The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  But then several years later, McDermott found himself sitting next to an attractive young woman on a flight to Paris. Taking advantage of airline liquor, “Henry got juiced,” recalled Bill Fisk, another clandestine officer who worked with McDermott, “and he started telling her stories about terrorist gangs in Paris. He was just trying to impress the woman.” Unbeknownst to McDermott, the woman was an aide to national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. She complained to Scowcroft, and soon thereafter McDermott was forced to accept an early medical retirement. He became a potter and lived on a boat in Belmar, New Jersey.

  A chief of station posting usually runs three years. But Kuwait was considered by Washington to be a hardship post, so many officers stayed only two years. In any case, Ames was pulled out of Kuwait in the summer of 1975 after only two years on the job. “Please let me know,” he wrote Ambassador Helms in Tehran, “if there are any last minute things you want me to do before I start closing up shop here.”

  He may have been pulled because in early 1975 his name and job title had been published in CounterSpy magazine, a left-wing publication critical of the CIA. Yvonne still thinks they had to depart prematurely—but Bob never talked about these things, so she’s not sure what happened. In December 1975, after they’d moved back to their Reston, Virginia, home, the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was gunned down outside his home. Welch had been named in the same CounterSpy article as Ames. (Welch was assassinated by gunmen from the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, a Greek underground group opposed to the military dictatorship in Athens.) This first assassination of a chief of station naturally shocked everyone back at Langley. “His murder is a gruesomely fitting climax to a year of insanity,” said Bill Nelson, a senior CIA officer, in a cable to Dick Helms.

  * * *

  *1 Before leaving Langley on February 2, 1973, Helms made sure to destroy the tapes on which he had recorded hundreds of conversations in his seventh-floor office (William Colby, cable to Helms, January 31, 1974, Helms Papers, CIA, Center for Intelligence Studies; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [New York: Doubleday, 2007], p. 324).

  *2 After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis captured some phone transcripts that allegedly had Salameh telling a Black September operative in Rome, “Clear the apartment and take all fourteen cakes [shoulder-fired missles]” (Simon Reeve, One Day in September [New York: Arcade, 2000], p. 172). The Israelis interpreted this as evidence of Salameh’s involvement in the assassination plot.

  *3 The allegation that Salameh was at Munich and planned the operation first appeared in a book by Time magazine reporter David Tinnin with Dag Christensen called The Hit Team (Dell, 1976). Tinnin’s book contains no source notes. But his book is clearly the source for many of the stories about Salameh in Bar-Zohar and Haber’s The Quest for the Red Prince.

  *4 The U.S. government later concluded there was good evidence that Arafat had personally approved the operation. A March 13, 1973, State Department cable reported, “Fatah leader Yasser Arafat has now been described in recent intelligence as having given approval to the Khartoum operation prior to its inception.”

  *5 At the time of his assassination, Al-Kubaisi was married to Nadera Khodari, a university professor. They had three children. Khodari and her children were all killed in a plane crash near Damascus two years later.

  *6 The Israelis had an ally inside the CIA in the figure of counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who, according to Thomas Powers, was convinced that the “KGB was in complete and utter control of the Palestine Liberation Organization” (Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979], p. 327). Ames thought this ridiculous.

  *7 Oddly enough, Mossad had assassinated some Palestinians who had no responsibility for Munich—yet the tactical mastermind of Munich, Abu Daoud, died of natural causes—kidney failure—in 2010 (Trevor Mostyn, “Mohammed Oudeh [Abu Daoud] Obituary: Mastermind Behind the Attack on Israeli Athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics,” Guardian, July 4, 2010). At least one of the three surviving Black September commandos at Munich is also still alive.

  *8 The author of this “secret” memo knew, of course, that Helms himself, for the last two years of his secondary education, had attended Le Rosey, where he had crossed paths with the eleven-year-old shah.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Headquarters, 1975–79

  Ames had his quirks, his cowboy boots and his tinted aviator eyeglasses. But when Bob walked into the room you didn’t get the sense … that he was a needy person.

  —Lindsay Sherwin, senior analyst, Directorate of Intelligence

  Upon his return to Reston in the autumn of 1975, Ames was promoted to chief of the Near East/Arabian Peninsula Branch inside the Directorate of Operations. This put him in charge of all covert operations in Saudi Arabia, the Yemens, Kuwait, and the rest of Arabia. It was a significant promotion, with a pay grade of GS-14—roughly equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the army. At the time, the Agency had more than 20,000 employees, but only about 2,500 of these were officers in the clandestine service, the DO. Landing a management job at Ames’s level was very competitive.

  Ames realized that he was coming back to a CIA very much under siege. After Dick Helms had left as director in early 1973, President Nixon ordered his replacement, James Schlesinger, to purge the Agency. “Get rid of the clowns,” Nixon said. “What use are they? They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.” Schlesinger lasted only seventeen weeks as director, but by the time he left he’d fired more than five hundred analysts and a thousand veteran clandestine officers. William Colby replaced Schlesinger. Morale inside Langley naturally plummeted.

  And then, on December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh published a front-page story in the New York Times with the headline “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. against Anti-war Forces.” That President Nixon had used the CIA to spy on his antiwar critics rapidly became a national scandal. The House of Representatives and then the Senate opened congressional investigations into the CIA’s activities over the past few decades. Eventually, the Church Committee—named after Senator Frank Church—published fourteen volumes of testimony and documents. Scores of witnesses were called to testify. The most sensational report focused on the CIA’s “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.” Americans learned that the CIA had been involved in plots to unseat Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Oddly enough, congressional investigators largely ignored the Agency’s activities in the Middle East. The House of Representatives’ “Pike Report” criticized the Agency for having incorrectly assured Washington that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had no intention of launching a war in the autumn of 1973. “We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out,” said William Colby. But otherwise, the CIA’s Near East division escaped any scrutiny. Ames was never asked to testify.

  At the time, Colby was bitterly criticized inside the Agency for giving away the family jewels, and for being too cooperative with the congressional investigators. He thought he had no choice. “In the context of the politics of the time, we had just had Watergate, you really weren’t going to get away with stonewalling them. It just wasn’t going to work.” Like most case officers, Ames was not a fan of Colby’s—and he was dismayed by the ordeal. “The Congressional investigations,” admitted Colby in 1976, “were like being pillaged by a foreign power, only we had been occupied by the Congress with our files rifled, our officials humiliated and our Agency exposed.”

  The Church Committee revealed many of the Agency’s worst intelligence failures. There came a moment when some thought the whole CIA was going to be put out of business. Helms warned President Gerald Ford that if the congressional investigations were allowed to continue, “A lot of dead cats will come out. I don’t know everything that went on in the Agency. Maybe no one does. But I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out,
I will participate.” Helms meant that he thought he’d be forced to reveal national security secrets.

  He was all too prescient. Eventually, the Church Committee revelations concerning the coup d’état against Chile’s Allende caused Congress and the press to scrutinize Helms’s testimony in his 1973 ambassadorial confirmation hearings. Helms had categorically denied under oath that the CIA had tried to overthrow Allende. Over the next four years—throughout his tenure as ambassador to Iran—Helms had to fly back to Washington thirteen times to testify before various congressional committees. Ames thought his old boss was being unfairly treated, and he made a point of taking Helms out to lunch. But Helms eventually had to plead nolo contendere to two misdemeanor counts for lying to Congress. The judge imposed a $2,000 fine and a suspended two-year jail sentence. Helms’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, told reporters that Helms would “wear this conviction like a badge of honor.” Helms emphatically agreed.

  Funding for the clandestine services shrank rapidly during the 1970s. Partly this was simply a result of the Vietnam War winding down. But the pendulum had swung, and the collection of human intelligence fell out of favor with policy makers. The business of cultivating human sources was time-consuming, uncertain, and ultimately just plain exasperating for most politicians in Washington. Once again, Washington was falling in love with high-tech spying: satellites, wiretaps, and intercepts.

  Still, the CIA always had far more resources than the State Department. Ames once told my father, a regular Foreign Service officer, “If we could, we’d bury you.” He said it in a manner both jocular and boasting. But it reflected a certain reality about the business of foreign policy. “In my experience,” wrote Richard L. Holm, a veteran CIA officer, “agency officers and foreign service officers rarely saw eye to eye. Those differences spawned a mutual lack of trust and confidence that consistently marred our exchanges.” By the late 1970s there were only about 2,300 Foreign Service officers posted abroad, with another 1,600 stationed in the State Department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. (The Foreign Service had another 5,000 administrative staff at home and abroad.) These men and women were the public face of American diplomacy. But they were far outnumbered by the CIA’s workforce, numbering more than 18,000 officers and staff with a budget of over $5 billion, which dwarfed that of the State Department.

  In 1975, Ames’s immediate boss was Duane R. Clarridge, deputy chief of the Near East for Arab Operations. “Dewey” Clarridge was not an Arabist. His first posting as a young case officer had been in Kathmandu, Nepal, and he’d worked in Turkey, but he knew nothing about the Middle East. He boasted about this, and much later in his memoirs he admitted: “I am sure there were those in the division who were appalled that I was given this assignment with no experience in the Arab world.” But for Dewey the Middle East was just a culture based on “a seminal Hellenistic cultural root, with strong overlays of various forms of Islam and Christianity.… In a generic sense, it’s all the same.”

  Ames thought this attitude reeked of ignorance and arrogance. His Arabs were in no sense “generic.” Ames was also annoyed by Clarridge’s casual use of the term wog. Clarridge was always talking about the “wog factor,” suggesting that one could never predict what these inexplicable foreigners would do next. To be sure, Clarridge wasn’t the only CIA officer who used the derogatory term, but it grated on Ames’s ears.

  Clarridge was flamboyant in a way Ames could never be. He wore white linen suits to the office. He was rambunctious and always wore his opinions prominently displayed on his sleeve. To be sure, Ames stood out, with his cowboy boots and tinted, aviator-style glasses. (He had three pairs in three different shades: yellow, dark brown, and pink.) But Ames was not a cowboy. Dewey was hot to Bob’s cool. “Bob played with a pipe and his worry beads,” observed Henry Miller-Jones, “but he never looked nervous.”

  Inevitably, Bob and Dewey clashed. The chemistry was not good. Bob was the consummate, learned “Arabist,” while Dewey was the can-do, hands-on operational guy who wanted to get things done. Clarridge thought Ames had an academic view of the world. “Ph.D.s don’t do well in the espionage business,” said Clarridge. “They are trained to see the gray. So they never pull the trigger in terms of recruiting somebody.” Clarridge felt a certain amount of frustration with Ames; he couldn’t understand why Ames wouldn’t at least try to pull the trigger with Salameh. “If you can’t ask the question,” said Clarridge, “you shouldn’t be in the business.”

  Clarridge had developed doubts about the Salameh channel. If the Palestinian couldn’t be recruited, maybe something else was going on. He eventually questioned whether even having a “liaison relationship with this murderer” (Salameh) was worth it. He wondered if “we, the CIA, were being had by Fatah.” Perhaps, he thought, Arafat was manipulating the “Salameh setup and [we] were being fed information—which in reality was precious little—to influence U.S. policy and nothing else.” Clarridge knew that the CIA had virtually no penetration into the PLO. That meant there was a lot of pressure within the Agency to believe that the Salameh channel was worthwhile. But Clarridge thought Salameh’s intelligence was inflated.

  “In the 1970s,” Clarridge said, “we had no agents inside the PLO, none.” There was one brief exception: a German national code-named “Ganymede.” And even “Ganymede” had not been recruited by a CIA case officer. “Ganymede” was a simple “walk-in.” Still, Clarridge regarded him—in contrast to Salameh—as the genuine article, a fully recruited agent. “Ganymede” has since told his story to a team of reporters from Der Spiegel. He is Willi Voss, a onetime petty criminal who in the early 1970s found himself working for Fatah’s Abu Daoud. A few years later, he offered his services to the CIA. His case officer was Terence Douglas. “Willi was a very cool guy,” Douglas told Der Spiegel in 2013. “He was creative and a bit crazy—we spent a very, very intense time together.” Voss was given some minimal training. He was taught how to use a miniature camera to copy documents. He was warned against carrying any incriminating “pocket litter” and was given a few lessons about dead drops, brush passes, and telephone security. And he was willing to sign receipts. For Clarridge, signing a “receipt” was the touchstone. It meant that the source was a fully recruited agent. On at least one occasion, Voss provided to the CIA photographs of PLO documents. While Voss was staying in the apartment of a ranking PLO official, he photographed some random documents while the Palestinian was out of the apartment. But Voss couldn’t read Arabic, so he had no idea what he was photographing. “The intelligence was valuable,” recalled Douglas, “in identifying participants in this chap’s cell.”

  In January 1976, Clarridge and Douglas met “Ganymede” in an Athens hotel room. They discussed a plan whereby Voss would attempt to lure Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—otherwise known as the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal—into the hands of the CIA. Clarridge writes in his memoirs that he’d discussed the operation in Langley prior to his departure for Athens. A senior clandestine officer had told him, “If the agent [Voss] can set up Carlos to be taken by a security service, it would be a boon for mankind.… If Carlos is killed in the process, so be it.” In the subsequent Athens meeting Voss initially agreed to the mission, but he eventually “lost his nerve.” And soon afterwards, Clarridge learned that on February 18, 1976, President Gerald Ford had promulgated Executive Order 11905, banning assassinations. Clarridge was disappointed.*1 “Ganymede” was an active agent only from about 1974 to 1976. But he was the kind of penetration agent Clarridge thought Ames should have been able to cultivate. Clarridge wanted Ames to persuade Salameh to “sign receipts.” He would be disappointed.

  Clarridge eventually came to think of Ames as not a really good fit in the DO—despite his reputation for having cultivated the Salameh back channel to the PLO. “He and I got along well when he was my deputy in Arab Ops,” Clarridge later insisted. “And I admired his insights into Middle Eastern problems, but they were no better than [Charlie] Waterman’s or Barnes’ and
others in the DO and certainly not the caliber of Philby the Elder [Harry St. John Bridger Philby], [Sir Richard Francis] Burton [1821–90] or Colonel [William] Eddy [1896–1962]”—the legendary English and American Arabists.

  Clarridge just didn’t think of Ames as a DO guy. He wasn’t one to go out drinking with the boys after work. And since he didn’t drink, how could he recruit anyone? Clarridge wondered. Alcohol, he wrote, “plays a major part” in developing an agent. Dewey always thought Bob’s career as a DO officer was “mediocre.”

  On the other hand, few DO case officers ever recruit anyone. It’s an extremely rare event. A CIA survey of the DO covering the three decades prior to 1985 concluded that less than 5 percent of DO case officers ever recruited someone capable of producing protected, significant information. “Recruiting agents is very hard,” Clarridge observed. “If only 5 percent of all case officers in their careers ever recruit an agent—well, in my time there were no more than two thousand case officers, so that suggests the Agency had recruited no more than one hundred agents over a period of twenty-five years.”