The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (31 page)

Ames may have gone to New Orleans to participate in this meeting, or he may have just greeted Salameh in Washington. In any case, according to Mustafa Zein, Salameh was showered with small, symbolic gifts—including a leather shoulder holster for his gun. Ames also gave
Salameh a leather briefcase that contained
a hidden tape recorder—a tool for spy craft. Later, Salameh gave the briefcase to Zein, who used it often to make a surreptitious record of his conversations with various people.

Ali Hassan hated Disneyland for all the usual reasons. But he liked New Orleans, and Hawaii was a real vacation.
Waverly
tried to teach Ali Hassan snorkeling in the blue-green waters of the Pacific Ocean. “
He was scared to death of it,” recalled
Waverly
. “He thought he was going to drown, and finally he just gave up and told me, ‘I can’t do it.’ I never did get him to do it. All he really wanted to do was eat oysters. He thought they were an aphrodisiac. I was in the adjoining hotel room—so in the evenings I heard the results. It was a perfect match. I think Ali Hassan really loved Georgina.”

In late February 1977, Dewey Clarridge and Alan Wolfe asked Ames to take on another temporary-duty assignment, this time for three months in Beirut. Bob agreed. He’d grown attached to his Reston life and hated being away from Yvonne and the children, but he still harbored ambitions of rising further in the Agency hierarchy, and taking on a TDY in war-torn Beirut would be noted as exceptional hardship duty.

Ames arrived in Beirut on a flight from Paris around February 21. He was met at the airport by an embassy security officer and hustled into an armored limousine. Accompanied by several armed guards, they drove straight to the U.S. embassy on the corniche of Ras Beirut. The streets were empty and dark. Every kilometer or so, they had to stop at a roadblock where soldiers from the Arab League peacekeeping force checked their identification papers. Syrian tanks were dug in around the main Palestinian refugee camps—with their gun turrets aimed at the camps. Forty thousand Syrian troops had invaded Lebanon the previous year, supposedly as peacekeepers. “
It was kind of creepy, riding in,” Ames wrote. He was told that the embassy maintained a nighttime curfew, and even during the day no one was allowed to travel about the
city without an armed guard. The only exceptions to this rule were the military attaché and CIA officer Bob Ames. “Obviously, I couldn’t do my job,” Bob explained to Yvonne, “with bodyguards around.”

Ames was given an apartment in the embassy, and he ate most of his meals in the embassy’s mess hall with the marine guards ($30 a week for breakfast and dinner). Everyone was eating through the embassy commissary’s very depleted stock of food. In the evenings the marines usually showed a 35mm movie on a projector. Restricted to the embassy building, most of the marines and staff were thoroughly bored. But Ames was determined to get out and see what he could learn from his contacts. He rented a beat-up 1974 Toyota to drive around town. The neighborhood around the embassy—including the Hamra Street commercial district and the American University of Beirut—seemed untouched by the war. The university, however, had suspended classes that spring, and most restaurants were shuttered. The hotel district and the center city were utterly destroyed. “
I think they should just level the place and start from scratch,” Bob wrote. “It is really a mess.” No one really knew if the war was over or Beirut was just experiencing a lull in the fighting. “Beirut is dead,” he wrote. “But it’s coming to life.… It looks like things are opening up and tension is lessening.” But Bob found his new post depressing. Soon after his arrival the city was hit by a spring thunderstorm. “Lebanon needs the rain,” he wrote Yvonne, “to wash away the death and filth. It has snowed heavily in the mountains and one day we had such heavy hail in Beirut that a few inches accumulated and Beirut was pure and white for a few hours.”

Ames had always found the Lebanese a little too cosmopolitan, a little too chic and thin-skinned. But they’d certainly proved themselves resilient, enduring periodic mortar shelling, firefights from the high-rise apartment buildings, and endless roadblocks. “
One good thing came out of this war,” Ames wrote. “The Lebanese are not so arrogant any more. They realize that life is more than a Mercedes and an Yves

St. Laurent tie.… Of course, all this can end with one bullet. Peace is a very fragile thing.”

Ames was traveling frequently back and forth between Christiandominated East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut, talking to many people from both sides. “
I feel the Muslims are more eager for settlement than the Christians.… The Christians are such bigots where Muslims are concerned, and that is the root of the Lebanese problem. I don’t see any real solution for a long time. The Christians want their own state, protected by the U.S., just like Israel. We don’t need another Israel in the area.”

He was right. The Maronite Christian establishment was not ready to give up. The civil war would soon restart and go on intermittently for another thirteen years. But in the current lull Ames found himself extremely busy as plenty of “old ‘friends’ are re-contacting us.” That spring, a large part of his job was to reestablish agent networks that had been disrupted by the war. Three of these agents had CIA-issued radios that they used to communicate with Beirut Station. Ames put them on a schedule: each day he had to check in with his “
three radio friends” at 8:00
A.M.
, 5:00
P.M.
, and 7:00
P.M.
He’d slip on a pair of headphones and listen to his agents while taking extensive notes. “What a slave to the radio I’ve become,” he wrote home. In addition, he had ten other people he had to see on a regular basis. “I’ve never worked harder anywhere in my life than I’m working here. It gets worse each day because the ‘peace’ brings more old friends out of the woodwork, and I’m sure my list of contacts will double before long.” He was working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. (He took off one day, March 4, for his forty-third birthday.)
Half of his meetings were conducted in Arabic.

Needless to say, there was considerable risk associated with some of these liaisons. Ames later told a friend that on one occasion
he had to hide inside the trunk of a car to get to one of these clandestine meetings. On another occasion, he was driving to meet a contact when he was stopped at an Arab League checkpoint that happened to be manned by illiterate South Yemeni soldiers from what was now the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. They searched Ames’s trunk and found a contraption they’d never seen—a vacuum cleaner. Ames
was intending to give the vacuum cleaner as a gift to his contact. But the nervous Yemeni soldiers were suspicious that the machine might be a bomb. As Ames tried to explain in Arabic the purpose of a vacuum cleaner, he kept thinking to himself that he was now a spy caught with a vacuum cleaner—just like the character in Graham Greene’s novel
Our Man in Havana
. It was a ludicrous situation—but also dangerous. “The problem was not Bob’s Arabic, which was excellent,” recalled a friend to whom Ames later told the story. The problem was that the soldiers didn’t have the vocabulary to grasp the concept of a vacuum cleaner. Frightened, they fingered the triggers on their guns. But Ames managed to talk his way through the situation and was allowed to go on his way. “
Bob said it was high tension for a few minutes.”

Initially that spring Ames was the only CIA officer stationed in Beirut. The station had been drastically drawn down in 1976 because of the civil war. But in late March 1977 Langley sent him an assistant,
Sanford Dryden
, a very junior case officer. It was
Dryden
’s second “action” assignment abroad, and he apparently got a little shook up during his first safe-house meeting. Bob commented, “
I guess none of us ever lose that strange feeling in the stomach when we enter a safe-house. It’s probably a good thing.” Bob decided he would turn over five of his twelve cases to this novice agent. He was later disappointed to see that
Dryden
’s Arabic was not up to snuff and he “
doesn’t know how to write.”
^*3

Ames had lunch with, among others, Mustafa, who was still living in the same hotel, the Bedford, a block off Hamra Street. Zein had so far survived the civil war very well. He now occupied the penthouse suite of the hotel, and Bob reported that his old friend “
has fixed it up as only a Lebanese male can do.” Zein had bought some nice carpets and
other furnishings “dirt cheap from looters.” The apartment was too cluttered for Bob’s taste. “Personally, I couldn’t live in the place. It’s just too full and has too much contrast between old and new for me.”

Ames no longer needed Zein as his cutout contact to Ali Hassan Salameh. Bob was seeing his “important friend”—always unnamed in his letters to Yvonne—every other day, “and that keeps me busy.” Salameh celebrated their reunion by giving Ames a beautiful set of
solid-gold prayer beads. On Sunday, March 13, 1977, Salameh and Mustafa hosted a belated birthday party for Ames, and Mustafa gave him another set of prayer beads, this time made from white coral. “I think they’re trying to convert me
!” Bob wrote home.

One day Zein took Ames to meet Salameh’s wife, Nashrawan, and his two young sons, Hassan, twelve, and Usama, five. Ames thought Nashrawan was quite “lovely and very bright.” The elder son, Hassan, was visiting Beirut on spring break from his London boarding school. When Bob whipped out photos of his children and explained that Kristen was also twelve years old, Hassan politely expressed an interest in meeting her. “
Especially since she is blonde,” Ames wrote to Yvonne. “Arabs are Arabs!” Bob thought the Salamehs were “a really nice family.”

Ames, of course, was well aware that Salameh was having an affair. And it didn’t seem to be just one of his flings. Bob disapproved. He had met Rizk, and while she was certainly attractive, Bob didn’t understand the relationship. “
Why he still has this thing going with the other [woman], I’ll never know,” Bob wrote Yvonne. “His wife is good-looking, as are his two sons, and very well educated.” Salameh knew that Ames disapproved because Bob had made it clear that he wouldn’t meet him in Rizk’s apartment. “Everyone says that if I tell him, because he respects me, to break off the other thing, he will. I hesitate to get involved in personal things—even though this affair is ruining his reputation.” Bob was thinking like a friend and a family man—not a case officer sizing up a prospective agent for his weaknesses.

Salameh and Ames were partners at this delicate moment in the course of the Lebanese civil war. They were trying to keep the lid on. Ames knew it was important work. “
I’m doing something useful and something no one else can do,” he wrote Yvonne. “I’m spending a great deal of time trying to keep the Palestinians calm. They are very frustrated because nothing seems to be moving. If they get too frustrated, they will get back into the terrorist business to get attention and action. I hope the USG can come up with some pressure on the Israelis to be more flexible, but I am not optimistic. At least I am keeping the Black September group calm, but the real radicals, like the PFLP, are ready now. I talked to one of the PFLP leaders who is a friend and I must say that his arguments for action are convincing, although I can’t agree with the type of action.”