Two married ex-spies describe life in the CIA and their lives after leaving the spying business. Excerpted from “Dayna & Robert Baer: A Husband and Wife True-Life Spy Story,” March 29, 2011.

DAYNA & ROBERT BAER, Former CIA Operatives; Authors, The Company We Keep
ROBERT ROSENTHAL, Executive Director, The Center for Investigative Reporting

 

ROSENTHAL: Dayna, tell us why you joined the CIA.

DAYNA: I did my undergrad at Berkeley, then I was getting a masters in social welfare at UCLA. I just went through on-campus recruiting. It wasn’t like they had a booth and CIA people were there recruiting; this wasn’t out in the open. But they had a little poster up somewhere, and I just sort of threw my résumé in a pile.

I didn’t read spy books when I was a kid or anything like that, but I was intrigued with the possibility of travel and something a little different from what I grew up with.

ROSENTHAL: Robert, one of the interesting things in your book was your very personal account of the impact of your life on your family. Why did you choose to get into that in this book?

ROBERT: This book is about alienation. When I was 10 years old, my mother divorced and took me to Europe for three years. [We] lived in a car essentially, driving all around Europe; we drove to Moscow. So the whole idea of exile, abandonment, leaving family behind was part of my life. It wasn’t something strange. I could get up and leave and go somewhere, and I think that’s why the CIA hired me. I was 22 years old. I was studying Mandarin at Berkeley. I didn’t even have a place to live. I was sleeping on the couch of a friend. He suggested I get a job, and as a joke I called the Federal Center here, and asked for the CIA. Seriously; it was that random.

ROSENTHAL: Dayna, tell us how you met and the circumstances of your assignment, and what your first impression was of this guy.

DAYNA: Well, first of all, my training was a totally different path than Bob’s. I trained to learn how to blend in any situation and be invisible. I went through a lot of weapons training, high-speed driving and crazy skills. You know, you can learn to drive at 70 miles per hour and run a car off the road. All these really useful skills.

I was also trained to do a lot of surveillance work: Could you sit at a bus stop for four hours without anybody noticing you – anywhere in the world? A lot of disguise, that type of thing. I was assigned to work for an operation that Bob was doing in Sarajevo. I showed up and I was just told to meet “Harold” at a restaurant in town. I show up, and he’s driving a lime-green car that’s got Orangina plastered down the side. So, the sparks, at first, were not – there was nothing like that. In fact, I was a little concerned for my team’s welfare at that point.

ROSENTHAL: In the book you get into detail about the placement [in Sarajevo] of the parabolic microphone [a secret listening device] and how it’s monitored. I guess that was one thing you were allowed to describe.

ROBERT: Yeah. By the way, every word of the book was cleared by the CIA. It’s just not worth it to be a whistleblower up against the CIA.

DAYNA: When you join there, you sign something that says anything you write basically for public consumption has to be cleared by them, so we worked with them for about a year to make sure this book was cleared. It’s also the reason why we can’t really give prepared speeches.

ROBERT: We can’t talk from notes.

DAYNA: In an apartment building, the parabolic mic can read through walls, across the river, into another building on the other side of the Miljacka River, that runs right through Sarajevo. It was getting us names and addresses, and we were coordinating that with taking photos of license plates. The whole idea was to match it all up and run down who these people were. Once we got this information, then what were we going to do with it? We’re in Sarajevo; it’s not like you could call the DMV. How do you get where these people live and exactly who their names are? That led into more of what Bob’s job was, and that was to try to recruit somebody. We targeted a local policeman who could help us possibly run traces on the information that we got.

ROSENTHAL: This question comes from the audience, about a female’s role in the intelligence world and the unique things you may be asked to do or skills you bring.

ROBERT: It’s a lot easier for a woman to carry a pistol, because the last person they suspect in a room if things go bad is the petite woman pulling a pistol and starting to shoot people. As apposed to the guy with a buzz haircut, in a vest, because you immediately suspect him. The CIA has figured this out, how to go invisible when it wants to.

DAYNA: It’s so much easier for a woman to do a lot of things. You’re just less noticeable and less suspicious. I did lots of different things. In Athens, I rode a motorcycle that had a camera attached to the back of it, and it was just easier for me to ride it in, a beat-up old motorcycle with a helmet on my head, and park it and turn a camera on to watch something.

There really is a big need and a role for women that makes it easier in the work that I did. My job was called an operations officer, so that really ran the gamut of a lot of different sort of things. A woman in a lot of the countries where Bob worked would have had a lot harder time, not just because that’s the way those cultures worked.

ROBERT: They’re male chauvinists. A woman can’t call up a man and say, “Hey, do you want to go out to dinner? I’m not going to tell you why,” and not [have him] think that something else is going on.

ROSENTHAL: That’s true here too.

ROBERT: I mean, try that in Saudi Arabia.

You know, I had women working for me. What I found is that they were more meticulous in their reporting. They’re better at the detail, checking sub-sources, getting the complete story than men are when you’re debriefing somebody.

ROSENTHAL: You’re no longer in the agency, but explain your leaving.

DAYNA: Like I said, we met during this operation in Sarajevo that went bad. By the way, during that whole operation he did not know my true name. We didn’t connect again until we were back at headquarters and I was walking down a hallway and he said, “Hey, Riley.” I turned around and said, “Oh, sorry, it’s Dayna.” He asked me to dinner and things snowballed from there.

ROBERT: I proposed, “Let’s take a hiking trip in the Alps.”

DAYNA: And, for some crazy reason, I accepted.

We continued to work for a little over a year after that, but the CIA is a big, huge place, and my job was different from his. I was sent on other operations overseas and he was sent a couple places. We both had former marriages to people outside of the CIA that, in my case, failed because there’s too much alienation and separation. There’s no emails or calling home, because you’re working under a different name. It’s easy to see how those sorts of relationships don’t survive all that. Bob has three children from a prior marriage that didn’t know he was in the CIA until many, many years later.

Once we saw that here we were, trying to be a couple – unfortunately, and it may have changed in the years since we’ve gone, it’s very difficult to find a two-career assignment everywhere. Besides, Bob was sort of the Pigpen of the CIA. He always had this little dirty cloud following him around because he was always getting in trouble for one thing or the other. Any chief of a country that was going to take me was going to look twice at taking Bob, because he was always a risky business person.

So we’d be separated again, and we’d already been through that and lost marriages. Bob was sort of at the end of his career. He talked me into leaving. I took a leave of absence, just cause I wasn’t sure how things were going to work out between the two of us. We moved to Beirut right after we left.

ROBERT: I promptly got her into trouble.

DAYNA: We promptly met a Gulf prince living in exile in Beirut because he was trying to overthrow his country, and we became friends. We went to his house in Damascus. We met his friends, a nice banker and his wife. One night back in Beirut, we were having dinner with the banker and his wife, and the banker leaned over and said, “I’ve got a really good business plan. Let’s borrow money from the Gulf prince, and then we’ll just have him killed and we won’t have to pay it back.” We got home that night, and I said, “This isn’t really a good business plan.” That was another country we had to pack up and move out from very quick. We left all our new appliances and all our new furniture we just bought, figuring we’d certainly spent a while in a rough trade, but we weren’t assassins, and just hanging out with people who were proposing murder for hire was probably not a good idea.

We went to Iraq.

ROBERT: I told Dayna, “The war is coming in 2003, and my friends live in the western desert in Ramadi. I’ve known them for years, they’re Bedouin, very close, pillars of Saddam’s regime.” I figured the friendship was so close we could go and spend the war with them and wait for the American invasion.

DAYNA: ABC News asked us to go do this.

ROBERT: Wait for it and film it. They called up one day and left a voicemail, and Dayna picked it up, and it was ABC News saying my contract was ready. But I’d forgotten to tell Dayna.

DAYNA: So I promptly reprimanded him for that. Then I sort of got over that. Saddam was sort of his focus for a long time, so I know he wanted to be there for the end of Saddam. So I said, “Fine, go.” But ABC could not find a cameraman willing to go with him to Iraq, so he volunteered me. So ABC trained me to use a camera, and we went to Iraq. The journalists were all gearing up and were all moving between Jordan and Beirut and Damascus at the time, waiting for the appropriate time to be able to go on into Baghdad. We met with Bob’s tribal friends in Damascus and discussed how we were going to get across the border, and they were just like, “You take this dirt trail, and you go across the border, and you call us, and we’ll come and pick you up.”

ROBERT: The Syrians promptly detained us when we were trying to get across the border. So I had another plan, and that was a Jordanian prince. There’s a smuggling route, and he said, “There’s no problem at all.” So he sat us down for lunch and said he’d found some Bedouin who he’d give 100 sheep and they’d smuggle us across the border. Dayna is still deferring to me on all these plans, thinking I have knowledge of the Middle East. She knew it was a bad sign when we got a call from the tribes saying there was somebody very important who wants to meet us in Ramadi. They couldn’t tell us who it is on the phone.

DAYNA: So we made plans to go in, and we were waiting for our truck that we were going to ride in the back of with 100 sheep across the border, and it became a very sad story, because we got an email that the house and compound where we were going to stay had been hit with six American missiles, and all the people were killed, mostly women and children who had all gathered in one room. We pieced together the story from the people who – we did go into Baghdad with ABC News, and then we did go out to the compound to pay our respects and talk to the people who had survived. It was then that we figured out there had been some sort of military connection where they had –

ROBERT: A half-brother of Saddam was waiting to meet us, and we heard this much later. In another house was Saddam, and at this point Saddam was on the run. He had heard of me from the coup that I tried in ’95. So they just assume you’re still in the CIA or can find the CIA. He wanted to cut a deal. So what happened was outside the house we were supposed to stay in, Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan, made a phone call which was intercepted by whichever national security agency, and that’s when they fired the six missiles down the signal.

ROSENTHAL: These were men you’d sort of cultivated, and really the meeting was set up to meet you, and they were killed. So how do you react to that?

ROBERT: Dayna does the travel plans now.

ROSENTHAL: For most Americans, Iraqis are stereotypes. You knew them as people and friends, so part of your life is creating assets, people you work with, and you develop relationships, which most people don’t understand.

DAYNA: It’s very much all about relationships and loyalty and trust. In the spying world, you can have all the gadgets or electronic things, but it’s really that human element. That translates into family, too, because we both had losses and estrangement from family because we had been gone for so long and because we weren’t able to tell people where we were or what we did, that spying is a lot like family. If you don’t tend that human element, you’re going to watch what’s of value just slip away.

ROBERT: You go away, and you go to strange places, and people are not interested in hearing your stories. They move on. They make other bonds, and you come back a stranger. You just don’t get to win it back. People ask us why we wrote the book, and this is a book about family, a lot of it.

Think of the military: five, six deployments, what they’re asking to give up. I don’t support the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I can tell you what the soldiers are going through.

ROSENTHAL: Tell us the story of the failed coup you were involved in in ’95.

ROBERT: In 1994, I took two congressional aides to northern Iraq. We were smuggled in by the Kurds. This was Senator Bob Kerry’s aide and Senator Glenn’s aide. I took them to the Zab River, which was the dividing line between Iraqi troops and the Kurdish rebels.

Bill Clinton was considered indifferent to foreign policy. Senator Bob Kerry and Senator Glenn decided we really have to try to remove this madman, Saddam Hussein. The plan was to simply decapitate the regime and leave the system in place, avoid an invasion, get rid of a man who was the problem. I said, “Look, if we set up a base in northern Iraq, we can at least get Iraqi military officers, tank commanders, across the border to let us know if they want to get rid of Saddam.” If they ultimately said, “No,” fine, it’s their country. But they would need American recognition.

I was sent as chief of this base, with four other CIA people, in 1995. Went across the border, and almost immediately an Iraqi general approached us representing five senior generals in the Iraqi army and said, “We want to get rid of Saddam.” Their plan was to create some fighting in Baghdad. Saddam’s modus operandi was to go to Tikrit, where he had a palace. At that point, we had a colonel that had 12 tanks, and he was going to take them and their commanders and surround Saddam at his palace and invite him to step down or flatten the palace.

The national security advisor, Tony Lake, had not been informed of this coup, even though we’d written in black and white the hour it was going to start. It was going to start at 10 o’clock on March 4, but no one had told Tony Lake or the military. The Iranians found out and started sending platforms to the border, went on full alert. The Turkish army went on full alert, and the Iraqi army went on full alert. [General John] Shalikashvili, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is getting frantic calls saying, “We’re about to have World War III. What’s going on?” Someone told him, “Oh, by the way, the CIA is doing a coup.” He went through the ceiling, called Lake up at four in the morning and Lake found Clinton and called him into the Oval Office and said, “I can’t be national security advisor if the CIA is doing illegal coups.” He didn’t know anything about these messages. Somebody at the White House calls the attorney general and the FBI. Neither knows that this has all been documented. So my team comes back from Iraq; we’re met by the FBI on murder charges. When you get the national security advisor screaming about you in the Oval Office, you know your career has been sidetracked.

ROSENTHAL: You were not a solo actor; you were being directed.

ROBERT: Absolutely. I was smart enough to know when I was in Iraq that this was very bad. In the CIA there’s a very strict accounting for messages. So I couldn’t actually take the messages, but I turned to my communicator, a special forces major, and I said, “Copy down every number, the time it came in, and the key wording.” So when the investigation started, no one told the FBI about this, and I pulled these papers out and showed the FBI, and the FBI agents were just furious that they’d been drawn into this fiasco.

Could we have gotten rid of Saddam? Maybe. But to go back to our story, once you’ve been investigated in the CIA for murder, you’re working in the basement forever, behind the coffee machine.