The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  He then turned around and someone whispered into his ear, “My God, Bill McIntyre’s dead. I’ve just seen the body.” Only then did Dillon realize there were fatalities. McIntyre had been killed while eating lunch with the journalist Janet Lee Stevens. She died with him.*3 When Ambassador Dillon finally made his way around to the front of the embassy, he was stunned by what he saw: the entire center wing of the building had pancaked. Dillon knew there must be many dead, and some people were probably still alive, trapped under the rubble. It would be five hours before the last living person came out of the ruined embassy.

  Anne Dammarell thought she was dead. The USAID official who’d been having lunch with Bob Pearson just remembered hearing a huge noise and feeling intense heat. And then there was just silence. Anne thought she’d been struck by lightning. “I thought—well, I’m dead. So I’m going to lean over and tell Bob that I’m dead.” But she had no voice and she couldn’t move. She felt as if an elephant had stepped on her. The next thing she knew Anne found herself lying on a stretcher, being carried outside. She heard voices yelling in Arabic, “Yallah! Yallah!”—“Go! Go!” Ambassador Dillon saw her being loaded hastily into an ambulance and thought, “She looks like a piece of hamburger.” He turned away, thinking that she wasn’t going to make it. X-rays taken at the American University of Beirut hospital showed she had nineteen broken bones, including her pelvic bone, both arms, several fingers, and her collarbone. Shredded glass was embedded in her neck and arms. But Anne survived.

  Staff Sgt. Charles Light had just left Cpl. Bobby McMaugh at Guard Post One and returned to his office on the first floor when the explosion blew him through a cinder-block wall into the adjoining room. He came to six or seven minutes later and heard ammunition rounds “cooking off” from the intense heat. He glanced to where his solid-oak desk had stood between him and the blast and saw that there was nothing left. “There wasn’t a piece of wood on it as big as a match or a toothpick.” When he got to his feet he noticed that his boots had been blown off. As Sergeant Light stumbled toward the front lobby, he heard a woman screaming. The blast had peeled off part of her face and she was bleeding profusely. Light wrapped his arms around the poor woman and tried to comfort her. At first, he wasn’t sure how to get out. But as the smoke and debris cleared, he spotted a slice of daylight from a V-shaped opening through the collapsed floors. Because he could also see flames coming from this opening, Sergeant Light left the woman for a moment and went to see if they could safely escape the wreckage through this two-foot hole. Peering out into what was the circular driveway to the embassy, Light could see a severed human leg lying in the driveway. Beside it was a car in flames.

  Sergeant Light ran back to the woman and guided her over to a place in the back of the lobby where water was gushing down from the upper floors. They stood under the water and thoroughly drenched their clothing. Only then did Light think it would be safe enough to crawl through the hole and out onto the driveway so near a burning car.

  After squeezing through, Sergeant Light stood up and peered into the car, which he recognized as the black Suburban “chase” vehicle that always trailed behind the ambassador’s limousine. The human leg on the asphalt belonged to Staff Sgt. Mark “Cesar” Salazar, a member of the Foreign Service National Guard. Salazar was one of the ambassador’s bodyguards, and Sergeant Light could see him sitting in the Suburban engulfed in flames. “And just as I looked at him,” Sergeant Light later testified, “his eyes popped out of his head.” As Sergeant Light looked on in horror, Salazar’s best friend, a senior Lebanese security guard named Mohammed al-Kurdi, was trying to pry Salazar out of the car with a long metal rod that had a little crook at one end. But every time Al-Kurdi tried to touch Salazar with the rod, a piece of flesh would drop off. Salazar was probably already dead, but just to be certain Mohammed pulled out his pistol and shot Salazar between the eyes.

  Sergeant Light turned back to the injured woman he’d dragged out of the embassy. She was a Lebanese employee of the consular section. He helped her out onto the street in front of the embassy and waved down a Mercedes taxicab that happened to be driving by. Seeing the devastation, the taxi driver stopped and started to back out. Light had to draw his sidearm and point it at the driver before the cabbie stopped. He got the woman into the backseat, threw some money on the seat, and told the driver, “Mustashfa,” meaning “hospital.”

  When Sergeant Light turned around, he caught his first panorama view of the carnage. There were burning bodies lying on the sidewalk and in the driveway. Cars that had been driving by when the truck bomb hit were now charred hunks of burning metal. A Lebanese army tank that had been parked on the corniche across the street from the embassy had been blown into the ocean. There were bodies floating in the surf. All eight floors of the central wing of the embassy had collapsed. And then Sergeant Light suddenly remembered that after the initial blast, as he lay semiconscious on the floor, he’d heard loud slapping sounds, one after another. “It dawned on me that it was those floors coming down, one after another. One would hit a floor, and the weight of it would take another one down.”

  Sergeant Light then ran around to the side of the embassy, looking for survivors. He found what remained of the consular section, imploded into a crater of rubble. Looking down, he saw a woman who’d been blown through the air only to land with her legs slammed into an open filing cabinet. She was still alive. Sergeant Light had a Red Crescent volunteer lower him into the crater with his belt. He then went over to the filing cabinet and pulled the woman out. Her legs were broken and her right hand had been blown off and was dangling by a piece of skin. She had a chest wound and her face was pockmarked with glass and shrapnel. Sergeant Light held her in his arms: “She was talking to me, talking to somebody in Lebanese [Arabic]. I held her there until she died, and then I put her down and went on inside the embassy.”

  When the Wall Street Journal’s David Ignatius heard the explosion, he was nearly a mile away from the embassy. The windows rattled and he felt a “momentary feeling of vertigo, like fear but worse.” He ran back down the hill toward the corniche. By the time he got there, U.S. marines were trying to cordon off the building. The smoke and dust had cleared. Ignatius looked up and saw the body of a man in a sports jacket dangling upside-down with his legs pinned between two collapsed floors.

  Sergeant Light saw the same hideous image. He spent the next four hours on a rope with a Red Crescent worker trying to extract the body of William Sheil, the fifty-nine-year-old former Green Beret and CIA contract interrogator. Light failed. “There was nothing I could do,” Light later said. “He was pinned, and there was no way I could get a bar or anything to pry him out of there. It took, I don’t know, two or three days before we could get that poor man out of there.” Sheil was caught between the fourth and fifth floors. They finally had to bring in two cranes, one with a chain tied to the floor that had crushed Sheil’s legs, and the other with a chain wrapped around his body. Sergeant Light later testified that when the cranes yanked Sheil’s dead body out, “the chain that was around him pulled his pants off; and he was hanging out there in public like that. I thought it was an absolute shame.”

  Back in America, Cheryl Lee Sheil was watching the television news because her sister had called to tell her that their father, William Sheil, was actually in Beirut. Concerned, Cheryl turned on the TV news and saw that the networks were airing clips of the damaged embassy. “I was watching them bring out dead bodies,” said Cheryl. “I remember there was one gentleman hanging over a balcony, and [the networks] kept showing him again and again, and I said, well, gee, somebody should go get that guy. And it was worse because he was wearing a jacket that looked like one that my dad had bought when he was in Chicago visiting at Christmastime. I said [to myself], Oh, I hope that’s not Dad.” It was.

  The Washington Post’s Nora Boustany came running down to the corniche when she heard the explosion. “It was the only time I felt completely speechless,” Boustany recalled. “I co
uldn’t talk. I just stood there in shock, looking at the bodies on the sidewalk.”

  Alison Haas—the wife of CIA station chief Ken Haas—had heard the explosion, but it never entered her mind that Americans might have been targeted. A month earlier, she’d heard a blast just down the street from their apartment. Some of the debris had landed on their balcony, and many people had been killed. So Alison told herself this was just another Beirut explosion. She walked around the corner to her local grocery and bought Ken some cigarettes. As she returned she saw a crowd gathering and pointing at a huge plume of white smoke. Alison then heard someone say “American embassy” in Arabic. She ran home and immediately tried phoning Ken, but she kept getting a busy signal. Alison interpreted this as a good sign. She turned on the radio and was somewhat reassured when she heard a report that the explosion had hit the consular section and that “only” two or three people had been hurt. She waited until 3:00 P.M.—and finally she got in her car and drove back to the embassy. She had to stop the car and get out several blocks away because the road was blocked. She started running. Several marines tried to stop her, but she got past them and kept running. Finally, an embassy officer grabbed her and asked her who had been in the CIA office that morning. Alison said everyone except Frank Johnston. She hadn’t seen Frank. By then, Alison was becoming hysterical. No one would let her around the corner where she could have seen the full extent of the damage to the front facade of the embassy. Someone took her by the hand and drove her to the ambassador’s residence.

  Early that evening Ambassador Dillon returned to the residence and gently knelt down on one knee before Alison and said that so far Ken had not been found. He explained that the CIA office on the fifth floor had taken the full force of the blast. Alison replied, “They could be in an air pocket, they could be trapped.”

  Later that night Alison was taken back to her apartment, where she saw that someone had brought Arlette, Frank Johnston’s Palestinian-Israeli wife. Arlette had heard the explosion from her apartment. The blast was “so hard it shook the windows.” She’d then run down to the embassy only to see that it was gone. She’d seen only darkness and black smoke. “The day seemed night,” she later wrote in her diary. By the time Alison arrived home, Arlette knew her husband was gone. Someone had handed her his wallet—proof that he’d been found. They didn’t tell her the grim story of how he’d been found. Soon after the blast, as the cloud of smoke and dust cleared, the marines could see someone trapped between two slabs of concrete. It was Frank Johnston, and he was still alive. Rescuers got to him fairly quickly and managed to pry him loose. But his body had been severely crushed. Just before he died, Frank managed to ask that his wallet be given to his wife.

  Arlette was given a sleeping pill and codeine—and she eventually fell asleep. But Alison couldn’t sleep, even when a marine doctor gave her another dose of codeine. Finally, around 3:00 A.M. on Wednesday, Murray McKann, one of three CIA officers who hadn’t been in the embassy late that morning, came and told Alison, “They found him.” Alison said, “Is he alive?” And Murray had to say, “No.”

  Deputy Chief of Mission Bob Pugh formally identified the bodies of Jim and Monique Lewis, Deborah Hixon, Ken Haas, and Phyllis Faraci. “They were not mangled,” Pugh recalled. “They looked very much like themselves. They’d been suffocated by the debris and dirt. It looked almost as if they had died in their sleep.”

  Susan Morgan, the CIA officer on a TDY assignment to Beirut, was having a leisurely lunch in the southern port city of Sidon when her hostess casually mentioned that there’d been an explosion in the embassy. Morgan thought she was joking. Another guest at the luncheon table reminded her that such things happened all the time in Lebanon: “We’re used to it.” Morgan and another embassy official quickly piled into their car for the hour-long drive back to Beirut. Bob Ames had called Morgan early that morning to invite her to have dinner with him and a “Shi’a businessman”—none other than Mustafa Zein. They’d agreed to meet at the Mayflower Hotel at 7:30 P.M. Morgan felt nauseous on the drive back to Beirut. She knew Bob had been heading for the embassy that morning.

  Morgan arrived at the embassy at 4:00 P.M. The scene of devastation stunned her. Bulldozers were already at work, clearing the rubble. “I see the walking wounded, and search for faces I know,” Morgan wrote a few days later in a “Beirut Diary” that the CIA classified “secret.” She saw a Foreign Service officer who’d been in the building, but when she asked about Ames, he just shook his head and said he didn’t know, but that “many people have died.” Morgan went back to the Mayflower, hoping to find a message from Ames; there was nothing, so she left one for him in case he returned. It then occurred to her that Bob might have been taken to the hospital, so she rushed over to the nearby American University of Beirut hospital. The emergency room was crowded with wounded people, but when Morgan scanned a list of the admitted wounded, Ames was not on the list. “I ask nurses,” Morgan wrote. “Nothing. In my heart, I know already.”

  By 9:00 P.M. Morgan returned to the embassy: “Nothing has changed except that tear gas canisters stored in the embassy are leaking. I approach the rubble to start searching only to drop back when I get a mouthful of gas.” Floodlights had been erected so that rescue workers could see as they dug through the rubble. Standing on the perimeter, just outside the floodlights amid the wrecked cars and debris, Bob Pugh pointed up to a dangling body, pinned between two upper floors. “I fix my eyes on the body,” Morgan wrote, “trying to see around it, to look for Bob Ames.” As the hours passed, the night air grew so chilly that Morgan left briefly to find a coat at a friend’s nearby flat. But she hurried back to the site, fearing that Ames’s body would be found in her absence. In fact, no bodies had been found in the rubble since 6:00 P.M.

  “Suddenly, at 0230,” Morgan wrote, “there is a commotion at the rubble heap. People cluster around one spot. A body has been found. My heart skips and I know.” Someone waved Morgan over and asked her to identify the body. “I look briefly. Yes. I am handed his passport and wallet.” Oddly, there was not a mark on Ames’s body or clothes, and Morgan later speculated that he’d died in the elevator from the concussion of the bomb.*4

  Bob Ames may have died alone. His daughter Karen later overheard someone at the memorial service saying that Bob had been found in a stairwell. “He looked like he’d just probably been leaving the cafeteria, heading up to a meeting, that he was facedown, that his eyes were already closed, and that he was killed by the impact of the explosion, not that anything had fallen on him, and that there was just a small cut on his neck.”

  An embassy officer reminded Susan Morgan that she should retrieve all of Bob’s papers from his hotel room. But Morgan was determined to accompany the body to the morgue. She followed the ambulance, arriving at the morgue around 3:30 A.M. It was a grisly scene, and the morgue’s guards tried to dissuade her from entering. Morgan ignored them and climbed a railing to get into the room. Upon entering, she saw that there were five other bodies lying on the floor. “I retrieve Bob’s wedding ring, pray for his soul, and tell him goodbye,” Morgan wrote. “I wonder why I do not cry.” She had to get someone to cut off Bob’s wedding ring, and she noticed that he was wearing a small chain around his neck. She took that too.*5 A half hour later, Morgan walked into the Mayflower, a regular venue for visiting Americans. The staff was in shock. “I tell them what I know of the dead and the living,” Morgan wrote. And then she explained that she needed to pack up his belongings—and make sure nothing of a classified nature was left behind. Only then did Morgan find a phone to call Langley. It was around 5:00 A.M. Beirut time when she called to report that she’d made a positive identification of Ames’s body. Back in Washington it was nearly 10:00 P.M. on Monday evening.

  Mustafa Zein had expected to see Ames that evening. He had made dinner reservations at Al-Ajami restaurant for himself, Ames, Ken Haas, and Susan Morgan. That afternoon, as Zein was driving to his appointment with President Amin Gemayel’s cousin, he
saw the plume of smoke along the corniche, and he briefly worried about his American friends. But he nevertheless decided to show up at Al-Ajami on time—and he waited alone with growing anxiety until the restaurant closed at 2:00 A.M. “I really, really lost it that day,” Zein later said.

  Pete Gallant, a thirty-four-year-old State Department security officer, arrived on Tuesday afternoon on a flight from Athens. Gallant was charged with writing up a preliminary investigation of the bombing. “The smoke had cleared,” he said, “but blood and body parts were everywhere. It is a smell you never forget.” The charred engine block of the truck carrying the bomb was retrieved from the shallow waters of the fishermen’s cove across the street from the embassy. Gallant learned from the embassy’s resident security officer, Dick Gannon, that two Delta vehicular barriers had been sitting in storage for nearly a year. They were to have been installed on the embassy’s driveway the following week.

  Three days after the blast, Marine Sgt. Charles Light and Cpl. Brian Korn crawled back into the rubble. They’d been instructed to see if they could find a safe in the marine office on the ground floor where their diplomatic passports were stored. They found the safe and the passports, and on their way out Corporal Korn said, “Here’s where Post One used to be. Robert’s here, we need to get him out.” Sergeant Light and Corporal Korn spent forty-five minutes digging through the rubble before they found him. “He was standing straight up, bent over,” Korn later testified. “His head was smashed like a pancake, real flat, real long.” Both his legs and his arms were broken—and, grotesquely—a steel rod had plunged through his chest. Corporal Bobby McMaugh had died instantly. Still, it was a terrible death.