The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (39 page)

The 444-day hostage crisis absorbed much of Ames’s time. Throughout the last year of the Carter presidency, Iran was Ames’s priority. As national intelligence officer (NIO) for the Near East, he was a key player in all the meetings concerning Iran and the hostages. His position as NIO gave him unique access. He was often the one individual in the room who had knowledge of both clandestine and analytical intelligence. His job title and his expertise made him a man very much in demand. Everyone realized that the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis had taken the CIA by surprise. America was grappling with the consequences of a momentous intelligence failure. “
The attacks on our embassy in Iran,” said Ames’s former mentor in the Agency, Dick Helms, “and the political infighting which brought on the taking of hostages were surprises born of an inadequate grasp of Ayatollah Khomeini’s bigotry and zealotry.… As a country we must develop a far deeper knowledge of other peoples’ culture, religion, politics than we possess today. Believe it or not, we are still essentially a provincial nation.” Ames emphatically agreed.

In mid-December 1979, the ailing, cancer-stricken shah left the United States for a new haven of exile on the Isla Contadora in Panama. The Carter administration understandably believed the shah’s
presence in New York could only make the task of negotiating the release of the hostages that much more difficult. Sometime in early January 1980, Ames heard rumors that the White House had found a way to open secret negotiations with someone in the provisional revolutionary government in Tehran about freeing the hostages. Ames heard that Hamilton Jordan, the president’s chief of staff, was the main conduit, and he thought he needed to be brought into the loop. So one day he called up Jordan and asked for a meeting. Jordan saw him right away in the White House and reluctantly revealed that two men—Christian Bourget, a Frenchman, and Héctor Villalón, an Argentinian businessman living in France—had arrived in Panama, ostensibly acting as emissaries of Iran, to request the shah’s extradition. This was a formality; they knew there was no prospect that the Panamanians would execute the extradition. But then they revealed that they had another mission. They asked the Panamanian strongman Gen. Omar Torrijos to pass on a message to the White House: Iran’s new foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, was interested in negotiating an end to the hostage crisis. But because he didn’t trust the State Department, he wanted to meet with President Carter’s friend and chief of staff. Jordan explained that the message had reached him and that the president had authorized him to see Ghotbzadeh. Jordan asked for Ames’s advice. Did he think the politically embattled foreign minister had the clout to negotiate a release of the hostages? Was this worth pursuing? And could the CIA help arrange for any meeting to be kept out of the press? Ames explained that he hadn’t met with Ghotbzadeh during his secret mission to Tehran the previous August, but he knew who the man was. He probably also explained that he’d interviewed Ayatollah Beheshti, the chairman of the Revolutionary Council, and noted that
Beheshti had recently defended Ghotbzadeh when the student hostage takers had criticized the foreign minister. Ames promised to get Jordan some background intelligence on Ghotbzadeh, and Jordan promised to keep Ames in the loop. Jordan was encouraged.

Afterward, Ames assigned one of his deputies, Thomas C. Braman, to regularly check in with Jordan. Braman was delighted to get the
opportunity to liaise with the White House. “
This did two things,” Braman later wrote. “It certainly made it quite clear to Jordan that his activities were known to the Agency, and it provided me with a personal, high-level contact who I could use in my own political dialogue between intelligence and operations officers within the Agency. A lesser officer than Bob would have kept the White House and Jordan to himself.” Braman thought Ames was “the ultimate team player.” Ames had brought Braman in the loop—but this did not mean that Ames cut off his dealings with Jordan.

Over the next few weeks, the CIA provided dossiers on Ghotbzadeh and his two intermediaries, Bourget and Villalón. On January 25, 1980, Jordan met with Bourget and Villalón in the White House. The two unofficial intermediaries had a plan, an intricately choreographed script that they believed would lead to the release of the hostages. First, the United Nations would create a commission of inquiry to review the historical grievances held by Iran against America. The Carter administration would criticize the idea but not block the creation of the commission. Second, the UN fact-finding commission would go to Iran and conduct a public investigation. The Iranian people would get a chance to vent. And finally, as Mark Bowden wrote in his history of the hostage crisis,
Guests of the Ayatollah
, “
the commission would then have the moral authority in Iran to condemn the holding of hostages as ‘un-Islamic.’ ” This would then give Ayatollah Khomeini the pretext he needed to order the hostages released. Jordan and others in the Carter administration were skeptical, but they thought it was worth a shot. A detailed schedule was created, delineating who would say what and when to get the charade started. But everyone agreed that this secret protocol had to be ratified by a face-to-face meeting between Ham Jordan and Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh.

That settled, Jordan flew to Paris on the Concorde, arriving shortly after midnight on Sunday, February 17. He wore a disguise, presumably provided him by the CIA, which included a gray wig, a fake mustache, and glasses. Accompanied by a Foreign Service officer, Henry Precht, Jordan was driven to the Paris apartment of Héctor Villalón,
where he met with Ghotbzadeh. The foreign minister reiterated that their meeting had to be kept highly secret. If there was a leak, he said, “
First I would lose my job and then I would lose my head.”

Jordan quickly got an inkling that things might not go as planned when Ghotbzadeh volunteered, not in jest, “It is easy to resolve the crisis. All you have to do is kill the shah.” When an astonished Jordan said that was out of the question, Ghotbzadeh reassured him that the hostages would be released in a matter of weeks after the proposed UN commission did its work. Jordan and Ghotbzadeh came to a mutual understanding. Jordan returned to Washington, and the Carter administration announced that it would not oppose the creation of the commission. The UN commission soon began its work, and as if on script, Ayatollah Beheshti announced that he thought the commission would end the hostage crisis soon. The plan seemed to be working—until Ayatollah Khomeini gave one of his mercurial speeches and announced that the crisis would be resolved only after the election of a national
majlis
(parliament). Clearly, Ghotbzadeh did not have the backing of his ayatollah. An angry President Carter told his chief of staff, “
Ham, they are crazy.” Ames had had a front-row seat to the disappointing spectacle.
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Ames usually saw CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner at least once a week. A graduate of Amherst College and a Rhodes Scholar, Admiral Turner was not popular with the clandestine division. A Christian Scientist, he never touched coffee or tea, let alone Scotch. He valued signal intelligence over human intelligence—and in 1978–79
he fired 825 clandestine officers on grounds of incompetence. Ames didn’t share Turner’s politics or worldview. “
Bob like myself was a problem-solver, not an ideologue,” observed David Long, one of his friends. “So
when we talked politics it was mainly about foreign policies, not partisan domestic politics. Both Carter and Reagan made some very excellent policy decisions and some really idiotic policy decisions. We both agreed that Carter’s moralistic dislike for dirty tricks was detrimental to CIA, particularly in making Stansfield Turner the DCI [director of central intelligence]. But then, James Schlesinger as DCI under Nixon was probably worse.”

Turner nevertheless admired Bob Ames and trusted his judgment. He signed promotion orders for Ames twice during his tenure, initially awarding him a rank of GS-16. Then in 1980 he elevated Ames to the elite
Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) with a rank of SIS-3. This made Ames the equivalent of a one-star army general.

Ames got along with the admiral, but he was frustrated by the Carter administration’s performance. Carter and his team were too often tentative and overly cautious. On the other hand, Ames admired the president’s determination to get a deal done on the Camp David Accords. Bob worked many long hours, preparing the CIA’s briefing book for the Camp David meetings. He was later told that Carter thought his “
assessments of both Begin and Sadat were right on target.”

Throughout 1979 and 1980, Ames regularly saw President Carter’s Middle East man on the National Security Council, Ambassador Robert Hunter (a savvy foreign policy analyst who’d once worked for Senator Edward Kennedy). Hunter rapidly came to trust his judgment. “
It was one-stop shopping,” Hunter said. “I would call him up once a day, and it was all I needed to know. He could talk off the top of his head about the succession battles inside the Saudi royal family, or what was going on inside the revolutionary regime in Tehran. He knew all the intricacies. And I could trust that he was also keeping me abreast of the differences, the arguments going on inside the intelligence community. He never cooked anything. He was the most effective intelligence officer I ever encountered.”

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, Ambassador Hunter and Ames worked together to draft a response for
President Carter to deliver in his January 23, 1980, State of the Union address. It became known as the “Carter Doctrine,” and Hunter says that Ames contributed heavily to the language in the speech, but the key sentence was probably drafted by Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Ames, the longtime clandestine officer, relished the opportunity to help make policy. But in retrospect, the Carter Doctrine seems a Cold War relic. Its purpose was to warn the Soviets not to threaten America’s oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz. It was all about oil. But the Carter administration also began a major covert operation to supply weapons to the Afghani mujahedeen. The program grew rapidly and would eventually succeed in forcing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. (That, of course, only served to usher into power a highly reactionary Taliban regime—one allied to a little-known Islamist Salafist group of dedicated terrorists calling themselves Al-Qaeda. But this particular blowback was far in the future.)

One day in the early spring of 1980, one of Ames’s two principal deputies, Robert Earl, walked into Bob’s office and said he’d heard rumors about a possible rescue mission. It was just “noise,” but Earl thought something was going on. Ames knew he wasn’t authorized to brief Earl on the rescue mission. “
In order to preserve operational security,” Earl realized later, “Ames gently deflected me. He just turned the conversation to something else. Only later did I realize that Ames had helped plan the failed Desert One rescue mission. He was one of the few Agency people who were cleared for Desert One.” The rescue mission, of course, was a disastrous failure, and eight U.S. servicemen were killed when one of the eight helicopters brushed against a C-130
transport plane at the landing site inside Iran and exploded. An official investigation later blamed the debacle on poor operational coordination between the various branches of the armed services involved in the mission. But the inherent complexity of the plan probably doomed it to failure. “
The effort relied very heavily on the CIA,” said a State Department official. Ames was, of course, bitterly disappointed. Working through Mustafa Zein, however, he arranged for Arafat to use his contacts in Tehran to obtain the bodies of the eight U.S. servicemen. This was but a small consolation. President Carter believed the debacle heavily contributed to his electoral defeat in November 1980.