The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (8 page)

Oman remembers being amazed by Ames’s grasp of the history. The young CIA officer obviously read a lot. “The Saudis loved him,” Oman recalled. “He was terrific in one-on-one conversations. He was tall,
handsome, respectful, and soft-spoken, with an engaging smile and a lively twinkle in his eyes. He had very broad shoulders that made him almost loom over the Saudi men he was talking to, and, as a rule, Saudi men are not short. He always addressed them with the honorific ‘ya sheikh.’ They always insisted that he was too kind.” Early in his Dhahran posting, Ames persuaded
one of Aramco’s Saudi desert guides to teach him how to track herds of camels. These expeditions took him out into the desert and could be physically grueling. But for Ames, the reward was meeting the Bedu. “
When the Arabs did not know him well,” wrote one of his fellow Agency officers, “they held him in slight awe for his size. When they got to know him, they loved him for his humor, his Arabic, his knowledge of their ways, his heart.”

During the month of Ramadan, the eight consulate officers were often invited on Thursday nights to a large dinner hosted by the governor of the Eastern Province, the crusty old emir Bin Jiluwi—whose father had fought side by side with the Kingdom’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, at the 1902 battle of Masmak Fort in Riyadh. Old Bin Jiluwi’s spear was still stuck in the door of the fort, a stark reminder of this signature battle for the unification of Arabia under the House of Saud. Emir Bin Jiluwi ruled the Eastern Province with an executioner’s sword; he was widely feared as “Head-Chopper Jiluwi.” But at these Thursday evening affairs he usually made a point of serving Arabic coffee to the American diplomats in his private reception room before attending to his other guests.

“We entered the reception room in order of rank,” recalled Oman. “Bob and I, both junior officers, would be last in line, with Bob second to last and me last. I always had to cool my heels for an extended period before shaking Bin Jiluwi’s hand, because the emir would always grab both of Bob’s hands and have an extended conversation with him, which they both enjoyed, talking about the camel crop in the Eastern Province, and the date harvest in al-Hasa.”

After coffee, the Americans filed into a great hall where dinner was being served to more than a hundred guests. Each diplomat sat at a different low-lying, circular table that seated twelve men. In the
center was a four-foot-wide platter with a huge mound of rice mixed with dates and raisins, surmounted by a whole roasted goat or sheep. “Among the Saudis,” said Oman, “Bob was a sought-after table companion, because he spoke perfect Arabic, he could tell jokes, he loved the food (which was delicious), he could eat deftly with his hand and a knife, and he seemed to really enjoy himself with the food and the good company.”

On rare occasions, Yvonne and Bob would invite a few people to dinner. They did not like large mob-scene parties. “
The house was small, and Bob was big,” recalled Oman, “so he seemed to dominate the room more than ever, but in a very nice way. He was an attentive and charming host, welcoming us to his home. Thinking back, he was a gracious Bedouin, welcoming strangers into his tent, treating them with traditional Arab hospitality, and making them feel very special. No wonder he was so good at what he did.”

Ames didn’t spend much time socializing with other Americans, particularly the Aramcons in the American Camp down the road. He was a case officer, and as such his job was to cultivate Saudi contacts. The one exception was an Aramcon who worked in the oil company’s Government Relations Department.
Ronald Irwin Metz was himself a veteran of the OSS and the CIA. A tall, ruddy, gregarious man with a hearty laugh, Metz had a colorful résumé. During World War II the OSS had parachuted him behind enemy lines in China. By the end of the war he spoke fluent Mandarin. Like many OSS veterans, he soon went to work for the CIA, which sent him for Arabic language studies at the American University of Beirut. Upon graduation with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1954, he was hired by Aramco and dispatched to Riyadh as the company’s key liaison with King Saud, the eldest son of the Kingdom’s founder. (Abdul Aziz ibn Saud had died the previous year.) Metz thus had unusual access to the Saudi royal family. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the king’s drinking companions and quite possibly his closest foreign confidant. When Ron visited the royal palace the king would greet him in his audience chamber. Servants would bring trays of sweet black tea. After a few moments,
Saud would curtly dismiss the servants, toss the tea, and pull out a bottle of scotch.

It was Washington’s policy then, as now, to support the Saudi royal family, if only to safeguard American access to Saudi oil. Metz’s relationship with King Saud was thus a useful conduit for conveying political intelligence about what was going on inside the palace and the Kingdom as a whole. Metz tutored Ames in the intricacies of Arabian tribal politics and no doubt helped to polish his Arabic. They had
an easygoing and fruitful relationship. After hanging around Metz, Ames could talk at length about the intricacies of palace politics and, in particular, the power struggle that was then taking place between King Saud and his half-brother Crown Prince Faisal al-Saud.

Ames spent a lot of time just wandering the desert in his jeep. He loved to stop at Bedouin encampments and strike up a conversation with the tribesmen. He later told a fellow officer, Henry Miller-Jones, that he was sometimes invited to honorific dinners that took place inside the Bedouins’ black tents. Sitting on layers of Persian carpets, he would eat lamb roasted over an open fire. Inevitably, as the guest of honor he’d be offered the tastiest morsel of the lamb, its eye. Bob said he hated eating the eye.

“
Ames’ interest in the Bedu was not just cultural education,” said Miller-Jones. “He was seeking contacts among them who would be sources of information on the growing Arab nationalist movement and other subversive elements. He educated me on the threat to the Saudi government posed by the Shi’a of the Eastern Province, and the Shi’a relationship to Iran. Bob always considered it a minor but not insignificant concern, but one the hyper-Sunni Saudis fretted over inordinately. At that time, he was more concerned about Arab Nationalism, and growing Soviet inroads among some of the Arab intelligentsia in the Arabian Peninsula in general.”

One day in late 1964 the consul general in Dhahran, Jack Horner, called Ames into his office along with a brand-new vice-consul,
twenty-two-year-old Patrick Theros. Horner explained that he’d received an invitation from the Emir Saud bin Jiluwi to attend a head chopping.

Horner said he wasn’t in the mood to attend an execution, but he wanted Ames and Theros to go in his place. “Bob thought it would be an excellent opportunity to develop some local contacts,” recalled Theros. “He was very matter-of-fact about it.” On the appointed day the two men drove nine miles north to Dammam’s central square, where a large crowd had gathered for the spectacle. Bearing rifles, members of the feared Saudi National Guard lined the square. The condemned prisoner was soon escorted into the square. He was an alleged pederast who’d been convicted of raping and murdering a small boy from a notable family. The families of both the murder victim and the murderer were present in large numbers. Emotions were high because of the notoriety of the crime. The Emir Bin Jiluwi himself was presiding over the event. Breaking with tradition, Jiluwi announced that he would allow the eldest brother of the murdered boy to carry out the beheading. As Ames and Theros watched from the back of the crowd, the executioner’s sword was handed to the brother. Instead of taking aim at the neck, the brother swung the sword and brought it down on the condemned man’s back, severely wounding him. He had deliberately botched the execution. Angry cries erupted from the members of the wounded man’s family—and the National Guard troops began to finger their rifles. At this point, Ames calmly turned to Theros and said, “
I think we should leave.” They turned and walked quickly up an alley away from the square. A moment later, they heard a single shot. A National Guard officer had stepped forward and killed the wounded murderer with a shot to the head. Theros remembers how unemotional and nonjudgmental Ames was in the wake of witnessing such a grisly event. Bob was cool. This was just the way justice was handed out in Arabia.

Theros saw a lot of Ames during his stint in Dhahran. Saudi Arabia was Theros’s first posting abroad as a newly minted Foreign Service officer. He knew Ames was CIA because that was how he’d been introduced
at the consulate’s weekly country team meetings. It was a very small post and everyone knew everyone else’s brief. Theros was stamping visas. But Theros and Ames were the only two consulate officers who regularly traveled to Bahrain and the Trucial sheikhdoms to the south. Ames flew to Bahrain frequently to liaise with his counterparts in British intelligence. So sometimes he and Theros flew together. It regularly fell to Theros, as a lowly vice-consul, to make the run to Bahrain, where he would buy a suitcase full of Ballantine whiskey and smuggle it into “dry” Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities at Dhahran airport knew full well that Theros was bringing in the consulate’s monthly stash of booze, but they’d been instructed to ignore this diplomatic smuggling.

In the summer of 1965, Theros was asked to make another booze run to Bahrain and bring back an extra-large shipment of Ballantine for the consulate’s Fourth of July party. After the landing in Dhahran, a Saudi porter picked up the heavy bag before Theros could grab it—and the porter promptly dropped it. The sound of broken glass echoed through the terminal, and the whiff of alcohol left no doubt about what had happened. Theros was told to leave the bag and return late that night when the terminal would be largely empty. Theros was only five feet eight inches tall and weighed a mere 165 pounds. Thinking he could use someone with more brawn, he persuaded Ames to assist him. They arrived at about 10:00
P.M.
and found the suspicious bag hidden away in a storage room. “Bob was a muscular fellow and weighed over two hundred pounds,” recalled Theros. “So he grabbed the bag and swung it over his shoulder—and then suddenly dropped it. He had thrown his back out. I’m afraid this was the source of his persistent back pain in the years to come.”

Despite this unfortunate injury, Ames and Theros became good friends. “
Bob tended to see humor in every situation—however bad,” Theros recalled. Bob and Yvonne didn’t socialize much in their home, which was rapidly becoming a nursery. On June 13, 1963, Yvonne gave birth to a new baby girl, Adrienne. She was born in the local hospital in Al-Khobar, a very rudimentary town a few miles away from
the consulate compound. And just a year later, Yvonne was pregnant again. Kristen was born in Al-Khobar on February 6, 1965. So now there were three baby girls in house number 8. There was little time for dinner parties. “But Yvonne decided that I was one more child to feed,” Theros said. “So I came by pretty often for dinner and sometimes I baby-sat the girls. Bob and Yvonne—well, it was as tight a family as I had ever seen.”

In the summer of 1966, Bob and Yvonne packed up their household goods in Dhahran and shipped them off to Beirut, where Bob was slotted for a full year of intensive Arabic language training. Meanwhile,
Aramco told Ames he had a standing offer to join the oil company; he would have made a lot more money, but he turned them down. He liked being a CIA case officer; he thought of it as public service. That summer he and Yvonne went on home leave to Philadelphia and Boston to see their parents and other relatives. By September they were settled into a lovely apartment in West Beirut, two blocks from the seaside corniche and within walking distance of Pigeon Rock Bay, one of Ras Beirut’s iconic landmarks. Ras Beirut was the most cosmopolitan part of the city, home to a multicultural population of middle-class Christians, Druze, and Muslims. In 1966, there were still several thousand Jewish Lebanese. It was also home to the American University of Beirut, founded a century earlier. And it boasted chic boutiques, cafés, and cinemas showing films in French, English, and Arabic. Bob studied Arabic during the week, but on weekends he and Yvonne often took the kids up to the Dhalamayeh Country Club in the mountains to the east of Beirut. When they couldn’t get away, Bob contented himself with reading the many books on Middle Eastern history and biography that he bought cheaply from Khayyat’s, Beirut’s oldest bookstore, located near the university on Rue Bliss.