CIA's Robert Baer

“… when I was living in Beirut and ran into a Qatari Prince, a man named, they called Bad Hamid or Hamid bin Jasim. He’d been chief of the police in Doha, and he told me that they had been intercepting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s phone calls and plans to hijack airplanes and use them as wea[pons]”

Whilst the video clip is cut short, I see no viable alternative to that full last word being 'weapons', and therefore Robert Baer clearly admits to being warned in 1998 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plans to use hijacked airplanes as kamikaze piloted missiles. The clip is from a longer Youtube video titled “Qatar Support for Terrorism: 9/11” and is preceded by Baer saying: “The first time I heard his name [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was when I was living in Beirut… ”, an assertion that contradicts all facts. Writing about the same meeting with the dissident prince in his book Sleeping with the Devil (2004), Baer says: “But I did care about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and I already knew about the so-called Bojinka plot – KSM’s plan to blow up U.S. passenger airlines.” and “When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed left Qatar in 1996, I wasn’t sure of the circumstances”. And given that CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle has stated the CIA knew who and where (Qatar) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was in 1995, and in January 1996 KSM was indicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it is unbelievable that Baer didn’t know who KSM was prior to his meetings with a dissident Qatari prince in Beirut.

But the starkest and most concerning difference between Baer’s writing and the Sky News interview is the warning he was given about KSM. In his 2002 book See No Evil, Baer says the warning was KSM “is going to hijack some planes” and in Sleeping with the Devil the warning was “[KSM’s] target of choice is airplanes” – both suitably vague enough to be able to claim he had no clear warning of 9/11. But recounting Baer’s undated Sky News interview, the 9/11 warning he was given in Spring 1998 could not have been clearer. The other startling omission from Baer’s books is that the Intel had come from phone calls intercepted (and therefore recorded) by the Qatari government, begging the questions when was that Intel collected, and what they did with those recordings? Did the Qatari government share that critical Intel with the American government and if not, why not? As for when the intercepted phone calls occurred, I'll speculate it was after September 1997, based on my first-hand knowledge of the 9/11 plot's origin detailed in 'Concurrent Events' below. And why did Baer omit such critical details from both books but then repeat them in a Sky News interview? Confusion, hazy memories, being stoned? Or perhaps an accidental lapse in his cover story?

Robert Baer's Source, the Dissident Qatari Prince

Hamid bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani was the commander in chief of the Qatar Police from 1972 to 1977 and Minister for Economy and Trade from 1977 to 1986, so it’d be hard to have a better placed or more qualified source, but why was he a Qatari dissident living in exile? In June 1995 there was a palace coup in Qatar, when Crown Prince Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani had supplanted his father, Emir Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, with Western backing. A counter-coup was attempted in February 1996, led by Baer’s source. The counter-coup failed, Baer’s source fled in to exile in Lebanon, and several of Qatar's traditional Arab allies were implicated in the plot, namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt. These shenanigans and alleged alliances only begin to hint at how complicated and fractured both the Middle East and their western backers' relationships are, especially when taken in the following context: the Qatari government employed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a no-show job from 1993 to 1996, helped him evade US capture after his 1993 WTC bombing indictment, and, according to Baer’s source, provided KSM with twenty blank passports to facilitate his international travel. And the cherry on top of all that is KSM’s US indictment was based on his transferring $660 from Qatar to the WTC bombers in New York on 3 November 1992.

Baer's Response and the Dissident Prince's Extraordinary Rendition

Baer said he passed that most specific of warnings – KSM’s plans to hijack airplanes and use them as weapons - by email to an old friend still working at the CIA. He claims the reply came back that the CIA weren’t interested. And then bizarrely, given the gravity of the warning and the validity of his source, instead of making further approaches to any of America’s many Intelligence agencies, Baer says he passed the information to a New York Times (NYT) journalist – including his source’s name! Baer goes on to say that before the NYT journalist could meet with the dissident prince, the prince was kidnapped by the Qatari government. A mid-air interception of a private flight over the Mediterranean by the Qatari air force was followed by his extraordinary rendition back to Qatar. Now he was in Qatari custody where his wife claims he was drugged and sedated for extended periods then tried for his role in the 1996 coup attempt. He was sentenced to death but that was commuted to imprisonment till 2008 (the prince died in 2012). So, after having effectively done nothing with that clearest of warnings, Baer had just lost his source. I say ‘lost’ but all the evidence points to him both compromising and betraying his source, almost as though Baer was both protecting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and ensuring KSM's latest plan – to use hijacked planes as weapons – went ahead unhindered.

Concurrent Events

1. Robert Baer gave two months’ notice when leaving the CIA, meaning he handed his resignation in around 4 October 1997. According to my first-hand evidence and assertions that was just ten days after KSM had initiated the 9/11 plot on 24 September 1997, during my visit to his front company in the multi-billion-dollar Hayel Saeed Anam Group headquarters in Yemen (17-miles south of Al Qaidah town). While my assertion may be dismissed, it is factual (according to the 2004 9/11 Commission report) that in September 1997 9/11 hijacker/pilot Ziad Jarrah ‘abruptly’ switched from studying dentistry in north Germany to studying aircraft engineering in Hamburg. That marked the coalescence of the Hamburg Cell that comprised all the 9/11 pilots, giving great weight to my claim of when the 9/11 plot began. How could those two events be connected? My business trip to KSM’s front company was setup by my employer’s US sales agent David Dean. Two days after I linked Dean to the CIA contractor (Billy Waugh) who admitted working with Al Qaeda operators in 1990s Yemen, Dean committed suicide by drowning in Lake Hartwell, Georgia on 8 January 2020.

2. I gave my last and clearest 9/11 warning on 2 December 1997, just two days before Baer flew to Beirut on the same day he left the CIA. How could those two events be connected? I gave that last and clearest warning in a meeting setup by David Dean to a man called Dan Barkochba in Brooklyn New York and included details of my September 1997 conversations in Yemen. Barkochba is an Israeli/American who I now believe is a Mossad agent, given that his Messianic last name – it is Aramaic language meaning ‘Son-of-a-Star’ – is almost certainly a nom-de-guerre. That coincidence of dates could be the reason for the urgency of Baer’s travel to Beirut on the same day he left the CIA, i.e. no holiday or celebration – it was straight back to work for Baer, only now working for his ‘friend back in Washington’. But why would Baer go to meet a dissident Qatari prince in Beirut when I had told Barkochba my 9/11 warning conversations had been in Yemen? After KSM fled US capture in 1996 Qatar, there’s very strong evidence (an August 1996 order for industrial quantities of TNT component chemicals) he went to the Hayel Saeed Anam Group HQ in Yemen, and I know he was there in September 1997. That would have made it very easy for Qatar to monitor his phone calls from Yemen and perhaps the Qatari government in their continued efforts to protect KSM were concerned the Intel they’d collected had been leaked to their dissident prince in Beirut.