CIA Spook Robert Baer's Role in 9/11
by Anthony C Heaford --- @mancunianquiet on twitter --- Updated 12 September 2026
Robert Baer ended his twenty-one-year career as a CIA agent on 4 December 1997. That same afternoon he flew to Beirut to continue his spy craft for a new boss, someone he only describes as a ‘friend back in Washington’. Within a month Baer had made contact with and become a close confidant of the target he’d been sent to spy on - a dissident Qatari prince called Hamid bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani. Baer was invited to the dissident prince’s home and handed the most startling of Intelligence warnings – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was making 'plans to hijack airplanes and use them as weapons’. Baer recounts that conversation in this Sky News interview:
“… 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 weapons” - Youtube video titled “Qatar Support for Terrorism: 9/11”
Despite the video clip being cut slightly short, I see no alternative to that full last word being 'weapons'. Therefore Robert Baer clearly admits to being warned of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plans to use hijacked airplanes as kamikaze piloted missiles. KSM was already indicted for his roles in the 1993 World Trade Center bomb and Bojinka Plot, and 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”. Baer should have had no doubts as to the potential of this threat and should have acted accordingly.
Baer's Actions
Baer passed that most specific warning to three people - a friend at the CIA, a New York Times journalist and of course his friend back in Washington who'd sent him to Lebanon. Therefore we now know that in 1998 sections of the US Intelligence Community, Main Stream Media and the Washington Deep State all knew that Qatar's police had heard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planning 9/11. What did those three behemoths do with that 9/11 warning? Nothing. In fact worse than nothing - instead of giving their Qatari source witness protection they abandoned him. They possibly even sold him out to  KSM's former employer, the government of Qatar.
Baer's Source Kidnapped and Jailed
Baer's source in Beirut was Hamid bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, the commander-in-chief of the Qatar Police from 1972 to 1977 and Qatar's Minister for Economy and Trade from 1977 to 1986. It’d be hard to have a better placed or more qualified source, but why was he a dissident living in exile? In June 1995 there was a palace coup in Qatar, when Crown Prince Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani 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 and, according to Baer’s source, provided KSM with twenty blank passports to facilitate his international travel.
Syriana movie clip - 'Beirut Rules'
Not too long after Baer had revealled his source's name to US Intel, the Main Stream Media and the Washington Deep State, his source was kidnapped and imprisoned for ten years by the government of Qatar. A mid-air interception of Hamid bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani's private plane over the Mediterranean by the Qatari air force preceded his extraordinary rendition back to Qatar. His wife claims he was drugged and sedated for extended periods in Qatari custody and then tried for his role in the 1996 counter-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 his 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. 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). The 2004 9/11 Commission reported that in September 1997 9/11 hijacker-pilot Ziad Jarrah ‘abruptly’ switched from studying dentistry in north Germany to aircraft engineering in Hamburg. That marked the coalescence of the Hamburg Cell that comprised three 9/11 pilots and Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh whose double I dined with in Taiz on 25 September 1997, adding weight to my claim that's 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. In December 2019 I publicly linked Dean to CIA contractor Billy Waugh who admitted working with Al Qaeda operators in 1990s Yemen. Dean committed suicide by drowning in Lake Hartwell 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. 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’.
Questions and Suggested Actions
1. If Qatar's police were monitoring KSM's phone calls and knew about
his plans to hijack airplanes, what did they do with that Intelligence?
2. If Baer did pass that warning on to the CIA, declassify that submission
and the CIA's response (they weren't interested according to Baer).
3. Why has the USA ignored Qatar's government's complicity with 9/11's KSM?
Qatar employed KSM from 1993-96 and helped him escape capture by the FBI.
4. Name Baer's friend back in Washington who sent him to Beirut.
Most people's impression of Robert Baer is derived from George Clooney’s portrayal of an honourable agent struggling to prevent wars and terrorist attacks in the most difficult of circumstances. But the reality in 1997/98 Beirut is Baer was free agent and can be held personally responsible and accountable for his actions. I believe Baer's actions got his Qatari source for the 9/11 warning kidnapped and jailed, contributing directly to the success of the 9/11 attacks. 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 to be able to claim he had no clear warning of 9/11. But recounting Baer’s Sky News interview, the 9/11 warning he was given in Spring 1998 could not have been clearer.
Deemed by some to be fake news, this report places Baer in Sarajevo in 1991, provoking a civil war in Yugoslavia.