Baden-Powell,
Dorothy. Operation Jupiter: SOE's Secret War in Norway. London: Hale, 1982. Baden-Powell,
Dorothy. Operation Jupiter: SOE's Secret War in Norway. London: Hale, 1982.
Wilcox: "Account of British Clandestine operations, Norwegian resistance,... in WWII."
[UK/WWII/Services/SOE; WWII/Eur/Resistance/Norway]
Baden-Powell,
Dorothy. Pimpernel Gold: How Norway Foiled the Nazis. New York: St. Martin's, 1978.
Wilcox: "Account of Norwegian resistance during World War II."
[WWII/Eur/Resistance/Norway]
Baden-Powell, Robert. "Adventures as a Spy." Everybody's 32 (Feb. 1915): 184-192. [Calder]
[UK/Historical; UK/Memoirs/PreWWII]
Baden-Powell,
Robert. My Adventures as a Spy. London: 1915.
[UK/Historical&Memoirs/PreWWII]
Badey, Thomas J. "Nuclear Terrorism: Actor-Based Threat Assessment." Intelligence and National Security 16, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 39-54.
"[A]nti-proliferation initiatives have a limited impact on the illegal flow of nuclear materials and are not likely to prevent the acquisition of nuclear materials by non-state actors.... [T]he primary threat of nuclear terrorism stems not from the availability of the materials but from the potential willingness of some groups to acquire [and use] them."
[Terrorism/00s/Gen]
Badgley, Kerry. "Researchers and Canada's Public Archives: Gaining Access to the Security Collections." In Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, eds. Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, 223-228. Toronto : Between the Lines, 2000.
[Canada/PostCW]
Baer, Robert.
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier
in the CIA's War on Terrorism. New York:
Crown, 2002.
According to Gellman, Washington Post, 17 Mar. 2002, "Baer leaps from these pages as a zealous and creative man, courageous to the brink of recklessness, and altogether lacking the political and diplomatic judgment that an intelligence agency needs at the top. What the book does well is provide a spy's-eye view of CIA intrigues by one of the agency's best. And it makes a persuasive case, with much amusing evidence, that the CIA lost interest in the skills Baer had to offer....
"Baer can write authoritatively on one page and with cartoonish fancy on another.... [He] adds an intriguing chapter to the literature on the Clinton administration's betrayal of Iraqi coup plotters in 1995. But he undermines the reader's trust with assertions that then-national security adviser Anthony Lake masterminded an FBI investigation meant to punish Baer for his role. No one who knows the mutual loathing between Louis Freeh and the Clinton White House will buy that."
Peake, AFIO WIN 31-02, 5 Aug. 2002, and Intelligencer 13.2, finds that See No Evil is "a memoir of disillusionment written in a positive style, not the bitter tone of those who wrote because they could not cope with the demands of the clandestine life.... Baer's comments on the tradecraft of espionage as practiced on the ground ... will enlighten historians and laymen interested in the profession.... This is a fine memoir, one of the best ever written."
To Berkowitz. IJI&C15.4, this book "is a great read." The author "is direct and honest ... and tells a good story."
Clark comment: I enjoyed reading Baer's See No Evil. The words flow in a spritely fashion from the page, and Baer certainly touched plenty of potentially important events in less frequented parts of the world. Much of what he writes rings true whether or not the reader is familiar with the details of each episode he spotlights. That does not mean, however, that he has captured the "capital T" truth.
Baer's view is that of the classic field operative -- essentially, "if politics/Headquarters/ Washington hadn't screwed it up, we could have pulled it off." It is true that too often those making the decisions back in Washington do not share the field operative's intimate knowledge of the situation on the ground. But it is just as often true that the person in the field has little understanding of the factors at play beyond his/her vision.
Baer complains that some Headquarters-based personnel considered him a "cowboy." From reading his memoirs, I have to conclude that they were correct. I would argue, however, that the CIA and the United States need a few such cowboys, although we probably should not put them in charge of things.
[CIA/C&C/DO; CIA/Memoirs]
Baer, Robert. "Wanted: Spies Unlike Us." Foreign Policy 147 (Mar.-Apr. 2005): 66-70.
"The CIA must cultivate foreign sources, reward service overseas, and tap America's top students to once again get good information on enemies of the United States."
[CIA/00s/05/Gen]
Baer,
Susan. "Tenet Survives Despite CIA Woes." Baltimore Sun,
6 Feb. 2002. [http:// www.baltimoresun.com]
"[I]f anyone was likely to take the fall for" the events of 11 September 2001, " it would be Tenet. Yet, with Congress beginning to request documents from the CIA for hearings to investigate what went wrong, few are pointing fingers at him. Instead, lawmakers have seen Sept. 11 as a government-wide breakdown, with plenty of blame to go around. And far from being ousted, the engaging, cigar-chomping Tenet has emerged as a key architect of the war on terror."
[CIA/DCIs/Tenet; Terrorism/02/War]
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