by Kai Bird
Bob arrived in Beirut on June 16 and checked into the Riviera Hotel. But then two days later he moved into Anderson’s three-bedroom apartment in the El Dorado building, right on the corniche and overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. He thought the Andersons were “lousy housekeepers,” so he spent that Sunday cleaning up the apartment. In the evening he could sit on the balcony and watch the sunset. He was amused to see that the Lebanese were participating in the current worldwide rage for jogging: “It is really hilarious to see these fat Lebanese in their Dior & Yves St. Laurent sweats.… Will they never change? The world may be falling down around them, but they’ll never be caught out of style.”
Beirut had changed dramatically. The first stage of the civil war, from 1975 to 1978, had left much of Beirut and the center city looking like a war zone. On block after block stood rows of high-rise apartment buildings that were now empty shells, pockmarked by bullets and mortar rounds. The 1976 “war of the hotels” had turned the city’s famous Phoenicia Intercontinental, the Holiday Inn, and the St.-George hotels into towering ruins. More recently, on March 11, 1978, a squad of eleven Fatah Fedayeen led by a woman, Dalal Mughrabi, had landed on Israel’s northern coast in rubber rafts and had proceeded to hijack a bus. They had driven the bus south on the coastal highway toward Tel Aviv until stopped by an Israeli roadblock. A nine-hour gun battle ensued. Mughrabi and most of her squad were eventually killed, together with thirty-seven Israelis—including thirteen children—and a female American photographer who happened to be sitting on the beach when the Fedayeen arrived. The Coastal Highway massacre remains the single worst terrorist attack carried out inside Israel. Three days later, on March 14, 1978, more than twenty-five thousand Israeli soldiers invaded South Lebanon, seizing the southern portion of the country up to the Litani River. The Israeli invasion killed an estimated two thousand Lebanese civilians and turned another quarter million into refugees.
Lebanon was a mess. Ames nevertheless could see lots of people strolling along Beirut’s seaside corniche. On Sunday, June 18, he sat on the balcony and in his neat cursive handwriting addressed a four-page letter to his family back in Reston. As was his style, he began affectionately, “Dear Bonnie, Babies & beasts …” The “Babies” were the six children, none of whom were any longer babies. And the “beasts” were Hansje, the Hungarian Vizsla breed of dog, and their numerous cats. “You would not believe this is a troubled country to look off your balcony.” Five days earlier, on the morning of June 13, six hundred Phalangist militia—under the control of the Gemayels, a leading Maronite Christian family—had assaulted the ancestral home of the Franjiehs, a rival Maronite clan who opposed the Gemayel alliance with Israel. Their goal was to kill Tony Franjieh, the thirty-six-year-old son of the family’s patriarch, former Lebanese president Suleiman Franjieh. The Phalangists killed thirty of Franjieh’s bodyguards and then forced Tony Franjieh and his wife, Vera, to watch as they shot two dozen bullets into their three-year-old daughter, Jihan. The killers then shot Tony’s wife—and finally executed him. “The murder was truly savage and brutal,” Ames wrote home. “In spite of this, I think the masses are just fed up with fighting and killing.… I’m speaking logically, of course, and there is not much room for logic in Lebanon.”
Ames was later shocked to read in Monday Morning that after the murders of Tony Franjieh, his wife, and his daughter, Suleiman Franjieh, the clan’s patriarch, had taken Tony’s eleven-year-old son to see the bloody scene before the bodies were removed “so he would know what his duty was.” To Bob’s thinking, this was sad proof that “there is enough hatred in Lebanon for the rest of the world.”
The day after he arrived in Beirut, Ames had dinner with Ali Hassan Salameh. Their relationship was long past the point of meeting awkwardly in CIA safe houses. Ali Hassan welcomed Bob into his home as a friend and colleague. “Our friend sends his best,” Ames wrote Yvonne. “I had dinner with his family on Friday night [June 16]. His wife [Nashrawan, his first wife], who does all the cooking despite several maids, really made some great Leb. dishes. I gorged myself so much that I only had a Shawarma [minced lamb sandwich] on Sat!” The two men had a lot to discuss. Over the next three weeks, Ames made it a habit to visit Salameh every other night at 6:30 P.M. Usually, he spent an hour and a half with him and then returned to the El Dorado apartment. The meetings left Bob with “lots on my mind.” He’d often wake up in the middle of the night, “usually thinking how to write the info I get in my almost nightly 6:30 P.M.–8 P.M. meetings with our friend.”
Even before the civil war started in 1975, Lebanon had been a very complicated piece of geography. By 1978 it was a maze of inexplicable narratives and constantly changing allegiances. The Palestinians were both a factor in the escalation of the civil war and its chief victims. Initially, Arafat and the PLO tried desperately to stay out of it, but by the end of 1976 they’d inevitably thrown in their lot with the Lebanese leftist alliance of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Druze parties against the right-wing Maronite Christian militias. Salameh was trying to brief Ames on what was turning into a very bloody sectarian war. “Lebanon is still waiting,” Bob wrote to Yvonne on June 25, “for the other shoe to fall after the assassinations up North and the continued trouble down South. Unfortunately, there is much outside interference in Lebanon’s affairs—not to mention their own tendency to shoot themselves in the foot. The Israelis like to keep the South unstable in order to keep the Palestinians out and to give themselves an excuse to come back in. The Palestinians want a weak Lebanon so there will be no army to harass them, and the Syrians just want Lebanon.”
Three days later, the proverbial shoe dropped. Thirty-three Christian Phalangist members near Baalbek were taken from their homes and executed. Their bodies were mutilated. Ames thought this massacre was probably carried out by the Syrians as a favor to their Franjieh allies—who had lost the same number in the attack on Tony Franjieh. At the same time, gun battles erupted in East Beirut between the Syrian army and the Gemayel clan’s Phalangist militia. “It’s getting nasty here in Beirut,” Bob wrote to Yvonne on July 5, “and we had some mortar rounds just a few hundred yards from my apartment. When they hit they sound as if they are right in the room. As I write this in the office, I can hear firing breaking out again.… Electricity has been on and off (mostly off) since noon yesterday.… One doesn’t go out on the streets these days unless he has to.… I love and miss you lots. God love you.”
Ames was naturally frustrated and discouraged by what he was experiencing in Beirut. “It seems a paradox,” he wrote Yvonne, “to say that one is both busy and bored at the same time, but I am.… I’ve been working as hard as I ever have in Beirut, long hours and lots of reading and writing, but I just don’t have the same enthusiasm or feeling of accomplishment. I get the feeling that I’ve written all this and done all this too many times before. There are no changes in the situation; it’s still as bad as it was and the USG does not appear to be prepared to bite the bullet and do something about it—and nothing will change until we do.” It wasn’t clear whether Ames was referring to the Lebanese situation or the old Palestinian conundrum—or both. But his malaise was deep-felt.
Something else was also bothering Ames. He’d applied late that spring for a new job in the Agency, the position of national intelligence officer (NIO) for NESA. This was a new position within what the Agency called the National Intelligence Council (NIC). As deputy chief of the Near East for Arab Operations, Ames felt he had hit a glass ceiling inside the DO. He was Dewey Clarridge’s number-one deputy, but he felt that both Clarridge and his boss, Alan Wolfe—chief of the Near East Division in the DO—would never allow him to rise higher in the DO. Clarridge just didn’t see Ames as a real operational officer. Neither did Wolfe. “Both men acknowledged Bob’s immense other talents,” recalled another DO officer, Henry Miller-Jones, “and both deferred to him in his handling of MJTRUST/2 [Salameh]. But Wolfe would not back him for a senior DO management position.” They knew Ames was smart and competent,
but they thought he was just too bookish for the DO. And they also thought that he should have been able to turn Salameh into a fully recruited agent. In their eyes, he had failed the recruitment.
“Bob had a reputation in the DO of being too smart, too much of an intellectual,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin, who later worked with him. Ames liked operations, and he thought he was good at it. But he believed clandestine work had to have a purpose larger than the simple “Great Game.” The point was to influence the course of history—to create a better world. He really believed this. He wanted his covert intelligence to persuade the policy makers to make good decisions. By the summer of 1978, Ames felt that American policy in the Middle East had run into a dead end. His TDY trip to Beirut had brought these feelings to the surface: “I really haven’t enjoyed anything about this TDY except an occasional good session with our friend [Salameh].” For all these reasons, he was anxious to hear about the new job. He thought he’d make a good fit. The new organization was not part of the DO, but neither was it in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI). The whole idea was to gather a handful of the Agency’s best people—both covert case officers and analysts—and get them to think about the broad picture. They would have access to everything from both the DO and the DI. But the council would also seek out academics and journalists outside the Agency. “After you have been around for a while,” said Graham Fuller, who was both a clandestine officer and later an NIO, “you come to realize that all this classified information is not as up to snuff as you once thought. The secret stuff often just doesn’t help to answer the deeper questions. In fact, the questions that really matter are usually unanswerable. Policy makers want to know if the Soviet Union is going to exist ten years from now, or if Anwar Sadat can survive signing a peace treaty with Israel. To get some kind of informed answer to a question like that requires going outside the Agency and finding the most knowledgeable minds around to make an informed judgment. I’d see a lot of academics and journalists. Independent thinkers. Being an NIO is a very stimulating job. You suddenly realize that some of these people without access to any classified information know a hell of a lot.”
The NIC was supposed to provide policy makers with a truly independent view of what was happening around the world. It was sort of a throwback to the Agency’s very early Board of National Estimates, when Yale’s Sherman “Buffalo” Kent and Harvard’s Bill Langer had hired a select number of regional experts to provide Washington with global intelligence estimates. When told in 1950 that he could hire a staff of hundreds, Langer replied in his high-pitched Dorchester Boston twang, “Well, I can’t possibly do the job with more than twenty-five people.” Like the Board of National Estimates, the new NIC was supposed to be very elite, prestigious, and slightly academic.
Ames desperately wanted the job. “Perhaps,” he wrote Yvonne on June 29, 1978, “my malaise is because I’ve heard nothing on the NIO business.… In any event, I’m sure that A.W. [Alan Wolfe] is using my absence to lobby against the assignment. Maybe taking that job would be even more frustrating ’cause I’d only have access to more indications of missed opportunities in the M.E. [Middle East].”
A week later, Ames finally received a cable from Langley saying that no decision had yet been made on the NIO job. “I gather they’re looking hard to find someone other than me, but haven’t come up with a candidate yet. I’m half tempted to tell them to stuff their NIO job, and try to look for something else when I get back.” He was also being urged to take another assignment to Tehran as chief of station. But he’d decided to fight that assignment: “I’ve done my share of ‘bang-bang’ posts.” He would have to wait to get back to Washington to hear about a new assignment.
Ames had found it difficult to wander the streets of Beirut. “I don’t like to be on the streets after dark,” he wrote home. “Too much kidnapping.” If he wasn’t meeting Salameh for dinner, he often just ate in the U.S. embassy’s marine mess. On July 4 he’d walked over to the campus of the American University of Beirut and played some softball—until the mortar shells started falling. He’d brought a little money to go carpet shopping on Rue Hamra, but he found the prices exorbitant. Before finally flying out on July 11, he had another good meal with Mustafa Zein. His young Lebanese friend was as well connected as ever. They commiserated about the Lebanese morass and the general stalemate in Arab-Israeli relations.
Later that autumn, ABC News came to Beirut to film a one-hour documentary about the Palestinians. The show focused on the PLO’s training of young men for desperate attacks on Israel. Narrated by Frank Reynolds, the documentary explored why these young men were willing to participate in virtual suicide missions. It was a controversial show, seen by millions of Americans. Ames was surprised to see that it featured an on-camera interview with Mustafa Zein. “Why is it so hard in the West,” Zein asked his audience, “to understand the Palestinian right to regain their dignity on his own land? Any man or woman of the Jewish faith, coming from Russia or the United States, automatically has the right to settle in Israel today—because he had a certain connection to the land two thousand years ago.” Why, Zein wanted to know, were people surprised that Palestinians had the same kind of attachment to the land? “Why are we expecting the Palestinians to be less patriotic than the Israelis?” The end of the program had a clip of Yasir Arafat walking through a crowd, accompanied by Ali Hassan Salameh—who was identified as one of the most “dangerous” men in the world. The program’s producers obviously didn’t know of Zein’s connection to Salameh.
Ames returned to Washington in mid-July and soon afterwards learned that he’d won the NIO position. He was greatly relieved and completely unaware that he had secured the job through the intervention of one of his longtime admirers, a former Beirut chief of station, Harry Simpson. This officer had since risen to be an executive assistant in the director’s office. “Despite the fact that Bob had no background in analysis,” said Simpson, “I thought he would make a great NIO and told [Deputy Director Frank] Carlucci that. He looked into it … the files, interviews, the works—talked it over with [Admiral Stansfield] Turner and they gave him the job.”
Simpson felt Ames was qualified, but he also thought it was high time to break down the walls between the DO and the analytical side of the Agency. It would help, he thought, to have an experienced DO officer trying to answer some of the big analytical questions. Ames took to the analytical work with a methodical zeal. In short order he was writing long situation reports and “monthly warning assessments” on such wide-ranging topics as “oil and politics,” “alleged coup-plotting” in Yemen, “mutual suspicion” between Iran and Iraq, and the possibility of a Soviet “military intervention” in Afghanistan.
Ames was now a GS-15—or the equivalent of a full army colonel, earning over $100,000 in current dollars. He knew Yvonne did not want another foreign posting. The NIC had only thirteen NIOs—one for each region or specialty. Thus Ames was NIO for NESA. But there were also NIOs for topics, such as science and technology, nonproliferation, and other issues. It was a very elite position—a coup for someone who, at age forty-four, was relatively young and who, unlike some of his fellow NIOs, possessed no graduate degrees. But he was nevertheless chosen to be one of the thirteen NIOs on his merits.
That autumn of 1978 the CIA conducted a routine personnel security investigation of Ames. Two of Ames’s listed references were interviewed, plus his current supervisor. One of the unnamed references told the security officer that Ames “has that unique ability to get along very well with all kinds of people and that he is definitely [a] people-oriented kind of man who takes [the] interest of subordinates at heart.… He is the kind of man who loves to listen to other people.” When asked to comment on Ames’s personal life, this informant said that Ames and Yvonne “appear to be very happily married.” Ames will “take a drink or two at parties, but certainly nothing more.” With regard to foreign contacts, the informant “noted that he believes the SUBJECT currently is in contact with a forei
gn national, however this was done at the specific request of the Chief of his Division and with White House approval.” Ames’s supervisor concurred, saying that Ames was “doing a very strong job.” Bob was known “as a man who is extremely stable and emotionally as solid as a rock.”
That autumn Ames became peripherally involved in what later became known as the case of the “vanished imam.” The imam Musa Sadr, the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Shi’a Muslims, was a highly charismatic scholar and political organizer who’d inspired the downtrodden Shi’a peasants of South Lebanon to stand up for their political and economic rights. Sadr, who was of distant Lebanese ancestry, had been born in Iran. In 1959 he immigrated to Lebanon, and by the 1970s he’d become an important political personality. In early 1975 he spoke before a rally of seventy thousand Shi’as and told them, “Possessing weapons is as important as possessing the Koran.” He was nevertheless regarded as a voice of reason and moderation, a Shi’a cleric who could break bread with Maronite Christian businessmen, Greek Orthodox prelates, Druze chieftains, and Sunni Muslim leaders.
But on August 31, 1978, Musa Sadr mysteriously disappeared while on a trip to Libya, where he’d been invited to meet with Col. Muammar Qaddafi. When the Lebanese government made inquiries in early September, Qaddafi’s regime announced that the cleric and two of his companions had left Tripoli bound for Rome on an Alitalia flight on August 31. The imam’s checked luggage had indeed arrived in Rome, but the imam himself was missing.
