See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism by Robert Baer

Author:Robert Baer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-26T01:44:41+00:00

BUT ALL THE BLAME couldn’t be put on the Europeans. The fact was, the CIA was in the process of closing up shop overseas. It was clear to me that we were disposing of agents faster than we were recruiting them. Bonn didn’t have a single Middle Eastern agent to run down leads— neither an Arab nor an Iranian. For that matter, it didn’t have a single Muslim agent in all of Germany’s enormous Islamic community, a failing that would become painfully obvious in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks when trail after trail began to trace back across the ocean to Hamburg and elsewhere. In the case of Pan Am 103, Bonn didn’t have a single source at the Frankfurt airport to say whether anything suspicious had occurred before 103’s feeder flight departed. The CIA couldn’t even obtain airline manifests on its own: It had to rely on the Germans. This, mind you, was at the absolute crossroads of European air traffic.

Almost as bad as the absence of new agents was the superannuation of old ones. The agents already on our books had lost their access, and no one seemed to care. It was like a permanent work slowdown sanctioned by Washington. And if Washington didn’t care, why should the case officers care? Trying to recruit an agent was likely to get you evicted from your cushy post where the government paid the rent and utilities, and sent back to Washington, where no one could afford the skyrocketing property prices on a CIA salary. And what was the thinking in D.C. ? I would have to wait to be reassigned there to find out, but the anecdotal evidence was not cheering.

In early 1989 I took over an agent from a young woman I’ll call Becky. Deciding she wasn’t suited for the spy business, Becky had resigned and was heading back to San Francisco, where she had been hired. The turnover meeting was held in a motel outside Paris, in one of those hideous bastard Bauhaus concrete-and-glass suburbs. The motel room carpet smelled of puke and cheap wine. Becky ordered a pot of coffee and tea from room service, and we waited for “Jacques” to make an appearance.

An arms dealer by trade, Jacques had been an outstanding agent,but his production had fallen off sharply in recent months. As he pushed his way into the hotel room, I could see that he had once been athletic, but he’d let his body go to seed. His belly hung out of his shirt, which was missing a couple of buttons. Jacques mumbled something about taking a girl to the hospital for a postabortion checkup. Becky ignored him.

Jacques looked at the coffee and then at Becky” I need a goddamn drink. Do you think there’s a bottle of cognac to be found in this filthy bordello?”

After Jacques got his cognac, we settled down and began sorting through a packet of documents he had brought with him. It was good stuff.

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