"So, You Ever Kill Anybody?"

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After 10 days, the trio piled into a Renault 25 and set off for Venice. In a hotel restaurant on the road, with Charlotte upstairs watching MTV, 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." Gaghan's initial thought was that he had been fed a line--and a bad one. Gradually, though, 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. "When I started this whole process, I ran across this Victor Hugo quote. 'Exile is not a material thing, it is a spiritual thing,'" says Gaghan. "And what ever happened to Bob inside the CIA, he felt to me like an exile."

When they got to Geneva, Gaghan learned that "all the business of the Middle East is conducted in hotel lobbies." Schmoozing with oil traders and arms dealers at the Hotel Intercontinental, he spotted former Saudi Oil Minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, still one of the world's most powerful people, and sent him a note requesting an interview, revealing what Gaghan calls the "pathetic ineptitude of my methodology."

Yamani never called, but he was in the minority. Gaghan was stunned by how eager people were to chat with him. "You're on the boat of the head of military intelligence for a North African nation. This man is worldly. And when the conversation turns to me, it's, 'Do you know Leonardo DiCaprio?'" Besides being fascinated by fame and flattered by Gaghan's interest in the Middle East, most believed themselves experts on the movie business; they pitied Gaghan because, as everyone knows, so few scripts ever get filmed. "That mix of interest and condescension was really useful. 'Such a shame you'll never get your movie made.' 'Yep, now tell me how you armed Saddam in the '80s ...'"

Gaghan developed his own connections ("It's exactly like backpacking from hostel to hostel," he says of navigating the social byways of the oil industry) and traveled alone to Beirut. There he was abducted by Hizballah and rewarded with such colorful Fadlallah quotes as "People moved to terrorism are like the people in a school or post office who are pressured, feeling there is no alternative" and "You can go to www .fadlallah org. Gaghan knew by then that an Arabist ex-- CIA agent would be a major character in the aborning film. But as in Traffic, he wanted multiple points of view, so he logged more miles--he guesses his expenses approached $70,000--and did similarly intensive research stints with oil traders in London and lawyers in Washington. Through a journalist friend, he arranged a meeting with Perle a few months before the invasion of Iraq. Over what Gaghan calls "the best cappuccino of my life," they bantered in Perle's palatial kitchen until Gaghan, at that point quite knowledgeable about the Middle East, questioned the viability of Perle's friend Ahmad Chalabi as a future Iraqi leader. "[Perle] steepled his hands just like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons and stared at me. Then the doorbell rang--beat ... beat ... beat--'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.'" (Neither Perle nor former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned calls for comment.)