by Kai Bird
This was not just talk. When Dany Chamoun, the chieftain of the Christian right-wing Tigers militia, was captured in Beirut by PLO forces, Salameh intervened and arranged for his release. Salameh was clearly trying to cultivate a pragmatic persona. And there is good reason to believe that he was doing so as a result of his relationship with Ames and the CIA.
Salameh’s star was rising inside the PLO. By 1976 the intelligence chief and head of Force 17 was thought by some to be a possible successor to Arafat in the event of the death of the “Old Man.” Salameh made a point now of conducting himself as a kind of envoy. He was no longer a foot soldier. “Salameh played a large part in winning the hearts and minds of the U.S. for the PLO,” said Bill Buckley, a Beirut CIA station chief—who was later abducted and killed. “He was charismatic and persuasive and knew when to argue and when to listen.” Sam Wyman believed Salameh was Arafat’s natural heir apparent. “I spent a lot of my time coaxing him to go in the direction of responsible policy—and to understand that if you are going to have a peaceful solution, you have to come down from the barricades.”
Salameh’s primary conduit to the Agency was still Ames—but remotely. Given that Bob was back in Washington, Wyman and Waverly were the two case officers who regularly saw the PLO intelligence chief. And like Ames, they used Mustafa Zein to set up their meetings. They also tried to keep Salameh under electronic surveillance. Salameh was still in love with all women. One of his lovers was a German reporter. “We had an audio operation,” boasted Dewey Clarridge. “We could hear Salameh screwing her.” Obviously, the Agency regarded Salameh as a valuable liaison and source. But he was also fair game for surveillance.
In April 1976, Salameh gave a splashy interview to a Beirut tabloid. He chose to sit down with Nadia Salti Stephan, a feature reporter from Monday Morning, the tabloid that typically ran profiles of Beirut high-society figures with the occasional serious piece of reporting. The result was a five-page spread, complete with an extensive interview and a photograph. Sam Wyman was dismayed. “I told Salameh,” recalled Wyman, “ ‘You are violating every principle of good intelligence practice. The Israelis know who you are and they know what you did, and so you should be careful.’ He shrugged his shoulders. He was so casual, so cool, just very cavalier. He was acting, I thought foolishly, like he was the abu dey—the street chief—of all of Beirut.” By 1976, Salameh had a very set routine. He traveled in a convoy, sitting in the backseat of a large Chevy station wagon. A lead car filled with gunmen led the way, while a Toyota pickup truck brought up the rear. Mounted on the Toyota’s flatbed was a Doschka 22mm cannon. Wyman once asked Salameh, “How is that damn cannon going to protect you? It just announces to everyone where you are.” Salameh just laughed and said, “Oh, it is good.”
Salameh was given numerous such warnings. But he was fatalistic. He knew that he’d already escaped several attempts on his life. A bomb had once exploded outside his apartment door in Beirut. On another occasion he’d refused to open a parcel addressed to him from the Algerian embassy; it turned out to be rigged with explosives. And, of course, the Israelis had tried to kill him in Norway. So far, they’d failed in these attempts on his life. “They [the Israelis] are not supermen,” Salameh said. So perhaps he might evade their hit teams.
He also knew that the Israelis were, in a calculated manner, adding to his notoriety, encouraging others to see him as “a playboy, a smuggler, a murderer, a blood-thirsty killer who cannot sleep at night without seeing blood.… The intention obviously was to pave the way for my liquidation.… They were, if you want, trying to make our assassination a legitimate act.”
If anything, Salameh was living his life more flamboyantly, not less. In 1976 he was openly dating a twenty-four-year-old woman named Georgina Rizk. She was stunning. Six years earlier, she’d been crowned the most beautiful woman in the universe. Rizk had a Lebanese father and an Italian mother. Born in 1953, she’d been raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. She began modeling for local fashion shows when she was fourteen. She spoke Arabic, French, and English. Georgina was young, beautiful, and entirely apolitical. When she traveled to Miami Beach to compete in the 1971 Miss Universe pageant, the press quickly picked up on the fact that she had befriended Miss Israel, Etty Orgad. “We are here for beauty, not politics,” Rizk said when asked about her friendship with the Israeli. On July 24, 1971, Bob Barker—the famous television personality and host of the pageant—crowned Rizk Miss Universe. Because she was the first Middle Easterner to win the crown, her image was splashed across the covers of numerous Lebanese, Egyptian, and Syrian magazines. In 1975, Lebanon issued postage stamps with Rizk’s image. A local newspaper proclaimed, “She is Lebanon’s queen, Lebanon’s goddess.” So when Ali Hassan Salameh began openly squiring around Georgina, popping up at Beirut’s upscale restaurants and nightclubs, the couple became a national sensation. Miss Universe and the Palestinian intelligence chief made quite an item.
In late November 1976, just after President Ford’s defeat in the presidential election, Ames persuaded then CIA director George H. W. Bush to extend an invitation to Salameh to visit Washington. The PLO was ecstatic. The Palestinians regarded it as an invitation for an “official” visit. Charles Waverly, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, delivered the invitation. Mustafa Zein was also invited, but he declined, saying he wanted to “prove that he was not needed anymore to uphold and protect the covert American/PLO relation and Ali knew well the way to the United States without any help or the company of Mustafa Zein.” Ford’s departing secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, tried to veto the Salameh visit. Kissinger, of course, knew full well that this was the man who’d been the CIA’s back channel to the PLO for nearly seven years. But in an extraordinary intervention, CIA director Bush approached President-elect Jimmy Carter’s designated secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and persuaded him that Ali Hassan Salameh’s visit to Washington was in the U.S. national interest. “Bush would have favored Salameh’s trip,” observed Duane Clarridge, “partly because of what Salameh had done earlier to get Americans out of Beirut.” Vance authorized the visit.
At some point, Salameh told Ames he wanted to bring Georgina Rizk to America. He explained that she wanted to visit Disneyland in California. And after California, they wanted to visit Hawaii. Ali Hassan said he was in need of a vacation. Could Ames make all this happen? Ames could, and did.
Salameh and Rizk would come to America under CIA cover. It had to be a highly secret trip. Ames arranged for alias documentation and special tourist visas. “Bringing MJTRUST/2 onto U.S. territory was quite sensitive,” recalled one Agency clandestine officer. “Much of the preparation had to do with arranging aliases for the couple.” The PLO paid their airfare to America, but the Agency picked up their tabs thereafter.
Mustafa Zein flew to Cairo from Beirut and met the CIA’s deputy chief of station, Sam Wyman, who handed over U.S. visas for Salameh, Rizk, and one other PLO official, Ziyad al-Hout. In early 1977, Salameh and Al-Hout flew from Cairo to New York. “Everything was arranged with U.S. immigration authorities,” said Clarridge, who knew about the secret trip. Rizk met Salameh in New York, having flown on a different flight from Beirut. They then traveled to Washington, D.C., where Ames escorted Salameh to see a few officers in Langley. The Israelis never learned that Salameh had visited CIA headquarters.
Charles Waverly was assigned to accompany the couple to New Orleans, then on to Anaheim, California—to visit Disneyland—and finally to Hawaii. New Orleans was added to their itinerary, partly for pleasure but also so a discreet exchange of intelligence could take place between Salameh and Agency officers. The British journalist Peter Taylor reports that Salameh met with “senior American officials” in a New Orleans hotel. Ames’s ranking superior at the time, Alan Wolfe, flew down to New Orleans to meet with Salameh. Georgina later told Taylor that Ali Hassan saw this meeting as a new step in his relationship with the Agency. It was a test. “They wanted to be sure,” Georgina said, “that he had the temperament a
nd ability of a man with whom they could do business.” The meeting lasted five hours. “Abu Hassan was pleased,” Georgina recalled. “He had passed the test.”
Ames may have gone to New Orleans to participate in this meeting, or he may have just greeted Salameh in Washington. In any case, according to Mustafa Zein, Salameh was showered with small, symbolic gifts—including a leather shoulder holster for his gun. Ames also gave Salameh a leather briefcase that contained a hidden tape recorder—a tool for spy craft. Later, Salameh gave the briefcase to Zein, who used it often to make a surreptitious record of his conversations with various people.
Ali Hassan hated Disneyland for all the usual reasons. But he liked New Orleans, and Hawaii was a real vacation. Waverly tried to teach Ali Hassan snorkeling in the blue-green waters of the Pacific Ocean. “He was scared to death of it,” recalled Waverly. “He thought he was going to drown, and finally he just gave up and told me, ‘I can’t do it.’ I never did get him to do it. All he really wanted to do was eat oysters. He thought they were an aphrodisiac. I was in the adjoining hotel room—so in the evenings I heard the results. It was a perfect match. I think Ali Hassan really loved Georgina.”
In late February 1977, Dewey Clarridge and Alan Wolfe asked Ames to take on another temporary-duty assignment, this time for three months in Beirut. Bob agreed. He’d grown attached to his Reston life and hated being away from Yvonne and the children, but he still harbored ambitions of rising further in the Agency hierarchy, and taking on a TDY in war-torn Beirut would be noted as exceptional hardship duty.
Ames arrived in Beirut on a flight from Paris around February 21. He was met at the airport by an embassy security officer and hustled into an armored limousine. Accompanied by several armed guards, they drove straight to the U.S. embassy on the corniche of Ras Beirut. The streets were empty and dark. Every kilometer or so, they had to stop at a roadblock where soldiers from the Arab League peacekeeping force checked their identification papers. Syrian tanks were dug in around the main Palestinian refugee camps—with their gun turrets aimed at the camps. Forty thousand Syrian troops had invaded Lebanon the previous year, supposedly as peacekeepers. “It was kind of creepy, riding in,” Ames wrote. He was told that the embassy maintained a nighttime curfew, and even during the day no one was allowed to travel about the city without an armed guard. The only exceptions to this rule were the military attaché and CIA officer Bob Ames. “Obviously, I couldn’t do my job,” Bob explained to Yvonne, “with bodyguards around.”
Ames was given an apartment in the embassy, and he ate most of his meals in the embassy’s mess hall with the marine guards ($30 a week for breakfast and dinner). Everyone was eating through the embassy commissary’s very depleted stock of food. In the evenings the marines usually showed a 35mm movie on a projector. Restricted to the embassy building, most of the marines and staff were thoroughly bored. But Ames was determined to get out and see what he could learn from his contacts. He rented a beat-up 1974 Toyota to drive around town. The neighborhood around the embassy—including the Hamra Street commercial district and the American University of Beirut—seemed untouched by the war. The university, however, had suspended classes that spring, and most restaurants were shuttered. The hotel district and the center city were utterly destroyed. “I think they should just level the place and start from scratch,” Bob wrote. “It is really a mess.” No one really knew if the war was over or Beirut was just experiencing a lull in the fighting. “Beirut is dead,” he wrote. “But it’s coming to life.… It looks like things are opening up and tension is lessening.” But Bob found his new post depressing. Soon after his arrival the city was hit by a spring thunderstorm. “Lebanon needs the rain,” he wrote Yvonne, “to wash away the death and filth. It has snowed heavily in the mountains and one day we had such heavy hail in Beirut that a few inches accumulated and Beirut was pure and white for a few hours.”
Ames had always found the Lebanese a little too cosmopolitan, a little too chic and thin-skinned. But they’d certainly proved themselves resilient, enduring periodic mortar shelling, firefights from the high-rise apartment buildings, and endless roadblocks. “One good thing came out of this war,” Ames wrote. “The Lebanese are not so arrogant any more. They realize that life is more than a Mercedes and an Yves
St. Laurent tie.… Of course, all this can end with one bullet. Peace is a very fragile thing.”
Ames was traveling frequently back and forth between Christiandominated East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut, talking to many people from both sides. “I feel the Muslims are more eager for settlement than the Christians.… The Christians are such bigots where Muslims are concerned, and that is the root of the Lebanese problem. I don’t see any real solution for a long time. The Christians want their own state, protected by the U.S., just like Israel. We don’t need another Israel in the area.”
He was right. The Maronite Christian establishment was not ready to give up. The civil war would soon restart and go on intermittently for another thirteen years. But in the current lull Ames found himself extremely busy as plenty of “old ‘friends’ are re-contacting us.” That spring, a large part of his job was to reestablish agent networks that had been disrupted by the war. Three of these agents had CIA-issued radios that they used to communicate with Beirut Station. Ames put them on a schedule: each day he had to check in with his “three radio friends” at 8:00 A.M., 5:00 P.M., and 7:00 P.M. He’d slip on a pair of headphones and listen to his agents while taking extensive notes. “What a slave to the radio I’ve become,” he wrote home. In addition, he had ten other people he had to see on a regular basis. “I’ve never worked harder anywhere in my life than I’m working here. It gets worse each day because the ‘peace’ brings more old friends out of the woodwork, and I’m sure my list of contacts will double before long.” He was working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. (He took off one day, March 4, for his forty-third birthday.) Half of his meetings were conducted in Arabic.
Needless to say, there was considerable risk associated with some of these liaisons. Ames later told a friend that on one occasion he had to hide inside the trunk of a car to get to one of these clandestine meetings. On another occasion, he was driving to meet a contact when he was stopped at an Arab League checkpoint that happened to be manned by illiterate South Yemeni soldiers from what was now the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. They searched Ames’s trunk and found a contraption they’d never seen—a vacuum cleaner. Ames was intending to give the vacuum cleaner as a gift to his contact. But the nervous Yemeni soldiers were suspicious that the machine might be a bomb. As Ames tried to explain in Arabic the purpose of a vacuum cleaner, he kept thinking to himself that he was now a spy caught with a vacuum cleaner—just like the character in Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana. It was a ludicrous situation—but also dangerous. “The problem was not Bob’s Arabic, which was excellent,” recalled a friend to whom Ames later told the story. The problem was that the soldiers didn’t have the vocabulary to grasp the concept of a vacuum cleaner. Frightened, they fingered the triggers on their guns. But Ames managed to talk his way through the situation and was allowed to go on his way. “Bob said it was high tension for a few minutes.”
Initially that spring Ames was the only CIA officer stationed in Beirut. The station had been drastically drawn down in 1976 because of the civil war. But in late March 1977 Langley sent him an assistant, Sanford Dryden, a very junior case officer. It was Dryden’s second “action” assignment abroad, and he apparently got a little shook up during his first safe-house meeting. Bob commented, “I guess none of us ever lose that strange feeling in the stomach when we enter a safe-house. It’s probably a good thing.” Bob decided he would turn over five of his twelve cases to this novice agent. He was later disappointed to see that Dryden’s Arabic was not up to snuff and he “doesn’t know how to write.”*3
Ames had lunch with, among others, Mustafa, who was still living in the same hotel, the Bedford, a block off Hamra Street. Zein had
so far survived the civil war very well. He now occupied the penthouse suite of the hotel, and Bob reported that his old friend “has fixed it up as only a Lebanese male can do.” Zein had bought some nice carpets and other furnishings “dirt cheap from looters.” The apartment was too cluttered for Bob’s taste. “Personally, I couldn’t live in the place. It’s just too full and has too much contrast between old and new for me.”
Ames no longer needed Zein as his cutout contact to Ali Hassan Salameh. Bob was seeing his “important friend”—always unnamed in his letters to Yvonne—every other day, “and that keeps me busy.” Salameh celebrated their reunion by giving Ames a beautiful set of solid-gold prayer beads. On Sunday, March 13, 1977, Salameh and Mustafa hosted a belated birthday party for Ames, and Mustafa gave him another set of prayer beads, this time made from white coral. “I think they’re trying to convert me!” Bob wrote home.
One day Zein took Ames to meet Salameh’s wife, Nashrawan, and his two young sons, Hassan, twelve, and Usama, five. Ames thought Nashrawan was quite “lovely and very bright.” The elder son, Hassan, was visiting Beirut on spring break from his London boarding school. When Bob whipped out photos of his children and explained that Kristen was also twelve years old, Hassan politely expressed an interest in meeting her. “Especially since she is blonde,” Ames wrote to Yvonne. “Arabs are Arabs!” Bob thought the Salamehs were “a really nice family.”
