Baer wrote about the events of the September 11 , 2001 terrorist attacks in '' The Guardian '' " D id bin Laden act alone , through his own al-Qaida network , in launching the attacks ? About that I 'm far more certain and emphatic : no . " He later stated , " For the record , I do n't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives , or that a rocket , rather than an airliner , hit the Pentagon . I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots , was n't all that good at it , and certainly could n't carry off 9/11 . Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with . " In June 2009 , Baer commented on the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President and the protests that accompanied it . " For too many years now , the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran 's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press , including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles ; but do they represent the real Iran ? " Baer has long been a supporter of the theory that the PFLP-GC brought down Pan Am Flight 103 . Later he began to promote the theory that Iran was behind the bombing . On August 23 , 2009 , Baer claimed that the CIA had known from the start that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 had been orchestrated by Iran , and that a secret dossier proving this was to be presented as evidence in the final appeal by convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi . According to Baer , this suggests that Megrahi 's withdrawal of the appeal in return for a release on compassionate grounds was encouraged to prevent this information from being presented in court
Pan Am Flight 103
Pan Am Flight 103
Robert Baer