The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (19 page)

Arafat quietly authorized Abu Iyad to organize a clandestine force to bring the war to the West—and to take his revenge against the Hashemites. Abu Iyad was Arafat’s oldest friend. With Arafat’s blessing, he now created a covert arm of Fatah called Black September, named obviously after the bloody events of September 1970. Abu Iyad was thought to be its “
spiritual godfather and chief.” Black September was said to be “more a state of mind than an organization as such,” but the shadowy group drew on Fatah communications and financial resources.

Arafat may have thought he could turn on terror operations—and then just as easily turn them off. But it was more complicated than that. Alan Hart later interviewed a member of Black September whose nom de guerre was Ben Bella. Hart asked him about Arafat’s attitude toward its activities. “
At the time,” said Bella, “Arafat could not afford to speak against us in public because he knew what we were doing had the support of the majority in the rank and file of our movement. Our way was the popular way. But in private meetings he took every
opportunity to tell us we were wrong. I remember an occasion when he said to some of us, ‘You are crazy to take our fight to Europe.’ I was angry and I said, ‘Abu Amar, maybe you are right, maybe we are crazy—but tell me this: is it not also crazy for us to sit here in Lebanon, just waiting to be hit every day by Israeli fighter planes, and knowing that we will lose some ten or more fighters every day without advancing our cause. Is that not crazy too?”

Ali Hassan Salameh no doubt understood these sentiments. As the head of Force 17, Salameh supervised the men who served as Arafat’s personal bodyguards. But Force 17 was also Fatah’s nascent intelligence service. As such, Salameh reported to Abu Iyad—though he had his own special relationship with Arafat. If Abu Iyad served as Black September’s spiritual inspiration, another senior PLO chieftain, Abu Daoud, was its tactical and operational commander. But the chain of command was murky. As head of Force 17, Salameh could hardly be unaware of the existence of this shadowy group. But according to Mustafa Zein, Salameh was not responsible for Abu Iyad’s operations: “
I told Ali that under no circumstances should he involve himself in spilling civilian blood.”

Salameh was clearly a rival of Abu Iyad’s. Both men were in competition for Arafat’s affections. Citing Jordanian authorities, the
New York Times
reported that “
Ali Hassan Salameh, the hard-living Fatah intelligence expert, who they say oversees Black September activities, has become a pawn in a rivalry between veteran commando chiefs.” The
Times
published a photograph with this story “said to depict Ali Hassan Salameh”—but it was a mistake. The photograph was clearly not Salameh.

Black September’s first target was Jordan’s prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal. Salameh personally chose the assassins and organized the operation. According to Yezid Sayigh, the author of the definitive history of the PLO,
Salameh was the “mastermind.” On November 28, 1971, as the Jordanian prime minister was walking into Cairo’s Sheraton Hotel, four Palestinians attacked him. Before his bodyguards could do anything, a young man named Izzat Ahmad Rabah fired four shots at
close range. As Al-Tal’s wife and bystanders watched in horror, one of the assassins, Monsa Khalifa, crouched next to the dying prime minister and licked some of his blood off the floor. As they were arrested, the assassins cried out, “
We are Black September.… We have taken our revenge on a traitor.”

Bob Ames happened to arrive in Amman that Sunday, just a few hours after the prime minister’s assassination in Cairo. “
The Jordanians were in an ugly mood,” Ames wrote, “and you can bet that there was not a Palestinian to be seen on the streets.” What he had planned as a brief informal fact-finding trip now became something more official. Two days after the assassination, Ames drove up with some other American diplomats to Irbid, where they paid a condolence call on Wasfi al-Tal’s family. “It was a pleasant trip and I enjoyed the good bedu coffee,” Ames wrote, “even though the occasion was solemn.… It was kind of fun to be in the middle of things again.”

Later that week, Ames drove to Allenby Bridge on the River Jordan and crossed into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It had been only a little more than four years since the Israelis had conquered the West Bank, but they were already intent on taking every opportunity to demonstrate that their presence was permanent. When Ames arrived at Allenby Bridge—the only crossing point from Jordan into the occupied territories—the Israelis wanted to stamp Ames’s diplomatic passport with an Israeli visa stamp. Normally, as a courtesy, and to encourage tourism, the Israelis routinely gave visitors an Israeli visa on a separate piece of paper so that their passports would still be valid for travel in Arab countries. But on this occasion, the Israeli officials at Allenby Bridge made a point of trying to stamp Ames’s diplomatic passport. When he refused to permit this, they delayed his passage. “They really put me through the mill,” Ames wrote. “They completely took apart my suitcases, emptied my toothpaste tube, dug into my shoe polish, exposed the film in my camera … and they were not going to let any of my aerosol cans in—deodorant, shaving cream—they could be bombs you know.”

And then someone intervened. Ames saw an Israeli army major
inspecting his passport and wallet. Upon finding some Yemeni money stuffed into the wallet, the Israeli army major turned to Ames and explained that he’d emigrated from Yemen in 1948. They’d found common ground. Ames charmed the man. “We talked about Yemen (my common language with the Israelis is Arabic) and he put all the aerosol cans back in my suitcase and let me go through.”

Arriving in Jerusalem, Ames checked in to the American Colony, a quaint boutique hotel in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Built in the late nineteenth century out of Jerusalem’s beautiful white stone, the American Colony had served as an integral part of Jerusalem’s social and political life for decades. It was a genteel expatriate haven in the midst of Arab Jerusalem. At the end of World War I another spy, T. E. Lawrence, had taken lodgings in the American Colony. Lowell Thomas, Gertrude Bell, and John D. Rockefeller were among the Colony’s notable list of visitors. Even after the June 1967 war, its bar and grand dining hall served as a cosmopolitan salon for Jerusalem’s diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals. In the evenings, dozens of expatriates and Palestinian intellectuals mingled in the “big salon,” sitting in overstuffed armchairs under
an elaborate Damascene ceiling hand-painted with gold leaf. Ames loved the hotel’s old-world, Orientalist charm. He liked the convenience of its location, just a few blocks from the American consulate. Also nearby was St. George’s Cathedral, where Ames’s old friend from Dhahran, the newly ordained Ronald Metz, was now an aide to the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. Metz had left both the CIA and Aramco for the Church. But his political work for the bishop focused on aiding the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem in coping with all the difficulties they faced living under the Israeli occupation. (The Israelis had annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, but neither the Palestinians nor the international community regarded the annexation as legal.)

Despite all his sympathies for the Palestinians, Ames could sometimes empathize with the other side. In Jerusalem he visited the Old City, entering through Jaffa Gate in the Jewish Quarter. He walked to the Wailing Wall. “
Today is the Jewish Sabbath,” he wrote home, “so
there was a large turnout at the Wall, and I must say this was impressive. Most of the visitors to the Wall were Oriental/Orthodox Jews dressed in their traditional garb. One goes away with the feeling that these people should not be denied access to the Wall no matter what the final solution is.”

Ames could see that the Israelis had imposed some modernity on the Old City. Hebrew signs adorned every street. The garbage was picked up routinely, and the city was just better organized than when the Jordanians had ruled it. But Ames was a bit of a romantic, and
he “missed the oriental dignity that was Jerusalem.” He wrote Yvonne that he “kind of liked the old chaos—it made you feel a little closer to the time of Christ.”

Ames also disapproved of what the Israelis were doing to encircle East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods. “I can look out my window [from the American Colony] and see all the high rise apartments the Israelis are building on the hills that surround Jerusalem. Somehow that doesn’t seem right.… You certainly get the impression that the Israelis are here to stay.”

After seeing a few contacts, both Israeli and Palestinian, Ames returned to Washington in time for the Christmas holidays.

Home was now Reston, in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. Bob, Yvonne, and the children had left Beirut early in the summer of 1971. Yvonne was pregnant again. On home leave that summer, they first went to Jackson, Mississippi, to visit Yvonne’s parents. Her father had retired as a navy commander and become a pastor with the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. And then they moved into a furnished apartment for a few weeks near Washington, D.C., while they went house hunting. On August 3, 1971, they bought their first home, a single-family, split-level brick-and-wood house at 2304 Short Ridge Road in Reston, Virginia. It was nestled on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a gentle hill, surrounded by dense forest. Sometimes they spotted deer grazing in the woods. They paid $48,950. With four bedrooms and three baths, it was small for a family of seven—soon to be eight. The children had to share one bathroom. It was a decidedly unpretentious suburban American home.

On August 21, 1971, Yvonne gave birth to her sixth child, Kevin. After nine years abroad, Yvonne was happy to be back in America. Bob was assigned a desk job in Langley. The children could play unattended outside;
they never locked their doors. Bob’s twelve-mile commute
to Langley was no more than twenty minutes. Yvonne loved the normalcy of it all.

In Beirut, Yvonne had become a convert to Catholicism. This certainly discomfited her ardently Lutheran parents. But she did it for Bob, who had regularly attended Catholic Mass in Beirut. Three of the children had been baptized in the Catholic Church. But three others were baptized in the Lutheran Church, including baby Kevin. Life in Reston was like nothing they’d experienced in Dhahran, Aden, Asmara, or Beirut. It was Pleasantville, USA. A meticulously planned residential community, Reston had been built in 1964 on a seven-thousand-acre piece of farmland on the outskirts of Washington. The architects zoned ten acres of parkland for every thousand residents. Bicycle paths, twenty swimming pools, and other recreational facilities were available to everyone. It was designed as a self-contained community with its own schools, cinemas, restaurants, and shopping centers. When the Ameses bought their home in 1971, Reston had a population of fewer than six thousand. And because Langley was so close, many of their neighbors were CIA officers.

Bob left for Langley at eight o’clock in the morning and, if he wasn’t traveling, was always home by six. Before dinner he sat in an Ethan Allen rocking chair and read a book while listening to music through a pair of stereo earphones. He rarely drank—at parties he might nurse a gin and tonic. “
He didn’t like what alcohol did,” said Yvonne. But she sometimes sipped a Manhattan—a cocktail made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters—while she cooked dinner. They rarely entertained at home. Their living room was decorated with Persian carpets, Arab brass coffeepots, and a few paintings depicting Bedouin life.
They owned a Kuwaiti chest that had once belonged to the legendary Arabian explorer Harry St. John Philby—the father of MI6’s notorious double agent Kim Philby. The bookshelves were stocked with Middle Eastern history. “He had a fantastic library of books about the Middle East,” recalled Sam Wyman. “I was very impressed.” Ames also owned a Modern Library collection of the one hundred greatest
books of all time. Bob rarely read fiction. But he liked poetry.
His favorite poem was Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

Kipling’s 1895 poem has become an emblem of British Victorian stoicism. Perhaps Bob thought its sentiments spoke to his own conservative instincts. He also liked to quote John Donne’s line “No Man is an island, entire of itself.” Charles Englehart, a twenty-nine-year-old CIA officer, remembers coming over to Ames’s Reston house for dinner one evening. Books were strewn everywhere—and toys. “
Bob was reading five books at any one time,” said Englehart.

On weekends, Bob sometimes shot a few baskets near the garage. On Saturday he spent hours watching basketball games or other sporting events; he liked to yell at the television. The girls were on the local swim team, and when the boys were a little older Bob was most definitely their basketball coach. For idle diversion, he loved to drop by the local Fair Oaks Mall—he punned it the “Medium Maples Mall”—and buy a Heathkit electronic hobby product, perhaps a stereo clock radio or some other electronic gadget that would take hours to assemble.