by Kai Bird
Henry Kissinger claims that he knew nothing of this internal Israeli debate. But in the midst of the crisis, on September 20, 1970, he told his aides, “I’m not really sure the Israelis would mind it if Hussein should topple. They would have no more West Bank problem.” And just a few days later he read an official memorandum of a conversation in which Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, speculated that Israel might indeed be better off without the Hashemite regime:
Foreign Minister Eban told [U.S.] Ambassador [Charles] Yost at the UN on September 23 that while Israel, on balance, favored Husayn at this time, “the world would not come to an end if he departed the scene.” Eban said the Palestinians would become more responsible when saddled with the day-to-day burdens of government, and the long-term trend in Jordan was toward greater recognition of the fact that Jordan was 70 percent Palestinian. Yost added that Eban seemed to imply that, sooner or later, Israel has to find an accommodation with the Palestinians and that it might in the long run be easier if they dominated the state of Jordan.
Kissinger read and initialed this memorandum—but evidently he discounted Eban’s analysis. Years later he insisted to the British scholar Nigel Ashton that “any move to undermine Hussein would have provoked a crisis in their [the Israelis’] relations with Washington.” More likely, Kissinger instinctively thought America’s Cold War imperatives—which in the Middle East usually meant blind support for a pro-American, anticommunist, and anti-Nasserite monarch—was a safer policy than actually addressing the Palestinian problem, one of the region’s primary sources of unrest. Ames thought this shortsighted. And O’Connell thought Ames was too much under the influence of his “Red Prince.”
Some thought Ames had an overt pro-Palestinian prejudice. But in point of fact, most CIA officers who spent any time in the region came to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian refugees. “Like all of us who get to know anything about the Palestinian problem,” said George Cave, a veteran of more than three decades in the Agency, “you can’t help but feel sympathy for them.… When people ask me what to read about the Arab-Israeli problem I tell them the Old Testament.” O’Connell also sympathized with the Palestinians—but he had a personal relationship with Hussein and genuinely liked the king.
On September 6, 1970, the crisis in Jordan was further inflamed by a brazen act of air piracy. Commandos from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four commercial airliners all in one day. One of the four planes, a Pan Am jumbo jet, was flown to Cairo. A hundred feet above the runway, a PFLP commando lit a fuse and informed the crew that they had eight minutes to get everyone off the plane. As the plane screeched to a halt at the end of the runway, the cabin crew blew the emergency slide chutes open and yelled at the 173 passengers to evacuate. Three minutes later, the $25 million jet blew apart on the tarmac. Miraculously, no one was injured. The hijacking of an El Al passenger jet bound for New York from Amsterdam was foiled by Israeli security guards; one of the hijackers, an American citizen, Patrick Arguello, was killed, and his companion, Leila Khaled, was detained in a British police station in London. But two of the other planes were piloted to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned World War II–era desert airstrip north of Amman. The passengers were kept hostage by hundreds of PFLP Fedayeen. Three days later, they were joined by yet another hijacked plane. By then, the PFLP had 426 hostages at Dawson’s Field—surrounded by hundreds of King Hussein’s Arab Legionnaires sitting in armored personnel carriers.
The multiple hijackings were a piece of meticulously planned guerrilla theater, designed to focus the world’s attention on the problem of Palestine. The PFLP demanded the release of more than three thousand Palestinians held in Israeli prisons in return for the release of the hostages. A year earlier, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir had famously insisted that when Israel was created in 1948, “it was not as though there was a Palestinian people.… They did not exist.” Now it became a little harder to say this with any credibility. As Walter Cronkite intoned on the CBS Evening News, “Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world’s attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace.”
The standoff at Dawson’s Field dragged on for ten days. King Hussein felt this was the final humiliation. The CIA’s Jack O’Connell urged the king to order his Arab Legionnaires into action. Finally, on September 16, 1970, Hussein declared martial law. That evening fifty tanks moved into positions above the main Palestinian refugee camps of Amman. The king told the new American ambassador, L. Dean Brown, that he was “betting all his chips.” It was going to be an “all or nothing showdown.”
At dawn the next morning, the Arab Legion began lobbing artillery shells at guerrilla positions on Jebel Hussain and into the crowded camps of Wahdat and Al-Husseini. The bombardment was indiscriminate, hitting residential quarters in the tightly packed camps. “It was very messy,” recalled the embassy’s Hume Horan. “The Jordanians didn’t want to send their infantry against the guerrillas in the slums of Amman. They felt the urban geography would negate the Army’s edge in discipline and weaponry. So they led their assaults with armor, the infantry following close behind. Through field glasses you could see the tanks roll up toward some buildings. Lurch to a stop. Then the main battle guns would go, ‘Boom!’ and part of the buildings would collapse. Out would swarm some Palestinians. The tanks would chase them, firing machine guns, with the infantry also in pursuit.” The result was carnage. The Royal Jordanian Air Force dropped phosphorus and napalm bombs on the refugee camps. From his bunker in one of the camps, Arafat vowed, “The fight goes on until the fascist military regime in Jordan is toppled.” By his side stood Salameh, who had rushed to Amman when the fighting broke out.
Over the next ten days, the Fedayeen held their ground in Amman and even turned down a cease-fire offer. Many were able to survive by hunkering down in some 360 subterranean bunkers carved beneath the refugee camps. Most of northern Jordan was still controlled by the PLO. But not for long. The threat of American and Israeli intervention dissuaded the Syrians from providing air cover for the attacking Syrian armor that had invaded northern Jordan in support of the Palestinians. At one point in the battle, King Hussein sent a frantic message to Washington asking “for an air strike by Israel against the Syrian troops.” But in the end, outright Israeli intervention was not necessary. The king’s own armored forces managed to advance, the Syrians withdrew, and the PLO’s guerrillas soon began to fall back. In Amman, the king ordered his army to redouble its bombardment of the refugee camps. An estimated 3,400 Fedayeen and civilians were killed. Some had to be buried in mass graves. “There were atrocities,” admitted Horan. “It was a time when no quarter was asked by or given to some of these combatants.” And yet, in the end, Horan believed, “The good guys won.”
That is certainly not how Arafat or Salameh saw things. By the end of September, they’d been forced to accede to a cease-fire brokered by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The PFLP agreed to release the remaining hostages from the air hijackings. And the PLO’s Fedayeen had to retreat from Amman. Salameh was responsible for getting Arafat out of Amman. It was Salameh’s idea to dress Arafat in the robes of a Kuwaiti sheikh; he and Salameh were then smuggled aboard an airliner, posing as part of the fourteen-member Arab Committee sent to mediate a cease-fire. Arafat arrived safely in Cairo, where he met with President Gamal Abdel Nasser and signed the cease-fire.
That autumn, King Hussein appointed Wasfi al-Tal as prime minister. A half-Kurdish businessman from Irbid in northern Jordan, Al-Tal was known for his hard-line views critical of the PLO. He now urged the king to rid the country of the PLO once and for all. In July 1971, Al-Tal ordered the army to resume its offensive against the Fedayeen. After four days of artillery and napalm strikes, at least 1,000 PLO fighters were killed or wounded and some 2,300 were arrested. King Hussein’s
secret police arrested another 20,000 Palestinian civilians and expelled Arafat and all other PLO officials to Lebanon. Henceforth, Jordan would be for “authentic” Jordanians—and “Jordanized” Palestinians.
Salameh was devastated by the PLO’s defeat in Jordan. “It left an indelible mark on all of us,” he told Nadia Salti Stephan, a reporter from Beirut’s English-language weekly Monday Morning, in April 1976. “I am one of those who were and remain unable to imagine how on earth we were driven out.”
The month of September 1970 was a national calamity for the Palestinians—and a sad month for Arabs everywhere. On the evening of September 28, 1970—just hours after Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had patched together a temporary truce between the PLO and King Hussein—the charismatic Arab leader died suddenly, felled by a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-two years old. Sitting in Beirut, Ames watched as tens of thousands of mourners poured into the streets, weeping and crying out Nasser’s name. Some of the mourners burned tires, and men armed with Kalashnikovs fired barrages into the evening heavens. Arabs everywhere could see television images of four to five million Egyptians walking behind the six-mile-long funeral procession. Nasser had been a volatile figure. A populist leader who had genuinely tried to improve the lives of Egypt’s impoverished peasantry, he had also gradually built an inefficient and sometimes bumbling police state. He was not exactly a tyrant, but neither was he a democrat. He was personally incorruptible. He was the only Arab leader of his time who could plausibly claim to reflect the broad popular will. But more than one American president had tried to dislodge him from power—and Nasser personally believed that the CIA had plotted with his domestic political enemies. Ames nevertheless was moved to write a poem the day Nasser died.
Abd-al Nasir died today:
A light went out, an era ended.
A world stood still, a gloom descended.
A nation cried today:
A river stopped, a dream lay shattered.
Abd-al Nasir died today,
A nation cried today.
Ames was an idealist—and as this poem suggests, he felt real empathy for the millions who were in mourning for Nasser.
Back in Langley headquarters, the news of Bob Ames’s meetings with Ali Hassan Salameh was still a tightly held secret. Henry Kissinger was adamant in public that the United States could not be seen as lending a terrorist organization any legitimacy. But inside the CIA, Ames’s relationship was regarded as an intelligence coup. Salameh was providing raw intelligence that eventually landed on the desks of the president’s National Security Council staff. (In this sense, Ames had fulfilled his promise to Mustafa Zein that the Palestinians would have a channel to the U.S. president.) Dick Helms knew all about Ames’s back channel with Salameh and approved it. The CIA director later privately complained to Frank Anderson that he was “under a lot of pressure from Nixon and Kissinger to get better intelligence about Arafat’s Fatah.” Ames was providing that intelligence.
Yet some of Ames’s superiors were unhappy that it was still only a relationship and not a formal recruitment. “Headquarters in Langley wanted Salameh to be a fully recruited agent,” said Bruce Riedel, an Agency officer who later read all fifteen volumes of cables and memoranda associated with the case. “Everyone involved knew that it was an extraordinary case. And everyone was debating the messy questions about whether we should be in liaison with a terrorist organization. Of course the director of central intelligence (Helms) knew. But this also went all the way up to the president. Helms had to tell Nixon because of the potential for blowback.”
Riedel and other Agency officers believe that Helms was always supportive of Ames. But the policy makers—really Kissinger—and President Nixon blew hot and cold. They wanted the intelligence. They even wanted the back channel because it only made pragmatic sense to be able to communicate with such important actors on the ground. But the policy makers would have greatly preferred that the relationship be with a controlled, paid agent—and not an independent actor like Salameh.
There were layers upon layers of ambiguity. “There is a lot that is just a matter of opinion in the business,” said Henry Miller-Jones. “Mainly it is what the customer thinks of the agent’s reporting that determines his overall value and it doesn’t matter whether he signed a chit or not.”
This was the nature of the game. It was hard to know exactly how to define the relationship. Some officers later insisted that Ames surely must have turned Salameh into a fully recruited agent. But those few people with direct knowledge of the case believe it was always a liaison relationship. “Part of the time, Salameh was probably telling Arafat that he had recruited a CIA officer,” said Riedel. “And Ames probably knew this. He would have understood that there was probably some resentment inside Fatah circles against Salameh’s friendship with a CIA officer. Salameh needed to tell his own people something like this for his own protection.”
Late in 1970, a debate took place inside the CIA about what to do about Salameh. At the time, the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the DO was David Henry Blee, fifty-four, a South Asia expert, Harvard lawyer by training, and highly regarded administrator. (He was also a devout Catholic who wore a Fatima medallion beneath his shirt.) Dave Blee looked over the Salameh case file and decided it was time to make the recruitment pitch. Ames thought this unwise. “Bob would say,” recalled John Morris, another clandestine officer, “ ‘You know, it would be fine to recruit Salameh, but you get what you can.’ ” Ames thought Salameh was not recruitable. “My best sources were never recruitable,” said Graham Fuller, a fellow Arabist and case officer. Ames sensed, correctly as it turned out, that Salameh had from the beginning kept Arafat apprised of his meetings with Ames. Salameh had explained to Arafat that the PLO needed a way to communicate with the Americans—and if Washington wouldn’t allow its diplomats to be seen talking to the PLO, then the next best thing was to establish a regular back channel through the CIA. Arafat agreed. The PLO chairman was running an armed liberation struggle, but at the same time he desperately wanted America to take him seriously. And from Ames’s point of view, his relationship with Salameh was as useful and productive as a formal recruitment could be. Moreover, it was a two-way street in which Ames tried to influence Salameh to have the PLO act more like a political party—and less like a guerrilla organization—while Salameh tried to influence Washington, through Ames, to understand that it was unrealistic for U.S. policy makers to ignore the Palestinian cause. “Ali’s ambition was to turn the back channel into a real diplomatic relationship,” recalled Frank Anderson. “He wanted the relationship to evolve into a de facto recognition of the PLO. But on our side, we had to cloak the relationship as an intelligence operation. At the same time, Ali had to make it seem to his own people that this was diplomacy, not intelligence. In the end, we committed more diplomacy, and he conveyed more intelligence.”
At times, Salameh and Ames traded useful bits of hard intelligence with each other, the kind of information that could save lives. “I remember avidly reading MJTRUST’s file,” recalled Charles Allen, an experienced DO officer. “It was unbelievably good stuff.” Ames obviously thought so too. So when Dave Blee pressured Ames to take the next step and turn Salameh into a full recruitment, Ames resisted. Why, he argued, should such a valuable relationship be jeopardized just so the CIA could claim it had a paid agent at the side of Arafat? “I thought it was a mistake,” recalled Charles Waverly, who was privy to the argument. “I thought it was out of context.” Sam Wyman also sided with Waverly and Ames. “I was of the opinion that it was not necessary to recruit Salameh,” Wyman said. “We had what we wanted.”
This was an old argument in the intelligence business. “An agent does not always mean a paid agent,” says Hillel Katz, a former high-ranking Mossad officer. “If I had heard about this, I would have said, ‘Bob, very good work. This is a good way to cultivate an agent.’ As a matter of principle you have to allow your agent to have a good reason
to justify what he is doing. Sometimes, he has to be able to tell himself, ‘I am doing good service for my people.’ It is never clean. In fact, it is best for everyone to keep it vague. Let him keep his pride.”
Ames, Wyman, and Waverly were overruled, and Blee ordered another Agency officer, Vernon Cassin, to make the recruitment pitch. Ames nevertheless played his part. He told Mustafa Zein that Washington had agreed to initiate a dialogue with the PLO. A clandestine meeting would take place in Rome. “A CIA officer would start the ball rolling and Bob would pick it up in Beirut afterwards.” Bob gave Mustafa handwritten instructions on how to meet Cassin in Rome. He told Mustafa to fly to Rome, where on December 16, 1970, he would receive a phone call in his hotel room at precisely 4:00 P.M.: “John will say he and his wife are in Rome and hope to see you …” Exactly one hour later, Mustafa was supposed to walk into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel with a coat over his arm. “John will carry [a] rolled Italian newspaper. You should take a seat in the corner of [the] lobby. John will approach and say, ‘I think I met you in the Semiramis Hotel.’ You should reply, ‘I think it was the Shepard’s [sic] Hotel.’ ” (Both were landmark hotels in Cairo.)
Zein did as he was told. Traveling on a diplomatic passport issued by Sharjah, Zein arrived in Rome on December 16, 1970. He met with “John”—Vernon Cassin—and subsequently made reservations for adjoining suites in the Cavalieri Hilton Hotel from December 18 through 21. Posing as a rich Arab businessman, Zein played host. Salameh arrived in Rome, along with a contingent of twenty-three security guards. His guards mostly kept out of sight. Salameh had been briefed by Zein and was under the impression that he was to meet with a high-ranking CIA official who was authorized to open a dialogue with the PLO. This was only several months after the September debacle in Jordan, and there was much to discuss. Salameh was introduced by Zein to Cassin, a tall, thin man who wore a fedora. A former station chief in Damascus and Amman, Cassin was a pretty straitlaced Agency officer. One colleague described him as “a complete professional who went by the book.”
