The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  A few weeks after Ames arrived in Aden, Dick Roane, another junior CIA officer, was walking back to his apartment when he noticed that he was being closely followed. Fearing a kidnapping or worse, he hastily made it to his apartment gate and locked the door. The following day Niner issued 9mm Browning automatic pistols to everyone in the station. Ames decided not to walk around with a gun. “If they get you here,” he wrote Yvonne, “it is in the back or when you’re not looking, and a gun wouldn’t do much good.”

  On October 14, 1967, Ames witnessed his first full-fledged street battle. It was the fourth anniversary of the National Liberation Front’s uprising against the British; a general strike was declared, and then at about 9:30 A.M. Ames heard machine-gun fire. He looked out his office window and saw British troops running for cover. “I saw one Brit get wounded about a block and a half away and the firing was so fierce that it was about five minutes before his buddies could get him.” The Brits had to bring in armored cars to suppress the firing. When it was over several hours later, one Arab had been killed and four British soldiers were wounded.

  A few days later a visiting Danish sea captain walked out of the Port Trust building and headed past the U.S. consulate. Someone walked up quickly from behind him and shot him in the head, leaving him dead in the street. The Dane was the first nonmilitary, non-British civilian to be assassinated since the outbreak of the rebellion. A week or so later a senior British official from the Governor-General’s Office was walking up the steps to the entrance of the Crescent Hotel when he was sprayed with machine-gun fire from a passing car. Grievously wounded, the man survived. In late October, Bob wrote, “The situation in Aden becomes worse each day.” After these brazen attacks, life in Aden for any of the expatriates became much more restricted. Henry Miller-Jones recalled the extreme security precautions he had to take on his way to work in the consulate: “Each morning, Niner instructed me that I was to ensure my 9mm was loaded and I was to open the gate in the wall that surrounded our 4-story apartment building that faced out onto the main street running from Ma’alla to Tarshyn. While I was doing this, gun in hand, my roommates would drive the car from its parking space in front of the building behind me with the rear door open. As the car passed through the gate on my all clear signal, I would jump in the back seat, and off we went to the office, right around the block, no more than three minutes away.” Miller-Jones had arrived in Aden a month after Ames. He was on a three-month temporary-duty assignment. Fresh off the Farm, he’d never been abroad to anywhere except Europe. “I was pure raw material for Ames’s self-appointed mentoring,” Miller-Jones recalled. “Niner was no help.”

  Aden was then in the middle of a three-way civil war. Southern Arabia was still a British protectorate. But British forces were fighting an insurgency waged by both the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY)—both of which were in turn engaged in a bloody struggle for power against each other. FLOSY was the guerrilla faction supported by Nasser’s Egypt. The NLF was a more leftist organization, an offspring of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). From his time in Dhahran, Ames was familiar with the ANM. But the NLF was an entirely different story. Some of their cadres had been trained in Moscow. In the last year, the NLF had taken to assassinating foreign civilians. Several British wives had been killed by sniper fire along Ma’alla Straight, where many of the British lived in new high-rises. This stretch of road became known as “Murder Mile.” Rebels sometimes seized the rim of the Crater district, which gave them a bird’s-eye view of the city from a thousand feet above. From there, they lobbed mortar or grenade rockets randomly into the city below. The Crater and its narrow, meandering streets in the Arab Quarter became a no-go zone for any foreigners.

  In such circumstances, the colonial representatives of the fading British Empire were just hanging on, trying to negotiate an orderly transfer of power. The June 1967 War had closed the Suez Canal, making Aden’s port of transit far less strategic to British maritime interests. That month the British evacuated most official families, and Governor-General Sir Humphrey Trevelyan announced that he intended to pull out all British forces entirely by January 1968.

  Thus, by the time Ames arrived, much of the European Quarter was deserted. Within a week of his arrival, Bob reserved a furnished three-bedroom house in the Khormaksar neighborhood. It had a lovely view of the Arabian Sea and came with a large roof deck equipped with an outdoor grill and bar. Quarters for two servants were located above the detached garage. But until Yvonne and the kids arrived, it didn’t make sense to move into a large house. For the first month, Bob had a hotel room in the Rock, a modern high-rise with a glassed-in rooftop restaurant. He found it to be pretty confining and lonely. The Rock was also Aden’s best-known watering hole; Niner and the rest of the station spent a lot of time in the Rock. But not Ames. “It’s a good thing,” Bob wrote Yvonne, “I’m not a drinker because that seems to be the favorite pastime.” He preferred root beer and a bowl of pretzels. He was still smoking a pipe, however, and in Aden he discovered a forbidden pleasure—Havana cigars. “I bet you’d like to be sitting in my office now,” he teased Yvonne in a letter. “I’m smoking a big smelly Cuban cigar!”

  Later that autumn, he and Dick Roane, who became Bob’s best friend in Aden, decided to share a small flat near the consulate. Roane was a bachelor. “He won’t have to worry about my cramping his style—there are just no girls here,” Bob wrote to Yvonne, and, in another letter, “Except for the aura of terrorism that now exists, I think I’d like Aden, and I’m sure you would. There are nice beaches and plenty of clubs and things to do—that is, in normal times.” Aden had evolved over the past century as a coaling station for freighters and tour ships passing through the Suez Canal on their way to or from India. The European Quarter of the city was relatively clean, and the city had the usual colonial amenities, including the British-run Gold Mohur Beach Club at Steamer Point, a duty-free market in the port area, and several good bars and hotels.

  “Bob wasn’t the kind of guy to go out drinking with the boys,” recalled one colleague. “He could be brusque and he didn’t suffer fools.” Ames and Niner didn’t get along. The chief of station “could be very imperious.” Niner was Germanic—like his German wife. He was a stickler for regulations. The chemistry between the two men was sour. They had what one case officer called an “ugly relationship.”

  But Bob didn’t care what his station chief thought, and he made no effort to cultivate Niner. Instead of hanging out at the Rock drinking, Bob spent his time reading and wandering the suq. On a typical day, he’d get into the office at 7:30 A.M., do some paperwork for two hours, and then walk to the suq, where he’d sit and chat with the merchants for several hours. “Most of them are quite friendly,” he wrote Yvonne, “when they learn I’m American and speak to them in Arabic.… What fun the Suq is here—you’d go wild.”

  One quiet weekend, he took time off and went for a swim at the Gold Mohur Beach Club, a very colonial British institution that welcomed American and European expatriates. Arabs were not allowed to join the beach club. Henry Miller-Jones remembers having his first long conversation with Ames, standing knee-deep in the Arabian Sea. Ames pointed out to him the nets strung across the mouth of the bay to prevent sharks from attacking bathers. “Ames admonished me to avoid socializing with the Western and American expat colonies,” recalled Miller-Jones. “He urged me to mix with the locals and other Arab targets where there was more likelihood of finding a potential source of any value. This was good professional advice, but I believe Bob also considered the social life among the expat communities not to his taste; he thought it pretty boring and superficial and maybe a bit too social.” Ames never joined the Gold Mohur Beach Club and instead eventually paid for a family membership at the less fancy Italian Beach Club. The latter had a clientele that included diplomats from communist and many Third World countries.

  The British naturally dominated the social scene in Aden. And
though he was always cordial, Ames clearly didn’t care for the Brits. They were the colonialists, and Ames believed them to be both insensitive to Arab mores and ill informed about Yemeni politics and history. During his visits to the suq, Ames noticed sandbagged machine-gun nests at every corner, and British soldiers patrolling the narrow alleys. “The soldiers are arrogant and forever harassing the Arabs,” he wrote. “No wonder they’re hated.”

  In his spare time, Ames read anything he could find on Yemeni history. “I really feel frustrated that there are no bookstores in Aden,” he wrote Yvonne. “You know how I like to ramble through them.” He particularly admired the works of Wendell Phillips (1921–75), the American explorer and adventurer who wrote about traveling through southern Arabia in the 1950s. His best-known book was Qataban and Sheba: Exploring the Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice Routes of Arabia, published in 1955. Phillips was a self-taught archaeologist and pistol-packing “Indiana Jones” adventurer. In 1950–51, he persuaded Yemen’s monarch to let him excavate the ancient city of Marib, thought to be the queen of Sheba’s ancient capital. While he was digging at Marib’s circular Moon Temple, a Bedouin raiding party attacked his encampment; the archaeologist survived to write Qataban and Sheba. Around the same time he wrangled oil concessions from the sultan of Muscat and Oman. By the 1960s, he was worth a reported $120 million. His fellow explorer Lowell Thomas once called Phillips the “American Lawrence of Arabia.”

  That Ames was attracted to the life and work of a modern-day Arabian explorer like Phillips is evidence of a certain kind of romanticism. But he was not guilty of the shallow Orientalism skewered by the late professor Edward Said. “He fully grasped the irrationality, fecklessness, bravado and rhetoric of the area,” observed his friend Henry Miller-Jones. He was an Arabist with a genuine curiosity and affection for Arab culture and in particular the culture of the Arabian Peninsula. He prided himself on his growing knowledge—and he was not afraid to be dismissive of those he thought ignorant. One day that autumn a cable arrived from the CIA station in Sana’a reporting the sensational news that Russian pilots were now flying combat missions in North Yemeni airspace in support of the Republican regime. Their evidence came from a recently downed MiG jet fighter: the body of the pilot had been recovered and he had red hair, so clearly he must be a Russian. Ames read the cable and burst out laughing. The dead pilot’s “red hair,” he knew, was just evidence that the pilot was a good Muslim who had probably recently returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, and so, like thousands of other Hajjis, had dyed his hair red with henna. The dead pilot was the usual Egyptian, not Russian. Ames fired off a highly dismissive cable to Langley; senior analysts in Headquarters read it and decided to kill the earlier report.

  On October 28, Ames accompanied Consul General Eagleton on a trip to the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman. “This is one of the most inaccessible kingdoms and a place I’ve always wanted to visit,” he wrote to Yvonne. They flew in a U.S. Air Force plane to Salalah, where Sultan Said bin-Taymur lived in an otherworldly mud palace. Ames later told a friend that it looked like something right out of Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights. “You’d love Muscat (I think), and Salalah too,” Bob wrote Yvonne. “The people are real friendly and full of the real Arab hospitality.… In the barren hills behind Salalah you can find the frankincense tree—the only place in the world it is found. Dhufar is the Ophir of the Bible and the land from which the wise men came. I got some frankincense which I’ll send home some day, hopefully by Christmas.” The sultan was without a doubt the Middle East’s most medieval ruler. “We had an audience with the Sultan and his son Qaboos,” Bob wrote. “They are both very charming.” But Ames also noted that the sultan and the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia were probably the last two complete despots in the world. “Nothing is done without the Sultan’s personal approval.”

  After the royal audience, the sultan’s twenty-seven-year-old son Qaboos bin Said took the visiting Americans on a tour of the royal gardens and “dined us royally.” Qaboos confided in Ames that his father was keeping him under virtual house arrest. Qaboos had been educated at Britain’s Sandhurst Military Academy. Ames was startled to hear that Qaboos was allowed only a few books and some classical Western music records. Qaboos had to send notes across the courtyard, asking permission to see his father. Obviously, this was an untenable situation for the son. “The Sultan, of course, will succumb to nationalists one day,” Ames predicted. “But it’s a shame that the ruler, who is father to all his subjects, must be overthrown by men who have no respect for family or the old Arab traditions, preferring instead the new testament and ten commandments of [Egypt’s] Abd-al-Nasir. There I go romanticizing. I should know that progress can’t be stopped—it’s just too bad that progress in the Arab world usually brings into play the worst of both worlds.”

  Ames was right to think the sultan wouldn’t last. Three years later, Qaboos bin Said staged a palace coup and seized power from his father. He did indeed modernize his kingdom, introducing schools, paved roads, and all the accouterments of modernity. But Qaboos is still an absolute monarch.

  Aden was one of the most dangerous places to live in 1967. Soon after Ames returned on November 1, the city was rocked by another round of assassinations. A German broadcaster with the Süddeutscher Rundfunk was shot at close range as he walked out of the Tawahi post office around noon. He’d just sent a telegram to his new Lebanese bride. The assassin was caught—and to everyone’s shock he was identified as the Yemeni announcer on the local evening radio news show. “They’ve caught the killer,” Ames wrote, “and it seems he is the one who did all the recent killings … and one of the fellows he killed was the Brit who taught him to be an announcer. How do you figure a person like that out?” The assassin had evidently been a secret member of the NLF all along. But that he had targeted a non-British foreigner, and a journalist at that, was ominous. “A great quiet has fallen on our part of the city,” Ames wrote. “No cars on the streets, no people, shops closed. This is the eye of the hurricane.”

  A few days later, the British suddenly announced that their military forces would all be out of Aden by the end of November—a full month or two before London’s planned withdrawal. The Brits had decided they just couldn’t take any further casualties. This precipitated a final blowout between the NLF and FLOSY forces. “We have a full scale civil war going on about five miles away from us,” Ames wrote. “At last count, there were over 100 killed and 300 wounded with many more kidnapped and assassinated.” The NLF controlled most of the countryside outside Aden—and some, but not all, of the key districts inside the city. “The Tawalhi, Steamer Point and Ma’alla area is now NLF since the NLF slit the throats of all FLOSY people in those areas.”

  In the event, the NLF won the civil war. “Well, it looks like the NLF all the way,” Ames wrote. “NLF flags are everywhere and it looks as if the Brits will turn over the government to the NLF.… There is a holiday mood in the air. I actually went down to the suq today and shopped around for two hours. I also got a much needed haircut.”

  In the midst of this chaos—civil war, assassinations, and general insecurity—Ames was worrying about his personal finances. And rightly so. He had about $1,000 in his stateside bank account. He reluctantly warned Yvonne, “I’m afraid some things must be put off because of lack of funds … so please portion out your expenses for the time being—just spending on the real necessities.” Bob was living in Aden entirely on his daily expense account and saving his paycheck. But with a wife and four children it was still hard to make ends meet on a government salary. On the other hand, he was so careful about money that he was never in debt.

  Bob hated to be separated from his wife and girls. He was counting the days. By October 22, 1967, because of home leave and his business travels, he’d seen Yvonne only 20 of the past 141 days. “I’m sure I’ll be a stranger to them when we’re together again.” He had photographs of his smiling girls displayed on his office desk, but he wrote Yvonne, “Wh
at good is a picture?” His letters home always began, “Dear Bonnie [Bob’s nickname for Yvonne] and babies,” and they always ended with the phrase “God love you all.” He looked forward to the day when they could live as a family again, and he even asked Yvonne, “Ready for #5?” But he worried about their security. “I love you and miss you so very much.… I won’t bring you out until I’m sure of your safety.” As Christmas approached, he wrote Yvonne, “Give the girls a hug from daddy and tell them, just like Santa Claus, daddy really does exist.”

  Ames viewed the British departure ceremony from aboard a British aircraft carrier, the HMS Albion. He was glad to see the Brits leave. Independence was officially declared on November 29. Crowds surged into the streets to celebrate. Cardboard and plywood arches were constructed and festooned with palm fronds and the red-, white-, and black-striped NLF flag. In the backs of pickup trucks racing through the city were gun-toting rebels who shouted slogans against the British. More than fifty thousand people attended the independence rally and heard speeches by the new president, Qahtan al-Sha’bi, and other NLF leaders. “The new government appears to be quite leftist,” Ames wrote, “and many feel it is deeply infiltrated by Communists. Certainly, the Communist press corps got the best treatment.” On the other hand, Ames pointed out that the new president appeared to be “sincere and hard working.”