An expert in terror

Maybe things just happen to Robert Baer. I’d been due to do a quick interview with him at 1pm at a hotel in central London. Four hours later, we are standing in Dalgarno Gardens, pressed up against the police “inner cordon” (red tape, not blue), where Baer has been roped in by US network Fox News to broadcast on the arrest of one of the men suspected of involvement in the abortive bomb attacks on July 21.

“Are you a terror expert?” the Fox man asks Baer when he arrives. “No, but I’ve been described that way,” says the soft-voiced Coloradan insouciantly. Insouciance is Baer’s trademark: when the Fox editor calls him up from the US afterwards to say how professional the broadcast was, he looks pained and says it must be time to quit.

Baer is in the UK to record the final sections of a two-part documentary on suicide bombers that starts on Channel 4 on Thursday. The timing – they have been shooting since January – shows terrifying prescience. The series traces the history of suicide bombings from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when a 13-year-old Iranian “martyr” strapped explosives to himself and threw himself under an Iraqi tank, to the carnage of July 7, when four British-made suicide bombers eviscerated their travelling companions.

The story is told logically and clearly, and Baer, who speaks both Arabic and Farsi, has recorded some remarkable interviews – with the family of that first suicide bomber, with the Syrian men, now growing old and sipping coffee in cafés, who sent stunningly beautiful teenage female suicide bombers to their deaths, and with the head of the Iranian army. Throughout Baer is wearing the same battered white jacket he has on today in Dalgarno Gardens. Insouciance.

Baer, who is 53, was in the CIA for 20 years from 1976, running agents in the Middle East. In 1995, he tried to orchestrate the overthrow of Saddam. He left the agency two years later, complaining that it had become sclerotic and out of touch. His devastating critique of his former employer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, appeared in 2002 and was leapt on by those seeking to explain why the September 11 attacks had evaded the radar of US intelligence. A film of the book called Syriana, in which George Clooney plays the baggy-jacketed Baer, will be released in the autumn. Baer, his stock rising fast, can afford to be insouciant.

Baer the man – as opposed to what he really wants to be, which is a writer – is not easy to read. In the first place, is he a commentator on the Middle East or an entertainer? He plumps for entertainer and likes to do himself down. “I work at the margins,” he says of his TV appearances. “Fox don’t ask me the hard questions like ‘What do we do in Iraq?’ TV is essential for selling books.”

I do ask him the hard question – what should we do in Iraq? He thinks the situation is hopeless. “If it goes very badly in Iraq and we leave, the Arabs and the Iranians will be pulled into the war one way or another, either through surrogates or directly. If it stays chaotic, the chaos will migrate to the other side of the Gulf. The potential for chaos in the Gulf is very high.” “So what is the answer?” I demand. “I don’t know. I’ve moved to Colorado and have a wood-burning stove.” When I ask him whether his critique of US policy in the Middle East will affect anything, his answer is stark: “I have no illusions I can make a contribution.”

That may not, however, be the entire story. His book on the CIA was written out of genuine frustration as well as an urgent need to make a living. And the analysis of what turns young men into suicide bombers is vivid and heartfelt: “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it’s an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.” HAR – Humiliation, Anger, Reaction – might be a useful acronym for the governments in Washington and London to stick on their reinforced office walls.

He believes allied intervention in Iraq was a disaster and has triggered the bombing campaign in London. “I was in Baghdad at the end of the [second Gulf] war. You could see the US military had destroyed every piece of armour the Iraqis owned. Not only armour but museums, too, cultural looting, the destruction of all infrastructure. It was a war against the Iraqi state, against an Arab country. That creates the humiliation and anger which fuel suicide bombing attacks. If you keep it up, you’re going to get hit. You can’t go randomly kill Muslims and not expect a reaction here.”

Baer has been fascinated and appalled by suicide bombers since the devastating attack in 1983 on the US embassy in Beirut, where he was stationed. “I knew a lot of the people killed – the chief of station, his deputy. I spent a lot of time at the station, I’d sat in those offices, looked over the city. Beirut was a fascinating place and there was so much hope with the May 17 agreement which was shattered by one person.”

His Channel 4 series traces the way suicide bombers mutated from resistance fighters attacking military targets to terrorists slaughtering civilians. He dates the change precisely – to the attack on a bus full of schoolchildren in Israel in 1994. “It was originally a state policy authorised by Ayatollah Khomeini and others, and it was very disciplined. Now it’s become chaotic and 1994 was the key date. That was when it moved from a disciplined state policy of martyrdom into chaos, which has ended up in London.”

In 2003 Baer followed up his attack on the CIA with a book called Sleeping with the Devil, a condemnation of the House of Saud and of America’s cosy relationship with the oil fiefdom of Saudi Arabia. He sees the latter as the source of much of the poison seeping across the Middle East, and believes Saudi money and personnel underpin terrorism in the region. For legal reasons – CIA censorship means Baer cannot name his sources – the book was never published in the UK.

If Baer were solely an entertainer, it seems improbable that he would have written a book like Sleeping with the Devil, or still be banging on about unanswered questions surrounding the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in 1983. There is a touch of the conspiracy theorist in him – he quickly loses me when he starts offering complex explanations for September 11 and tracing links between the attackers and Saudi backers. He has enough material to keep website conspiracy theorists in business for decades.

His next book will be a novel, Blow the House Down, based on the September 11 attacks. He tells me about it in a cab on the way back from Dalgarno Gardens. It sounds as complicated as the Twin Towers conspiracy itself – and, if his explanation of the way his reliable narrator becomes unhinged and wholly unreliable in the course of the book is anything to go by, a cut above your average espionage thriller.

It’s his first attempt to write fiction but probably comes naturally to someone who spent 20 years under cover. “I was living fiction as a CIA agent,” he says. “You got very good at lying. You’d get on an airplane and make up a cover. To shut up conversations, I used to tell people that I did actuary tables on cancer victims for a large insurance company. End of conversation.”

He is amusing about his dog days at the CIA in the mid-90s. “There were a lot of people who had never served overseas running the place. We had a guy running surveillance who had been in a wheelchair his whole life. You cannot understand surveillance on the street if you can’t get up and get around. The surveillance teams didn’t even speak the language. We had some ex-military people who didn’t speak a word of German but went to Berlin to do surveillance. They were looking for a cheap hotel – probably to make something extra on expenses – and saw this advert on the internet for Hund Hotel. They showed up in the taxi to try to check in and of course it was a kennel. These were the guys doing surveillance in Berlin?!”

Mediocrity is something he can’t bear. He attacks CIA boss George Tenet was not coming clean and saying “we don’t know” about Iraqi WMD; he dislikes publishers that try to get the book out rather than get it right; he even has a go at me for not phoning in eyewitness accounts from residents evacuated from Dalgarno Gardens. “There’ll be a Guardian news man here,” I assure him. “I’m doing a feature.” “You’re as bad as the CIA,” he says, reasonably insouciantly.

He insists that being portrayed in a film will not change his life, beyond perhaps selling more books. “My wife keeps on reminding me, ‘It’s not about you, it’s not all about you.’ I think it’s sad when people are associated with a movie and then try to live off the slight notoriety. You go into the wake of George Clooney.” A nice touch is that he has a small role in the film – as an interrogator shouting at the Clooney character, “Mr Baer, why are you lying to me?” “I hope they cut it,” he says, with what seems excessive insouciance.

The movie, he adds, is not quite true to life – too full of action and derring-do. Wasn’t there much derring-do during his stints in Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Sudan and Tajikistan? “No, it was fairly boring,” he says. “Every time the shelling started I usually went to bed. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just put your ear-plugs in and go to sleep.”

Baer likes to present himself as a hick from the Colorado mountains – a skiing fanatic who stumbled into espionage, the “Forrest Gump of the CIA”, as he puts it. Accidental spy, accidental author, now accidental inspiration for a movie that is already being tipped as a possible Oscar winner – the makers have pushed the release date back to November 23 with the Academy in mind. He may not be quite as insouciant as he seems. Do things happen to him, or does he make them happen? As ever, the truth is elusive.

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