The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Ames stood in the hot sun for several hours, taking notes on the speeches. Astonishingly, he was the only consulate staffer who spoke enough Arabic to understand the speeches. “I’ve been living and breathing the Arabic language for the last three days,” Ames wrote Yvonne. Consul General Eagleton and the other Foreign Service officers were completely dependent on him—and this annoyed Ames. “After sixty straight days of work,” he wrote Yvonne, “I’m getting kind of tired and a bit cranky. Sometimes the acidity of my tongue surprises me, but there is so much incompetence and lack of organization on the State [Department] side that I find I can take [only] so much.” Ames was particularly annoyed that his Foreign Service colleagues would quiz him for what was being said in Arabic and then run off to the consulate to give the consul general “their news” without crediting him. Ames thought it “pathetic.… But when I think of myself as a taxpayer, I get kind of sick.”

  Ames also believed the consulate’s staff had no empathy for what was taking place in Aden. He thought “the whole independence bit was kind of exciting—the enthusiasm and jubilation of the people over being free after 138 years of British rule was contagious.… It was only when I returned to the confines of the Consulate that I felt depressed. Here the freedom and independence that pervaded the new state was lost on the obsequious individuals who compose our Consulate staff.”

  During the busy transition period to independence, Ames was designated to serve as the consulate’s “press officer.” This allowed him to attend the new government’s press conferences and mingle with local reporters and a few foreign correspondents. Among others, he met CBS broadcast reporter Winston Burdett and the New York Times’s Dana Adam Schmidt. Ames found the press people he met “interesting.” He also served as Consul General Eagleton’s translator in meetings with NLF officials. “My Arabic is improving even if my patience and stamina are not.” Ames thought the consulate was “one disorganized mess and our office is no exception—and you know how I am about neatness and organization.”

  In the ensuing weeks, Aden came back to life. “People are cautiously sticking their heads out of their hiding places,” Ames reported, “and finding they’re not getting shot at now.” He resumed his visits to the suq, where he bought Yvonne a beautiful pearl necklace—and, on an uncharacteristic whim, got himself an expensive Akai tape recorder. He wrote guiltily to Yvonne, “I got it for under $250 [worth $610 in the U.S.] and we still have $750 in the bank. Hope you’re not too upset, what with your pinching pennies, but you know that spending is good for the soul.” He wanted it so he could play music in his room. Bob had been confined to his apartment and office for weeks on end, complaining, “Our contacts are so restricted.” He was looking forward to getting out and doing his real job—recruiting some agents. “So far, I haven’t made any real close Arab friends,” Ames wrote, “but that is because they are conservative by nature and are still not sure what the new government feels about contact with Americans.” With the independence festivities behind him, he was eager to be “lost in the obscurity which I enjoy so much.”

  The new NLF government gradually restored a semblance of security, and it became safe enough for Ames and other consular officials to travel into the countryside. Ames drove to Lahej, a day trip north from Aden. Bob loved getting out into the rugged countryside, driving past old Arab forts, camel trains, and dusty mud villages. He later also took the opportunity to travel to the Hadramaut, South Yemen’s exotic but very isolated province in the far east—and the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden.

  Ames was rarely seen in the Agency’s consular offices. Despite the dangers on the street, he spent most of his time cultivating contacts among the locals, using his commercial-officer cover story. “I have been all over Aden in places I wouldn’t dare to have entered a few days ago.” He made himself approachable, dressing casually in his standard polo shirt, blue trousers, and chukka boots. At six feet three inches, Ames stuck out. His size impressed the Arabs and he was aware of that. Word got out that the tall American was approachable and simpatico. “I don’t recall a lengthy or active list of agents on Bob’s payroll,” said Henry Miller-Jones. “He was not an aggressive recruiter across the spectrum of potential assets, rather more the type who developed meaningful personal relationships with significant people of real potential value and, if appropriate, brought them gradually into a paid or otherwise compromised agent relationship. It was his knowledge of the area and culture that enabled him to draw real intelligence out of such contacts, rather than a more formal businesslike relationship. He was more interested in the subject matter than ‘adding coonskins’ to his belt.” Stephen Buck, a young Foreign Service officer who arrived in Aden in 1968, admired Ames’s grasp of Arabic and of Yemen’s complex tribal politics. “I used to say that Bob forgot more about Yemen than the rest of us ever learned.”

  One expatriate institution Ames made sure he frequented was the Catholic church. He was, after all, still a Catholic. He sometimes attended Mass at St. Anthony’s Church, built by the British in 1839, the year they seized Aden and made it a protectorate of the British Empire. The Franciscan order had built a church at Steamer Point in Aden. The church operated several Catholic schools. Ames easily got to know some of the priests associated with these institutions. A thirty-one-year-old priest, Father Ambrose, became a regular dinner companion. Bob described him as “a real down to earth fellow who knows more jokes and appears to be anything but a priest.” Father Ambrose came from the same order of priests Ames had known in Asmara a decade earlier.

  If you socialized in Yemeni society, that inevitably meant learning to chew qat, a mildly narcotic leaf that Yemenis languidly chew every afternoon for hours while sipping sweet black tea. Qat makes people loquacious. It is the perfect drug of choice for a case officer cultivating agents. So perhaps Ames met Abd’al Fatah Ismail while chewing qat in someone’s living room. Born in 1939 in North Yemen, Ismail had been educated at the Aden Technical College. He became a schoolteacher and then a labor-union activist. He was a dogmatic, bookish Marxist. Ismail was only twenty-eight years old when he met Ames. Four years earlier, Ismail had been a founding member of the NLF. Ames later told CIA director William Casey that he had befriended this budding young revolutionary. At the very least, he got Ismail to confide in him. Yemen’s brutal civil war was finally winding down; the British were soon leaving. Ostensibly, South Yemen was about to become a republic. In reality, it was a feudal backwater, a nation with a high illiteracy rate steeped in Islamic traditions and bogged down by petty tribal feuds. Ismail explained to Ames that he wanted to change all this. Casey gave a speech in May 1985 in which he explained:

  Abd’al Fatah told Bob of his experience in the higher Komsomol school that the Soviets maintain in Moscow for training young revolutionaries.… Abd’al Fatah explained that he had been taught in Moscow that he would need 20 years—a generation—to consolidate his revolution. He would have to control the education of the youth. He would have to uproot and ultimately change the traditional elements of society. This would mean undermining the influence of religion and taking the young people away from their parents for education by the state. He was taught that to control the people he would have to establish block committees … and a powerful secret police.

  Ames was a patient listener. He’d already confided to his own colleagues his disdain for the British Raj. So it isn’t inconceivable that he’d express to someone such as Ismail his empathy for Ismail’s anticolonial struggle. By December he’d already met many of the regime’s new cabinet ministers. “Most of them are just about my age,” he wrote, “and I must say that I’m impressed with their sincerity and desire to get their country on the road of progress. Perhaps this, more than any other factor, has given me confidence in the new state.” Ismail was named minister of culture in the new NLF government. The right-wing faction of the NLF purged him in March 1968; he was arrested and then sent into exile. But then in the summer of 1969 he orchestrated a “correction” in NL
F party doctrine—essentially an internal party coup—and by the summer of 1969 was secretary-general of the NLF and a member of the Presidential Council. As such, he was South Yemen’s de facto leader.*1

  “Ames told me,” Casey said, “that as he looked back, Abd’al Fatah—with Soviet bloc help—had done just as he’d been taught. He captured and subverted a legitimate war of independence in his own country. He killed or drove into exile those members of the movement who believed in democracy, and then went about the work of consolidating a Communist regime.”

  Ames’s colleagues back in Langley noted that he’d been able to cultivate a future head of state. Getting to know the right people was the definition of good spy craft. It was all about getting close to influential or powerful actors. It’s hard to see in retrospect what Ames or Washington got out of this relationship in any concrete sense. And it’s hard to see what Ismail got out of it. Perhaps the young revolutionary got a kick out of confiding in a CIA agent. But Ames got a chance to understand the mind of someone who became a player. It didn’t matter that Ismail was an ideological opponent. It didn’t matter that he was not a “controlled” source. He’d become a source nevertheless, a window onto this very foreign world called Yemen. Ames thought his government wanted him to understand what motivated Ismail and his colleagues to wage a revolution against the British. Good spying was all about empathy.

  “Had Ames been a public man,” wrote one of his colleagues in Aden, “he would have stood tall in his all-American shoes [cowboy boots] as a Louis L’Amour hero. But he belonged more to John le Carré’s world: anonymous, perceptive, knowledgeable, highly motivated, critical, discreet—with a priest’s and a cop’s understanding of the complexity of human nature in action. More private than secret—but that too.”

  One day at the Gold Mohur Beach Club three Arabs swam over from another beach and approached a U.S. Foreign Service officer swimming in the cove. One of the young men asked the diplomat if he knew how to contact “Mr. Bob.” The Foreign Service officer said, “Sure, you can find Bob Ames at the Caltex building.” Later, Ames casually thanked the Foreign Service officer for the referral.

  This young man would become one of Ames’s sources. Born in Iraq in 1933, Basil Raoud al-Kubaisi had earned a B.A. from Adams State College in Colorado, an M.A. from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a doctorate in political science from American University in Washington, D.C. His 1971 thesis was titled “The Arab Nationalist Movement, 1951–1971: From Pressure Group to Socialist Party.” The 167-page thesis explored the origins of the ANM, the same organization that Ames had been told by his Langley superiors to target for intelligence during his first posting in Dhahran in the early 1960s. By 1969, the ANM would morph into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). But in 1967–68 Al-Kubaisi visited Aden to interview sources for his thesis research. In July 1967, for instance, he interviewed Qahtan al-Sha’bi, an ANM member who later that year became the first president of the Democratic Republic of South Yemen. He had also interviewed George Habash (a medical student at the time and the principal founder of the ANM), Nayef Hawatmeh (leader of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and Wadi Haddad, later the mastermind behind the PFLP’s spectacular air piracy in the early 1970s.

  Al-Kubaisi came from a wealthy and well-connected Sunni Muslim family in Baghdad. He finished high school in Baghdad and then studied political science at the American University of Beirut. Habash befriended him at the American University. Basil joined the ANM, but his political activities on campus eventually led to his expulsion. He spent his senior year at Colorado’s Adam State College, graduating in 1956. Basil then returned to Iraq, where he worked in the foreign ministry. But once again his political views got him into trouble. In the mid-1960s he fled Iraq altogether and enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C. While pursuing his graduate studies, Basil was also a prominent leader of the ANM’s activities in America, recruiting Arab students to the cause of Arab unity. After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Basil went back to the Middle East to interview ANM figures for his thesis.

  We cannot know what motivated Al-Kubaisi to seek out Ames in Aden, but we can know that Ames would have regarded the Iraqi academic as an invaluable source of information about a rising new generation of radical Arab political figures. “Ames was good at recruitment,” recalled a former Agency officer, “because he sensed how to match up a potential recruit’s interests with his own. He could make a recruit believe that ‘you and I talking’ was the right thing to do.” Al-Kubaisi may have been just one of Ames’s “sources” and not a fully recruited agent. We just know they knew each other in Aden. Al-Kubaisi was probably delighted to find someone who was willing to listen to what he was learning from his research about the ANM. “Bob was a very good listener,” said the Foreign Service officer who had referred Al-Kubaisi to Ames.

  That Al-Kubaisi had been educated in America presumably also made him susceptible or open to talking with an American official; he was someone who obviously understood the United States. Perhaps this made him want to help America, and Ames in particular, to understand Arab aspirations. We also know from a top-secret British Foreign Office memo that Al-Kubaisi had been a source in 1963 for information on the ANM—so he already had some experience in dealing with Western intelligence services. Al-Kubaisi’s obvious sympathy for the ANM and the Palestinian cause gave him entrée to left-wing intellectual circles. And likewise, Ames’s interest in the history of the ANM and his empathy for the Palestinian cause attracted Al-Kubaisi’s interest in the American. They were a natural fit.

  With independence and the departure of the British, it was now safe for Yvonne and the kids to come to Aden. But Bob was nevertheless forced to spend Christmas in Aden alone. He did manage to attend midnight Mass, but he called it “the most depressing and un-Christmas-like Christmas I have ever spent.” The only present he got was from a colleague who gave him a meerschaum pipe from Turkey. Still, on Christmas morning he wrote Yvonne a satirical ditty taking off from Clement Clarke Moore’s nineteenth-century Christmas poem. Ames’s version was set in Aden, and St. Nicholas was an “agent.”

  T’was the night before Christmas and all through the town

  Not a rifle’d been fired nor grenade had been thrown.

  The checkpoints were manned, the security tight;

  No sleigh-driving agent would get through tonight!

  The poem had Arab gunmen intercepting the “sleigh-driving agent” and confiscating his toy guns. “So lock up this agent, his deer and his sleigh, / and double the guard through the whole holiday.” Sitting in Norwood, Massachusetts, Yvonne was faintly amused. She and the four children finally were allowed into Aden in January 1968 and moved into the spacious Khormaksar house Bob had found. “Aden was spartan,” Yvonne recalled. “But I loved it. I felt at home in this part of the Middle East. Beirut was a big city, and I am not a big-city girl. But in Aden I didn’t feel confined.” She drove the girls to the Gold Mohur Beach Club and frequently shopped in the duty-free shops in the Port Authority. She had a cook—who turned out to have tuberculosis and infected one of the girls. Yvonne also hired an Ethiopian ayah to help her take care of the girls. Bob was out and about every day, but he always spent his evenings at home. “He didn’t share secrets,” said Yvonne, “so that made life normal.”

  Even in Aden it was the sixties, and Bob Ames, the CIA case officer, was not immune to popular culture. He still considered himself a conservative Republican, but he loved pop music, particularly the Beach Boys. He’d also listen to Petula Clark and Glen Campbell. But the Beach Boys was his favorite band. He could sing some of their classics, hitting all the falsetto high notes.

  Bob was still the occasional prankster. He could make his little girls squeal with delight by speaking to them in a Donald Duck voice. But he’d never perform his Donald voice on command; he’d only do it spontaneously. One evening at the dinner table he showed the girls his “thumb apart” magic tric
k. The Ethiopian ayah, a woman named Hewit, was feeding baby Karen when she saw Bob “separate” his thumb. “Her eyes got wide, she threw the spoon up to the ceiling and went screaming out of the room,” Bob wrote. “The kids were hysterical and that was the end of dinner.” By then, the four girls ranged in age from four months to six years. They were a handful. Yvonne had to boil their diapers in a pot over a kerosene burner. She had a wringer washer machine—but no dryer. Every morning the three older children were dressed in white school uniforms and sent off to the convent school run by an order of nuns. Late in November 1968 a very pregnant Yvonne flew alone to Asmara, leaving Bob to look after the girls. The medical facilities at Kagnew Station were thought to be superior to anything in Aden. “Please hurry the baby on its way,” Bob wrote facetiously. “Sit-ups are the best thing, so that you can get home to your family.” A betting pool was established among Aden’s expatriate community on whether Yvonne would have yet another girl. “I think half of Aden is waiting!” Bob wrote on December 3. “The betting has been brisk.” Six days later, Yvonne gave birth to their first son. They named him Andrew Thomas Ames.

  Later that year, Marsh Niner left Aden, and Ames replaced him as chief of station (COS), a significant accomplishment for someone only thirty-four years old. Dick Roane was promoted to be his deputy chief of station. Roane’s Arabic was not yet as good as Ames’s, but he was on his way to becoming very fluent. They were a good team. Roane’s previous post had been just to the north in Sana’a, where his job had largely been to collect intelligence on SOVMAT—Soviet weapons pouring into the country. He’d spent a lot of his time crawling under Soviet-made tanks and other military equipment, copying down their serial numbers so that analysts back in Langley could build a database on Soviet arms shipments. It was dangerous work, and one day he was kidnapped on the road from Sana’a to Hudaydah. The U.S. government had to pay a sizable sum to ransom him. Despite this experience, Roane loved Yemen. He and Ames shared an interest in Middle Eastern history, and they worked well together over the next two years.