The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (25 page)

Two days after Boudia’s assassination, in the early morning hours of July 1, 1973, Col. Yosef Alon, the assistant air attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., was shot and killed outside his Chevy Chase home. The murder remains unsolved, but it was reportedly the work of a Force 17 assassination team led by an operative named Abu Faris, a Palestinian of African descent who wore an Afro hairstyle. Their
intended target was Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, but because Rabin’s personal security was so tight, the assassins instead targeted Colonel Alon. The next day a Voice of Palestine radio broadcast out of Cairo claimed that Colonel Alon had been killed in retaliation for Muhammad Boudia’s assassination in Paris: “
His is the first execution operation carried out against a Zionist official in the U.S.” If it was a Force 17 operation, Ali Hassan Salameh must have known about it. Indeed, Mustafa Zein believed that Salameh himself “
had ordered the execution of the Military Attaché.” Ames reportedly sent an urgent message to Salameh after the assassination, demanding to know if Force 17 was operating on U.S. territory. We don’t know what Salameh replied, but he reportedly had the team extracted safely back to Beirut. Four years later, the CIA tipped off the FBI that the Agency had learned from a “
Fedayeen senior official” that “the Black September Organization” was responsible for the assassination. Perhaps this information came from Ames, and perhaps the “Fedayeen senior official” was Salameh.

Salameh was obviously involved with some Black September operations. He no doubt considered himself a guerrilla soldier, fighting a war to restore Palestine to his people. If he was involved in Colonel Alon’s murder, he would have considered him to be a legitimate “military” target. Mossad was killing civilians like Boudia and Al-Kubaisi in the streets of Paris. Black September was retaliating. This is how Salameh would have viewed it. But if it had also become known that such a man was regularly talking with a CIA officer, well, the controversy in the media would have been the least of the Agency’s problems. But at the same time, Ames must have believed that talking with Salameh was the right thing to do.

And indeed, during their talks on July 9 and 10 in the CIA’s Beirut safe house, Ames learned that Salameh had something to say of extreme importance. Ali Hassan said that he’d been instructed by Arafat to initiate a major overture to the Americans. Arafat was “gratified” that a recent Nixon communiqué with the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev had included a brief but telling mention of “Palestinian interests” in the Middle East. Salameh told Ames that significant
changes had taken place in the Palestinian movement since the two had last seen each other in early March 1973. Arafat wanted the U.S. government to know that he’d “put a lid” on any Fedayeen operations targeting Americans—and that “the lid would stay as long as both sides could maintain a dialogue, even though they might have basic disagreements. This was not a threat—i.e., talk to us or else—but a recognition that talking was necessary.” Arafat could not guarantee Americans “complete immunity from terrorist acts” because “no one can stop a determined individual gunman,” but there would be no PLO operations against Americans.

The PLO’s inner circle had settled on a new strategy. Munich might have put Palestinian grievances in the media spotlight, but Arafat had decided that going after European and American targets was counterproductive. He was going to turn off the terror spigot. Henceforth, Salameh said, the Fedayeen would confine their operations to Jordan and Israel. The Hashemite Kingdom would be priority number one. Why? Salameh explained that Arafat had persuaded his comrades to alter a key plank in Fatah ideology. They now recognized that “
Israel is here to stay.” So the “establishment of a democratic state of Muslims, Christians and Jews in what is now Israel is just not realistic.” Nevertheless, the Palestinians had to have a home, and “that home will be Jordan.”

As Ames put it in a long memo to Helms dated July 18, “
Arafat claims to have the agreement of all Arab states, including Saudi Arabia in principle, to the replacement of the Hashemite Kingdom by a Palestinian Republic. Jordan, therefore, will be the prime target of the Fedayeen, with acts of terrorism against Israel maintained to sustain the movement’s credibility.… Arafat wants a real state or nothing.”

Salameh then asked Ames if he could get Washington to answer the following questions:

Ames said he couldn’t predict how Washington would respond to “such provocative questions,” but he’d pass them on. He did.

In late July Ambassador Helms flew from Tehran to Washington, D.C., and told Kissinger about Salameh’s approach to Ames. Arafat wanted a dialogue with the Americans, a dialogue based on two premises: that “Israel is here to stay” and that a Palestinian state should replace the Hashemite Kingdom.

Helms and Ames certainly believed that a dialogue with the PLO was worthwhile. After all, Arafat’s first premise—that “Israel was here to stay”—was a dramatic concession to reality. This was a real breakthrough. His second premise was provocative, but the future and nature of the Hashemite regime in Jordan could be negotiable. In reality, Jordan was a de facto Palestinian state, since a majority of its population was Palestinian. Helms bluntly told Kissinger, “The issue is whether you want to have policy talks with Fedayeen or not.”

Kissinger agreed that this was the question, and according to his memoirs, he told Helms he would think about it. “My reflections were unlikely to be positive,” he later wrote. “I considered King Hussein a valued friend of the United States and a principal hope for diplomatic progress in the region.” Kissinger also wrote that he thought any Palestinian state run by the PLO would become irredentist and that any Palestinian entity in the West Bank would be used as a launching pad for attacks on both Jordan and Israel. Kissinger thought that the Palestinians would never relinquish their desire to return to all of Palestine. “To them,” he wrote, “a West Bank mini-state could be only an interim step toward their final aims.” The Palestinians wouldn’t be satisfied even if the Israelis returned to the 1967 borders and gave back East Jerusalem. And besides, Kissinger wrote in his 1982 memoir, “There were few who thought this [an Israeli withdrawal] in the realm of possibility.” Basically, Kissinger didn’t believe the Israelis would give up
the occupied territories—and he didn’t believe Arafat when the PLO leader said, “Israel is here to stay.”

So on August 3, 1973, Kissinger told Helms that he had “a nothing message” by way of reply. At least, that is how he characterized the message in his memoir. But in the spring of 2008 the CIA declassified some of Richard Helms’s papers. Among them was an unsigned and untitled document that addressed Arafat’s questions. This memo was the first formal diplomatic communication between Arafat and any U.S. administration. It was probably conveyed to Arafat through the Ames-Salameh back channel—and it was not “a nothing message”: “
When the USG says that an Arab-Israeli settlement must take ‘Palestinian interests’ into account, it has two points in mind: First, there has to be a far-reaching solution of the refugee problem, and the U.S. is prepared to participate actively in a major program to help these people reestablish normal lives. Second, it is apparent that some Palestinians have an interest in political self-expression of some kind.”

Kissinger’s reply concluded, “Exactly how Palestinian interests reach an accommodation with those of others in the region is best decided by negotiation. If the Palestinians are prepared to participate in a settlement by negotiation, the U.S. would be pleased to hear their ideas. The objective of overthrowing existing governments by force, however, does not seem to be the most promising way.”

Kissinger was, in fact, inviting the PLO to the negotiating table, signaling that Washington would fund a major program to resettle the refugees, but also conceding that the Palestinians had a right to some kind of “political self-expression.” His only caveat was the warning that they could not expect to achieve their aims by the forcible removal of King Hussein.

This was a classic Kissinger gambit. In 1973 Kissinger was saying publicly that the PLO was a terrorist organization and that no American official could talk with its representatives. But privately, he was using what he disparagingly called in his memoirs “
low-level intelligence channels” to explore how to bring this terrorist organization in from the cold. Maybe this was both devious and brilliant.

On August 13, 1973, Kissinger received another feeler from the PLO, this time through Morocco’s King Hassan, who passed on the same three questions conveyed by Salameh to Ames. Perhaps there hadn’t been enough time for Salameh to receive Kissinger’s August 3 reply—but the fact that the PLO was knocking on another door was evidence of its seriousness. The message this time was given to Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters, then deputy director of the CIA, who happened to be visiting the king in Casablanca. Kissinger told Walters to keep the door open to a possible meeting. In early September 1973, Ames sent Salameh an encouraging message: “
My company is still interested in getting together with Ali’s company. The southern company [Israel] has investigated. I’ve seen a lot of their files, and they know about our contacts.” Kissinger dispatched General Walters to Rabat with instructions to listen to the PLO representatives—and also warn them that any further attacks on Americans wouldn’t be tolerated. Walters hesitated for a moment and then said, “Dr. Kissinger, I must be No. 8 or 9 on their hit list.” Kissinger responded in his Germanic accent, “
But Valters, I’m No. 2, so you’re going.”

On November 3, 1973, Walters and the CIA’s station chief met in Rabat with two high-ranking PLO emissaries, the brothers Khalid al-Hassan and Hani al-Hassan. They assured Walters that the PLO was not targeting Americans—but that King Hussein was still regarded as an obstacle to Palestinian aspirations. Walters responded—on Kissinger’s instructions: “
We regard the King of Jordan as a friend.” But in the context of a comprehensive settlement, Washington would expect the Palestinian movement and the Hashemite regime to “develop in the direction of reconciliation.” Walters told the Al-Hassan brothers, “
There are no objective reasons for antagonism between the United States and the Palestinians.”

The Palestinians responded with not much more than a sermon about the plight of the Palestinian people. They insisted that the West Bank was too truncated for a Palestinian state and that it followed that King Hussein would have to step aside to make way for a Palestinian republic. The important implication of all this was that the PLO
representatives were still talking under the presumption that “Israel was here to stay.” Kissinger was unimpressed. He still didn’t think the Palestinians were serious: “
The dynamics of the movement made it unlikely that such moderation could be maintained indefinitely.”

In his 1982 memoir, Kissinger downplayed the significance of this Rabat meeting, but he also quietly acknowledged that the talks had gained something concrete for Washington: “After it [Walter’s Rabat meeting with the PLO], attacks on Americans—at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO—ceased.” Salameh had, in fact, delivered on his promise to Ames the previous summer that Americans would no longer be targets of the Fedayeen. Ames’s back channel to Salameh had created a virtual nonaggression pact between the U.S. government and Arafat’s Fatah guerrillas.

At the time, of course, Kissinger could not publicly acknowledge that he was dealing with the PLO. But he was. And he understood that such a clandestine negotiation with the PLO was “
potentially too explosive to risk its uncontrolled leakage.” So to protect himself and Nixon, he quietly informed King Hussein, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and other Arab leaders of the very preliminary talks. He also made sure
Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Simcha Dinitz, was briefed on Arafat’s approaches. The Israelis, of course, were shocked and would now do everything they could to keep Washington from further talks with the PLO.
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Yitzhak Hofi, Mossad’s director general from 1974 to 1982, was outraged when he later learned of Kissinger’s dealings with the PLO. And he became apoplectic when he learned that it was Ali Hassan Salameh—whom he regarded as a mastermind of the Munich tragedy—who had initiated the talks. Even worse, he thought, was the intelligence that Arafat had designated Salameh as the PLO’s
liaison to the Americans. Hofi was livid to think that the Americans were talking to a man that his own Mossad officers had recently tried to assassinate.

On July 21, 1973—just eleven days after Ames had met with Salameh—a Mossad hit team in the Norwegian resort town of Lillehammer gunned down a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Boushiki, in the mistaken belief that he was Ali Hassan Salameh. Six of the Mossad officers were arrested and convicted of murder, and some spent two years in prison. The botched assassination brought an abrupt end, for the moment, to Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God attempts to kill Black September operatives.

When the innocent Moroccan waiter was killed in Lillehammer,
Salameh was somewhere in Europe. News of the arrest of the Mossad officers was splashed across Scandinavian newspapers. “
When they killed Boushiki,” Salameh later told the Lebanese weekly newspaper
Al-Sayad
, “I was in Europe.… Boushiki was a swimming pool employee. His face and figure did not fit my description.” Salameh then boasted that he was still alive, “not so much because of my skills, but rather because of the weakness of Israeli intelligence.” He pointed out that Mossad was “supposed to be capable of hitting everywhere.”

The scandal was a major embarrassment to Mossad. But the fact that the CIA had opened up a liaison relationship with the Palestinian intelligence chief was even more troubling than the Lillehammer affair. The CIA talking to Salameh established a precedent; in Jerusalem it was seen as the first step to recognition of the PLO. Mossad’s Hofi protested directly to General Walters and demanded the CIA cancel its unofficial “nonaggression pact” with the PLO. According to Gordon Thomas, the author of
Gideon’s Spies
, a history of Mossad, “
The CIA deputy director said it was not possible and warned Hofi that Washington would regard it as an ‘unfriendly act’ if news of the pact became public.”