FOR over 20 years, Robert Baer worked as a CIA field officer in the Middle East, using his fluency in Farsi and Arabic to, as his government citation states, “repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country.” Last year, the icing on the cake was that actor George Clooney played Baer in “Syriana,” the film adaptation of Baer’s 2002 memoir “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism.” Now the former agent turns the camera on himself for the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” in which he revisits the Middle East to interview relatives, friends and associates of suicide bombers, attend militant rallies, and outline the evolution of the quasireligious terrorism movement.
Many of your interview subjects had never gone on record before, or in some cases ever met a Westerner before. How did you convince them to talk to you?
The producers had spent years getting inside I.R.A.
[Irish Republican Army] families and documenting them. They brought that experience, and married it to my experience with the Middle East. I’d never had the experience of talking to families like this before.
But it was more than that – it was also about getting into Iran. The documentary revolves around Iran’s key role in spreading terrorism.
I’m still at a loss to figure out why they let me in.
You describe 13-year-old Iranian, Hossein Fahmideh as the first suicide bomber in 1980.
What distinguished him from the “martyrs” before who willingly died in battle?
The fact that he strapped explosives around himself.
This wasn’t a question of charging the enemy lines, it was what we would call suicide.
There was no coming back, no chance of survival.
He apparently went out on his own, without telling his parents, and hooked up with some unit. He wasn’t an adult.
Did you get a sense of anger or injustice from the families of suicide bombers that you met?
The parents will always say that the child was absolutely normal, had no problems, good student, loving family member. Like we would with a football player:
smart kid, just wanted to play ball, blah blah blah.
There’s really no regret within in the family. It’s a sacrifice for the tribe, if you like. They don’t feel that they’ve been manipulated.
It’s a consensus within the family – there are no doubts like we have about Iraq or Vietnam, or even working for the federal government.
These people are absolutely committed to this cause.
During these interviews, was there any point at which martyrdom actually made sense to you?
You know, both sides have a logic that they engage in.
Which, once you stand back, you don’t see it. When I was talking to them, I never challenged their beliefs, because what’s the point? You simply discuss their logic because that’s all you care about, getting inside their heads.
If they’re using this against a military target in Israel or the Marines, it’s more on our logical plane. If you’re a lone suicide bomber walking into an Israeli base, you can say that this is almost a military action. But once it becomes nihilistic, like bin Laden in Iraq, it’s gotten completely out of hand. It’s just for sheer slaughter, for pornography of violence.
After chronicling the past and present of the suicide-bomber cult, what do you see as its future?
It’s going to implode on itself. It’s going to become so destructive that you’re going to see the Islamic community turning against it. The whole motivation behind it will fall away. I hate to put it this way, but it’s a fad, almost.
When you have 12 suicide bombings a day [in Iraq], that’s a record. But I think it’s the beginning of the end. It’s a dead end because the logic takes them into killing just anyone. The Khmer Rouge burnt themselves out over slaughter. It’s going to happen with this movement.
How did you like “Syriana”?
And how much influence did you have on George Clooney’s performance?
I thought it was great. It was a serious movie, it was taken seriously, and it got good reviews. How can you complain?
When you’re in the CIA, you tend to look at the world a bit bleakly. Especially when you’re following terrorists.
You’re always dealing with betrayal – either you’re being betrayed or you’re getting people to betray someone else. I would like to think I contributed to [Clooney’s] always sort of looking around. And the whole idea of him being bewildered when the ultimate betrayal comes from Washington.
How does a guy in a fairly rough trade get surprised like that? I thought it was an interesting characterization.
But I don’t know if he had figured all that out before I met him.