Robert Baer

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. He is the intelligence columnist for Time.

Policy
Salon.com describes him as part of a loose grouping of dissident ex-CIA personnel, including Reuel Marc Gerecht, Howard Hart and the pseudonymous Edward G. Shirley.

Iran
His current writings and concerns focus on Iran. In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, he suggested that the election may have been "a coup d'etat by the Revolutionary Guard against the clerics."

Baer interpreted pictures from the June election as coming from upper-class districts, not the poorer ones that support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "Before we settle on the narrative that there has been a hard-line takeover in Iran, an illegitimate coup d'état, we need to seriously consider the possibility that there has been a popular hard-line takeover, an electoral mandate for Ahmadinejad and his policies."

In 2007, he wrote of a potential U.S. attack on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which did not happen although rumors might have been a deterrent.

Iraq
He said the CIA orchestrated a bomb and sabotage campaign between 1992 and 1995 in Iraq via one of the resistance organizations, Ayad Allawi, leader the Iraqi National Accord, was installed as prime minister by the U.S.-led coalition after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The campaign had no apparent effect in toppling Saddam Hussein's rule.

According to Baer, the bombing campaign against Baghdad included both government and civilian targetsm. The civilian targets included a movie theater and a bombing of a school bus and schoolchildren were killed. No public records of the secret bombing campaign are known to exist, and the former U.S. officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. "But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then."