The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Relations between the U.S. consulate—now upgraded to an embassy—and the new government of South Yemen were difficult. In retrospect, it is somewhat extraordinary that the U.S. mission even existed in Aden, given the radical nature of the regime. But finally, on October 24, 1969, the South Yemeni regime broke relations, denouncing the Nixon administration’s decision to sell Phantom jet fighters to Israel. The U.S. chargé d’affaires, William Eagleton, was given twenty-four hours to get out. The seventeen other embassy staff and their dependents were allowed forty-eight hours to leave the country. “A female police officer arrived at the house and stood in the kitchen while we packed up our things,” Yvonne said. “And then we were escorted to the airport by armed soldiers.” On October 26, 1969, Bob, Yvonne, and their five children boarded a chartered flight for Asmara.

  Soon afterwards, Ames flew off to Washington for debriefings at Langley, leaving Yvonne stuck in an Asmara hotel with the children (and their pet cat). When Christmas arrived, they were still camping out in the hotel. Finally, after ten long weeks in the hotel, the Agency arranged for them to move to the army base at Kagnew Station, where at least they could eat all their meals in the army cafeteria. There they sat until late in the spring of 1970, when Ames received travel orders to move his family to Beirut. In the meantime, Bob had spent much of the past year commuting between Washington, Beirut, and Asmara. Yvonne was greatly relieved when in mid-May she finally moved into a nice apartment on Rue de Californie, just west of the American University of Beirut and within eyesight of Ras Beirut’s landmark lighthouse. The kids were enrolled in the American Community School—well within walking distance. “I let them walk alone,” Yvonne recalled. “I felt safe.” On some evenings they could walk to Uncle Sam’s Diner, a student hangout at the corner of Rue Jeanne d’Arc and Rue Bliss. Faisal’s Restaurant, also on Rue Bliss, right across the street from the American University’s main gate, was another nearby landmark. And Khayyat’s Bookstore was just down the street.

  Beirut was not without its hazards even in these pre–civil war days. A Druze Lebanese family lived across the street, and one day Yvonne went to the window when she heard a young woman screaming. She saw the woman struggling with her brother. A moment later shots were fired and Bob hastily pulled Yvonne into the hallway. When they next looked, they could see the woman’s body lying in the street. She had been shot dead. The young woman had “dishonored” the family by having a love affair. A few minutes later, a taxi arrived to whisk the murdering brother away. After the body was removed, there was still blood on the street. “We told the kids the next day,” Yvonne said, “that a truckload of ketchup had accidentally overturned.”

  Yvonne had given birth to five children in less than a decade. But she was not yet done. By late November, she was pregnant again. Bob kept very regular hours. “Most of us case officers worked at night, to see our agents,” observed a CIA case officer who knew Ames. “Not Bob. He was devoted to his family. He would come home, go to his study and decompress a bit by reading, and then he’d have dinner. He saw his agents during the day.”

  Another CIA case officer, Sam Wyman, once asked Ames how he found the time to read books. “Oh, I always make time to read—at least an hour a day,” Bob replied. Wyman was another of the Agency’s few Arabists. (At any one time, the CIA had only twelve to thirteen Arabic speakers in the Directorate of Operations.) Wyman’s father had been an army intelligence officer stationed in Cairo—where Wyman spent part of his childhood after World War II. Wyman had gone to Georgetown University and then earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University. He also spent two years studying Arabic at the University of Baghdad, so he had much more formal training in Arabic than Ames. He’d joined the CIA in 1965. But Ames was probably the more fluent Arabist. “We used to try to come up with Arabic puns and little limericks,” recalled Wyman. “We had a lot of fun together playing with the language.” Both men also enjoyed listening to the popular Lebanese singer Fayrouz. Wyman still has in his possession an Arabic lexicon that once belonged to Ames; the blank pages at the back of the volume are filled with Bob’s neat, tiny handwriting—lists of Arabic words with his own translations.

  In Beirut, Ames was working under Station Chief Gene Burgstaller, who was very much an old-school veteran case officer. He’d served in Berlin and later was chief of station in Paris. Ames admired him and thought he’d built a good team in Beirut Station. His fellow officer from Aden, Henry Miller-Jones, was also living in Beirut. Miller-Jones studied Arabic for a full year and then was peremptorily ordered to replace another case officer assigned to recruiting agents in Syria. This was a tough job, since Syria was deemed a no-travel zone for Agency officers. Too dangerous. So Miller-Jones also was instructed to target potential agents who could pass on any information about Soviet activities in the Middle East. Ames scoffed at this mission; he thought the Soviets were a decidedly secondary target in a place like Beirut.

  Richard Zagorin, another member of Beirut Station that year, lived down the street from Ames in Ras Beirut. “I was in awe of Bob,” Zagorin said. “I’d studied Arabic, but I knew Ames knew Arabic. And I knew Ames understood the Arab world. He was a guy who knew his stuff.” Zagorin had attended the language school in Beirut, and with the outbreak of the June War he’d joined the station. The station chief had called him in to help shred classified papers. Zagorin had entered the CIA because he had an acquaintance, Bill Bromell, who served in the Directorate of Operations and specialized in the Middle East. Zagorin admired Bromell, so when the Agency asked which division he’d like to work in, Zagorin said the Near East. They gave it to him. “Beirut in those days,” Zagorin said, “was terrific, a great operational climate. It was like a Gilbert and Sullivan show. You could do anything. There was nothing you could do that would land you into trouble. We had a team of very talented people.”

  The CIA station in Beirut was located then on the top floor in the left wing of the U-shaped embassy building. “We case officers,” said Zagorin, “all worked in this bull pen. We worked hard, and we played hard. There were, I am afraid, lots of divorces. Our targets were various Arab governments, but also the Soviets.” The crypt for Soviet officials in the region was REDTOP. “We called them Realflops.”

  Ames befriended another officer in Beirut Station, the rather mercurial Henry J. McDermott III. Henry was known inside the station as the “Green Wog,” partly because of his Irish ancestry and partly because he was always referring to Arabs as “wogs”—a British colonial acronym for “worthy Oriental gentlemen.” Wog was a nineteenth-century British Raj euphemism for an Indian trying to emulate upper-class British etiquette. The word was obviously derisive, but Henry loved his “wogs” and he used the term affectionately. Henry had grown up with an abusive father, which may or may not have explained his legendary capacity for drink. One case officer in Beirut called him “a professional Irishman.” But he was nevertheless admired for his brazen courage. He once famously walked into the Beirut offices of the PFLP and introduced himself as a comrade from the Irish Republican Army. The scam worked for a while and led to McDermott’s obtaining information that allowed the CIA to prevent a planned hijacking of a commercial airliner. McDermott had arrived in Lebanon in 1965, and with the exception of one year spent in Iraq, he’d been there ever since. He was a good Arabist—and a very convivial spirit. “Henry was an aggressive, talented, street smart and gutsy officer,” recalled Henry Miller-Jones, who knew him well in Beirut. “He was willing to take big risks and his Irish charm took him a long way.” Like Ames, McDermott was working the Palestinian target. “This called for some serious bravery,” said Miller-Jones. “Bob was pretty tough himself and appreciated someone who could act on his bravado, and Henry had a productive ops imagination.”

  Ames and McDermott made for an improbable friendship. They were opposites. The one thing they had in common was their Catholicism. Both men regularly attended Mass at St. Francis, a Catholic church on Hamra Street. Bu
t the steady, reliable Ames enjoyed the company of the mercurial, hard-drinking McDermott. “They really were very close,” recalled McDermott’s wife at the time, Betty, “and Henry, as much as he was able, loved Bob and respected him enormously.” Henry nicknamed the six-foot-three Ames the “White Whale.”

  McDermott lived in an apartment building near Ras Beirut’s landmark lighthouse. Loren Jenkins, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Beirut from 1970 to 1973, was a neighbor. “Henry was a character,” recalled Jenkins. “He loved to throw knives at a wooden board. He’d show up at odd hours with a bottle of whiskey, and then he’d try to get me drunk so he could pump me for information. But I could hold my liquor better than Henry, so I would turn the tables on him and pump him for stories about his tradecraft. He was the only CIA officer who ever tried to recruit me.”

  Beirut was a vibrant, cosmopolitan, chaotic city in 1970–71, and a playground for a score of rival intelligence services. Things happened. “There was a period,” said Zagorin, “when I was given a recruitment pitch by a Soviet officer—and in the days afterwards, I felt threatened. So I arranged with Bob to have a mutually agreed-upon signal, so that if I got wind they were trying to take me or something, he would come to my rescue. He was armed and ready.”

  In late 1969—soon after his evacuation from Aden—Ames met a twenty-seven-year-old Lebanese citizen who had spent his college years in the American Midwest. Mustafa Zein would become a keystone of Ames’s career. As one of Ames’s CIA colleagues put it, Zein was Ames’s Sancho Panza for the next fourteen years. They met in West Beirut’s Bedford Hotel, where Zein lived and worked as a businessman. They spoke in English, but occasionally Ames would interject an Arabic proverb. It was his way of making a point and making sure that his Arab contacts understood that he had an appreciation for the language.

  Mustafa had spent his childhood in Lebanon, the son of a moderately wealthy Shi’ite Lebanese landowner from southern Lebanon. He was born on January 22, 1942, in the coastal city of Tyre. The Shi’ites of Lebanon were then typically an underclass. Most were landless peasants who worked the rocky soils of South Lebanon as virtual serf laborers for Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim landlords. Zein’s circumstances were different. He grew up privileged and cosmopolitan. His mother gave birth to eight boys and three girls, all delivered at home. His father owned a general grocery store that sold food staples and household goods. The Zeins also owned orchards that produced olives, figs, oranges, and watermelons that they sold in Beirut. Mustafa’s uncles had made a fortune trading diamonds in Sierra Leone. His maternal grandmother was the richest woman in Tyre and lived in an old palace. Mustafa adored his grandmother. Though illiterate, she was both religiously devout and tolerant. Mustafa used to read the Koran to her, and she persuaded him to help with her charitable projects. From the age of nine, Mustafa was entrusted with large sums of cash and instructed to purchase sacks of flour, rice, and sugar, which he quietly delivered on Thursday nights to the homes of Tyre’s poorest residents.

  Unlike most of his peers, Mustafa learned good English at the Gerard Institute, an American boarding school founded in 1881 in Sidon and run by the United Evangelical Church. In 1959 the American Field Service selected Zein to spend his senior year in high school with an American family in Naperville, Illinois, a town thirty miles southwest of Chicago. Naperville, population 12,933 in 1960, gave Zein a quintessential small-town American experience. “Bob and June Beckman became my American father and mother,” Zein said, “and their two daughters and their son became my American sisters and brother to this very day.” Mustafa was particularly close to June Beckman, a devout Christian Scientist. Far from being put off by the Beckmans’ religiosity, Mustafa came to “greatly admire this very principled Christian community.” Zein soon fell in love with all things American. “That was the year I truly became bi-national,” he observed.

  Upon graduating from high school in Naperville, Zein enrolled in the town’s North Central College, a small private liberal-arts college founded in 1861 by the United Evangelical Church. Zein waited tables in the summer at an upscale restaurant, and later he and three friends won a contract from the college to clean dormitories. Zein was already displaying the kind of entrepreneurship that would make him both a good businessman and a facilitator of intelligence. By the time he graduated from college in 1964, he’d saved close to $12,000. He then moved to New York City, where he worked in the national headquarters of the Organization of Arab Students.

  America politicized Zein. As a Shi’ite, he sympathized with the Palestinian refugees. They too were a landless people, and like the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon they had little or no political power. In 1964, he was elected vice president of the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada. He was a handsome young man, his black hair neatly parted on the side. His slightly hooded eyes made him seem exotic. He spoke excellent American English, but with a definite hint of the Middle East. He was a charming extrovert.*2 Zein’s leadership position in the Organization of Arab Students naturally brought him into contact with a similar organization, the U.S. National Student Association—whose international program was underwritten by the CIA from the early 1950s until Ramparts magazine revealed the CIA funding in 1967. The CIA found the National Student Association’s contacts with similar foreign student societies a fertile recruiting ground. Zein was a friend of Richard “Rick” Stearns, the international vice president of the National Student Association.*3 Inevitably, the CIA took note of Zein’s activities. Interestingly, when Ramparts’s revelations were published, Zein was unfazed by the fact that the CIA had funded some of these student organizations. He told his friends in Cairo at the time that the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB, was doing the same thing.

  “Zein was a player in the Arab student milieu,” said another CIA officer who got to know him later. “He had built quite a network of contacts through his work with the Arab student association. He was very bright, very well read, and genuinely pro-American. He had very good taste in art. My wife enjoyed him a lot.”

  In May 1964, Zein became embroiled in a public controversy over a mural in the Jordanian exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York City. The mural depicted a destitute Palestinian refugee living in a camp in Jordan. The New York Times reported that officials from the nearby Israel Pavilion had dispatched a telegram to Robert Moses, who was then running the World’s Fair. They had protested that the Jordanian mural amounted to “propaganda against Israel and its people” and had demanded that Moses remove the offending image. When Moses declined to censor the exhibit, some forty Jewish American protesters converged on the Jordanian pavilion and shouted obscenities. Zein happened to witness the event—and this inspired him to send his own telegram to Moses. Writing in his capacity as vice president of the Organization of Arab Students, Zein expressed his shock at the behavior of the protesters. “This and many other incidents are wearing out the patience of Arab students in the United States,” he wrote. “It makes us wonder sometimes if we are living in America or Israel.” Zein pleaded with Moses to maintain an open mind and to understand his “sincere desire to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between the American people and our Arab nation.” Zein had become a lobbyist—a truly American pastime.

  In late 1964, Zein moved to Cairo, where he enrolled in Cairo University’s medical school. He lasted only a year before dropping out to devote himself to politics and business. That year, he began to acquire powerful acquaintances. He was photographed with King Hussein of Jordan in 1964. And in April 1965 he met Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  In 1968, at the age of twenty-six, Zein landed a job as a “special adviser” to Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan al-Nahyan. Zein became the sheikh’s strategic adviser and interlocutor with the Americans and the British, who were then competing to control the future of the oil-rich Trucial Coast kingdoms. Given Zein’s history of connections to the CIA-funded National Student Association a few years earlier, it was not
surprising when one day in 1968 Zein received a phone call from a visiting American. Allen McTeague identified himself as a Foreign Service officer stationed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He explained that he was the commercial officer in the U.S. consulate—the same position held by Ames just two years earlier. He wanted to talk. Zein invited him to his office in the Abu Dhabi palace. They talked. McTeague gave Zein a copy of John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage and then revealed that he was really from the CIA and simply wished to establish a channel of communication with Zein. The young Lebanese listened—and indicated that he was sympathetic. That was all. But McTeague mentioned that the next time he was in Beirut he should look up a young American named Bob Ames.

  Zein met with Ames in Beirut in late 1969, just after Bob’s evacuation from Aden. Ames wore a gray suit and his trademark western boots. He greeted Zein with a broad smile. He made a few jokes in Lebanese Arabic. “Bob opened the meeting by informing me that he was very familiar with my life,” recalled Zein. Ames had read Zein’s file. He knew about his work with the Organization of Arab Students in New York. He knew about Zein’s cable to Robert Moses in 1964—which demonstrated not only that Mustafa was capable of taking the initiative to approach a powerful figure but that he was genuinely interested in “bridging the gap” between his people and America. They talked frankly. Zein told Ames that he “knew who he [Ames] was, and I did not mind a bit.” But he also underlined his deep disappointment in Washington’s alliances with “thugs and despots.” America, complained Zein, was pushing patriots into the arms of the Soviets “by default.” Inevitably, Zein brought up the plight of the Palestinians. Ames listened patiently—and largely in silence.