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Sounds like one to check out! Robert Baer's audacious first novel is going to be controversial because of both who he is and what he says. He retired after 20 years with the CIA and wrote a memoir, "See No Evil," that inspired "Syriana," the murky Middle East spy flick starring George Clooney. Now, in "Blow the House Down," Baer gives us a fictional version of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that high-level CIA officials could have stopped the terrorists but had other priorities. It's fiction, of course, but in an interview with journalist Seymour Hersh that the publisher sent along with the novel, Baer says: "It's like 'Primary Colors.' There's a lot more truth in this book than is apparent."
The spy novel that "Blow the House Down" recalls more than any other is Charles McCarry's "The Tears of Autumn," an alternative scenario for the Kennedy assassination. The difference is that McCarry's take on Kennedy's death, while fascinating, didn't ruffle many feathers, while Baer's angry version of 9/11 makes you wonder if the "house" in his title is the CIA itself.
The novel begins with an all-too-real event, the 1984 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Bill Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut. Baer's hero, Max Waller, a young agent then, admired Buckley and became obsessed with finding his killers. We flash forward to June 2001. The rebellious Waller ("I'd reported one too many unpalatable truths, poked Foggy Bottom in the eye one too many times") has been called back from the field to CIA headquarters in Langley. He searches the agency's archives until he finds a photograph that he thinks may lead to Buckley's kidnappers. Osama bin Laden is in the photo, along with a Palestinian terrorist and several other men. The head of one man has been clipped out of the photo, but Waller becomes convinced he is an American.
Waller shows the picture to a colleague who soon dies mysteriously. His stubborn curiosity gets him fired by the CIA, but he continues his investigation. It takes him to a Palestinian refugee camp, an Israeli prison, a luxury hotel in Lebanon and banks in Zurich. As he questions terrorists, Saudi princes and an ex-CIA colleague who's become a rich wheeler-dealer, he picks up hints of a new terrorist attack on America, one that might involve airplanes. Because it's the summer of 2001, we know what Waller does not, that something fateful is indeed coming. Waller issues warnings that are ignored. The suspense becomes harrowing as that bright September morning dawns.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/04/AR2006060400823.html |
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