The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  That leaves Ali Reza Asgari, the Revolutionary Guard officer who, according to Mustafa Zein, was the man who initially recruited and groomed Imad Mughniyeh to fight the Americans. Mughniyeh told Zein that the Beirut embassy attack was “Asgari’s operation.” The case of Asgari is an extraordinary one.

  Ali Reza Asgari was born on January 10, 1957, in the small town of Ardestan, in the central province of Isfahan. (In Farsi, Asgari means “soldier.”) He reportedly joined the Revolutionary Guard soon after the 1979 revolution. He arrived in Damascus on June 21, 1982, as a member of an official Iranian military delegation sent to discuss aid for the Lebanese in their war with Israel. Asgari accompanied Iran’s minister of defense, Mohammed Salimi, and two other Iranian officers. Asgari was then a twenty-five-year-old intelligence officer in the Revolutionary Guard. At the time he was already a senior member of the Muhammad Rasoullah Twenty-seventh Brigade. This unit was deployed to Lebanon but never saw combat that summer. That autumn, most of these Revolutionary Guards were ordered back to Iran, where they were needed to fight the Iraqis. But some five hundred IRGC men from two units remained in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Asgari was one of several IRGC commanders who stayed behind in Lebanon. Corroboration of his presence in Lebanon comes from Brig. Gen. Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the current commander in chief of the Iranian national police. This high-ranking Iranian official gave a speech on December 15, 2012, in which he said that Asgari had been sent in 1979 to Iranian Kurdistan, where he helped to suppress the Kurdish uprising of 1979–80. Ahmadi-Moghaddam then explained that Asgari had been deployed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “from Kurdistan to Lebanon” in the early 1980s. Ahmadi-Moghaddam stated that Asgari had set up a program to train young Shi’a Lebanese recruits in the military arts. According to Ahmadi-Moghaddam, his longtime friend Asgari was deeply involved that autumn in the “establishment of Hezbollah as a complete party with all military, intelligence, cultural and political elements.” And according to Mustafa Zein, that is when Asgari met Imad Mughniyeh.

  Former Mossad director general Danny Yatom told the Washington Post, “He [Asgari] held a very, very senior position for many long years in Lebanon. He was in effect the commander of the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon.” Asgari was certainly in Damascus and Lebanon during the summer of 1982 and later that autumn. Iranian press accounts later described Asgari as the deputy chief of the “Qods Force”—the “Jerusalem Force”—a special foreign branch of the Revolutionary Guard. Its mandate was to export Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of Islamic revolution to other parts of the Islamic world. In 1985, Asgari was rewarded with a promotion within the Revolutionary Guard. He spent the entire decade between 1982 and 1992 shuttling between Baalbek and Tehran, directing Iran’s political and military activities in Lebanon—and nurturing the nascent Hezbollah’s military prowess. These were the years, of course, when scores of Americans, French, British, and other Europeans were held hostage, often in the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks, controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Some of these hostages died in captivity. And some were held in solitary confinement for as many as six years. As the former CIA officer Robert Baer wrote in Time magazine, “Asgari was in the IRGC’s chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.” Asgari was a manager, as such, of this hostage business. Asgari admitted as much when on April 11, 1991, he told the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, “Iran has a desire to release the Western hostages as well as Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. But the United States refuses to enter into this issue through a humanitarian window. It wants only to manipulate political interests from this issue.” That same year he was interviewed briefly on the BBC’s Voice of Lebanon, where he was identified as “the Pasdaran commander in Lebanon.” Pasdaran is the Farsi term for the Revolutionary Guard. He told the BBC on this occasion that the Revolutionary Guard “is not a militia; our mission is to train the people to fight Israel.” As Baer has written, Asgari “knows dirty secrets.… Asgari knows a lot about other IRGC-ordered, Lebanon-based terrorist attacks, including the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.” Baer also seems to corroborate Mustafa Zein’s allegation that Asgari was Imad Mughniyeh’s virtual control officer: “Asgari was the primary Iranian contact for one of the world’s most lethal and capable terrorists, Imad Fa’iz Mughniyeh.”

  Oddly enough, Asgari’s role in all these Lebanese events, and his relationship with Mughniyeh, remained shrouded from public view—until, that is, he defected to the West in 2007.

  By 1997, Asgari had become a brigadier general and a deputy minister of defense in Tehran. He occupied this position until 2002, when he fell out of favor and left the Defense Ministry. For the next two years he worked inside the Kala-Electricity company, an entity deeply involved in Iran’s nuclear energy program. But in 2004 Asgari was arrested and he spent eighteen months in prison. Upon his release he reportedly went into business trading olive oil, and he briefly wrote a Farsi-language blog. During these years he was clearly disaffected with the regime, and particularly with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, his former rival in the Revolutionary Guard who became president in 2005. Asgari may have been recruited by a Western intelligence agency as early as 2003. In any case, on February 7, 2007, Asgari traveled from Tehran to Damascus and then on to Istanbul, where he checked in to a hotel. He then vanished. Various newspapers soon reported that the CIA and Mossad had whisked away the Iranian general first to Europe, and then to America. “It was an organized defection,” said Uri Lubrani, a former Israeli ambassador to Iran. “Everything was prepared, and his family sought refuge abroad before he did.” The Washington Post quoted a “senior U.S. official” as saying that Asgari was “willingly cooperating.”

  A former CIA clandestine officer, Vincent Cannistraro, told the London Guardian that Asgari was a “longtime Western intelligence agent.” Cannistraro later elaborated that “[any] Iranian defector was highly valued because of the terrorism by Iran and the information one might have on the nuclear issue.” The Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman reported that in 2006 Asgari gave the Americans actionable intelligence that made possible the arrest of Revolutionary Guard officers in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil. A former European counterintelligence officer told Le Figaro, “This type of defection requires at least two years of preparation.… This is the coup that all agencies dream of.”

  The actual story of Asgari’s defection may be more prosaic. Erich Follath and Holger Stark, two reporters from the German magazine Der Spiegel, wrote about the case in 2009. Their key source is another Iranian defector, Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, who fled Iran in 2003 and ended up in Berlin, where he became, according to a Los Angeles Times story, “a valuable asset for Western intelligence agencies and analysts seeking information on the Islamic Republic. He was in regular contact with Western officials and a circle of neoconservative activists.” Ebrahimi and his friends established a “Salvation Committee” to aid Iranian defectors. Perhaps Asgari had heard of Ebrahimi’s Salvation Committee. But he apparently had met the Iranian years earlier in Beirut. As a young man, Ebrahimi had briefly served as a press attaché in the Iranian embassy in Beirut. It was during this period that he first met Asgari. “We were at the [Iranian] embassy together in Beirut in the mid 1990s,” Ebrahimi later told a reporter. “That’s where we knew each other. That’s why General Asgari called me when he was in Damascus.… He reminded me that we had been together in Beirut.” Asgari told him he didn’t want to return to Iran—so Ebrahimi set in motion a simple plan to extract the general. He told him to rent a car and drive to Istanbul. Asgari had to pay a Turkish border guard a $1,500 bribe to get into Turkey without a visa. Ebrahimi then arranged for a U.S. embassy official to meet with Asgari.

  The Iranian brigadier general was flown from Istanbul to the Rein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt. Greeted by Ebrahimi, he reportedly said, “I brought my computer along. My entire life is there.” Just hours after his
arrival in Germany, Asgari was whisked to Washington, D.C.

  Asgari reportedly brought with him Iranian intelligence documents containing information about Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Iran’s uranium-enrichment program. The CIA knew exactly whom they were getting. A Mossad officer, Ram Igra, said, “He lived in Lebanon and, in effect, was the man who built, promoted and founded Hezbollah in those years. If he has something to give the West, it is in this context of terrorism and Hezbollah’s network in Lebanon.”

  Asgari was brought to a CIA safe house near Washington, D.C., and was extensively debriefed. Among other things, he revealed that Iran had built a new centrifuge enrichment plant near Natanz and that Iranian engineers were also attempting to enrich uranium using lasers, an expensive and time-consuming process. He also provided evidence that convinced some in the CIA that Iran was helping Syria to develop nuclear weapons. A German defense-ministry official revealed that Asgari brought evidence that Iran was financing the transfer of North Korean nuclear technology to Syria. This intelligence reportedly led to the September 6, 2007, Israeli air strike on a Syrian nuclear reactor. In short, Asgari was regarded by many in the intelligence community as an extraordinary source of intelligence on the Islamic Republic.

  Asgari may also have provided the information the Mossad needed to assassinate Imad Mughniyeh. This information reportedly included Mughniyeh’s cell phone numbers and recent photographs. “It may be no coincidence,” Ronen Bergman wrote in the New York Times, “that the Damascus operation [meaning Mughniyeh’s assassination] followed the apparent defection to the United States last year of an Iranian general, Ali Reza Asgari, who in the 1980s had helped Mr. Mughniyeh establish Hezbollah as a military force in Lebanon.”

  Washington intelligence sources refuse to confirm or deny that Asgari may have been paid a portion of the $5 million reward money offered for Mughniyeh’s capture or death by the State Department’s Rewards for Justice antiterrorism program. Asgari remains in the United States, probably living under a CIA agent-protection program. He made phone calls to his friend Ebrahimi on two occasions after his defection, once from Washington, D.C., and again from “somewhere in Texas.” Asgari reportedly wanted Ebrahimi to assure his second wife that he was in good health. He has since disappeared.

  The decision to give Asgari political asylum under the CIA’s Public Law 110 program was probably opposed by veteran CIA officers who had some knowledge of Asgari’s alleged responsibility for Robert Ames’s murder. But they and the Agency were reportedly overruled by the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council. This was not, however, the kind of decision anyone in the intelligence community, including the director of central intelligence, could have made on their own. Granting asylum to a man with Asgari’s résumé was a political call that could only have been made in the White House. Some of President Bush’s NSC advisers evidently believed that the intelligence Asgari brought to the table on the Iranian nuclear program was essential to the national defense. In effect, national security needs trumped whatever loyalty the U.S. government owed to the memory of Robert Ames and all of Asgari’s other victims in the Beirut embassy and marine barracks bombings. It was a cold calculation. When one high-level intelligence official in the Bush White House was asked about Asgari’s asylum, he responded, “At the unclassified level, I cannot elaborate on the issue.”

  When told that a man with Asgari’s résumé was now living in America, one retired CIA officer—a man who’d known and deeply admired Bob Ames—shrugged his shoulders and said simply, “Well, it happens.” Fred Hutchinson, the former CIA general counsel who’d urged Ames’s promotion in 1981, had this observation: “The value of information that Asgari could provide and the symbolic importance of his defection to the CIA would have outweighed personal feelings about his involvement with the embassy attack.”

  But others were surprised and disheartened. Schmuel Litani, a veteran Mossad officer, observed, “When faced in life with the unexplainable, you can ascribe it to either stupidity or malice. But usually the better explanation is simple stupidity. Yes, Asgari is in America. Why? Well, you should ask the Americans.”

  No one in Washington wants to address this question. It’s an official secret. But what happened to Asgari is a generic secret. Dealing with bad guys is part of spy craft. If you are seeking information about bad things, you necessarily seek out bad guys. But there’s always a decision made about the trade-off. Bob Ames befriended Ali Hassan Salameh, someone whose résumé at the time spelled “bad guy.” But most people would probably agree today that Ames’s calculation was a moral one. He was bringing Salameh in from the cold to a place where he could end violence and bring some definition of justice for his people: a two-state solution to the Palestinian conundrum.

  Dealing with Asgari is an entirely different equation. Unlike Salameh, this man is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of Americans and many others. No doubt, some intelligence officer somewhere is making the case that by dealing with Asgari, America can avert a war or save some lives. But it’s also just as likely that Asgari’s “intell” became stale almost as soon as he defected—so it may become yet another sad story from the wilderness of mirrors.

  * * *

  * The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson reported on these intercepts. Casey was furious over the leak of such highly classified information. Tipped off that their communications were being intercepted, the Iranians fixed the breach, and soon this source of intercept intelligence dried up.

  Epilogue

  Yvonne Ames today lives in a comfortable, but decidedly modest, cottage in rural North Carolina. Two of her children, Adrienne and Kevin, live nearby. She spends her days taking care of her grandchildren. She has found some solace in her religious faith. At the dinner table, she says a simple grace. She rarely hears from any of Bob’s Agency friends. After Bob’s murder, the CIA offered her a choice between an annual pension or a lump-sum payment. Perhaps unwisely, she chose the lump sum. That money ran out a long time ago.

  “I was overcome by the responsibility of having five children at home; and until then I had always thought I was very strong, but that’s when I realized that the strength of the family came from Bob’s presence. He was dependable. He was reliable. He was someone you could turn to, you could lean on, and whatever children’s problems there were, I could go to him to get help. And that was gone, and it became my responsibility. It was frightening.

  “I was raised in a military family, and I learned that you kept a stiff upper lip when things went wrong. And Bob also had that demeanor … and I just carried it through. To me, that was my coping mechanism. We did not take time to grieve.

  “I went to work almost immediately afterwards. I lasted about a month when I realized it was just too much.” Yvonne eventually went back to work on a part-time basis.

  Sixteen months after Bob’s murder, Yvonne married a man she’d known before she met Bob. She felt that with five children at home there should be a man in the house. Andrew asked her to wait until he graduated from high school. “He wanted to be the man in the house,” Yvonne said. But she thought he needed to be “the young man, and not the man of the house.” She later regretted her decision to remarry so quickly. The new husband was the “polar opposite of Bob,” Yvonne said. “There were too many changes too soon.” The marriage was rough going, and after twelve years it ended in divorce.

  In retrospect, Yvonne believes she made a mistake in not confronting her grief. “So the stiff upper lip is not a good way to go. It is better to feel the pain and face the reality and heal. I think as a result of that, none of us have healed. None.”

  When Anne Dammarell wrote her a letter asking her to join the civil suit against Iran, Yvonne was initially opposed to the idea. She did not like the notion of a lawsuit. But after talking with Anne on the phone, and thinking about it for a month, she changed her mind. In 2003, she told Judge John D. Bates during the trial, “My reasoning for going ahead with it is that in order to deter or
even hope to begin to deter the terrorists, the money has to be stopped.” But she also thought that the act of publicly testifying might help her and her grown children heal. “Not only is it something that I now believe in, it is also a process of personal healing. And I thank you, Judge, for hearing us today.”

  In September 2003, Judge Bates awarded Yvonne Ames and her children a total of $38,249,000 in compensatory damages. But she hasn’t seen a penny of this money. The Islamic Republic of Iran has ignored the U.S. court decisions in such cases, and the lawyer in the civil suit, Stu Newberger, has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to seize Iranian assets in America or abroad. Newberger says he’s still hopeful. So perhaps someday Yvonne and her children will be awarded this compensation.

  When I first contacted Yvonne Ames about writing a book about her late husband, she was hesitant. She said she’d never spoken to any reporters or historians about Bob. She did not wish to divulge secrets. Instinctively, she was still the CIA spouse, reticent and protective of the Agency. In recent years she has occasionally accepted invitations to attend ceremonies at Langley marking the anniversaries of the Beirut embassy bombing. She knows that Bob devoted twenty-three years—most of his adult life—to the CIA. She bears no animosity toward the institution.

  But thirty years have passed since the Beirut tragedy, and now she wants people to know what Bob Ames did with his life. More important, she wants her children to know what he did. “Bob appears in my dreams even now. He appears—initially, it was [as if] he had come back from hiding, and my concern was: But I’ve remarried. What do I do now? But lately, he appears, and it’s just a comfort.”