The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  * * *

  *1 Another part of Salameh’s intelligence job was to liaise with “comrades” from radical organizations like the Baader-Meinhof Group, a terrorist organization that operated in Europe. In 1970 Andreas Baader and other German colleagues reportedly received training in a Fatah camp in Jordan. But the Germans misbehaved, and eventually Ali Hassan Salameh sent them packing back to Europe.

  *2 Mossad had a technician skilled in assembling letter bombs. This individual devised the book bomb that maimed the PFLP’s Bassam Abu Sharif on July 25, 1972. Mossad’s “Q” was reportedly responsible for more than thirty such mail bombs.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Secret Diplomacy

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you

  —Rudyard Kipling, 1895

  Home was now Reston, in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. Bob, Yvonne, and the children had left Beirut early in the summer of 1971. Yvonne was pregnant again. On home leave that summer, they first went to Jackson, Mississippi, to visit Yvonne’s parents. Her father had retired as a navy commander and become a pastor with the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. And then they moved into a furnished apartment for a few weeks near Washington, D.C., while they went house hunting. On August 3, 1971, they bought their first home, a single-family, split-level brick-and-wood house at 2304 Short Ridge Road in Reston, Virginia. It was nestled on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a gentle hill, surrounded by dense forest. Sometimes they spotted deer grazing in the woods. They paid $48,950. With four bedrooms and three baths, it was small for a family of seven—soon to be eight. The children had to share one bathroom. It was a decidedly unpretentious suburban American home.

  On August 21, 1971, Yvonne gave birth to her sixth child, Kevin. After nine years abroad, Yvonne was happy to be back in America. Bob was assigned a desk job in Langley. The children could play unattended outside; they never locked their doors. Bob’s twelve-mile commute to Langley was no more than twenty minutes. Yvonne loved the normalcy of it all.

  In Beirut, Yvonne had become a convert to Catholicism. This certainly discomfited her ardently Lutheran parents. But she did it for Bob, who had regularly attended Catholic Mass in Beirut. Three of the children had been baptized in the Catholic Church. But three others were baptized in the Lutheran Church, including baby Kevin. Life in Reston was like nothing they’d experienced in Dhahran, Aden, Asmara, or Beirut. It was Pleasantville, USA. A meticulously planned residential community, Reston had been built in 1964 on a seven-thousand-acre piece of farmland on the outskirts of Washington. The architects zoned ten acres of parkland for every thousand residents. Bicycle paths, twenty swimming pools, and other recreational facilities were available to everyone. It was designed as a self-contained community with its own schools, cinemas, restaurants, and shopping centers. When the Ameses bought their home in 1971, Reston had a population of fewer than six thousand. And because Langley was so close, many of their neighbors were CIA officers.

  Bob left for Langley at eight o’clock in the morning and, if he wasn’t traveling, was always home by six. Before dinner he sat in an Ethan Allen rocking chair and read a book while listening to music through a pair of stereo earphones. He rarely drank—at parties he might nurse a gin and tonic. “He didn’t like what alcohol did,” said Yvonne. But she sometimes sipped a Manhattan—a cocktail made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters—while she cooked dinner. They rarely entertained at home. Their living room was decorated with Persian carpets, Arab brass coffeepots, and a few paintings depicting Bedouin life. They owned a Kuwaiti chest that had once belonged to the legendary Arabian explorer Harry St. John Philby—the father of MI6’s notorious double agent Kim Philby. The bookshelves were stocked with Middle Eastern history. “He had a fantastic library of books about the Middle East,” recalled Sam Wyman. “I was very impressed.” Ames also owned a Modern Library collection of the one hundred greatest books of all time. Bob rarely read fiction. But he liked poetry. His favorite poem was Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too:

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

  Kipling’s 1895 poem has become an emblem of British Victorian stoicism. Perhaps Bob thought its sentiments spoke to his own conservative instincts. He also liked to quote John Donne’s line “No Man is an island, entire of itself.” Charles Englehart, a twenty-nine-year-old CIA officer, remembers coming over to Ames’s Reston house for dinner one evening. Books were strewn everywhere—and toys. “Bob was reading five books at any one time,” said Englehart.

  On weekends, Bob sometimes shot a few baskets near the garage. On Saturday he spent hours watching basketball games or other sporting events; he liked to yell at the television. The girls were on the local swim team, and when the boys were a little older Bob was most definitely their basketball coach. For idle diversion, he loved to drop by the local Fair Oaks Mall—he punned it the “Medium Maples Mall”—and buy a Heathkit electronic hobby product, perhaps a stereo clock radio or some other electronic gadget that would take hours to assemble.

  On Christmas morning Bob would get out of bed no earlier than usual, walk the dog, and shave. “He would draw the whole thing out,” recalled his daughter Adrienne. “He would not allow us children to come down before he was quite ready to open presents.” Bob was the designated disciplinarian. If the boys needed spanking, he could scare the hell out of them by walking down the hallway toward their room snapping his belt. He was a very old-fashioned father.

  And on “career day” at the local school, Bob would dutifully show up and introduce himself as a Foreign Service officer who worked at the State Department. The children did not know otherwise. “He didn’t talk much about himself,” recalled Adrienne. “Everything I learned about him I learned after he died.” Only one neighbor, Ron Simmers Sr., knew that Ames worked for the Agency. “He was a quiet, solid neighbor,” recalled Simmers. “Everyone liked him.” Ames once gave Simmers a Yemeni dagger, a gift from one of his trips to Yemen.

  In 1971, Bob Ames was a GS-13, earning less than $20,000—about $95,000 in current dollars. This was a very fine middle-class salary at the time, but with a family of eight, they didn’t save anything. “Bob didn’t tolerate debt,” Yvonne recalled, “so we lived within our means. We didn’t go out to dinners; we didn’t have a savings account, and we didn’t take vacations. Wherever home was, that was my domain. He let me run things; I paid the bills. And I watched the budget. Money was always tight.” Yvonne drove a used Chevy station wagon, and Bob drove to work in a sporty four-door Fiat with leather seats that he had bought in Beirut and shipped home. The Fiat proved to be a nuisance, hard to maintain and unreliable, so he eventually sold it to his neighbor Ron Simmers, and thereafter drove around in a white Ford Pinto, a two-door subcompact. The Pinto was Ford’s cheapest possible car, designed to compete with the low-end European imports of the era. Bob nevertheless dreamed of someday owning a BMW.

  Life in Reston was pretty ordinary, even prosaic. And very middle-class. “Everyone in our neighborhood lived pretty much as we did,” Yvonne said. “Or at least, it felt like it.” On weekends, Yvonne sang with the Sweet Adelines, a four-member female barbershop-style a cappella music group. She liked the ordinariness of this time in her life—but it wouldn’t last long.

  In late May 1972, Bob was posted to Sana’a, Yemen, on a short-term temporary-duty assignment (TDY). He flew to Paris, stopped in Rome, and finally landed in Bahrain, where he had a meeting with his CIA colleague and friend from Aden Dick Roane. He spent the day exchanging briefings with Roane and then caught a flight fo
r Beirut via Dhahran. “It seemed all the planes took off at midnight and landed about 5:00 A.M., so there was little sleep to be had.” He had a four-hour meeting with “the boys” in Beirut and then flew to Athens, where he caught a connecting flight to Asmara. He spent a few days in Asmara, seeing some old friends. Finally, on May 25, 1972, he flew to Taiz, Yemen. From there he had to drive two hundred miles up into the mountains to Sana’a, a city that stood at 7,500 feet. “That road is really scary,” Ames wrote. “They had to pry my fingers from the car when I arrived in Sana’a.” Altogether, it had been a grueling trip.

  He would stay in Sana’a for two and a half months, standing in for the chief of station, Graham Fuller, another newly minted Arabist. It was a one-man station. Sana’a was then still a mostly walled, medieval-looking city of stone-block and mud-brick “skyscrapers,” often rising four, five, or six stories. Scores of minarets dotted the skyline. In 1972 it had a population of only 125,000. Men walked its narrow alleys dressed in belted robes and turbans. Virtually every Yemeni man above the age of fourteen wore a jambiya, a short, curved, double-edged dagger stuck beneath his belt, and many young men also carried a Kalashnikov rifle slung over their shoulder. Every afternoon, the men and women of Sana’a adjourned separately to the top-floor sitting rooms of their homes to sip sweet black tea and chew qat. Sana’a was a much more traditional society than Aden. North Yemen’s traditional tribes dominated the conservative regime in Sana’a—whereas Ames’s former acquaintance Abd’al Fatah Ismail was still the de facto ruler of the Marxist regime in South Yemen. Border incidents between the two Yemens were on the rise.

  “There’s lots of activity going on these days and, as usual, I’m right in the middle of it,” Bob wrote home to Yvonne. “There appears to be a concerted effort underway to get rid of the bunch in Aden and most of the plotting seems to take place in my house.” He had six “guests” the evening of June 18 and three more the following night. “It sure is interesting, but tiring. They seem to really want to do something now, but when I asked one of the leaders if he thought they would succeed, he answered only ‘We’re Arabs!’ Which translated means, if anything can go wrong we Arabs will make sure it does! At least he is being realistic.”

  The CIA was encouraging political refugees from Aden to organize a coup against the left-wing regime in Aden. But Ames was skeptical: “I hear all sorts of gory tales about what’s going on in Aden and if only half of them are true it’s a disaster. Despite all their acts of terrorism, however, Abd’al-Fatah and his boys appear to keep right on going while the exiles in North Yemen sit around and chew qat and talk about how they’re going to overthrow the government. I don’t think the Adenese will ever change—qat comes before all. The only way they’ll ever move is if someone threatens to cut off their qat supply.”

  That October, tensions between the two countries erupted into armed clashes followed by a desultory armistice. The CIA would certainly have liked to see regime change in Aden, and actually tried to bring it about in the early 1980s, in a clumsy effort that failed completely, but the leftists hung on to power until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the two Yemens were finally united.

  Ames hated Sana’a’s filthy air. “Here everything is dust,” he wrote. “The only thing I like about this place is the people.” His cover job was as a consular officer. He had never had to process visas before and found the work tedious. “This working seven days a week and constant use of Arabic wears you down after a while,” he wrote. He figured out that in the past three years he’d taken only about fifteen days of vacation. And in the year since returning to Reston, he’d been abroad for nearly ninety days of TDYs. “It’s about time I relaxed a little and that’s just what I’m going to do when I get home.”

  Yemen was a hardship post. Ames was house-sitting for the Fullers in their spacious Yemeni home. Ascetically beautiful, Yemeni architecture did not accommodate Ames’s six-foot-three-inch-stature. “I still crack my head on these low doors,” he complained. The house had “water problems, dust problems, electricity problems and gas problems—so I’ve got problems.” The Fuller home was also cluttered with magazines, books, and tape cassettes. “I honestly can’t stand the mess,” Ames wrote. “I just can’t sit down and read until I at least get the stuff out of sight.” Every day he had to prepare his drinking water by boiling a large pot and then pouring the water through a filter. He cooked with butane gas and shopped for himself in a meagerly stocked cold store. His meals were simple: Arabic bread and Tang for breakfast; more Arabic bread, butter, jam, and powdered Nestle’s milk for lunch; and a dinner of tough, gristly meat and vegetables. One evening he wrote Yvonne, “I just had some canned spaghetti and vegetables, but it was the best meal I’ve had in Sana’a.” He disliked North Yemeni food—gristly boiled mutton and rice—and greatly preferred the spicy fare of Aden. (He also missed his American root beer and pretzels.) Ames typically rose at 6:30 A.M. and spent his mornings in the embassy’s CIA station, then moved to the consular section in the afternoons. He read in the evenings—or sometimes he had to go out to meet contacts. But mostly he read: “Well, it’s getting late for me (10:30 P.M.) and I’ve only read one book today.” It was lights-out by 11:15 P.M.

  The life of a CIA case officer in a place like Yemen was exotic but certainly not glamorous. “I won’t be bored,” he wrote, “just lonesome.” He lived frugally, spending no more than his government TDY per diem allowance. “I’m just an old homebody now,” Ames wrote, “who wants to be with his wife and kids (you’ve all kind of grown on me) and not wandering around the world.… Keep reminding the kids that ‘Yes, there really is a Daddy.’ ”

  In an effort to combat his isolation, Ames listened to the BBC News each morning on a shortwave radio. He also read the Economist, delivered each week through the embassy’s pouch mail. On very rare occasions, he might see a copy of the International Herald Tribune. “One good thing about being in Yemen,” Ames observed, “is that you are far away from the Israeli-Palestinian problem. You never hear it mentioned at all.”

  Yemen was still a dangerous place to be in the early 1970s. A brutal civil war had ended just a few years earlier. But because the country was still divided between a conservative regime in the North and a radical, leftist government in the South, tensions were high. Assassinations or kidnappings were common. So were roadside mines. Occasionally, the Sana’a government carried out executions of South Yemeni saboteurs who had been caught planting roadside mines. After a short, almost perfunctory trial, these young men would be shot by a firing squad in the main town square. Shortly before Ames had to drive from Sana’a to Taiz, two people were killed when their car struck a mine. So on the day of his trip to Taiz, Bob decided he should wait until 7:30 A.M.—“so there would be cars in front of me, before I went on my way. The trip was uneventful, if any ride on that road can be uneventful.” Near the end of his TDY he wrote home, boasting of his travels all over Yemen: “Well, I’ve driven everywhere there is a road in Yemen, so that must be some kind of record.”

  In addition to his drab consular work interviewing Yemeni visa applicants, one day he had to deal with a mob of more than two hundred applicants lined up outside the embassy, all wanting visas to America. The consular work was part of his diplomatic cover, but it sometimes could also lead to productive sources of information. Ames was putting in long hours, as usual, developing sources and writing up contact reports. His assignment was to keep tabs on developments in Aden, but he also found time to report on political developments in North Yemen. “The thing is,” he wrote, “as far as Yemen is concerned you can get all the info you want just by asking.” Ames made a point of asking, meeting with government officials, tribal leaders, and even shopkeepers in the Old City’s suq. After returning from an exhausting day trip to the isolated mountaintop village of Kawkaban (elevation 11,300 feet), he got home in the evening only to receive a string of phone calls: “People wanted to see me. It was late at night and that meant the next day would be a busy d
ay writing.” In the first two months of his TDY he wrote more than twenty-five reports back to Langley: “If I put out ten more reports, I’ll have produced more in these past two months than [the station has] in the first five months of the year.” Bob was nothing if not competitive.

  Ames finally returned to America on Sunday, August 13, 1972, in the midst of a presidential campaign. President Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide in November 1972 and soon afterwards he decided to fire Richard Helms as CIA director. Helms was surprised and only later realized that Nixon was worried that Helms might know too much about a scandal that would come to be known as Watergate. Nixon asked Helms if he’d like to be appointed ambassador to Moscow. Helms told the president he thought the Russians wouldn’t like the notion of a former CIA chief residing in Moscow. On a whim, Helms said, “Tehran might be a more plausible choice.” Nixon thought this a good idea, so by early April 1973 Helms found himself in Tehran.*1

  Helms took with him one of the Agency’s senior Iranian experts, George Cave, who agreed to serve as deputy station chief under Art Callaghan. But Helms also asked for the services of Bob Ames. Helms said that Ames and Cave were “two of his best case officers” and he wanted them both in Tehran. Ames was an odd choice; he was an Arabist and not a Farsi speaker. He’d never spent time in Iran. But Ames deeply admired Helms and quickly acceded to his request. He arrived in Tehran that spring, and Yvonne and the six children followed shortly afterwards. They even shipped their dog, Hansje, a Hungarian Vizsla. The poor dog was temporarily lost during transit in London but eventually made it to Tehran.

  Though based in Tehran for what he expected would be a two-year assignment, Ames traveled a lot that summer. In late May, Helms wrote to Henry Kissinger and urged the national security adviser to “try to find time for a few minutes with Robert Ames of the Agency who is assisting me here on Persian Gulf problems.”