IF, AS WE may now have to concede, terrorism is not a crime to be solved and deterred but a war to be fought, it is the worst sort of war, the type where once the fog has cleared you still cannot make out the battlefield. As someone who prefers his terrorism confined to Sunday nights and episodes of
24, I had been clinging to the hope that London’s recent Thursdays were an aberration. My optimism is severely dimmed by meeting Robert Baer, a former CIA spy who has returned to his old beat in the Middle East to make a grimly fascinating two-part history of suicide bombing for Channel 4. What he delivers is not good news. It provides, however, an unusually clear view of the landscape.
Baer is a good-looking, untwitchy 53-year-old American, dressed this morning in sincere green shirt and blue denims. He has an easy style, a quick, if mordant, sense of humour and vanity enough to take pleasure in knowing that he is about to be portrayed in a movie by George Clooney. Our conversation in the lobby of a London hotel to which he has just flown after a trip to Syria consists of my asking to hear something hopeful about the current wave of terrorism and his refusing to oblige. He does not disown the words he uses at the end of this Thursday’s documentary, that suicide bombing, “like a pathological virus”, has become unstoppable. He does add, perhaps for my sake, the proviso “until you take the causes away”, but by this stage even I can see they are not going to be.
Thursday’s programme begins in a mosque in Iran where an imam is working the crowds. “The White House will be destroyed,” he promises. “Death to America,” the crowd agrees. Baer then visits the family of Hussein Fahmideh. One of the world’s youngest suicide bombers, at the age of 13 he blew himself and an Iraqi tank up during the Iran-Iraq War. Baer, who has wisely not told the family he is a former spook, is respectful when they show him the shrine they have built for him, but draws attention to their insistence that their boy did not commit suicide. It was an act not of despair, but duty.
“Somewhere along the line,” Baer tells me, “I’ve subtracted the morality out of terrorism. The only thing I really care about is to put myself, as much as I can as a Westerner and an American, in the position of the Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas, and even the four British bombers.”
He is convinced of one thing: that they all truly believe that they are headed for paradise. “We kept on asking the families the dream question: ‘Where do you see your son now?’ And none of them see them other than in Heaven. By the way, 72 virgins never came up. It’s a myth.
“The other one thing is, ‘they hate us’, which is just total bullshit.”
Is it? “Yes,” he says, “it is.”
In a school run by Hezbollah, he asked a class dominated by the daughters of “martyrs” if they watched US television. “Everybody raised their hand. And what did they watch? Oprah. I said, ‘How can you watch this crap?’ And they said, ‘No, she’s great. We love Oprah.’ So, it’s nothing to do with a hate for the West, or a cultural divide. It may have become that with bin Laden and the Sunnis, but for the Shia, it wasn’t.”
He points to Beirut, a surprisingly Western city. “It’s much more decadent than London. You can go into places in Lebanon where they still serve drugs across the bar. You’ve got all-night dancing, all-night partying. You’ve got very Western art. And it doesn’t seem to bother Hezbollah. So, it wasn’t our values. It wasn’t Western values. It’s Western presence. They want us to get out.”
Our “invasion” began, he explains, with the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. Ironic though it sounds now, Saddam was considered an agent of the US and fighting on behalf of post-revolutionary Iran easily segued into a fight for true Islam. “Martyrdom operations”, as suicide bombings were called, emerged as a tactical necessity for fighting a superior enemy. In 1982 a new front opened up when Israel, which had invaded Lebanon in 1978, bombed West Beirut, an event that Osama bin Laden has said in interviews radicalised him personally. Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorists, backed by Iran, imported the suicide bomber cult. In November that year, an attack on a military HQ that killed 74 Israelis brought the world the phenomenon of the suicide car bomber. In 2000 the Israelis withdrew. The suicide bombers had won a famous victory and the cult spread to Israeli cities and the West.
“As long as the violence continues in the Middle East, it will spill over into Europe. You and I could go to Paris and I’d know exactly where I could get a rocket-propelled grenade. I know who’s selling them, in what suburbs. We could take a sailboat across here into Britain, avoid Customs . . .”
There are other scenarios that Baer can imagine: a terrorist with a machinegun smuggled out of former Yugoslavia shooting dead 20 people in Oxford Street; a bomber using radioactive material stolen from a hospital setting off a dirty bomb in the City of London. The only thing he cannot foresee easily is nuclear attack on London. “You’d need a Hollywood movie plot for it to happen. But it is the low-level technology and the determination of people who have shown they’re ready to die that we should worry about.”
So, I say, if we want to stop being attacked, what do our governments have to do? “The first thing is get out of Iraq. To pretend this has nothing to do with Iraq is idiocy. I mean, I don’t know if it’s in the back of these people’s minds or if they think about it all day long, but what they see is that we attack Muslims, we provoke the killing of Muslims, Shia or Sunni, we provoke what they call ‘fitna ’, which is chaos among the Muslims. They see it as neo-colonialism, hate for Muslims. And the same thing with the Palestinians. They do not believe that Israel is an accident, that it was founded from a feeling of guilt after the Second World War. They think it’s an attack from the West, an outpost of Western colonialism.”
There is, however, a three-letter reason why the US will not impose a peace plan on Israel and leave the region. Baer, the author of Sleeping With The Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, well knows what it is. “I don’t think any American politician, however at fault we are in Iraq or anywhere else, can say, ‘All right, let the crazies have the oil fields’, because oil at $200 a barrel would put us into a depression.”
So because the American economy is at stake, we can’t get out even to save our skins? “That, I believe, is your classic paradox.”
Until making the programme, Baer had not visited Iran since 1979, near the beginning of his 21-year career as a CIA field officer that would post him to Syria, Sudan, Beirut and Tajikistan. March 1995 found him in northern Iraq, where rebels were preparing an uprising against Saddam Hussein. To Baer’s amazement, at the last moment the Clinton regime decided to disown it. When he returned to the CIA’s HQ in Langley, Virginia, he was told he was to be investigated by the FBI for leading a rogue US National Security Council team in a mission to assassinate Saddam. The allegation was an invention of the disgruntled Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who had led the failed coup.
I own up to Baer that before the invasion I had interviewed Chalabi, who looked at the time like a possible future Iraqi president, and that I had rather liked him. “Oh, I loved the guy too. He’s brilliant. He’s like Dracula. You keep driving in the stake and he keeps on coming back. He is brilliant.
“He is articulate. He is one of the most beautiful cons in the world.”
But if Saddam had been toppled in 1995, would that have helped to avoid the current mess in Iraq? “Oh, yeah. The whole idea was to get rid of Hussein in ’95 and replace him with a military officer whom you could talk to and leave the Sunni in control. It would not be a democracy.
“Human rights would still be violated, but it would be a gradual return to the comity of nations or whatever you want to call it. But what they have done now is to remove the 20 per cent of the people who controlled the country, removed the police, and put corrupt exiles in power who only care about getting as much money as they can, so they can drive around Kensington in Ferraris.”
Baer flew through the polygraph tests and was cleared by the investigation. In 1997 he received the CIA Intelligence Medal but by now his disillusion was complete and he resigned. “This cowboy is hanging up his spurs,” was how he phrased it. He joined CBS as a consultant, but now appears as a pundit for CNN and Fox News.
Shortly after 9/11 he published See No Evil, an autobiography-cum-exposé in which he accused the CIA of turning its back on spying. By the mid-Nineties, he claimed, it lacked not only Arabic speakers but sources in Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It no longer even “collec-ted” on Afghanistan, where, of course, bin Laden was plotting. Telling the politicians what they wanted to hear, political correctness and internal politics had become more important than collecting secrets. As a result, on September 11, 2001, the defence of the nation was left to the “courageous passengers of United Airlines Flight 93”. Baer says he no longer feels anger towards suicide bombers. The same cannot be said for his feelings about the American security services.
But, I ask, how good have ours been? If teenagers in internet cafés can sign up for suicide-bombing missions, why haven’t our spooks infiltrated these cells? “Bureaucratic lethargy. At the very least, MI5, or Special Branch in Leeds, should be coming out and saying, ‘Listen, the atmosphere is bad, people are talking about hate and violence.’ I mean, that’s a start. Not that you could have stopped it.”
So he wasn’t surprised that the July 7 terrorists turned out to be suicide bombers? “I could see it coming. It’s a virus. It went to New York. Now it’s in London.”
Baer finished five weeks’ filming in Tehran six weeks before the London bombing. “The timing was good, wasn’t it?” he says.
His cynicism has undoubtedly been sharpened by his treatment at the hands not only of his CIA masters, but by politicians. He abhors the neo-cons who now shape American foreign policy (he says on leaving the CIA he had any number of offers to take a job in a “crazy right-wing institute”), but he is also deeply critical of Bill Clinton’s “moral pliability”. “Clinton brought the whole level of politics to a new low, and then Bush come along and institutionalised the corruption.”
Yet his cynicism is also much what you might expect anyway from someone after two decades in the CIA. In certain lights, Baer looks like an archetypical John le Carré or Graham Greene hero, a defeated idealist. He says he joined the CIA out of intellectual curiosity rather than because he fancied himself as James Bond. His mother, separated from his father, was a Sixties hippy who despised money. (A trust fund helped, he concedes.) “So money was never the issue for her or me.”
In the CIA he could to assign himself hundreds of thousands of dollars, but financial dishonesty never tempted him. Other kinds of deceit, perhaps, came more easily. His marriage to a State Department worker, with whom he had three children (he dedicated See No Evil to them), did not survive.
“As the marriage disintegrated, it was very easy for me to get on an aeroplane and go to Beirut or Iraq or some place like that. It’s a great excuse if things are not working at home. In the CIA, you start in the early in the morning, usually doing your cover job, and then you are up late until one or two. You are out every single night. The rate of alcoholism is high, divorce is high, and the ability to have an affair is very easy.”
And he took advantage of that? “Yeah. Well, the marriage started disintegrating right away. It was a bad marriage.”
He has recently remarried and settled in Colorado. His first wife may take some comfort in knowing that in Syriana, the movie opening in November, she is played by Greta Scacchi. Opposite her, Clooney plays Baer as paunchy and flawed, an exaggeration that Baer seems at ease with. He is, after all, still George Clooney. He is just as chuffed to have won a cameo as the FBI man who interrogates Clooney. He proudly shows me his Screen Actors Guild card nestling in his wallet next to his Iranian press pass.
So does he regret spending the best years of his life in the CIA? “Do you accept facetious answers? It got me into the entertainment business, the last refuge of cynics.”
His next book, he says, will also be an entertainment, a novel about 9/11 that should be read as fantasy. Baer, it seems, is retreating into 24 territory, and who can blame him? T.S. Eliot wrote that humankind cannot bear very much reality. Baer has borne his fair share.
The two-part series Cult of the Suicide Bomber is on Channel 4 on August 4 and August 9 at 9pm
