The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-wife True-life Spy Story [Hardcover]

Dayna and Robert Baer were in the CIA's clandestine service. The first half of the book is a bunch of spy anecdotes from their work on Hezbollah-related issues from Morocco to Central Asia, mostly in Bosnia and Syria. These are good stories, connected by the common set of policy targets but not really tied together in a narrative. Some seem to be heavily cleaned-up by CIA censors, and (perhaps as a result) the chronology is somewhat jumbled. Still, they're good stories.

They get to know each other on a mission in Bosnia and eventually become a couple. There's enough information about parents, former spouses, and Robert's kids to make clear the personal costs of the CIA life. When they leave the agency, their recognition of those costs drives a number of personal choices, which then become the focus of the book. The transition here is very rough, and doesn't really cohere - - in part because they're living well despite having no apparent career, though Robert in particular has a lot of good connections in shady places.

It all comes together in the third part of the book when they settle down, get married, and decide to adopt a child. At that point the book is no longer a spy story.

Those three different parts make it hard to evaluate the book as a whole and its audience. They both write well, but in eerily similar styles - if I were to read a random page I wouldn't be able to tell whether Robert or Dayna had written it. If you want some rip-roaring spy stories that then coasts into something rather different, it's an enjoyable, fast read.

Ok, first off, let me say I really liked this book. The accounts were great and I was intrigued the entire time, but... I will get to that in a minute.

This book is the story of Bob and Dayna Baer, two CIA agents who worked in the field, mainly in the Middle East. The chapters bounce back and forth between them and the different assignments they worked. All riveting accounts of their time in the field, but... the stories do not seem to be connected. They are loosely connected, but they do not really seem to flow. Sometimes the stories are years and countries apart. All good stories, but the flow seems interrupted. Unless you step back and look at the big picture of what they were trying to convey?

This book is basically a story of two souls coming together. Not a romance, at least the book does not get all mushy or romantic, but it is two lost souls finding each other. The story tells of spending months at a time in different scumholes around the world. I know when I think of undercover agents I think of James Bond, not Bob and Dayna, that spend months living in dirty, nasty places, many without running water, or if the water does work its only cold water. It gives you an idea of how many people on this planet live. They had one assignment watching a Hezbollah safe house, but the only apartment they could rent had an unexploded artillery shell stuck in the floor. Since it was too dangerous to remove, the owner of the apartment just cemented over the shell. Nice. I wonder if he put that little detail in the advertisement for his rental apartment?

This book does a great job of showing the amount of sacrifice that goes into being a CIA operative. Bob lost his wife and kids because he was never around, Dayna lost her family and felt the pain when she found out her father had another daughter. Not a biological daughter, but someone he called his "other daughter" and spent his time with. That's gotta be a hard one to deal with. Hey, since you were never around I found a replacement daughter to spend my quality time with. The story wraps up with their attempts and final success of adopting a child from Pakistan.

When I started reading this book I found out that the movie "Syriana" was based on Bob. I liked Syriana, but that was one confusing movie. I guess its hard to write a true story when most of the details get removed by the CIA because they are classified. You also have to take into account how many balls these operatives have to keep juggling at the same time. It sounds like a very hard job.

Being a CIA operative always seemed like a really cool job. Then I read this book and I realize that dream is dead to me now. Not that I had any chance of ever doing that, but now I realize if the CIA knocks on my door tomorrow with a job offer I will have to turn them down.

If you like true-life spy stories, you'll probably like this book, but you'll also might find it thin gruel since it's not connected to big events and most of the story builds up to the writers leaving the CIA. They don't write about catching any bad guys or stopping terrorist tasks. Maybe they did that, but they just can't talk about it. They were as coy about it in their Fresh Air interview too.

The problem with any book from former members of the CIA is that they can't give you the real dirt, and even if the CIA doesn't censor the book (see the fight over Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan -- and the Path to Victory, for instance), the authors self-censor. I have no problem with that and I recognize that importance of it in the real world, but while reading the veneer of stories that any former-agent tells, I am constantly wanting to know more about what is going on, and I'm never satisfied. But, that's the genre. The book is short on operational details, and that extends even to the start of their personal relationship and Bob's seemingly sudden decision to leave the CIA, their divorces, and many of the other pivotal moments in the story. Even when they are out of the CIA, they can't let on too much about their lives. The book is mostly the highlights.

This book alternates between chapters by Bob and Dayna. For the first half of the book, their stories aren't connected. Bob is doing something in Central Asia, and Dayna is starting her career in the CIA protective services. Eventually there stories converge, and when they do the CIA portion is mostly over. Much of the book is matter-of-fact, as if everything has the same importance, or nothing is important. Just reading from the book, you'd think that one day he was in and the next day he wasn't. He doesn't go much into everything that led him to resign. He doesn't say much about thinking about "Riley", Dayna's codename, until one day he runs into her at Langley and asks her on a ski date in France. All of a sudden they are a couple. There's not much conflict or tension in their stories, like Mary Matalin and James Carville let go in their alternating chapters in All's Fair: Love, War and Running for President. The only thing they offer is that Dayna didn't like the car Bob first picked her up in and that Bob didn't know if they should get a third dog. There must be a lot more that we don't get to see. They do say that CIA couples have the advantage that they can at least talk to each other about work.

Dayna's story starts with her doing background checks, then being selected for the protective services. Bob's story starts with him already operating in Central Asia. There's not a lot of background, but Bob may have left most of his story to his earlier book, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. Those are the details I find most interesting, but this isn't a memoir of their careers; it's the part of their careers where they overlap.

The most disappointing part of the book, however, is that the tidbits that these authors do let us see aren't really that important to the layperson. They aren't writing about super secret fieldcraft schools, they aren't writing about chasing bin Ladin or Carlos the Jackal, they aren't writing about stopping events that we've seen on the news, and they are in places where the bad things have already happened. The lure of the spy book is that we think they are doing those things even if they aren't telling us they are. Like the people they deal with after they leave the CIA, we want to believe in a cloak-and-dagger world of secret conspiracies and power that doesn't exist.

Bob starts the last paragraph in the book saying "Nothing I did in my years in the CIA added or subtracted from the mess out there". At the end of the most exciting event, where one of Bob's agents is shot, Dayna ends her part of story with "Another thing I think most people would be surprised about is that in espionage, few mysteries are ever solved" to explain that they never found out why the agent was attacked. Those two statements are the best summary of the book, no matter what the real story actually was.