Lockerbie Transparency -

Robert Baer a former high level CIA guy that inspired the movie Syriana believes Iran is involved with the Lockerbie bombing worked all over the Middle East & Europe (including Lebanon & Paris). He was told in August 1993 of the killing of CIA officer Fred Woodruff (Mark Silverman’s neighbor) in Tblisi, Georgia. Woodruff (Mark’s neighbor) had been in a car driven by….the head of personal security for Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, Subsequently, it was found that the Russian mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames (a bad spy) had met with Woodruff (Marks neighbor) shortly before, and had an argument

1993 is the same year I was asked about going to Georgia for a democracy trip. Glad I did not go Aldrich Ames a bad spy was ratting out people (although he would not have know who I was or maybe not... I DO NOT KNOW WHO I WORKED FOR).



Mark Silverman is the 2010 Ben Bradlee Winner & he met Sharyn Bovat in January 2011



Mark Silverman met Aldrich Ames at Freddie Woodruffs funeral/wake Ames had the balls to go to Freddie’s home after he “most likely” ordered his death (Ames gave Mark a different name). Mark said “that” was creepy.



All “this” Middle Eastern/Russian drama is connected to France & Carlos Ghosn. Congress needs to do PUBLIC Hearings about the French involvement in Iran Contra/Lockerbie and other stuff OR congress needs to tell NISSAN to treat the Whistleblower with respect: NISSAN I’ve got PTSD and when I was jailed I started getting “flashbacks”. I was told for my health “this” has to get resolved.
America, Japan, France, Nissan, Renault I know that foreign policy stuff is twisted and people don’t get it. It’s easier for America to keep “just Libya” as the “evil doer”. OK Fine just tell Ghosn to CHANGE: I’m tired of America being taken advantage of by those that participated in the Lockerbie cover up. Too much DOE money has been wasted and too many people have had their lives harmed by Carlos Ghosn’s inhumanity. If Ghosn stays he better “CHANGE”.

 

From: "Sharynbovat@aol.com" <sharynbovat@aol.com>
Date: December 25, 2011 2:24:12 PM CST
To: "msilverm@gannett.com"

Subject: This is Spooky your former CIA neighbor connected to CIA guy that thinks Iran did Lockerbie bombing

Mark,

NOW it's STRANGER

My "low level" research parallel this guy’s career. Why?

Remember after you told me your CIA neighbors wife learned that her husband died while you were at the movie theater watching the Clint Eastwood movie with her called "in the line of fire" and then I asked if it was 1993 ... We googled it was..... Then I told you I was asked to go to Georgia for democracy thing.... I did not do it because I was still freaked out by my previous USSR trip ( FYI-having a bunch of men barge into my hotel room in the middle of the night and strap me to a board was a little stressful, they drove me around and took me to an abandon hospital and stared at me it was horrible) .... Well this former clandestine CIA spy guy Robert Baer who’s convinced Lockerbie was done by Iran and Lebanon was in Georgia when I was asked to go. He's (Robert Baer) is in publications commenting on your neighbor Freddie woodruff's death and it includes the Aldrich Ames stuff, CREEPY!

I've had WAY too many viewers read my blog. YOU’RE really nice to me. Yes I’m adorable.
I'm just trying to figure out WHO exactly I worked for. CIA yes but they had different "teams" in the organization (like at Nissan) my instincts say I did cultural research for various people on different teams (like at Nissan) Nothing else makes sense (like at Nissan).

Have a Great Day!
The guy wrote a movie that George Clooney wrote..... Huh

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SPYTALK
Who Killed Fred Woodruff October 12, 2007
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

The FBI had harder information, from “assets involved with Russian organized crime,” said an investigative source, who “would go back to Moscow for monthly meetings between organized crime and governmental officials.”

The “assets” reported that a top Russian official was overheard saying “that they had problems with an American CIA agent in Georgia by the name of ‘Woodford.’ Mark Silverman’s former neighbor They said that they needed to do something about ‘Woodford’ or his Georgian contact, Eldar Gogoladze,” the driver of the death car. And they may well have known what Woodruff knew about them. In another odd coincidence, the CIA traitor Aldrich Ames had been in Tblisi several weeks before Woodruff’s murder.

Ames (Bad Spy), whose signature act was selling Moscow the names of the CIA’s spies in Russia, was then working for Baer (CIA Guy that thinks Iran did Lockerbie Bombing) on a CIA counternarcotics task force. He would have seen all of Woodruff’s (Mark;s neighbor) intelligence reports.

Ames might have elicited even more sensitive details from Woodruff when they went out drinking together — and were spotted arguing — at a Tblisi hotel bar a month or so before Woodruff was killed, according to witnesses who were interviewed by the FBI. A multitude of sinister forces, Baer said, had an interest in liquidating Woodruff.

Freddie Woodruff (died August 8, 1993) was a regional affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilsi, Georgia. He was shot in the head and killed in 1993. Woodruff has been widely reported as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief involved in training the bodyguards of the Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze and an élite Omega Special Task Force.
Robert Baer was a Central Intelligence Agency operations officer between 1976 and 1997. He is a critic of the Agency's effectiveness in the Middle East, and, in general, with U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia. ^[1] He is the intelligence columnist for Time; the movie "Syriana" is modeled on his career.
Aldrich Hazen Ames (born May 26, 1941) is a former Central Intelligence Agency counter-intelligence officer and analyst, who, in 1994, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. Until the arrest of Robert Hanssen seven years later, Ames compromised more CIA assets than had any Soviet mole in American history.

CIA evidence 'clears Libya' of Lockerbie

“Baer claims he is breaking his silence now because of growing disillusionment with the CIA's counter-terrorist operations and the war on terror. Baer, an anti-terrorist specialist, was one of the key CIA officers investigating Lockerbie. He says the CIA received definitive evidence that the PFLP-GC struck a deal with Iranian intelligence agents in July 1988 to take down an American airliner. Baer also has details of an $11m payment made to the PFLP-GC. On December 23 1988 the money was paid into a bank account used by the terror group in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was transferred to another PFLP-GC account at the Banque Nationale de Paris and moved to the Hungarian Trade Development Bank. THE SUNDAY HERALD 17/02/2002

CIA agent's murder is a hard blow for Georgia: Freddie Woodruff's death reflects the threats from both past and present. Andrew Higgins reports from Tbilisi

ANDREW HIGGINS in Tbilisi

Tuesday 24 August 1993

THEY KNEW each other from the Piano Bar at the Metechi Palace Hotel, one of the few places left in Georgia where foreigners feel safe. Marina, 29, tall, slim and jangling silver bracelets, served drinks. She also spoke English, Russian and Georgian. She had a university degree in philology.

Freddie Woodruff was 45, married - happily by most accounts - and worked as regional affairs officer at the US embassy. He had a thick Oklahoma accent, a degree in theology, kept a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and played the amiable good ol' boy. 'He wanted to know about everything, about our life, how we lived. There were no barriers. He was so friendly. I loved him - as a friend,' says Marina. Everyone liked Freddie.

But few knew his real job: CIA station chief. He had been in and out of Georgia since the end of 1992 and was only a few days away from a final flight home to Virginia, where, he told friends, he was going on a Czech language course to prepare for new posting to Prague.

Mr Woodruff, or 'Freddie' as he preferred, did return home - in a flag-draped coffin, escorted aboard a US government jet by James Woolsey, director of the CIA. Mr Woolsey had rushed to Tbilisi from Moscow, cutting short meetings with his Russian counterpart, Yevgeny Primakov. As the coffin was loaded, he conferred with the Georgian leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, for an hour, guarded by young men with assault rifles.

Marina from the Piano Bar was the last person to see Freddie alive. She was sitting next to him in the back of a Niva car when a single bullet smashed open his head. They were returning to Tbilisi after a jaunt two weeks ago to Mount Kazbek on the Georgian Military Highway. The driver was Eldar Guguladze, head of Mr Shev ardnadze's security. In the passenger seat was a second Georgian woman. Marina was sitting on the left behind the driver, Freddie on the right. His window, says Marina, was open.

The car had just passed the village of Natakhtari and was approaching a fork. One road branches off to Sukhumi, a Black Sea resort ravaged by shelling, the other to Tbilisi. There was a single shot. There was no shattered glass and no screaming. Then Marina noticed Freddie. 'I looked at him. It is such an awful feeling when you know you cannot do anything.' They rushed to hospital, she says, but it was too late.

'I sometimes wish I had been killed instead. He could have done a lot more to help this country than I can,' says Marina, now back at work in the Piano Bar serving guests: a telephone consultant from New Jersey; a morose professor from Berlin nostalgic for days when he could do research on early Christian architecture in the Caucasus without getting shot; and a young Georgian claiming to work for state security. 'If it had been me there would not have been such a scandal,' Marina said.

Nor would the art and aims of post- Cold War espionage have been placed under such scrutiny. The main event of US-Soviet confrontation has faded. Its spies, though, have not. Some are co-operating like never before. Witness Mr Woolsey's talks with Mr Primakov. But a new rivalry is beginning to stir in the crumbling purlieu of the Soviet empire. Moscow and Washington both claim stability as their goal. But trust is fragile. So the spies probe, seeking out allies and contacts, as in countless Third World backwaters in the past. Freddie Woodruff was a part of this.

Across Russia's periphery there is a cautious but growing US presence. Special Forces have been to Georgia to help train Mr Shevardnadze's guards. Georgians are studying at bases in America. The US embassy in Tbilisi occupies a large 19th century mansion. The Russian mission is squeezed into a converted cultural centre alongside the Israelis, a refugee committee, a trading company and a South Ossetia theatre group. The contrast reflects wishful thinking, not reality. The real power in the Caucasus, as in Central Asia, is Russia.

When Freddie Woodruff joined the CIA in 1978 it was to wage an ideological crusade. It took him to Leningrad, Turkey, Sudan and Ethiopia. Georgia was different. Moscow and Washington were on the same side. But Thomas Gamkrelidze, chairman of the Georgian parliament's foreign affairs committee, sees the murder as a decisive marker: 'The game is open now. They are playing an open match.' He has just returned from Washington, where he had this message for State Department and Pentagon officials: 'There will always be rivalry with Russia. In the rivalry we are on the side of the United States.'

Mikhail Naneishvili, head of the Liberal Democratic National Party, talks of inviting in US troops. It is not a role Washington would relish: 'We are completing a fight that is not just 70 years old or 200 years old. It has been going on for half a millennium. This is our struggle to join the West.'

The more paranoid believe Mr Woodruff was killed to stop this from happening. Tbilisi rumour blames one of his companions and points to the fact that Mr Guguladze, the driver and security boss, has been suspended. Marina, though, insists the bullet came from outside the car, probably a random shot by bandits wanting nothing more than cigarettes, petrol or, at worst, the car. 'It was a blind bullet. It was an accident. I am 100 per cent sure.'

Eduard Shevardnadze sounds a bit less sure: 'I want to believe and do believe that this was an accident. The US has helped Georgia in so many ways that to have an American diplomat killed here is a real tragedy.' He says that Mr Guguladze has not only been suspended but replaced. According to the First Deputy Interior Minister, Mikhail Osadze, the case is all but closed: a young man will be charged, one of three picked up soon after the murder. All are said to have been drunk and members of a para- military band. Washington, which has sent out forensic experts and agents from the FBI and the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, has yet to give its verdict.

Whoever did it, the murder carries an alarming message for Georgians: no one, not even the US, the last superpower to which so many look in hope, can escape the turmoil. Levan Mikaladze, a presidential adviser, keeps a book on his desk: a Heritage Foundation report, Making the World Safe for America. Far more difficult is how to make Georgia safe for anyone.

(Photograph omitted)

Robert Baer

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Robert Baer was a Central Intelligence Agency operations officer between 1976 and 1997. He is a critic of the Agency's effectiveness in the Middle East, and, in general, with U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia. ^[1] He is the intelligence columnist for Time; the movie "Syriana" is modeled on his career.

CIA experience and reaction

After his parents separated, he spent much of his boyhood traveling around Europe, with skiing being his principal interest but also gaining language and cross-cultural skills. Eventually, school problems caused his mother and grandfather to send him to a military school in 1968, where the dean suggested he become a Foreign Service Officer. Georgetown University's school of foreign service accepted him, and he took the Foreign Service examination after graduation in 1976, failing by a few points.
He moved to San Francisco, found part-time work, started a Mandarin Chinese course, and applied to the University of California at Berkeley for East Asian graduate studies. When he told a friend that the Foreign Service examination it would not be offered again for a year, it was suggested he apply for the CIA. After taking the exam, and assuming the leftist tendencies of his mother would exclude him, he was surprised to be called in by a recruiter, mentioning both the analytical and operations directorate. Since he did not yet have a graduate degree, the recruiter aimed him toward the Directorate of Operations. He was accepted in July 1976, and entered paramilitary training in 1977.

Initial field experience

He was assigned to India for his first field assignment, the exact date being redacted but in the late 1970s. After three years of reasonable success for a beginner, the Near East Division offered to send him to two years of Arabic language instruction. He was in Tunisia, studying, at the time of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut; after finishing a few months later, and having had some contacts with Palestinian groups, he was assigned to an unspecified Middle East station. At that location, he attempted a penetration of the Abu Nidal group through a personal contact, but his supervisor, whom he described as a no-risk bureaucrat, forbade it.
After the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, he received a temporary assignment to Lebanon. One of his chief interests was Balabakk, in the Bekaa Valley, where the Shaykh Abdallah barracks were located. In November 1982, a group led by Husayn al-Musawi captured the barracks and gave control of them to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or Pasdaran. Syrian troops ignored the takeover and the Lebanese were unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
Iran, according to Baer, ran its hostage-taking from Balabakk, and, by June 1983, out of the barracks. They had decided, after taking an earlier hostage to Teheran, to keep their captives in Lebanon, to give them plausible deniability. ^[2] Western hostage rescue forces had long been frustrated, since the inability to locate the places of captivity prevented them from operating.
Baer began talking to locals in the Bekaa Valley. He chatted with a Lebanese police sergeant, "Ali", explaining he was an American student of antiquities, and wanted to see some Roman ruins. They became friendly, and Baer learned he had relatives in the U.S. and would like to move there. Bringing him a visa application, but making no promises, the police sergeant gave him his full name — and Baer learned he was related to Husayn al-Musawi. In January 1984, he warned Baer not to visit in the near term, saying "They're going to kidnap an American in Lebanon."
Returning to his home station, he learned, on March 16, that Bill Buckley, the CIA Beirut station chief, had been kidnapped. He pleaded to be allowed to go back and see Ali. Seven months later, he managed to visit Balabakk, with a Lebanese army captain who took him to the ruins. Pasdaran soldiers cheerfully guided him. As they drove away, he asked about some buildings, which included the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. Years later, he learned Buckley and five other hostages were inside.

Counterterrorism

In 1986, after he had been transferred to Khartoum, Sudan, Dewey Clarridge recruited him into the Counterterrorism Center. Due to personnel shortages, however, he was transferred back to Beirut.
Before his physical transfer, however, he reviewed the terrorism files relevant to the area, especially that of Imad Mugniyah, whom he suspected may have been the bomber of the Beirut embassy. Baer also believed he was backed by the Pasdaran and Iran, and was involved in hostage-taking.
When he arrived in Beirut in 1987, he was able to do more than in the past. He had, for example, an agent, "Farid", who had extensive contacts except for Hizballah and the Mugniyah Group. Nevertheless, he was able to establish linkage between Muhammad Hammadah, one of the hijackers of TWA Flight 847, and Mugniyah.
With the confusion of the Lebanese telephone system, wiretapping was easy. This gave him more and more information on Mugniyah.
Later, he was able to place an agent, "Hasan", ino Hizballah.

France and Morocco

He was reassigned from Beirut to Paris in 1988. Six months after his arrival, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed, and he regretted not being in Lebanon to chase leads about possible Iranian involvement. While Libya has accepted responsibiity for the bombing, Baer's theory was based on an assumption that the Iranians had decided to take revenge for the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes (CG-49). Baer says there were reports that Iran had contacted officials, in Lebanon, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which had experience with airliner bombings. The Palestinians involved were Muhammad Hafiz Dalqamuni and Nabil Makhzumi (Abu Abid).
He was able to establish links between Germany, France, and Iran. Makhzumi spoke Farsi and may have been the courier. France, in particular, was focusing intelligence resources on North Africa, a traditional sphere of influence, after a 1991 military coup overthrew a democratically elected Islamic government. The French concern was that there could be spillover, from the resulting Algerian civil war,^[3] into the Algerian immigrant population in France.^[4]
In general, he found, the CIA was shutting down its European agents. After Pan Am 103, there was not a single source at the Frankfurt Airport, the busiest in Europe, to provide manifests. When he took over an existing agent, a French arms dealer, from another case officer, he was questioned, then greeted with enthusiasm: the agent had said the previous officer, a convert to a new religious movement, had spent the last year trying to proselytize him rather than conduct espionage. When Baer told the station chief, who discovered there were several other members of the church, headquarters told him that he could not interfere with their First Amendment rights. He was unable to get permission for a variety of operations, as technical means of collection became more popular in Washington.
After his assignment to the Paris station, he spent three years in Morocco, attempting to follow the Western Sahara insurgency. He found the 1989-1991 assignment frustrating, as all decisions of consequence were made in the inaccessible royal court.

Central Asia

Return to Tajikistan

.
On its recapture by the ex-communists in January 1993, he returned, only mildly surprised to find that he now had to pass through the KGB station to reach the CIA station, both being in the same hotel. Since the Russian 201st Division was the only external force in contact with the insurgents, it became clear to him that he had to befriend Russians to get information, and did so through skiing. His first Russian ski visit required parachuting to the site, which was promptly banned by CIA headquarters.^[5]
He did, however, get a friendly Russian contact about a week later. Thinking that Baer was the American military attache, the colonel invited him for a visit. First, the group picnicked at the Russian military range, made toasts to GEN H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., and then the Russians demonstrated equipment. The equipment included silenced assassination weapons, which a Russian captain told him was how they dealt with the "Vahabis" — their pronunciation of Wahabbi. This was the first confirmation that the Russians were executing fundamentalists in Tajikistan. He continued to build friendship, learning to drive a T-72 (tank) and being rather annoyed when CIA banned tank driving; as he rather enjoyed it.
A Russian senior officer invited him to see something that would be of interest: the weekly shipment of tons of opium, from Afghanistan, to Moscow, by collaboration of the Tajik Minister of the Interior, Yaqub Salimov, and Russian generals.^[6] He and the U.S. Ambassador visited Salimov and informed him that the U.S. could not tolerate involvement in the heroin trade. Two weeks later, Salimov responded by detonating a bomb in Baer's house. Sympathetic Russians offered to lend him a tank to flatten Salimov's house.
More significantly, his Russian friend began to talk about Russian nationalism, and a possible new (after 1993) Russian military coup against Boris Yeltsin. Washington, however, told him that it fully supported the Yeltsin government.

Georgia

His Russian contact, on 9 August 1993, first told him of the killing of CIA officer Fred Woodruff in Tblisi, Georgia,^[7] blaming it on elements from Moscow. Woodruff had been in a car driven by Eldar Gogoladze, head of personal security for Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, and two women with ties to Russian intelligence. The Georgians claimed he was shot by a drunken soldier, but he had been shot with ammunition unlikely, according to the FBI investigation team, for an ordinary soldier to have had. They also found the ballistics unlikely, and hypothesized a second shooter.^[8]
Subsequently, it was found that the Russian mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, had met with Woodruff shortly before, and had an argument. Much later, a Russian military officer was arrested in an undisclosed nearby country, in possession of a suppressed assassination rifle; he claimed to have been part of a team that shot Woodruff.

Stein said Michael Pullara, a Woodruff family friend, had investigated, and found links to a murder-for-hire organization in the Caucausus. Pullara found that the Tajik head of domestic security questioned it, and was fired. Pullara's theory was based on Shevardnadze's fight with pro-Russian insurgencies and partnering up with the Clinton administration:

Russian Defense Ministry officials connected with the heroin trade wanted to make a bloody point to American intelligence by killing Woodruff: Stay out of Georgia. Georgian security forces, helped by the United States, were monitoring the transshipment of southwest Asia heroin across the region. Interdictions that threatened a multitude of ex-Russian KGB and Georgian gangsters involved in the trade were on the rise. Woodruff was also pushing a Black Sea Basin intelligence consortium to rope the spy services of other former Soviet republics into a pro-U.S. network. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse only two years earlier, the CIA, the Pentagon and American oil companies were pushing aggressively into the newly free Black Sea nation...Delta Force operatives were active in the Pankisi Gorge, adjacent to Chechnya, which was in full rebellion against Moscow. Other highly classified U.S. intelligence programs were under way there.^[7]

According to Baer, Washington did not want confrontations with Russia at the time, even when they fired a rocket-propelled grenade, on September 13, 1995, into the side of the Moscow embassy.

CIA spook says Megrahi was freed before appeal humiliated justice system

Aug 23 2009 Charles Lavery, Sunday Mail

A CIA terror expert who worked on the Lockerbie investigation has claimed Megrahi would have been freed on appeal.
In an exclusive interview, retired case officer Robert Baer has revealed details of the secret dossier of evidence Megrahi hoped would clear his name.
Baer claims the appeal, which he worked on, could have done serious damage to our legal system.
And he insists Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill had little option other than to release Megrahi.
Baer claimed: Key witnesses - including Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci - were "manipulated".
Vital details freely available to intelligence agencies were withheld from the original prosecution.
Megrahi's appeal papers would have proven beyond doubt the bombing was orchestrated by Iran.
During his 20-year CIA career, Baer worked "on assignment" across the globe and was investigated by the FBI for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
His book See No Evil was the basis for the hit George Clooney movie Syriana. Clooney's character was based on Baer.
The 57-year-old, who lives in Colorado, said: "Your justice secretary had two choices - sneak into Megrahi's cell and smother him with his pillow or release him.
"The end game came down to damage limitation because the evidence amassed by his appeal team is explosive and extremely damning to your system of justice.
"There is hard evidence of other nations - Iran particularly - being responsible for this atrocity.
"The CIA knew this almost from the moment the plane exploded. This decision to free Megrahi was about protecting the integrity of your justiciary because the appeal papers prove Iran was involved.
"That doesn't mean Megrahi is innocent but had it been presented at Camp Zeist, there would never have been a conviction. I knew this information back then so you can rest assured both MI5 and MI6 knew.
"The question is who knew and when you consider they've released him rather than hear his appeal, you can draw your own conclusions.
Pressured "The decision serves everybody's purpose. I don't think anyone wanted to face the consequences of that evidence being heard at appeal.
"The Maltese witness was manipulated and perjured himself at trial.
"I talked with the appeals commission investigators and that's what was going to be laid before the hearing. At least one FBI officer was pressured too.
"I spoke to the case officer and he was pressured to change his testimony. It was a bad show all the way but whether Megrahi is innocent is another question entirely.
"If I were the prosecutors, I would not afford Megrahi the opportunity to state what his appeal team discovered. The investigators in the original case did not get all the information we had.
"If I knew this stuff, you can guarantee MI5 and MI6 knew it long before his conviction.
"It is at least an act of omission not to tell the Scottish authorities.
"It would be very clear there was some form of prosecutorial misconduct in this case and that Megrahi did not get a fair trial."
Baer, who quit the CIA in 1997, revealed a US intelligence report said the attack was "conceived, authorised and financed" by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, who was Iran's Interior Minister in the first years of the Islamic Revolution.
The document also says the operation was carried out by Ahmad Jibril - the founder and leader of a Palestinian militant group with links to revolutionary Iran and Hezbollah.
A senior Iranian intelligence officer who fled to Turkey also claims Iran masterminded the bombing.
Ahmad Behbahani says he has documents to prove Tehran was behind the bombing.
Baer believes Iranian intelligence paid £8million into the bank account of a Syrian terror group days after the bombing in December 1988.
He claims Megrahi's defence team planned to cast doubt on forensic evidence and cast doubt over Gauci's testimony. They also say Gauci was paid £1.2million for his evidence.

Robert Baer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert "Bob" Booker Baer (born July 1, 1952) is an American author and a former CIA case officer who was primarily assigned to the Middle East.[1] He is currently TIME.com's intelligence columnist[1] and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.[2] Baer is a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage and U.S. foreign policy.

Early life

Baer was born in Los Angeles, raised in Aspen, Colorado, and aspired to become a professional skier. He spent many years of his childhood with his mother in Europe before returning to the US. After a fairly poor academic performance during his freshman year at high school, his mother sent him to Indiana's Culver Military Academy. In 1976, after graduating from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and entering the University of California, Berkeley, Baer decided to join the CIA's Directorate of Operations (now the National Clandestine Service) as a case officer. Upon admittance to the CIA, Baer engaged in a year's training, which included a four-month paramilitary course and foreign language courses.

He is fluent in Arabic, French, German, Persian (Farsi), as well as his native English. He is also conversant in Russian, Tajik, and Baluch.

Career

During his twenty-one years with the CIA, Baer has publicly acknowledged field assignments in Madras and New Delhi, India, Beirut, Lebanon, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Morocco, and Salah al-Din in Iraqi Kurdistan. During the mid-1990s, Baer was sent to Iraq with the mission of organizing opposition to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein but was recalled and investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for allegedly conspiring to assassinate the Iraqi leader.^[3][4] While in Salah al-Din, Baer unsuccessfully urged the Clinton administration to back an internal Iraqi attempt to overthrow Hussein (organized by a group of Sunni military officers, the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmad Chalabi, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Jalal Talabani) in March 1995 with covert CIA assistance. Baer quit the Agency in 1997 and received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998.

Baer wrote the book See No Evil documenting his experiences while working for the Agency. The C.I. Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle, by Christopher Lynch, Dog Ear Publishing, ISBN 9781608447398, describes parts of the contentious CIA pre-publication review process for Baer's first book. In a blurb for See No Evil Seymour Hersh said Baer "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East." In the book, Baer offers an analysis of the Middle East through the lens of his experiences as a CIA operative.

Baer's political outlook does not hew exclusively to either conservative or liberal viewpoints. Through his years as a clandestine officer, he gained a very thorough knowledge of the Middle East, Arab world and former Republics of the Soviet Union. Over the years, Baer has become a strong advocate of the Agency's need to increase Human Intelligence (HUMINT) through the recruitment of agents. Baer, long a supporter of the theory that the PFLP GC brought down Pan Am Flight 103, has recently begun to promote the theory that Iran was behind the bombing.^{[clarification needed]}

In 2004, he told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the CIA deals with terrorism suspects, "If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear, never to see them again, you send them to Egypt."^[1]

September 2001 attacks

In an interview with Thom Hartmann on June 9, 2006, Baer was asked if he believed "that there was an aspect of 'inside job' to the September 11, 2001 attacks within the U.S. government". He replied, "There is that possibility, the evidence points at it."^[5] However, he later stated, "For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with."^[6]

Iran

In June 2009, Baer commented on the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President and the protests that accompanied it. "For too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles."

Lockerbie bombing

On 23 August 2009, Robert Baer claimed that the CIA had known from the start that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 had been orchestrated by Iran, and that a secret dossier proving this was to be presented as evidence in the final appeal by convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. According to Baer, this suggests that Megrahi's withdrawal of the appeal in return for a release on compassionate grounds was encouraged to prevent this information from being presented in court.^[7]

Books and media

Baer's books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil were the basis for the 2005 Academy Award-winning Warner Brothers motion picture Syriana. The film's character Bob Barnes (played by George Clooney) is loosely based on Baer. For this role, Clooney won a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. To better resemble Baer, Clooney gained weight. When Baer learned of this, he was inspired to get back into shape.

For the past two years, Robert Baer has worked closely with the director Kevin Toolis and Many Rivers Films, a Channel 4 production company in the UK, to present four authoritative documentary series, Cult of the Suicide Bomber I, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber II and Cult of the Suicide Bomber III on the origins of suicide bombing. Cult of the Suicide Bomber I was nominated for an Emmy in 2006. In 2008 Baer presented Car Bomb – a film history about the weapon.

Baer was interviewed in the Robert Greenwald documentary Uncovered: The War on Iraq. He was also one of the main participants in the 2009 documentary film Lockerbie Revisited by Dutch film director Gideon Levy.

Baer recently wrote an online forward to Hoodwinked, by John Perkins, on Amazon.com:

"I wasn't twenty pages into Hoodwinked when I realized Perkins nailed it. What got us into the mess we're in today, the worst recession since the Great Depression, is the same grotesque capitalism cum corruption we shoved down the throat of the Third World since the end of World War II. (Yes, the Third World's elites were cheerfully corrupted.) We, and the rest of the West, learned the trick of selling unneeded infrastructure, services, over-sophisticated weapons--stuff that could never benefit anyone other than the people who lined their pockets. And yes, Perkins is right, the international economists and press were handmaidens to the thievery. It was all fairly routine until 9/11, when the real gorging started. Tell the people their roof is on fire and they'll give you whatever you ask for. Between 2001 and 2009 the Department of Defense budget increased 74 percent, and that is not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars in related contracts. Nigeria on the Potomac. Perkins is quick to state he doesn't believe in a grand conspiracy theory. Few of the people who call the shots have ever met each other. They don't have a playbook other than a couple of fraudulent economists like Milton Friedman and the others who worship at the altar of deregulation. No, what they have in common is an obsession with the winner takes all. Perkins's message isn’t going to be popular. We're a country invested in a system in which five percent of the world's population consumes 25 percent of the world's resources. It's a system we're trying to sell to the world, only we don't mention that we'll need five planets to sustain it. Perkins isn't the pessimist I am. He says we can save the world if we green it--and, of course, start telling the truth to each other. Otherwise we end up a banana republic like the ones we know so well how to despoil."^[8]

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