Director and CIA officer team up for ‘Syriana’

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Gaghan’s harrowing trip
While no specific moment from Baer’s book appears in “Syriana,” Gaghan included his own harrowing experience from a trip he took alone to Beirut in 2002.

He had just arrived and was going through customs when he got a call on his cell phone from “an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Bob’s” — even though Baer had warned him not to trust anyone in Beirut.

The caller said he’d send a driver, but couldn’t tell him where he’d be going or what he’d be doing. Gaghan walked outside, got into the back seat of the car and was blindfolded and driven out to the suburbs. Little did he know he was on his way to meet Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon’s most senior Shiite Muslim cleric.

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Baer said that’s standard procedure for meeting a Hezbollah sheik, which Fadlallah was then. Gaghan used it in the film for a scene in which Clooney’s character has a similar meeting.

“They took my phones, my belt, my backpack, my pens, notepads, everything. Blindfolded me, drove me,” he said. “And then you notice everyone has a gun, like, stuck in their waistband. The gate comes down, the driver doesn’t speak English, nobody speaks English — everyone’s speaking Arabic. They could be saying ...”

“‘Let’s go ahead and kill him,”’ Baer offers.

Gaghan believes any number of episodes in Baer’s book would have made compelling films of their own — from his time in Beirut in the mid-1980s during the U.S. embassy bombing to being in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s, which prompted the FBI to investigate his involvement in an attempt to murder Saddam Hussein.

“But I felt like — and I think Bob probably would agree — that at the end of the day, all the groundwork was laid during those times for the sort of crisis period we’re in now,” Gaghan said. “Post-9/11, this guy Osama bin Laden is this rallying point, and all communication is breaking down with Iran, a lot of powerful rhetoric from the West, from America — it just seemed really great to contemporize that, to try to get what’s going on now.”

The best way to tell such a complicated story was through various threads because “his life crosses all these worlds,” Gaghan says.

“But never really part of it,” Baer adds.

“Yeah, but we’re looking at a big system. That was my experience coming out of ‘Traffic,’ is that when you try to talk about a system — like if the system is the bad guy — the whole movie is all gray area, there are no good guys or bad guys. The system itself is what you’re indicting.”

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