The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  A few days earlier, Salameh had been warned by a most unlikely source that Mossad was plotting to assassinate him. Bashir Gemayel, the Phalangist warlord, had heard from his Mossad sources that a hit on Salameh was imminent. Gemayel told one of his associates, Karim Pakradouni, to warn Salameh. “I think Bashir had some crise de conscience,” Pakradouni told Peter Taylor, “and wanted to inform Abu Hassan about the operation.” When Taylor asked Pakradouni why he thought Mossad wanted to assassinate Salameh, he replied: “Because he was a member of Black September and because he had a relationship with the American Embassy in Beirut.… The policy of Israel was to destroy any contact between the PLO and the USA.… So quickly the Mossad realized that Abu Hassan was not just a security threat, but a political danger because he represented the Palestinian window on America.”

  Frank Anderson, the chief of station in Beirut at the time, had an evening meeting with Salameh in his apartment in early January 1979. “He told me,” Anderson said, “that he’d heard the Israelis were targeting him. I said he should take the warning seriously.”

  Salameh’s sister and mother also warned him. His sister Nidal told Taylor that she knew her brother had once gone to a fortune-teller who had told him that he would die at the age of thirty-seven—the same age his father had been killed by the Israelis in 1948. Ali Hassan had just laughed. “He meant such a lot to me,” Nidal said, “and I thought he was too great to die, too great to be killed. I thought he was immortal—that it was impossible for him to die.”

  His mother, Um Ali, told Taylor, “The last time I saw him I warned him. I told him that I had a feeling that something bad would happen to him. He laughed and said not to worry: he would live another fifty years. I told him fifty years were not enough.… As he left, I felt I would never see him again.”

  Mustafa Zein saw Ali Hassan on the evening of January 21, 1979. Ali Hassan knew it was Mustafa’s birthday the next day, so he stopped by that evening at Mustafa’s newly renovated penthouse suite in the Bedford Hotel. “He asked me how I planned to celebrate my birthday,” Zein recalled. “I replied that I didn’t want to celebrate. And then he walked over to my bookshelves and pulled down a book. He’d chosen The City of Death. I said, ‘Ali, put it down.’ And then I walked downstairs with him to his car and we hugged each other.”

  January 22, 1979, was a cold and gray day in Beirut. It was the birthday of Salameh’s young niece, and Ali Hassan had promised he would stop by his mother’s apartment in the late afternoon for the birthday party. He then intended to drive on to Damascus, where Arafat was expecting him to attend a meeting of the Palestinian National Council. That afternoon at 3:25 P.M. Salameh kissed Georgina good-bye—she was five months pregnant. He then got into the backseat of the tan Chevrolet station wagon. At the last moment, one of his aides, a young man named Jamal, came running up with a written message. It was yet another warning from Bashir Gemayel’s Phalange, saying the hit would happen in the next day or two. One of Salameh’s guards got out of the station wagon, and Jamal took his place. His driver headed out toward Rue Verdun with the Land Rover jeep following. Just a kilometer away, the convoy turned right from Rue Verdun onto Beka Street and glided past Erika Chambers’s eighth-floor balcony. Just then a woman driving behind the Land Rover suddenly sped up and, passing the backup car, cut in behind Salameh’s Chevy station wagon. As the Chevy came abreast of the parked Volkswagen, Chambers held her breath and pushed a remote-control switch. The Volkswagen exploded, enveloping the Chevy in a huge ball of fire. It too exploded, and so too did the car driven by the woman, a thirty-four-year-old British secretary named Susan Wareham. She died along with Salameh and his bodyguards.

  “It was like hell,” an eyewitness told Peter Taylor. “There was a flash, then a big bang.… So many dead people, burnt cars and young bodies littering the street. Then I saw Abu Hassan Salameh getting out of a car and falling on the ground. The people told me who he was.” By sheer coincidence, Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the Munich Olympics attack, happened to be in the neighborhood and rushed down the street to see the wounded Salameh lying in the street. “His face was badly cut,” Abu Daoud said.

  Still alive, Salameh was taken in an ambulance by the Red Crescent (the local equivalent of the Red Cross) to the hospital of the American University of Beirut, just five hundred yards away, where surgeons tried to extract a metal splinter lodged in his brain. He died on the operating table at 4:03 P.M.

  In the midst of the carnage, Erika Chambers calmly walked out of her apartment building, climbed into a rented Datsun, and drove away toward the beaches of East Beirut. Late that evening, she rendezvoused with two Mossad officers in a rubber raft who motored her out to an Israeli naval ship.*2

  Eight other people were killed by Chambers’s car bomb: Salameh’s two bodyguards and driver, the British secretary Susan Wareham, a German nun who happened to be walking on the sidewalk, and three Lebanese civilians. Sixteen people were wounded.

  Frank Anderson was preparing for a meeting with Salameh when he heard the explosion. When he received a phone call from an embassy officer saying that Salameh might have been hit, Anderson drove to Salameh’s apartment and only then learned what had happened.

  Mustafa Zein had spent the entire day holed up in his Bedford suite. With a heavy sense of foreboding, he’d even unplugged his telephone. So a messenger had to be sent by Force 17 to tell Mustafa the news. He then rushed to the American University of Beirut hospital, but by the time he arrived Ali Hassan had died.

  Early the next morning Anderson came by the Bedford and found Zein reading the Koran. Anderson sat down and took the time to write a condolence note to Salameh’s eldest son, explaining what his father had meant to him.

  Dear Hassan,

  At your age, I lost my father. Today, I lost a friend whom I respected more than other men. From the memory of my past loss, and from the pain of today, I share your pain. I promise to honor your father’s memory—and to stand ready to be your friend.

  A friend.

  Frank also penned a note to one of Salameh’s widows, the first wife, Nashrawan Sharif.

  Dear Um Hassan,

  I, who must grieve in silence, have lost a friend. No one can compensate your loss. Still, I hope you will find some comfort in my pledge to honor your husband’s memory.

  That afternoon more than twenty thousand people attended Salameh’s burial in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Cemetery. Like his father, Hassan Salameh, Ali was dead at the age of thirty-seven. Monday Morning published a picture of Yasir Arafat helping to carry the casket. A poignant photo appeared on the cover of the Beirut weekly depicting a crestfallen Arafat, his arm wrapped around Ali Hassan Salameh’s thirteen-year-old son, Hassan. The boy wore a military beret on his head, and a Fedayeen’s keffiyeh was draped around his shoulders. Someone had shoved a Kalashnikov assault rifle into his small hands. It was a staged photo op. But a glassy-eyed Arafat was clearly devastated. He’d thought of Ali Hassan as his own son. “We have lost a lion,” he told reporters in Damascus. At the gravesite, he shouted out to the throngs of mourners, “We bury a martyr! We will continue to march on the road toward Palestine. Goodbye, my hero.”

  Mustafa Zein witnessed the chaotic scene. “It was an unforgettable day,” Zein said. Arafat was a mess. He’d been in Damascus when he heard the news. A snowstorm had blocked the road from Damascus to Beirut, and it had taken Arafat and his convoy of security guards seven hours to drive to Beirut. At one point, the chairman of the PLO had to get out of his car and use his bare hands to remove snow from beneath the tires. At the funeral, Arafat came up to Zein and remarked bitterly, “Your friends could not protect my son. I gave them the most I cared for, my right hand. How could that happen?”

  In an extraordinary tribute, the Maronite warlord Bashir Gemayel attended the funeral, and at the moment of burial a squad of his men saluted Ali with a volley of rifle fire in the air. “The most ardent enemies of the Palestinians were honoring the death of a Palestinian leader,” Zein remarked
.

  The page-one headline in the New York Times read, “Reputed Planner of Munich Raid Killed in Beirut.” In Tel Aviv that day, the widow of one of the Olympian athletes killed at Munich, Ilana Romano, told reporters that she’d waited for this day for years. “In my name, and in the name of all the other widows, I want to thank those who did it.” For virtually all Israelis, the man responsible for the Munich tragedy had been justly executed.

  In Langley, the CIA did not see it the same way. “The day Ali Hassan Salameh was killed was a very bad day,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin, a senior Middle East analyst. “Everyone in the Agency knew it was a big deal. Bob was clearly stunned when he heard the news. He became very quiet, and the color drained from his face. I heard someone ask, ‘Is he all right?’ ”

  Many of Langley’s clandestine officers thought Salameh’s death was an egregious mistake. “I am surprised Clair George and those guys didn’t try harder to keep Salameh alive,” said Sherwin. Others labeled it a tragedy. “If Ali Hassan had lived,” Sam Wyman said, “things might have gone in a different direction. He could never have been recruited, but if handled carefully he could have been a very powerful diplomatic conduit. It was a blow to our influence, and a blow to the prospects for peace.” In Beirut, Chief of Station Anderson agreed: “We lost a very important diplomatic channel. We lost the capability to advance the peace process. Arafat by comparison to Ali Hassan was just a very weak man.” When Anderson finally met Arafat in 1993, he came away from the interview thinking that the PLO chairman was an empty vessel. “A few weeks later,” Anderson recalled, “I was having dinner with King Hussein and I began to describe how unimpressive Arafat seemed. The king finished my sentence by saying, ‘There’s nothing there.’ ”

  Many in the Agency thought that Salameh should have been protected. Whatever the political risks, some spooks thought the Israelis should have been told that he was untouchable. One veteran DO officer, Charlie Allen, thought killing Salameh harmed Israel’s national interest. “When Mossad killed Ali Hassan,” Allen said, “it was an act of cutting off the nose to spite the face.”

  Herman Eilts, the U.S. ambassador to Cairo at the time, candidly told the Wall Street Journal, “He was extraordinarily helpful—as was Fatah—in assisting in security for American citizens and officials. I regard his assassination as a loss.” Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director in the Carter administration, reportedly told the president that “our man” in the PLO had been assassinated.

  Some Mossad officers understood the American conundrum. “It is an enormous investment,” observed Yoram Hessel. “Salameh was a ten-year intelligence relationship. So on the one hand you can see why they wanted to protect him. But there is something wrong about all this. From our perspective—the Israeli perspective—it is unthinkable that you would have anything to do with such a man. The idea that there was intelligence sharing with the Red Prince would have been anathema to us.”

  It was a thin red line. Meir Harel—later a Mossad director general—understood perfectly why Ames would have cultivated Salameh. “A backstage contact is well within the accepted rules of the game,” Harel observed. “We knew Salameh was talking to the Americans. And I came to know later that Ames was very angry with us when Ali Hassan was killed.” But Harel seems to think that if the Americans wanted to keep Salameh alive all they had to do was ask: “You may assume that if the Americans had told us that Ali was an asset, we would have stopped our operation.” But this begs the question because Ali never would have agreed to be considered an asset. And Harel himself admits that he knew Ali was not an agent. “It does not surprise me,” Harel said. “It does not make me angry that the Americans were talking to the Palestinian. It was part of the game. But it is fascinating. We suspected Ali had contacts with the Americans. We thought, however, that the relations were of a liaisonship nature and not of an agent to his control.”

  Another senior Israeli intelligence officer, Dov Zeit, recalls talking with Ames in Washington about his “close professional relations with the PLO.” This must have been after Salameh’s death. “He was not playing games,” Zeit recalled. “He was being honest—even matter-of-fact. I remember my superiors were shocked by the nature of the relationship.”

  Virtually the entire Israeli military and intelligence establishment celebrated Salameh’s death. A terrorist was dead. But aside from vengeance, what exactly did this accomplish for the Israelis? Ronen Bergman, one of Israel’s most prominent national security and intelligence reporters, remains highly skeptical. “Did it solve the Palestinian problem?” Bergman asks. “No. Did it help to bring peace to the Middle East? No—and it created bloodshed from both sides in Europe. Tactically, it was successful. Strategically, it was a failure.” Frank Anderson had a more cynical interpretation: “The Israelis had a policy to eliminate everyone around Arafat who had a tendency to be liberal. I know they deny this, but just look at who they killed.”

  To be sure, killing the Red Prince probably postponed the day when American officials would openly negotiate with Yasir Arafat. But it did not close the back channel for long. In the wake of Salameh’s assassination, Anderson wanted to know who would replace Salameh as the liaison to the Agency. The PLO’s Mohammed Subeh—whose wife was the sister to Salameh’s first wife, Nashrawan—came to Beirut and told Anderson that Mustafa Zein would be the liaison. And indeed, Zein was called to one of Arafat’s safe houses in Beirut in the middle of the night and had a long talk with the Old Man. “I want you to do this,” Arafat told Zein, “even though I am asking you to put one foot in the grave. But you are Lebanese, not Palestinian, so maybe it will be easier for the Americans to meet with you.” Anderson was skeptical that Zein could replace Salameh, and so too were his bosses back at Langley. But the CIA made a determined effort to keep the channel open by meeting with, among others, Hani al-Hassan, the PLO official who had met with Gen. Vernon Walters in Rabat in 1973.

  Two weeks after Salameh’s assassination, Zein flew into Washington. Ames visited him in his hotel room and the two men commiserated over Salameh’s death. Mustafa remembers tears. Ames told him, “We want to finish the job we started with Ali.”

  * * *

  *1 The Canadian passport was in the name of Ronald Kolberg of Vancouver, who at the time was a biology student at the University of Tel Aviv. Kolberg later told reporters that his passport was used without his knowledge. Using the passports of third-country nationals is a long-standing Mossad tactic.

  *2 Chambers is today living in Israel. She was chosen for the job because in practice sessions rehearsed by Mossad’s Caesarea unit the men always pushed the remote-control button a second or two late. So Mike Harari, the head of Caesarea from 1970 to 1980, decided to try a woman. Chambers was successful every time.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Ayatollahs

  Fuck the Shah. I am not going to welcome him here when he has other places to go where he’ll be safe.

  —President Jimmy Carter

  On February 1, 1979, just nine days after Ali Hassan Salameh’s assassination, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was welcomed home in Tehran by millions of Iranians celebrating the shah’s ouster just two weeks earlier. Over the next eleven days Khomeini mobilized his supporters in the streets. By February 11, Khomeini’s revolutionaries were in full command of the government. The revolution had begun in October 1977 with a few hundred demonstrators. Protests escalated throughout 1978, and by the late autumn it was clear to everyone that the Pahlavi regime could no longer control the streets.

  After the 1979 revolution, George Cave was brought back from Saudi Arabia to Washington, where he worked on the problem of how to deal with a very unstable, fluid revolutionary government in Tehran. As national intelligence officer (NIO) for the Near East, Ames was working on many of the same issues. Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, a fierce power struggle had been taking place in Tehran between moderate members of the revolutionary government and Khomeini’s more radical Islamists, who wanted to turn
Iran into a fundamentalist theological state. The moderates were led by Mehdi Bazargan, a professor of engineering from Tehran University whom Khomeini had appointed as his interim prime minister. But while Bazargan tried to restore essential government services and get a constitution written, Khomeini inflamed political passions with fiery speeches attacking foreign imperialists and corrupt, irreligious secularists at home. Throughout 1979, the ayatollah was methodically undermining his prime minister.

  By the spring of 1979, Tehran was descending into chaos. Bands of radical Islamists loyal to Khomeini roamed the streets. Armed men set up checkpoints throughout the city. On March 18, 1979, the acting chief of station, Howard Hart, was out meeting a source in the middle of the night when he was attacked by a couple of men shouting, “CIA! CIA!” Beaten to the ground, Hart pulled out his gun and shot them dead. On the other hand, it was a period of postrevolutionary exuberance when a “thousand flowers were blooming.” Hawkers on Tehran sidewalks were selling newspapers and magazines espousing viewpoints that ran the gamut from communist to Islamist. The Tudeh Communist Party maintained public offices, as did the People’s Mujahedin Party, an armed group with a leftist Islamic program. Yet it was clear that Khomeini’s Islamist radicals had the political momentum and the street muscle to prevail in any political showdown.

  In this uncertain atmosphere, U.S. policy makers were under no illusions that the monarchy could ever be restored. Washington’s decidedly modest goal was merely to restore some normalcy to American-Iranian relations and hope that Prime Minister Barzargan’s cabinet, dominated by men of more or less moderate and modernist temperaments, could survive long enough in power to stabilize the government and write a democratic constitution—and perhaps keep the oil exports flowing to the international markets. Sadly, this goal would prove illusory. As one American official noted, “It is not easy to sleep next to an elephant that you have wounded.” But Bob Ames and George Cave nevertheless made a valiant attempt in 1979 to divert the Iranian revolutionaries’ relations with America from messianic nihilism to something approaching normalcy.