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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Blow the House Down
By Robert Baer (Crown)
Review by Allan Fallow
, May 2006
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I've read Blow the House Down twice now and still don't understand the plot, but you read Bob Baer for his insider's outrage, not his narrative niceties.
After 20 years as a CIA field operative in Europe and the Middle East, Baer quit the Agency in 1999 for the same reason so many old hands do: he had seen or learned too many truths to stomach. Shunning the default spook retirement—golf, poker, tennis, and the track—Baer channeled his anger into two blistering indictments of his former employer. See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism appeared in 2002 and was later made into the George Clooney flick Syriana. It was followed in 2003 by Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. Both books were published with extensive strike-throughs by Agency censors.
Now Baer is back, spinning his tales as fiction, and fans of his earlier screeds will be happy to know that his bile remains at full boil. As the novel opens it's June 2001, and Baer's thinly veiled alter ego—46-year-old CIA agent Max Waller, whose professional conduct ranges from lone wolf to loose cannon—finds himself facing a kangaroo court on the seventh floor of Langley HQ. For reasons he will spend the next 258 pages frantically trying to untangle, Max is being framed for alleged ties to a vicious Nicaraguan drug lord.
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The grand inquisitor of this star chamber—"the CIA's premier spy catcher"—is drawn with such delicious venom that his real-world counterpart, whoever that may be, will squirm at Baer's letter-perfect portrayal: "Vince Webber…was sitting at the end of the conference table, examining the back of his hand, acting bored as only a Romanian pimp can. He hadn't changed a bit in all these years—pitted face, diamond Air Force Academy ring, gold neck chain gleaming through a diaphanous white shirt, gold Rolex watch."
But at least Webber is a member of the Old Guard, and as such he satisfies Baer's doctrine of "Better the devil you know:"
A whole new generation of PowerPoint and one-page-memo wizards had taken over the top floor in recent years. The average age was maybe thirty. They all lived in townhouses somewhere down I-95 in Virginia…in "planned communities" where the schools are good and crime means running a stop sign…. The places I'd spent my life in they'd only seen in their nightmares.
Intent on clearing his name, Max enlists the aid and comfort of two cronies whose loyalties will be tested—and questioned—in a sinuous sequence of imagined events culminating in 9/11.
One of them is Frank Beckman, the former number two in the Agency's Directorate of Operations, who has since reinvented himself as a multimillionaire consultant to the oil-rich. Beckman's "tastefully imposing Georgian mansion" on posh Tuttle Place in D.C. harbors two crown jewels: "a Modigliani nude, Frank's newest acquisition," and his exotic daughter, India, a CIA legacy who pops up conveniently in all sorts of global hot spots, including—spoiler alert!—Max Waller's hotel bed.
The second ally offering Max exoneration is far less fictional. In fact, he is a real-life FBI Special Agent named John O'Neill, director of the Bureau's National Security Division. "O'Neill never stopped reminding me that he caught bank robbers for his living, while I robbed banks for mine." Baer's decision to include O'Neill and other real-world walk-ons in a work of fiction—among them George Tenet, Porter Goss, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Daniel Pearl, and Osama bin Laden—reveals a first-time novelist chafing at his new fictive raiment. Baer strains to defend the overlap in a discordant epilogue, where he coyly maintains that "There's a lot more truth in this book than is apparent."
In the novel itself, one core truth becomes increasingly apparent: the plot hinges precariously on a photographic McGuffin. Before being drummed out of the Agency, Max braves its musty basement Archives to disinter the snapshot of a curious quintet: "In the middle [of the five men] was Osama bin Laden…. To the left of bin Laden was…a Westerner, but his head had been carefully scissored out…. Faces and other identifiers of CIA officers get cropped out of photos sent in from the field, even when they're marked Secret."
Waller's crusade to identify bin Laden's four companions takes him on a Bourne Identity-style chase through New York, Paris, Zurich, Italy, Cyprus, Israel, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and the treacherous Biqa' Valley of Lebanon. Here the novel finds its footing and Baer is at his best, deftly describing the worst parts of the world where he spent the best years of his life: "One Palestinian refugee camp looks pretty much like another," Max observes as he ferrets out a Hamas terrorist who may or may not be able to ID the "headless horseman" in the photo. "Unfinished cinder-block houses intersected by dirt roads, mounds of rotting trash, posters of suicide bombers pasted on the walls. But the Gaza Strip's Beach Camp is different—narrower streets, more rubble, more menacing. Although the Israelis regularly hit the place with drones and F-16s, Israeli assassination teams stayed clear of it. It was too dangerous."
Burning through his supply of fake passports to shake off his pursuers, Max pauses during a clandestine border crossing to wonder if spy-versus-spy might not be a younger man's game:
It didn't look that tough when I planned the route. The Colle [del Nivolet] sits more than twelve hundred meters below Val d'Isère, less than ten miles away, across terrain I had traversed before. But I was almost thirty years younger then…. by night, on skis, in my mid-forties, it was a miracle I made it.
Equally miraculous is the novel's short course in tradecraft. To cover up a bungled break-in, we learn, you can always smash a window at the site with a dead pigeon fired from a five-inch pneumatic gun. The bird's body should explain away the tripped alarm long enough for you to escape.
In sketching a frighteningly feasible alternative history of the 9/11 architects and their diabolical design, Blow the House Down evokes the reigning champion of revisionist espionage fiction, The Tears of Autumn, by fellow Agency alum Charles McCarry. If you haven't read that 1974 masterpiece, this newer novel can wait until you do. Baer's chillingly cynical premise—he who blows the house down may profit from picking up the pieces—will still be there to grab you by the throat.
Recovering CIA brat Allan Fallow is the managing editor of AARP Books.
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