The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (23 page)

The evidence is circumstantial. Later in the 1970s, Israeli intelligence officers told Western journalists that they had in their possession
telephone conversations intercepted by the German government between Salameh and one of his operatives in Berlin—proving that he’d been there at the time of Munich. “
Not to my knowledge was Ali Hassan in Munich,” said
Meir Harel
, a Mossad officer at the time who later became director general. “But for sure, he was among the planners.
I don’t have any doubt of that. But here is the interesting point. On the one hand, Ali Hassan was talking to the Americans, and on the other hand, he was in on the planning of such an operation. His adrenaline must have been rocketing.”

Some people in the CIA who had contact with Salameh also believed what Mossad believed. Sam Wyman—who later took over from Ames as Salameh’s case officer—categorically says that Salameh was involved. “
Ali Hassan was the tactical planner,” Wyman said. “He went to Munich and organized the casing out of the Olympic Village. Abu Daoud was the strategic planner. It was his idea. But Ali Hassan made it happen. Bob Ames knew that Ali Hassan was involved with Munich. And Ali Hassan knew that I knew he was involved in Munich—but we just didn’t talk about it.”

Wyman may be mistaken. He never confronted Salameh about Munich. But then he can’t recall discussing the issue with Ames either. He may have assumed that the legend surrounding Salameh and Munich was true because many Americans and Israelis in the business believed it. Mustafa Zein has another story. “
Initially, Bob thought Ali was behind the Munich operation, and so he thought he could never see Ali in a million years. But later he learned otherwise from sources inside the PLO. This intelligence persuaded him that Ali was not personally responsible.” Zein insists, “Ali’s role was to hunt the Mossad; Force 17 had nothing to do with Munich.” Writing in his unpublished memoir “Deceit with Extreme Prejudice,” Zein explained, “
I am not trying to portray him [Salameh] as St Francis, but what I am trying to make clear is that Ali had many operations, [some] extremely deadly, but they were very focused to make sure they did not harm innocent civilians.”

Salameh never talked publicly about Munich. But his sister Nidal later told the British journalist Peter Taylor that she’d confronted her brother about it. “
When I heard about Munich,” she said, “I asked him right away. I’d heard in one way or another that he was behind it, but I couldn’t believe it. So I asked him, ‘Were you behind the Munich massacre?’ He said, ‘No.’ ” Taylor also reports that Ali Hassan’s
mother asked him about it and he denied it: “He said he was against killing any civilian and didn’t believe in it.”

But Munich nevertheless became a part of his legend. And he must have realized that it forever made him a target. As George Jonas, the author of
Vengeance
—yet another book about the Munich tragedy—wrote in 1984, “
In counter-terrorism, as in terrorism itself, military objectives often took second place to symbolic acts. In a sense, assassinating Salameh became the equivalent of capturing the enemy’s flag.”

Salameh became a living reminder of the Munich murders. He was an iconic figure for both Palestinians and Israelis. And inside Mossad the quest for his death became an obsession. Israeli intelligence officers demonized him as a “
man with the imagination of the devil and the determination of the believer.” Salameh himself was unapologetic. He explained that Black September’s operations were a desperate but necessary response to the Palestinian defeat in Jordan in 1970–71. He was very candid about their thinking: “
At the time, we were subjected to a blackout—a terrible blackout. We had to overcome this blackout, and we did. We did burst out on the world scene. We overcame the blackout and were able to tell the world: ‘We are here, even though we have been temporarily ousted from Jordan.’ The world looked at us as terrorists. It didn’t look at us as revolutionaries.… But the truth is that we are waging a revolutionary struggle.” In Salameh’s view, “revolutionary” terrorism worked. It made global headlines and made it clear that the Palestinians were not giving up.

But it is also true that Salameh believed that his “revolutionary struggle” someday had to end at the negotiating table. Long before Munich, sometime in the late 1960s, he and Mustafa Zein were arguing one day about the armed struggle. “What is the end game?” Zein wanted to know. Ali Hassan replied, “
It has to be resolved in a political settlement that is just and fair between us and the Israelis.”

Incredibly, not long after the Munich tragedy the CIA made another pass at recruiting Salameh as a full-blown agent. Ames was not
involved in the second recruitment attempt, but there was a witness to the clumsy effort—none other than Salameh’s wife, Nashrawan Sharif, who told Peter Taylor: “
I saw somebody give him [Salameh] a cheque without any amount written in, telling him, ‘You write in the number you want.’ My husband was mad, very angry at the time, because it was very insulting to him. He threw the cheque back and left. He couldn’t be an agent for anybody, not only the Americans. He used to tell me, ‘Nobody in this world could give me anything my revolution is not giving me.’ He didn’t mean by that the money; he meant the satisfaction and pride he got from fighting for his country.”

The CIA officer who made the pitch left Beirut empty-handed. Salameh had once again made it quite clear that he was his own man. Salameh was decidedly annoyed. It seemed to him that the CIA’s only agenda was recruitment.

Ames had not given up on restoring their friendship and regular contacts, but he knew the clumsy offer of a blank check to Ali Hassan only complicated his delicate attempt to reopen the channel. His superiors had been stupid. By once again offering Ali Hassan crass dollars the Agency had only offended the Palestinian. But Ames also understood that his agency had endangered Ali Hassan’s life. Ames knew full well that an organization like the PLO was extremely vulnerable to foreign intelligence. Arab, Soviet, and Israeli intelligence agencies undoubtedly had sources planted within the PLO who could report on Salameh’s various contacts. And that could mark him as a CIA source, and thus a traitor to the revolution.

Late in 1972, just weeks after the Munich fiasco, Ames met with Zein in Beirut and got an earful. Zein was angry. Things seemed to be slipping away, and Zein was venting. Ames left unhappy. In February 1973, after months of silence, he finally wrote Mustafa a long letter. “I won’t try to explain my silence these past months in any detail. I still consider you a friend, and friends do not have to apologize for things that happen beyond their power. Also, there is not much one can put on paper and commit to the open mails.” Bob then complained that he
thought “some of the things you conveyed in Beirut were unfair, but I understand why you did it.”

Ames was still disturbed by what he had learned in the aftermath of Munich. “
What hurt deepest were the comments of Ali,” Ames wrote Zein. “I thought we understood each other. We are both professionals in our trade, but I have a personal loyalty to friends that transcends business.”

Ames then confessed, “I have written much about Ali as I’m sure he has done about me for his organization. What I wrote was intimate and detailed because I wanted our people to understand him, his motives and his organization. What was written was written at the time we all had great hopes. Unfortunately, we never saw those hopes come into fruition and, in frustration, we went our separate ways. However, I never gave up my hopes and still have them today.”

But then Bob acknowledged that Munich had happened. And that had changed everything. “I came back here [to Washington] ready to do things and I actually was making some headway. Then came September [the Munich operation]. Leave aside the motives for this act, and my own feelings. The fact of the matter is, this act so alienated all the people here that the damage is irreparable. It was the timing and place, not the act in and of itself that did the damage. After that act no one would listen anymore. All sympathy was gone. The only thought was that this should never happen again.”

Munich had led to an upheaval at Langley. The game had changed. The horrendous casualties—innocent Israeli athletes killed on global live television—had forced the CIA to share more intelligence with Mossad. Ames was shocked by what he saw. “
I happened to see many files on Ali,” he wrote Mustafa Zein, “particularly from the southern company [Mossad] and believe me the details were amazing, particularly since they included much on me which could only have come from his organization! I’m sure much of our files were passed to other companies although I cannot be sure of that. Ali is not exactly unknown.”

A leak had occurred. Ames obviously thought it had come from
within the PLO, suggesting that Mossad had informants inside the PLO who were able to pass on information about Salameh and his contacts with Ames. Zein insists that only Arafat himself knew Ames’s identity. But it was also possible that CIA sources had shared information about the Ames-Salameh back channel with their Mossad counterparts. Perhaps a leak had been inevitable.

But in any case, by February 1973, the back channel was virtually dormant. Ames had not seen Salameh since May or June 1971, shortly before his transfer back to Langley. Their only communication was through Zein. Ames had tried repeatedly to resuscitate the relationship. Munich had put even these efforts on hold. Having convinced himself that the Munich killings could not be blamed on Salameh, Ames was pushing hard to see Salameh. But Ali Hassan was clearly fearful of resuming any contact. He feared yet another recruitment attempt. Worse, he feared that perhaps in lieu of recruitment the Agency might be out to “get” him. Ames tried to address this fear directly in his February 10, 1973, letter to Zein: “If he [Salameh] believes that I or my company is out to get him personally, he is wrong and he should know this without my having to say so. In spite of all that is in the fiction books, my company does not ‘get’ people. Sometimes I think we’re foolish in this respect, but it is, nonetheless, true.”

Ames told Zein that he planned to be in Beirut around February 24 and again on March 9. “
There is much I would like to tell you which I cannot put on paper. Also, I’d be willing to meet Ali any place he chooses and answer any questions he might have personally. If he then wants to ‘get’ me he can, although I hope we are above such things.”

Sometime in the second week of March 1973, Ames finally reestablished contact with Salameh. They met in Beirut shortly after five Black September operatives invaded the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, interrupting a farewell party in honor of American chargé d’affaires George Curtis Moore. The American ambassador, Cleo Noel Jr., was wounded as the Black Septemberists stormed the embassy. They held everyone hostage
for a day, demanding the release of Abu Daoud from a Jordanian prison. Abu Daoud had recently been captured by Jordanian intelligence and brutally tortured. The Jordanians ignored Yasir Arafat’s demand for Daoud’s release, so on March 2, 1973, Ambassador Noel, Curtis Moore, and a Belgian diplomat were taken to the basement and machine-gunned to death. The killings garnered worldwide condemnation.

Ames must have been shocked by the coldhearted brutality of the Black September murders in Khartoum. An American ambassador and his chargé had been executed in cold blood. But this did not stop him from seeing Salameh. He believed Salameh had not been personally responsible. Salameh was in Kuwait at the time, not Khartoum. Zein later told him that it had been a kidnapping plot, organized by Abu Iyad, to extract millions of dollars from the Saudis.
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But this couldn’t have mollified Ames. PLO thugs had murdered American diplomats. We don’t have a full account of the Ames-Salameh meeting. Perhaps strong words were exchanged. Or more likely, Ames quietly listened to Salameh’s explanation.

We do know that Salameh told Ames,
“Khartoum has made its point of causing the USG [U.S. government] to take Fedayeen terrorist activity seriously.” According to a memorandum Ames later wrote about this encounter, Salameh implicitly defended the Khartoum operation as a necessary evil. He said, “No blackmail was intended, the men would have been killed in any event.” But he also assured Ames that Khartoum would not be repeated: “The Fedayeen have no plans to go after individual Americans or American interests.”