Robert and Dayna Baer. The Company We Keep: a husband-and-wife true-life spy story. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-307-87848-9. Bob Baer has lived an intensely interesting life as a CIA field operative. His most recent book, co-written with his wife Dayna, a former CIA shooter (trained in firearms for assassination), talks about the isolation and loneliness that comes with long overseas assignments gathering intelligence. As their respective marriages fell apart, they fell in love with each other. The Big Oil and espionage movie, Syriana, was based partly on Bob's 2003 CIA memoir See No Evil. George Clooney won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Bob in that film. Today, Bob continues to write magazine articles on the intelligence community and provide analysis for television news on US foreign policy in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Dayna Baer started her intelligence career in the dreary, tedious bureaucratic offices of the CIA's Los Angeles division, doing background checks on applicants. When she was offered training as a field operative—a shooter—she left the office and never looked back. Her first impressions of meeting an animated and ostentatious Bob on assignment together during the Balkans War are funny and touching. After, they met again in Langley, Virginia, walking the corridors of CIA headquarters, and didn't know each other's real name. Bob invited Dayna on a skiing trip in Europe and they've been together ever since. Leaving the CIA found the Baers struggling to find meaningful careers. Bob and Dayna wandered. They lived in Beirut and rural Colorado before settling in Berkley, California. Civilian life required deprogramming: Dayna still watches the hands of strangers for weapons and furtive movements, Bob immediately picks the spot on a car he will ram, when somebody abruptly stops in front of them, “… as soon as they open the door and their feet touch the ground. It's the perfect time.” There were other complications: Bob was investigated by the FBI for his role in a Kurdish assassination plot on Saddam Hussein, while he was working as a CIA operative during the Clinton administration. Bob assures the reader this unfortunate event was merely a case of departmental rivalry between the FBI and the CIA, two agencies notorious for bickering. The US Justice Department dropped the charges upon review. And Bob was afterward awarded the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal. The Baers decide to adopt a Pakistani child, which proves a rather lengthy, complicated and absurdist task. On the advice of their Pakistani lawyer, who helps broker the adoption, the Baers stop by a bustling souq to buy pirated DVDs of Syriana in order to present them to the presiding judge, as a means of convincing him that they are decent, caring people who will take proper care of the baby girl they are trying to adopt. During the down time of the adoption process, Bob hires taxi drivers in Islamabad, asking them to show him the house that bin Laden had lived in—a retired CIA spook's idea of a sight-seeing tour. Chapters telling tales of assignments and meetings with shady associates in the field are equally entertaining. This book paints a humanistic portrait of people working in the intelligence community. The propellant here is the stories within the frame story of the love affair, almost like the structure of The 1001 Nights. ** Willows is an assistant editor at Bikya Masr and a contributing writer to The Egyptian Gazette and its weekly edition, The Egyptian Mail. He can be reached at: [email protected] ShortURL: http://goo.gl/tlqee Tags: Bob Baer, CIA, Dayna Baer Section: Written Word
