Robert B. Baer > Quotes

“It seems to me it's always the evil we refuse to see that does us the greatest harm.”
― Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism

“Egypt is the next domino to fall and, as they say, so goes Egypt so goes the Middle East.”
― Robert Baer

“Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there's every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq.”
― Robert Baer

“On one level, Americans are too distant from the Middle East, too naive to understand its complexities and history. On another, it's the people who show up in Washington-Iranian and Arab exiles nursing a grudge, with time on their hands and money to pay for a hotel-who influence U.S. policy by default. They color Washington's view of the world, drawing us into foreign adventures we have no business being in.”
― Robert Baer, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower

“Society attacks early when the individual is helpless. —B. F. SKINNER”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

“George Bernard Shaw once famously said that if you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you might as well teach it to dance.”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

“The Saudi judicial system looks as if it were designed by Ghengis Khan. Saudi Arabia tops the world in public beheadings.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

“We can walk away from the moral consequences of our actions, but we can’t walk away from economic consequences.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Things are even worse than they seem. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have what we would call a rule of law. Look inside a Saudi passport: It states that the holder “belongs” to the royal family. A Saudi commoner is chattel, a piece of property no different from an Al Sa’ud’s Jeddah palace or his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“I still laugh at the stale office joke that if you can’t drive, read a Thomas Guide to L.A., and eat an In-N-Out Burger at the same time, you’re not working hard enough. I can do all that, but do I want to?”
― Robert B. Baer, The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story

“Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria all backed the February 1996 coup attempt and were continuing to undermine the Qatari government.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The Saudi government probably spends more per capita than any other country in the world on arms. (It acknowledges only that it spends 13 percent of its gross domestic product, but half of its revenue is earmarked for the military.)”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The CIA couldn’t hope to recruit a source in the Kremlin without first cleaning its own house of Russian moles, and the only sure way to accomplish that would be to recruit a Russian spy who knew about”
― Robert Baer, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for the KGB’s CIA Mole and Why the US Overlooked Putin

“In other words, no matter what country you buy your oil from, Saudi Arabia determines world price by how much oil it chooses to produce.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Anger against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to—the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, of course—and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the principal backer: Saudi Arabia.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“That’s why we in the West—Washington, D.C., in particular—have to face up to our part in cultivating the virus that has infected Saudi Arabia. And that is why we must consider putting to sleep the host, the House of Sa’ud, if it can’t or won’t cure itself.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella. —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

“It also was enough for a judge to authorize the FBI to secretly break into Ames’s house and search it. Finding incontrovertible evidence he was a Russian double agent, the FBI arrested Ames on February 21, 1994, and quickly extracted a confession of espionage from him. He copped to betraying in 1985 nearly a dozen CIA and FBI Soviet agents. He’d done it for money, banally fencing the CIA’s crown jewels to treat himself to a new Jaguar and suburban spread. It was an act of treason from which the CIA would never”
― Robert B. Baer, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin's Russia

“The equations have changed. One report sent to the United Nations Security Council indicated that Saudi Arabia transferred half a billion dollars to al Qaeda in the ten years beginning 1992.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Every time you fill up your car with gas that has its beginning as Saudi crude—and statistically, that should be about one in every five or six times you pull up to the pump—you’re contributing something like a dollar toward keeping Saudi royal heads attached to their necks.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The CIA couldn’t hope to recruit a source in the Kremlin without first cleaning its own house of Russian moles, and the only sure way to accomplish that would be to recruit a Russian spy who knew about them.”
― Robert Baer, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for the KGB’s CIA Mole and Why the US Overlooked Putin

“a democratic election in Saudi Arabia would bring to power a militant Islamic government more hostile than Khomeini’s Iran.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“There was a Wahhabi way to sneeze, embrace, shake hands, yawn, kiss, dress, and so on. There was even a Wahhabi way of reinterpreting physics; strict Wahhabis believe the world is flat. (If this begins to conjure images of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there’s a good reason.)”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Number three is called 'pulling nails from fingers'. What do you think Bob? Number three sound good to you? The purpose is to get the monks or whatever to recant their beliefs. What if I had to get you to recant? That would be pretty difficult right? Because if you have no beliefs to recant then what? Then you're fucked is what.”
― Robert B. Baer, Syriana

“The kingdom’s mosque schools have become hothouses of militant Islam, the breeding grounds of Sunni terrorism.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Franklin D. Roosevelt plays a part, as does the eighteenth-century tribal chief Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud. So does another eighteenth-century Arab, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and the archconservative thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taymiyah. And so, finally, do the fruits of all the malignant seeds planted by Ibn Taymiyah: the Muslim Brotherhood.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“95 percent of educated Saudis between the ages of twenty-five and forty-one support bin Laden.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Even the interior minister, Na’if, had to admit that Saudi Arabia had a problem with Islamic militants. In November 2002 he said, “All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood. We have given too much support to this group. The Muslim Brotherhood has destroyed the Arab world.” Na’if went on to accept, at least minimally, Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for militant Islam.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil