The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  ALSO BY KAI BIRD

  The Chairman: John J. McCloy; The Making of the American Establishment (1992)

  The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy; Brothers in Arms (1998)

  Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (coedited with Lawrence Lifschultz, 1998)

  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (coauthored with Martin J. Sherwin, 2005)

  Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 (2010)

  Copyright © 2014 by Kai Bird

  All rights reserved

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bird, Kai.

  The good spy : the life and death of Robert Ames / by Kai Bird.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Ames, Robert, 1934–1983. 2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Officials and employees—Biography. 3. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  JK468.I6B549 2014

  327.12730092—dc23

  [B]

  2013049480

  ISBN 978-0-307-88975-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-88977-5

  Jacket design by Darren Haggar

  Jacket photograph by George Baier IV (Newspaper: UMAM Documentation and Research, Beirut)

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  v3.1

  DEDICATED TO SUSAN.

  AND FOR YVONNE AMES,

  who lost the father of her six children in Beirut.

  AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,

  Jerine Newhouse Bird (1926–2012).

  THREE STRONG WOMEN.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Author’s Note

  Cast of Characters

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 The Making of a Spy

  2 The Agency

  3 Arabia

  4 Aden and Beirut

  5 The Red Prince

  6 Secret Diplomacy

  7 Headquarters, 1975–79

  8 The Assassination

  9 The Ayatollahs

  10 Jimmy Carter and Hostage America

  11 Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan

  12 Beirut Destiny

  13 The Enigma of Imad Mughniyeh

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Insert

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I began the research for this book, I visited the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and met with George Little, then head of the Agency’s Office of Public Affairs. We met for exactly one hour: I did most of the talking, trying to describe the kind of book I hoped to write about Robert Ames. I also explained that I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with one of the CIA’s in-house historians and check basic facts about Ames’s career. I was hoping that the CIA would declassify some materials related to Ames and his work in the Middle East. Mr. Little eagerly expressed the hope that the Agency would be able to give me some kind of limited assistance. But after repeated requests in the months and years to come, I never heard back from the Agency. CIA directors Leon Panetta and David Petraeus never replied to my e-mails. So I wrote this book without the cooperation of anyone inside the CIA.

  Fortunately, I found more than forty retired officers, both clandestine officers from the Directorate of Operations and analytical officers from the Directorate of Intelligence, who generously shared their memories of Bob Ames. Some of these individuals were willing to speak for the record, but many spoke not for attribution. I have given aliases to those sources who did not want to be named. These aliases appear in the narrative in italics. This is also the case for a number of retired Mossad officers who agreed to be interviewed.

  I knew Bob Ames when I was an adolescent. He and his wife, Yvonne, were our next-door neighbors from 1962 to 1965 in the small U.S. consulate compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. So I have vivid memories of this tall, handsome young man who liked to play basketball with the consulate’s squad of U.S. marine guards. I was unaware at the time that Bob was a CIA clandestine officer. I thought he was just another Foreign Service officer, like my father. Decades later, I approached Yvonne to say that I was writing a biography of her late husband; she remembered me. And though she’d never spoken to a reporter about her husband’s life, she graciously agreed to talk and to share her small collection of photographs, correspondence, and a family scrapbook.

  I also found a few declassified documents in the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library pertaining to Ames. But most of this book is based on interviews in Washington, D.C., Beirut, Amman, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I wrote it in Barranco, a suburb of Lima, Peru.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Robert C. Ames: A CIA officer in the Directorate of Operations and later chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the Directorate of Intelligence.

  Yvonne Blakely Ames: The wife of Bob Ames and mother of his six children.

  Frank Anderson: Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

  Ali Reza Asgari: Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence officer.

  Anne Dammarell: A U.S. Agency for International Development officer stationed in Beirut.

  Robert S. Dillon: U.S. ambassador, Beirut.

  Phyllis Faraci: A CIA administrative officer working in Beirut.

  Bashir Gemayel: A Maronite Christian warlord and president-elect of Lebanon.

  Kenneth Haas: The CIA station chief in Beirut. Haas had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Syracuse University.

  Deborah Hixon: A thirty-year-old CIA officer in Beirut on a temporary-duty assignment.

  Frank J. Johnston: A CIA officer in Beirut, married to Arlette, a Palestinian-Israeli woman.

  James F. Lewis: The deputy CIA station chief in Beirut. He was the last POW released from a North Vietnamese prison, in October 1975.

  Monique Nuet Lewis: A Vietnamese-born, naturalized American citizen. She was the wife of James Lewis. Monday, April 18, 1983, was her first day on the job as a CIA administrative officer.

  Sgt. Charles Allen Light Jr.: Assistant commander of the Marine Security Detachment for the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

  William McIntyre: Acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Beirut.

  LCpl. Robert (“Bobby”) McMaugh: The U.S. marine on duty at Post Number One in the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983.

  Henry Miller-Jones: A CIA officer who served with Ames in Aden and Beirut.

  Imad Mughniyeh: A Shi’ite Lebanese, recruited by Ali Hassan Salameh into the PLO’s Force 17 and later associated with a long list of kidnappings, air hijackings, and car bombings.

  Stuart H. (“Stu”) Newberger: A senior partner at Crowell & Moring, a Washington-based law firm, who has pioneered civil suits on behalf of victims of international terrorism.

  Georgina Rizk: Miss Lebanon and Miss Universe, 1971. Rizk became Ali Hassan Salameh’s second wife in 1977.

  Ali Hassan Salameh: Chief of the PLO’s Force 17 intelligence unit.

  Will
iam R. Sheil: A contract CIA officer and former Green Beret.

  Janet Lee Stevens: Freelance American journalist in Beirut, a model for John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl.

  Mustafa Zein: A Shi’ite Lebanese businessman and friend of Robert Ames in Beirut. Zein became the intermediary in Ames’s relationship with Ali Hassan Salameh.

  “Espionage, properly conducted, never announces itself. ‘Stolen’ information remains in its accustomed place; the ‘spy’ is a trusted civil servant; the spymaster betrays no sign of special knowledge.”

  —Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, September 13, 1993

  It was a bright blue, cloudless September day in Washington, D.C., a day of hope for the peoples of the Middle East after decades of cyclical wars, massacres, and spectacular acts of terrorism. But Frank Anderson—the Central Intelligence Agency’s ranking clandestine officer in the Arab world—was nevertheless somehow annoyed that morning. He knew something extraordinarily good was about to happen. At fifty-one, Anderson had spent half his life working on the Middle East. After joining the CIA in 1968, Anderson had risen rapidly in the ranks of the Agency’s clandestine services, learning Arabic in Beirut and specializing in the war-torn Middle East. By 1993, he was chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. That morning he had every reason to believe that peace was finally coming to a region to which he had dedicated his entire career. He should have felt elated, but he was quietly miffed.

  Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, were about to sign a peace accord at the White House. President Bill Clinton had invited three thousand people to witness the historic moment on the South Lawn of the White House—and Anderson suspected that not a single CIA officer had been invited. Anderson thought that was wrong. Someone in the White House had forgotten how this peace process had started as an intelligence operation. Anderson believed the CIA, through its careful cultivation of clandestine sources, had created the opportunity for the Oslo Accords, which were to be signed that morning. He knew it had all started decades earlier when a young CIA officer named Robert Clayton Ames had cultivated the first highly secret contacts between the United States and the Palestinians. Ames had paved the way for the peace accords—and for his dedication to his spy craft and his work as an intelligence officer, he’d been murdered in Beirut on April 18, 1983, in the first truck-bomb assault on a U.S. embassy. He had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The horrifying attack had killed sixteen other Americans—including seven other CIA officers—and forty-six Lebanese civilians. Anderson thought that on this special day someone should remember what Ames had done for the peace process.

  So when he arrived at his office at Langley’s CIA headquarters that morning, Anderson convened a regular 9:00 A.M. meeting of his top officers. “It was noted that this was a big day for the peace process,” recalled Charles Englehart, another clandestine officer, who’d worked with Ames. “We were all quite optimistic in those days that this time the Israelis and the Palestinians would get it right. Someone asked who was representing the CIA on the occasion: the director? A quick check indicated that there was no CIA representation at the ceremony.”

  After an awkward moment of silence, Anderson turned to his assistant, Bob Bossard, and said, “Okay, let’s get a bus and go visit our dead.” Anderson quickly spread the word that he wanted to take dozens of young, newly minted clandestine officers—and a few analysts—out to Arlington National Cemetery. They would walk to Ames’s gravestone and say a few words in his memory. “I’m proud to say that it was my idea,” Anderson said many years later. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. By 10:30 A.M. a CIA bus was waiting at the southwest entrance. “We filled the bus,” said Anderson, “probably thirty or forty people.” Anderson wanted the younger officers there because he thought of the visit as a “values transmission opportunity.”

  When they arrived at Ames’s gravesite on a gentle hill near a clump of oak trees, Anderson and his colleagues stared across the Potomac River toward the White House. They knew that at that moment, at 11:43 A.M., Israeli and Palestinian officials were signing a Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Rabin said in his formal remarks, “We the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: ‘Enough of blood and tears! Enough!’ ”

  The New York Times’s correspondent Thomas Friedman reported that as soon as the documents were signed, President Clinton “took Mr. Arafat in his left arm and Mr. Rabin in his right arm and gently coaxed them together, needing to give Mr. Rabin just a little extra nudge in the back. Mr. Arafat reached out his hand first, and then Mr. Rabin, after a split second of hesitation and with a wan smile on his face, received Mr. Arafat’s hand. The audience let out a simultaneous sigh of relief and peal of joy, as a misty-eyed Mr. Clinton beamed away.” It was an awkward moment, but “hope” had seemingly “triumphed” over history.

  “We were at Bob’s gravesite,” Anderson later recalled, “at the moment of the handshake—as planned.” The chalky white gravestone read simply, “Robert Clayton Ames, Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, March 6, 1934–April 18, 1983.” Nearby were the graves of veterans from the Civil War and America’s wars in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. A rear admiral born in 1876 was buried behind Ames. But Ames’s was then the only gravestone in Arlington to identify a clandestine officer of the CIA. Standing near the grave, Frank Anderson spoke briefly of Ames’s career and how Bob’s clandestine relationship with Arafat’s intelligence chief, Ali Hassan Salameh, had brought the Palestinians in from the cold. Ames, Anderson explained to the novice officers, was one of the CIA’s fallen heroes, a man who was good at forming clandestine relationships in a dangerous part of the world. “He was no Lawrence of Arabia,” said Henry Miller-Jones, another clandestine officer. “He had little patience with pretentiousness or patronizing ‘Arabophiles’ and fanatic adventurers. He was never naïve about the Middle East, a cockpit of power politics. He understood the personalities and motivations of the revolutionary left in the Arab world as much as he appreciated the rituals of the Sheiks.”

  Ames had understood that a good CIA officer must have a curiosity about the foreign other—and a certain degree of empathy for their struggles. As Miller-Jones put it, “He came to know kings, emirs and princes as well as revolutionaries and terrorists, goat herders and penthouse commandos.” He was adroit at making his way through the wilderness of mirrors that was the Middle East. He was naturally reserved, a man who easily kept secrets. He inspired trust, even in the company of men with bloody pasts. But he was also an intellectual, who later in his career could brief a president or a secretary of state about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics and history. He was a model intelligence officer. “Everyone credited Ames with getting the peace process started,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin, a CIA analyst.

  “There was a moment of silent prayer,” recalled Englehart, “as we all stood on the grass around the grave. I remember wondering why, after all we had done for this, President Clinton would not recognize our contribution—but it wasn’t politically expedient. We should have known that, but it still stung.”

  After a few minutes, Anderson led his colleagues over to the nearby grave of William Buckley, the CIA Beirut station chief who’d been kidnapped in March 1984; he had been severely mistreated in captivity and had died fifteen months later, probably of pneumonia. Next they visited the gravesites of James and Monique Lewis, both of whom had died with Ames on that terrible day in April 1983. Both were CIA employees. And then they walked to the gravesite of Kenneth Haas, the CIA station chief in Beirut at the time. He too had died with Ames. Finally, they found the gravesite of Frank Johnston, yet another CIA officer who’d died
that day in Beirut. All had been buried in Arlington. It had been a heavy toll—the worst in the Agency’s history.

  The visit to the cemetery was a sobering moment. But there was also a feeling of exhilaration—as if these sacrifices had been vindicated. “We were all quietly excited,” Englehart recalled. “For those of us who spent our working lives in the Arab-Israeli firestorm, it was positive. After all, everybody would get what they wanted [with the Oslo peace accords], or what they thought they wanted. I had a definite feeling at the time that the sacrifices of our dead were not in vain, that the Israeli people and the Palestinian people could at last let go of each other’s throats and understand that they are all brothers and sisters.”

  It was not to be.

  Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin hesitates for a moment before the iconic handshake with PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, September 13, 1993.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Making of a Spy

  I love you now and ever more

  And promise to be true.

  —Robert Ames

  Robert Clayton Ames was a very good spy. Everyone at the Central Intelligence Agency who knew him thought he was good at his work precisely because he was so very disarming and innocent. He was a classic American—idealistic and good-hearted and open as a Jimmy Stewart character. There was nothing phony about him, nothing cosmopolitan or pretentious. To the contrary, as another CIA officer later observed, he exuded a “rock-bottom American-ness that was neither Ugly nor Quiet.” Foreigners invariably liked him.

  Bob Ames was born on March 6, 1934, in Philadelphia and grew up in Roxborough, a largely white, working-class neighborhood in the northwest part of the city. People prided themselves in caring for the row homes that lined the streets. Fairmount Park, Wissahickon Creek, and the shops along Ridge Avenue were all within walking distance, and Roxborough residents had multiple bus routes to take them into downtown Philadelphia. Ten churches graced the neighborhood. Life in Roxborough was sheltered and comfortably predictable. Bob spent his entire childhood in the same plain, two-story row house at 4624 Pechin Street. His father, Albert Clayton Ames, was a steelworker who spent thirty-two years with SKF, the Swedish-owned ball-bearing plant. His paternal grandfather, Albert Beauregard Ames, was a Philadelphia policeman. Albert “Bud” Ames’s job at SKF was to inspect the quality of ball bearings; it was tedious, low-paid work. Bob’s mother, Helen Frances Amorose, was a homemaker. Bob was the second of three children. He had two sisters, Patricia, who was three years older, and Nancy, who was two years younger. The family got by, but modestly. Albert Ames lived from paycheck to paycheck. He was a union man, a member of the United Steel Workers—and every two years, around Christmastime, the union would take him out on strike. Albert would then sometimes go door to door, selling Christmas trees. A soft-spoken man, he never complained. He never raised his voice or his hand against the children. There were hard times, but Albert’s son, Bob, grew up feeling as though he was a part of the American dream.