The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (52 page)

When Sergeant Light turned around, he caught his first panorama view of the carnage. There were burning bodies lying on the sidewalk and in the driveway. Cars that had been driving by when the truck bomb hit were now charred hunks of burning metal.
A Lebanese army tank that had been parked on the corniche across the street from the embassy had been blown into the ocean. There were bodies floating in the surf. All eight floors of the central wing of the embassy had collapsed. And then Sergeant Light suddenly remembered that after the
initial blast, as he lay semiconscious on the floor, he’d heard loud slapping sounds, one after another. “It dawned on me that it was those floors coming down, one after another. One would hit a floor, and the weight of it would take another one down.”

Sergeant Light then ran around to the side of the embassy, looking for survivors. He found what remained of the consular section, imploded into a crater of rubble. Looking down, he saw a woman who’d been blown through the air only to land with her legs slammed into an open filing cabinet. She was still alive. Sergeant Light had a Red Crescent volunteer lower him into the crater with his belt. He then went over to the filing cabinet and pulled the woman out. Her legs were broken and her right hand had been blown off and was dangling by a piece of skin. She had a chest wound and her face was pockmarked with glass and shrapnel. Sergeant Light held her in his arms: “She was talking to me, talking to somebody in Lebanese [Arabic]. I held her there until she died, and then I put her down and went on inside the embassy.”

When the
Wall Street Journal
’s David Ignatius heard the explosion, he was nearly a mile away from the embassy. The windows rattled and he felt a “
momentary feeling of vertigo, like fear but worse.” He ran back down the hill toward the corniche. By the time he got there, U.S. marines were trying to cordon off the building. The smoke and dust had cleared. Ignatius looked up and saw the body of a man in a sports jacket dangling upside-down with his legs pinned between two collapsed floors.

Sergeant Light saw the same hideous image. He spent the next four hours on a rope with a Red Crescent worker trying to extract the body of William Sheil, the fifty-nine-year-old former Green Beret and CIA contract interrogator. Light failed. “There was nothing I could do,” Light later said. “He was pinned, and there was no way I could get a bar or anything to pry him out of there. It took, I don’t know, two or three days before we could get that poor man out of there.” Sheil was
caught between the fourth and fifth floors. They finally had to bring in two cranes, one with a chain tied to the floor that had crushed Sheil’s legs, and the other with a chain wrapped around his body. Sergeant Light later testified that when the cranes yanked Sheil’s dead body out, “the chain that was around him pulled his pants off; and he was hanging out there in public like that. I thought it was an absolute shame.”

Back in America, Cheryl Lee Sheil was watching the television news because her sister had called to tell her that their father, William Sheil, was actually in Beirut. Concerned, Cheryl turned on the TV news and saw that the networks were airing clips of the damaged embassy. “
I was watching them bring out dead bodies,” said Cheryl. “I remember there was one gentleman hanging over a balcony, and [the networks] kept showing him again and again, and I said, well, gee, somebody should go get that guy. And it was worse because he was wearing a jacket that looked like one that my dad had bought when he was in Chicago visiting at Christmastime. I said [to myself],
Oh, I hope that’s not Dad
.” It was.

The
Washington Post
’s Nora Boustany came running down to the corniche when she heard the explosion. “
It was the only time I felt completely speechless,” Boustany recalled. “I couldn’t talk. I just stood there in shock, looking at the bodies on the sidewalk.”

Alison Haas—the wife of CIA station chief Ken Haas—had heard the explosion, but it never entered her mind that Americans might have been targeted. A month earlier, she’d heard a blast just down the street from their apartment. Some of the debris had landed on their balcony, and many people had been killed. So Alison told herself this was just another Beirut explosion. She walked around the corner to her local grocery and bought Ken some cigarettes. As she returned she saw a crowd gathering and pointing at a huge plume of white smoke. Alison then heard someone say “American embassy” in Arabic. She ran home and immediately tried phoning Ken, but she kept getting a busy signal. Alison interpreted this as a good sign. She turned on the radio and was somewhat reassured when she heard a report that the explosion had hit the consular section and that “only” two or three people had been
hurt. She waited until 3:00
P.M.
—and finally she got in her car and drove back to the embassy. She had to stop the car and get out several blocks away because the road was blocked. She started running. Several marines tried to stop her, but she got past them and kept running. Finally, an embassy officer grabbed her and asked her who had been in the CIA office that morning. Alison said everyone except Frank Johnston. She hadn’t seen Frank. By then, Alison was becoming hysterical. No one would let her around the corner where she could have seen the full extent of the damage to the front facade of the embassy. Someone took her by the hand and drove her to the ambassador’s residence.

Early that evening Ambassador Dillon returned to the residence and gently knelt down on one knee before Alison and said that so far Ken had not been found. He explained that the CIA office on the fifth floor had taken the full force of the blast. Alison replied, “They could be in an air pocket, they could be trapped.”

Later that night Alison was taken back to her apartment, where she saw that someone had brought Arlette, Frank Johnston’s Palestinian-Israeli wife. Arlette had heard the explosion from her apartment. The blast was “so hard it shook the windows.” She’d then run down to the embassy only to see that it was gone. She’d seen only darkness and black smoke. “
The day seemed night,” she later wrote in her diary. By the time Alison arrived home, Arlette knew her husband was gone. Someone had handed her his wallet—proof that he’d been found. They didn’t tell her
the grim story of
how
he’d been found. Soon after the blast, as the cloud of smoke and dust cleared, the marines could see someone trapped between two slabs of concrete. It was Frank Johnston, and he was still alive. Rescuers got to him fairly quickly and managed to pry him loose. But his body had been severely crushed. Just before he died, Frank managed to ask that his wallet be given to his wife.

Arlette was given a sleeping pill and codeine—and she eventually fell asleep. But Alison couldn’t sleep, even when a marine doctor gave her another dose of codeine. Finally, around 3:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, Murray McKann, one of three CIA officers who hadn’t been in the
embassy late that morning, came and told Alison, “They found him.” Alison said, “Is he alive?” And Murray had to say, “No.”

Deputy Chief of Mission Bob Pugh formally identified the bodies of Jim and Monique Lewis, Deborah Hixon, Ken Haas, and Phyllis Faraci. “
They were not mangled,” Pugh recalled. “They looked very much like themselves. They’d been suffocated by the debris and dirt. It looked almost as if they had died in their sleep.”

Susan Morgan, the CIA officer on a TDY assignment to Beirut, was having a leisurely lunch in the southern port city of Sidon when her hostess casually mentioned that there’d been an explosion in the embassy. Morgan thought she was joking. Another guest at the luncheon table reminded her that such things happened all the time in Lebanon: “We’re used to it.” Morgan and another embassy official quickly piled into their car for the hour-long drive back to Beirut. Bob Ames had called Morgan early that morning to invite her to have dinner with him and a “Shi’a businessman”—none other than Mustafa Zein. They’d agreed to meet at the Mayflower Hotel at 7:30
P.M.
Morgan felt nauseous on the drive back to Beirut. She knew Bob had been heading for the embassy that morning.

Morgan arrived at the embassy at 4:00
P.M.
The scene of devastation stunned her. Bulldozers were already at work, clearing the rubble. “I see the walking wounded, and search for faces I know,” Morgan wrote a few days later in a “Beirut Diary” that the CIA classified “secret.” She saw a Foreign Service officer who’d been in the building, but when she asked about Ames, he just shook his head and said he didn’t know, but that “many people have died.” Morgan went back to the Mayflower, hoping to find a message from Ames; there was nothing, so she left one for him in case he returned. It then occurred to her that Bob might have been taken to the hospital, so she rushed over to the nearby American University of Beirut hospital. The emergency room was crowded with wounded people, but when Morgan scanned a list
of the admitted wounded, Ames was not on the list. “I ask nurses,” Morgan wrote. “Nothing. In my heart, I know already.”

By 9:00
P.M.
Morgan returned to the embassy: “Nothing has changed except that tear gas canisters stored in the embassy are leaking. I approach the rubble to start searching only to drop back when I get a mouthful of gas.” Floodlights had been erected so that rescue workers could see as they dug through the rubble. Standing on the perimeter, just outside the floodlights amid the wrecked cars and debris, Bob Pugh pointed up to a dangling body, pinned between two upper floors. “I fix my eyes on the body,” Morgan wrote, “trying to see around it, to look for Bob Ames.” As the hours passed, the night air grew so chilly that Morgan left briefly to find a coat at a friend’s nearby flat. But she hurried back to the site, fearing that Ames’s body would be found in her absence. In fact, no bodies had been found in the rubble since 6:00
P.M.

“Suddenly, at 0230,” Morgan wrote, “there is a commotion at the rubble heap. People cluster around one spot. A body has been found. My heart skips and I know.” Someone waved Morgan over and asked her to identify the body. “I look briefly. Yes. I am handed his passport and wallet.” Oddly, there was not a mark on Ames’s body or clothes, and Morgan later speculated that he’d died in the elevator from the concussion of the bomb.
^*4

Bob Ames may have died alone. His daughter Karen later overheard someone at the memorial service saying that Bob had been found in a stairwell. “
He looked like he’d just probably been leaving the cafeteria, heading up to a meeting, that he was facedown, that his eyes were already closed, and that he was killed by the impact of the explosion, not that anything had fallen on him, and that there was just a small cut on his neck.”

An embassy officer reminded Susan Morgan that she should retrieve
all of Bob’s papers from his hotel room. But Morgan was determined to accompany the body to the morgue. She followed the ambulance, arriving at the morgue around 3:30
A.M.
It was a grisly scene, and the morgue’s guards tried to dissuade her from entering. Morgan ignored them and climbed a railing to get into the room. Upon entering, she saw that there were five other bodies lying on the floor. “
I retrieve Bob’s wedding ring, pray for his soul, and tell him goodbye,” Morgan wrote. “I wonder why I do not cry.” She had to get someone to cut off Bob’s wedding ring, and she noticed that he was wearing a small chain around his neck. She took that too.
^*5
A half hour later, Morgan walked into the Mayflower, a regular venue for visiting Americans. The staff was in shock. “I tell them what I know of the dead and the living,” Morgan wrote. And then she explained that she needed to pack up his belongings—and make sure nothing of a classified nature was left behind. Only then did Morgan find a phone to call Langley. It was around 5:00
A.M.
Beirut time when she called to report that she’d made a positive identification of Ames’s body. Back in Washington it was nearly 10:00
P.M.
on Monday evening.