The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Ames, of course, was well aware that Salameh was having an affair. And it didn’t seem to be just one of his flings. Bob disapproved. He had met Rizk, and while she was certainly attractive, Bob didn’t understand the relationship. “Why he still has this thing going with the other [woman], I’ll never know,” Bob wrote Yvonne. “His wife is good-looking, as are his two sons, and very well educated.” Salameh knew that Ames disapproved because Bob had made it clear that he wouldn’t meet him in Rizk’s apartment. “Everyone says that if I tell him, because he respects me, to break off the other thing, he will. I hesitate to get involved in personal things—even though this affair is ruining his reputation.” Bob was thinking like a friend and a family man—not a case officer sizing up a prospective agent for his weaknesses.

  Salameh and Ames were partners at this delicate moment in the course of the Lebanese civil war. They were trying to keep the lid on. Ames knew it was important work. “I’m doing something useful and something no one else can do,” he wrote Yvonne. “I’m spending a great deal of time trying to keep the Palestinians calm. They are very frustrated because nothing seems to be moving. If they get too frustrated, they will get back into the terrorist business to get attention and action. I hope the USG can come up with some pressure on the Israelis to be more flexible, but I am not optimistic. At least I am keeping the Black September group calm, but the real radicals, like the PFLP, are ready now. I talked to one of the PFLP leaders who is a friend and I must say that his arguments for action are convincing, although I can’t agree with the type of action.”

  The Palestinian problem should have been a top priority for Washington. It was the single most contentious and thorny issue in a region plagued by volatility. It was a festering source of latent anti-Americanism. Yet astonishingly the CIA had few, if any, real assets inside the Palestinian exile community.

  “The bottom line,” said Dewey Clarridge, “is that except for a few uncontrolled informants and a German support asset of Fatah’s, we had no significant agents in any part of the Palestinian movement for most of the 1970s. Around 1977, there were two, maybe three action-type Palestinians who were used to thwart some Palestinian ops against the US Embassy in Beirut, Lisbon and perhaps another place.” Ames was the Agency’s only conduit into the PLO.

  To say that Bob Ames was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause would be an understatement. He empathized with them deeply and admired Ali Hassan to a degree that is hard to explain. He knew Salameh had done some terrible things. “It is hard to believe our friend was what he was,” Bob wrote to Yvonne. “But that’s what comes of frustration. If the Palestinians could only have a country, they would be a great asset to the world. When I see some of these so-called ‘nations’ in Africa like Uganda and Idi Amin, I don’t think it is fair. Here a very educated people are denied a home, while the Ugandese eat each other and have a vote at the U.N.! Something’s wrong somewhere.”

  Ames was pleased when on March 16, 1977, President Jimmy Carter referred to “a homeland for Palestinian refugees.” It was a calculated comment, casually made in the course of a town hall meeting in Clinton, Massachusetts, but it was the first time an American president had ever used the words. The statement made headlines in the Lebanese press, and a few days later Salameh told Ames that his people were “delighted” with the president’s words. “I think we’re finally making some headway,” Ames wrote, “and our friend is already talking about the house he will build for us next to his in Jerusalem.”

  The American ambassador at the time was Richard Parker, a veteran Arabist. Ames knew Parker was also a longtime skeptic and critic of the CIA. “I think, however,” Bob wrote home, “I’ve earned his grudging respect because I know what I’m talking about and I won’t let him bully me.” It probably helped that Parker agreed with Ames’s assessment of the Maronites; he thought they were overreaching and arrogant. And Ambassador Parker specifically thought the Maronite Phalangist militia chief, Bashir Gemayel, was “a consummate liar and dissembler. The truth was not in him.” Everyone who ever met Dick Parker agreed that he was a man of wry humor and sharp opinions. He was a refreshingly frank diplomat. Parker thought the Israelis were encouraging the Phalangists to think they could restore Maronite supremacy in Lebanon. “I got pretty pissed off with Israeli arrogance and disregard for Lebanese sovereignty,” Parker said. “Between the Israelis and the Syrians, there wasn’t much to choose from.” Ames grew to like Parker; they shared the same crustiness and ironic sense of humor. “I think I’m getting on better with the Ambassador,” Ames wrote.

  Parker was extremely impressed when Ames announced that he’d found and retrieved the embassy limousine in which Ambassador Francis Meloy and his aide had been riding when they were kidnapped and killed in June 1976. Ames also got a full report from Salameh on his investigation into the assassinations. “It makes for grim reading,” Ames wrote, “but now they [U.S. officials] have all the facts on one of these assassinations for the first time. And I say, with all due humility, that no one else could have done it.” Bob complained to Yvonne that none of his superiors back at Langley had bothered to congratulate him on this work. “At least the Ambassador has invited me to lunch.”

  Ames was being very productive. After one month in the country, he’d written sixty reports—the highest output of any CIA station in the region. There was a lot to report on. On March 16, 1977, Kamal Jumblatt, the chieftain of the Lebanese Druze, was assassinated. Jumblatt was the political leader of the Druze-Muslim leftist coalition forces, known as the Lebanese National Movement (LMN). When the civil war had broken out in mid-1975, Jumblatt’s LMN, allied with the PLO, had quickly seized control of more than 70 percent of the country. Jumblatt promised to reform Lebanon’s increasingly undemocratic confessional system—which apportioned political representation in parliament to the Maronite Christians, the Sunni Muslims, and other sectarian religious groups on the basis of the country’s first—and only—1932 census. This antiquated sectarian political system had unfairly allowed the minority Maronite Christian community to dominate the state. The civil war might have ended at this point, but then in 1976 Syrian president Hafez Assad sent forty thousand troops into Lebanon. Assad feared that Jumblatt’s promised reforms would ultimately not only weaken the Maronite political machine but also threaten the legitimacy of his own Baathist Party dictatorship, a system that favored his own Alawites, an ethnic minority offshoot of Shi’a Islam.

  Jumblatt had been a voice of reason and moderation. But he was also a critic of the Syrians—and President Assad almost certainly ordered his assassination. “After his death was announced,” Ames wrote, “the Druze went on a rampage and killed every Christian in the Shuf [a mountainous region south of Beirut] they could find.” (The Druze are an ancient sect and, like the Alawites, are an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, dating back to the eleventh century.) More than 140 people, mostly women and children, were massacred. Naturally, these killings reinforced hard-line sentiments within the Maronite community. Ames knew from his agents in Christian East Beirut that Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangist militia was taking advantage of the political vacuum to rearm. The Phalangists were getting armaments from the Israelis, and in the spring of 1977 the Israelis were allowing Gemayel to smuggle his men by boat via Israel into South Lebanon, where they were mounting attacks on Shi’a villages and PLO positions. The Israeli goal was to create a zone in southern Lebanon free of Palestinians. Gemayel was obliging the Israelis, doing their dirty work for them, and in return he was getting the arms and financial support he needed to reassert Maronite control over the Lebanese state. Needless to say, all these machinations were to have tragic and unintended consequences.

  Ames was alarmed and frustrated by what was happening in South Lebanon. “The fighting there is foolish and both the Christians and the Palestinians are being used by the Israelis and Syrians respectively to fight their battles by proxy. This is the part that is very sad. The Israelis and Syrians look on self-righteously while Lebanese and P
alestinians kill each other. I know I can get the Palestinians to stop, but [the] old USG will not pressure the Israelis to stop supporting the Christians. I guess if the Israelis lead us right into WWIII, we still won’t put pressure on them.” When an informal cease-fire failed to hold, and fighting once again broke out in South Lebanon, Ames concluded, “Again the Christians and Israelis started it. Most of the Christians really want a separate state which they believe we will support as we support Israel.”

  Ambassador Dick Parker shared some of these sentiments. He was then trying to convince Bashir Gemayel that his military alliance with the Israelis was foolish. “He reported my remarks to Begin,” Parker later wrote, “who then complained to Sam Lewis, our Ambassador in Tel Aviv. The working level of the Department tried to support me in these efforts, but it was clear that there was no inclination at upper levels of our government to challenge the Israeli assertion of a right of eminent domain in South Lebanon.”

  Not surprisingly, the fighting that spring in the south escalated. And, of course, whenever the Palestinians managed to launch an attack across the border, the Israelis retaliated with severe air strikes, causing heavy civilian casualties among both Shi’ites and Palestinians. “When this happened,” Parker later wrote in his memoirs, “frightened Shia, caught in the middle, would stream up to Beirut, exacerbating the already severe socio-economic and security problems of that city and paving the way for eventual Shia dominance in west Beirut.”

  Ames sometimes met with Ali Hassan Salameh inside the teeming refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, on the southern edge of the city, near the international airport. So he couldn’t help but notice the growing number of Shi’ite refugees mixed in with the Palestinian residents. The combination of the civil war and Tel Aviv’s attempt to carve out an Israeli security zone in South Lebanon was creating a new alliance between the Palestinians and the Lebanese Shi’ite community—the two poorest and most disenfranchised peoples in the Lebanese mosaic. In a very few years this development would create an ominous new political force called Hezbollah—the Party of God.

  On April 2, 1977, Ames had a scheduled meeting with Salameh. “When I got to the usual place,” Ames wrote, “he drove me into the camp and I met #1 with the beard.” This was not the first time he’d met Arafat, but his only previous encounter with the PLO leader had entailed just a handshake and a few words of greetings. This time Ames had a long, rambling conversation with Arafat and Salameh. Ames wrote to Yvonne about the PLO leader that same day. “He’s funny-looking as his pictures, but a very bright and sincere man. Headquarters would go into outer space if they learned about this.” By all accounts, Ames’s two immediate bosses, Dewey Clarridge and Alan Wolfe, ran a very tight organization; no one did anything without their knowledge. But neither knew that Ames had met with Arafat. This was at a time when the Carter administration was publicly insisting that it wouldn’t countenance any dealings with the PLO. “No one in the CIA,” said a senior Agency official at the time, “was prepared to let Ames or anyone else talk to Fatah unless it was at a diplomatic function.”

  One Agency officer was highly skeptical that Ames could have done this: “Had Ames met Arafat or even Salameh he would have reported it. I recall none such, and obviously, I would have remembered. Ames could be off the reservation at times but not on that kind of situation. Moreover, at that time we were constrained by State from any contacts with the Palestinians, not just Fatah, that could be used by them politically. This put a damper on our ability to cultivate Palestinian sources, but did not affect ongoing ones.” But Ames did meet with Arafat—and he did not immediately report it.

  So Ames was taking a risk with his career. Meeting Salameh was one thing; this was a long-standing relationship with a source. For this he had authorization. But not so for Arafat. Salameh had no doubt sprung the meeting on Ames; it came as a surprise. Ames nevertheless thought it well worth it: “I think it was most useful.” At the same time, Bob had come to think that there was nothing he could do that would fundamentally change American policy in the region. “Very few dull moments here, but don’t get the idea that I enjoy it. I think I would if I thought it meant anything, but it doesn’t. Very frustrating. We’ll just never learn.”

  Just seventeen months later, President Jimmy Carter reluctantly felt compelled to accept the resignation of Andrew Young, his UN ambassador. Young had met in his New York apartment with Zuhdi Tarazi, chief of the PLO mission at the United Nations. “It is absolutely ridiculous,” Carter wrote in his diary at the time, “that we pledged under Kissinger and Nixon that we would not negotiate with the PLO.” Carter later said the ban was “preposterous, as this group was the key to any comprehensive peace agreement.” But Kissinger had given the Israelis this pledge in a Memorandum of Agreement on September 1, 1975—so when Ambassador Young informed the Israeli ambassador that he’d met with the PLO official on mundane Security Council business, the Israelis promptly leaked the information, precipitating Young’s resignation. Ames knew he could have suffered the same consequence; after all, what he’d done was a worse violation of the ban. He’d lacked even the fig leaf of a recruitment attempt; rather, he’d gone to see the PLO chief to exchange political views with him. If the Israelis had found out, they certainly would have made the meeting public and vigorously protested. It might have meant the end of his career.

  Ames was becoming a cynic. This was not uncommon for a rising clandestine officer. “The loss of innocence comes in stages,” said Graham Fuller, a clandestine officer whose career mirrored that of Ames’s. “In the beginning, you find yourself exhilarated by the access to classified information, and by all the direct, hands-on knowledge you are acquiring in the field. You have this notion that all you need to do is get the right skinny, the right facts before the policy makers—and things would change. You think you can make a difference. But gradually, you realize that the policy makers don’t care. And then the revelation hits you that U.S. foreign policy is not fact-driven.”

  Ames was working hard in Beirut “on some very sensitive stuff.” In forty-five days he’d sent out over a hundred “operational” cables, a few of which he labeled “nasty-grams.” He thought if he wrote too many more “nasty-grams” the Near East Division might try to get rid of him: “My heart would be broken.” He tried to restrain himself, but he felt that on occasion a strongly worded cable was “the only way to get through to people.” He was not getting along with Dewey Clarridge. “Maybe my sharp cables to him will mean he won’t want to work with me again—horror!” Ames complained to Yvonne that he was suffering from high blood pressure that spring. He blamed it on “job pressures” and the irregular routine he had to keep in Beirut. “I’m sure Clarridge doesn’t suffer from my problem,” Bob grumbled. His health worried him. “I enjoy life too much not to get my full share.”

  Bob was hoping he might come back to a different job in Washington. “I feel I should get a promotion this year, but I won’t.” He felt underappreciated. He’d been a GS-14 for only about two years, but he was already impatient for another promotion. “If John MacGaffin [a younger clandestine officer whom Ames had known in Beirut] gets promoted to GS-15 I leave the Division. That would be just too much to take.” Ames admired MacGaffin, but he saw no reason why the younger man should advance more rapidly than he: “I’m more and more convinced that there are just a few good men in NE and they get ridden into the ground to make others look good. Strange people.”

  “I hear indirectly from people on what a great job the Station is doing,” Ames wrote home. “But I’ve never heard a word from the Division management. I think we’re doing great in terms of quality and quantity—in fact, I think we’re nothing short of amazing. But not a word, and then they wonder why people want to get out.” Most of his work was generated from his meetings with Salameh. He spent hours with “our friend” on Saturday, April 9—the day before Easter: “I just got back from a long meeting with our friend,” Ames wrote, “so I have lots to write down between now
and Monday morning, so I’ll probably spend part of Easter writing.” An unappreciated aspect of good spy craft is simply writing down what transpires, and Ames’s cables back to Langley about his meetings with the Palestinian were detailed and meticulous. (And they remain classified.)

  Ames was scheduled to spend another month in Beirut to complete a full three-month TDY. But on April 23, 1977, he received an emergency phone call from Yvonne. She told him that his father, Albert, had been hospitalized the previous day—and had died that day. Albert had apparently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer some time earlier, but he’d kept this news from his family. He’d also had emphysema—and on April 23 his heart finally gave out. “Bob took his father’s death very hard,” said Sanford Dryden. “I think they had been very close. He did cry.” Ames boarded a flight home the next day, but he arrived too late for the funeral. His father had been seventy-seven years old.

  On June 8, 1977, Salameh married Georgina Rizk, who became his second wife. He wore a white suit for the occasion. It was not a lowprofile affair. Salameh was always a bit self-indulgent. As a Muslim he could decide to take a second wife. He wouldn’t divorce Nashrawan, but neither could he resist the charms of Georgina. “She seduced Ali,” Mustafa Zein said. “And after they made love for the first time, that was it, Ali was in love.” Arafat had bluntly told Salameh, “Marry her or leave her. Leaders do not take mistresses.”

  A year after Salameh’s second marriage, in mid-June 1978, Ames boarded a TWA plane at Dulles and flew off to Beirut. He was traveling on a newly issued diplomatic passport, No. X135101. He hadn’t been back to Lebanon in a year. His immediate boss, Alan Wolfe, had asked him to stand in for Frank Anderson, then chief of station in Beirut, while Anderson went on home leave for nearly a month. Ames was ambivalent about these occasional TDYs. They earned him extra cash—and he liked the opportunity to look up his old sources. But he disliked being away from his family. The last thing he told Yvonne was that she had to promise him to write regular letters. (All his letters to her ended with the line “God love you.”)