The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Later that autumn, President Reagan was awakened at 2:30 A.M. on October 23, 1983, with a phone call informing him that another truck bomb had exploded—this time hitting the barracks near Beirut airport that housed U.S. marines serving as part of the Multinational Force. This bomb was much larger than the one that had hit the U.S. embassy six months earlier. It created an explosion the equivalent of twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT—the largest non-nuclear event ever. It killed 241 U.S. servicemen. “We all believe Iranians did this bombing,” Reagan wrote in his diary, “just as they did with our embassy last April.”

  In a generic sense, this judgment is probably accurate. But many aspects of both tragedies remained a mystery. The Reagan administration really didn’t know who had hit them. “We were too paralyzed by self-doubt,” recalled Secretary of State George Shultz.

  Casey asked his in-house counselor, Frederick Hutchinson, to supervise an investigation. “When Bob was killed,” Hutchinson said, “Casey asked me to give him a full picture of what happened and why.” Hutchinson had entered the Agency as a high-ranking GS-16 in 1974. Bill Colby had recruited him from the Defense Department. Born in 1933, Hutchinson was one of the officers who’d persuaded Casey to promote Ames to be head of the Near East and South Asia Division in the Directorate of Intelligence. Hutchinson ended up writing a twenty-five-page report on the embassy attack. The report remains classified. But Hutchinson recollects its substance: “It criticized the State Department’s security policies. The embassy was wide open to attack.” Within hours of the truck-bomb attack someone had called several media outlets in Beirut and claimed responsibility on behalf of the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO). No one had ever heard of this group. Hutchinson believes the IJO was actually a cover name for Islamic Amal, a recent breakaway faction from Amal, the Shi’ite Lebanese political party led by Nabih Berri. Hutchinson recalls that the Lebanese intelligence agency picked up four individuals who’d witnessed the attack. But they were released two days later. They merely told police that they’d seen a young man wearing a black leather jacket crash a black pickup truck into the front door of the embassy.

  Eventually, a dozen people were arrested, including an Egyptian named “Harb,” who Hutchinson believes was the “principal grunt on the ground who helped put the bomb together.”

  In a subsequent phase of the investigation, a CIA contract officer named Keith Hall, age thirty-two, was ordered to fly to Beirut to interrogate those arrested by the Deuxième Bureau, Lebanon’s intelligence bureau, headed at the time by Johnny Abdo. Hall was a former U.S. marine who’d worked as a cop in California before joining the CIA in 1979. (He’d also earned a master’s degree in history.) At the time, he was assigned to the CIA’s investigative and analysis unit. He was called to Langley’s seventh floor and told, “We want you to go to Beirut and find out who blew up the embassy and how they did it. The President himself is going to be reading your cables. There is going to be some retribution here.”

  Hall later told his story to author Mark Bowden in the Atlantic magazine. He flew to Beirut and occupied an office in the Deuxième Bureau. And he confessed to Bowden that he “took part without hesitation in brutal questioning” of the Lebanese men arrested. Clubs and rubber hoses were used. The suspects eventually fingered a man named Elias Nimr, whom they described as the “paymaster” of the bombing. Nimr was arrested, but he initially evinced no fear, thinking that his family and political connections would protect him. He was only twenty-eight years old, but he was already a feared man. Years later, Newsweek’s accomplished investigative reporter Christopher Dickey wrote that Nimr “appears to have been a double, triple, a geometric-multiple agent. He was a Christian Lebanese intelligence chief who was trained by the Israelis but allegedly worked secretly for the Syrians as a paymaster for agents from Iran.”

  The Lebanese allowed Hall to feed questions to Nimr’s interrogators, and over the course of ten days Hall personally questioned Nimr alone. According to Bowden, on the first occasion Hall bluntly told Nimr, “I’m an American intelligence officer. You really didn’t think that you were going to blow up our embassy and we wouldn’t do anything about it, did you?” Hall warned him that his Lebanese compatriots were not going to let him go. “That’s not going to happen,” Hall said. “You’re mine. I’m the one who will make the decisions about what happens to you. The only thing that will save your ass is to cooperate.” When Nimr refused to talk, he was taken to a cell and made to stand for two days.

  When he was brought back for another session, Hall kicked the chair out from under Nimr. He still refused to talk. “I sent him back to his cell,” Hall said, “[and] had water poured over him again and again while he sat under a big fan, kept him freezing for about twenty-four hours. He comes back after this, and you can see his mood is changing. He hasn’t walked out of jail, and it’s beginning to dawn on him that no one is going to spring him.”

  In future sessions, Hall watched as a Lebanese captain used a wooden bat to hit Nimr across his shins. The torture worked—or at least it persuaded Nimr to tell Hall what he wanted to hear. Nimr confessed that he’d been part of the plot to bomb the embassy. He also confessed to having some complicity in the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel the previous autumn. He admitted that he’d been taking orders from Syrian intelligence agents. Hall taped Nimr’s confession and flew back to Langley, convinced that he’d broken the case.

  Not long afterwards, however, Hall learned that Nimr had died in his jail cell. Hall assumed Lebanese security officials had ordered Nimr’s death to silence him and protect other parties implicated in the embassy plot. Someone also leaked the fact that a CIA officer had participated in the kind of rough interrogation techniques that had led to the death of the suspect. This earned Hall the moniker “Captain Crunch.”

  Fred Hutchinson recalls that when Casey learned of Nimr’s death he hit the roof. Hall hadn’t been there when the man died, but he’d tortured the man. Casey thought this could embarrass the Agency, so he had Hall fired. “We had the Justice Department look into whether Hall should be prosecuted,” said Hutchinson. “But they said there was no case, so we just dismissed Hall. He later sued the Agency for wrongful dismissal, but nothing came of it.”

  Hall remains bitter and disillusioned about his experience in the Agency. And apparently he’s unrepentant about his rough interrogation of Nimr. He believes the Agency made a mistake by refusing to pursue the leads he developed. The Lebanese eventually released all the suspects they’d rounded up. “No one was punished for it,” Hall said, “except me!”

  Unfortunately, the evidence against Nimr is less definitive than Captain Crunch would have us believe. Newsweek’s Dickey reported that in 1985 a Lebanese judge named Nimr as responsible for the embassy bombing. But Dickey also reported that “some of Nimr’s old colleagues say he was just a victim of bloody inter-service rivalries among Lebanon’s covert warlords and had nothing to do with the case.” And, of course, the very fact that Captain Crunch used torture devalues Nimr’s confession. Aside from that confession, there’s no other evidence tying Nimr to the embassy bombing. It was, in fact, a dead end.

  Other Agency officers dismiss the evidence obtained by Hall against Nimr. Robert Baer was a CIA officer who joined the Directorate of Operations in 1976 and spent the next twenty years in India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Baer never met Ames, but he made it his business over the years to investigate the embassy bombing. He wrote about his conclusions in his 2002 memoir See No Evil. The book doesn’t even mention Captain Crunch. Baer has a wholly different theory. “Iran ordered it,” writes Baer, “and a Fatah network carried it out.” When he says “a Fatah network” he means Imad Mughniyeh, the elusive Lebanese Shi’ite operative who joined Fatah at an early age. Baer makes a circumstantial case that Mughniyeh was still in touch with his old Fatah comrades when the embassy was attacked.

  Soon after Ames was killed, his fellow Arabist Sam Wyman was appointed head of Arab-Israeli affairs in th
e Directorate of Operations. “I was asked to keep tabs on the investigation of the embassy bombing,” Wyman said. “I went out to Beirut and met with officers from the Lebanese intelligence and police services. And I read the investigative reports. But I don’t recall ever seeing any hard evidence on who did it.” As late as 2001, former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger told PBS, “We still do not have actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn’t then.” Yet over the years, a consensus has gradually emerged that places Mughniyeh as the key protagonist in any narrative on who was responsible for the 1983 embassy bombing. Still, the evidence is curiously opaque.

  Mughniyeh lived in the shadows. Even his birth is in dispute. Some accounts say he was born on July 12, 1962, in the village of Teir Dibna, a mountainous region overlooking the southern Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. But Mughniyeh seems to have doctored any official records. He may have been born on January 25, 1962, in Al-Jiwar, a poor neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He came from a poor Shi’a family who for generations had made their living from a small orchard of olive and lemon trees. He grew up in the slums of southern Beirut, bordering the largely Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. They lived in a simple cinder-block house with no running water. His friends described him as “very smart” and “always alert.” In 1976—at the age of fourteen—Mughniyeh and some of his friends joined a Fatah student training camp near Damour, on the southern Lebanese coast. A Fatah intelligence officer named Anis Naqqash ran the twenty-day military training course. “Imad stood out from the others,” Naqqash told Nicholas Blanford, the author of a history of Hezbollah, “because while everyone was looking forward to the end of the course when they would get to fire guns, Imad was more interested in learning about tactics. He was the only one, apart from a teacher and a Maoist, who wrote down notes during the course. He was not interested in shooting guns like the others.”

  Mughniyeh may possibly have spent a short time studying business at the American University of Beirut. But in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, probably in late 1978 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon for the first time, Mughniyeh was recruited into Ali Hassan Salameh’s elite Force 17. At some point, he may have benefited from training provided by the CIA to “professionalize” Arafat’s personal bodyguard unit. Mughniyeh served as a bodyguard for Yasir Arafat, and he fought as a sniper along the Green Line dividing East and West Beirut. He made his first visit to postrevolutionary Iran as early as 1979. Some accounts have him performing the Haj to Mecca in 1980 in the company of Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, then a leading Shi’ite cleric. Like many young Shi’ite Lebanese, Mughniyeh was radicalized by the disappearance of Lebanon’s charismatic Shi’ite cleric, Imam Musa Sadr, who vanished mysteriously on a trip to Libya in 1978. And he was further radicalized by the Israeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982. He’d witnessed the emotional scene between Janet Lee Stevens and Arafat in which Janet had pleaded with Arafat not to leave Beirut. And then, of course, Mughniyeh had been deeply affected by the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982. He had plenty of motives.

  But in April 1983 Mughniyeh was only twenty years old. As the CIA’s Robert Baer asks in his memoir, “How did a poor boy from Ayn al-Dilbah rise out of the ashes of the 1982 invasion and in less than a year put together the most lethal and well-funded terrorist organization in the world?” Baer points out the obvious: it just didn’t add up. Mughniyeh seems too young, at age twenty, to have been the mastermind for the embassy bombing. Yet in subsequent decades Mughniyeh was deeply implicated in all sorts of attacks. The CIA blames him for a long string of terrorist attacks over a period of twenty-five years:

  The marine barracks bombing in Beirut that took the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen on October 23, 1983

  The March 16, 1984, kidnapping of Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley, who died in captivity

  The September 20, 1984, bombing of the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut

  The June 14, 1985, hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem (Mughniyeh’s fingerprints were found on the airplane)

  The kidnappings of dozens of Westerners in Lebanon during the 1980s

  The March 17, 1992, bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed twenty-nine people

  The July 18, 1994, bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina that killed eighty-six people

  The June 25, 1996, bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed nineteen American solders and one Saudi civilian

  If you count the U.S. embassy bombings and the marine barracks attack, Mughniyeh was responsible for more American deaths than anyone until the September 11, 2001, attacks on American soil by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. But the notion that Mughniyeh had a hand in the embassy and marine barracks attacks really only arose after the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. Mughniyeh was indicted that year in a U.S. court for his role in the TWA hijacking and the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. It was Mughniyeh’s long résumé of post-1985 terrorist operations that has led many to assume that he must have been the mastermind of the 1983 attacks. “When in doubt,” said one retired CIA officer, “and we are always in doubt about this, blame Mughniyeh.”

  In any case, while there’s much that isn’t known about the elusive Mughniyeh, it is known that, sometime after Arafat’s departure from Beirut in August 1982, he offered his services to Shi’ite Lebanese political forces. Hezbollah—the Party of God—didn’t exist at the time, at least by that name. But a shadowy Shi’a resistance group known as Islamic Amal had formed that summer, inspired by the Iranian revolution. Another group, the Islamic Jihad Organization, was probably the same entity under another name. Both parties eventually morphed into what we today call Hezbollah. But in late 1982 any Shi’a resistance was an effective arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. By offering his services to Islamic Amal, Mughniyeh was going to work for the Revolutionary Guard.

  According to the journalist Hala Jaber, who in 1997 wrote Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance, Mughniyeh had become thoroughly disillusioned with the PLO and “turned to the newly arrived Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Jaber reports that the Revolutionary Guard initially tasked Mughniyeh to “gather information and details about the American embassy and draw up a plan that would guarantee the maximum impact and leave no trace of the perpetrator.”

  Mughniyeh was inventive. A well-known Lebanese member of Al-Fatah, Bilal Sharara, told the Beirut-based journalist Nicholas Blanford that Mughniyeh approached him in the autumn of 1982 with a novel and audacious plan. “He wanted some explosives,” Sharara said, “and wondered whether I had some for him.” Mughniyeh explained that he had someone who was willing to blow himself up to attack the Israelis. “I laughed,” said Sharara, “and thought he was crazy. Who would want to blow himself up? No one had done anything like that at the time.” Blanford writes in his history of Hezbollah, Warriors of God, that Mughniyeh persuaded a childhood friend—Ahmad Qassir, age seventeen—to drive a white Peugeot sedan into the entrance of the Israeli army headquarters in Tyre. The car exploded and seventy-five Israeli soldiers were killed. This occurred on November 11, 1982—five months prior to the U.S. embassy attack. If Mughniyeh organized the Tyre suicide truck bomb, he could certainly have also been the mastermind behind the embassy bombing. Mossad later came to a qualified conclusion about Mughniyeh’s responsibility. “We knew Mughniyeh was later responsible for many other terrorist acts,” said Yoram Hessel, a senior Mossad officer. “But he had to have had institutional backing.”

  In March 1983, Mughniyeh drove to Damascus for a meeting with Iran’s Syrian ambassador, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur. By Jaber’s account in her book about Hezbollah, the Iranian ambassador hosted the meeting in the presence of Syrian intelligence officers. On the agenda was a plan to expel the American, French, and other Multilateral Peacekeeping Forces from Lebanon. Mughniyeh proposed a series of truck-bomb operations modeled after the Tyre a
ttack. If true, the result of this meeting was the April 18, 1983, suicide truck-bomb attack on the Beirut embassy.

  Mughniyeh operated in the darkest of shadows. Eventually, he built a network of individuals he could absolutely trust because they were blood relatives. For decades, only two photographs of him seemed to exist, and they were of doubtful provenance. “Imad was a very handsome young man, and very thin,” recalled Mustafa Zein, who knew him when he worked for Force 17. “I wouldn’t have recognized him from the photographs decades later.”

  Unlike many of his Shi’a colleagues, Mughniyeh was not motivated by religiosity. The Israelis later recorded a phone conversation in which one of his friends said of him, “He’s no great saint when it comes to religion, but his glorious military achievements make up for that and assure him a place in Paradise.”

  Some sources claim that Mughniyeh underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance. But this piece of his legend is apocryphal. He lived in Beirut, but unlike Ali Hassan Salameh he rotated randomly between different apartments and cities. By the mid-1980s, he understood very well that he was being hunted. But he was the most elusive of agents. “Mugniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else,” said Robert Baer. “He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983.” A former director general of the Mossad described Mughniyeh as “very shrewd, very talented.… He was the liaison between Hezbollah and Iran—and he spent long periods of time in Tehran.” Mughniyeh reportedly learned to speak Farsi like a native Persian. The Iranians even gave him citizenship.