Robert Baer hates the Saudi royal family and Washington's coziness with it -- and his ripping book couldn't be better timed. Just last week Congress released the report of its investigation into the September 11th attacks, with a 28-page section on Saudi Arabia blacked out because we can't embarrass such close friends of ours, even if it might help explain the last attack and prevent the next one.

The House of Saud, argues the former CIA Middle East operative, isn't merely a pack of corrupt philanderers graced by the abundance of black gold under their desert kingdom. They're dangerous double crossers with terrorism their second biggest export.

Mr. Baer starts his jeremiad with a seething indictment of the leaders of the country that practices the strict form of Islam known as Wahhabism. The Saudis have tried to murder dissidents, support terrorists, and have thoroughly wasted their wealth. They've created a spoiled country where people do nothing but study Islam, often in its most radical form. They don't have a constitution, rule of law, or basic respect for human rights. Mr. Baer gets personal too, describing a general interest in pedophilia and surrounding that with references to the interior minister's impotence and the incapacitated king's incontinence.

Our biggest ally in the Middle East has proved unwilling to help our spooks, even though 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers came from that country. "Since September 11th, not a single indictment or even useful lead has come out of Saudi Arabia," writes Mr. Baer. "Its public-decency police force, the muttawa, has zero interest in stopping Saudis from plotting righteous murder abroad. It tends to more important matters, like forcing store owners to shut down during prayer time and beating women on the arms and legs when their robes are too short."

The Saudis though are nothing if not profligate, particularly toward the U.S. power structure: millions for presidential libraries, George Bush scholarship funds, think tanks, lobbying firms, and much more. Not to mention money for fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and supporting the contras, or more than $100 billion worth of arms purchases from American arms manufacturers, particularly those employing former CIA chiefs or top foreign policy officials.

Tellingly, on September 11, 2001, former secretary of state James Baker, former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, and numerous other Washington big wigs, were meeting in Washington with the investors in the Carlyle Group, an investment fund that also employs former president Bush and that has done hundreds of millions of dollars of business with Saudi Arabia. As the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Mr. Baker and co. were talking with Shafiq bin Laden, brother to the most famous Saudi national of all.

Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, often found now in Crawford, Texas, with the current president, once justified dumping money into politician's post-career pockets as follows: "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."

So it's not surprising that the CIA had very little useful presence in Saudi Arabia before the attacks, that we gave virtually instant visas to many of the hijackers, and that we black out the kingdom's wrongdoing even now.

But Mr. Baer's book isn't just an attack on the Saudi royals, though it particularly shines there. After the initial attacks, it pipes down, moving into a history section which includes how King Ibn Sa'ud founded the kingdom and how Franklin Roosevelt designed our special relationship with it. Next, Mr. Baer tells of his attempts within the CIA to understand Islamic fundamentalism and the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately -- for the book and the United States -- these bits consist mainly of turned-around cars, lost leads, and bosses who don't really care.

As Mr. Baer argues powerfully, when it comes to the Middle East, the Agency has long been woefully understaffed and unimaginative. He describes serving as deputy chief of Iraqi operations in 1994, trying to track a rumor of Saddam Hussein again moving tanks toward Kuwait. Unfortunately the Agency didn't have any useful human sources in Iraq or nearby. Mr. Baer ended up relying on a Kuwaiti border guard with a pair of binoculars for the information he relayed to the White House.

Mr. Baer's new calling as a journalist is good for him. He's obviously an independent soul and has reported a lot of new and useful information since leaving the agency, much of which appears in this book. The book is dedicated to Danny Pearl, the slain Wall Street Journal reporter, and Mr. Baer seems to quite admirably want to continue Pearl's work.

Mr. Baer ends his book by making the case that the House of Saud is doomed and that we ought to take over its oil fields while we still can, perhaps even trying to create a series of Shi'a governments "from Tehran to Kuwait to Bahrain to the Eastern provinces" of Saudi Arabia. Given the mayhem in Iraq at the moment, and the actions of our supposed Shi'a allies, that proposal seems ill-timed.

But just because the solution offered isn't compelling doesn't mean the author hasn't done a great service in describing the underlying mess. The rest of the government seems merely interested in blacking it out.