The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (12 page)

We cannot know what motivated Al-Kubaisi to seek out Ames in Aden, but we can know that Ames would have regarded the Iraqi academic as an invaluable source of information about a rising new generation of radical Arab political figures. “
Ames was good at recruitment,” recalled a former Agency officer, “because he sensed how to match up a potential recruit’s interests with his own. He could make a recruit believe that ‘you and I talking’ was the right thing to do.” Al-Kubaisi may have been just one of Ames’s “sources” and not a fully recruited agent. We just know they knew each other in Aden. Al-Kubaisi was probably delighted to find someone who was willing to listen to what he was learning from his research about the ANM. “Bob was a very good listener,” said the Foreign Service officer who had referred Al-Kubaisi to Ames.

That Al-Kubaisi had been educated in America presumably also made him susceptible or open to talking with an American official; he was someone who obviously understood the United States. Perhaps this made him want to help America, and Ames in particular, to understand Arab aspirations. We also know from
a top-secret British Foreign Office memo that Al-Kubaisi had been a source in 1963 for information on the ANM—so he already had some experience in dealing with Western intelligence services. Al-Kubaisi’s obvious sympathy for the ANM and the Palestinian cause gave him entrée to left-wing intellectual circles. And likewise, Ames’s interest in the history of the ANM and his empathy for the Palestinian cause attracted Al-Kubaisi’s interest in the American.
They were a natural fit.

With independence and the departure of the British, it was now safe for Yvonne and the kids to come to Aden. But Bob was nevertheless forced to spend Christmas in Aden alone. He did manage to attend midnight Mass, but he called it “
the most depressing and un-Christmas-like Christmas I have ever spent.” The only present he got was from a colleague who gave him a meerschaum pipe from Turkey. Still, on Christmas morning he wrote Yvonne a satirical ditty taking off from Clement Clarke Moore’s nineteenth-century Christmas poem. Ames’s version was set in Aden, and St. Nicholas was an “agent.”

The poem had Arab gunmen intercepting the “sleigh-driving agent” and confiscating his toy guns. “So lock up this agent, his deer and his sleigh, / and double the guard through the whole holiday.” Sitting in Norwood, Massachusetts, Yvonne was faintly amused. She and the four children finally were allowed into Aden in January 1968 and moved into the spacious Khormaksar house Bob had found. “
Aden was spartan,” Yvonne recalled. “But I loved it. I felt at home in this part of the Middle East. Beirut was a big city, and I am not a big-city girl. But in Aden I didn’t feel confined.” She drove the girls to the Gold Mohur Beach Club and frequently shopped in the duty-free shops in the Port Authority. She had a cook—who turned out to have tuberculosis and infected one of the girls. Yvonne also hired an Ethiopian
ayah
to help her take care of the girls. Bob was out and about every day, but he always spent his evenings at home. “He didn’t share secrets,” said Yvonne, “so that made life normal.”

Even in Aden it was the sixties, and Bob Ames, the CIA case officer,
was not immune to popular culture. He still considered himself a conservative Republican, but he loved pop music, particularly the Beach Boys. He’d also listen to Petula Clark and Glen Campbell. But the Beach Boys was his favorite band. He could sing some of their classics, hitting all the falsetto high notes.

Bob was still the occasional prankster. He could make his little girls squeal with delight by speaking to them in a Donald Duck voice. But he’d never perform his Donald voice on command; he’d only do it spontaneously. One evening at the dinner table he showed the girls his “thumb apart” magic trick. The Ethiopian
ayah
, a woman named Hewit, was feeding baby Karen when she saw Bob “separate” his thumb. “
Her eyes got wide, she threw the spoon up to the ceiling and went screaming out of the room,” Bob wrote. “The kids were hysterical and that was the end of dinner.” By then, the four girls ranged in age from four months to six years. They were a handful. Yvonne had to boil their diapers in a pot over a kerosene burner. She had a wringer washer machine—but no dryer. Every morning the three older children were dressed in white school uniforms and sent off to the convent school run by an order of nuns. Late in November 1968 a very pregnant Yvonne flew alone to Asmara, leaving Bob to look after the girls. The medical facilities at Kagnew Station were thought to be superior to anything in Aden. “Please hurry the baby on its way,” Bob wrote facetiously. “Sit-ups are the best thing, so that you can get home to your family.” A betting pool was established among Aden’s expatriate community on whether Yvonne would have yet another girl. “I think half of Aden is waiting
!” Bob wrote on December 3. “The betting has been brisk.” Six days later, Yvonne gave birth to their first son. They named him Andrew Thomas Ames.

Later that year, Marsh Niner left Aden, and Ames replaced him as chief of station (COS), a significant accomplishment for someone only thirty-four years old.
Dick Roane
was promoted to be his deputy chief of station.
Roane
’s Arabic was not yet as good as Ames’s, but he was on his way to becoming very fluent. They were a good team.
Roane
’s previous post had been just to the north in Sana’a, where his job had
largely been to collect intelligence on SOVMAT—Soviet weapons pouring into the country. He’d spent a lot of his time crawling under Soviet-made tanks and other military equipment, copying down their serial numbers so that analysts back in Langley could build a database on Soviet arms shipments. It was dangerous work, and one day he was kidnapped on the road from Sana’a to Hudaydah. The U.S. government had to pay a sizable sum to ransom him. Despite this experience,
Roane
loved Yemen. He and Ames shared an interest in Middle Eastern history, and they worked well together over the next two years.

Relations between the U.S. consulate—now upgraded to an embassy—and the new government of South Yemen were difficult. In retrospect, it is somewhat extraordinary that the U.S. mission even existed in Aden, given the radical nature of the regime. But finally, on October 24, 1969, the South Yemeni regime broke relations, denouncing the Nixon administration’s decision to sell Phantom jet fighters to Israel. The U.S. chargé d’affaires, William Eagleton, was given twenty-four hours to get out. The seventeen other embassy staff and their dependents were allowed forty-eight hours to leave the country. “
A female police officer arrived at the house and stood in the kitchen while we packed up our things,” Yvonne said. “And then we were escorted to the airport by armed soldiers.” On October 26, 1969, Bob, Yvonne, and their five children boarded a chartered flight for Asmara.

Soon afterwards, Ames flew off to Washington for debriefings at Langley, leaving Yvonne stuck in an Asmara hotel with the children (and their pet cat). When Christmas arrived, they were still camping out in the hotel. Finally, after ten long weeks in the hotel, the Agency arranged for them to move to the army base at Kagnew Station, where at least they could eat all their meals in the army cafeteria. There they sat until late in the spring of 1970, when Ames received travel orders to move his family to Beirut. In the meantime, Bob had spent much of the past year commuting between Washington, Beirut, and Asmara. Yvonne was greatly relieved when in mid-May she finally moved into a
nice apartment on Rue de Californie, just west of the American University of Beirut and within eyesight of Ras Beirut’s landmark lighthouse. The kids were enrolled in the American Community School—well within walking distance. “I let them walk alone,” Yvonne recalled. “I felt safe.” On some evenings they could walk to Uncle Sam’s Diner, a student hangout at the corner of Rue Jeanne d’Arc and Rue Bliss. Faisal’s Restaurant, also on Rue Bliss, right across the street from the American University’s main gate, was another nearby landmark. And Khayyat’s Bookstore was just down the street.

Beirut was not without its hazards even in these pre–civil war days. A Druze Lebanese family lived across the street, and one day Yvonne went to the window when she heard a young woman screaming. She saw the woman struggling with her brother. A moment later shots were fired and Bob hastily pulled Yvonne into the hallway. When they next looked, they could see the woman’s body lying in the street. She had been shot dead. The young woman had “dishonored” the family by having a love affair. A few minutes later, a taxi arrived to whisk the murdering brother away. After the body was removed, there was still blood on the street. “We told the kids the next day,” Yvonne said, “that a truckload of ketchup had accidentally overturned.”

Yvonne had given birth to five children in less than a decade. But she was not yet done. By late November, she was pregnant again. Bob kept very regular hours. “
Most of us case officers worked at night, to see our agents,” observed a CIA case officer who knew Ames. “Not Bob. He was devoted to his family. He would come home, go to his study and decompress a bit by reading, and then he’d have dinner. He saw his agents during the day.”

Another CIA case officer, Sam Wyman, once asked Ames how he found the time to read books. “Oh, I always make time to read—at least an hour a day,” Bob replied. Wyman was another of the Agency’s few Arabists. (At any one time, the CIA had only twelve to thirteen Arabic speakers in the Directorate of Operations.) Wyman’s father had been an army intelligence officer stationed in Cairo—where Wyman spent part of his childhood after World War II. Wyman had gone to
Georgetown University and then earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University. He also spent two years studying Arabic at the University of Baghdad, so he had much more formal training in Arabic than Ames. He’d joined the CIA in 1965. But Ames was probably the more fluent Arabist. “
We used to try to come up with Arabic puns and little limericks,” recalled Wyman. “We had a lot of fun together playing with the language.” Both men also enjoyed listening to the popular Lebanese singer Fayrouz. Wyman still has in his possession an Arabic lexicon that once belonged to Ames; the blank pages at the back of the volume are filled with Bob’s neat, tiny handwriting—lists of Arabic words with his own translations.

In Beirut, Ames was working under Station Chief Gene Burgstaller, who was very much an old-school veteran case officer. He’d served in Berlin and later was chief of station in Paris. Ames admired him and thought he’d built a good team in Beirut Station. His fellow officer from Aden, Henry Miller-Jones, was also living in Beirut. Miller-Jones studied Arabic for a full year and then was peremptorily ordered to replace another case officer assigned to recruiting agents in Syria. This was a tough job, since Syria was deemed a no-travel zone for Agency officers. Too dangerous. So Miller-Jones also was instructed to target potential agents who could pass on any information about Soviet activities in the Middle East. Ames scoffed at this mission; he thought the Soviets were a decidedly secondary target in a place like Beirut.

Richard Zagorin
, another member of Beirut Station that year, lived down the street from Ames in Ras Beirut. “
I was in awe of Bob,”
Zagorin
said. “I’d studied Arabic, but I knew Ames knew Arabic. And I knew Ames understood the Arab world. He was a guy who knew his stuff.”
Zagorin
had attended the language school in Beirut, and with the outbreak of the June War he’d joined the station. The station chief had called him in to help shred classified papers.
Zagorin
had entered the CIA because he had an acquaintance, Bill Bromell, who served in the Directorate of Operations and specialized in the Middle East.
Zagorin
admired Bromell, so when the Agency asked which division he’d like to work in,
Zagorin
said the Near East. They gave it to him.
“Beirut in those days,”
Zagorin
said, “was terrific, a great operational climate. It was like a Gilbert and Sullivan show. You could do anything. There was nothing you could do that would land you into trouble. We had a team of very talented people.”