The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (26 page)

Despite Israeli protests, Kissinger allowed General Walters to meet with the Palestinians again on March 7, 1974. By then Kissinger, as secretary of state, was engaged in shuttle diplomacy, trying to turn the
cease-fire from the October War into a semblance of real peace. (He wouldn’t be successful.) The PLO envoy—not Salameh—who met with Walters reminded Walters that when Kissinger had flown into Beirut on December 16, 1973, it had been Ali Hassan Salameh who’d thwarted a plot by the Abu Nidal Organization—the nihilist terrorist group responsible for killing numerous Westerners but also some PLO figures—
to shoot his plane down. In his memoirs, Kissinger said he was unimpressed. But the reality was that U.S. diplomats in Beirut were beginning to rely on Salameh and Fatah’s Fedayeen for their security.

Kissinger was still skeptical about the PLO and still wedded to his alliance with the Hashemite monarchy. The Americans felt comfortable with their “plucky little king”—but in reality the Palestinians were becoming a political force that could not be ignored. King Hussein himself had decided that as a matter of self-preservation he had to make his own deal with Arafat. By mid-1974 the PLO was rapidly moving away from a strategy of armed struggle and morphing into a political movement seeking international legitimacy. Salameh had said as much to Ames a year earlier. And now it was happening. On June 8, 1974, Arafat revealed that the Palestinian National Council had voted overwhelmingly to adopt a new “Ten Point Plan.” Couched in purposefully convoluted language, the plan stated that the PLO would seek to establish a Palestinian state over any portion of Palestine that might someday be “liberated.” This was code for the West Bank and Gaza, the territories occupied by Israel in 1967—and that remained occupied by Israel. The plan was the first hesitant step toward a two-state solution. It was a formal acknowledgment of what Salameh had told Ames the previous summer: Israel was here to stay.

Simultaneously, the Ten Point Plan was an implicit concession that the Hashemite regime was also here to stay. The PLO was abandoning the goal of attempting to overthrow King Hussein and turn Jordan into a Palestinian republic. This opened the door to the possibility that King Hussein could forge a reconciliation with Arafat and the PLO. And it became inevitable when, on October 28, 1974, the summit of Arab
heads of state in Rabat formally designated the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” The United Nations quickly followed up with an invitation to Yasir Arafat to address the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974. Arafat arrived in New York—
accompanied by Ali Hassan Salameh and a team of other aides and bodyguards. Salameh traveled under the alias Rafik Behlouli, using an Algerian diplomatic passport numbered 2092 A 73. But the Americans knew exactly who he was. Before departing for New York, U.S. diplomats at the Beirut embassy had spent four hours haggling with Salameh over the terms of the visit. The Americans tried to restrict the size of Arafat’s delegation—and they insisted that no one in the PLO delegation could arrive in New York with their sidearms. “
Salameh begged for understanding and flexibility,” according to a classified telegram describing the negotiations. Salameh said all he could promise was that any arms “will absolutely not be visible.” But in exasperation, he wryly observed, “Have you ever seen a picture of Abu Ammar [Arafat] without a pistol?”

The Red Prince waited in the wings as Arafat, wearing an empty holster, addressed the General Assembly. With a flair for the dramatic, Arafat ended his speech by saying, “
I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” The Israeli diplomats—who boycotted the session—were outraged that the international community had given Arafat such a prominent soapbox.

That same day Salameh met with
Charles Waverly
, the newly designated CIA station chief in Beirut, in a suite the PLO had rented at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Ames had arranged the meeting.
Mustafa Zein was there to introduce Salameh to
Waverly
. Security was tight. The PLO delegation was given three floors of the luxurious hotel; Arafat, Salameh, and other senior aides occupied the middle floor, and their security details lived below and above them. Guards armed with submachine guns were posted at the end of each hallway and on all the staircases.
They spent the night in the Waldorf, traveling to the UN headquarters and back in armored limousines.

David Ignatius of the
Washington Post
later wrote an account of the negotiations between the CIA and Salameh. Ignatius reported that according to one source who was in the room, “
Arafat and his Fatah wing of the PLO would seek to halt international terrorist operations outside Israel, with the understanding that Arafat couldn’t be held responsible for the actions of every Palestinian. In exchange, the United States said it was prepared to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.” A former CIA official had a slightly different take: “The PLO was generally going to lay off Americans, especially official Americans. In return, we would be attentive to some of the security concerns that the PLO had.” Zein,
Waverly
, and Salameh spent four hours together, ironing out the details of this security agreement. Zein told Salameh that Bob Ames had told him to emphasize that if the PLO wanted to be accepted as a state, “the PLO must conduct itself as a member state to join other states of the world.” (They also agreed that the CIA and the PLO should cooperate against any common enemies, such as the Abu Nidal Organization.) Finally, at 3:00
A.M.
the meeting ended, and Salameh left to accompany Arafat on a flight to Cuba, where they were scheduled to see Fidel Castro.

Before leaving New York, Salameh bought a postcard picturing the Waldorf Astoria. He drew an arrow pointing to one of the suites on the upper floors and then wrote on the back, “The PLO at the Waldorf Astoria
!” And then he mailed the postcard to his family in Beirut.

In retrospect, the evolution of the PLO in 1973–74 was a watershed. By the end of 1973, Arafat had closed down Black September. Arafat also deployed his men, as agreed at the Waldorf Astoria talks, against Abu Nidal. Salameh’s deputy in Force 17, Mohammed Natour (Abu Tayeb), later explained, “
We in Force 17 were requested by Arafat to attack Abu Nidal’s headquarters in Libya, and we killed all who were there planning operations to kill PLO representatives in Europe.… Many terrorist operations were disrupted and stopped dead in their tracks. No terrorist act was ever allowed to reach the shores
of America. All Americans and Western nationals were protected in Lebanon by Force 17.”

Fatah did not give up entirely on armed struggle, but henceforth its targets were confined to Israel and the occupied territories. After the Lillehammer fiasco in Norway, Mossad’s assassination program came to a halt. The war of spooks petered out.
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The Palestinians had taken far more casualties, but a few Israelis had been assassinated as well. In London a letter bomb killed an Israeli diplomat—and in Madrid Black September assassinated a Mossad agent. Major General Yariv later insisted that Israel’s wave of retaliatory assassinations “
persuaded the PLO leaders to stop the terrorism abroad. This proves that we were right to use this method for a certain period.” Yet Mossad’s assassination program did not stop attacks from non-Fatah groups like the PFLP and the Abu Nidal Organization. More persuasive is the argument that Arafat and Salameh understood that Black September’s spectacular attacks had indeed captured the world’s attention. Everyone understood now that there was a Palestinian problem. But they realized that continued terrorism would make more people less sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Even more important, they realized they could not keep the CIA’s back channel open if Black September continued to attack Western targets. By mid-1973, Arafat could see that the channel that went through Bob Ames to the CIA leadership and ultimately to the White House offered him the potential opportunity to gain America’s recognition for both the PLO and the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and nationhood. In this sense, Ames and the CIA had planted the seeds of a peaceful settlement. “
I’m just a middle man in all this,” Ames wrote to Zein in June 1974—just days before Arafat had persuaded the Palestinian National Council to accept
the idea of a Palestinian state on a portion of Palestine. “Middle men often spend much time waiting. It seems to me there is a famous saying, which goes, ‘He also serves who stands and waits.’ That’s us, you and I. Tell our friends to be patient.”

Ames was very pleased that Washington had allowed Arafat and Salameh to visit New York. He felt that his off-and-on dialogue with Salameh—a delicate relationship cultivated over five long years—had finally led to a concrete diplomatic achievement. After the October 1974 Rabat Arab League summit, when the PLO was recognized as “the sole representative of the Palestinian people,” Ames wished that Washington could have followed suit. Arafat for a moment really thought the Americans were going to recognize him as a legitimate leader. But Kissinger balked and insisted that Arafat had to recognize Israel’s right to exist and fully endorse UN Resolution 242—which implicitly recognized Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Arafat couldn’t bring his own constituency along that far—not yet. Ames thought that this stalemate was unfortunate and that more could have been done to bridge their differences. He thought it essential to U.S. national interests that the Palestinian conundrum be resolved. Ames’s secret diplomacy with Salameh had opened a back door to a peace settlement—but the policy makers, Kissinger in particular, had missed an opportunity to reach for a truly comprehensive peace settlement. Kissinger’s “step-by-step” diplomacy was wasting time; it allowed the Israelis to postpone making the hard compromises necessary for peace—and gave them more time to create new facts on the ground in the occupied territories. Ames was thus both proud of what he had done and also frustrated.

And even if Salameh wasn’t exactly a fully recruited agent, Ames felt that he’d been at least partially responsible for bringing this particular Palestinian in from the cold. It was a step in the direction of political legitimization and a step away from the terrorism. It was an open secret inside the CIA that Bob Ames had helped to make this happen. Some of his colleagues knew of Ames’s cultivation of MJTRUST/2,
and those who didn’t nevertheless knew that Ames was somehow a rising star. They also knew that the thirty-nine-year-old Ames was a protégé of Dick Helms. That alone marked him as special.

Throughout these momentous events in 1973–74, Ames had been posted first
in Tehran, serving under Ambassador Helms—and later in Kuwait. He had flown frequently into Beirut to see Salameh. But at the same time, his job in Tehran required him to acquire a new expertise on things Iranian. He disliked the sprawling concrete city and thought the Persians pretentious and faux-cosmopolitan—at least those who populated the pampered inner circle of the Pahlavi dynasty. “In Tehran,” recalled another CIA officer, “we were completely cut off from Iranian society. The CIA station had to rely for everything on SAVAK [the shah’s secret police], and they were very condescending about the Arabs. Ames was no doubt annoyed by this attitude. Besides, these SAVAK guys were all liars. It was tiresome. They would lie to me about what they ate for lunch.” In private Ames liked to mock the shah’s imperial pretentions, calling him in a Farsi accent the “shah-in-shah-shah.” A few colleagues in the embassy shared his sentiments. That summer, one Foreign Service officer wrote Ambassador Helms a long skeptical assessment of the shah’s regime:”
The Shah in his early years tried to behave like a constitutional monarch and to implement the democratic ideals which he is said to have acquired at Le Rosey [an elite boarding school in Switzerland].
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Whether or not this is true (and I must say that Le Rosey seems to me a most unlikely place for anyone to acquire democratic ideas), it is clear that in the early 1950s, especially after the Mossadegh episode, the Shah determined to rule as well as reign.” The officer then described Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi’s governance style: “The system is simple and crude, but complicated in
use, rather as primitive languages are said by linguists to have the most complex grammars. Every important organ of government is managed by a few men who must be kept in a state of intense rivalry and distrust of one another. All power comes from the Shah.”