The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  In 1980, Ames was still a Republican. And he was delighted when Ronald Reagan selected George H. W. Bush as his vice-presidential nominee. Like most clandestine officers, Ames had admired Bush’s handling of himself as director of the CIA under President Ford. Naturally, Ames hoped the Republican ticket would prevail that autumn. At the same time, he’d been working throughout that election year to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis, both through the aborted Desert One rescue mission that spring and later through a negotiated release of the hostages. By the summer of 1980, everyone in Washington understood that President Carter’s reelection chances might well hinge on a successful, last-minute resolution of the hostage crisis. Reagan campaign strategists feared their candidate’s rising prospects could be derailed by an “October surprise”—a sudden and dramatic release of all the hostages.

  Ames knew that Yasir Arafat and the PLO had an open channel to the revolutionary regime in Tehran. Arafat had sent arms and men to aid in the revolution, and he’d flown to see Khomeini soon after the ayatollah’s return to Iran. Arafat had also brokered the initial release of thirteen of the American hostages—all women or African Americans—in late November 1979. And that spring he’d helped the Americans retrieve the bodies of their eight servicemen killed at Desert One. Obviously, the PLO represented a potential channel of negotiations. Further, Arafat had every reason to believe that if he was successful in playing some part in obtaining the release of the remaining hostages, this intervention might open a door to Washington’s recognition of the PLO.

  Ames knew from his meetings that summer with the ubiquitous Mustafa Zein that Arafat was indeed trying to use his influence in Iran to solve the hostage crisis. Ames and his counterpart in the NSC, Robert Hunter, told Zein that he should do whatever he could to encourage Arafat. Ames and Hunter met with Zein more than once in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House and briefed him on the administration’s various diplomatic efforts to release the hostages. Zein understood perfectly the importance of this back channel to both the Carter administration and the PLO.

  But early that summer, Zein stumbled onto what appeared to be an effort by the Reagan campaign to undermine these diplomatic efforts. As it happened, an old friend from his Naperville days, the Rev. Milo J. Vondracek, paid Zein a visit in New York. His friend encouraged Zein to look up his son, Jon Vondracek, who was then working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a well-known think tank in Washington, D.C. A few weeks later, Zein happened to be in Washington to see Ames and Hunter. Afterwards, Zein had lunch with Jon Vondracek—whom he’d known from his time in Naperville—and mentioned that he’d again been to the Old Executive Office Building. The very next day Jon called Mustafa and encouraged him to meet with a friend of his who was working on the Reagan campaign. Zein asked why and was told, “This man [Jack Shaw] is slated to take over the job of Bob Hunter in the NSC if the Republican ticket wins the election.” Zein’s curiosity was naturally aroused, so he agreed to the meeting.

  Soon afterwards, Zein met Shaw, age forty-one, for a casual lunch at a restaurant in downtown Washington. The two men began their conversation by discussing the Middle East in general terms. Shaw had served as an assistant secretary of state in the Ford administration. More recently, he’d been a vice president at Booz Allen & Hamilton International, overseeing lucrative contracts in Saudi Arabia. In 1980, he was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies—where Jon Vondracek was a friend and colleague. Coincidentally, Shaw had also met Bob Ames at a seminar on the Middle East sponsored by the CSIS. That year Shaw was also raising money for the Reagan presidential campaign and working with Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey. Zein recalls that he and Shaw discussed the ongoing hostage crisis—a topic that was still dominating the headlines that summer. When Zein volunteered that the Palestinians were trying to do everything they could to defuse the crisis, Shaw said that he thought the Palestinians would be better off with Reagan than Carter. As the conversation ended, Shaw invited Zein to come to his house the next day for lunch. Zein agreed, but he sensed that Shaw was going to pitch something to him. So the next day when Zein showed up at Shaw’s home in a Washington suburb, he brought with him the small leather briefcase that Ames had given Ali Hassan Salameh several years earlier. This was the briefcase that contained a hidden tape recorder. Zein says that he recorded their entire luncheon conversation.

  The two men sat down to a lunch of chicken and vegetables prepared by Shaw’s Spanish-speaking maid. Shaw told Zein that he knew Casey well. And then he asked how Zein knew Bob Ames. Zein had nothing to hide, and he explained that he’d known Ames for more than a decade. “He confirmed to me that Casey knew about my special relation with Ames,” Zein recalled. Shaw indicated that he knew from Casey that Zein was Ames’s back channel to Arafat. Shaw then turned the conversation to the PLO and Arafat’s relationship with the revolutionary regime in Iran. Shaw made it clear that he was aware of Arafat’s role in obtaining the release of the thirteen American hostages the previous autumn. According to Zein, Shaw then asked if Arafat was still trying to secure the freedom of the remaining hostages. When Zein confirmed this, Shaw bluntly asked if Arafat could be persuaded to delay his efforts until the election was over. He argued that the “Palestinian interest lay with a strong president, like Reagan, who would push for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” Zein asked Shaw if he wanted him to carry this message to Arafat. Did he want Zein to tell Arafat to delay his efforts until after the election? Shaw answered, “Yes.” Zein promised to do so right away.

  Thirty-three years later, Shaw says he has “no recollection” of the luncheon with Zein. “I wouldn’t contest that such a meeting took place,” Shaw said. “I know I had luncheons at that stage of the game with all sorts of people, and Jon Vondracek was a good friend who introduced me to a lot of people.” But Shaw suggests that Zein misunderstood; he says he was merely voicing his personal opinion that the Palestinians would be better off with Reagan. A strong president, he said, would be more likely to bring about a real peace in the Middle East. “It is altogether possible that I would tell Zein this; it reflected my thinking at the time.” But he says Bill Casey certainly didn’t ask him to convey a message to Arafat, and he recalls no discussion about the hostages. “Most of my involvement with Casey that summer was purely political, talking about the campaign. I don’t remember talking to Casey about the Middle East. He may certainly have known about my Middle East interests, but we didn’t talk about it.” But, Shaw admits, “Casey was famous for working indirectly, and I may have conveyed the message the way you described.… I know I was not approached directly by Casey on this, but his modus operandi was to bounce the cue ball off several billiard balls to get a job done without his fingerprints on it.”

  Zein insists that they talked about the hostages and persuading Arafat to suspend his efforts to get them released. Zein says he’d just come from Beirut two weeks earlier, and he was not about to fly back there on short notice to see Arafat without ascertaining that Shaw was indeed working for Casey. He wanted to be able to tell Arafat that Shaw’s message was “an official request from Casey.” So, soon after his lunch with Shaw, Zein looked up John Shaheen, who’d befriended Casey when the two had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Shaheen was an American citizen of Lebanese ancestry who’d gone into the oil business. Casey had been one of his business partners—and Zein had met both Casey and Shaheen earlier in the 1970s when the two men needed advice on a business proposition in the Gulf. “Shaheen confirmed to me,” Zein said, “after speaking directly with Casey, that Jack Shaw was representing Casey.” Zein remembers that the meeting with Shaheen cost him $15,000 because Shaheen took the opportunity to solicit that amount as a campaign contribution to John Anderson’s presidential campaign. (Arafat later reimbursed him for this “expense.”)

  In August 1980, just a few days after his meeting with Shaheen, Zein flew bac
k to Beirut and told Arafat what this “representative of Casey” had said. He played the audiotape for Arafat. When the PLO chairman asked for Zein’s advice, Mustafa wrote him a memo: “Double your efforts to release the hostages because the coming administration, if the Republican ticket wins, has a devil in it. Reagan and Bush are decent men, but the maestro who is conducting the orchestra … cannot be trusted.” But a short time later, Arafat told Zein that he’d learned from the Iranians that they’d struck a deal directly with Casey in a meeting in Spain in late July. Arafat told Zein that he should go back to Casey’s man, Jack Shaw, and make him believe that the PLO was doing what he’d asked. “We wanted to earn some brownie points,” Zein said, “just in case Reagan won the election.” So after spending a week in Beirut, Zein headed back to Washington, where he met again with Shaw and told him the “good news”: Arafat was going to hold off on his efforts to release the hostages.

  Zein’s story, of course, is highly conspiratorial. He insists that both the tapes and the transcripts of his conversations with Shaw and Shaheen are stored in the PLO’s archives in Tunis. But these documents have yet to be released. Shaheen died of cancer in 1985. Jon Vondracek died in 2005. And Shaw insists that whatever he may have told Zein was simply his own opinion, unprompted by Casey.

  Over the past few decades numerous investigative journalists have written about a rumored meeting Casey had in Spain with a representative of Ayatollah Khomeini in July 1980. Two books have been published about the alleged October surprise. But over the years, the investigations petered out. Congress looked into the allegations against Casey and came to an inconclusive judgment. Zein says that he never told Ames about his taped conversation with Jack Shaw.*2 But he always thought Bob had suspected something. Bob once asked Mustafa if he thought there was going to be a last-minute release of the hostages, and Mustafa told him no.

  Reagan, of course, won the election handily. He probably would have won even if there had been an October surprise. But perhaps Bill Casey was determined not to be surprised. Interestingly, Arafat later discussed the October surprise overtures with former president Jimmy Carter. The noted presidential historian Douglas Brinkley was present at the January 22, 1996, meeting between Carter and Arafat in Gaza City. According to Brinkley’s notes, Arafat told Carter, “Mr. President, there is something I want to tell you. You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election. I want you to know that I turned them down.”

  Like many clandestine officers, Bob Ames had a low opinion of Admiral Turner’s tenure as President Carter’s DCI. But the admiral nevertheless admired Ames’s talents. A month before the 1980 presidential election, on Saturday, October 4, Admiral Turner took Ames with him to Middleburg, Virginia, to brief the Republican presidential candidate on Middle East issues. Ex-governor Ronald Reagan was staying for a few days at Wexford, a beautiful horse farm outside Middleburg once owned by Jack and Jackie Kennedy. When they arrived, Turner, Ames, and two other CIA officers were taken into the large living room, where they were introduced to Reagan and his advisers. These included George Bush, legal counsel Edwin Meese, campaign director William Casey, and Richard Allen, then Reagan’s adviser on national security issues. One of the participants in the session later described it as a “chaotic movie set” with chairs scattered about the room and various campaign staff constantly walking through the room. It was a noisy “circus.”

  Ames led the briefing with a short survey on the internal politics of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Admiral Turner talked about international oil supplies, and another officer gave an overview of developments in the Iran-Iraq War, which had broken out a month earlier when Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of southern Iran. Afterwards, Reagan asked a few simple questions. Richard Allen made Admiral Turner uncomfortable by asking pointedly if the CIA was supplying arms to the insurgents fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. (The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979.) Turner gave him a vague answer. “The Afghan story had not yet leaked,” Turner later said, “and we were scared about Pakistan’s position.”

  The session lasted just one hour. Curiously, no one bothered to ask about the American hostages in Iran. The next day, the same briefing was given to independent presidential candidate John Anderson—who took Turner aside at one point and mentioned that he’d recently been approached by an Iranian intermediary who had suggested that perhaps the American hostages could be released in exchange for weapons Iran could use in its war with Iraq. Turner informed the State Department, but no one seems to have investigated this overture to Anderson.

  After Reagan defeated President Carter, the CIA came back to brief the president-elect. The subject was again the Middle East, but this time Turner was accompanied by Martha Neff Kessler, an assistant NIO for the Near East and South Asia Division. Kessler had joined the Agency in 1970 and had risen rapidly in the Directorate of Intelligence. She was an analyst, not a clandestine officer. She was an expert on Libya and Syria, but her real specialty was the general Arab-Israeli conflict. She went to work for Ames in the autumn of 1978, right after he was named national intelligence officer.

  On November 19, 1980, Turner and Kessler met with Reagan and his staff around a dining-room table at his prepresidential headquarters on Jackson Place, near the White House. After the briefing, Reagan asked quite a few questions about the Golan Heights, Syria, and Palestinian politics. At one point, Turner was taken aback when the president-elect asked in all earnestness, “What is the biblical name for the Golan Heights?” He hadn’t expected this query and had no idea how to answer this Sunday Bible-study quiz. At one point, Kessler ventured, “We could lose Sadat.” This was a risky thing for a CIA analyst to say. Reagan responded, “What do you mean, ‘lose Sadat’?” Kessler explained that Egypt was not invulnerable to the Middle East’s general instability. Sadat, she said, could be overthrown just like the shah—or assassinated. (Less than a year later, Kessler’s speculations proved prophetic with Sadat’s assassination by a radical Islamist cell within the Egyptian army.)

  Ames, Kessler, and other CIA briefers did not buy into the press’s notion that Reagan was disconnected. But it became clear that the new president grasped information anecdotally. “You can’t capture his attention,” Ames told a friend, “for more than three or four minutes before he interrupts you with an anecdote.” The president-elect also had certain preconceived convictions coming into office. “The problem with Ronald Reagan was that his ideas were all fixed—he was an old dog,” said Peter Dixon Davis, a CIA analyst. His ideas about anything to do with the Palestinians were set in concrete. At some point prior to the inauguration, the CIA produced a memorandum to try to bring the prospective president up to speed about the Palestinian conundrum. It was complicated. The memo tried to explain the different factions within the Palestinian movement for self-determination—the radical rejectionists, the emerging consensus among those willing to settle for something like a two-state solution, and the crazy nihilists like Abu Nidal, who was from time to time assassinating any Palestinian showing any hint of a willingness to compromise with the Israelis. Reagan read the memorandum “very slowly and thoughtfully,” recalled Dixon Davis. “He must have taken ten minutes. At the end he said, ‘But they are all terrorists, aren’t they?’ My heart just sank.”

  * * *

  *1 Ghotbzadeh was arrested in April 1982 and later convicted of treason. On September 15, 1982, he was executed by a firing squad. Khomeini personally approved the execution. The revolution was eating its own children.

  *2 Jack Shaw was not appointed to the NSC. The Middle East slot on the NSC went to Geoffrey Kemp. But Shaw briefly became the Reagan White House’s liaison to the State Department, working under the president’s chief of staff, Judge William Clark.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan

  I liked Casey. He was nuts.

  —Clair George

&
nbsp; When Bill Casey walked into Langley headquarters on January 28, 1981, he found himself in charge of a highly demoralized intelligence agency. Because of the personnel cuts under both Schlesinger and Admiral Turner, the CIA had shrunk to about fourteen thousand personnel with a budget of about $6 billion. “With the people fired, driven out or lured into retirement,” complained Robert Gates, who’d served as Turner’s executive assistant, “half our analysts had less than five years’ experience. And our analysis wasn’t at all sharp, forward looking or relevant. Our paramilitary capability was clinically dead. What covert action we did carry out was super-cautious and lacked any imagination.” The Agency, Gates, concluded, “was hunkered down in a defensive crouch.”

  Ames was one of those officers who felt very skeptical about the Agency’s mission. He was frustrated, gloomy, and cynical. “He was not happy with his career,” said Lindsay Sherwin. “He said no one leaves the Agency feeling good about their career.” He morbidly told one of his best friends, Bob Headley, another CIA officer, “When we’re gone, they’ll pass the hat for us and that will be that.” Ames worried about his family finances. He hired a financial consultant, who bluntly told him that if he intended to send all six of his children to college, he was going to have to quit the government and get a job in the private sector. He told a friend that he’d stay in the Agency until 1984, when he’d turn fifty and be eligible for early retirement. He’d then leave to make some real money.

  Before cleaning out his desk at the National Security Council (NSC), Robert Hunter called his successor, Geoffrey Kemp—who was slated to take over the Middle East portfolio—and told him, “Look, I just want you to know that I think Bob Ames is the most knowledgeable fellow they have at Langley on the Middle East. He is really terrific.” In early February 1981, Ames came by with Chuck Cogan to introduce himself to Kemp. (Cogan was then chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations.)