The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (16 page)

Ames and Salameh had an easy and quite open relationship. “
Bob had Ali Hassan over to our apartment one time,” recalled Yvonne, “but I didn’t meet him.” They made an odd pair. On one level, they clearly had nothing in common. Ames dressed modestly, like a conservative American businessman: cheap tan slacks, perhaps a loose-fitting polo shirt and a gray sports jacket. Nothing out of the most ordinary—except for the cowboy boots he sometimes chose to wear. Going on thirty-six years of age, Bob had a bit of a paunch. He kept his hair short and well trimmed. He was devoted to his wife of ten years and their five children. And he hated to spend money. He rarely drank. There was nothing extravagant about Bob Ames.

Ali Hassan, age twenty-seven, looked like a movie actor or a rock ’n’ roll musician. He dressed his six-foot frame in black. His standard uniform was a tight-fitting black shirt unbuttoned to show his hairy chest, a black leather jacket, and black trousers. His wavy, jet-black hair was thick and brushed straight back, revealing a broad forehead. His sideburns were long and bushy, almost like a nineteenth-century Englishman’s muttonchop sideburns. His stomach muscles were taut and
firm, evidence of his almost daily karate workouts in the Continental Hotel’s gym; he’d earned either a fourth or a fifth black belt. He was in very good shape. “
He moved like a panther,” recalled Frank Anderson, a case officer who worked with Ames. He spoke fluent English, German, and French. He listened to American pop music; his favorite song was Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” He was rumored to have
an IQ of 180. Ali Hassan was not a nervous man, but rather incongruously, he chain-smoked cigarettes. He drank Scotch whiskey, but he also had a taste for expensive red wines, and though he was married and had two sons he openly dated other women. “When Ali walked in,” recalled the wife of one CIA case officer, “he sucked the air out of the room.” He knew people gossiped about his playboy lifestyle. But he didn’t care. He once told a reporter, “
People expect a revolutionary to be a miserable-looking, shabby creature dressed in rags. That’s the wrong notion.… As the Arabic saying goes: Better a reputation of opulence than a reputation of misery.”

Ames and Salameh were opposites. But they quickly established a genuine friendship. Ali Hassan joked that by hanging out with Ames he’d get a chance to practice his English. “
Professionally speaking,” said Anderson, “they each were the most significant person in each other’s lives.”

The ever-reliable Mustafa Zein always arranged their meetings. “Mustafa was a constant presence,” Anderson said. “He deeply admired both Bob and Ali Hassan.” Zein had cultivated a persona in West Beirut’s café society as a smooth-talking radical-chic Lebanese leftist who strongly sympathized with the Palestinian cause. He seemed to know everyone.

By the summer of 1970, Ames’s special relationship with Salameh had evolved to a point where the young Palestinian had become a critical source of information about the brewing crisis in Jordan. Salameh was still just a “source”—not a recruit. Nevertheless, the CIA sometimes assigns a cryptonym to a source, if only to make it easier to disseminate
the source’s information more widely within the Agency without compromising his identity. Salameh’s crypt was MJTRUST/2. All crypts are capitalized and begin with a two-character prefix, a diagraph that signifies a country or subject. At the time,
MJ
stood for Palestinian. The originating case officer—in this instance, Bob Ames—usually selected the root word following the two-character diagraph. Significantly, Ames called Salameh TRUST, suggesting exactly what he thought of him. He was trusted. The root word in the crypt is always followed by a slash and a number. MJTRUST/2 signified that Salameh was the second member of this organization to have been identified by this case officer. “
The PLO factions were the darling of Arab intellectuals and the Arab street,” recalled Hume Horan, then the U.S. embassy’s chief political officer in Amman. “King Hussein was extraordinarily isolated. Washington wondered how Hussein could last, with half of

Jordan’s population being Palestinian.… Every Arab under twenty thought Hussein a stooge for Zionism and Western imperialism.”

Early in 1970, Ambassador Harry Symmes made it clear to President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that he believed the king’s days were numbered. “
I didn’t think the king was effectively in charge of the situation—and even if he tried to be in charge that he would succeed.”

Kissinger agreed that King Hussein was “in grave peril” and was concerned that his collapse “would radicalize the entire Middle East.” At the same time, he doubted that Israel would ever allow the PLO to take over Jordan.

But the facts on the ground suggested that the Hashemites could no longer be sustained in power. By June 1970, lawlessness was commonplace. Both the Fedayeen and the army committed various atrocities. That month the king’s convoy of cars was attacked and Hussein personally participated in a street battle. On September 1, 1970, he barely survived an assassination attempt. The CIA’s longtime station chief in Amman, Jack O’Connell (1921–2010), bluntly told the king that the time had come to mount a crackdown on the PLO’s militia and seize back the streets from the Fedayeen. “I
was virtually alone in believing
that the king and his army would ultimately prevail,” O’Connell later wrote in his memoirs. “The U.S. government was deeply divided. State was pessimistic. The Agency was split between my views in Amman and the views of Bob Ames, a rising CIA star who was stationed in Beirut and in liaison with Arafat’s intelligence chief, Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames and I were rivals.”

O’Connell had first arrived in Amman in 1958 when he was sent by the Agency to warn King Hussein of an army plot against his regime. O’Connell played a key role in thwarting the coup and thus earned the king’s gratitude. In 1963, O’Connell was sent back to Amman as chief of station, and he quickly became the king’s closest foreign confidant. O’Connell believed deeply in the “plucky little king” and believed that his Bedouin army could keep him in power—regardless of the wishes of the majority of his people.

Ames believed Salameh—who was telling him that the PLO forces were capable of withstanding anything the Hashemites could throw at them. Ames believed the Palestinians were going to win, if only because the PLO had a popular mandate and the momentum. “
Bob was just very clearly anti-Hashemite—and ambivalent about Israel,” recalled Dewey Clarridge, later a high-ranking officer in Arab Operations. Ames and O’Connell argued vigorously with each other, both verbally and in their cables back to Langley. O’Connell thought Ames was “
misinterpreting his own personal experience with urban warfare in Aden, where the Yemeni insurgents had driven British troops from the port city in 1967.” O’Connell pointed out that the British were the foreigners in Aden, while the Jordanian army was fighting on home ground. Ames countered that historically, King Hussein, the Hashemite family, and the king’s Bedouin tribesmen were actually the foreigners in that they had come from the Hejaz in western Arabia during World War I. The British colonialists, Ames reminded O’Connell, had imposed the Hashemite regime on the Palestinian population. It was the Palestinians, he argued, who were on home ground, and it was the Palestinians who possessed the higher quotient of political
legitimacy. O’Connell thought this was too fine a point; Ames was intellectualizing. What mattered was power, and Hussein’s army had 150 tanks and plenty of artillery. “
Bob was prescient,” said Graham Fuller, another clandestine officer. “And like many prescient officers, he would be right about the longer time frame, and just wrong in the short term.”

As civil war loomed, the PLO had around twenty-five thousand men in its militia, but all summer they’d been passing out arms to thousands of young men in the refugee camps. All told, there were perhaps as many as forty thousand Palestinians walking around with guns in their hands. Hussein’s regular army numbered some sixty thousand troops, but more than half of these men—even many of the officers—were Palestinians. Hussein felt he could count on the loyalty of less than half his army. But O’Connell was right about one thing: Bedouin officers loyal to the monarch controlled the armored units, and they could prove to be decisive in any showdown with the guerrillas.

Ironically, the Israeli political and military establishment was having the same debate as Ames and O’Connell. Leading Israeli political figures were themselves divided on whether saving King Hussein’s throne was good for Israel. Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Abba Eban, and Yitzhak Rabin surmised that King Hussein might someday be persuaded to conclude a separate peace deal with Israel. “The opposing opinion,” wrote Mordechai Gur, the Israeli general in charge of the Syrian-Lebanese front in 1970, “supported the transformation of Jordan into a Palestinian state.… They suggested allowing the guerrillas to achieve their aims and to take control over all of Jordan. In this they saw the ideal solution to the issue of the Palestinians.” Ezer Weizman, Gen. Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres made this argument—and so too did Gen. Ariel Sharon.

Henry Kissinger claims that he knew nothing of this internal Israeli debate. But in the midst of the crisis, on September 20, 1970, he told his aides, “I’m not really sure the Israelis would mind it if Hussein should topple. They would have no more West Bank problem.” And
just a few days later he read an official memorandum of a conversation in which Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, speculated that Israel might indeed be better off without the Hashemite regime:

Kissinger read and initialed this memorandum—but evidently he discounted Eban’s analysis. Years later he insisted to the British scholar Nigel Ashton that “
any move to undermine Hussein would have provoked a crisis in their [the Israelis’] relations with Washington.” More likely, Kissinger instinctively thought America’s Cold War imperatives—which in the Middle East usually meant blind support for a pro-American, anticommunist, and anti-Nasserite monarch—was a safer policy than actually addressing the Palestinian problem, one of the region’s primary sources of unrest. Ames thought this shortsighted. And O’Connell thought Ames was too much under the influence of his “Red Prince.”

Some thought Ames had an overt pro-Palestinian prejudice. But in point of fact, most CIA officers who spent any time in the region came to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian refugees. “
Like all of us who get to know anything about the Palestinian problem,” said George Cave, a veteran of more than three decades in the Agency, “you can’t help but feel sympathy for them.… When people ask me what to read about the Arab-Israeli problem I tell them the Old Testament.”
O’Connell also sympathized with the Palestinians—but he had a personal relationship with Hussein and genuinely liked the king.

On September 6, 1970, the crisis in Jordan was further inflamed by a brazen act of air piracy. Commandos from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four commercial airliners all in one day. One of the four planes, a Pan Am jumbo jet, was flown to Cairo. A hundred feet above the runway, a PFLP commando lit a fuse and informed the crew that they had eight minutes to get everyone off the plane. As the plane screeched to a halt at the end of the runway, the cabin crew blew the emergency slide chutes open and yelled at the 173 passengers to evacuate. Three minutes later, the $25 million jet blew apart on the tarmac. Miraculously, no one was injured. The hijacking of an El Al passenger jet bound for New York from Amsterdam was foiled by Israeli security guards; one of the hijackers, an American citizen, Patrick Arguello, was killed, and his companion, Leila Khaled, was detained in a British police station in London. But two of the other planes were piloted to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned World War II–era desert airstrip north of Amman. The passengers were kept hostage by hundreds of PFLP Fedayeen. Three days later, they were joined by yet another hijacked plane. By then, the PFLP had 426 hostages at Dawson’s Field—surrounded by hundreds of King Hussein’s Arab Legionnaires sitting in armored personnel carriers.