The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (30 page)

The specific identities of the murderers and their motives remain unknown. In any case, it was not Fatah who killed the ambassador and his aide, and they were not assassinated while under the security umbrella of Fatah. On June 20, 1976, the bodies of the two American diplomats had to be extracted from Lebanon via a convoy of cars over the mountains into Syria. The airport was closed, and even a seaside departure was deemed too dangerous.
Salameh supervised the security arrangements for the embassy convoy. “
I will get you through the Palestinian lines,” Salameh promised Sam Wyman, the case officer responsible for extracting the bodies out of Lebanon. “Sure enough,” said Wyman, “as soon as we passed out of PLO-controlled territory, we ran into a firefight between the Syrian and Maronite Christian forces. But Ali Hassan got us out. We were good friends. He was smart, well read, and not unrealistic.”

After the evacuation from Lebanon of 263 private American citizens, President Gerald Ford publicly thanked the PLO for providing
security for the operation.
Kissinger even sent Arafat an official letter thanking him for his cooperation.

Salameh was no longer sending his operatives abroad to target Israelis or Westerners in Europe. He was, however, still an enforcer. “I asked him once,” said
Charles Waverly
, “about a guy we thought was involved in terrorism. But when I mentioned his name, Salameh said,
‘Oh, I killed him two days ago.’ ” Another case officer stationed in Beirut in the mid-1970s recalls going to see Salameh with a complaint. “
I told him that we had some intelligence that some of his people were about to do something bad in Germany. Salameh reached for the phone and called someone. And then I heard him yelling, ‘What is this shit? Stop it!’ ”

In the early days of the Lebanese civil war,
Waverly
was trying to have a conversation with Salameh in one of the Agency’s safe houses. They could hear the sound of mortars being fired nearby. “
It is a little hard to hear,”
Waverly
said. Salameh pointed at the desk and asked, “Does that phone work?” When
Waverly
nodded his head Salameh picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. In a moment,
Waverly
heard Salameh saying, “Yah, Bashir—
khallas
[enough].” He was talking to Bashir Gemayel, the Christian warlord and one of the PLO’s main enemies. The shelling soon stopped.

Bashir Gemayel was considered to be pro-American. He certainly had close connections to the Americans. Clair George thought Bashir was
a “barbarian” and a murderer. Ames called him simply “
our brutal warlord.” (Years later, Bob Woodward reported that Bashir Gemayel had been on the CIA’s payroll, but Sam Wyman—who was in a position to know something like this—says that
Woodward got this wrong.)

Gemayel and Salameh were enemies, but fellow warlords. In Beirut’s surreal world, they had a grudging admiration for each other. Said K. Aburish once unkindly described Gemayel as a “
pimply-faced, overweight hooligan who merits the teenage epithet ‘greasy.’ … [Salameh] competed with Bashir Gemayel as to the number of undone
buttons on his shirt.” Aburish was a harsh critic of both men and wrote of Salameh: “He had the mental makeup of an Italian harbor boy and his emergence as a celebrated leader of Palestinian fighting men casts serious doubts on Arafat’s judgment of men.” In March 1976, Mossad brought the Christian Phalangist warlord to Herzliya, a seaside resort town just north of Tel Aviv, to share intelligence and iron out the details of the Israeli alliance with the Lebanese Phalange. At one point, a Mossad officer took Gemayel aside and asked if he could share with them the details of
Salameh’s daily routine and itinerary. Bashir nodded and indicated that would be no problem. But Mossad reportedly never got anything. Gemayel apparently thought Salameh might someday be useful to his own political ambitions. And he understood that if the Israelis killed Salameh, a less astute player would simply replace the Palestinian.

In the midst of the seesaw civil war, Salameh sometimes tried to signal that the Palestinian community trapped in Lebanon—some 250,000 refugees—did not wish to involve themselves in Lebanese politics. “
Being outside Palestine,” Salameh told a reporter from
Monday Morning
, an English-language Lebanese weekly tabloid, “we get involved in problems which distract us from what is going on inside our homeland. That is what is happening in Lebanon.” In another interview with the daily
Al Ziat
, he said, “We made mistakes.… We treated the Lebanese right-wing [the Phalangists] as the enemy camp and many of us thought that we shouldn’t try to seek understanding and cooperation with it. I was among the very few who believed that we can reach understanding with them.” He told another reporter, “
There are no permanent enmities or permanent friendships.”

This was not just talk.
When Dany Chamoun, the chieftain of the Christian right-wing Tigers militia, was captured in Beirut by PLO forces, Salameh intervened and arranged for his release. Salameh was clearly trying to cultivate a pragmatic persona. And there is good reason to believe that he was doing so as a result of his relationship with Ames and the CIA.

Salameh’s star was rising inside the PLO. By 1976 the intelligence
chief and head of Force 17 was thought by some to be a possible successor to Arafat in the event of the death of the “Old Man.” Salameh made a point now of conducting himself as a kind of envoy. He was no longer a foot soldier. “
Salameh played a large part in winning the hearts and minds of the U.S. for the PLO,” said Bill Buckley, a Beirut CIA station chief—who was later abducted and killed. “He was charismatic and persuasive and knew when to argue and when to listen.” Sam Wyman believed Salameh was Arafat’s natural heir apparent. “
I spent a lot of my time coaxing him to go in the direction of responsible policy—and to understand that if you are going to have a peaceful solution, you have to come down from the barricades.”

Salameh’s primary conduit to the Agency was still Ames—but remotely. Given that Bob was back in Washington, Wyman and
Waverly
were the two case officers who regularly saw the PLO intelligence chief. And like Ames, they used Mustafa Zein to set up their meetings. They also tried to keep Salameh under electronic surveillance. Salameh was still in love with all women. One of his lovers was a German reporter. “
We had an audio operation,” boasted Dewey Clarridge. “We could hear Salameh screwing her.” Obviously, the Agency regarded Salameh as a valuable liaison and source. But he was also fair game for surveillance.

In April 1976, Salameh gave a splashy interview to a Beirut tabloid. He chose to sit down with Nadia Salti Stephan, a feature reporter from
Monday Morning
, the tabloid that typically ran profiles of Beirut high-society figures with the occasional serious piece of reporting. The result was a five-page spread, complete with an extensive interview and a photograph. Sam Wyman was dismayed. “
I told Salameh,” recalled Wyman, “ ‘You are violating every principle of good intelligence practice. The Israelis know who you are and
they know what you did, and so you should be careful.’ He shrugged his shoulders. He was so casual, so cool, just very cavalier. He was acting, I thought foolishly, like he was the
abu dey
—the street chief—of all of Beirut.” By 1976, Salameh had a very set routine. He traveled in a convoy, sitting in the backseat of a large Chevy station wagon. A lead car filled with gunmen
led the way, while a Toyota pickup truck brought up the rear. Mounted on the Toyota’s flatbed was a Doschka 22mm cannon. Wyman once asked Salameh, “How is that damn cannon going to protect you? It just announces to everyone where you are.” Salameh just laughed and said, “Oh, it is good.”

Salameh was given numerous such warnings. But he was fatalistic. He knew that he’d already escaped several attempts on his life. A bomb had once exploded outside his apartment door in Beirut. On another occasion he’d refused to open a parcel addressed to him from the Algerian embassy; it turned out to be rigged with explosives. And, of course, the Israelis had tried to kill him in Norway. So far, they’d failed in these attempts on his life. “They [the Israelis] are not supermen,” Salameh said. So perhaps he might evade their hit teams.

He also knew that the Israelis were, in a calculated manner, adding to his notoriety, encouraging others to see him as “
a playboy, a smuggler, a murderer, a blood-thirsty killer who cannot sleep at night without seeing blood.… The intention obviously was to pave the way for my liquidation.… They were, if you want, trying to make our assassination a legitimate act.”

If anything, Salameh was living his life
more
flamboyantly, not less. In 1976 he was openly dating a twenty-four-year-old woman named Georgina Rizk. She was stunning. Six years earlier, she’d been crowned the most beautiful woman in the universe. Rizk had a Lebanese father and an Italian mother. Born in 1953, she’d been raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. She began modeling for local fashion shows when she was fourteen. She spoke Arabic, French, and English. Georgina was young, beautiful, and entirely apolitical. When she traveled to Miami Beach to compete in the 1971 Miss Universe pageant, the press quickly picked up on the fact that she had befriended Miss Israel, Etty Orgad. “
We are here for beauty, not politics,” Rizk said when asked about her friendship with the Israeli. On July 24, 1971, Bob Barker—the famous television personality and host of the pageant—crowned Rizk Miss Universe. Because she was the first Middle Easterner to win the crown, her image was splashed across the covers of numerous
Lebanese, Egyptian, and Syrian magazines. In 1975, Lebanon issued
postage stamps with Rizk’s image. A local newspaper proclaimed, “
She is Lebanon’s queen, Lebanon’s goddess.” So when Ali Hassan Salameh began openly squiring around Georgina, popping up at Beirut’s upscale restaurants and nightclubs, the couple became a national sensation. Miss Universe and the Palestinian intelligence chief made quite an item.

In late November 1976, just after President Ford’s defeat in the presidential election, Ames persuaded then CIA director George H. W. Bush to extend an invitation to Salameh to visit Washington. The PLO was ecstatic. The Palestinians regarded it as an invitation for an “official” visit.
Charles Waverly
, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, delivered the invitation. Mustafa Zein was also invited, but he declined, saying
he wanted to “prove that he was not needed anymore to uphold and protect the covert American/PLO relation and Ali knew well the way to the United States without any help or the company of Mustafa Zein.” Ford’s departing secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, tried to veto the Salameh visit. Kissinger, of course, knew full well that this was the man who’d been the CIA’s back channel to the PLO for nearly seven years. But in an extraordinary intervention, CIA director Bush approached President-elect Jimmy Carter’s designated secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and persuaded him that Ali Hassan Salameh’s visit to Washington was in the U.S. national interest. “
Bush would have favored Salameh’s trip,” observed Duane Clarridge, “partly because of what Salameh had done earlier to get Americans out of Beirut.”
Vance authorized the visit.

At some point, Salameh told Ames he wanted to bring Georgina Rizk to America. He explained that she wanted to visit Disneyland in California. And after California, they wanted to visit Hawaii. Ali Hassan said he was in need of a vacation. Could Ames make all this happen? Ames could, and did.

Salameh and Rizk would come to America under CIA cover. It had
to be a highly secret trip. Ames arranged for alias documentation and special tourist visas. “Bringing MJTRUST/2 onto U.S. territory was quite sensitive,” recalled one Agency clandestine officer. “Much of the preparation had to do with arranging aliases for the couple.” The PLO paid their airfare to America, but the Agency picked up their tabs thereafter.

Mustafa Zein flew to Cairo from Beirut and met the CIA’s deputy chief of station, Sam Wyman, who handed over U.S. visas for Salameh, Rizk, and one other PLO official, Ziyad al-Hout. In early 1977, Salameh and Al-Hout flew from Cairo to New York. “
Everything was arranged with U.S. immigration authorities,” said Clarridge, who knew about the secret trip. Rizk met Salameh in New York, having flown on a different flight from Beirut. They then traveled to Washington, D.C., where Ames escorted Salameh to see a few officers in Langley. The Israelis never learned that Salameh had visited CIA headquarters.

Charles Waverly
was assigned to accompany the couple to New Orleans, then on to Anaheim, California—to visit Disneyland—and finally to Hawaii. New Orleans was added to their itinerary, partly for pleasure but also so a discreet exchange of intelligence could take place between Salameh and Agency officers. The British journalist Peter Taylor reports that Salameh met with “senior American officials” in a New Orleans hotel.
Ames’s ranking superior at the time, Alan Wolfe, flew down to New Orleans to meet with Salameh. Georgina later told Taylor that Ali Hassan saw this meeting as a new step in his relationship with the Agency. It was a test. “They wanted to be sure,” Georgina said, “that he had the temperament and ability of a man with whom they could do business.” The meeting lasted five hours. “
Abu Hassan was pleased,” Georgina recalled. “He had passed the test.”