The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  The problem was that Shultz wanted a “fresh start” that wouldn’t reward Arafat with recognition of the PLO—let alone a Palestinian state. Neither did he wish to undermine King Hussein by doing anything that would replace the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan with a Palestinian state. Throughout late July and August, Shultz and his small team met regularly. In the interest of secrecy, they often met on weekends. Their discussions were sometimes heated. At one point, someone warned Shultz, “Anything we come up with will be unacceptable to Israel.” Shultz replied, “Nothing that is worthwhile is acceptable to anyone in the Middle East, but everyone looks to us for ideas. It is up to us to set the agenda.”

  Shultz essentially wanted to square the circle. He wanted to offer hope that the Palestinians, like other people, could have “self-determination.” But he knew that “self-determination” was code for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. And Shultz was enough of a politician to know that a Palestinian state was not in the cards. So he told himself that a Palestinian state in the occupied territories was not economically viable. Shultz concluded that “self-determination” would have to occur within the political confines of the Jordanian state.

  Various parties had kicked around the notion of a “Jordanian option” for years. Ames and others familiar with the Black September civil war understood that satisfying Palestinian aspirations within a Jordanian state would work only if Jordan became a democratic state. But because Palestinians represented a majority of Jordan’s population, a “Jordanian solution” entailed the collapse of King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy. Yet Shultz had made it clear that he wasn’t prepared to undermine King Hussein. Nevertheless, Ames saw great value in Shultz’s determination to have President Reagan lend his administration’s prestige and influence to a grand American peace initiative. So he encouraged Shultz.

  By mid-August Shultz and his secret group had the outlines of a plan. As specified by the Camp David Accords, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would acquire autonomy over the next five years. Local elections would be held. And during this period Israel would freeze all settlement activity. Ames knew this was the critical factor. With a freeze on new settlements in the occupied territories, Palestinian “self-determination” in the West Bank and Gaza could gradually become a reality. To be sure, Shultz was making it clear that the United States opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. The autonomous Palestinian entity would instead be linked to Jordan. Ames understood that Shultz was trying to finesse an intractable issue. And that was fine with him. Shultz’s “fresh start” might not be so fresh, but it was nevertheless a step forward. As an intelligence officer, Ames understood that a policy maker like Shultz had to operate under political constraints.

  Shultz was always suspicious of any memo that reeked of a contrived consensus. He thought most of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates were boring “compromises.” So periodically, he’d call up Bob Gates and ask him to stop by for an hour with several of his brightest analysts. Shultz would quiz them. “You find out the analysts have all kinds of different opinions,” Shultz later explained, “and that’s much more useful, much more interesting.” Ames shone in these situations.

  Bob knew he had the secretary’s ear—and that was an invaluable thing. Some CIA officers spend their whole careers without ever really getting to influence a powerful policy maker. “It is a tricky business,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin. “Do you try to stay true to your views or do you try to remain effective? At some point, people stop listening to you.” Sherwin and other CIA colleagues thought that Ames was buying into some wishful thinking. “When it came down to it, they were proposing a Jordanian option,” said Sherwin, “and everyone knew that was a nonstarter. But Bob argued that we should try to remain in the game. I would like to think that he had a broader view. He was telling himself that if we could persuade the Israelis to end the occupation, maybe down the road a real peace could emerge.”

  Bruce Riedel, an Agency analyst who worked with Ames on the peace initiative, thought it was the right thing to do. “Bob was a passionate believer in the idea that the Palestinian issue was a critical threat to U.S. national interests,” Riedel said. “So he thought something had to be done. The initiative was a compromise between those saying we have to put forward an American peace plan and those who said we can’t piss off the Israelis. It was a big step forward, even if it was a Jordanian option.” Some of his colleagues nevertheless thought Ames was drinking the Kool-Aid. Some muttered that he was “getting too big for his cowboy boots.” Even Ames’s boss, CIA director Casey, was beginning to have some misgivings about Ames’s close relationship with Shultz. “The fact that Ames was by then so much a part of Shultz’s inner circle must have led to some tension,” recalled Riedel.

  On August 14, Shultz took Ames and several other members of his secret team up to Camp David to brief President Reagan on their progress. They had lunch with Reagan in a cozy dining room lined with knotted-pine boards. The president wore black cowboy boots, jeans, and a bright-red polo shirt. After lunch, the men adjourned to the living room, where Shultz outlined his peace initiative. He then asked Ames and Veliotes to “role-play” how the plan would be presented to Begin, King Hussein, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—and how these leaders would react. “The actors were effective,” recalled Shultz. “The play was tense and presumed no sure outcome.” The little drama appealed to the actor in Reagan—which was probably why Shultz put on this production. He knew the plan would inevitably attract intense controversy, so he wanted to be sure the president was on board and engaged—and that he would know his lines.

  A few days later, Shultz called in Israeli ambassador Moshe Arens. Without revealing his still-secret initiative, Shultz suggested that with Arafat’s departure from Lebanon imminent, perhaps it was time to revitalize the peace process. Arens vigorously disagreed. “Look,” he said, “we have wiped the PLO from the scene. Don’t you Americans now pick the PLO up, dust it off, and give it artificial respiration.”

  Ames was telling Shultz that Arens was wrong. Arafat, he said, was in the process of solidifying his political position even as he was being defeated and removed from the battlefield. “The PLO has plenty of life in it,” Ames insisted. He predicted that after leaving Beirut, Arafat would take “a grand tour” of all the Arab capitals, drumming up political support. The PLO’s new headquarters in Tunis was already being furnished. Operating out of Tunis would free Arafat from his previous dependency on Syria’s dictator, Hafez Assad. And in an ironic twist, Ames argued, the PLO’s defeat in Beirut had actually strengthened the hand of moderates within the organization. These political pragmatists in the PLO would now turn Arafat into a more effective leader on the world stage. Moreover, Ames said that from his meetings with his counterparts in Tel Aviv, he knew that Mossad’s intelligence analysts agreed that Arafat had decisive control over the organization. Arafat was not going to disappear—and neither was the Palestinian conundrum.

  Shultz didn’t doubt Ames’s analysis. But he did not regard the PLO as a reliable player. And he certainly did not see the PLO as moderate. That was why he thought it essential to bring King Hussein “back into the center of the scene.” Shultz trusted and admired Ames. But a part of Shultz also discounted Ames’s optimism precisely because of his Arabist credentials. On the afternoon of August 24, Shultz convened a meeting of his secret team to hear Nick Veliotes report back on his briefing of King Hussein. From Shultz’s perspective, it was critical that he get Hussein firmly on board. But from Veliotes’s account of his meeting with the king, it was clear that Hussein was covering his bases. Yes, he liked the Shultz plan—but Shultz could see from King Hussein’s carefully worded written response that he really wanted the United States to negotiate directly with the PLO—and get the Israelis to withdraw from the occupied territories. “It’s a very upbeat letter,” Veliotes said, trying to put it in a good light. “The king is very interested; it’s just that he has to cover his ass.” Ames c
himed in, “Hussein is always this way in first meetings. He’ll come around.”

  Shultz knew he was being spun. “I also felt that I was seeing some of the professional optimism, even wishful thinking, for which the Arabists in the government were known.… My Arabist advisers did not appreciate my reaction and considered me lacking in the sophistication necessary to plumb the Arab mind.”

  He was right to be suspicious. The Arabists—Ames included—understood perfectly well why King Hussein was not willing to stick his neck out. Ames was the one man in the room who’d always had a jaundiced view of the Hashemite regime. But in this instance he no doubt kept that opinion to himself and tried to encourage the secretary of state to press ahead with what everyone knew would be a controversial initiative.

  Shultz would have been shocked to learn that Ames had also arranged for Arafat to see a summary of the peace plan even before Reagan unveiled it. Four days before Arafat departed, Ames had Mustafa Zein fly into Cyprus from New York with a typed two-page summary of the plan. Beirut was still under siege and the airport was closed, so Zein had to take the ferry from Cyprus to the Maronite-controlled Lebanese port of Jounieh. Fearing that Israeli or Maronite soldiers would search him, Zein befriended an Egyptian doctor on the ferry and persuaded him to take his briefcase through customs. Zein had forged a press pass that identified him as an ABC News employee. The ruse worked: he sailed through customs, retrieved his briefcase, and emerged from the port. Ames had sent the new CIA station chief, Ken Haas, to meet him. Haas was driving a weathered white Mercedes sedan. It was late at night, so Haas drove him to the Hotel Alexander, a hangout for journalists and foreign nationals in East Beirut.

  As they pulled up in front of the Alexander, Haas groaned, “Oh, shit, here come a bunch of Mossad guys.”

  Mustafa turned to Haas and told him, “Here, take my briefcase and wait right here.” He then popped out of the car and ran toward the Mossad men, shouting, “Hey boys, I am with ABC News. I’d just like to talk.”

  The Israelis hastily walked away, not wanting to talk to anyone from the press. Haas was incredulous. He’d never met Zein before, but he’d heard of his exploits. Ken later laughed about the incident and told Ames, “The last I saw Mustafa he was chasing Mossad officers in Jounieh.”

  The next morning Zein crossed over to West Beirut, leaving Haas behind. He paid a driver for the ABC News crew $500 to take him across the Green Line dividing the city between Maronite-controlled East Beirut and Muslim-controlled West Beirut. When they passed through the dangerous Museum checkpoint, Zein was greeted by Force 17 commandos, who escorted him to see Arafat.

  Zein briefed Arafat on the peace plan, handing him a document titled “US Views Regarding the Future Settlement.” The highlights included:

  “Self-government in the West Bank and Gaza for more than one million Palestinians.”

  “Israeli military government and administration to be removed and replaced by a Palestinian government elected by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

  “The United States considers Jerusalem as occupied territory as all other territories occupied in 1967, and all changes made in Jerusalem are illegal.”

  “The United States does not recognize the PLO since it refuses to accept Security Council resolution 242.”

  Only the last point would have caused Arafat unhappiness. But Zein argued that the other points were a significant step in the right direction. Arafat was personally inclined to agree, but he correctly knew that most of his colleagues in the PLO would conclude that the plan didn’t go far enough to satisfy their minimalist demands for a Palestinian state on some portion of old Palestine. Moreover, Arafat understood that the PLO’s defeat in Beirut left him little political capital.

  On August 30, 1982, Arafat finally boarded a ship in Beirut and sailed for Tunis. (Mustafa Zein was there at the dock to see him off.) All told, some 8,500 PLO fighters were evacuated under the eyes of Israeli sharpshooters. Habib was ecstatic. Nearly three months of excruciating diplomacy had finally triumphed.

  Some people thought the PLO shouldn’t have left. “Arafat muffed it,” said David Hirst, a seasoned British reporter for the Manchester Guardian. “The PLO was on the verge of its first real heroic moment. People were ready to go on. He blew it.”

  Another reporter in Beirut, Janet Lee Stevens, agreed. Thirty-two years old, Stevens had come to Beirut in late 1981 and was freelancing for a number of magazines, including the local English-language weekly Monday Morning and a Japanese newspaper, Asahi. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, she published an article in Monday Morning titled “Slaughterhouse Lebanon.” It described the “thousands of civilians who were maimed and wounded” in the invasion. She was also filing reports on human rights cases for Amnesty International.

  Born in 1951, Stevens was trying to finish her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. A Fulbright scholar, she’d once been married to the Tunisian playwright Taoufik Jebali. By 1982, Janet spoke fluent Arabic and knew her way around the Palestinian refugee camps. That summer she had lived through the Israeli siege, stubbornly refusing to leave. She was an advocate. Other journalists thought of her as a partisan journalist. Some wondered if she was working for some intelligence agency. “I thought she was CIA,” said the Washington Post reporter Loren Jenkins. “I had dinner with her a couple of times at the Commodore Hotel.” But Janet was just a passionate young woman who felt strongly about the plight of the Palestinian refugees. She spent a lot of time in Sabra and Shatila, sometimes volunteering her time at the Akka Hospital and the Gaza Hospital, both located in the camps. She was a familiar figure. The residents of Sabra and Shatila knew her as Miss Janet. And because of her strongly voiced opinions, some called her “the little drummer girl.” Anne Dammarell, a U.S. embassy official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), thought Janet “was not flashy.… She was a very serious young woman.”

  The British novelist David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré, hired Stevens to serve as his “guide, interpreter and irrepressible philosopher” when he visited Beirut in 1982. Le Carré had visited the Middle East for three months in 1980 to conduct research for his novel The Little Drummer Girl—a title le Carré appropriated from Janet’s moniker in the refugee camps. He was introduced to Yasir Arafat on this trip and also met with Mossad officers in Israel. He met Stevens when he returned in 1982 to scout out scenes for a movie based on the book. Le Carré later wrote of his friendship with Stevens: “We all loved Janet, and quickly appointed her to be our instructor and—even more—our moral and compassionate focus for the pain and devastation which we witnessed.” Janet took le Carré into Sabra and Shatila so he could see for himself the conditions in which these poor people lived. “It was Janet’s sensitivity which guided us through Sabra and Shatila, the Gaza hospital and the camps of the south; [it was] Janet’s amazing capacity to reach the poor and bereaved and destitute that made us feel their plight, and her unswerving commitment.”

  Le Carré and Stevens clicked. The novelist admired her passion and her disarming irreverence. He once teased her that when she was old she would acquire “the venerability, if not the piety, of Mother Teresa.” Janet scoffed at this. She thought the comparison was absurd. They also shared similar political views about the Arab-Israeli conflict. “I think the Israelis have behaved disgracefully,” le Carré told Monday Morning, “and I don’t care who knows it.”

  Janet had interviewed Yasir Arafat on numerous occasions, and on August 8, 1982—three weeks before Arafat’s eventual departure—Stevens walked into Arafat’s bunker headquarters and begged him not to evacuate his PLO Fedayeen to Tunis. She urged him to stand and fight the Israelis. “You must launch a ‘Stalingrad defense,’ ” she told the guerrilla leader. “The international public will support it.… You cannot believe the Reagan Administration, Abu Ammar! Women and children are terrified of what might happen if their husbands and brothers leave them alone.” Arafat understood. He tried to console her. She became
distraught and started to cry. Arafat actually wrapped his arms around her even as she began to beat his shoulders gently with her clenched fists. There were witnesses to this drama. One was a twenty-year-old Lebanese Shi’ite named Imad Mughniyeh. Four years earlier, Ali Hassan Salameh had recruited Mughniyeh into Arafat’s elite intelligence unit, Force 17. By 1982, Mughniyeh was serving as one of Arafat’s many bodyguards. When Arafat left Beirut he would leave his young Shi’ite bodyguard behind. The unemployed Mughniyeh would soon transfer his allegiances to a new underground militia called Islamic Amal. His presence that day in Arafat’s bunker would become a deadly irony.

  On the day Arafat left Beirut, Bob Ames was working with President Reagan’s speechwriters. Reagan delivered the speech on the evening of September 1, 1982. He began by saying bluntly that the “military losses of the PLO have not diminished the yearning of the Palestinian people for a just solution of their claims.” The president then endorsed the not very controversial notion that the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza should gain “full autonomy over their own affairs” over the next five years. According to the terms of the 1978 Camp David Accords, this should have happened long ago. But he specifically called for “the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel in the occupied territories.” That was controversial. Then again, he also specified that Washington “will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.” But he also said that the United States would not support the “annexation or permanent control by Israel” of these occupied territories. Negotiations had to determine the final status of these lands. “But it is the firm view of the United States,” said Reagan, “that self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan offers the best chance for a durable, just, and lasting peace.”