The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Ames knew from his training that recruitment was a difficult art. Failure was almost inevitable—unless the target actually had a desire to be recruited. Ames sensed that young Zein wanted to work for America because he really believed it was in the interest of his people to develop a genuine bond of friendship with the United States. “Was there ever anyone easier to recruit than me?” says Fuad, the fictional character in David Ignatius’s 1987 novel Agents of Innocence. “I recruited myself.” Ignatius’s brilliant spy novel is set in Beirut in the 1970s. It is a roman à clef, and Fuad is most definitely based on Mustafa Zein. But Zein firmly says this was wrong. He was never in the employment of the CIA.*4 He was something else entirely.

  Zein made a good living in Beirut as a business consultant. His clients eventually included such multinational companies as City Service Oil, Suma Corporation, Salomon Brothers, United States Steel, Kaiser Corporation, and Northrop Corporation.

  Sometime in 1969 Ames blandly suggested that they shared mutual interests; perhaps they could work together. Nothing more. Zein always believed their relationship was based on simple friendship and shared values. “He was never a ‘paid agent,’ ” confirms Sam Wyman, a CIA officer who later dealt with Zein. “His was an ideological recruitment. He probably did recruit himself, or allowed himself to be recruited, but he wouldn’t deal with anyone he didn’t like or respect. But he would do just about anything for those whom he did like and respect, and those who achieved the most success with him understood this.” Zein was the absolute best. He was not a bought man. He didn’t take orders from the Americans. He was his own man. But he was willing to do things to advance the relationship between America and his people. Bob Ames thought Mustafa was ideal. So there was no need to make him a paid agent. As Mustafa later explained, “When I met Bob in Beirut a few months later we made a pledge to be truthful to each other in a world filled with lies.” In the world of intelligence this was a rare kind of friendship. It was a partnership.

  Ames told Zein that he thought he was the most “qualified” Arab capable of building a bridge across the political and cultural divides between America and the Arab world. Zein knew America from his college years—and he knew the Arab world. Zein was an Arab Zelig—and like Woody Allen’s Leonard Zelig, he seemed to be everywhere and know everyone. (His unpublished memoir, “Deceit with Extreme Prejudice,” contains photographs of himself with King Hussein of Jordan, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, India’s Krishna Menon, the sheikh of Sharjah, Yasir Arafat, Barbara Walters, and other noted personalities.)

  Bob just wanted Zein to introduce him from time to time to his broad range of friends. Normally, Zein would be called what is known in the business as an “access agent.” Jack O’Connell—a veteran case officer and station chief in Amman—defined an access or principal agent as a “headhunter” for other spies. “You recruit a principal agent because he knows everybody in the town.… You want him to be your partner in finding spies. You might match his salary, pay him $10,000 a year, or $1,000 a month—enough for his time and loyalty.” Zein was a very good access agent—but he refused any money and refused to sign a contract.

  “I was very fond of Mustafa,” said one CIA officer who worked with him. But he knew Zein had an “obsessive personality.” Zein observed the proprieties in Arab society; he dressed stylishly but conventionally. He frequented Beirut’s nightclubs and casinos—though he rarely drank. For a time he dated one of Beirut’s most famous and beautiful casino dancers. He didn’t care what people thought. He was a free spirit, handsome and charming. But there was a serious side to Mustafa. He was deeply philosophical, and beginning in 1963, while still in college in Illinois, he began to study Sufism, a mystical but culturally liberal tradition in Islam.

  Zein knew that Bob Ames was very much married with all those kids. Bob had introduced Mustafa to Yvonne early in their friendship. Mustafa became a family friend of long standing. (Decades later, when one of Bob’s sons got married, Yvonne invited him to the wedding. Mustafa couldn’t make it.) Bob and Mustafa were not professional colleagues; they were just good friends. This was Ames’s way. He recruited sources by befriending them. “Bob really wasn’t that great at recruiting agents,” said George Coll, a former high-ranking CIA officer. “Very few people are. Bob didn’t see the need to formally recruit people. They just became friends.”

  But it was also true that Zein was capable of delivering more than the average friend. He knew how to cultivate new friends; he was pragmatic and quite courageous.*5 “He was very long on guts,” recalled one Agency officer. “I saw him operating in some very dicey circumstances, particularly in Lebanon, crossing one dangerous checkpoint after another. He was very brazen.” Ames began referring to Zein in his cables back to Langley as “the Prophet,” partly because his intelligence was so often on the mark—but partly because Ames knew Zein was a fan of Kahlil Gibran’s best-selling book The Prophet. And sometimes he called him “the Catalyst.” It was a Sufi term. To be a catalyst one had to be “in this world, but not of it.” Without the Catalyst, the Americans and the Palestinians would not have come together.

  * * *

  *1 Ismail was a dominant figure in South Yemeni politics for nearly two decades. But in January 1986 he was mortally wounded when a gun battle erupted at a contentious Politburo meeting.

  *2 As a student activist in America, Zein befriended numerous Palestinians, including Nabil Shaath, who later became a cabinet minister for the Palestinian Authority. Zein also knew men like Amr Moussa, later an Egyptian politician, and Dr. Osama El-Baz, who became a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat.

  *3 Rick Stearns was later a friend of Bill Clinton’s at Oxford University, and President Clinton appointed him a federal district judge in Boston in 1993.

  *4 Years later, a CIA official testified in a federal district court, “Mustafa Zein never received any monies for his efforts. The basis for Mr. Zein’s collaboration with the Agency has been his desire for the United States to comprehend and sympathize with the Arab and Palestinian perspective on the situation in the Middle East.” Mustafa Zein, e-mail to author, August 4, 2012, and U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Mustafa M. Zein v. The United States, No. 99-244C, April 23, 2002, p. 5.

  *5 Zein was once kidnapped by Abu Ahmed Yunis, the PFLP’s notorious security chief, and interrogated brutally for ten days in a dank prison cell in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila. Zein had the presence of mind to persuade one of his guards to convey a cryptic message to a friend—who organized a rescue operation. Yunis was executed by the PFLP in 1981.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Red Prince

  People expect a revolutionary to be a miserable-looking, shabby creature dressed in rags. That’s the wrong notion.… As the Arabic saying goes: Better a reputation of opulence than a reputation of misery.

  —Ali Hassan Salameh

  In Beirut, Ames began to spend a lot of time with Mustafa Zein. One day in late 1969 they began talking about various personalities in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Zein mentioned that he’d reconnected with a young Palestinian who had the ear of Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the PLO. At forty years of age, Arafat was already known as the “Old Man.” Zein’s friend, Ali Hassan Salameh, twenty-seven years old, was a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council and since 1968 had worked with Fatah’s Revolutionary Security Apparatus. Salameh was essentially nurturing the PLO’s rudimentary intelligence bureau, later called Force 17, simply named after its telephone extension in Fatah’s Beirut headquarters. He was trying to turn Force 17 into a professional intelligence organization. He was no ideologue. Soon after taking control of Force 17, he overheard one of his men accusing another officer of being an Israeli spy simply because the man could speak Hebrew and was seen reading an Israeli newspaper. Salameh interrupted to say that they all should be fluent in Hebrew. And then he dismissed the officer who had made the accusation.

  Salameh was a decidedly cosmopolitan Palestinian. Zein said he was th
e kind of young man who broke all the social mores of the Arab world. He flaunted his modernity. Though married, he loved beautiful women and usually had one on his arm. “He was a youthful Marlon Brando, standing over six feet tall,” recalled Zein. Ali Hassan was also a sixties revolutionary. That didn’t mean that he was a Marxist. Like many other Palestinian revolutionaries, Salameh was just a young man with a gun who believed in the righteousness of the struggle to return to his ancestral homeland in Palestine. He drove around town in an expensive car and ate in the finest restaurants. He obviously came from money. Israeli intelligence gave him an aristocratic moniker: the Red Prince. Ames was intrigued.

  At this point, Ames made a brazen pitch to Zein. He told the young Arab that President Richard Nixon himself had authorized him to “explore the possibility of contact between the USA and the PLO.… He

  [Ames] was the person designated for this task.” It was a good story, an improbable story, but a perfect story. There are no declassified records in the Nixon Presidential Library to suggest that Nixon had entrusted Ames—a low-ranking, thirty-five-year-old CIA officer—to open a back channel to the PLO. But Ames told the story to inspire Zein—and to underscore the importance of their collaboration. Ames then asked Zein to go to Amman and look up his friend Ali Hassan Salameh. Zein left for Amman the very next day.

  Zein told Ames that he was a very close friend of Ali Hassan’s. Zein had met Salameh five years earlier in Cairo in 1964. They had been introduced by the president of the General Union of Palestinian Students, just prior to a trip Salameh was making to Europe. Salameh was off to visit an Italian girlfriend. “The man was a magnet,” recalled Zein, “who literally could not be resisted by girls. Period.” Ali Hassan and Mustafa instantly connected. “He was a fixture in my apartment, spending many nights in my guest room.” When Ali Hassan returned from Italy he told Mustafa that he’d decided to move to Kuwait and join the PLO. In Kuwait City Salameh was interviewed by Khalid al-Hassan, the head of the PLO mission in Kuwait and a founding member of the organization. Al-Hassan was delighted to meet the young Salameh—because he knew of the young man’s singular pedigree. Zein and Salameh kept in touch even after Salameh moved to Kuwait. The Palestinian visited Zein in Abu Dhabi—and at one point Zein gave Salameh a very thin Swiss platinum watch. Salameh would wear it for the rest of his life.

  Ali Hassan Salameh was born in 1942 in Baghdad, where his parents had fled from Palestine when the British Mandate authorities put a price on his father’s head. His father, Sheikh Hassan Salameh, was born in 1911 into a poor Palestinian peasant family in Qula, near Lydda. By the time he was twenty-three, Sheikh Salameh was a wanted man. In 1934 he joined Abdul Qader al-Husseini’s anti-British underground army, the Jihad al-Muqaddas (Holy Struggle). During the 1936–39 Arab Revolt he was a commander of a Palestinian militia in the Lydda-Ramla district. In 1938 he led a raid that blew up the Lydda-Haifa railroad tracks. British Mandate records from the Criminal Investigation Department describe Sheikh Salameh at the time as a “gang chieftain.” The Haganah—the military arm of the Zionist movement at the time—created an intelligence file on Salameh that portrayed him as a hardened criminal and terrorist: “Salameh has turned Ramla [town] into a centre of disorder,” the Haganah reported. “People are being murdered in the middle of the city.” Whether he was a “gang chieftain” or a guerrilla resistance leader, Salameh had the backing of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. And when the mufti fled Palestine in 1939, Salameh followed him into exile to Baghdad. There he received military training in Iraq from 1939 to 1940. But soon afterwards, Salameh followed the grand mufti to Nazi Germany, where he served as his senior aide.

  For Palestinian nationalists in World War II this was a classic story: the Nazis were the enemies of their enemies—the British Empire and the Zionist colonialists—so the most prominent Palestinian leader at the time, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin Husseini, considered the Nazis to be strategic allies. This would prove to be an egregious miscalculation, not only because the Germans lost the war, but also because of what the Germans did to the Jews. The enormity of the Holocaust would mean that Haj Amin Husseini’s alliance—however ineffectual—would become a black stain on the reputation of the Palestinian cause. And Hassan Salameh was personally involved. He became a virtual covert operative of the Germans.

  In December 1941 Haj Amin met with Hitler and suggested that German and Palestinian commandos should parachute into Palestine and incite the local population to rise up against the British. This idea languished until late in the war, when the Germans activated a covert plan—Operation Atlas—to do exactly what the grand mufti had suggested. By one account, Haj Amin Husseini persuaded the Germans to provide the commando team with poison to release into the city of Tel Aviv’s water supply.

  On the evening of October 6, 1944, a five-member unit parachuted from a small plane over the Jericho Valley. Hassan Salameh was one of the five. A German SS officer, Colonel Kurt Wieland, led the team. Wieland had grown up in the Templar community of Sarona, just outside Jaffa. (Templars were a small German Protestant sect whose millennial beliefs drove them to immigrate to Palestine in the late nineteenth century.) In 1936 Wieland traveled to Germany and joined the Nazi Party. He was familiar with Palestine and spoke fluent Arabic. Wieland was thus unusually well qualified, but Operation Atlas was an impossible mission. Things went awry from the moment the men jumped out of a German prototype plane powered by an experimental engine. The plane was supposed to have dropped the five-member team at a site north of Jericho. But it flew too high, so Wieland and two other team members landed south of Jericho—while Hassan Salameh and another German officer landed even farther afield. Their supplies—which included two thousand gold coins, guns, maps, radio equipment, and allegedly ten cardboard boxes of poison—were scattered over a wide region.

  The parachute drop botched the entire operation. British police soon received reports that locals had stumbled across gold coins. Search parties were sent out to scour the Jericho region. Wieland and two others sought refuge in one of Jericho’s caves—where they were soon discovered and arrested by British forces. But Salameh and another German escaped on foot toward Jerusalem. Salameh had suffered a foot injury during the parachute landing. He nevertheless made his way to his native Qula, near Lydda, where a doctor treated him. Despite putting a price on his head, the British never caught Salameh.

  On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming that the British Mandate in Palestine would end on May 15, 1948. On that date Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The Jewish population of Palestine celebrated long into the night of November 29. The very next morning, however, Palestinian guerrillas firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades attacked a Jerusalem-bound bus filled with Jews, six of whom were killed. Salameh’s guerrillas allegedly carried out the attack. A week later, Salameh led three hundred of his men in an attack against the Hatikva Quarter, a suburb on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv. But he lost sixty of his fighters and was forced to retreat. Salameh concluded that his militia was no match for the Haganah, so in the ensuing months he returned to attacking Jewish vehicles on the open roads. It was a deadly strategy.

  Sheikh Hassan coordinated his road attacks with Abdul Qader al-Husseini, the Palestinians’ most famous guerrilla leader—and a cousin of the grand mufti. Abdul Qader tried to conquer Jerusalem, while Salameh sought to control the roads leading up to Jerusalem. During the first six months of 1948, Salameh’s force grew to a roving band of perhaps five hundred guerrillas. He called his men the “Mediterranean Irregulars.” They specialized in roadside bombs. On January 22, 1948, seven Jewish auxiliary policemen were killed when their vehicle was blown apart as it drove past a booby-trapped carcass of a dog lying in the middle of the road. In late March 1948, Salameh boasted to a reporter from the Associated Press that his men were preparing to conquer Tel Aviv. He maintained his headquarters in a building in an orange grove outside Ramla. On the
night of April 4, 1948, this four-story structure was blown up; more than twenty of his men died, but Salameh once again escaped with his life. By then he and Abdul Qader al-Husseini were recognized as the Palestinians’ two top military commanders. But not for long. On April 8, an Israeli sentry outside the village of Al-Qastal shot and killed Husseini.

  On May 30, 1948, militia from Menachem Begin’s paramilitary group, the Irgun, attacked the strategic village of Ras al-Ein, whose wells supplied Jerusalem with much of its drinking water. After a two-hour battle, the Irgun seized the village, including the ruins of Antipatris, a Crusader fortress. The next day Salameh led three hundred of his men to take back Ras al-Ein. After eleven Irgun men were killed and a score were wounded, the Irgun fell back. But as they retreated, they managed to fire off one more mortar round that exploded in the midst of the advancing Fedayeen—volunteer militia. Salameh’s cousin was killed and a nephew was wounded. And Salameh himself suffered shrapnel wounds to his chest. On June 2, 1948, he died in a Ramla hospital. He was only thirty-seven years old. His death marked a decisive turning point in the Palestinian resistance to the newly established Israeli state.

  Ali Hassan Salameh was only six years old when his father died. But he grew up with family stories of his father’s exploits. Salameh was reared to regard his father as a legendary Palestinian hero and martyr to the cause—notwithstanding his association with the failed plot to poison Tel Aviv’s water supply. His father had displayed audacity and courage. “We must mention two Palestinian commanders,” later wrote the official historian of the Haganah. “Abdul Kader [al-Husseini] and Hassan Salameh. In spite of all the cruelty they showed in harming non-combatant Jewish civilians, they fought personally at the head of their soldiers, and both perished in battle.”