The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Helen was a second-generation Italian. She was the avid reader in the family—and also the disciplinarian. “She had her way,” recalled Nancy Ames. “You did what you were told.” Helen kept the house immaculate. Mondays were washdays, Tuesdays ironing days. Every child had chores and regular homework hours. Helen was a lapsed Catholic. She’d married a Methodist, so the children went to their father’s Methodist church every Sunday. Though the Ameses were a working-class family, they were registered Republicans, like most of their neighbors in Roxborough. “My mother didn’t think much of FDR,” recalled Nancy. “She was a very smart woman. She listened to the radio news every day and read the newspapers. She was the kind of Republican who liked Ike.”

  Bob took after his mother. He was an avid reader. “He used to devour books,” Helen later said. When Bob turned ten, his Uncle John gave him an encyclopedia—and many months later Bob came downstairs one night and announced that he’d read it from cover to cover. He was mild-mannered and personable. “He didn’t like confrontation of any kind,” recalled his sister Nancy. “He was very private and quiet. Not a talker.” Like most boys in the neighborhood, he was a Cub Scout and later a Boy Scout. Though his father liked to hunt and fish, Bob took no interest in his father’s guns. As the only son, he got away with things. If his mother asked him to do the dishes, he’d stand at the sink and start whistling a tune. He loved to whistle, but he knew his mom hated it—and inevitably she’d dismiss him from doing the dishes. In school, he was known as the class prankster. When Bob was in sixth grade, a teacher thought he was so bright that she recommended he be sent to Penn Charter, a local private school. “There was no money for that,” recalled Nancy.

  Bob was always meticulous. His bedroom in the Pechin Street house was tiny. There was room only for a bed, a small bookcase, and a desk. So maybe he had to be neat. But his handwriting was also remarkably tiny and perfect script. “At dinner,” remembered Nancy, “all his food had to be separated; nothing was ever to be mixed. The gravy had to be poured exactly in the center of his scoop of mashed potatoes.”

  One evening when Bob was thirteen or fourteen years old he was given tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters perform in an exhibition game. He was enthralled by the show. That Christmas his parents bought him a basketball. It became his prize possession. “In Roxborough,” recalled his sister Nancy, “if you owned your own basketball, you were special.”

  Bob and the girls attended Roxborough High School, just a few blocks from their home. By then, he stood six feet three inches. He was a strikingly handsome teenager with brown hair and hazel eyes—and a prominent, squared-off chin. His smile was broad and infectious. He was a spiffy dresser. Despite all these attractive qualities, he never dated in high school. His mother later observed that her son was “never one to travel in crowds.” He either kept to himself or socialized with a few friends who enjoyed basketball.

  During his summers “Big Bob” worked as a lifeguard at Wildwood Crest, a small beach community on the Jersey Shore. Wildwood was almost a second home. His mother’s parents—Vittorio and Agnes Amoroso (later changed to Amorose)—owned a summerhouse at Wildwood. An Italian immigrant, Victor had done well in the furrier business. He boasted that his clientele included the wives of Dupont chemical company executives. Like most everyone, he’d lost money during the 1929 crash, but he was still well off enough to own a beach house and a small apartment building on the Jersey Shore. Helen Ames refused to take any money from her father, but every summer she sent her children off to the Wildwood beach house.

  Bob’s passion was still basketball, and even at the Jersey Shore he played the game at a local gym. One evening at Wildwood’s Kenny Gym night court he was introduced to a young man named Tommy Gola, who he soon realized was a truly phenomenal player. “Bob was always talking about Gola,” recalls Jack Harmer, a friend who lived a block away from the Ames house. “Bob played basketball year round. We had a dirt court at the end of my street where the neighborhood kids played. I would hear Bob dribbling his basketball past my house on the way to the court, and I’d join him to shoot baskets. In the winter mornings the ground would be frozen, but later it would thaw out and your hands and the ball would be coated in mud.” Harmer thought Ames was a “quiet fellow, and a little hard to get to know on an intimate basis … but very likable.”

  Ames loved the game, and by his senior year he was the team’s leading scorer. This earned him a four-year athletic scholarship to La Salle University, an all-men’s Catholic college in Philadelphia run by the Christian Brothers. He also had a scholarship offer from Gettysburg College, where he would have been a starter on the basketball team. But he knew Tommy Gola was going to La Salle, and he wanted to play ball with Gola. Bob was the first and only member of his family to attend college. To save on expenses, he lived at home throughout his college years.

  Ames did well academically. He majored in sociology but also took quite a few courses in psychology and philosophy. He knew he had an aptitude for languages. (He’d taught himself some Spanish during his summers at Wildwood.) In college he excelled in French. He had a vague notion of someday becoming an FBI agent. He knew the Bureau hired many lawyers, so he also took prelaw and kept a 3.06 grade average. And he played basketball every single day. He was a terrific outside shooter. At Roxborough, he had been the star player—yet at La Salle he mostly warmed the bench. That’s how good La Salle’s team was. “Ames was a great player,” recalled Fran O’Malley, one of his teammates. “I don’t know why he didn’t play more.” The star of the team was Tommy Gola. (Gola later played professionally for the Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks. He was so good that Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees once described him as “the Joe DiMaggio” of basketball.) The coach for La Salle’s team, the Explorers, was Ken Loeffler, a Yale-trained lawyer who led the team in 1954 to an NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) championship. It was a magical season for La Salle; the team won nineteen of its last twenty games. When the boys returned in triumph from Kansas City that spring, they were greeted at the airport by ten thousand fans. Bob even saw a few holding placards emblazoned with “Ames.” It was an exhilarating moment.

  Yet Coach Loeffler had kept him on the bench for much of that championship season—even though he maintained the highest shooting percentage on the team. He was nevertheless intensely proud of his time with the Explorers. (During the 1953–54 season he played in fourteen out of thirty games, averaging two points and a rebound in each game.) For the rest of his life he kept prominently displayed in his home an NCAA plaque honoring the Explorers. He carefully saved in his scrapbook newspaper clippings and even the TWA baggage-check stub from the trip to Kansas City. Still, he’d always remember that Coach Loeffler hadn’t let him play in that one glorious championship game. Years later, he wrote a thinly disguised short story in which he had the coach tell him, “I’m not talking to you to say that I am sorry that I didn’t play you tonight. As I said, I’m never sorry for what I do.… You took all I could give you and you took it like a man. It’s the hardest thing in the world to be a sub.”

  If Ames chafed at being a sub, his demeanor was always genial. He was always a team player. Basketball taught him discipline and persistence. “The other sports can be fun,” Coach Loeffler once explained. “But the truth is that most of them are elementary compared to basketball. None involves such speed and intricacy of tactics. None demands such fast-moving, fast-thinking and all-round athletic skill.” Ames would shoot baskets for the rest of his life.

  After graduating from La Salle in June 1956, Ames headed to Orange, Texas, where he worked for the Catalytic Construction Company. Like most young American men in the 1950s, he expected soon to be drafted into the army. But in the meantime he needed the money.

  The army inducted him on November 8, 1956. After thirteen weeks of basic training, Ames was assigned to the U.S. Army’s Middle East Signal Communications Agency. He shipped out to Africa in the early winter of 1957. His assignme
nt was to work as a signal-supply specialist at Kagnew Station, an army listening post just outside the town of Asmara in what was then the Ethiopian province of Eritrea. Ames had to look up the location in an atlas to see where he was going. In the Eritrean language, Kagnew means “to bring order out of chaos.” Gen. William Westmoreland once visited the listening post and remarked, “I do not believe we have a more remote station of our Armed Forces than Kagnew Station.”

  Kagnew was home to the Fourth U.S. Army Security Agency. Ames was a member of the 9434 Signal Corps. Getting to this isolated spot entailed a four-day trip in a Douglas C-47 two-engine propeller plane. The flight took him first to Bermuda and then to the Azores for refueling. He had to spend one night in Tripoli, Libya, and another night in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. These stopovers gave him his first glimpse of the Arab world. He heard Arabic spoken for the first time. Then the next morning he caught another C-47 for the flight to Eritrea.

  Located close to the equator at an elevation of 7,300 feet, Kagnew was one of America’s most valuable Cold War listening posts. It housed several thousand American soldiers and technicians employed by the U.S. military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. They called it their “island in the sky.” The Americans operated a 2,500-acre “antenna farm” to intercept radio communications from all over Africa and the Middle East. Because of its location and high altitude, the spot was ideal for “listening.” The station’s primary mission was to intercept the military and diplomatic communications of Egypt and other Arab governments. As a practical matter, everyone at Kagnew Station was working for the National Security Agency, America’s electronic eavesdropping agency. So Ames, like everyone else, was accorded one of the highest security classifications—Top Secret Codeword.

  It was merely an accident of army life that Ames was chosen for this signal intelligence duty. But for whatever reason, the assignment to Kagnew opened Bob’s eyes to the world of intelligence. It was a very technical world. Kagnew’s antenna intercepted radio waves and recorded the intercepts on reel-to-reel tape recorders. If the data were encrypted, then trained cryptographers had to decipher the codes. Russian, Arabic, and other linguists had to translate the material. It was all very classified. Yet Ames’s personal duties were mundane. He and his army buddy John Wilson, a young man from Oklahoma, were assigned to a supply company responsible for keeping track of spare parts for the transmitters and receivers.

  Ames had first met Wilson in a signal-supply classroom at an army base in Georgia. The classroom instructor announced that Private Wilson would be the squad leader for their group. Ames promptly shot his arm in the air; he wanted to know why Wilson had been chosen. The instructor replied that Wilson had scored the highest on the aptitude test. Afterward, the instructor called Wilson and Ames to the front of the class and explained that Ames had scored only two points lower. Ames was clearly ambitious, but he and Wilson nevertheless became close friends.

  At Kagnew, they lived in a second-story squad room with ten other soldiers. Ames and Wilson had facing lower bunks. “Ames was closer to me than either of my two brothers,” Wilson later said. Their daily routine was spent entirely together. They showered at the same time, walked together to the mess hall, and worked at their desks facing each other. Ames, the city boy from Philadelphia, enjoyed reading the newspapers Wilson received through the mail from his small town in Oklahoma. Their work was not onerous. And life in the barracks was simple and easy. Tending each squad of a dozen men were two Eritrean “houseboys” who made the beds and cleaned up after the Americans and shined their boots.

  Kagnew was equipped like a summer camp in the midst of Eritrea’s dirt-poor villages. It boasted a chapel, commissary, snack bar, and post office. The mess hall—“Mom’s Place”—served mediocre food, but when the men were off-duty they could buy ten-cent beers at the Oasis Club. The 320-seat Roosevelt Theater showed decent movies. There was a bowling alley, a softball field, and an indoor pool. The men sometimes took day trips down to the Red Sea beaches. Ames was once again the star of the basketball court, winning a trophy in the autumn of 1957 for being the post’s leading scorer. “Ames played every game like it was the most important thing going,” recalled Wilson. Ames may have had the opportunity to visit Arabia a second time because Kagnew’s basketball teams were occasionally invited to compete with teams at the U.S. air base at Dhahran.

  The social life at Kagnew was intense. The young, crew-cut men worked long shifts—they called them “tricks”—and they played hard as well. But while others spent their off-duty hours in Asmara’s bars drinking beer and paying for the services of local women, Ames abstained. Wilson remembers how Bob preferred to stay in the barracks, reading books or working out in the gym. “Ames spent a lot of time in the gym working out with weights,” Wilson recalled. He was never much of a drinker. Neither did he play poker like many of the men.

  Bob Ames was a serious young man—far more serious than most army recruits. Kagnew Station changed him in many ways. He met a Catholic priest, probably one of the army chaplains, who persuaded him to convert to Catholicism. Back home in Roxborough, Bob’s sister Nancy remembered being told by their mother that her brother had become a Catholic. Nancy was surprised—though later in life both she and her sister, Pat, also converted. The Church was in the family’s ancestry. Bob knew that his mother, Helen, had been raised a Catholic—and he knew that his Italian-born grandfather, Vittorio Amoroso, and his Irish-born grandmother, Agnes Egan, had been Catholics. So it was in the blood. But the Church also suited Ames’s personality—and it suited his future profession.

  During his occasional trips to downtown Asmara, Ames made a point of visiting St. Joseph’s Cathedral, an ornate Romanesque-style church built by the Italians in 1922. Wilson would wait for him while he spent a few minutes in the confessional booth.

  Many of the men at Kagnew Station worked out of uniform. It was a very informal army post. But Ames was different. “Ames was very meticulous about his clothing,” remembered Wilson. “His fatigues always somehow looked like new. His khaki cap, however, was worn enough for the sweatband to show.” But Ames never laundered his cap because to do so one had to remove the wire band threaded at the top of the cap. The caps never kept their shape after laundering.

  On the other hand, Ames didn’t take the U.S. Army too seriously. One day the soldiers had to put on dress uniforms and pass inspection prior to a parade in honor of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, who was visiting Asmara. As the commanding officer passed down the line of men standing at attention, he suddenly stopped in front of Wilson and commented, “Fine-looking soldier!” At that, Ames snorted loud enough that Wilson thought the two of them would be reprimanded. “I don’t think Ames really ever had the soldiering spirit,” recalled Wilson.

  Ames was a steady, solid character, but there’s also evidence that he was impressionable. One day he happened to be in the Oasis Club when a local hypnotist came to entertain the men. The performer chose Ames as his subject, and to the astonishment of everyone, he hypnotized Ames and had him riding an imaginary bicycle on the stage. “I never thought he would give up control to that extent,” said Wilson.

  One extraordinary thing happened during Ames’s stint at Kagnew Station. In December 1957, the cryptographers in the classified Operations Company launched a virtual mutiny to protest the post commander’s decision to institute compulsory inspections and parade duty. The men grumbled that as they were getting off their long shifts they were forced to get ready for an inspection. “After a week or so of this bullshit,” recalled one Kagnew veteran, George E. Matthias, “they rebelled.” The Morse code intercept operators claimed that there was too much static and they couldn’t hear anything; the automatic Morse code and telex operators claimed they couldn’t find the network that they were monitoring. In effect, it was a work stoppage—unheard-of in the army. After about a week, the National Security Agency headquarters realized what was happening and immediately dispatched a group o
f new officers to relieve Kagnew’s commander.

  After this incident, Kagnew’s chaplain announced that he was organizing a morale-building trip to the Holy Land. “Ames talked me into going,” Wilson said. “I’m still very grateful.” They managed to spend several days in Jerusalem, walking through the narrow lanes of the Old City, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s most sacred sites. On the flight back, the plane had to land in Cairo, and the airline put the men up in a hotel and arranged a tour of the Pyramids of Giza. Ames and Wilson got to ride a camel. The entire trip took less than a week, but it left a deep impression on young Ames.

  Toward the end of his assignment, he began to study Arabic. It was a curious choice. “Sometime before we were to leave Africa,” Wilson recalled, “Ames began to learn Arabic. I don’t know whether he had outside help or not, but I remember him sitting cross-legged at his footlocker, using it for a table, and making those Arabic characters.” He had heard the guttural but melodious language spoken during his brief visits to Jerusalem, Cairo, and Dhahran. In addition, he had certainly heard Arabic spoken in the streets of Asmara. (Tigrinya and Arabic were the official languages in Eritrea from 1952 to 1956.) Perhaps this was enough to motivate him to tackle Arabic—one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn. It was a fateful decision.