Baer was born in Los Angeles.[7] At the age of 9, his parents divorced and he moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he aspired to become a professional skier.[7] After a fairly poor academic performance during his first year at high school, his mother, a wealthy heiress, took him to Europe where they traveled throughout Europe including Paris during the 1968 riots, Germany, Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Russia.[8]
Baer wrote the book See No Evil documenting his experiences while working for the Agency. The C.I. Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle, by Christopher Lynch (Dog Ear Publishing), describes parts of the contentious CIA pre-publication review process for Baer's first book. In a blurb for See No Evil, Seymour Hersh said Baer "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." In the book, Baer offers an analysis of the Middle East through the lens of his experiences as a CIA operative.
In 2004, he told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the CIA deals with terrorism suspects, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt."[11][12]
In January 2002, Baer wrote about the events of the September 11 attacks in The Guardian: "[D]id bin Laden act alone, through his own al-Qaida network, in launching the attacks? About that I'm far more certain and emphatic: no."[14] He later stated, "For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with."[15]
In 2008, video interviewed 'live' by 'We Are Change.org' in Los Angeles about pre-9/11 intel, Baer exclaimed: "I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego (on September 10th) and said, 'Cash me out, it's going down tomorrow'...His brother worked at the White House!"[16][17]
In June 2009, Baer commented on the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President and the protests that accompanied it. "For too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class—an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles; but do they represent the real Iran?"[1] Following reports of an attempt by Iranian agents to assassinate the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States, Baer told Die Zeit that he doubted that Iran was behind the attempt since there seemed no obvious motive and Iran had been more careful in past collaboration with terrorists.[18]
Baer has long been a supporter of the theory that the PFLP-GC brought down Pan Am Flight 103. Later he began to promote the theory that Iran was behind the bombing. On August 23, 2009, Baer claimed that the CIA had known from the start that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 had been orchestrated by Iran, and that a secret dossier proving this was to be presented as evidence in the final appeal by convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. According to Baer, this suggests that Megrahi's withdrawal of the appeal in return for a release on compassionate grounds was encouraged to prevent this information from being presented in court.[19]
Personal life
Baer has been married twice. He has two daughters and a son from his first marriage,[7] to a State Department secretary.[20] His second marriage was to fellow CIA operative Dayna Williamson.[21]
Robert Baer has never written or promoted a book with the title "The Secret of the White House", but a fabricated interview with him about promoting this book in Canada has been circulating on the web since 2012. In this fabricated interview the USA was accused of having caused the collapse of Yugoslavia.[24][25][26][27][28]
Media
Books
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Crown Publishing Group, January 2002, ISBN0-609-60987-4.
^"A fictional interview with a former CIA agent has been circulating in the Balkans for a decade". Raskrinkavanje.ba (BiH). seecheck.org. March 24, 2023. Retrieved March 31, 2023. Cupurdija claimed that he interviewed Baer in Canada, where he was promoting the book "The secret of the White House". Baer never wrote or promoted such a book, nor was he in Canada at the time the interview was published. On the other hand, Baer did publish several books about his experiences working for this agency, in which he never claimed anything close to what the obscure author of the fake interview wrote. Finally, Robert Baer confirmed for Raskrinkavanje that he never gave the said interview.
^Napisao Miloš Ćupurdija, četvrtak (September 6, 2012). "Intervju sa Robertom Baerom - Kraj Jugoslavije". Moje Novine (in Croatian). Archived from the original on September 9, 2012. (origin of the fabricated Interview on a platform for aspiring young journalist)
