The World’s ‘Best’ Car Bombers?

Q&A with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer on terror, the Iran crisis, and Hezbollah blasts

When reports from US and Canadian intelligence sources surfaced in late June claiming that Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and paramilitary movement which the Canadian government calls a terrorist organization, was scouting Jewish and Israeli locations in Ontario for possible attack, Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, offered his usual blunt take. “They cannot have an operation fail,” said Baer, “and I don’t think they will. They’re the A-team of terrorism,” he told ABC News.

The Lebanese Shia—Hezbollah, in other words—may even be the best car bombers in the world, Baer recently told me. No small praise, it would seem, since he’s also one of those rare terrorism experts with the know-how to build a car bomb himself.

Before retiring from the CIA in 1997, Baer spent what he calls “the best parts of my life in the worst parts of the world.” Think Tajikistan and northern Iraq. He also worked in Syria and Lebanon—Hezbollah’s home turf. In 2002, Baer published a memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, partly about his hunt for the perpetrators of a massive car bomb that destroyed the US embassy in Beirut in 1983, killing over sixty people. It was also about the mistakes that led to 9/11. Hollywood called and Baer became the model for George Clooney’s skilled, disillusioned field operative in Syriana, a geopolitical thriller about power and corruption in Washington and oil and terrorism in the Middle East, which also drew on Baer’s follow-up effort, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

Excerpt: Ayers discussing the 70's

http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html

For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.” Ayers makes clear that his political views haven’t changed much since those glory days. He cites a letter he recently wrote: “I’ve been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your ‘youthful idealism’ is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out.”

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