The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (53 page)

Mustafa Zein had expected to see Ames that evening. He had made dinner reservations at Al-Ajami restaurant for himself, Ames, Ken Haas, and Susan Morgan. That afternoon, as Zein was driving to his appointment with President Amin Gemayel’s cousin, he saw the plume of smoke along the corniche, and he briefly worried about his American friends. But he nevertheless decided to show up at Al-Ajami on time—and he waited alone with growing anxiety until the restaurant closed at 2:00
A.M.
“
I really, really lost it that day,” Zein later said.

Pete Gallant, a thirty-four-year-old State Department security officer, arrived on Tuesday afternoon on a flight from Athens. Gallant
was charged with writing up a preliminary investigation of the bombing. “
The smoke had cleared,” he said, “but blood and body parts were everywhere. It is a smell you never forget.” The charred engine block of the truck carrying the bomb was retrieved from the shallow waters of the fishermen’s cove across the street from the embassy. Gallant learned from the embassy’s resident security officer, Dick Gannon, that two Delta vehicular barriers had been sitting in storage for nearly a year. They were to have been installed on the embassy’s driveway the following week.

Three days after the blast, Marine Sgt. Charles Light and Cpl. Brian Korn crawled back into the rubble. They’d been instructed to see if they could find a safe in the marine office on the ground floor where their diplomatic passports were stored. They found the safe and the passports, and on their way out Corporal Korn said, “Here’s where Post One used to be. Robert’s here, we need to get him out.” Sergeant Light and Corporal Korn spent forty-five minutes digging through the rubble before they found him. “
He was standing straight up, bent over,” Korn later testified. “His head was smashed like a pancake, real flat, real long.” Both his legs and his arms were broken—and, grotesquely—a steel rod had plunged through his chest. Corporal Bobby McMaugh had died instantly. Still, it was a terrible death.

Altogether, sixty-three people died and some 120 people were wounded, many with lifelong injuries. Seventeen Americans were killed, along with thirty-two Lebanese employees of the embassy and fourteen visitors or passersby, mostly Lebanese applying for American visas. Of the seventeen Americans, eight were CIA officers—an unprecedented number then or since.
^*6
The other dead Americans included one U.S. marine, four other U.S. servicemen, three USAID officials—and Janet Lee Stevens, the freelance American reporter.

The truck bomb had hit the embassy at 1:04
P.M.
, or shortly after 6:00
A.M.
Washington time. Yvonne had risen early that morning and gone as usual to the local YMCA to swim. It was part of her new regimen. She returned a little later to get the children off to school. Around 9:00
A.M.
someone from the CIA called and asked if she’d seen the news on television. Yvonne said no. She was then told that the embassy had been bombed but that they’d had no communication with Beirut. Yvonne didn’t know what to think. It was “employee lunch day” at her office and she’d prepared some food for the potluck, so she decided to go in to work. She was then working full-time as an administrative assistant at the accounting firm of Arthur Young. “I continued through the day as though nothing had happened,” Yvonne recalled. She mentioned her worry to only one friend at work. That evening, she received a phone call from Beirut.
It was Mustafa Zein, asking rather plaintively if she’d heard from Bob. Mustafa was clearly concerned and upset, so Yvonne tried to reassure him that Bob was just out of reach. She still hadn’t heard anything more from the Agency, but she nervously decided to keep a dinner appointment at a friend’s house nearby. She left the children at home, giving them a number where she could be reached. The children hadn’t heard about the bombing—and Yvonne didn’t want to alarm them with what could only be speculation. So she went out.

Later that Monday evening, around 10:00
P.M.
,
Kristen, eighteen, was upstairs watching television in her parents’ bedroom. She came across a news report about the Beirut bombing and remembered thinking, “That’s interesting.” She knew her father was out in the Middle East, but she didn’t know his itinerary. When she mentioned the news report to Kevin, eleven, and Karen, fifteen, they speculated that their father probably hadn’t arrived, and in any case they would have heard something if he was there. A few moments later, Kristen heard the doorbell. When she opened the door, she saw two strangers, Thomas Braman and his wife, Lillian. They introduced themselves as colleagues of her father’s. They asked if Yvonne was at home, and upon learning
that she was out, Braman waited for Yvonne to return. Later, Braman asked Kristen if she’d seen the news about Beirut. When Kristen said yes, Braman said he thought Bob was in the embassy and that he might have been killed.

“I told them he wasn’t there,” Kristen said, “and that he wasn’t killed.”

Tom replied, “Well, we do think he was there, and he was killed.” Kristen said, “No.”

Finally, Lillian Braman said, “No, we don’t think. We know. He was killed.” At this point, Kristen broke down and started screaming hysterically. Her brother Kevin was in his room upstairs. He’d heard Kristen answer the door and then heard her piercing scream. “
It’s the kind of scream you hear,” he later said, “and you cringe inside, because you know something horrible has happened.”

Moments before this, Karen had been sitting on her bed, trying to memorize a line from her French homework. “As I was staring at that page,” Karen said, “trying to memorize that line, a chill came over me. And I just looked up, and my [elder] brother [Andrew] was standing in my doorway, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. And I just said, ‘He’s dead.’ ” She remembers Andrew just shook his head and ran off. Karen picked up a phone and called a friend and told her, “What am I going to do? My dad’s dead.”

Andrew remembers the same scene a little differently. He was in his room upstairs and heard Kristen’s screams, so he ran into the living room, where he saw two strangers standing with Kevin and Kristen. Everyone was crying. “I went immediately downstairs to Karen’s room,” Andrew said, “and I stood in the doorway. She looked up at me, and she saw it right away. She said, ‘He’s dead.’ And I just nodded and ran back to my room.”

Eleven-year-old Kevin had a hard time comprehending what was happening. He walked downstairs to the family’s small study and sat in his father’s rocking chair. He sat there for the longest time, just rocking back and forth. Unconsciously, as he rocked, he gripped one handle so tightly that his thumbnail wore a deep groove into the wood.

One of the children had called their mother at the phone number she’d left for them. When Yvonne got the call, she knew. She rushed home and walked into the house in tears. She remembers little. It was all a blur. She had to call Bob’s mom, and his sisters and her own parents. “From that time on, the house was filled with people for about two weeks,” Yvonne said. “But it didn’t give us any time to be alone together and to grieve together and to come to some sort of closure.” Her neighbors brought by home-cooked dishes, often walking past black government limousines parked in the cul-de-sac. CIA director Bill Casey came to the house and offered his condolences, as did many others.

The children were devastated—and also shocked to learn that their father had worked for the CIA and not the State Department. They felt both a sense of wonder and disbelief. Their father had lied to them all these years—but at the same time they felt a certain pride in what they were beginning to learn about what he’d done.

The news quickly spread through the hallways of Langley. Eight CIA employees were dead. “When I heard the news,” Clair George said, “I ran out into the hall and screamed,
‘Does anyone know what to do?’ ” Sam Wyman got a phone call from a friend in the DO Watch Office. He was informed that one of the three DO officers who hadn’t been in the embassy had phoned from Beirut and reported that the station had been wiped out. “
I broke down,” Wyman recalled. “I called my wife and cried. I was dumbfounded and shocked. It was just unbelievable.” Wyman was then chief of the Arabian Peninsula Branch for the DO, but he’d soon be tasked with supervising the bombing investigation.
Lindsay Sherwin
had heard the morning news reports about the Beirut attack but had thought Bob would be okay. As the day progressed,
Sherwin
began to feel sick. Late that evening he got the phone call. He too cried. The next morning he tried to go to work as usual.
Sherwin
made it to Langley’s parking lot. “
And then I had to turn around and go home,” he said. “It was horrific. The Agency did not know how to deal with it.”

In Tel Aviv that day
Dov Zeit
, a senior Israeli intelligence officer, had been awaiting Ames’s scheduled visit later in the week. “
The word spread that there had been an explosion,”
Zeit
recalled. “The mood among those of us who had known him was of deep mourning. A certain melancholy settled in. We Israelis may be rough, but we can also be very sentimental.”

The next morning, Ames’s NSC counterpart, Geoff Kemp, noted in his diary, “
Bob Ames among the dead in Beirut. We believe Iran involved. Felt very sad about Bob.”

Five days later, on Saturday, April 23, President Ronald Reagan took a marine helicopter out to Andrews Air Force Base to meet a cargo plane containing sixteen coffins. (One of the Americans killed, Albert N. Votaw, a USAID official, was cremated in Beirut at the wishes of his family.) The sixteen flag-draped coffins were lined up in an airport hangar. Inexplicably, the mourners were not told which casket contained the body of their husband or son or daughter. The relatives of those killed stood nearby, weeping. Reagan spoke briefly and, visibly shaken, walked among the mourners. “
It was a moving experience,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “Nancy and I met individually with the families of the deceased. We were both in tears—I know all I could do was grip their hands—I was too choked up to speak.” Reagan lingered for a few moments more with Yvonne Ames, who was wearing a short black veil to cover her eyes. Someone told the president that these were Bob Ames’s widow and children. “
There was definitely a marked sadness on his face and in his eyes,” Karen Ames recalled. “They both gave us hugs.”

Ames was the only one of the victims whom the president had known. They’d seen each other just a month earlier, on March 17, 1983, in the White House. When he heard that Ames was one of the victims, Reagan had noted in his diary, “
We lost [name deleted] our top research man on Middle East.” Afterwards, Reagan told an aide that the ceremony was one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do.

The very next day, on Sunday, April 24, Ames’s casket was loaded aboard a military funeral carriage drawn by four horses. A U.S. marine in dress uniform led a riderless horse up a hill in Arlington National Cemetery. Yvonne and the children sat under a canopy by the burial site.
Mustafa Zein had hastily flown in from Beirut for the funeral; he rode in a black limousine with Yvonne and her brother to the cemetery and sat with the family at the grave site. A squad of marines fired their rifles in the air. After the casket was lowered into the ground, Yvonne remembers someone handing her an American flag, folded into a triangle. She remembered little else: “
I was there in body, but it was like—it was just the body.” Eighteen-year-old Kristen asked if they could put a flower on the casket, or just touch it: “We were told we couldn’t do that.” Afterwards, Yvonne had to return to her Reston home with her six children. She was numb with fear and grief. “Bob’s death fractured our family,” she later explained. “It’s like when you take a photograph and rip it. You can try to piece it back together, but it’s never the same.”