The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (34 page)

Ames was naturally frustrated and discouraged by what he was experiencing in Beirut. “It seems a paradox,” he wrote Yvonne, “to say that one is both busy and bored at the same time, but I am.… I’ve been working as hard as I ever have in Beirut, long hours and lots of reading and writing, but I just don’t have the same enthusiasm or feeling of accomplishment. I get the feeling that I’ve written all this and done all this too many times before. There are no changes in the situation; it’s still as bad as it was and the USG does not appear to be prepared to bite the bullet and do something about it—and nothing will change until we do.” It wasn’t clear whether Ames was referring to the
Lebanese situation or the old Palestinian conundrum—or both. But his malaise was deep-felt.

Something else was also bothering Ames. He’d applied late that spring for a new job in the Agency, the position of national intelligence officer (NIO) for NESA. This was a new position within what the Agency called the National Intelligence Council (NIC). As deputy chief of the Near East for Arab Operations, Ames felt he had hit a glass ceiling inside the DO. He was Dewey Clarridge’s number-one deputy, but he felt that both Clarridge and his boss, Alan Wolfe—chief of the Near East Division in the DO—would never allow him to rise higher in the DO. Clarridge just didn’t see Ames as a real operational officer. Neither did Wolfe. “
Both men acknowledged Bob’s immense other talents,” recalled another DO officer, Henry Miller-Jones, “and both deferred to him in his handling of MJTRUST/2 [Salameh]. But Wolfe would not back him for a senior DO management position.” They knew Ames was smart and competent, but they thought he was just too bookish for the DO. And they also thought that he should have been able to turn Salameh into a fully recruited agent. In their eyes, he had failed the recruitment.

“
Bob had a reputation in the DO of being too smart, too much of an intellectual,” recalled
Lindsay Sherwin
, who later worked with him. Ames liked operations, and he thought he was good at it. But he believed clandestine work had to have a purpose larger than the simple “Great Game.” The point was to influence the course of history—to create a better world. He really believed this. He wanted his covert intelligence to persuade the policy makers to make good decisions. By the summer of 1978, Ames felt that American policy in the Middle East had run into a dead end. His TDY trip to Beirut had brought these feelings to the surface: “
I really haven’t enjoyed anything about this TDY except an occasional good session with our friend [Salameh].” For all these reasons, he was anxious to hear about the new job. He thought he’d make a good fit. The new organization was not part of the DO, but neither was it in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI). The whole idea was to gather a handful of the Agency’s best people—both covert
case officers and analysts—and get them to think about the broad picture. They would have access to everything from both the DO and the DI. But the council would also seek out academics and journalists outside the Agency. “
After you have been around for a while,” said Graham Fuller, who was both a clandestine officer and later an NIO, “you come to realize that all this classified information is not as up to snuff as you once thought. The secret stuff often just doesn’t help to answer the deeper questions. In fact, the questions that really matter are usually unanswerable. Policy makers want to know if the Soviet Union is going to exist ten years from now, or if Anwar Sadat can survive signing a peace treaty with Israel. To get some kind of informed answer to a question like that requires going outside the Agency and finding the most knowledgeable minds around to make an informed judgment. I’d see a lot of academics and journalists. Independent thinkers. Being an NIO is a very stimulating job. You suddenly realize that some of these people without access to any classified information know a hell of a lot.”

The NIC was supposed to provide policy makers with a truly independent view of what was happening around the world. It was sort of a throwback to the Agency’s very early Board of National Estimates, when Yale’s Sherman “Buffalo” Kent and Harvard’s Bill Langer had hired a select number of regional experts to provide Washington with global intelligence estimates. When told in 1950 that he could hire a staff of hundreds, Langer replied in his high-pitched Dorchester Boston twang, “
Well, I can’t possibly do the job with more than twenty-five people.” Like the Board of National Estimates, the new NIC was supposed to be very elite, prestigious, and slightly academic.

Ames desperately wanted the job. “
Perhaps,” he wrote Yvonne on June 29, 1978, “my malaise is because I’ve heard nothing on the NIO business.… In any event, I’m sure that A.W. [Alan Wolfe] is using my absence to lobby against the assignment. Maybe taking that job would be even more frustrating ’cause I’d only have access to more indications of missed opportunities in the M.E. [Middle East].”

A week later, Ames finally received a cable from Langley saying
that no decision had yet been made on the NIO job. “
I gather they’re looking hard to find someone other than me, but haven’t come up with a candidate yet. I’m half tempted to tell them to stuff their NIO job, and try to look for something else when I get back.” He was also being urged to take another assignment to Tehran as chief of station. But he’d decided to fight that assignment: “I’ve done my share of ‘bang-bang’ posts.” He would have to wait to get back to Washington to hear about a new assignment.

Ames had found it difficult to wander the streets of Beirut. “
I don’t like to be on the streets after dark,” he wrote home. “Too much kidnapping.” If he wasn’t meeting Salameh for dinner, he often just ate in the U.S. embassy’s marine mess. On July 4 he’d walked over to the campus of the American University of Beirut and played some softball—until the mortar shells started falling. He’d brought a little money to go carpet shopping on Rue Hamra, but he found the prices exorbitant. Before finally flying out on July 11, he had another good meal with Mustafa Zein. His young Lebanese friend was as well connected as ever. They commiserated about the Lebanese morass and the general stalemate in Arab-Israeli relations.

Later that autumn, ABC News came to Beirut to film a one-hour documentary about the Palestinians. The show focused on the PLO’s training of young men for desperate attacks on Israel. Narrated by Frank Reynolds, the documentary explored why these young men were willing to participate in virtual suicide missions. It was a controversial show, seen by millions of Americans. Ames was surprised to see that it featured an on-camera interview with Mustafa Zein. “Why is it so hard in the West,” Zein asked his audience, “to understand the Palestinian right to regain their dignity on his own land? Any man or woman of the Jewish faith, coming from Russia or the United States, automatically has the right to settle in Israel today—because he had a certain connection to the land two thousand years ago.”
Why, Zein wanted to know, were people surprised that Palestinians had the same
kind of attachment to the land? “Why are we expecting the Palestinians to be less patriotic than the Israelis?” The end of the program had a clip of Yasir Arafat walking through a crowd, accompanied by Ali Hassan Salameh—who was identified as one of the most “dangerous” men in the world. The program’s producers obviously didn’t know of Zein’s connection to Salameh.

Ames returned to Washington in mid-July and soon afterwards learned that he’d won the NIO position. He was greatly relieved and completely unaware that he had secured the job through the intervention of one of his longtime admirers, a former Beirut chief of station,
Harry Simpson
. This officer had since risen to be an executive assistant in the director’s office. “
Despite the fact that Bob had no background in analysis,” said
Simpson
, “I thought he would make a great NIO and told [Deputy Director Frank] Carlucci that. He looked into it … the files, interviews, the works—talked it over with [Admiral Stansfield] Turner and they gave him the job.”

Simpson
felt Ames was qualified, but he also thought it was high time to break down the walls between the DO and the analytical side of the Agency. It would help, he thought, to have an experienced DO officer trying to answer some of the big analytical questions. Ames took to the analytical work with a methodical zeal. In short order he was writing long situation reports and “
monthly warning assessments” on such wide-ranging topics as “oil and politics,” “alleged coup-plotting” in Yemen, “mutual suspicion” between Iran and Iraq, and the possibility of a Soviet “military intervention” in Afghanistan.

Ames was now a GS-15—or the equivalent of a full army colonel, earning over $100,000 in current dollars. He knew Yvonne did not want another foreign posting. The NIC had only thirteen NIOs—one for each region or specialty. Thus Ames was NIO for NESA. But there were also NIOs for topics, such as science and technology, nonproliferation, and other issues. It was a very elite position—a coup for someone who, at age forty-four, was relatively young and who, unlike
some of his fellow NIOs, possessed no graduate degrees. But he was nevertheless chosen to be one of the thirteen NIOs on his merits.

That autumn of 1978 the CIA conducted a routine personnel security investigation of Ames. Two of Ames’s listed references were interviewed, plus his current supervisor. One of the unnamed references told the security officer that Ames “
has that unique ability to get along very well with all kinds of people and that he is definitely [a] people-oriented kind of man who takes [the] interest of subordinates at heart.… He is the kind of man who loves to listen to other people.” When asked to comment on Ames’s personal life, this informant said that Ames and Yvonne “appear to be very happily married.” Ames will “take a drink or two at parties, but certainly nothing more.” With regard to foreign contacts, the informant “noted that he believes the SUBJECT currently is in contact with a foreign national, however this was done at the specific request of the Chief of his Division and with White House approval.” Ames’s supervisor concurred, saying that Ames was “doing a very strong job.” Bob was known “as a man who is extremely stable and emotionally as solid as a rock.”

That autumn Ames became peripherally involved in what later became known as the case of the “vanished imam.” The imam Musa Sadr, the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Shi’a Muslims, was a highly charismatic scholar and political organizer who’d inspired the downtrodden Shi’a peasants of South Lebanon to stand up for their political and economic rights. Sadr, who was of distant Lebanese ancestry, had been born in Iran. In 1959 he immigrated to Lebanon, and by the 1970s he’d become an important political personality. In early 1975 he spoke before a rally of seventy thousand Shi’as and told them, “
Possessing weapons is as important as possessing the Koran.” He was nevertheless regarded as a voice of reason and moderation, a Shi’a cleric who could break bread with Maronite Christian businessmen, Greek Orthodox prelates, Druze chieftains, and Sunni Muslim leaders.

But on August 31, 1978, Musa Sadr mysteriously disappeared while
on a trip to Libya, where he’d been invited to meet with Col. Muammar Qaddafi. When the Lebanese government made inquiries in early September, Qaddafi’s regime announced that the cleric and two of his companions had left Tripoli bound for Rome on an Alitalia flight on August 31. The imam’s checked luggage had indeed arrived in Rome, but the imam himself was missing.