In Baer's view, we should take it
with a grain of salt. He further hints that, in
the light of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's current lack
of gravitas and obvious reliability as a witness,
we should perhaps look to the contributions of
other agents and state actors in our evolving
understanding of the dynamics of al Qaeda. And
though he now seeks to minimize the role of KSM in
the Pearl killing - Baer considers him, as he has
now learned through the proverbial grapevine, as
more of a standby eyewitness than as an actual
hands-on participant - Baer neglects to inform his
readers of his own personal role in Daniel Pearl's
investigation, a role that could arguably be said
to have set Pearl directly on the course toward
his tragic fate.
Nevertheless, since Baer did
insinuate himself personally into the Pearl
legend, as of his September 30, 2002 revelation to
UPI, one would expect that he would - at least
someday - have to give a more detailed description
of the nature of his "joint investigation" of the
9/11 mastermind with Daniel Pearl - that is,
unless it can be shown that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
is not "all that" in the end. As Baer seems to be
suggesting in his recent Time magazine piece,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is damaged goods, a
thoroughly brain-addled and water-boarded "clown"
from whom little of any reliable intelligence
value may be wrung.
When Baer had first offered up
the account of his personal role in Daniel Pearl's
investigation, many of the discrepancies
surrounding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had yet to
fully disseminate among some of the more
discerning members of the public. Yet with the
9/11 mastermind officially in custody, Baer now
strongly hints that perhaps we should direct our
lingering questions elsewhere, to the roles of
other actors, and different horizons.
And thus does Baer continue to
postpone his own accounting with the historical
record, which is provided below
Former CIA agent Robert Baer
claimed that he and Daniel Pearl were working
together on a joint project when Pearl
disappeared. Has Baer been caught in a lie?
Who, exactly, is Robert Baer? In
the months after 9/11, Baer first emerged on the
public radar scope as a "former" CIA official
involved in counter-terrorism. After publishing
his widely acclaimed book, See No Evil, Baer
established himself as the mainstream media's
"go-to" guy when making the case for pre-9/11
complacency and opportunistic blindness. But his
contributions to our understanding of 9/11 didn't
end there. In addition to focusing attention on
Saudi Arabia and the dominating influence of the
neo-conservatives on foreign policy, Baer has
personally insinuated himself into the Daniel
Pearl story. On September 30, 2002, Richard Sale
of UPI reported:
"Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who
allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings
and attacks on New York and Washington when he was
kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to
two Central Intelligence Agency officials...
...'I was working with Pearl,'
said [Bob] Baer, who had written a book about his
time as a CIA official and has acted as a
consultant and source for numerous media outlets.
'We had a joint project. [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed
was the story he was working on, not Richard Reid
[a.k.a. the shoe bomber].' "
Was Baer being truthful, or
rather was he disseminating a blatant slice of
disinformation? You be the judge. In Baer's latest
widely acclaimed book, Sleeping With The Devil -
published after the September 30, 2002 UPI article
- Baer blatantly contradicts himself, as evidenced
on p.199:
"I have no way of knowing whether
Pearl went to Karachi and asked about Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. The Wall Street Journal says no,
that he was working on the shoe-bomber case."
No way of knowing? What about
that "joint project" with Pearl? According to
Baer's UPI version, back in 1997, Baer learned of
efforts by the government of Qatar to shield
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed from FBI apprehension.
Khalid, at the time, was wanted for his alleged
role in the aborted 1995 Bojinka plot. Yet when
none of his former colleagues in counter-terrorism
would follow up on Baer's leads, according to UPI,
"Baer said he was frustrated and called Pearl..."
telling him that "he had a hot story on
terrorism..."
However, in Baer's book version,
it was Pearl who had first initiated contact after
hearing of Baer's leads from other sources:
"In 1998, when I was living in
France, I got a call from a young Wall Street
Journal reporter named Danny Pearl."
As for that "joint project"
alluded to in the UPI article, here is how Baer
sums up the course of their interaction in his
book:
"We met in Geneva...I told him
about KSM [Khalid] and Qatar. He listened, took
notes, and promised to follow up on it one day. We
saw each other from time to time in Washington. He
would bring up the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed story,
but neither of us had anything new to add."
And here is the version that Baer
offered to UPI, describing the aftermath of his
very first telephone contact with Pearl:
"Baer said to his annoyance,
Pearl did not begin to work on the story. Nothing
was done until the day of the Sept. 11 attacks
when Pearl called to talk to Baer."
Thus are we faced with two
alternate realities. In the quantum reality
offered in Baer's book, Daniel Pearl is the dogged
investigator who tracks down Baer for his story on
Khalid, following it up on subsequent meetings
with further queries of Baer, though neither has
"anything new to add." Yet in the quantum reality
offered to UPI, it is Baer who tracks down Pearl,
and who subsequently becomes annoyed with Pearl's
presumed disinterest in Baer's revelation - that
is, until September 11, 2001. In Baer's book,
three days after September 11, Pearl called Baer
after sending him an email the day before. What
follows is Baer's account of their very last
conversation:
"I reminded him about our talks
on KSM [Khalid] and Qatar. 'Worth thinking about,'
[Pearl] replied."
Thus, in Baer's book version,
that fateful phone call signals the end of their
interaction, consequently leaving Baer with "no
way of knowing" whether or not Pearl had picked up
the ball and hustled on over to Karachi to flesh
out Baer's initial lead on Khalid. Meanwhile, over
in the UPI parallel universe, that post-9/11phone
call marks the beginning of their "joint
project":
"Baer said he gave Pearl all the
old information he had and new information he had
since obtained -- for example, that there are
files on [Khalid] in the Qatari Embassy in
London.
Baer said he and Pearl then
'began to work together' -- in other words, Pearl
would get info and check it out with Baer and Baer
would feed Pearl what he was getting. It was 'a
joint project,' said Baer. Baer was giving
direction, but Pearl's contacts were not confined
to Baer."
Simply based on the foregoing,
one might reasonably conclude that Baer is either
a quantum leaper or a bona fide fibber. But even
if Baer's credibility is undermined by all this,
what's the big deal? Isn't Baer, after all, just a
retired CIA guy far out of the loop, trolling the
media circuit as an "independent" critic? Or is
he, rather, a key operative among an insular
(though by no means rogue) counter-terror clique
involved in the formation and presentation of the
Official 9/11 Legend and its off-shoots?
At the time of Baer's UPI
revelation, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had only been
known to the public for less than four months -
dating from the time in June 2002 when he was
first introduced as the "official" 9/11
mastermind. Prior to that date, scarcely any
details at all were offered to the public
concerning Khalid - other than a generic "wanted"
listing for his alleged role in the 1995 Bojinka
plot. And, perhaps, a very brief, general
reference to Khalid as an expert in the hijacking
of planes in Baer's first book. Yet if we are to
believe Baer's post-June 2002 account, Khalid was
the object of intense concern to both Baer and
Pearl - neither of whom had ever gone on record as
evincing any substantive interest in Khalid at any
time prior to Baer's September 30 UPI account.
More curiously, by June 2002, with Khalid now
making the headlines as the brains behind 9/11 -
and coming more than four months after Pearl's own
widely publicized kidnapping - Baer was continuing
to do the media circuit, promoting his earlier
book along with his version of the 9/11
Complacency Theory, yet still no word on his
purported "joint project" with Pearl on the newly
unveiled 9/11 mastermind. Rather, Baer waited
until three weeks after the well-publicized
apprehension of Khalid's alleged co-plotter, Ramzi
Binalshibh, and only then broached the news of his
"joint project" with Pearl, tying this in with the
latest bombshell that Khalid had also likely
killed Daniel Pearl. Curious timing, that.
So who, exactly, is Robert Baer -
and, more to the point, why should this question
matter? Baer - along with the likes of Vincent
Cannistraro and Milt Bearden - is among the select
few who have managed to "dirty" their hands with
past CIA involvement with the Afghani mujahedin.
Terror, drugs, arms-smuggling,and the Byzantine
workings of Mideast geopolitics - Baer has
personally seen it all. In Baer's chronicle of the
past CIA/Bin Laden/Muslim Brotherhood nexus, there
is really nothing particularly sinister in the
fact that the CIA had originally fostered and
funded a network that would later go on to unveil
itself as America's foremost enemy. Baer
characterizes it all as blowback.
But perhaps Baer manages to
provide us a crucial - though probably unintended
- insight as to how we may characterize all that
purported blowback. In Baer's oft-repeated account
of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's escape from Qatar, he
reveals that Khalid had managed to slip away with
another member of his al-Qaida cell - a man by the
name of Shawqui Islambuli, whose brother happens
to be the man who had assassinated Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat on behalf of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
It is indeed an artful pairing -
for these two men serve, on a symbolic level, as
the operative bookends of the Official 9/11
Legend. At the tail end, of course, stands Khalid
as the 9/11 mastermind. At the front end stands
the Egyptian fundamentalist clique whose 1981 move
against Sadat would coincide with its recruitment
by Baer's CIA colleagues into the Afghan effort.
One member of that Egyptian clique, Sheik Omar
Abdel-Rahman, would go on to become a CIA asset,
and, after his acquittal in relation to the Sadat
killing, would then be cleared to enter the United
States in 1990 by way of a CIA-approved visa.
Setting up shop in a Brooklyn mosque, the men in
Abdel-Rahman's circle - Sayyid Nosair, Ramzi
Yousef, etc. - would go on to be implicated in the
assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the plot to
destroy New York City landmarks, and, most
importantly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center.
If the early shoots of what would
eventually evolve into "al-Qaida" look
suspiciously like an Egyptian-CIA hybrid, that is
probably due to the fact that - from the vantage
point of 1993 - a suspicious number of Egyptian
CIA assets (and/or FBI informants) were popping up
all over the map. For one, a former Egyptian
military officer (and FBI informant) named Emad
Salem had managed to "infiltrate" former CIA asset
Abdel-Rahman's New York circle, giving his FBI
handlers the "heads-up" on the plot to take down
the Twin Towers in '93. Meanwhile, another former
Egyptian military officer (and subsequent FBI
informant) by the name of Ali Mohamed would train
Abdel-Rahman's men in the arts of bomb-making,
formation of operative cells, and all the
sophisticated military tactics Ali had gleaned
from his three-year stint as a U.S. sergeant with
the Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Ali had first
entered the United States on a CIA-sponsored visa
in 1981, in order to serve his first four-month
stint with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg -
incidentally, the same year in which Ali had
reportedly joined the ranks of the Muslim
Brotherhood implicated in the Sadat
assassination.
After being honorably discharged
from service at Fort Bragg in 1989, Ali's resume
would include the training of Abdel-Rahman's men,
an ongoing stint as an FBI informant (carrying on
even after the 1993 WTC bombing), the authorship
of al-Qaida's training manuals, along with the
training of bin Laden's personal security detail
and the refinement of al-Qaida's military tactics.
Publicly outed for the first time in 1995 as the
trainer of the 1993 New York landmarks suspects,
Ali would remain free to carry on his busy
globe-trotting itinerary for three more years
before being lured out of his cozy Sacramento digs
in the aftermath of the 1998 Embassy bombings in
Tanzania and Kenya. Duly subpoenaed and then
"secretly" indicted, Ali would go on to plead
guilty, implicate his fellow conspirators, and
then forever fade from public view (and
scrutiny).
With just the foregoing facts in
mind, it doesn't take a forensic expert to connect
the dots and draw certain conclusions as to the
likely paternity of what would later become known
as "al-Qaida." From the vantage point of 1993,
where were those suspicious dots connecting this
close-knit terrorist network to Saddam Hussein? Or
the Pakistani ISI? Or the Saudis? Or the Israelis?
After 1995, however, there would be new dots to
connect up, with new links subsequently forming in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, along
with new al-Qaida cells springing up in London,
Hamburg, and across the globe - and, in lockstep
with the times, new investigative cliques forming
across the US, UK, and the EU. Yet from that
crucial, embryonic time period of 1981-1993, we
can venture a reasonable guess as to which entity
was most involved in coddling, handling, clearing,
and funding this insular grouping of Egyptian-born
radicals, from out of which would grow the full
blossom of al-Qaida. And so we must ask what the
likes of Bob Baer, Vincent Cannistraro, and Milt
Bearden were truly up to in those years.
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