Robert Baer was a CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997, where he served in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Lebanon. He is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Crown Publishers, 2002). Here, Baer says that there is evidence linking Iran to attacks on American interests, including the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. soldiers in 1996. He says that Iran has been mishandled by U.S. diplomats since the 1980s and that American foreign policy regarding the Islamic Republic is based on myths and misinformation. Baer was interviewed by FRONTLINE producer Neil Docherty on March 22, 2002.

Maybe it was for robbery. We don't know. We're not sure. ...

So they started kidnapping, and shortly after that they kidnapped David Dodge, the acting president of the American University of Beirut and took him to Tehran. They got caught. We found out about it. We went to the Syrians; the Syrians forced his release. After [Dodge] was released, the Iranians then arranged to use surrogates in order to have plausible denial. ... They used the Hezbollah, a group in Hezbollah, to kidnap hostages.

The way it went down is the Iranians assumed, since the Lebanese Christian forces were our allies and the allies of Israel, that we had to be responsible for those kidnappings and the murders later. ... Even though we knew nothing about it -- the CIA didn't know about it, American government didn't know about it, we ourselves were asking what happened to these people -- for the Iranians, it was a key event which for them broke the contract.

When I first went to Lebanon, it was in December 1982. A seminal event had occurred about six months before I got there, and that was the kidnapping of three Iranian diplomats, the charge d'affaires, and a Lebanese translator. They were murdered and they were buried in a Lebanese forces parking lot -- that's the Christian Lebanese forces -- in a part of Beirut. What we didn't realize as Americans, because we didn't understand Iran, is we were going to get blamed for that kidnapping.

... Maybe you could paint me a political picture of Lebanon in the 1980s, when you first got there. What was happening?