The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Salameh was a Palestinian patriot, a guerrilla fighter, and a terrorist. He had killed civilians in the name of Palestinian nationalism. His fellow partisans would say that he only fought terror with terror. He was brazen and unorthodox and fearless. His son would become all these things.

  Ali Hassan spent his childhood years in Beirut. He and his sisters, Jihad and Nidal, were raised by their mother in a middle-class apartment in the lovely neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh. They were Palestinian refugees; the Salameh family house in Qula had been razed to the ground. But in Beirut they did not live like refugees. Ali attended Maqassed College, a private school. In 1956, when he was fourteen, he was sent to a boarding school in Bir Zeit, on the West Bank. His mother constantly reminded him of his father’s legacy. “The influence of my father has posed a personal problem to me,” Ali Hassan Salameh later told a Lebanese reporter in the only extended interview he ever gave to the press. Twelve other family members, mostly cousins, had died in the 1948 war. “My upbringing was politicized,” Ali Hassan said. “I lived the Palestinian cause, at a time when the cause was turning in a vicious circle. They were a people without a leadership. The people were dispersed, and I was part of the dispersion.… The problem I faced was this: whereas the family considered struggle a matter of heritage, there was no real cause to struggle for. There was a history of a cause, but no cause. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan Salameh at a time when the most any Palestinian could hope for was to live a normal life.… I was constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that, even without being told how the son of Hassan Salameh should live.”

  Ali tried for years to live his own life. “I wanted to be myself,” he said. “The fact that I was required to live up to the image of my father created a problem for me.”

  In 1958 the family moved to Cairo, where Ali studied engineering, graduating with a B.A. in 1963. The move to Cairo was made possible by an invitation from Egypt’s charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser—who had heard that the family of the famous Palestinian martyr was living in strapped circumstances. Nasser offered scholarships to Ali Hassan and his two sisters. Afterwards, Ali did graduate work in Germany—where he learned fluent German and acquired a taste for expensive clothes, gourmet foods, and wine. Also women. But all along, despite his ambivalence, he was always drawn to politics. In May 1964 Ali Hassan attended the first convening of the Palestinian National Council in East Jerusalem, and thus he witnessed the formation of the PLO. Shortly afterwards he joined Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, a secular Palestinian political party and militia. (The name is an acronym from the full name—the Palestinian National Liberation Movement—which when spelled backwards becomes “Fatah” in Arabic, or “opening.”) Ali Hassan had finally found his cause—and how to live as the son of Hassan Salameh. “I became very attached to Fatah,” he recalled. “I had found what I was looking for.”

  After spending a year in Cairo, Salameh was sent by Arafat to Kuwait to be in charge of the PLO’s Popular Organization Department. As chairman of the Kuwaiti chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students, Salameh actively recruited students into Fatah. In 1966 Mustafa Zein paid a visit and spent a week in his home. When the June 1967 war broke out, Ali Hassan fled to Amman, thinking he could join in the fight. It was all over soon after he arrived. Afterwards, Arafat assigned him to work in Fatah’s Revolutionary Security Apparatus (al-Razd), the organization’s intelligence bureau. In 1968 Salameh was sent back to Cairo, where he received intelligence training from the Egyptian government. Initially, Ali Hassan specialized in counterintelligence, vetting the security files of Fatah volunteers and keeping track of Palestinians who might have been recruited by the Israelis to penetrate Fatah. It was distasteful work, but Ali Hassan was good at it. He was methodical and patient.*1

  Arafat liked Salameh—despite the young man’s extravagant lifestyle. And he was certainly drawn to Salameh’s pedigree as the son of a famous Palestinian martyr. Perhaps it also counted that Ali Hassan had married well. His wife was Nashrawan Sharif, whose wealthy Palestinian family came from Haifa, where they’d owned property worth millions of dollars. Ali and Nashrawan had met in Cairo—and it had been a love marriage. Nashrawan was an intelligent, attractive woman who had earned a bachelor’s degree in French literature.

  Bob Ames knew only enough of Salameh’s biographical details to know that he made an interesting target for recruitment. Accordingly, he encouraged Mustafa to approach his friend. Zein and Salameh soon met in Faisal’s Restaurant on Rue Bliss, across the street from the American University of Beirut’s main gate. Salameh was as clever as he was flamboyant, and he immediately understood that Zein had some special American friends. According to Zein, some months earlier Salameh had “alerted me to expect an American request for me to arrange a contact with the PLO.” Salameh wanted to establish contact with some “official” Americans. But he could not meet in public. So Ames later conveyed through Zein his plan for an initial contact: Zein would meet Salameh at the Strand café at Hamra Street and Rue Jeanne d’Arc. Ames would stroll by at an appointed hour, and as he walked by their table Zein would signal that the man walking by was their contact. Salameh would respond by placing his hand on Zein’s shoulder. It was a script by which Ames could know that Salameh indeed knew whom he was dealing with and was willing to play the game. They would not speak to each other; they might make eye contact. In public, they were merely passing strangers on Hamra Street. But in the future, they’d be able to recognize each other. It was designed by Ames as the first step—one that would preserve Salameh’s security.

  The scene is accurately portrayed in David Ignatius’s novel about Ames and Salameh, Agents of Innocence. Both Salameh and Ames brought their own security. Salameh had a number of Force 17 commandos in civilian clothes stationed discreetly around the café. Ames had his own security team in place. As scripted, Ames approached Salameh’s table at the Strand café; but instead of walking by silently as planned, Ames suddenly paused, and Salameh rose and shook his hand. “Ali looked at Bob, and then pointed to me,” Zein recalled, “and said, ‘This is my man.’ ”

  Soon afterwards, Ames had Zein set up a clandestine meeting with Salameh in a CIA safe house—actually an apartment—in Beirut. A PLO source later told David Ignatius that Ames had told Salameh he’d been authorized by the National Security Council to open up a channel to the PLO. The gist of his message was: “You Arabs claim your views are not heard in Washington. Here is your chance. The president of the United States is listening.” This was somewhat of a calculated embellishment. Ames would have reported the initial contact and requested permission to develop the relationship.

  CIA director Richard Helms had cause to learn of Ames’s operation at the end of January 1970, when he attended a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House’s West Wing. Also present were President Nixon and British prime minister Harold Wilson. On the agenda was a discussion of the political challenges facing King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. The British handed over intelligence reports showing that Arafat had communicated to one of Hussein’s associates an offer to be prime minister in a future government. Clearly, the PLO expected to soon topple the king. According to David Ignatius, who talked with a source close to Helms while researching Agents of Innocence, Helms went back to the Agency convinced that the CIA needed to improve its sourcing from within the PLO. After questioning some top officers in the Directorate of Operations, Helms was informed about Ames’s promising lead with a top Fatah officer.

  Helms thus knew about Ames’s contact with Salameh within six weeks of the meeting. But at what point Helms went to President Nixon to inform him of the existence of this back channel is unknown. Helms had an awkward relationship with Nixon. They didn’t meet often. So Helms probably waited until he had something of substance to report from Ames’s meetings with Salameh. He wouldn’t have waited too long, however, because of the political sensitivities. The PLO was regard
ed as a terrorist organization, and thus political contacts with its members were prohibited. On the other hand, the CIA viewed the PLO as a natural target for intelligence recruitment. Ames had not gone “rogue” by approaching Salameh. Helms knew Ames was just doing his job as a clandestine officer. His encounter with Salameh could always be seen as the first step in an attempted recruitment. But it was another matter if Ames’s intention was not recruitment but the opening of a liaison relationship. That could be political dynamite if it were to leak. Helms understood that the president—and probably his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger—had to approve the operation and judge its potential rewards against the risks of disclosure. Nixon and Kissinger were probably brought into the loop by the summer of 1970, some six months after the initial contact. And this meant that at some point intelligence reports sourced to someone close to Chairman Arafat—not naming Salameh, but making it clear where the information came from—would have landed on the president’s desk, perhaps in the Presidential Daily Brief. So maybe Ames’s boast to Salameh was not such an exaggeration. The president of the United States was listening.

  Ames and Salameh had an easy and quite open relationship. “Bob had Ali Hassan over to our apartment one time,” recalled Yvonne, “but I didn’t meet him.” They made an odd pair. On one level, they clearly had nothing in common. Ames dressed modestly, like a conservative American businessman: cheap tan slacks, perhaps a loose-fitting polo shirt and a gray sports jacket. Nothing out of the most ordinary—except for the cowboy boots he sometimes chose to wear. Going on thirty-six years of age, Bob had a bit of a paunch. He kept his hair short and well trimmed. He was devoted to his wife of ten years and their five children. And he hated to spend money. He rarely drank. There was nothing extravagant about Bob Ames.

  Ali Hassan, age twenty-seven, looked like a movie actor or a rock ’n’ roll musician. He dressed his six-foot frame in black. His standard uniform was a tight-fitting black shirt unbuttoned to show his hairy chest, a black leather jacket, and black trousers. His wavy, jet-black hair was thick and brushed straight back, revealing a broad forehead. His sideburns were long and bushy, almost like a nineteenth-century Englishman’s muttonchop sideburns. His stomach muscles were taut and firm, evidence of his almost daily karate workouts in the Continental Hotel’s gym; he’d earned either a fourth or a fifth black belt. He was in very good shape. “He moved like a panther,” recalled Frank Anderson, a case officer who worked with Ames. He spoke fluent English, German, and French. He listened to American pop music; his favorite song was Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” He was rumored to have an IQ of 180. Ali Hassan was not a nervous man, but rather incongruously, he chain-smoked cigarettes. He drank Scotch whiskey, but he also had a taste for expensive red wines, and though he was married and had two sons he openly dated other women. “When Ali walked in,” recalled the wife of one CIA case officer, “he sucked the air out of the room.” He knew people gossiped about his playboy lifestyle. But he didn’t care. He once told a reporter, “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.”

  Ames and Salameh were opposites. But they quickly established a genuine friendship. Ali Hassan joked that by hanging out with Ames he’d get a chance to practice his English. “Professionally speaking,” said Anderson, “they each were the most significant person in each other’s lives.”

  The ever-reliable Mustafa Zein always arranged their meetings. “Mustafa was a constant presence,” Anderson said. “He deeply admired both Bob and Ali Hassan.” Zein had cultivated a persona in West Beirut’s café society as a smooth-talking radical-chic Lebanese leftist who strongly sympathized with the Palestinian cause. He seemed to know everyone.

  By the summer of 1970, Ames’s special relationship with Salameh had evolved to a point where the young Palestinian had become a critical source of information about the brewing crisis in Jordan. Salameh was still just a “source”—not a recruit. Nevertheless, the CIA sometimes assigns a cryptonym to a source, if only to make it easier to disseminate the source’s information more widely within the Agency without compromising his identity. Salameh’s crypt was MJTRUST/2. All crypts are capitalized and begin with a two-character prefix, a diagraph that signifies a country or subject. At the time, MJ stood for Palestinian. The originating case officer—in this instance, Bob Ames—usually selected the root word following the two-character diagraph. Significantly, Ames called Salameh TRUST, suggesting exactly what he thought of him. He was trusted. The root word in the crypt is always followed by a slash and a number. MJTRUST/2 signified that Salameh was the second member of this organization to have been identified by this case officer. “The PLO factions were the darling of Arab intellectuals and the Arab street,” recalled Hume Horan, then the U.S. embassy’s chief political officer in Amman. “King Hussein was extraordinarily isolated. Washington wondered how Hussein could last, with half of

  Jordan’s population being Palestinian.… Every Arab under twenty thought Hussein a stooge for Zionism and Western imperialism.”

  Early in 1970, Ambassador Harry Symmes made it clear to President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that he believed the king’s days were numbered. “I didn’t think the king was effectively in charge of the situation—and even if he tried to be in charge that he would succeed.”

  Kissinger agreed that King Hussein was “in grave peril” and was concerned that his collapse “would radicalize the entire Middle East.” At the same time, he doubted that Israel would ever allow the PLO to take over Jordan.

  But the facts on the ground suggested that the Hashemites could no longer be sustained in power. By June 1970, lawlessness was commonplace. Both the Fedayeen and the army committed various atrocities. That month the king’s convoy of cars was attacked and Hussein personally participated in a street battle. On September 1, 1970, he barely survived an assassination attempt. The CIA’s longtime station chief in Amman, Jack O’Connell (1921–2010), bluntly told the king that the time had come to mount a crackdown on the PLO’s militia and seize back the streets from the Fedayeen. “I was virtually alone in believing that the king and his army would ultimately prevail,” O’Connell later wrote in his memoirs. “The U.S. government was deeply divided. State was pessimistic. The Agency was split between my views in Amman and the views of Bob Ames, a rising CIA star who was stationed in Beirut and in liaison with Arafat’s intelligence chief, Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames and I were rivals.”

  O’Connell had first arrived in Amman in 1958 when he was sent by the Agency to warn King Hussein of an army plot against his regime. O’Connell played a key role in thwarting the coup and thus earned the king’s gratitude. In 1963, O’Connell was sent back to Amman as chief of station, and he quickly became the king’s closest foreign confidant. O’Connell believed deeply in the “plucky little king” and believed that his Bedouin army could keep him in power—regardless of the wishes of the majority of his people.

  Ames believed Salameh—who was telling him that the PLO forces were capable of withstanding anything the Hashemites could throw at them. Ames believed the Palestinians were going to win, if only because the PLO had a popular mandate and the momentum. “Bob was just very clearly anti-Hashemite—and ambivalent about Israel,” recalled Dewey Clarridge, later a high-ranking officer in Arab Operations. Ames and O’Connell argued vigorously with each other, both verbally and in their cables back to Langley. O’Connell thought Ames was “misinterpreting his own personal experience with urban warfare in Aden, where the Yemeni insurgents had driven British troops from the port city in 1967.” O’Connell pointed out that the British were the foreigners in Aden, while the Jordanian army was fighting on home ground. Ames countered that historically, King Hussein, the Hashemite family, and the king’s Bedouin tribesmen were actually the foreigners in that they had come from the Hejaz in western Arabia duri
ng World War I. The British colonialists, Ames reminded O’Connell, had imposed the Hashemite regime on the Palestinian population. It was the Palestinians, he argued, who were on home ground, and it was the Palestinians who possessed the higher quotient of political legitimacy. O’Connell thought this was too fine a point; Ames was intellectualizing. What mattered was power, and Hussein’s army had 150 tanks and plenty of artillery. “Bob was prescient,” said Graham Fuller, another clandestine officer. “And like many prescient officers, he would be right about the longer time frame, and just wrong in the short term.”

  As civil war loomed, the PLO had around twenty-five thousand men in its militia, but all summer they’d been passing out arms to thousands of young men in the refugee camps. All told, there were perhaps as many as forty thousand Palestinians walking around with guns in their hands. Hussein’s regular army numbered some sixty thousand troops, but more than half of these men—even many of the officers—were Palestinians. Hussein felt he could count on the loyalty of less than half his army. But O’Connell was right about one thing: Bedouin officers loyal to the monarch controlled the armored units, and they could prove to be decisive in any showdown with the guerrillas.

  Ironically, the Israeli political and military establishment was having the same debate as Ames and O’Connell. Leading Israeli political figures were themselves divided on whether saving King Hussein’s throne was good for Israel. Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Abba Eban, and Yitzhak Rabin surmised that King Hussein might someday be persuaded to conclude a separate peace deal with Israel. “The opposing opinion,” wrote Mordechai Gur, the Israeli general in charge of the Syrian-Lebanese front in 1970, “supported the transformation of Jordan into a Palestinian state.… They suggested allowing the guerrillas to achieve their aims and to take control over all of Jordan. In this they saw the ideal solution to the issue of the Palestinians.” Ezer Weizman, Gen. Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres made this argument—and so too did Gen. Ariel Sharon.