by Kai Bird
Alternatively, many unrecruited “sources” were assigned cryptonyms, ostensibly so their information could be disseminated without revealing their identities. This sometimes had the effect of misleading policy makers, who might easily assume that the reports attributed to a crypt came from a fully recruited and controlled agent. According to Clarridge, this became an inside joke. Then again, he said, if every case officer had recruited even one agent in a two-year tour, “the Agency would have been awash in spies.”
Ames was certainly aware of these realities, and by all accounts he just didn’t take Clarridge’s criticisms seriously. He knew he had lots of contacts and good sources of information, particularly among the Palestinians. And some of them, like MJTRUST/2, were assigned crypts. Moreover, Ames thought Clarridge was one of those DO officers who too often acted like a cowboy. Clarridge was a magnet for strong opinions, both pro and con. “Dewey is a brilliant intelligence officer,” said Clair George, one of his colleagues in the DO, “who suffers from one problem: he likes to see his name in the newspaper.”
“Dewey was an ass, a showboat,” recalled one colleague, an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. “I mean, 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, like you did from Dewey, that he was a needy person.”
Ames liked to yank Clarridge’s chain. One day on his way out of the office to meet with a source in New York City, Ames turned to a colleague and said, “If Dewey asks where I’ve gone, tell him I’ve gone to New York to meet a guy in the oil business about a possible job.” He knew this would tick off Clarridge, but he didn’t mind. It wasn’t just Clarridge. “He once told me,” wrote Henry Miller-Jones, “that he thought he would never rise above middle management in the Agency because he was too argumentative and outspoken. Indeed, he could have stormy battles with his superiors over personnel choices, or how to handle an agent (often one he’d recruited), or over a significant political trend.”
Ames’s other boss in the mid-1970s was Alan Douglas Wolfe, chief of the Near East and South Asia Division (NESA) in the DO. Wolfe was a peculiar man for the job. “Alan looked like a shorter and ruddier version of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia,” recalled Henry Miller-Jones. Born in 1928 in New York City, Wolfe had graduated from Columbia University and then joined the CIA. His first posting abroad was to Karachi, Pakistan, in 1951. Some thought Wolfe had a Napoleon complex, and Wolfe himself once complained that he certainly would have risen to become director of the CIA—if only he’d been as tall as Bob Ames. “He had a low threshold for the dim-witted,” wrote Clarridge. “[Wolfe] made little effort to hide his opinion of those he felt lacked common sense and operational know-how.” He thought he knew a lot about the Middle East, even though his only posting in the Arab world was a short stint in Jordan in 1956. Wolfe was a specialist in South Asia; he had just come from being chief of station in Pakistan—where in July 1971 he had served as the advance man for Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China. He was not an Arabist. In fact, he did not believe in language training. He once famously said that no case officer needed to speak anything but English because anyone worth recruiting in the Near East would speak English. “Learning a wog language,” he said, “was a waste of time.” He was prickly and egotistical. He had way too much confidence. The few women in the DO thought Wolfe was sexist. “He was a crude individual,” said one female CIA officer.
Wolfe was very opinionated and very ambitious. “Wolfe was the kind of man who was deliberately not endearing,” recalled another high-ranking officer. One evening in early 1975 Wolfe was introduced to the Israeli chargé d’affaires at a diplomatic reception in Washington, D.C. This was just after CIA director Bill Colby had finally decided to take the Israeli desk away from James Jesus Angleton*2—the legendary counterintelligence chief who’d run Israeli affairs as if it were his private fiefdom—and put it where it logically belonged: in NESA. The Israelis regarded NESA with profound suspicion. Tel Aviv had lodged an official protest, arguing that they shouldn’t be lumped with the Arab world—and shouldn’t have to liaise with the Agency’s Arabists, whom they regarded as “Orientalists,” liable to be critical of Israel. So upon meeting Wolfe, the Israeli diplomat asked, “Alan, I understand you will have the Israeli account?”
“Yes,” replied Wolfe, “and it is about time.”
“Well,” said the Israeli chargé, “I understand that you are an anti-Semite.”
“That’s damn right,” Wolfe shot back. “I’ve dealt with all those Semites and none of you are worth a damn.”
Wolfe rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But he had nevertheless risen rapidly in the ranks of the Agency. His small office had a window perched directly above the main entrance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Oddly enough, behind his desk was a framed color poster of a muscular Amazon beauty in a ragged, sexy outfit grasping an AK-47, leaping through the air, and proclaiming. “Eh, maintenant, mes amis, aux barricades!” Over the next few years Ames would learn not to trust Wolfe’s judgment.
Like Dewey Clarridge, Wolfe didn’t understand why Ames didn’t make more of an effort to recruit his “friends.” One day when Mustafa Zein was visiting Washington, Ames took Wolfe to see Zein in his hotel room. “Right away,” recalled Zein, “Wolfe wanted to know why I was doing all this without any money. I told him, ‘If I get paid for what I say, you are not going to respect me or believe the information.’ ”
Wolfe responded, “All agents are motivated by profit, not by seeking the truth.”
“Mr. Wolfe,” retorted Zein, “I am a seeker of truth.”
As chief of covert operations for the Arabian Peninsula, Ames was on a management track. And by all accounts his immediate subordinates liked him. “Clandestine officers are usually extroverts,” said Charlie Allen, a CIA officer who met Ames in 1973. “They can be supersalesmen. But Bob wasn’t like that. There was something solid about him. He was just a remarkable clandestine officer, the best I’ve ever seen.”
Ames was the kind of boss who always came out from behind his desk and sat down with people to talk one on one. “Bob had a nice personality,” recalled one colleague. “He came across as a very balanced person. He was skilled with people, so it wasn’t surprising that he was skilled at recruitment. He had a way of inspiring confidence.”
He kept a clean desk. It was practically bare. “I think sloppiness is contagious,” Ames once told Yvonne. “And if you are sloppy in the office, it will carry over to all things.” He typed his own memos on a manual typewriter—and a few years later, on an IBM electric typewriter. He never learned to type with more than two fingers. He liked to write on a yellow legal pad with green ink. Only books, not paper, cluttered his office.
Though his purview was the Arabian Peninsula, Ames never relinquished full control over his back channel with Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames continued to believe in Salameh. He liked the man, especially his laid-back manner and his sense of humor. “Salameh was perceived by all of us,” said Charles Waverly, who a few years later took over from Ames as his case officer, “as more open-minded, and Bob carefully nurtured this.” At some point, Ames decided it would be a nice gesture to give Ali Hassan a personal gift. But he thought it would have to be something meaningful, something Ali Hassan would treasure. Ames knew Ali Hassan was not just a parlor revolutionary. He walked around with a pistol in a holster on his belt. So he came up with the idea that he should give Ali Hassan a fine American pistol. For this, he knew he would have to get authorization from Langley. Headquarters didn’t like the idea. This crossed some invisible ethical line. The Agency could have dealings with a terrorist, but it would be unseemly to make a gift of a gun. Cables flew back and forth. Ames pressed the issue. He wouldn’t give up on it. Finally, Headquarters said, “Okay, why don’t you give him a replica of a gun? A neutered gun?” Ames fired back a cable saying no way. Ali Hassan would be insulted. Eventually Ames had to give up on the whole idea
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Perhaps Ames hadn’t given up on the notion of a full-blown recruitment. His attempt to give Ali Hassan a gun is evidence of this. He just understood that if it were ever to happen, it would take time and a long history of proven friendship. The line between recruitment and a liaison relationship is always subtle. “Ames no doubt often tried to peel MJTRUST/2’s loyalties away from Arafat,” recalled Miller-Jones. Ames would do this by trying gently to solicit from Salameh his personal opinions and analysis. He’d encourage Salameh to talk about what he thought—as opposed to Arafat or the official PLO line. “He would seek his ‘out of school’ take on an issue,” Miller-Jones said. “Wherever it crossed a line and differed from Arafat in a significant way, well, Salameh would really have been risking his job, at the very least, and maybe worse. And whenever he took any kind of material reward from Ames, he would be vulnerable to charges of spying for the Americans, especially if he did not report it to his Fatah bosses. Therein lies the subtle difference in nomenclature between recruited or not.”
Salameh, however, seemed to understand the game all too well, and he walked a very fine line. He knew how to play it. “They were constantly trying to recruit each other,” said Jack O’Connell, the chief of station in Jordan. Ames and Ali Hassan had a genuine friendship. “They tell you in the CIA never to fall in love with your agent,” recalled Miller-Jones. “But everyone does, and those few who don’t rise to senior management.” Ames was different. It was an open question in 1975 about how high in the bureaucracy Ames would ever rise. He was known for his strong opinions and passions. Some thought his passions would block further promotions. On the other hand, he was efficient and effective. Earlier that year, during one of Ames’s frequent trips from Kuwait to Beirut, Ames got Salameh to pledge that his Force 17 would provide security for the embassy—which was located in PLO territory in Ras Beirut. Force 17, of course, was the same security apparatus that provided personal security for Yasir Arafat. As part of the security arrangement negotiated between Ames and Salameh, the Agency agreed to provide Force 17 with some limited training. To put it bluntly, the Agency was now in the business of training Arafat’s bodyguards.
With the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975, the CIA’s heavy investment in covert operations in Southeast Asia came to an end. But although the overall number of covert ops had declined in the early 1970s, clandestine operations still accounted for 37 percent of the Agency’s total budget. And a large portion was being spent in the Middle East. That was where the “action” was in terms of operations. Whereas Berlin had been the spy capital of the early Cold War, Beirut was now the place to be if you were in operations. So when Clair George was offered the chief of station job in Beirut, he regarded it as a plum assignment.
But soon after George’s arrival in Beirut, the Lebanese began killing one another in a brutal sectarian civil war, pitting competing Maronite Christian militias against a loose coalition of Druze, Sunni, and Shi’ite militias. “I never thought of Lebanon as a country,” wrote Said Aburish, the Palestinian journalist who spent much of his career in Beirut. “I always thought of the place as an idea, essentially a good idea.” Until 1975, Lebanon had indeed been a good idea for the whole Middle East, a model of how a mosaic of religions and ethnicities could nevertheless flourish in a multicultural and mostly civil society. And then it all fell apart. One could say it began on April 13, 1975, with the “Bus Massacre” in which some twenty-seven Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims were killed by Maronite Phalangist gunmen. This egregious massacre had no doubt been incited by any number of previous, less bloody incidents. But for most historians this was the spark that began a civil war that would last for fifteen years. At least 130,000 people were killed, and some estimates range as high as 250,000. The Maronite Christian militias fought to defend their vision of a Lebanon dominated by the Maronite elite—even though by the 1970s this ancient Christian community was a decided minority compared to the Druze, the Sunni, and the rapidly growing population of Shi’ites. The Druze, Sunni, and Shi’ite communities were aligned together, but they all acquired their own militias. The refugee Palestinians, represented by the PLO, gradually became drawn into the civil war and fought against the Maronites and their dominant militia, the right-wing Phalangists. The Syrian army eventually intervened, initially against the Maronites, but then against the Palestinians and their Druze and Sunni allies. It was, needless to say, a bloody mess of a war, characterized by shifting tribal and sectarian loyalties.
Beirut became a combat zone as the civil war spiraled out of control. “In Beirut everyone has an agenda and a gun,” George told a friend. “And the agenda can go in any direction, and the gun can shoot in any direction.” But as things got worse, Salameh’s value to the Americans rose. He became essential to the security of the American embassy. This was underscored in June 1976, when U.S. ambassador Francis Meloy and his economic counselor, Robert O. Waring, were assassinated. Despite the obvious dangers, Ambassador Meloy decided he needed to keep an appointment with Lebanese president Elias Sarkis in East Beirut. He and Waring got into the armored ambassadorial limousine and were driven by a longtime Lebanese chauffeur toward East Beirut. Incredibly, no armed security guards accompanied them. As they were about to cross into Christian-controlled East Beirut, unknown gunmen halted the car and seized them. Their bodies—including the chauffeur’s—were found in a garbage dump a few hours later. According to Jonathan Randal, the Washington Post correspondent at the time, that particular stretch of the road from West Beirut into the Christian sector of East Beirut was controlled by a Lebanese militia calling itself the Socialist Arab Labor Party. They were loosely affiliated with the PFLP.
The specific identities of the murderers and their motives remain unknown. In any case, it was not Fatah who killed the ambassador and his aide, and they were not assassinated while under the security umbrella of Fatah. On June 20, 1976, the bodies of the two American diplomats had to be extracted from Lebanon via a convoy of cars over the mountains into Syria. The airport was closed, and even a seaside departure was deemed too dangerous. Salameh supervised the security arrangements for the embassy convoy. “I will get you through the Palestinian lines,” Salameh promised Sam Wyman, the case officer responsible for extracting the bodies out of Lebanon. “Sure enough,” said Wyman, “as soon as we passed out of PLO-controlled territory, we ran into a firefight between the Syrian and Maronite Christian forces. But Ali Hassan got us out. We were good friends. He was smart, well read, and not unrealistic.”
After the evacuation from Lebanon of 263 private American citizens, President Gerald Ford publicly thanked the PLO for providing security for the operation. Kissinger even sent Arafat an official letter thanking him for his cooperation.
Salameh was no longer sending his operatives abroad to target Israelis or Westerners in Europe. He was, however, still an enforcer. “I asked him once,” said Charles Waverly, “about a guy we thought was involved in terrorism. But when I mentioned his name, Salameh said, ‘Oh, I killed him two days ago.’ ” Another case officer stationed in Beirut in the mid-1970s recalls going to see Salameh with a complaint. “I told him that we had some intelligence that some of his people were about to do something bad in Germany. Salameh reached for the phone and called someone. And then I heard him yelling, ‘What is this shit? Stop it!’ ”
In the early days of the Lebanese civil war, Waverly was trying to have a conversation with Salameh in one of the Agency’s safe houses. They could hear the sound of mortars being fired nearby. “It is a little hard to hear,” Waverly said. Salameh pointed at the desk and asked, “Does that phone work?” When Waverly nodded his head Salameh picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. In a moment, Waverly heard Salameh saying, “Yah, Bashir—khallas [enough].” He was talking to Bashir Gemayel, the Christian warlord and one of the PLO’s main enemies. The shelling soon stopped.
Bashir Gemayel was considered to be pro-American. He certainly had close connections to the Americans. Clair Geo
rge thought Bashir was a “barbarian” and a murderer. Ames called him simply “our brutal warlord.” (Years later, Bob Woodward reported that Bashir Gemayel had been on the CIA’s payroll, but Sam Wyman—who was in a position to know something like this—says that Woodward got this wrong.)
Gemayel and Salameh were enemies, but fellow warlords. In Beirut’s surreal world, they had a grudging admiration for each other. Said K. Aburish once unkindly described Gemayel as a “pimply-faced, overweight hooligan who merits the teenage epithet ‘greasy.’ … [Salameh] competed with Bashir Gemayel as to the number of undone buttons on his shirt.” Aburish was a harsh critic of both men and wrote of Salameh: “He had the mental makeup of an Italian harbor boy and his emergence as a celebrated leader of Palestinian fighting men casts serious doubts on Arafat’s judgment of men.” In March 1976, Mossad brought the Christian Phalangist warlord to Herzliya, a seaside resort town just north of Tel Aviv, to share intelligence and iron out the details of the Israeli alliance with the Lebanese Phalange. At one point, a Mossad officer took Gemayel aside and asked if he could share with them the details of Salameh’s daily routine and itinerary. Bashir nodded and indicated that would be no problem. But Mossad reportedly never got anything. Gemayel apparently thought Salameh might someday be useful to his own political ambitions. And he understood that if the Israelis killed Salameh, a less astute player would simply replace the Palestinian.
In the midst of the seesaw civil war, Salameh sometimes tried to signal that the Palestinian community trapped in Lebanon—some 250,000 refugees—did not wish to involve themselves in Lebanese politics. “Being outside Palestine,” Salameh told a reporter from Monday Morning, an English-language Lebanese weekly tabloid, “we get involved in problems which distract us from what is going on inside our homeland. That is what is happening in Lebanon.” In another interview with the daily Al Ziat, he said, “We made mistakes.… We treated the Lebanese right-wing [the Phalangists] as the enemy camp and many of us thought that we shouldn’t try to seek understanding and cooperation with it. I was among the very few who believed that we can reach understanding with them.” He told another reporter, “There are no permanent enmities or permanent friendships.”
