Robert Baer Books In Order

Novels

  1. Blow the House Down (2006)

Non fiction

  1. See No Evil (2002)
  2. Sleeping with the Devil (2003)
  3. Speak No Evil (2003)
  4. The Devil We Know (2008)
  5. The Company We Keep (2010)
  6. The Perfect Kill (2013)
  7. The Fourth Man (2022)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Robert Baer Books Overview

Blow the House Down

Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.

Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect an Iranian math genius turned terrorist the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out of favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.

Eluding a global surveillance net, Max in the summer of 2001 begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he d sought for a decades old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.

Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.

Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook

From the Hardcover edition.

See No Evil

Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on the ground field officer in the Middle East. Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker Robert Baer was one of the most talented Middle East case officers of the past twenty years. Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Atlantic MonthlyIn See No Evil, one of the CIA’s top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA s efforts to root out the world s deadliest terrorists. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the wake of those attacks, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. Robert Baer was not surprised. A twenty one year veteran of the CIA s Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post cold war world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere.A throwback to the days when CIA operatives got results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world s most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence, he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency s suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground. See No Evil is not only a candid memoir of the education and disillusionment of an intelligence operative but also an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism. Baer reveals some of the disturbing details he uncovered in his work, including: In 1996, Osama bin Laden established a strategic alliance with Iran to coordinate terrorist attacks against the United States. In 1995, the National Security Council intentionally aborted a military coup d etat against Saddam Hussein, forgoing the last opportunity to get rid of him. In 1991, the CIA intentionally shut down its operations in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and ignored fundamentalists operating there. When Baer left the agency in 1997 he received the Career Intelligence Medal, with a citation that says, He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country. See No Evil is Baer s frank as*sessment of an agency that forgot that service to country must transcend politics and is a forceful plea for the CIA to return to its original mission the preservation of our national sovereignty and the American way of life. From The PrefaceThis book is a memoir of one foot soldier s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don t need to do business with. This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too. The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see. From the Hardcover edition.

Sleeping with the Devil

Saudi Arabia is more and more an irrational state a place that spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that can t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we want the global economy to balance on? In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil, former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight global terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil, Baer turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our government s cynical relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and America s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of terrorism. For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a harmony of interests. America counted on the Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious market for the kingdom s vast oil reserves. With money and oil flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al Sa ud family. But the rot at the core of our friendship with the Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent that fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi citizens. In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa ud s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly portrays our decades old relationship with the increasingly dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa ud family, the fierce anti Western sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups an end game just waiting to play out. Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which the Al Sa ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame. So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state to bank our oil under its sand and so long as we continue to grab at the Al Sa ud s money we are laying the groundwork for a potential global economic catastrophe. From the Hardcover edition.

The Devil We Know

Over the past thirty years, while the United States has turned either a blind or dismissive eye, Iran has emerged as a nation every bit as capable of altering America’s destiny as traditional superpowers Russia and China. Indeed, one of this book s central arguments is that, in some ways, Iran s grip on America s future is even tighter.

As ex CIA operative Robert Baer masterfully shows, Iran has maneuvered itself into the elite superpower ranks by exploiting Americans false perceptions of what Iran is by letting us believe it is a country run by scowling religious fanatics, too preoccupied with theocratic jostling and terrorist agendas to strengthen its political and economic foundations.

The reality is much more frightening and yet contained in the potential catastrophe is an implicit political response that, if we re bold enough to adopt it, could avert disaster.

Baer s on the ground sleuthing and interviews with key Middle East players everyone from an Iranian ayatollah to the king of Bahrain to the head of Israel s internal security paint a picture of the centuries old Shia nation that is starkly the opposite of the one normally drawn. For example, Iran s hate spouting President Ahmadinejad is by no means the true spokesman for Iranian foreign policy, nor is Iran making it the highest priority to become a nuclear player.

Even so, Baer has discovered that Iran is currently engaged in a soft takeover of the Middle East, that the proxy method of war making and co option it perfected with Hezbollah in Lebanon is being exported throughout the region, that Iran now controls a significant portion of Iraq, that it is extending its influence over Jordan and Egypt, that the Arab Emirates and other Gulf States are being pulled into its sphere, and that it will shortly have a firm hold on the world s oil spigot.

By mixing anecdotes with information gleaned from clandestine sources, Baer superbly demonstrates that Iran, far from being a wild eyed rogue state, is a rational actor one skilled in the game of nations and so effective at thwarting perceived Western colonialism that even rival Sunnis relish fighting under its banner.

For U.S. policy makers, the choices have narrowed: either cede the world s most important energy corridors to a nation that can match us militarily with its asymmetric capabilities which include the use of suicide bombers or deal with The Devil We Know. We might just find that in allying with Iran, we ll have increased not just our own security but that of all Middle East nations. The alternative to continue goading Iran into establishing hegemony over the Muslim world is too chilling to contemplate.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Company We Keep

Robert Baer was known inside the CIA as perhaps the best operative working the Middle East. Over several decades he served everywhere from Iraq to New Delhi and racked up such an impressive list of accomplishments that he was eventually awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. But if his career was everything a spy might aspire to, his personal life was a brutal illustration of everything a spy is asked to sacrifice. Bob had few enduring non work friendships, only contacts and acquaintances. His prolonged absences destroyed his marriage, and he felt intense guilt at spending so little time with his children. Sworn to secrecy and constantly driven by ulterior motives, he was a man apart wherever he went. Dayna Williamson thought of herself as just an ordinary California girl admittedly one born into a comfortable lifestyle. But she was always looking to get closer to the edge. When she joined the CIA, she was initially tasked with Agency background checks, but the attractive Berkeley graduate quickly distinguished herself as someone who could thrive in the field, and she was eventually assigned to Protective Operations training where she learned to handle weapons and explosives and conduct high speed escape and evasion. Tapped to serve in some of the world’s most dangerous places, she discovered an inner strength and resourcefulness she’d never known but she also came to see that the spy life exacts a heavy toll. Her marriage crumbled, her parents grew distant, and she lost touch with friends who’d once meant everything to her. When Bob and Dayna met on a mission in Sarajevo, it wasn’t love at first sight. They were both too jaded for that. But there was something there, a spark. And as the danger escalated and their affection for each other grew, they realized it was time to leave the Company, to somehow rediscover the people they d once been. As worldly as both were, the couple didn t realize at first that turning in their Agency I.D. cards would not be enough to put their covert past behind. The fact was, their clandestine relationships remained. Living as civilians in conflict ridden Beirut, they fielded assassination proposals, met with Arab sheiks, wily oil tycoons, terrorists, and assorted outlaws and came perilously close to dying. But even then they couldn t know that their most formidable challenge lay ahead. Simultaneously a trip deep down the intelligence rabbit hole one that shows how the game actually works, including the compromises it asks of those who play by its rules and a portrait of two people trying to regain a normal life, The Company We Keep is a masterly depiction of the real world of shadows.

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