Blow the House Down: A Novel

Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.

Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect — an Iranian math genius turned terrorist — the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max's suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.

Eluding a global surveillance net, Max — in the summer of 2001 — begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he'd sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.

Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.

"Former CIA agent Baer, author of the memoir See No Evil (2002), which inspired the film Syriana, offers the same closely observed details of intelligence work and life in his first novel, a political thriller. Unfortunately, a surfeit of subplots and dozens of characters slow the action down. One day in June 2001, veteran CIA case officer Max Waller is crudely and coldly removed from his office and job in Langley, Va. On September 11, 2001, what Waller has discovered sifting through live secrets and dead agents from Washington to Tehran comes together into a plausible alternate theory of how and why the Twin Towers were targeted. Whether or not readers buy into that theory, they're sure to enjoy Baer's jaundiced view of his former employer. When Waller finds himself being trailed by some obvious outsiders, he thinks, 'The FBI was capable of screwing up...but neither it nor the local police nor anyone else I could think of in this nation or abroad would be idiotic enough to field a white surveillance team in Harlem. For that, you needed incompetence on a colossal scale. Langley had to be behind it.' Author tour. (May)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Robert Baer's audacious first novel is going to be controversial because of both who he is and what he says. He retired after 20 years with the CIA and wrote a memoir, 'See No Evil,' that inspired 'Syriana,' the murky Middle East spy flick starring George Clooney. Now, in 'Blow the House Down,' Baer gives us a fictional version of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that high-level CIA officials could have... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) stopped the terrorists but had other priorities. It's fiction, of course, but in an interview with journalist Seymour Hersh that the publisher sent along with the novel, Baer says: 'It's like "Primary Colors." There's a lot more truth in this book than is apparent.'

The spy novel that 'Blow the House Down' recalls more than any other is Charles McCarry's 'The Tears of Autumn,' an alternative scenario for the Kennedy assassination. The difference is that McCarry's take on Kennedy's death, while fascinating, didn't ruffle many feathers, while Baer's angry version of 9/11 makes you wonder if the 'house' in his title is the CIA itself.

The novel begins with an all-too-real event, the 1984 kidnapping and subsequent murder of Bill Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut. Baer's hero, Max Waller, a young agent then, admired Buckley and became obsessed with finding his killers. We flash forward to June 2001. The rebellious Waller ('I'd reported one too many unpalatable truths, poked Foggy Bottom in the eye one too many times') has been called back from the field to CIA headquarters in Langley. He searches the agency's archives until he finds a photograph that he thinks may lead to Buckley's kidnappers. Osama bin Laden is in the photo, along with a Palestinian terrorist and several other men. The head of one man has been clipped out of the photo, but Waller becomes convinced he is an American.

Waller shows the picture to a colleague who soon dies mysteriously. His stubborn curiosity gets him fired by the CIA, but he continues his investigation. It takes him to a Palestinian refugee camp, an Israeli prison, a luxury hotel in Lebanon and banks in Zurich. As he questions terrorists, Saudi princes and an ex-CIA colleague who's become a rich wheeler-dealer, he picks up hints of a new terrorist attack on America, one that might involve airplanes. Because it's the summer of 2001, we know what Waller does not, that something fateful is indeed coming. Waller issues warnings that are ignored. The suspense becomes harrowing as that bright September morning dawns.

When I compared Baer's novel to McCarry's, I didn't mean they are alike in style. McCarry writes shimmering prose. Baer's style is that of a good private-eye novelist. Waller is a wisecracking, trouble-prone protagonist in the tradition of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, and Baer's fast-moving narrative is filled with colorful characters who mostly are not to be trusted. Some are real-life figures such as the admired FBI anti-terrorism expert John O'Neill, who died on 9/11, and others seem to be CIA notables whose names have been changed to avoid legal unpleasantries. One of Baer's villains is a half-mad billionaire whose schemes suggest that high-level government officials can be had if the price is right. There's an abundance of inside baseball in this spy thriller.

What most of us want to know, of course, is how many of its insinuations are true — or simply an ex-agent's sour grapes. It is worth noting that the book comes equipped with praise from leading journalists who've studied the CIA closely: Hersh, David Wise, Thomas Powers and David Ignatius among them. I don't take their comments to mean they endorse every plot twist, but they seem to be saying that Baer has the spirit of things right." Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"The plot...is extremely well crafted, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the author...fills the book with the kind of detail that will make readers feel as though they have completed a crash course in international intelligence." Booklist

"Baer...puts his decades of intelligence work to good use in this predictably hard-boiled but unflaggingly entertaining tale....A wild ride filled with the sort of insider details that make a difference." Kirkus Reviews

"Filled with fascinating bits of tradecraft (e.g., how to disable a motion detector and thwart a silent alarm), this complex thriller will both entertain and instruct. Recommended." Library Journal

"One of the finest espionage novels I've read since the end of the Cold War. Sharp, witty, and chilling; do yourself a big favor and read this." Nelson DeMille, author of Night Fall and The Lion?s Game

"Moves at jet speed...a crackling spy thriller that will leave readers wondering how much may be true." David Wise, author of Spy

"Harrowing...pulses with the gritty details only a former intelligence officer could know. Watch out, Tom Clancy, there's a new storyteller in town — and he's actually lived the life he writes about!" David Ignatius, author of Agents of Innocence

"Unputdownable...Bob Baer has developed great characters and put them in situations that are devastatingly authentic." Joseph J. Trento, author of The Secret History of the CIA

"Lively...an insider's tale about the one unforgivable sin of the intelligence world — not wanting to know." Thomas Powers, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Intelligence Wars

"Engrossing and challenging — how do you act when you know what really happened on September 11? Baer is so persuasive, one wonders whether he in fact did know. He certainly writes as if he did." William F. Buckley, Jr., author of Miles Gone By and Last Call for Blackford Oakes

"Baer's style is that of a good private-eye novelist....There's an abundance of inside baseball in this spy thriller." Washington Post

Fiction this real can only come from someone who knows the truth.

New York Times bestselling author and former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit. Rich with the real-world tradecraft of today's counterintelligence, Blow the House Down is a relentlessly riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11. Deftly balancing fact and possibility, this is the first great thriller to spring from the global war on terrorism, and the electrifying debut of a major new fiction talent.

Robert Baer spent twenty years running agents from inside the CIA's Directorate of Operations, developing intelligence on Hizballah, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and "was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field office in the Middle East" (Symour M. Hersh, the New Yorker). His memoir See No Evil was a New York Times bestseller and inspired the movie Syriana starring George Clooney.