The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Altogether, sixty-three people died and some 120 people were wounded, many with lifelong injuries. Seventeen Americans were killed, along with thirty-two Lebanese employees of the embassy and fourteen visitors or passersby, mostly Lebanese applying for American visas. Of the seventeen Americans, eight were CIA officers—an unprecedented number then or since.*6 The other dead Americans included one U.S. marine, four other U.S. servicemen, three USAID officials—and Janet Lee Stevens, the freelance American reporter.

  The truck bomb had hit the embassy at 1:04 P.M., or shortly after 6:00 A.M. Washington time. Yvonne had risen early that morning and gone as usual to the local YMCA to swim. It was part of her new regimen. She returned a little later to get the children off to school. Around 9:00 A.M. someone from the CIA called and asked if she’d seen the news on television. Yvonne said no. She was then told that the embassy had been bombed but that they’d had no communication with Beirut. Yvonne didn’t know what to think. It was “employee lunch day” at her office and she’d prepared some food for the potluck, so she decided to go in to work. She was then working full-time as an administrative assistant at the accounting firm of Arthur Young. “I continued through the day as though nothing had happened,” Yvonne recalled. She mentioned her worry to only one friend at work. That evening, she received a phone call from Beirut. It was Mustafa Zein, asking rather plaintively if she’d heard from Bob. Mustafa was clearly concerned and upset, so Yvonne tried to reassure him that Bob was just out of reach. She still hadn’t heard anything more from the Agency, but she nervously decided to keep a dinner appointment at a friend’s house nearby. She left the children at home, giving them a number where she could be reached. The children hadn’t heard about the bombing—and Yvonne didn’t want to alarm them with what could only be speculation. So she went out.

  Later that Monday evening, around 10:00 P.M., Kristen, eighteen, was upstairs watching television in her parents’ bedroom. She came across a news report about the Beirut bombing and remembered thinking, “That’s interesting.” She knew her father was out in the Middle East, but she didn’t know his itinerary. When she mentioned the news report to Kevin, eleven, and Karen, fifteen, they speculated that their father probably hadn’t arrived, and in any case they would have heard something if he was there. A few moments later, Kristen heard the doorbell. When she opened the door, she saw two strangers, Thomas Braman and his wife, Lillian. They introduced themselves as colleagues of her father’s. They asked if Yvonne was at home, and upon learning that she was out, Braman waited for Yvonne to return. Later, Braman asked Kristen if she’d seen the news about Beirut. When Kristen said yes, Braman said he thought Bob was in the embassy and that he might have been killed.

  “I told them he wasn’t there,” Kristen said, “and that he wasn’t killed.”

  Tom replied, “Well, we do think he was there, and he was killed.” Kristen said, “No.”

  Finally, Lillian Braman said, “No, we don’t think. We know. He was killed.” At this point, Kristen broke down and started screaming hysterically. Her brother Kevin was in his room upstairs. He’d heard Kristen answer the door and then heard her piercing scream. “It’s the kind of scream you hear,” he later said, “and you cringe inside, because you know something horrible has happened.”

  Moments before this, Karen had been sitting on her bed, trying to memorize a line from her French homework. “As I was staring at that page,” Karen said, “trying to memorize that line, a chill came over me. And I just looked up, and my [elder] brother [Andrew] was standing in my doorway, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. And I just said, ‘He’s dead.’ ” She remembers Andrew just shook his head and ran off. Karen picked up a phone and called a friend and told her, “What am I going to do? My dad’s dead.”

  Andrew remembers the same scene a little differently. He was in his room upstairs and heard Kristen’s screams, so he ran into the living room, where he saw two strangers standing with Kevin and Kristen. Everyone was crying. “I went immediately downstairs to Karen’s room,” Andrew said, “and I stood in the doorway. She looked up at me, and she saw it right away. She said, ‘He’s dead.’ And I just nodded and ran back to my room.”

  Eleven-year-old Kevin had a hard time comprehending what was happening. He walked downstairs to the family’s small study and sat in his father’s rocking chair. He sat there for the longest time, just rocking back and forth. Unconsciously, as he rocked, he gripped one handle so tightly that his thumbnail wore a deep groove into the wood.

  One of the children had called their mother at the phone number she’d left for them. When Yvonne got the call, she knew. She rushed home and walked into the house in tears. She remembers little. It was all a blur. She had to call Bob’s mom, and his sisters and her own parents. “From that time on, the house was filled with people for about two weeks,” Yvonne said. “But it didn’t give us any time to be alone together and to grieve together and to come to some sort of closure.” Her neighbors brought by home-cooked dishes, often walking past black government limousines parked in the cul-de-sac. CIA director Bill Casey came to the house and offered his condolences, as did many others.

  The children were devastated—and also shocked to learn that their father had worked for the CIA and not the State Department. They felt both a sense of wonder and disbelief. Their father had lied to them all these years—but at the same time they felt a certain pride in what they were beginning to learn about what he’d done.

  The news quickly spread through the hallways of Langley. Eight CIA employees were dead. “When I heard the news,” Clair George said, “I ran out into the hall and screamed, ‘Does anyone know what to do?’ ” Sam Wyman got a phone call from a friend in the DO Watch Office. He was informed that one of the three DO officers who hadn’t been in the embassy had phoned from Beirut and reported that the station had been wiped out. “I broke down,” Wyman recalled. “I called my wife and cried. I was dumbfounded and shocked. It was just unbelievable.” Wyman was then chief of the Arabian Peninsula Branch for the DO, but he’d soon be tasked with supervising the bombing investigation. Lindsay Sherwin had heard the morning news reports about the Beirut attack but had thought Bob would be okay. As the day progressed, Sherwin began to feel sick. Late that evening he got the phone call. He too cried. The next morning he tried to go to work as usual. Sherwin made it to Langley’s parking lot. “And then I had to turn around and go home,” he said. “It was horrific. The Agency did not know how to deal with it.”

  In Tel Aviv that day Dov Zeit, a senior Israeli intelligence officer, had been awaiting Ames’s scheduled visit later in the week. “The word spread that there had been an explosion,” Zeit recalled. “The mood among those of us who had known him was of deep mourning. A certain melancholy settled in. We Israelis may be rough, but we can also be very sentimental.”

  The next morning, Ames’s NSC counterpart, Geoff Kemp, noted in his diary, “Bob Ames among the dead in Beirut. We believe Iran involved. Felt very sad about Bob.”

  Five days later, on Saturday, April 23, President Ronald Reagan took a marine helicopter out to Andrews Air Force Base to meet a cargo plane containing sixteen coffins. (One of the Americans killed, Albert N. Votaw, a USAID official, was cremated in Beirut at the wishes of his family.) The sixteen flag-draped coffins were lined up in an airport hangar. Inexplicably, the mourners were not told which casket contained the body of their husband or son or daughter. The relatives of those killed stood nearby, weeping. Reagan spoke briefly and, visibly shaken, walked among the mourners. “It was a moving experience,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “Nancy and I met individually with the families of the deceased. We were both in tears—I know all I could do was grip their hands—I was too choked up to speak.” Reagan lingered for a few moments more with Yvonne Ames, who was wearing a short black veil to cover her eyes. Someone told the president that these were Bob Ames’s widow and children. “There was definitely a marked sadness on his face and in his eyes,” Karen Ames reca
lled. “They both gave us hugs.”

  Ames was the only one of the victims whom the president had known. They’d seen each other just a month earlier, on March 17, 1983, in the White House. When he heard that Ames was one of the victims, Reagan had noted in his diary, “We lost [name deleted] our top research man on Middle East.” Afterwards, Reagan told an aide that the ceremony was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do.

  The very next day, on Sunday, April 24, Ames’s casket was loaded aboard a military funeral carriage drawn by four horses. A U.S. marine in dress uniform led a riderless horse up a hill in Arlington National Cemetery. Yvonne and the children sat under a canopy by the burial site. Mustafa Zein had hastily flown in from Beirut for the funeral; he rode in a black limousine with Yvonne and her brother to the cemetery and sat with the family at the grave site. A squad of marines fired their rifles in the air. After the casket was lowered into the ground, Yvonne remembers someone handing her an American flag, folded into a triangle. She remembered little else: “I was there in body, but it was like—it was just the body.” Eighteen-year-old Kristen asked if they could put a flower on the casket, or just touch it: “We were told we couldn’t do that.” Afterwards, Yvonne had to return to her Reston home with her six children. She was numb with fear and grief. “Bob’s death fractured our family,” she later explained. “It’s like when you take a photograph and rip it. You can try to piece it back together, but it’s never the same.”

  That they’d never been allowed to see Bob’s body made things infinitely worse. It had been surreal at Andrews Air Force Base, where they’d had to stare at sixteen flag-draped coffins without knowing which contained Bob’s body. Later, Yvonne had asked if she or another family member could identify the body—and she was told this was not possible. “There was no closure for us,” Yvonne said in 2003. “I think if we’d been able to see Bob … we could have had closure. I know I have spent these twenty years thinking, well, perhaps he was involved in something and for the safety of his family—I feel ridiculous saying this, but it is the truth—that he was alive somewhere.”

  All the children had the same thoughts. “I guess the way we put it in our minds,” Kristen said, “was that he was doing something noble for us, and he’s not really in there; he’s just protecting us from whoever’s trying to get him so that he’s alive somewhere.… There’s a hope.”

  On Tuesday, April 26, more than 3,100 diplomats, government employees, and private citizens gathered in the nave of Washington’s National Cathedral to honor all those who had died. Vice President George H. W. Bush attended the forty-five-minute memorial service, as did Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Bush made a point of taking Yvonne aside and offered her his condolences.

  The April 1983 Beirut embassy bombing is a largely forgotten moment in the history of America’s presence in the Middle East. But it was a signal moment. It was the beginning of America’s deadly encounter with a political Islamist movement. It was also the birth of a Shi’ite political entity that we now know as Hezbollah. As a 1984 declassified CIA document noted, “The [1979] Iranian revolution … and the Israeli invasion of predominantly-Shi’a southern Lebanon galvanized the Shi’a and set the stage for the emergence of radical groups prone to terrorism.” Young Shi’ites in southern Lebanon traumatized by the Israeli invasion saw the Americans as allies of the Israelis. It’s easy to see how America became a target. “We were very much identified with the Israelis,” testified Ambassador Robert Dillon in 2003, “particularly among the Shi’as. There was huge resentment of the Israelis by this time in southern Lebanon.”

  Ambassador Robert Oakley read a flash cable about the bombing while standing in his office in the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia. “I was not astonished,” he later said, “because we’d seen the frenzy with which the Lebanese Shi’a responded to the United States following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and above all, the massacres of the Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila camp. The United States by that time had become identified with the Israelis and we were seen as an enemy of Islam and as an enemy of Iran because we were supporting the Iraqis in the war against Iran—and the Iranians had good reason to try to get us out of there. But we also were seen throughout the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon as sort of public enemy number one right after the Israelis themselves.”

  To be sure, Americans had lost their lives before in this troubled part of the world. Ambassadors had been assassinated. But April 18, 1983, was the first time a truck bomb was used against a high-profile target like an American embassy. President Reagan and Secretary Shultz tried to talk tough in the wake of the embassy tragedy. Reagan publicly called the bombing a “vicious … cowardly act.” Shultz said, “Let us rededicate ourselves to the battle against terrorism.” But these words were mere bromides. There was no talk of retaliation, because no one was quite sure who’d carried out the attack. Privately, Reagan confided in his diary, “Lord forgive me for the hatred I feel for the humans who can do such a cruel but cowardly deed.” But he knew there was nothing to be done.

  At a memorial service at CIA headquarters, Bill Casey described Ames as “the closest thing to an irreplaceable man.” He intoned, “They did not die in vain.”

  But in reality, the truck bomb, driven by a single suicidal driver, demonstrated more than just America’s political and military weakness in the Middle East. For some, it seemed to underscore that Americans were very much out of place in this part of the world. Shortly before Susan Morgan left Beirut, she ran into a young U.S. Army officer who’d been working on providing military assistance to Lebanon’s national army. He was bitterly disillusioned and told Morgan that “his men had come out here John Wayne–style, believing that they could save Lebanon, only to find themselves being shot at by the Israelis and bombed by the Arabs.” He said, “We should withdraw and let the people here fight it out among themselves. They deserve each other.”

  On Wednesday, April 27, Morgan got up in the middle of the night to catch her ride to the airport. It was 3:00 A.M. “I look out my hotel window to the Embassy on the seaside, less than a mile away. It is brightly and garishly lit up, the only visible building in the blackness and mist. From here it looks almost like a stage set. It seems right to turn my back and drive away from Beirut in the darkness.”

  Shortly afterwards, Morgan resigned from the CIA.

  * * *

  *1 When Bruce Riedel visited Beirut the following year, he clambered down from the helicopter and was asked, as if it was a routine question, if he wanted a shotgun or just a pistol.

  *2 CIA station chiefs rarely write long personal assessments, but these occasional lengthy cables back to Langley are referred to in the Near East Division as AARDWOLFS—perhaps because they are as rare as the termite-eating mammal native to Africa.

  *3 John le Carré flew in from Cyprus two days later, checked into the Commodore Hotel, and then visited the ruins of the embassy. On April 29, 1983, he wrote a moving letter to Janet’s parents, mourning their loss. And when The Little Drummer Girl was released as a film in October 1984, he made sure the film was dedicated to her memory in the credits.

  *4 According to Ames’s death certificate, Dr. Ahmed Harati noted that the cause of death was “fractures, burns, wounds, internal hemorrhage as a result of the explosion.”

  *5 The wedding ring was eventually given to Yvonne Ames; it still had blood on it. Yvonne gave the necklace to Karen Ames, then fifteen. Twenty years later, Karen said, “I’ve never taken it off.”

  *6 Three CIA officers survived the blast only because they happened to be out of the building. Susan Morgan was having lunch in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. Murray J. McKann had slipped out of the building to inspect a Persian carpet he was considering buying. And Alexander MacPherson was avoiding the embassy precisely because he was in Lebanon under deep cover.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Enigma of Imad Mughniyeh

  When in doubt, and we are always in doubt
about this, blame Mughniyeh.

  —A retired CIA officer

  In the days after the attack, Bill Casey was visibly angry. He ordered his officers to launch an investigation. He wanted justice for those who’d died in Beirut. But it wouldn’t be easy. “Terrorist targets had shifted,” said John McMahon, Casey’s deputy director. “At one time, we had a PLO that was big enough to penetrate. But what we were getting now in places like Lebanon were small mom-and-pop operations. Unless you’re practically a member of the family, you don’t get in. These organizations are almost impossible to infiltrate.”

  The National Security Agency scoured its satellite data for any intercepts of phone conversations in the region that mentioned the embassy as a target. All it could find were some cryptic conversations between Iranian Foreign Office officials in Tehran and their diplomats in Damascus. The NSA may also have intercepted some phone calls from Revolutionary Guard officers in Baalbek and the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The intercepts merely hinted that someone might be striking at an American installation somewhere in the region. One intercepted cable from the Iranian Foreign Ministry reported that $25,000 had been sent to Lebanon for an unspecified operation.* Only in retrospect did it seem logical that they were talking about the American embassy as a target.