The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (24 page)

Some Americans may be astonished that a CIA officer chose to meet with a man like Salameh so soon after his organization killed two American diplomats. Peter Taylor once asked a CIA officer who later dealt with Salameh if America as such was “dealing with a terrorist.” The officer replied, “
I suppose we were. But then we deal with all sorts
of people.” Surely it is a gray area, but just as surely, this is what CIA agents do—deal with bad guys.
“You sup with the devil,” said one clandestine officer, “but you use a long spoon.”

Sometimes the bad guys can offer useful intelligence. In the early 1970s, the CIA received unconfirmed intelligence about what was described as a PLO plot to assassinate President Nixon.
Ames passed an urgent message to Salameh, inquiring about the plot. Salameh investigated and later told Ames and Beirut chief of station Gene Burgstaller in a meeting in Beirut’s Bedford Hotel that it was merely a scam by a Libyan businessman named Al-Khudairi, who had been caught smuggling fifteen kilograms of pure heroin in Rome. According to Force 17’s Mohammed Natour (Abu Tayeb), the Libyan had fabricated a story in a gambit to get himself out of jail: “The Libyan told Italian intelligence that Ali Hassan Salameh was planning to assassinate President Nixon during his coming trip to Europe.” Salameh explained that he indeed knew Al-Khudairi as a millionaire businessman who lived in Switzerland. Al-Khudairi, he said, had invested $200,000 in the Diplomat Restaurant, a venture owned by Force 17 in Rome. Salameh’s story checked out.

In the meantime, the Israelis were striking back at Black September with a vengeance. “
After Munich,” says one Mossad officer, “we had a lot of people who were to be given passports to hell. I admit some of them were not very important people. But they paid the price.” On October 16, 1972, two gunmen shot and killed Abdel Wael Zu’aytir, allegedly the PLO’s representative in Rome. On December 8, 1972, Mahmoud Hamshari was killed in Paris by an exploding telephone. On January 24, 1973, Hussein al-Bashir, a Fatah representative, was killed in Nicosia by a bomb planted under his bed. Accounts by the
New York Times
and other press outlets at the time implied that all three men had “played undercover roles” in the Munich massacre. In fact, we now know that none of these men had any connection to the Munich operation.

The case of Zu’aytir seems particularly troubling. Writing in his
2005 book,
Striking Back
, Aaron J. Klein convincingly portrays Zu’aytir, thirty-six, as an intellectual, a lover of music and books. At the time of his assassination he was working on an Italian translation of
One Thousand and One Nights
. He was a part-time translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome and was paid so poorly that his telephone had recently been disconnected. Born in Nablus, he was naturally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause—but the extent of his political activism was turning out for the occasional political rally. Mossad had but one piece of circumstantial evidence linking him to an actual operation, the August 16, 1972, explosion in the baggage compartment of an El Al flight from Rome. The pilot had safely returned the aircraft to Rome without any injuries. But afterwards, hundreds of Arabs living in Rome had been picked up for interrogation—and Zu’aytir was one of those questioned and summarily released. This slim fact persuaded Mossad that Zu’aytir was guilty of something.

“
Over the years,” Klein wrote in
Striking Back
, “Zu’aytir’s guilt came to be taken as fact.” But in 1993, Maj. Gen. Aharon Yariv, Prime Minister Golda Meir’s personal adviser on terrorism, told the BBC, “
As far as I remember, there was some involvement on his [Zu’aytir’s] part in terrorist activities; not in operations but in terrorist activities: supplying, helping, let us say ‘support’ activities. You must remember the situation. Activity continued on their part and the only way we thought we could stop it—because we didn’t have any interest in just going around killing people—was to kill people in leadership roles. And it worked in the end. It worked.” Klein flatly concludes that there was no link between Zu’aytir and Munich. Zu’aytir had publicly denounced the use of violence. His assassination was, writes Klein, “a mistake.” Mossad was using the right of “vengeance” for Munich as an excuse to strike out blindly at Palestinians whose worst crime was sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Mossad was combatting terror with its own brand of targeted terror.

Next on the Israeli hit list was Basil al-Kubaisi, the young Iraqi whom Ames had met in 1967–68 while stationed in Aden. Ames had cultivated Al-Kubaisi. They shared a mutual interest in the history of
the Arab Nationalist Movement. Perhaps Ames had tried to recruit Al-Kubaisi. But more likely, they had just become friends. Ames would have described it as a relationship with a knowledgeable source. And he no doubt would have reported what he had learned from this source in cables back to Langley. Al-Kubaisi would have been assigned a cryptonym.

Al-Kubaisi had earned his doctorate in 1971 from American University in Washington, D.C., and then moved to Beirut, where for a while he taught as a part-time lecturer at the American University of Beirut. He’d joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and George Habash regarded him as one of the Front’s most promising young intellectuals. “
Basil was an Arab nationalist, but certainly not a violent man,” said his doctoral adviser at American University, Dr. Abdul Said Aziz. “He was a mild-mannered young man, always focused and attentive, but not verbose.”

Now forty years of age, Al-Kubaisi wore impeccably tailored suits; he spoke fluent English, French, and Arabic. He traveled under his own name. He was unarmed and not undercover. That spring the PFLP sent him on what was essentially a public relations mission to Paris. According to one source, Al-Kubaisi was “
on a tour in Europe to acquaint the European left with the views of the PFLP.” He was a suave, sophisticated academic—a man who could represent the “civilized” face of the PFLP.
He lived modestly; by one account, in Paris he walked around the city, avoiding taxis to save money. Unbeknownst to him, he was being followed by Israeli agents, who tracked him down to a Paris hotel. In the late evening of April 6, 1973, two Israelis confronted him near the Church of the Madeleine, a block from his hotel, and pulled out long-barreled Berettas fitted with silencers. Al-Kubaisi cried out,
“La! La! La!”—Arabic for “No!” But the Israeli agents pumped nine .22-caliber bullets into his chest and head. And then they calmly walked away. French police said the murder was “carried out with a dexterity and precision that one can only call professional.” The
New York Times
cited an Iraqi embassy official who described Al-Kubaisi as “
a revolutionary avant-garde intellectual known for his anti-Zionist
positions.” The
Washington Post
quoted a police spokesman saying that it “
looks very much like the execution of a secret agent.” Police found $1,000 in cash in Al-Kubaisi’s hotel room, and
nine different passports. He’d traveled extensively in recent months to Canada and Europe.

Mossad was probably unaware that they’d assassinated someone who might have still been an active CIA source. Basil Raoud al-Kubaisi was known to the Israelis as an operative for George Habash’s PFLP. By one account, they thought him to be a “
quartermaster” for PFLP operations in Europe. Al-Kubaisi was certainly a member of the PFLP—and in the eyes of Mossad that was enough evidence to label him a terrorist. After his murder, a Palestinian news agency in Beirut reported that he was a leading member of the PFLP and was “
on a mission” in Paris to talk with a French government official. Some newspaper accounts called him Habash’s “
roving ambassador.”

But even Israeli sources seem to agree that he had no role in the Munich affair. Klein writes that Al-Kubaisi “
was probably not affiliated with Fatah’s Black September and certainly had no hand in the Munich Massacre.” Klein nevertheless reports that Mossad’s file on Al-Kubaisi was “one of the thickest.” This raw intelligence implied that Al-Kubaisi might have been involved in a long list of terrorist attacks. The Israelis thought that in 1956 he had somehow been associated, at the age of twenty-three, with a failed plot to assassinate Iraq’s King Faisal II. Maybe. More recently, Mossad thought he’d aided the PFLP in smuggling arms and explosives into Europe. Maybe. And just a month before he was killed, Mossad thought he might have been involved in the March 4, 1973, planting of three car bombs in New York City, timed to explode on the same day that Israeli prime minister Golda Meir arrived at New York’s JFK airport. Maybe. But all Klein can do is report what he was told by his Mossad sources about what was in Al-Kubaisi’s file. We really don’t have any evidence of how Mossad would have known these things. And the allegation that Al-Kubaisi was involved in the March 1973 New York car bomb plot seems particularly implausible. That was a Black September operation,
carried out by a Fatah operative named Khalid al-Jawary, who was extradited to the United States in 1991 and convicted of the car bomb plot. (The bombs failed to explode.) Al-Jawary was sentenced to thirty years in prison, but he was released in 2009 and extradited to Sudan. No evidence emerged from the Al-Jawary prosecution that implicated Al-Kubaisi. If the evidence was murky, so too was Al-Kubaisi’s life and death.
^*5

Al-Kubaisi was not a man of the gun. So why was he targeted? One of his friends, Dr. Fadle Naqib, a Palestinian economist, had a premonition that he would be assassinated. In July 1972, when the Israelis killed Ghassan Kanafani—the PFLP’s spokesman, but also a well-known novelist and literary critic—Naqib wrote to Al-Kubaisi that he feared his friend would be targeted next. Naqib later observed that the Israelis did not seem to be targeting men with guns. “
The Mossad was not after the muscle of the Palestinian revolution,” wrote Naqib, “but its soul.… Basil was a prominent leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement.… He was different from other Arab intellectuals or militants. He was well educated, with a Ph.D. in political science. But he was not interested in an academic career.”

Al-Kubaisi was an intellectual emissary for the PFLP—and perhaps a secret asset of the CIA. We don’t know if Al-Kubaisi was an active CIA asset at the time of his death. If so, this was the first time Ames had lost an agent to assassination. “
Kubaisi rings a bell,” said George Cave, the officer who worked with Ames in Iran. “But since I was in Islamabad when he got zapped, I don’t know much about him. Bob developed a lot of contacts among the various Palestinian organizations but did not formally recruit them. They were assigned cryptonyms for communication purposes.” So Al-Kubaisi might have been one of these unrecruited sources that were nevertheless assigned a crypt. “
Mr. K was a chattering contact not a spy,” says Dewey Clarridge,
“for Bob was not a closer.” Whatever his status, Al-Kubaisi was certainly in a position to provide the Agency with a great deal of information about the PFLP. His death was a loss for the Agency. “
I know,” said Graham Fuller, “there was a lot of anger among officers that the Israelis seemed to be deliberately gunning down our assets who could provide influential info on the Middle East other than via Mossad channels.” Fuller went on to observe, “Most Agency case officers working in the Middle East at that time did not view Mossad as friendly, or working to the same goals at all. Rather, Mossad was seen as in competition or antipathetic to the work and reporting of Agency officers. That’s because most Agency officers had a view of Palestinian realities that were both based on realities that we were close to, and that we knew were not generally listened to at the Washington policy level—due mainly to Israeli or pro-Israeli domination of all such info at the policy level.”

In late June 1973, Salameh sent Ames a letter in which he said that he urgently needed to see him again. So in early July Ames flew into Beirut from Tehran. The two men met on July 9 and 10 in a CIA safe house. They had a long agenda. Salameh gave Ames his assessment of the situation in
Lebanon and said that Arafat had instructed his forces to avoid any confrontation with the Lebanese army “at all costs.” He also complained about the Israeli assassination program. The latest victim, Muhammad Boudia, an Algerian playwright, had been blown up in his car in Paris on June 29. Salameh revealed that he had “personally recruited” Boudia to run Black September operations in France. Ames thought this was “
interesting intelligence.”