The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (18 page)

At times, Salameh and Ames traded useful bits of hard intelligence with each other, the kind of information that could save lives. “
I remember avidly reading MJTRUST’s file,” recalled Charles Allen, an experienced DO officer. “It was unbelievably good stuff.” Ames obviously thought so too. So when Dave Blee pressured Ames to take the next step and turn Salameh into a full recruitment, Ames resisted. Why, he argued, should such a valuable relationship be jeopardized just so the CIA could claim it had a paid agent at the side of Arafat? “
I thought it was a mistake,” recalled
Charles Waverly
, who was privy to the argument. “I thought it was out of context.” Sam Wyman also sided with
Waverly
and Ames. “
I was of the opinion that it was not necessary to recruit Salameh,” Wyman said. “We had what we wanted.”

This was an old argument in the intelligence business. “
An agent does not always mean a paid agent,” says
Hillel Katz
, a former high-ranking
Mossad officer. “If I had heard about this, I would have said, ‘Bob, very good work. This is a good way to cultivate an agent.’ As a matter of principle you have to allow your agent to have a good reason to justify what he is doing. Sometimes, he has to be able to tell himself, ‘I am doing good service for my people.’ It is never clean. In fact, it is best for everyone to keep it vague. Let him keep his pride.”

Ames, Wyman, and
Waverly
were overruled, and Blee ordered another Agency officer, Vernon Cassin, to make the recruitment pitch. Ames nevertheless played his part. He told Mustafa Zein that Washington had agreed to initiate a dialogue with the PLO. A clandestine meeting would take place in Rome. “
A CIA officer would start the ball rolling and Bob would pick it up in Beirut afterwards.”
Bob gave Mustafa handwritten instructions on how to meet Cassin in Rome. He told Mustafa to fly to Rome, where on December 16, 1970, he would receive a phone call in his hotel room at precisely 4:00
P.M.
: “John will say he and his wife are in Rome and hope to see you …” Exactly one hour later, Mustafa was supposed to walk into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel with a coat over his arm. “John will carry [a] rolled Italian newspaper. You should take a seat in the corner of [the] lobby. John will approach and say, ‘I think I met you in the Semiramis Hotel.’ You should reply, ‘I think it was the Shepard’s [
sic
] Hotel.’ ” (Both were landmark hotels in Cairo.)

Zein did as he was told. Traveling on a diplomatic passport issued by Sharjah, Zein arrived in Rome on December 16, 1970. He met with “John”—Vernon Cassin—and subsequently made reservations for adjoining suites in the Cavalieri Hilton Hotel from December 18 through 21. Posing as a rich Arab businessman, Zein played host. Salameh arrived in Rome, along with a contingent of twenty-three security guards. His guards mostly kept out of sight. Salameh had been briefed by Zein and was under the impression that he was to meet with a high-ranking CIA official who was authorized to open a dialogue with the PLO. This was only several months after the September debacle in Jordan, and there was much to discuss. Salameh was introduced by Zein to Cassin, a tall, thin man who wore a fedora. A former
station chief in Damascus and Amman, Cassin was a pretty straitlaced Agency officer. One colleague described him as “
a complete professional who went by the book.”

Cassin told Zein that he wanted to speak to Salameh alone. Zein immediately understood what was up, and before the meeting he took Ali Hassan aside and told him, “He is coming to recruit you. Just be cool. Listen to what he has to say and then politely excuse yourself.” Salameh did as Zein advised. According to Peter Taylor, a British broadcast reporter who interviewed Zein at length, “
The meeting did not go well.” Salameh was offered $300,000 a month “to co-ordinate activities between your organization and our organization.” Taylor later wrote in his 1993 book,
States of Terror
, that there was no proverbial suitcase stuffed with cash—just a verbal offer. After making the pitch, Cassin was pleased by Salameh’s calm demeanor. No theatrics was a good sign. When Salameh rose to leave, Cassin promised they’d meet the next day for a fine meal in one of Rome’s most expensive restaurants.

The next day the three men met for lunch. When Salameh momentarily excused himself, Zein turned to Cassin and said, “
Ali told me everything. He said you were willing to finance the PLO to the tune of $35 million a year—and recognize the PLO. He’s already sent a coded message to Arafat. The Chairman is very pleased.”

Flabbergasted, Cassin hastily left the restaurant. Salameh and Zein were playing with him. He knew the attempted recruitment had failed; he reported this to Langley, but he also claimed that Salameh had angrily refused to cooperate with the Agency in combating terrorism. This was a lie, but one that conveniently explained the failed recruitment. Cassin painted Salameh as a dogmatic extremist.

For his part, Salameh was deeply offended by the overture. “
It took a while to restore the relationship,” said
Waverly
.

Back in Beirut, Ames and Zein tried to put things on an even keel. But Ames was terribly disappointed by the fallout from the Rome fiasco.
“
We, you and I,” he wrote Mustafa Zein, “really tried to do something which was perhaps ahead of our time.” He was also angry about the “lies and misunderstandings” told by Cassin about Salameh. “Since I have read the files on these matters I can say, unfortunately, that lies were told.” Ames also had cause to worry about Salameh’s safety. Soon after the Rome meeting, Salameh received a package addressed to him in Beirut. “
Bob had warned us to watch out for letter bombs,” Zein said. Salameh normally received all his mail through the PLO office. But one day in early 1971 a heavy manila envelope arrived at his Verdun Street apartment. Salameh had it x-rayed. Had he opened it, he would have been maimed or worse. This was almost certainly Mossad’s first attempt to kill Ali Hassan.
^*2

Ames saw Salameh intermittently over the next six months, and they met about a month before Ames was posted back to Washington in June 1971. But then Salameh seemed to disappear. “After the Rome meeting,” Zein said, “Ali lost favor inside the PLO. Arafat had put him in charge of Palestinian-American relations, and now this didn’t seem to be going anywhere.” Ames was aware that Salameh’s fortunes had dimmed precisely because of his association with the Agency. “
I know he’s suffered some setbacks because of his contact with me,” Ames wrote Zein. “He was also ahead of his time. We really started something good and I believe history will prove that if people had been wiser and more honest much misery could have been avoided.”

Just two weeks later, Ames wrote Zein again. The tone of the letter made it clear that Ames was trying to keep Zein on board, trying to persuade him that all was not lost in their venture. It was not a letter from a CIA case officer instructing his access agent. It was a letter of persuasion from one friend to another. “
It sure was great to hear from you,” Ames wrote in longhand, “and learn you are still in the middle of things. Life back here [Washington, D.C.] is dull by comparison—paper,
politics and bureaucracy. Frankly, I miss the action and wish I were out doing something again.”

Zein was then still working for the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi, but he was planning to move back to Lebanon. Ames told Zein that he felt indebted to him and offered to help: “Whatever you choose, I hope you’ll keep in touch and if there is anything I can do to help let me know. I don’t like to owe debts and I do owe a great deal to you.” He said that he was planning a trip to Beirut and Amman in late October and suggested that perhaps they could meet there or in Bahrain. “I have much more to discuss when we get together later,” Ames wrote. “There is much that can’t be put in writing. As I’m sure you realize.”

Zein was not an agent of the CIA. Ames knew that Mustafa was his own man. But Mustafa was also Bob’s invaluable channel to Ali Hassan. “
Regarding our friend,” Ames wrote, “if you see him tell him that we are doing our best to balance things and we have achieved some success. I have a few things for him which I’ll pass along via you. These items will help him regain some of the stature I know he lost because of his contact with us. I have a debt to him too which I want to pay off.”

Bob signed this letter “Munir”—Arabic for “the Enlightener.” This was Mustafa’s affectionate, Sufi-derived alias for his American friend. Bob used his home for the return address on the envelope, but instead of his name he used the initials RCA.

Three weeks later, on September 14, 1971, Ames wrote Mustafa again about possibly setting up a meeting with Salameh. Ames was anxious to resume his conversations with Salameh, but he knew any such meeting, if leaked, could jeopardize Salameh’s standing in the PLO. “
Regarding our friend,” Ames wrote Zein, “I believe it is imperative that you and I discuss any meeting with him prior to any firm commitment being made, if indeed we decide such a meeting should even take place. I, of course feel, personally, such a meeting would be extremely useful but what we want to avoid is any misunderstanding, such as existed in the past, and which caused all the parties concerned, especially you, so many problems. Now that he is back in his proper position, we do not want to repeat past mistakes.”

Salameh’s standing in the PLO had indeed suffered a setback in the spring and summer of 1971. Ali Hassan had his rivals, and Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf) was one of them. The PLO’s number-two leader had once been a mentor of Ali Hassan’s. But after the disastrous outcome of the Jordanian civil war, some blamed Abu Iyad for poor intelligence on King Hussein’s intentions and capabilities. Ali Hassan had once worked directly under Abu Iyad, but after September 1970 Salameh became Arafat’s shadow. Abu Iyad resented Salameh’s growing influence and access to the Chairman. By the spring of 1971, Abu Iyad was looking for any excuse to discredit Salameh. The perception that Salameh had somehow mishandled the back channel to the CIA had hurt his standing. But Abu Iyad also seized upon an incident in Europe on February 6, 1972, where a shoot-out involving some of Salameh’s Force 17 commandos had resulted in the deaths of five men. Abu Iyad went to Arafat and complained that Salameh was out of control. Arafat placed Salameh on a three-month leave while an internal PLO investigation probed the incident. Salameh used the time to visit London and other European cities, traveling on an Algerian diplomatic passport. Upon his return to Beirut, Salameh was vindicated. Arafat’s investigation concluded that the five men killed by Salameh’s Force 17 operatives had been Mossad informants. As Ames had heard through his own sources, by the autumn of 1971 Salameh had been restored to his position as chief of Force 17.

The incident later became an important piece of Salameh’s résumé, because in his absence Abu Iyad had created a rival organization within the PLO that became known as Black September. Salameh was not there when this happened. He thus had an alibi for not being present at the creation of Black September.

In the aftermath of the Jordanian civil war, the PLO found itself at a difficult crossroads. The defeat in Jordan had demoralized Arafat’s Fatah Fedayeen and had simultaneously increased the political appeal of radicals to Arafat’s left. The spectacular airline hijackings carried
out by George Habash’s PFLP had turned the Palestinian cause into a global issue. But now Arafat’s younger cadres demanded that the “Old Man” come up with a new strategy. Arafat needed some victories lest he find himself pushed aside. His ranking deputy, Abu Iyad, urged Arafat to escalate the violence. Arafat was torn. A sharp debate took place. Khalid al-Hassan, the PLO’s virtual foreign minister at the time, later explained to the British journalist Alan Hart, “
I was opposed to the playing of the terror card. But I have to tell you something else. Those of our Fatah colleagues who did turn to terror were not mindless criminals. They were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it. I have to say they were wrong, and did so at the time, but I have also to understand them. In their view, and in this they were right, the world was saying to us Palestinians, ‘We don’t give a damn about you, and we won’t care at least until you are a threat to our interests.’ In reply those in Fatah who turned to terror were saying, ‘Okay, world. We’ll play the game by your rules. We’ll make you care!’ ”