The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (9 page)

Soon after his arrival in Beirut, one of Bob’s colleagues took him to the bar at the St. George Hotel. It was inevitable. The St. George was
Beirut’s premier hotel in the 1950s and 1960s and well into the 1970s. It was where visiting dignitaries stayed, and its famous bar was the watering hole for two generations of diplomats, journalists, and the agents of various intelligence services. Surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, the St. George offered its clientele a beautiful view of both the sea and the snow-capped mountains to the east. It employed 285 staff to service only 110 rooms. “
I felt as if my clients were running the Middle East, occasionally the world,” said Jean Bertolet, the hotel’s manager in the 1960s. Bankers and financiers such as John J. McCloy, J. Paul Getty, and Daniel Ludwig stayed at the St. George on their business trips to Beirut. Journalists like Joe Alsop and NBC’s John Chancellor were regular visitors. The legendary British spy for the Soviet Union, Kim Philby, drank his gin and tonics at the St. George—until he fled to Moscow on January 23, 1963. Philby later wrote in his memoir, “
Beirut is one of the liveliest centres of contraband and espionage in the world.” He loved the city. “
It was an amazing listening post,” recalled the London
Daily Mail
’s Anthony Cave Brown. “Everything and everyone passed through it.” Like many foreign correspondents,
Newsweek
’s Loren Jenkins used the bar as his “mail drop.”

The St. George’s longtime concierge was Mansour Breidy, a Maronite Christian. “
He knew everyone,” said Jenkins. Around noon each day Lebanon’s most connected journalist, Mohammed Khalil Abu Rish—more commonly known as Abu Said—arrived to cultivate his sources over lunch. Abu Said had once worked for the
New York Times
, but by 1966 he was working for
Time
magazine. Abu Said knew just about everyone connected to this exotic labyrinth, including the CIA station chief and the Egyptian intelligence chief. It was an era when a reporter like Abu Said discreetly traded information with various intelligence services and in return was given useful nuggets for his reports in
Time
. Over the years,
rumors dogged him that he was an agent for the CIA. He always firmly denied this. Certainly, he was openly pro-American and gladly passed along his observations to the CIA. “
It was clear to me that Abu Said had never been anybody’s agent,” wrote
Wilbur Crane Eveland, a CIA operative in the Middle East in the 1950s. “He happened to believe that Americans were friends of the Arabs.”
*

Abu Said’s grown son Said Aburish was then a reporter for Radio Free Europe, and later the author of many revealing history books about the region. In 1989, he wrote a book about the St. George: “
For those of us lucky enough to have known the St. George Hotel bar in the fifties, sixties and seventies, life will never be the same again; the bar will always be with us, an invisible, hallowed component of our existence which we celebrate wherever we may be.”

But though Bob Ames certainly knew some of these St. George bar regulars, he was not one of them himself. Aburish never met him. Ames was studying Arabic in 1966, not cultivating agents. But neither was he a barfly. He preferred to spend his free time either practicing his Arabic in the
suq
or doting on his girls.

By the spring of 1967, Ames was told he was scheduled for a posting in Sana’a, North Yemen. As Yemen was still embroiled in a brutal civil war, it was unlikely that Yvonne and the children would be allowed to move with him. But then yet another Arab-Israeli war broke out, on June 5, 1967. A month prior to the war, as tensions escalated, the Israelis sent an intelligence estimate to the Johnson administration warning that they could be defeated. Within six hours the CIA’s top analysts produced a counterestimate that predicted, “
Israel could defeat within two weeks any combination of Arab armies which could be thrown against it no matter who began the hostilities.” Dick Helms thought the Israelis were just trying to get President Johnson to green-light a preemptive attack—and authorize American arms shipments. When a skeptical President Johnson asked Helms to review the estimate—or, in his words, to have it “scrubbed down”—the Agency analysts revised their prediction: the Israelis would win any war within one week. As it happened, the Agency’s estimate was off by only one day. Within six days Israeli forces swept into East Jerusalem and occupied both the West Bank and the entire Sinai Peninsula.

The June War was a defeat for the entire Arab world—but specifically for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brand of secular Arab nationalism. It
was a humiliation that disillusioned an entire generation of Arabs. But it also circumscribed American influence in the Middle East. In its aftermath, twenty-four thousand American expatriates working in the region were expelled. Anti-American demonstrations swept through Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. Egypt and most other Arab states broke diplomatic relations with Washington. Ames’s posting to North Yemen was canceled, and instead he was posted to Aden in the British protectorate of South Yemen.

Yvonne was already pregnant again. That summer Bob had completed nine months of intensive Arabic language study. The family spent much of that summer in Washington and Boston—where baby Karen was born on August 30, 1967. Bob came up to Boston from Washington, D.C., to see his new baby—their fourth child. And then in early September he flew off to Aden. Yvonne and the girls weren’t permitted to join him. And for good reason. Aden was a war zone.

Before heading off to Aden, Ames was required to take a routine polygraph. He thought it a waste of time. He told the technician administering the test, “
Why don’t you ask me the one question that matters: Have I had an illicit contact with a foreign agent? And then we can be done with this.” The technician was not amused.

Ames flew to London in late September and had a couple of nights in the Cumberland Hotel near Hyde Park. He chose this hotel because he knew it was within walking distance of Francis Edwards, an antiquarian bookseller dating back to 1855. He found many books he wanted to buy, but he wrote Yvonne that he had “
no honey to convince me that I should buy them.” He later regretted this. “When I think of all the good maps in them I get mad at myself, but that’s me. Mr. Indecision.” Bob was instinctively too careful with his money.

On the evening of Monday, October 2, 1967, he flew to Tripoli and then Nairobi, finally landing in Aden at 9:15
A.M.
Bob was startled to see that as his plane rolled to a stop it was quickly surrounded by British troops with rifles cocked. A helicopter hovered overhead, providing
additional security. Armed with a green diplomatic passport, he walked rapidly through customs, to be greeted outside by Consul General William Eagleton and another Foreign Service officer. As they exited the airport, they drove past a sandbagged machine-gun nest manned by two British Tommies wearing their trademark berets. “
Everywhere you look there are soldiers with guns,” Bob wrote home. “Kind of creepy.” The streets were mostly deserted and plastered with political graffiti. Aden had been built on forbidding volcanic rocks. Its paint-flecked, fortresslike houses now were pockmarked with bullets. Ames could see, off in the distance, the blue and turquoise waters of the harbor. He and his companions drove directly to the waterfront offices of the U.S. consulate general in Tawahi, just down the street from the Aden Port Trust. There, Bob was introduced to Arthur Marsh Niner, the Agency’s chief of station. Niner was the product of an East Coast prep school. He wore casual wrinkled seersucker suits and Brooks Brothers shirts and ties. He’d married a pretty German woman just before arriving in Aden. His cover in the consulate was as a political officer. Ames’s cover would be as a commercial officer. He was
one of only seven officers in the tiny post.

A few weeks after Ames arrived in Aden,
Dick Roane
, another junior CIA officer, was walking back to his apartment when he noticed that he was being closely followed. Fearing a kidnapping or worse, he hastily made it to his apartment gate and locked the door. The following day Niner issued 9mm Browning automatic pistols to everyone in the station. Ames decided not to walk around with a gun. “
If they get you here,” he wrote Yvonne, “it is in the back or when you’re not looking, and a gun wouldn’t do much good.”

On October 14, 1967, Ames witnessed his first full-fledged street battle. It was the fourth anniversary of the National Liberation Front’s uprising against the British; a general strike was declared, and then at about 9:30
A.M.
Ames heard machine-gun fire. He looked out his office window and saw British troops running for cover. “
I saw one Brit get wounded about a block and a half away and the firing was so fierce that it was about five minutes before his buddies could get him.”
The Brits had to bring in armored cars to suppress the firing. When it was over several hours later, one Arab had been killed and four British soldiers were wounded.

A few days later a visiting Danish sea captain walked out of the Port Trust building and headed past the U.S. consulate. Someone walked up quickly from behind him and shot him in the head, leaving him dead in the street. The Dane was the first nonmilitary, non-British civilian to be assassinated since the outbreak of the rebellion. A week or so later a senior British official from the Governor-General’s Office was walking up the steps to the entrance of the Crescent Hotel when he was sprayed with machine-gun fire from a passing car. Grievously wounded, the man survived. In late October, Bob wrote, “
The situation in Aden becomes worse each day.” After these brazen attacks, life in Aden for any of the expatriates became much more restricted. Henry Miller-Jones recalled the extreme security precautions he had to take on his way to work in the consulate: “Each morning, Niner instructed me that I was to ensure my 9mm was loaded and I was to open the gate in the wall that surrounded our 4-story apartment building that faced out onto the main street running from Ma’alla to Tarshyn. While I was doing this, gun in hand, my roommates would drive the car from its parking space in front of the building behind me with the rear door open. As the car passed through the gate on my all clear signal, I would jump in the back seat, and off we went to the office, right around the block, no more than three minutes away.” Miller-Jones had arrived in Aden a month after Ames. He was on a three-month temporary-duty assignment. Fresh off the Farm, he’d never been abroad to anywhere except Europe. “
I was pure raw material for Ames’s self-appointed mentoring,” Miller-Jones recalled. “Niner was no help.”

Aden was then in the middle of a three-way civil war. Southern Arabia was still a British protectorate. But British forces were fighting an insurgency waged by both the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY)—both of which were in turn engaged in a bloody struggle for power
against each other. FLOSY was the guerrilla faction supported by Nasser’s Egypt. The NLF was a more leftist organization, an offspring of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). From his time in Dhahran, Ames was familiar with the ANM. But the NLF was an entirely different story. Some of their cadres had been trained in Moscow. In the last year, the NLF had taken to assassinating foreign civilians. Several British wives had been killed by sniper fire along Ma’alla Straight, where many of the British lived in new high-rises. This stretch of road became known as “Murder Mile.” Rebels sometimes seized the rim of the Crater district, which gave them a bird’s-eye view of the city from a thousand feet above. From there, they lobbed mortar or grenade rockets randomly into the city below. The Crater and its narrow, meandering streets in the Arab Quarter became a no-go zone for any foreigners.

In such circumstances, the colonial representatives of the fading British Empire were just hanging on, trying to negotiate an orderly transfer of power. The June 1967 War had closed the Suez Canal, making Aden’s port of transit far less strategic to British maritime interests. That month the British evacuated most official families, and Governor-General Sir Humphrey Trevelyan announced that he intended to pull out all British forces entirely by January 1968.

Thus, by the time Ames arrived, much of the European Quarter was deserted. Within a week of his arrival, Bob reserved a furnished three-bedroom house in the Khormaksar neighborhood. It had a lovely view of the Arabian Sea and came with a large roof deck equipped with an outdoor grill and bar. Quarters for two servants were located above the detached garage. But until Yvonne and the kids arrived, it didn’t make sense to move into a large house. For the first month, Bob had a hotel room in the Rock, a modern high-rise with a glassed-in rooftop restaurant. He found it to be pretty confining and lonely. The Rock was also Aden’s best-known watering hole; Niner and the rest of the station spent a lot of time in the Rock. But not Ames. “
It’s a good thing,” Bob wrote Yvonne, “I’m not a drinker because that seems to be the favorite pastime.”
He preferred root beer and a bowl of pretzels. He was still smoking a pipe, however, and in Aden he discovered a forbidden
pleasure—Havana cigars. “
I bet you’d like to be sitting in my office now,” he teased Yvonne in a letter. “I’m smoking a big smelly Cuban cigar!”