The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (27 page)
Read The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames Online
Authors: Kai Bird
The Pahlavi regime was nevertheless a close ally, so Washington would quietly ignore the regime’s inherent weakness and unpopularity for another six years—until the Persian “emperor” was overthrown by a violent and unforgiving revolution.
In the autumn of 1973, just six months after arriving in Tehran, the CIA rewarded Ames with a significant promotion to be chief of station in Kuwait. Ambassador Helms orchestrated the transfer. Ames welcomed the new posting; he was happy to get back to Arabia. Neither was Yvonne unhappy about the sudden change in orders. They were still living out of suitcases in temporary quarters in Tehran when the Kuwait assignment came up. When they arrived in Kuwait in the early autumn of 1973, their household effects were still on a ship bound for Iran.
Initially they lived in the Hilton Hotel, not far from the American embassy. But in short order they found a traditional walled house near the Persian Gulf. From the roof, one could see the sparkling turquoise waters that the Kuwaitis called the Arabian Gulf. The children attended the local American School. Yvonne bought them mail-order clothes from JCPenney and Sears Roebuck catalogues. There was no television then in Kuwait, but the children could walk to the beach and go swimming nearly every day. Bob relished being back in Arabia. He again took to driving through the desert, stopping occasionally to talk with the Bedouins. One evening the whole family was invited to a Kuwaiti neighbor’s house for dinner. A Bedouin-style black tent had been pitched in the garden, and their hosts brought out a whole roasted lamb on a tray piled high with rice. After that memorable evening the Ames girls all became vegetarians. Even today, Adrienne won’t touch meat.
That autumn, Ames cabled “Fletcher M. KNIGHT”—Ambassador Helms’s official CIA pseudonym—and gave an enthusiastic report on their new life in Kuwait. “KNIGHT” replied, “
Glad things have worked out so well.” Bob liked his overseas assignments; the work was more interesting than attending meetings in Langley, and the pay was better. The Agency paid the family’s rent in Kuwait; Bob had access to official cars, and he was given an entertainment allowance. Naturally, any expenses from clandestine meetings with agents were reimbursed. He had two other Agency officers working under him, and between the three of them they typically produced about twenty intelligence reports a month.
While in Kuwait, Ames recruited a Palestinian agent who seemed to be very knowledgeable about both Kuwaiti and Palestinian politics. This agent’s cryptonym was MJVOICE/1, and he had close contacts in the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Ames relied on MJVOICE/1’s reporting. “
Bob frequently produced long think pieces on the Palestinian question,” recalled
David Reeve
, a CIA case officer then stationed in Beirut.
Reeve
had known Ames in Beirut and liked him. But he grew to have misgivings. Ames’s reporting made it seem as if MJVOICE/1 was an astute analyst with unique insights. But when
Reeve
met the agent in Beirut he was not impressed. “I used Bob’s reporting to try to get him to open up about what was transpiring in Beirut,” recalled
Reeve
. “I never found him to be very forthcoming. He certainly did not provide information on the scale that he did with Bob.”
Reeve
wondered whether “Bob might have been using this source as a vehicle to get his point across. The source never struck me as that intelligent.”
Reeve
knew this was an occupational hazard, but he thought it wrong to embellish your reporting with your own opinions; he thought Ames had crossed the line. For his part, Ames must have heard complaints from MJVOICE/1 about his meetings with
Reeve
. So Ames sent a back-channel cable to the Beirut chief of station, John Seidel, suggesting that another case officer be used with MJVOICE/1. Seidel refused.
A few of Ames’s peers in the Agency thought he had sharp elbows.
“
Bob had a keen instinct for the jugular,” said Graham Fuller. Fuller admired Ames and thought they had a lot in common. But on one occasion, he felt blindsided by Ames. Fuller had confided in him, frankly sharing some of his doubts about how he was handling some of his recruits. A few weeks later, Fuller was shocked to receive a cable from Ames criticizing his work. The criticism was based wholly on what Fuller himself had revealed to Ames. “I had a feeling that my honesty with him had been turned against me,” Fuller said. “After this, I was wary of him. You know, I couldn’t quarrel with his judgment on matters of substance, but inside the Agency he could play these cat-and-mouse games. After this incident, I couldn’t quite trust him anymore.”
Ames was clearly ambitious. Some ambitious men muffle their opinions and keep their head low. Not Ames. He had certitudes, and he wasn’t shy about expressing them. “
He once told me,” Yvonne Ames said, “that anyone working with him needed to take his ideas and make them work.”
At the same time, Bob could be faultlessly loyal to those he considered his friends. Working with Ames in Kuwait was his colleague from Beirut, Henry McDermott. Bob liked the decidedly irascible McDermott, and he did everything he could to protect Henry from his foibles. “
Henry was a mess,” recalled Yvonne, “but Bob had patience and he could see past the problems. Henry, with all his faults, was easy to be around.” When Henry had an affair with the station secretary, Ames disapproved but chose not to say anything. (McDermott had been separated from his wife, Betty, since 1970.) By then, Henry’s drinking had become a serious problem. “
His pugnacious Irish temperament was always pissing people off,” recalled Henry Miller-Jones. After McDermott’s Kuwait assignment, no one wanted to work with him. Langley wanted to cashier him but instead sent him to counseling for his drinking. At this point, Ames interceded and asked Gene Burgstaller, who by then had been named chief of station in Paris, if he could find a place for McDermott in the Paris station. Like Ames, Burgstaller had a soft spot for Henry, who he knew had pulled off more than one risky
operation during their time together in Beirut. So Burgstaller agreed to shelter him.
But then several years later, McDermott found himself sitting next to an attractive young woman on a flight to Paris. Taking advantage of airline liquor, “
Henry got juiced,” recalled
Bill Fisk
, another clandestine officer who worked with McDermott, “and he started telling her stories about terrorist gangs in Paris. He was just trying to impress the woman.” Unbeknownst to McDermott, the woman was an aide to national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. She complained to Scowcroft, and soon thereafter McDermott was forced to accept an early medical retirement.
He became a potter and lived on a boat in Belmar, New Jersey.
A chief of station posting usually runs three years. But Kuwait was considered by Washington to be a hardship post, so many officers stayed only two years. In any case, Ames was pulled out of Kuwait in the summer of 1975 after only two years on the job. “
Please let me know,” he wrote Ambassador Helms in Tehran, “if there are any last minute things you want me to do before I start closing up shop here.”
He may have been pulled because in early 1975 his name and job title had been published in
CounterSpy
magazine, a left-wing publication critical of the CIA. Yvonne still thinks they had to depart prematurely—but Bob never talked about these things, so she’s not sure what happened. In December 1975, after they’d moved back to their Reston, Virginia, home, the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was gunned down outside his home. Welch had been named in the same
CounterSpy
article as Ames. (Welch was assassinated by gunmen from the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, a Greek underground group opposed to the military dictatorship in Athens.) This first assassination of a chief of station naturally shocked everyone back at Langley. “
His murder is a gruesomely fitting climax to a year of insanity,” said Bill Nelson, a senior CIA officer, in a cable to Dick Helms.
*1
Before leaving Langley on February 2, 1973, Helms made sure to destroy the tapes on which he had recorded hundreds of conversations in his seventh-floor office (William Colby, cable to Helms, January 31, 1974, Helms Papers, CIA, Center for Intelligence Studies; Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
[New York: Doubleday, 2007], p. 324).
*2
After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis captured some phone transcripts that allegedly had Salameh telling a Black September operative in Rome, “Clear the apartment and take all fourteen cakes [shoulder-fired missles]” (Simon Reeve,
One Day in September
[New York: Arcade, 2000], p. 172). The Israelis interpreted this as evidence of Salameh’s involvement in the assassination plot.
*3
The allegation that Salameh was at Munich and planned the operation first appeared in a book by
Time
magazine reporter David Tinnin with Dag Christensen called
The Hit Team
(Dell, 1976). Tinnin’s book contains no source notes. But his book is clearly the source for many of the stories about Salameh in Bar-Zohar and Haber’s
The Quest for the Red Prince
.
*4
The U.S. government later concluded there was good evidence that Arafat had personally approved the operation. A March 13, 1973, State Department cable reported, “Fatah leader Yasser Arafat has now been described in recent intelligence as having given approval to the Khartoum operation prior to its inception.”
*5
At the time of his assassination, Al-Kubaisi was married to Nadera Khodari, a university professor. They had three children. Khodari and her children were all killed in a plane crash near Damascus two years later.
*6
The Israelis had an ally inside the CIA in the figure of counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who, according to Thomas Powers, was convinced that the “KGB was in complete and utter control of the Palestine Liberation Organization” (Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979], p. 327). Ames thought this ridiculous.
*7
Oddly enough, Mossad had assassinated some Palestinians who had no responsibility for Munich—yet the tactical mastermind of Munich, Abu Daoud, died of natural causes—kidney failure—in 2010 (Trevor Mostyn, “Mohammed Oudeh [Abu Daoud] Obituary: Mastermind Behind the Attack on Israeli Athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics,”
Guardian
, July 4, 2010). At least one of the three surviving Black September commandos at Munich is also still alive.
*8
The author of this “secret” memo knew, of course, that Helms himself, for the last two years of his secondary education, had attended Le Rosey, where he had crossed paths with the eleven-year-old shah.
Headquarters, 1975–79
Ames had his quirks, his cowboy boots and his tinted aviator eyeglasses. But when Bob walked into the room you didn’t get the sense … that he was a needy person.
—Lindsay Sherwin, senior analyst, Directorate of Intelligence
Upon his return to Reston in the autumn of 1975, Ames was promoted to chief of the Near East/Arabian Peninsula Branch inside the Directorate of Operations. This put him in charge of all covert operations in Saudi Arabia, the Yemens, Kuwait, and the rest of Arabia. It was a significant promotion, with a pay grade of GS-14—roughly equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the army. At the time, the Agency had more than 20,000 employees, but
only about 2,500 of these were officers in the clandestine service, the DO. Landing a management job at Ames’s level was very competitive.
Ames realized that he was coming back to a CIA very much under siege. After Dick Helms had left as director in early 1973, President Nixon ordered his replacement, James Schlesinger, to purge the Agency. “
Get rid of the clowns,” Nixon said. “What use are they? They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.” Schlesinger lasted only seventeen weeks as director, but by the time he left
he’d fired more than five hundred analysts and a thousand veteran clandestine officers. William Colby replaced Schlesinger. Morale inside Langley naturally plummeted.