Former CIA Agent Once Played by George Clooney Explains Why He Quit DC and Is Holing Up in the Rockies

When I first met ex-CIA officer Bob Baer in Washington DC, I thought, The guy looks nothing like George Clooney. But Clooney, who won an Academy Award playing Baer in the film Syriana, had in fact captured something about the posture, the pathos, the weariness of a CIA man who spends too many years getting filthy in the field - in the peculiar mire of the Middle East, no less - risking his life and being ignored for it. Clooney in the film cycles among the suits at Langley, the cubicled bureaucracy, looking somewhat like the only sane man in a mental ward.

So it was with Bob Baer in DC - unfamiliar ground, "a city of crazies," he said. He was heading back home, out west, to the little mountain village of Silverton, and when I met him there a few months later, he took me on the big tour. Silverton is a mining outpost turned tourist stop, but it still resonates with the dissident manners of men who dig silver out of the ground looking for paydirt and don't like the authorities interfering. The town is accessed by high passes where tractor trailers regularly fall off the cliffs in winter, and it has only one paved road, Main Street, and it has a church with upside-down crosses. Several residents - so Baer assured me - are licensed to own fully-automatic machineguns. "It's to shoot at the black helicopters," he laughed but didn't seem to be joking. The locals tell me the place has a tendency to welcome "people who messed up in some other life and come here to be nobody." I think Bob Baer came here partly because the CIA claimed he messed up. Maybe he did. Depends on who you talk to in this business, which is as it should be among professional liars.

Because maybe it was the Agency that messed up - this seems to be a CIA habit, the kind of habit that fails to see Al Qaeda on the horizon, that gets the country mired in Iraq, that makes you wonder, as a tax-paying citizen, whether the agency in its current incarnation has a reason for being other than to squander your money. It's something the citizens in Silverton might grouse about.

Robert Baer dedicated 21 years to the storied Central Intelligence Agency, beginning in 1976, at age 22. He was a believer. He trained to blow things up - the tradition of covert action from which the CIA was born - and, more important, to make sure Americans didn't get blown up. He trained to listen, watch, take notes. He dove into the cities of the Middle East, learning the spy game, learning to deceive and trick and be someone else, perfecting his Arabic, growing out his black beard, tanning his skin. The Middle East was his crucible and eventually his obsession. He became so good he passed as native, wandering Beirut in the 1980s during the civil war that ravaged Lebanon, wearing a headband that announced, in the calligraphy of the Qu'ran, We Crave Martyrdom. "These fucking Americans are everywhere," he'd tell his cabbies, looking to flush out martyrs. "We should blow up their embassy!" As early as 1983, he was chronicling the threat of Islamist terrorist networks in memos that he says few of the people who mattered in Langley or the Oval Office bothered to read. His work would win him the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal; Seymour Hersh, the dean of intelligence reporters in Washington DC and a personal friend, once called him the "best field operative the CIA had in the Middle East." The accolade from his higher-ups felt like cruel irony when years later the Islamists he warned about smashed into American shores.

When he left the Agency in 1998, he hunkered down and wrote about his time as a spy. His first two books - a memoir, See No Evil, and an expose, Sleeping with the Devil, about the demented US relationship with the Saudis - netted him a deal with Hollywood. But what Syriana as film could not capture - because, after all, it's a Hollywood operation and dedicated, like the CIA, to a good cover story, one that sells, keeps us watching without really understanding - is that the CIA isn't very good at doing what it's supposed to do, which is not to assassinate or to blow things up or to mount ill-conceived coups, but to know. The agency Baer labored for and loved has been credited in its lowest hours with so much foolery, atrocity, waste and deception, so much that is subterranean and unaccountable, and meanwhile it's supposed to know what the rest of us can't know, to get a grip on the secrets of the world, to be accountable in the final sense of providing what's called "intelligence" - not stupidity.