The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Frank J. Johnston, age forty-six, also came to the Lewis dinner party that evening, accompanied by his twenty-three-year-old bride, Arlette. Born in Nazareth, Israel, Arlette was a Palestinian-Israeli, and though her native tongue was Arabic, this was the first time she’d lived in an Arab country. Arlette called Frank her “first real love, her husband, her universe.” She knew Frank was a veteran CIA operative. They’d met in a bowling alley in Germany, dated for six months, and then gotten married on October 26, 1982. They’d arrived in Beirut in January 1983. For security reasons, they had to drive around the streets of Beirut in a car with armor plating. But Arlette liked the city. “I spoke Arabic,” Arlette recalled, “and Lebanon felt like home for me.” Frank had served under Ken Haas in a previous posting in prerevolutionary Iran. They were good friends, and Frank was eager to work with him again.

  Deborah M. Hixon, thirty years old, had just arrived in Beirut for a six-week TDY. “She was a lovely woman,” said Clair George, the legendary DO officer who was her boss at the time. Hixon had grown up in Colorado and her father was an airline pilot. She was fluent in French. Alison Haas thought of her as a “very vivacious young woman.” Hixon loved her work in Beirut and thought it so important that she’d recently asked for an extension.

  Phyllis Faraci, forty-four, was a single woman who’d turned a secretarial career in the CIA into a life adventure. The Agency had sent her all over the world, including many years in South Vietnam, where she had been one of the last four Americans to be evacuated from the Mekong Delta when Saigon fell in April 1975.

  William R. Sheil, fifty-nine, was a former Green Beret Special Forces officer who, like Jim Lewis, had melted into the Agency after his years in Southeast Asia. He was valued for his skills as an interrogator, a man who could gently and expertly extract information from foreign informants. He was stationed in Washington, D.C.—but he traveled all the time on short-term assignments for the Agency. He was a contract agent for the CIA—and in recent years his family had known that he spent a lot of time in Central America, working on missions to support the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua. His son assumed that was where he was. In fact, that April he’d just arrived in Beirut.

  These and other guests at the dinner party savored Jim Lewis’s Vietnamese cooking and the fine Bordeaux he served. But as the evening progressed, the conversation soured. “It was a very nice dinner,” recalled Arlette Johnston. “But the atmosphere was very tense and very—there was something going on which I didn’t really understand.” Arlette later noted in a diary that “this guest [Ames] seems to have bad news, as if he was not happy with the work these people were doing.… The atmosphere was gloomy.” Alison Haas, the wife of the station chief, remembered the dinner party “for a visiting dignitary from Washington” with the same misgivings. “There Washington saw things one way and the people in Beirut saw things another way.” “Washington” in this case clearly meant Bob Ames. He was the visiting dignitary. Everyone in the room knew that Ames met regularly with Secretary of State George Shultz and President Ronald Reagan.

  And all the CIA officers that evening knew that Ames was the ghostwriter of the Reagan peace initiative. It was his plan, his idealism, his innate optimism that had persuaded the president to put his prestige behind a plan for Israel to exchange the territories occupied in the June 1967 war for a comprehensive peace with its Arab neighbors. Yet seasoned CIA officers like Ken Haas, Jim Lewis, and Frank Johnston could not help but voice some skepticism about the practicality of persuading Lebanon’s warlords to play that rationality game. And what about the Israelis, who were now prowling the streets of Beirut’s outer suburbs? Was the Reagan administration truly prepared to force them out of Lebanon? They argued over the peace initiative’s viability.

  Lewis’s guests lingered uncomfortably, drinking late into the night. They went home feeling troubled. Bob Ames went back to the Mayflower Hotel, knowing that the next morning he’d be hard-pressed by his colleagues to see the Beirut of 1983 through their eyes. It would be a difficult meeting. Beirut was no longer the cosmopolitan city he knew from the late sixties and early seventies.

  That evening, as Frank Johnston crawled into bed, his Nazareth-born wife heard him muttering to himself. “What are you talking about?” Arlette said.

  “I’m talking to him.”

  “Who?” said Arlette.

  “I’m talking to God,” Frank said. “When I’m going to die, I’m going to talk to him and tell him—”

  “Stop talking like that,” interrupted Arlette.

  “Don’t worry,” Frank replied, “you’ll be a nice, beautiful rich widow.”

  Arlette didn’t sleep very well that night. She had cramps. But she also heard an owl screeching—and in Nazareth an owl was bad luck. She awoke the next morning to a dark, overcast day. It looked as though it might rain. Frank had risen earlier and was already dressed for work. He came over to her side of the bed and kissed her. They debated whether she should join him for lunch at the embassy, but Arlette finally said, “Maybe you can come home and I will fix you lunch.” Frank said, “Okay, maybe,” and kissed her again. As he walked out the door Arlette yelled out, “Come back! Kiss me again!”

  While the party at the Lewises was taking place Sunday night, another party was occurring over at the apartment of Elizabeth “Tish” Butler, an embassy USAID official. She’d invited all the off-duty U.S. marines whose job it was to guard the embassy. The marines stayed late that night, eating spaghetti and drinking champagne. By the time they walked into the embassy at 1:00 A.M., they were raising a bit of hell. The marine guard on duty at Guard Post One nevertheless buzzed them in, and they took the elevator up to their apartment on the sixth floor. LCpl. Robert “Bobby” McMaugh had a beer in his room and then collapsed on his bed fully clothed. He knew he had to get up by 7:00 A.M. the next morning and stand duty at Guard Post One. When he showed up on time, his face was white. Confessing that he felt hung-over, he told Cpl. Ronnie Tumolo, “I’ll give you three hundred Lebanese lira if you stand my duty today.” Tumolo was broke, so for a moment he considered the offer. But then he realized that he’d have to awaken the gunnery sergeant and ask his permission. So he told Bobby, “Well, I don’t think that is going to happen, but we’ll see how things go later on in the day.”

  Bobby McMaugh was the second-youngest marine guard in the embassy, and probably the most popular. He made a habit of handing a single red rose to any of the pretty secretaries as they made their way to work each morning. Despite his hangover, this morning was no exception. Bobby was a charmer. He’d grown up in Manassas, Virginia, and his father, Earl Vincent McMaugh, had worked most of his career for the Defense Intelligence Agency. That spring, Bobby knew his parents were probably headed for a divorce, and this worried him. In recent weeks he’d used a free phone at the embassy to call his family back in Virginia. He was particularly close to his younger sister, Teresa Ann McMaugh; he had, in fact, called her on an embassy tie-line phone the previous evening. They commiserated with each other about their parents’ impending divorce. Bobby wanted to know if Teresa was okay. But as they were speaking, Teresa could hear loud noises in the background. “What is all that noise?” she asked. Bobby said they were explosions, followed by big flashes of light in the sky. Teresa was just eighteen years old; she had no idea what was happening in Lebanon, but she tried to ask her brother what it was like living in Beirut. Bobby just replied that he’d met a lot of “neat people.” It was their last conversation.

  At 7:00 the next morning—April 18, 1983—Bob Ames walked the short distance from the Mayflower Hotel over to the Commodore Hotel to have breakfast with Mustafa Zein in his suite. It was a dark, cloudy day. The sky was filled with black thunderclouds sweeping in from the Mediterranean Sea. The two old friends flinched momentarily when a loud clap of thunder interrupted their conversation. Bob mentioned the dinner party from the previous evening and explained that he and Ken Haas, the station chief, had gotten into an argument. Bob pulled a me
mo from his briefcase and asked Mustafa to read it. It was an unofficial summary of a proposed peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon. The agreement provided for a staged withdrawal of Israeli forces from South Lebanon. Bob explained that the whole agreement had a catch. The Israelis would withdraw their forces only if Syria actually withdrew all its military forces from all of Lebanon. Both men understood that the Syrians were not party to this agreement and probably would not withdraw their troops. Bob asked Mustafa what he thought.

  Mustafa smiled mischievously and said, “These are very thick papers. It would be very practical and wise to type the agreement on very thin papers.”

  Bob said, “I know something is coming and I hate to ask why. But I am asking, why?”

  “In case someone wanted to wipe his ass with it,” replied Mustafa, “he doesn’t get hurt!”

  Bob laughed so hard he spit out some of his tea. But Mustafa was right about the agreement. A peace treaty with Israel would be highly unpopular with Lebanon’s Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim citizens, who viewed the “Zionist entity” as a Western colonial outpost. Egypt’s dictator, Anwar Sadat, had signed a peace treaty with Israel—and his 1981 assassination sent a clear message to Arab politicians everywhere that they risked the same fate. So Ames and Zein knew a Lebanese-Israeli peace treaty would never happen. And since the Syrians were not even a party to the agreement, and were unlikely to leave Lebanon, this meant the Israelis were unlikely to withdraw from South Lebanon. The so-called peace treaty would, in fact, fall apart within the year, and Israeli and Syrian troops would occupy portions of Lebanon for years to come.

  After their breakfast, Ames walked down to the U.S. embassy on the corniche, just a ten- or fifteen-minute walk. Zein had tried to persuade him to have lunch at one of Bob’s favorite restaurants, Al-Ajami—the name of which in Arabic refers to a non-Arabic-speaking Persian or “foreigner.” Bob seemed doubtful. Shortly after noon, Zein dropped by the embassy and called Ames from the lobby. They talked briefly, and Zein again encouraged Ames to come with Haas and any other colleagues to the Al-Ajami. Ames said they were too busy and it would be better to meet for dinner. So Zein reluctantly walked out of the embassy at about 12:40 P.M. As Zein left, he passed by LCpl. Bobby McMaugh, still standing guard that morning at Guard Post One.

  Ames had been meeting all morning with the entire CIA station on the fifth floor. It had turned into a “contentious” meeting. They argued. Station Chief Ken Haas was so disturbed by the meeting that he called his wife, Alison, and suggested they should have their usual lunch a little earlier. Alison was already in the embassy that morning. She wasn’t on the payroll, but it was her habit to come into the office and help out on whatever anyone needed. Usually, she brought her husband a homemade sandwich and they’d lunch together. On this day they ate their sandwiches, and then at about 12:45 P.M. Alison produced an apple and began to peel it. Ken stopped her and said he was “too upset, and to put the apple away.” He told her that he had to write a long cable to Washington, a cable known in the business as an AARDWOLF: “I don’t know how I’m going to do it; you go ahead and go home and take a nap and I’ll be home when I finish.”*2

  As Alison rose to leave, Ken came over and took her head in both hands and gave her a “great big dramatic kiss.” Alison left for home, but on her way out she dallied. She went to the embassy’s travel section to see about tickets for a planned trip to Cyprus the following week. But the travel office was closed for the lunch hour. She then tried to get a cholera shot, but the health clinic was also closed. She then tried the commissary in the basement, but it too was locked. So rather reluctantly, Alison walked out of the embassy at about 12:55 P.M., got into her car, and drove home to their apartment. As she got out of the car at 1:04 P.M., she heard an explosion and muttered to herself, “That was a big one.”

  Downstairs in the first-floor cafeteria, Anne Dammarell and Bob Pearson were having lunch together. Both were USAID officials. Anne ordered a chef’s salad. She was scheduled to rotate out of Beirut in a week for a new posting in Sri Lanka. Pearson wanted to talk to her about whom to invite to her farewell party. They ordered lunch and sat down in the back of the cafeteria, behind a supporting pillar.

  Sitting at another table closer to the front of the cafeteria was William McIntyre, the director of USAID’s Beirut operations. He was having lunch with Janet Lee Stevens, the freelance American reporter who, despite being pregnant, was immersed in an investigation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Two days earlier, she’d told a friend, Franklin Lamb, that she was working hard to unearth evidence to convict Gen. Ariel Sharon of war crimes. At lunch that day she intended to urge USAID director McIntyre to funnel some development assistance into the camps. She’d arrived at the embassy around 12:45 P.M. and was scheduled the next day to fly to Cyprus to see her friend the author John le Carré.

  Another reporter was in the embassy late that morning. David Ignatius was the son of Paul Ignatius, a former secretary of the navy and president of the Washington Post Corporation. David was then working for the Wall Street Journal. He was a good reporter and had developed a wide range of sources. On April 18 he had an interview on the sixth floor with a U.S. Army officer with the Office of Military Cooperation. Ignatius wanted to learn more about the U.S. government’s efforts to rebuild and modernize the Lebanese army. The officer gave him an upbeat briefing, claiming that the program was turning the Lebanese army into “a force for national reconciliation that will bring together Sunnis, Shi’ites and Christians.” As he took notes, Ignatius thought, It’s almost believable. Maybe the good times are returning.… The city has been pounded by eight years of civil war, and then by the Israeli invasion, and then by the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. But now the United States has arrived as Lebanon’s protector. The interview ended and Ignatius was escorted down to the first floor by Rebecca J. McCullough, twenty-four, a newly married embassy secretary. Ignatius retrieved his American passport at the marine desk, Guard Post One. He noticed Cpl. Bobby McMaugh’s imposing physique and the shiny brass buttons on his dress blues—the dark-blue pants with the long red stripes. And then he walked out of the embassy and up the hill, toward his hotel in Ras Beirut.

  Corporal McMaugh had just returned at about 12:55 P.M. to Guard Post One after a short lunch break. He’d tried to talk Corporal Massengill into taking his duty for the rest of the afternoon. Massengill declined, saying he was too tired, and took the elevator up to his room on the sixth floor. Rebecca McCullough, the secretary who’d escorted Ignatius, lingered at the marine desk and joked with Bobby. She teasingly warned him that she was going to tell her husband that the corporal was flirting with her. They laughed, and then McCullough suddenly thought she should get back to work. It was almost 1:00 P.M. She said good-bye to Bobby and took the elevator back up to the sixth floor.

  At that moment, a weathered black GMC pickup truck was passing by the pockmarked ruins of the St. George Hotel on Beirut’s waterfront corniche. The young Shi’ite Lebanese man at the wheel was driving slowly. He wore a black leather jacket. The truck’s tarpaulin-covered cargo, weighing two thousand pounds, made the vehicle run low on its springs and its tires bulge beneath the weight. A green Mercedes sedan was parked two blocks away from the embassy. As the truck passed by, the driver in the Mercedes flashed its headlights, a signal to proceed. Moments later, the driver of the heavy truck slowed and then suddenly turned sharply into the exit of the embassy’s crescent-shaped driveway. The driver gunned the engine and swerved wildly around the ambassador’s parked black armored limousine. Implausibly, the truck then bounced up six or seven steps and crashed through the embassy’s glass front doors and sped partly into the building’s central lobby, immediately adjacent to Guard Post One. At exactly 1:04 P.M. the driver detonated his cargo and an enormous explosion ripped through the salmon-colored building.

  Ambassador Robert S. Dillon was standing beside his desk on the eighth floor, talking on the phone to a German banker about some J.P. Mor
gan investments. As he listened to the banker, Dillon was simultaneously trying to pull a thick red U.S. Marines sweatshirt over his head. He’d been intending to go out for a jog along the corniche. Just as he pulled the sweatshirt over his face, the Mylar-covered glass window abruptly flashed toward him. He never heard the explosion. The sweatshirt probably saved his face from cuts. But the next thing he knew, Dillon found himself flat on his back, half buried under bricks and debris from the ceiling. He began swearing to himself in between fits of coughing. The room was filling with smoke, dust, and the whiff of tear gas. Dillon thought to himself that a rocket-propelled grenade must have hit his office. “Damn it,” he muttered, “they missed us four days ago, but this time they really got us.” For a moment, Dillon thought he’d lost his legs.

  The ambassador’s deputy, Robert Pugh, experienced much the same thing in the adjoining room. The windows had blown in—but he and the ambassador’s secretary hadn’t been buried in rubble. Within a minute or two, Pugh stumbled into Dillon’s office and found that one wall had collapsed on the ambassador. Ironically, he was draped in the American flag that had stood ceremoniously next to his desk. Pugh grabbed the flagpole and used it to leverage off the largest piece of debris from the ambassador’s legs. Only then did Dillon realize that his legs were whole and he was even able to stand upright. He was still bruised and scratched and bloody. But he knew he was alive. Everyone then began retching from a cloud of tear gas that quickly enveloped the room—tear gas from canisters stored by the marines in their quarters. Finally, a breeze from the blown-out windows cleared the room and they were able to see and breathe. At first they tried to make their way out to the elevator in the center of the embassy, but they quickly saw it was simply gone. So they turned around and found an open stairwell at one end of the embassy’s crescent-shaped building. Only when they managed to get down to the second floor did they realize how much damage had been inflicted on the building. Dillon stepped out onto the second floor and saw Mary Lee McIntyre, the wife of the acting chief of the USAID mission. She had such a bad cut over her tearing eyes that she couldn’t see anything. Dillon lifted her into his arms and carried her to a window, where he could see someone was standing on a ladder. Dillon gently handed Mary Lee out to the stranger.