by Kai Bird
After one year, one month, and three days at Kagnew Station, Ames was flown back to America. His two years of service were up, and he expressed no interest in an army career. He was no longer the boy from an insulated working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. He’d seen a bit of the world, and the exposure to life overseas had implanted the idea that maybe he could have a career in the State Department. He left the army on November 7, 1958, with an honorable discharge and a good-conduct medal.
Back home in Philadelphia, Ames got a job with Allstate Insurance Company, and in the evenings he began studying to take the State Department’s Foreign Service written exam. He told his parents that he “could not spend his life stuck behind a desk.” He wanted to travel “and see the world.” The insurance company had its offices in the Gimbel Building in downtown Philadelphia. Bob was a “repo man” for Allstate. It was unpleasant work, having to repossess cars or other property. But the company’s six-foot-three rookie was charming and he could get the job done. After lunch one day in the spring of 1959, Ames was walking back to work when he spotted a pretty blond, blue-eyed young woman whom he recognized as someone who worked as a secretary in the insurance company. He made a mental note to himself that she was far too beautiful for him—and that she must have a dozen men after her already.
Yvonne Blakely had been born on June 21, 1937, in San Diego, California, where her father was stationed with the navy at the time. But like any navy brat, she had moved around. She ended up spending her high school years in Groton, Connecticut, graduating in 1955. Instead of college, she enrolled in the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston and learned stenography and typing. “Gibbs girls” were considered to be class A secretaries; every student was required to wear a formal hat and long white gloves. “You were virtually guaranteed to get a job,” Yvonne recalled. She graduated in 1956 and followed her parents to Honolulu, where her father was stationed at Pearl Harbor. She spent two years working for a shipping company until 1958, when her father was transferred once again, this time to the navy yard in Philadelphia.
For her part, Yvonne, twenty-two, had noticed Ames. She’d already heard through the office rumor mill about a new employee, a handsome and very tall bachelor. “I was going back to work,” she recalled, “and I saw this giant of a man. I decided right away that he wasn’t for me because there were already too many girls after him.”
But one day they found themselves together, walking to catch a bus on Chestnut Street. Bob introduced himself. “One of the first things he talked about was his love of Arabic,” Yvonne said. “He wanted to go to the Middle East.” Yvonne thought he was not only attractive but worldly. By then, he’d taken to smoking a pipe—and even when he was not actually smoking he often had it clenched in his teeth.
Ames took her out on their first date on April 11, 1959. They went to a movie theater. “Bob was not a big winer and diner,” Yvonne recalled. But by July 30 they were engaged. “His parents were wonderful about it,” Yvonne said. “My parents hesitated because of Bob being Catholic.” Yvonne had been raised in the Lutheran Church—and when her father retired from the navy in 1961 after twenty-nine years of service, he enrolled in a Lutheran seminary and became an ordained pastor. The Blakelys were serious Lutherans.
There was also a big class difference. Yvonne’s father, Robert Graham Blakely, had been born in San Bernardino, California, and raised in Idaho. His parents were from Ireland and Scotland. During World War II he’d been a submariner—dangerous duty. But he’d survived and spent the rest of his career in the navy. By 1960, he had risen to the rank of a navy commander. He was somebody, and young Bob Ames from Roxborough had no pedigree other than his association with a winning college basketball team. But he was charming, and he was clearly in love.
Later that summer Bob wrote a love poem to Yvonne:
There are so many loving things I’d like to say to you.
That even in a million years I never could get through.
I’d like to tell you how I feel when you are by my side.
And how you always fill my life with happiness and pride.
But there are not sufficient words to glorify a star.
Or any phrase that can describe how wonderful you are.
So after all is said and done
I say these words to you.
I love you now and ever more
And promise to be true.
Love,
Bob
Yvonne was a truly stunning woman. She had dirty-blond hair, icy-blue eyes, and the prominent, high cheekbones of her mother’s Norwegian ancestors. (One of Bob’s friends later remarked that she bore a strong resemblance to the Norwegian movie actress Liv Ullmann.) She walked with a quiet elegance that came naturally. She knew how to dress stylishly, but without great expense. She possessed the polite poise of a navy officer’s daughter. There was something formal about her demeanor, but it wasn’t pretentious.
They were married on April 30, 1960, in a Lutheran church. “Bob was excommunicated by the Catholic Church,” Yvonne said. “He just accepted it; he didn’t have a problem with it.” He was Catholic, but he chose Yvonne over the Church. It was an easy choice.
Immediately after their marriage in the spring of 1960 Bob took the written Foreign Service exam—and soon learned that he’d failed it. Still determined to have a career in the Middle East, he decided to apply to the Central Intelligence Agency. In late June he and Yvonne made a quick trip to New York City, where he had his first Agency interview. In New York, the couple took the opportunity to see Alfred Hitchcock’s newly released thriller Psycho. By mid-August, Yvonne was pregnant.
CHAPTER TWO
The Agency
Helms and Ames were very much alike. Both were real gentlemen who valued a certain decorum. They were not soldiers of fortune like some of the guys in operations.
—Lindsay Sherwin, CIA analyst, Directorate of Intelligence
Late in 1960, the CIA offered Ames a job. They hired him at a salary of more than $5,000 per annum. That was serious money for the young man from Philadelphia. Bob and Yvonne moved down to Washington, D.C., right after the Christmas holidays and rented—for $150 a month—a small apartment at 1400 South Twenty-eighth Street in Arlington, Virginia. They arrived in Bob’s red Fiat, his first car. They called it the “tomato can.”
Bob had been told that he couldn’t tell anyone whom he was working for. Ostensibly, that meant even his wife. But in practice most CIA officers told their wives. Yvonne knew. But other relatives usually had only a vague notion of what they were doing in Washington. When one of Ames’s future colleagues, Clair George, joined the CIA a few years earlier, he wrote home: “Dear Mom, I have been offered about $4,500 per year or so to do something for Uncle Sam, exactly what I’m not sure. Nor do I know where, when, how, or why. So think it over and remember the child of 1955 has [a] strange and sometimes tortuous path to follow.” Bob probably told his parents what he was doing after CIA officers came by to interview them and various neighbors for his background check. Helen and Albert then told his sisters that he’d joined the CIA. “Initially, I couldn’t picture him as CIA,” said his sister Nancy. “This was not the brother I knew. Bob didn’t seem like the kind of person who would put himself in danger. But later we all told ourselves that this was the perfect job for him. He was very private and he knew how to keep a secret.”
It was an exciting time to be in Washington. Jack Kennedy was about to be inaugurated as president. Bob and Yvonne were both registered Republicans, but after watching the Kennedy-Nixon televised debates they decided to vote Democratic. “Nixon looked horrible,” Yvonne recalled. “I tended to vote Republican, but I never voted a straight party ticket.” Bob rarely talked politics with his wife. He had very conventional views about women: he thought they belonged at home.
That winter Ames was inducted into the Agency as a junior officer trainee (JOT) and assigned to Operations Course-11. (The Agency had been founded in 1947, but this was the eleventh yea
r in which the yearlong Operations course had been offered.) There were forty-four other men in this class—and, unusually, one woman.*1 Everyone in the class was slated to work in the Directorate of Plans (DP)—which later became the Directorate of Operations (DO) and today is called the National Clandestine Service. DP was the Agency’s branch for the collection of intelligence by covert means. If the JOTs survived the DO’s nearly two-year-long training program, they could become case officers, usually assigned abroad to work in U.S. embassies or consulates under diplomatic cover. While ostensibly listed as Reserve Foreign Service officers, their actual job would be the recruitment of foreign agents and the collection of covert intelligence from foreign sources. Operations Course-11 would teach them basic tradecraft: how to spot and assess potential agents and then how to recruit and manage them. Ames was surprised by how much of it entailed “sitting behind a desk.” It was a bureaucracy. Initially, the trainees had to memorize a one-page list of cryptonyms identifying the Agency’s various departments and functions. Classes were held in a row of dilapidated white clapboard, barrack-like buildings thrown up during World War II as “temporary” office space. Years later, in the early 1960s, the CIA was still using the spartan structures, located on Ohio Drive along the Potomac River. One could see the ground between the gaps in the floorboards. All day long, the trainees were subjected to a parade of speakers from various parts of the Agency, each more eager than his predecessor to regale the new recruits with the virtues of his particular expertise. “It got old, fast,” recalled one of Ames’s classmates.
Because the Agency barracks were located so close to National Airport, there was a sign at the back of each classroom, facing the speaker, that read, “Pause for Planes.” The roar of the planes taking off was close enough to rattle the windows.
By 1961, at the dawn of President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the CIA was already a large, unwieldy bureaucracy, numbering some sixteen thousand employees. The Agency was about to move into its new seven-story quarters in Langley, Virginia. Allen Dulles, veteran Wall Street lawyer and former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, was the Agency’s director of central intelligence. But he was also head of the entire intelligence community and the president’s principal intelligence adviser. The new recruits got so tired of being told that Dulles wore “three hats” that some took to coming to work wearing more than one hat. No one seemed to get the joke. One day a speaker in class was surprised to be greeted with groans and boos when he casually boasted, “At this time, I am actually wearing two hats.” Ames and his fellow Operations Course-11 classmates quickly acquired a reputation for their public unwillingness to suffer such pretentiousness without a display of derision.
The men snickered when more than one speaker was heard to say, “We’ll run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.” And they sat nonplussed when another officer admonished them, “Do not clog the intelligence stream with the luxuriant water hyacinth of trivia.”
But they were impressed when a group of four or five men from the Agency’s School of International Communism came to address them. They were cigar-smoking, hard-drinking intellectuals, all with doctorates in political science or history. They explained that it was their job to keep themselves well informed on the intricacies of the international communist movement. They talked about the doctrinal disputes and the various personalities who led one faction or another in the world of communism. Ames and his colleagues were surprised to learn that communism was less than monolithic.
There were rules in the game of intelligence, and then there were rules to be broken. Some years later the Agency hired some psychiatrists to profile the qualities of a good covert operative. One of the characteristics identified was “a high tolerance for ambiguity.”
Ames quickly made new friends, discovering early on that one of his classmates came from Philadelphia. Socially, the group split between those who were married and those who were still single. “The institution of the cocktail party was still alive, and we all supported the institution,” recalled one of Ames’s classmates. “Mixed drinks were very much still in vogue, and beer and wine might accompany a meal, but they never preceded it.”
In late March of 1961 Ames was sent to the CIA’s “Farm”—a nine-thousand-acre training ground at Camp Peary, located on the York River in Virginia’s Tidewater region near Williamsburg. Army MPs stood guard at the gates, part of the site’s cover as an army base. Officially, Camp Peary was known for “Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity.” But everyone referred to it as “the Farm.” The trainees were housed in Quonset huts; everyone had individual rooms, but they had to share common latrines and showers. Upon arrival, they donned khaki shorts and shirts. That first evening they attended a cocktail party hosted by an army colonel whom they never saw again. Every day there were morning reveille and evening retreat announced with bugle calls on loudspeakers. There was an auditorium shaped like a small Roman coliseum with a speaker’s well at the bottom. They called it “the Pit.” Everyone ate together in a central mess hall, and after dinner an officers’ club opened in the evening where the men could drink beer. The club had a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, and a television. A small movie theater screened a different film each evening for ten cents. It might have been a rustic country club.
But over the next twenty-two weeks Ames and the other men received paramilitary training in the use of firearms and demolitions. They learned to fieldstrip an AK-47, an early version of the M-16 rifle, pistols, and other weapons. They practiced firing these weapons on a target range but also in moving cars and at night. They learned how to maneuver and land a small motorboat and engaged in hand-to-hand combat exercises. They ran through an obstacle course of barbed wire, chain-link fences, and trenches set up to simulate a border. “We gained a respect for the borders that can both be protected and breached,” recalled one trainee. They were taught to handle explosives. “It was the first time I learned that ordinary fertilizer could be used to blow stuff up,” recalled fellow DO officer Henry Miller-Jones. “They blew up a barn for us using fertilizer.” Recruits took a course in map reading and went on uncomfortable marches through the forest at night. It was physically exhausting—but not as rigorous as a marine boot camp. Some sixteen years later another young recruit went through a similar paramilitary training course at the Farm. “The course was a relic from the OSS, which really did fight in World War II,” Robert Baer wrote in his memoir, See No Evil. “But the DO existed to run agents, not defend battle lines. As far as I could figure out, the only reason the DO kept the course going was to engender an esprit de corps in its new officers—a reminder that we didn’t work for the pinstriped crowd down at the State Department.”
Soon after coming to the Farm, on the morning of April 17, 1961, the trainees were called to the Pit and told that a Cuban rebel force supported by the CIA had landed at the Bay of Pigs. They were given regular updates throughout the next few days. “We cheered initially,” said one of Ames’s classmates, “but became increasingly quiet as the scope of the disaster unfolded. Everyone was pretty despondent.” One trainee, Ben Ramirez—a Mexican American and a former marine—revealed that a few months earlier he’d briefly had an interim assignment with the Agency in Miami. His job had been to help with the training of some of the Cuban volunteers. Ramirez was devastated that so many good men he’d trained had probably died in the operation. There was no guilt, but there was a profound sadness.
A few weeks later, Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s inspector general, came to the Farm to brief everyone on what had happened. Kirkpatrick was one of the Agency’s highest-ranking officers. He’d contracted polio during a trip to Bangkok in 1952 and was still confined to a wheelchair. But he sat at the bottom of the Pit and briefed the members of Operations Course-11 at length on the Bay of Pigs. When he was finished, he announced that he’d be available for further questions in the bar of the officers’ club after dinner. He stayed in the bar until closing hour, taking question
s. Kirkpatrick made it clear that he didn’t blame President Kennedy or the Agency. He characterized the Bay of Pigs as a professionally planned and executed operation that had gone terribly awry. He explained that he’d be leading a vigorous investigation of what was obviously one of the Agency’s most embarrassing debacles. Ames and his classmates were impressed that someone of Kirkpatrick’s stature would spend so much time with them.*2
Three weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Ames was given permission to rush home to see Yvonne, who was about to give birth to a baby girl. On May 11, 1961, Catherine was born. A few days later, he had to report back to the Farm. Bob never told Yvonne what he was doing at the Farm—only that he was undergoing some kind of training.
After Ames got back from seeing his newborn daughter, he was finally exposed to the Farm’s core purpose: learning how to recruit and handle agents. (The paramilitary training might seem glamorous, but it would rarely, if ever, prove useful in Bob’s future career as a case officer.) One morning he and his fellow trainees reported to the Pit. Everyone was handed thick briefing books for what was called a “live problem scenario.” Ames was told to imagine that he’d been posted to a CIA station in a fictional country. The briefing books named this fictional country and gave it a history, a geography, a currency, a cultural life, a government—everything that a CIA officer might expect to encounter in a real country. Government leaders and opposition-party members were identified. These fictional characters had detailed biographies that the trainees were told to memorize. Senior military and intelligence officials were named. “The live problem scenario was to become very real to us,” recalled one trainee, “and the degree to which each of us was able to immerse himself in it had a great deal to do with our eventual performance at the Farm.”
