Here is the gist of the comments Baer made in The Atlantic article. A long article that I've edited to deal only with SA issues
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Thank you very much for having me this evening. I’m going to give this talk without notes because I’ve been warned by the CIA that should I speak in public with notes then I’m subject to their regulations, so I will try to make this as coherent as I can....
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It’s very important in international relations to strike when you can. It’s going to be that much harder today. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know how widespread this phenomenon of bin Laden is in Saudi Arabia. When I was out there, I was told by one of the intelligence services in the Gulf that of the 15 Saudis who had been arrested by the Iranians and turned over to Saudi Arabia, none of them were interrogated. The Saudis were from prominent families, and the Saudi government didn’t feel they could do it. They were worried about their police, their intelligence services, and what’s going to happen.
My opinion, after having spent 25 years in the Middle East and Central Asia and the Islamic countries, is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen in this war. It’s not going to be a clean war. There could be a lot of changes. I think there are smart people in this town; I think it’s about time for change in the Middle East. The status quo is no longer acceptable. I think between now and January or February, whenever this war occurs, it’s going to be a very interesting time, to say the least.
I think it’s best for questions now.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Question: With respect to your final segment there, what you were hearing from your Iraqi friends, the logical question is, in your view how equipped is Saddam Hussein’s regime to go after those other nations?
Mr. Baer: I get the impression that he’s not really much concerned. I ask them the question, is Saddam going to fire rockets into Saudi Arabia? Is he going to try to set the oil fields on fire, and they said no. He said that a war in itself will cause the reaction he wants. I said, what about Israel? They said, oh, definitely he’ll drop some Scuds into Israel, hoping that the Israelis become involved, that they send troops in or retaliate, which would serve his purposes.
They’re convinced that Saddam has, I guess we would say, lost his mind, but this is Armageddon for him.
Question: You just said the magic word. Based on the amount of time that you’ve been in that area, and if in fact we initiate preemptive strikes and he’s moved all of those targets that we’re looking for inside urban areas, can it produce World War III?
Mr. Baer: It could produce World War III, but what I’m more worried about is Saudi Arabia. I don’t know how many oil experts are here, but I’ve been told the oil fields in Saudi Arabia are concentrated in the eastern province. All of the workers that work in the oil fields, the Saudi workers, are Shiite Muslims for the most part. They are beholden to or follow the leadership of Karbala in Iraq. The religious leadership in Karbala has said that it will support Saddam until the end.
Let’s take the worst-case scenario. If you take 20 kilos of plastique, that’s not much, and you put it in the right place on a gas-oil separation tower at Abqaiq, for instance, it will release hydrogen sulfide into the air, which will make that equipment untouchable for two years. Abqaiq produces 6 million barrels a day. What will this do to the American economy? What if you take Iraqi oil off the market, plus Kuwaiti oil and Saudi oil, for a period of six months or a year in a prolonged war? You think the Dow is doing badly today.
This is a worst-case scenario. But I don’t think the people in Washington in this government know. The worst thing you can do when you’ve left the CIA is comment on current intelligence because I just don’t know. I have no access. But before I left the CIA in December 1997, I got into the computers and I wanted to learn about Saudi Arabia. It’s the key country in the Middle East for us. It’s got 25 percent of the world’s oil resources. I was looking for reports on divisions in the family, fundamentalism, support for bin Laden, what’s going on in the mosques. There was nothing there. No CIA reporting. The National Security Agency has virtually nothing, there’s nothing from the Defense Department, and State Department reporting was conversations with government officials, who of course have their own agenda: to convince the United States that things are going well.
What I’m trying to say is, we really don’t know whether this worst-case scenario is going to come about. I don’t think there is anybody in this town who can really tell you what’s happening in Saudi Arabia. I was in the United Arab Emirates and asked them. They said, listen, this guy, Mustaffa Ahmed, whoever he is, that crossed over from Saudi Arabia, I think on the 10th, collected the money that was sent back from the suicide bombers and then disappeared. The United Arab Emirates said, we don’t know who this guy is. I mean, if they don’t know who he is—was he a Saudi government official, was he a member of the royal family? Is he part of a much larger group? He’s just disappeared. They’re getting no cooperation from Saudi Arabia.
It’s what we don’t know that scares me, not what we do. |
