' As it happened, Baer, who speaks Farsi and Arabic, was a willing conduit into the culture and characters of the Middle East. "Summer was ending and i had to take my daughter back to boarding school in Europe," says Baer, 53. All the players in the Gulf spend August in the South of France, so I told Gaghan, 'Come along, We'll see some arms dealers, some people from Fatah Intelligence, some oil traders.' I wasn't a consultant on the film. This was just a road trip. THe terrorism-arms-dealer-oil-trader tour!

Gaghan, Baer and Baer's then 13-year-old daughter Charlotte met up in Nice. Within a few hours, they were relaxing on the yacht of a former Fatah intelligence officer. Then a representative of the Carlyle Group, the global investment behemoth anchored next to them."it kept getting crazier and crazier," says Baer...."I have no money. I got a 70000 advance for my book - which in their world is a three day trip to New York....

Gaghan felt comfortable enough to ask, "So, you ever kill anybody?" Baer said, "I've made decisions that resulted in people's deaths, maybe hundreds of people's deaths, but i never lost a night's sleep. Never because I had 500 pages of U.S. law to hide behind."... Gradually he realized Baer's candor with a flourish was not affectation but a kind of verbal rosary. Baer had done some bad things, and he needed to reassure himself and others that he had done them for a good cause... I ran across this Victor Hugo quote. 'Exile is not a material thing, it is a spiritual thing."'

TIME Nov. 28 2005 "So you ever kill anybody?"