The Secret Life of Robert Ames
The story of the American spy's contacts with the PLO underscores the necessity of talking to adversaries.
Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (New York: Crown, 2014), 448 pp., $26.00.
THE SECRET WORLD OF CLANDESTINE OPERATORS and the more public world of statesmen intersect in a number of ways. The gathering of useful information through espionage is well known, but the clandestine operator can also help take action and not just inform it. Sometimes what he or she does is given a formal structure and called covert action. At other times the help is less formal, such as making contacts and opening channels of communication that the statesman cannot, for one reason or another, embrace openly or directly. An inspired and skillful operator can make important things happen.
What the operator can accomplish, however, is ultimately limited by the political constraints that apply to the statesmen for whom he or she works. Inspiration and skill can open promising avenues, but the constraints may keep them from being fully explored. The clandestine operator, exposed to dangers that typify the spy world when the action is hottest and the opportunities greatest, is as likely to experience tragedy as triumph.
Of course, the intrigue and danger of that world have provided material for an entire genre of fiction. David Ignatius launched a successful second career as a writer of spy novels withAgents of Innocence, which is based on events in the Middle East he had covered as a journalist. Set mostly in Beirut in the 1970s, the story involves American intelligence officers trying to swim through a cauldron of conflict involving Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs. Although this novel was a roman à clef, Ignatius could take the fiction writer’s prerogative of bending the story in his preferred directions.
Now Kai Bird has written a vivid nonfictional account of many of those same events. Bird demonstrated his chops as a biographer with a national-security specialty in earlier books on John J. McCloy, the Bundy brothers and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He centers The Good Spy on Robert Ames, the CIA operations officer who did more than anyone else to open a channel of communication between the United States and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) at a time when the need for such a channel and the perils of opening it were both great. It is a reflection of the drama of this patch of history as well as Bird’s skill in rendering it that the book is as compelling a read as most spy novels. Not detracting from its page-turning quality is our knowledge of the protagonist’s tragic end: his death in the rubble of the U.S. embassy in Beirut when a truck bomb demolished it in 1983.
Ames is less well known to the public than several other American intelligence officers of his and earlier generations, including ones who had operated in the same part of the world and accomplished no more than he had. Probably the main reason for this difference is that those other officers lived to write their own books and Ames did not. Bird’s volume fills that gap; while he presents other perspectives he is consistently sympathetic toward the mission Ames saw himself performing and Ames’s views of the best way of doing so.
The Good Spy depicts multiple and often-conflicting considerations that go into planning and conducting clandestine operations, a diversity of opinions that often exist internally about how to conduct them and complexity in the CIA’s relations with its policy-making customers. The book also describes the personal stresses that accompany the life of a clandestine operator, including geographic separation from a spouse while trying to support a family (which in Ames’s case included six children) on a government salary.
The principal contribution of Bird’s book, however, is to illuminate earlier chapters of a political and diplomatic story that challenges U.S. policy makers to this day. It is the story of the United States being caught between Israel and its regional adversaries as those enemies have waged war against each other both openly and in the shadows. The United States has suffered as a result at a personal level—as with the victims of the bombing of the embassy in Beirut—and at the level of its own broader foreign-policy interests. The United States has been handicapped in coping with this uncomfortable situation because it often has lacked effective communications with parties that it really should talk to. That handicap is partly the product of deference to Israeli sensibilities and partly due to Americans’ own notions of who ought to be shunned as an enemy.
Bird’s reportage relies on the cooperation of Ames’s widow, including access to personal correspondence. Many of the book’s intimate looks at the perceptions and opinions of Ames come in the form of quotations from letters to his wife. Bird also conducted interviews with dozens of former officers, some identified by name and some not, who worked with Ames. The author’s only direct contact with his principal subject took place long ago and was nonsubstantive—in Bird’s youth as the teenage son of a U.S. diplomat at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when he lived next door to Ames. Bird knew him as a young officer who liked to play basketball with the consulate’s Marine guards.
Although the operations Bird describes occurred more than three decades ago, they remain sufficiently in the shadows that readers who were not involved in them—this reviewer included—cannot independently assess their accuracy. A few of Bird’s subthemes about the CIA seem to be grounded more in cliché and conventional wisdom than in reporting. Elsewhere, however, Bird is appropriately agnostic about events whose details remain unclear.
LITTLE ABOUT THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT AMES POINTED to the sort of role he would later play in Middle East policy and diplomacy. He grew up in Philadelphia and attended college locally at La Salle University, where the basketball was serious—Ames played on a team that included a future NBA professional. Inducted into the army, he was assigned to a signals-intelligence facility in Eritrea, where in his spare time he began learning the Arabic he heard spoken by townspeople in Asmara. He developed an itch to work someday in the lands on the other side of the Red Sea. Once out of the military, he worked as a repo man for an insurance company. He applied to the Foreign Service but failed the written entrance exam. The CIA hired him in 1960.
Ames had several of the qualities that make for an excellent intelligence officer. He had a flair for learning foreign languages and would become highly proficient in Arabic. He liked making contacts with a lot of strangers, increasing the odds of contacts growing into friendships and lasting relationships. That, in turn, increased the odds of some of these relationships yielding useful information or leading to still other contacts that would yield it. He had a genuine yen for wandering the streets of dusty and even dangerous places. He was a good listener and an avid reader who easily absorbed and digested information about subjects in which he was keenly interested, and he was fascinated by the Middle East.
After duty in Dhahran and Aden, Ames was assigned to Beirut. There in late 1969 he met a Lebanese Shiite named Mustafa Zein, who would function as, in the words of another CIA officer, “Ames’s Sancho Panza” for the next fourteen years: Zein would become the model for a major character in Ignatius’s novel, and would later become one of Bird’s major sources of information about Robert Ames.
Zein grew up in a moderately wealthy family in southern Lebanon. He learned English attending an American school in Lebanon before graduating from high school and college in the United States. He stayed there and became one of the leaders of the New York–based Organization of Arab Students. He became more actively involved in issues related to the Palestinians. While still in his twenties he started acquiring powerful acquaintances in the Middle East, meeting Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser during a stint in Cairo and then landing a job as an adviser to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, where he served as an interlocutor with American and British interests seeking to make deals in the oil-rich emirate. Zein’s subsequent endeavors, bringing him back to Lebanon and later again to New York, spanned the worlds of international politics and business.
Zein’s entrepreneurial talent for making contacts in high places made him an ideal candidate to be what intelligence officers call an access agent: someone whose main value lies not in having useful first-hand information himself but instead in identifying and facilitating relationships with others who do. Access agents may be put on the payroll of an intelligence service just as primary, information-providing agents typically are. It appears, however, that Zein never entered into a paid relationship with the United States, and with his business success he was not in need of the money anyway. Bird quotes testimony in court (related to a lawsuit many years later involving Zein) from a CIA official stating that “Mustafa Zein never received any monies for his efforts. The basis for Mr. Zein’s collaboration with the Agency has been his desire for the United States to comprehend and sympathize with the Arab and Palestinian perspective on the situation in the Middle East.”
This sort of relationship suited Ames as well. He was not a standout operations officer as measured by the number of fully recruited spies he put on the roster. He believed that useful information often could be more easily obtained, and useful business more readily conducted, by maintaining a relationship on the basis of friendship and parallel interests rather than formal recruitment. This outlook was at times a source of disagreement between Ames and other officers in the clandestine service at the CIA. But it would govern Ames’s dealings with Zein for the rest of his life.
BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT of the contacts that Zein would facilitate was with a young, energetic, flamboyant, cosmopolitan, womanizing Palestinian named Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh was a member of the Revolutionary Council of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, the largest of the resistance groups under the umbrella of the PLO. Salameh’s principal responsibility was to try to develop Fatah’s nascent intelligence organization, later called Force 17, into a professional intelligence organization. That role by itself would obviously have made Salameh of interest to the CIA. But during the 1970s Salameh’s broader influence within Fatah grew to the point that some considered him second in importance only to Arafat himself.
According to Bird’s account, there would not be a recruitment, and Salameh would not be a paid agent any more than Zein. But when Zein brought Ames and Salameh together, it was the start of a decade-long relationship that provided a hidden and tempered (but important and otherwise missing) means of communication between the Palestinian nationalist movement and the United States. The incentive that Ames held out to Salameh for having the relationship was nothing material but instead the argument that, as Bird puts it, “You Arabs claim your views are not heard in Washington. Here is your chance. The president of the United States is listening.” Ames, the U.S. point man at the start of this relationship, kept a hand in it even after he moved on to other assignments.
The extent to which the president of the United States really was listening is one of the factual lacunae that Bird acknowledges and does not attempt to fill with a made-up narrative. He assesses that the CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, would very likely have informed Richard Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, of the contact. Kissinger says nothing of this in his memoirs, but Bird’s assessment is probably correct; however much distrust of the PLO there was at the White House, the channel was too important and potentially useful to disregard.
From the perspective of today, two decades after Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, regular communication between the Palestinian leadership and the U.S. government seems unexceptional and uncontroversial. The absence of such communication would be an anomaly that disables U.S. diplomacy on a subject that is very important to U.S. interests. But Ames established his channel more than two decades beforethe handshake, when any official and openly acknowledged U.S. contact with the PLO was considered out of the question. The organization was viewed as a manifestation of international terrorism, to be shunned or combated rather than accepted as an interlocutor or the instrument of a legitimate nationalist aspiration.
Underlying this American posture was intense Israeli opposition against contacts with the PLO. Israel spared no effort, up to and including assassination, to prevent or destroy any U.S. channel with the Palestinians. Salameh thus became a prime Israeli target. Probably the first Israeli attempt to kill him was in 1971, using a Mossad-constructed letter bomb. Salameh—whom Zein says was warned by Ames to be wary of letter bombs—did not open it and instead had it x-rayed.
The kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by an offshoot of Fatah called Black September accelerated the Israeli assassination campaign against Palestinians (with Black September striking back, with less effectiveness, against the Israelis). The Israelis, among others, believed that Salameh had a role in the Munich incident; Bird examines the evidence and concludes that he probably did not. But it didn’t matter as far as Salameh’s eventual fate was concerned, because the Israelis had their other reasons to kill him, including their determination to abort any dialogue between the United States and the PLO. They tried again to do so in 1973 but bungled the attempt when a Mossad hit team, in a case of mistaken identity, shot an innocent Moroccan waiter to death in Norway. The negative publicity from this incident led the assassination teams to stand down temporarily.
BY THE MID-1970s the value of doing business with Arafat and the PLO had become increasingly apparent—including to Henry Kissinger, who built on the Salameh channel by authorizing some other secret contacts with PLO emissaries. By 1974 Arafat had shut down Black September, the Palestine National Council had adopted a “ten-point plan” that implicitly accepted Israel’s existence and marked a step toward a negotiated two-state solution, and the Arab League had recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” For Ames it was a time of hope and of satisfaction in his own role in generating some diplomatic movement. These sentiments were tempered by his disappointment that the movement was only slow and incremental. The disappointment was well founded; in retrospect, it is hard to see how much of the diplomacy that would wait until the 1990s should not have been accomplished in the 1970s.
On the U.S. side the slowness was due partly to hang-ups about what the PLO should say explicitly and not just implicitly. It was also partly due to uncertainty over the shape that Palestinian self-determination might take, and especially what the implications would be for the kingdom of Jordan. The idea of Jordan becoming “the Palestinian state” was still out there, even though the PLO’s ten-point plan also implicitly recognized that a separate Jordan was there to stay. U.S. policy makers as well as intelligence officers had differing sentiments about this, which tended to correlate with who had been their partners in doing business—and striking up friendships. Ames was sympathetic chiefly to the Palestinians. A different perspective, one sympathetic to the Jordanian monarchy, can be found in the posthumously published King’s Counsel by Jack O’Connell, who had been the CIA’s station chief in Amman and a longtime confidant of the late king Hussein.
Meanwhile, the resistance to talking directly with the PLO persisted. When Jimmy Carter negotiated language in the Camp David accords that tentatively addressed Palestinian political rights, he was negotiating with an Egyptian president, not a Palestinian. Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was forced to resign in 1979—ten years after the first meeting between Ames and Salameh—when Israel leaked word that Young had held a single meeting with the PLO’s representative to the UN.
The Israelis had not forgotten Salameh. They finally got their target in 1979 with a remotely detonated car bomb that also killed eight other people in a Beirut street. Bird’s account tells us that the Mossad agent who did the detonation, a woman who went by the name Erika Chambers and is living today in Israel, was chosen for the mission because in practice sessions she did a better job of pushing the button at the right moment than the men did.
Even with Salameh dead, the usefulness to the United States of secret contacts with the PLO continued. The usefulness became all the greater with the outbreak in 1975 of civil war in Lebanon, to which the PLO had retreated after King Hussein forcibly pushed it out of Jordan. U.S. diplomats and other Americans in Lebanon became partly dependent on the Palestinians for their security. The mess and danger in Lebanon became messier and more dangerous with multiple Israeli invasions of the country. This was especially true of the war of 1982, which featured Ariel Sharon’s relentless offensive to try to crush the PLO once and for all, and the Israelis’ firing of flares that enabled Christian militias to do by night the work that became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Amid the chaos, the United States still had the handicap of not being able to deal openly and directly with the PLO. Bird describes the heroic and necessarily convoluted efforts of the U.S. diplomat Philip Habib to negotiate the departure of the PLO from Lebanon, amid warnings from Sharon that he would send his army into West Beirut if Habib talked directly to any PLO official.
BY THIS TIME ROBERT AMES HAD made a career change that partly reflected his modest prospects, despite his accomplishments, for further advancement in the clandestine service; some in the service considered him “too intellectual,” even though he had no graduate degree. Ames sought, and was appointed to, the position of national intelligence officer (NIO) for the Near East and South Asia. The NIOs are senior officials at the National Intelligence Council responsible for coordinating analysis and policy support across the intelligence community for their regional or functional subject. I did some work for Ames at the council and later would fill the same NIO position myself. A more unusual move was when Ames was later made, for what would be the last year and a half of his life, director of the CIA’s analytic office covering the Near East and South Asia. He had exchanged the streets of the Middle East for corridors in Washington as his operating milieu.
Ames thrived in that milieu, quickly gaining—largely through his on-the-ground knowledge of the region—credibility and access with senior figures in Ronald Reagan’s administration. This was especially true of George Shultz, who became Reagan’s secretary of state in 1982. Shultz was a tough, doubting customer of intelligence who was turned off by tendencies to politicize intelligence under CIA director William Casey and Casey’s protégé Robert Gates. After Gates became acting director following Casey’s death, Shultz told him, “I feel you try to manipulate me. So you have a very dissatisfied customer. If this were a business, I’d find myself another supplier.” But Robert Ames earned Shultz’s respect for his substantive command of Middle Eastern topics in general and Palestinian matters in particular, even though Shultz writes in his memoir that his distrust of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership prompted him to oppose initially even secret contacts with the PLO.
Shultz describes how on the day he was sworn in as secretary of state—and having to deal immediately with the crisis in Lebanon—his first telephone calls were to a few experts, including Ames, to help him to think fresh thoughts about the Middle East. Ames became a regular member of a small group of policy planners that Shultz assembled to shape a Reagan administration “peace plan” aimed not only at dealing with the Lebanese mess but also at building on the Camp David accords to make progress toward settling the Israeli-Palestinian issue. In these discussions Ames’s urging was mostly in the direction of more contact, more engagement and more effort to resolve the Palestinian problem.
Although Ames, while in his senior Washington jobs, occasionally made trips to New York to meet with Zein, by the spring of 1983 it had been more than four years since he had been in the Middle East. He thought that was too long; he wanted to make a trip back to the region to get a feel for the current “ground truth.” Zein was temporarily back in Lebanon and wished to set up a meeting for Ames with the new Lebanese president, Amin Gemayel, even though the security situation in Beirut had made the city, in Bird’s words, a “veritable hellhole.” Ames did not have any other official business in Beirut, but colleagues advised him to visit the CIA to avoid it looking like a snub.
Thus Ames was in the U.S. embassy building at midday on April 18, when a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck up the steps of the embassy and detonated two thousand pounds of explosives, shearing off the front of the building and causing several floors to collapse. Bird’s account of the day of the attack is detailed, wrenching and poignant. He traces the actions before the bomb went off of several of the other sixteen Americans who died with Ames (along with forty-six non-Americans) and others who were severely wounded, as well as the responses of some of the other Americans who were not at the embassy at the time of the attack. One of the latter was a CIA officer on temporary duty who would go to the morgue to retrieve a ring and a necklace from Ames’s body, which she brought back to give to his family.
The bombing of the embassy marked the beginning of a chapter in which the collateral damage to Americans of the Israeli-Arab conflict came partly through the hands of Shia extremists in Lebanon. Several causes contributed to the rise of that brand of extremism in the early 1980s and the emergence of the organization we know now as Hezbollah, but Israel’s actions and relationship with the United States unquestionably were a major factor. Bird quotes later testimony from Robert Dillon, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon at the time, who survived the blast and had to reconstitute the embassy’s operations after climbing out from under the debris. “We were very much identified with the Israelis, particularly among the Shias,” explained Dillon. “There was huge resentment of the Israelis by this time in southern Lebanon.” An even higher price in terms of the number of American dead—the highest from any terrorist attack until 9/11—came six months later when a truck bomb at the Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 U.S. servicemen.
A narrow focus on one variety of international terrorism emanating from the Middle East had helped give rise to another brand of it. Policies of shunning or crushing a Palestinian movement that had practiced the first variety, and efforts to expel that movement from its place of exile in Lebanon, boosted the early growth of Shia terrorism. And one of the first victims was an intelligence officer who had contributed significantly to trying to break the whole deadly cycle.
Even as Arafat and the PLO were leaving their Lebanese exile for far-off Tunisia, the decisions that needed to be taken to break the cycle were not adopted. In August 1982, Shultz called in Israeli ambassador Moshe Arens to tell him that with Arafat’s departure from Lebanon imminent, it was a good time to “revitalize” the peace process. Arens disagreed: “Look, we have wiped the PLO from the scene. Don’t you Americans now pick the PLO up, dust it off, and give it artificial respiration.” It would take another decade and a change of Israeli leadership to get to the Oslo process, the signing of a declaration of principles on Palestinian self-government and the handshake on the White House lawn before a beaming Bill Clinton.
BIRD BEGINS HIS BOOK WITH a prologue about what was happening in the Near East Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations on the day of the handshake. Chagrined that there was no CIA representation at the White House ceremony—despite the agency’s contributions to the diplomatic achievement being observed—the division chief, Frank Anderson, organized on the spur of the moment an observance in which his own people could participate. About three dozen officers piled into a bus and rode to Arlington National Cemetery. There they visited first the grave of Robert Ames, and then the graves of the other CIA officers killed in the embassy bombing as well as of William Buckley, the later CIA station chief in Beirut who was kidnapped in 1984 and tortured before dying in captivity. The trip to the cemetery was intended as an homage to the dead as well as an inspiration to the younger officers on the bus.
Too often the contributions of people in that profession are, as on that day, insufficiently recognized by the public, although Bird’s volume is a helpful partial corrective. And too often the insights and access that intelligence officers may provide are not followed up with the necessary political decisions for them to have any beneficial effect. On the latter subject Bird cites a cynical comment from Graham Fuller, who also had a career in clandestine operations in the Middle East before becoming the NIO for the Near East and South Asia (later than Ames and earlier than I). “You have this notion,” says Fuller, “that all you need to do is get the right skinny, the right facts before the policy makers, and things would change. You think you can make a difference. But gradually, you realize that the policy makers don’t care. And then the revelation hits you that U.S. foreign policy is not fact-driven.”
In the two decades since that White House ceremony we have had Sharon’s stroll on the Temple Mount, the second intifada, the breakdown of the Oslo process and plenty of reason for pessimism about an Israeli-Palestinian peace process going anywhere. We have come full circle back to several features of Middle East conflict that prevailed in Robert Ames’s day. These include the festering Palestinian issue being an oft-cited motivation for anti-American terrorism, although the terrorists today are more likely to be Sunni than Shia. They also include an Israeli posture of all threats and pressure and no engagement with its principal adversaries of the day, including Hamas and the government of Iran; the United States has gone along with the Israeli posture on the first and broken with that posture only recently on the second. There is even a war of assassinations, including botched ones, such as the Israeli attempt to kill Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal in 1997, and successful (in the sense that the intended targets are dead) ones, such as the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists.
We do not know what work members of the American clandestine service may be doing today to try to blaze routes away from such futile and deadly paths. But we should hope that any such work, for the sake of its effectiveness, stays secret for now—and that years later the stories will be told by a biographer as adept as Bird.
Paul R. Pillar is a contributing editor at The National Interest. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.
Image: Flickr/Zach Copley. CC BY-SA 2.0.