the job was to recruit agents to gather information from the assigned country and pass it to the Directorate of Intelligence. At the beginning he made many mistakes, and sometimes he almost died. As time went by, however, he became better and better at his job, the number of mistakes he made decreased and the information he collected became bigger and more important. On April 18, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, a terrorist group attacked the American embassy. A truck smashed in to the embassy, detonating a bomb that killed 63 people, including 6 CIA officers. Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in one attack. Baer received this news while studying Arabic in Tunis. He thought it was a radical Palestinian group behind it and they would be caught in a week or so. He was wrong. The bombers did really good, that the CIA could not locate the ringleader. Baer has tried to catch them throughout his career as a CIA officer, although this case has never been officially solve...

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...aw the reader's attention, and his non-stop action accounts make it hard to put the book down. His dramatic prose conveys a fiction story. He describes himself as a hero fighting the evil side of his own country. He criticizes the CIA and America a lot for what they have been doing, and what they haven't done.

At the beginning and the end of this book, Baer talks about the attack on September 11. He says it could have been avoided if the CIA kept its style by getting good agents and tried harder to gather information. His objective is for the CIA to learn from this incident and he says, "They should start listening to people again, no matter how unpleasant the massage is. The CIA doesn't have a choice but to once again to go out and start talking to people.E He believes that the only way to defeat the enemy is to know what it is going to do, and to be ready for it.