Blow the House Down

March 13, 2006
Former CIA agent Baer, author of the memoir See No Evil
(2002), which inspired the film Syriana
, offers the same closely observed details of intelligence work and life in his first novel, a political thriller. Unfortunately, a surfeit of subplots and dozens of characters slow the action down. One day in June 2001, veteran CIA case officer Max Waller is crudely and coldly removed from his office and job in Langley, Va. On September 11, 2001, what Waller has discovered sifting through live secrets and dead agents from Washington to Tehran comes together into a plausible alternate theory of how and why the Twin Towers were targeted. Whether or not readers buy into that theory, they're sure to enjoy Baer's jaundiced view of his former employer. When Waller finds himself being trailed by some obvious outsiders, he thinks, "The FBI was capable of screwing up... but neither it nor the local police nor anyone else I could think of in this nation or abroad would be idiotic enough to field a white surveillance team in Harlem. For that, you needed incompetence on a colossal scale. Langley had to be behind it." Author tour.

April 15, 2006
In his fiction debut, former CIA agent Baer ("Sleeping with the Devil") merges fact and conjecture to suggest that Iran was behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Using knowledge gained from his service as a field officer in the Middle East, Baer creates a protagonist much like himself. In his spare time, CIA agent Maxwell Waller is working on determining the identity of the men behind the kidnapping and execution of a CIA chief of station in Beirut. Then he discovers a photo of Osama bin Laden, the future head of the military wing of Hamas, an unknown American, and a man he thinks may be a colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Waller's relentless search for the story behind the photo leads him to the Middle East and into a conspiracy that culminates in the bombing of the World Trade Center. Filled with fascinating bits of tradecraft (e.g., how to disable a motion detector and thwart a silent alarm), this complex thriller will both entertain and instruct. Recommended for all public libraries. [Baer's memoir, "See No Evil", inspired the movie "Syriana"; this book includes an author interview conducted by journalist Seymour Hersh. -Ed.]" -Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2006
Baer, the American intelligence officer on whom the central character in the film " Syriana "was modeled, makes his fiction debut with this shrewd and rather alarming exploration of events surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To call the book an "alternate history" conjures up notions of science fiction, which this novel definitely is not, but, on the other hand, to assume that Baer is postulating that what happens here actually happened in real life is equally inappropriate. The book is a novel and a very believable one: leave it at that. The plot, which revolves around a CIA officer whose personal investigation into Osama bin Laden takes him into dark and dangerous territory, is extremely well crafted, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the author, an expert on terrorism (and on Al-Qaeda, in particular), fills the book with the kind of detail that will make readers feel as though they have completed a crash course in international intelligence. This is the kind of stuff that could make a terrific flick, but it's doubtful that a Hollywood blockbuster could capture the subtlety that Baer brings to his story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)