The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (33 page)

Ames was becoming a cynic. This was not uncommon for a rising clandestine officer. “
The loss of innocence comes in stages,” said Graham Fuller, a clandestine officer whose career mirrored that of Ames’s. “In the beginning, you find yourself exhilarated by the access to classified information, and by all the direct, hands-on knowledge you are acquiring in the field. You have this notion that all you need to do is get the right skinny, the right facts before the policy makers—and things would change. You think you can make a difference. But gradually, you realize that the policy makers don’t care. And then the revelation hits you that U.S. foreign policy is not fact-driven.”

Ames was working hard in Beirut “
on some very sensitive stuff.” In forty-five days he’d sent out over a hundred “operational” cables, a few of which he labeled “nasty-grams.” He thought if he wrote too many more “nasty-grams” the Near East Division might try to get rid of him: “My heart would be broken.” He tried to restrain himself, but he felt that on occasion a strongly worded cable was “the only way to get through to people.” He was not getting along with Dewey Clarridge. “
Maybe my sharp cables to him will mean he won’t want to work with me again—horror!” Ames complained to Yvonne that he was suffering from high blood pressure that spring. He blamed it on “
job pressures” and the irregular routine he had to keep in Beirut. “I’m sure Clarridge doesn’t suffer from my problem,” Bob grumbled. His health worried him. “
I enjoy life too much not to get my full share.”

Bob was hoping he might come back to a different job in Washington. “
I feel I should get a promotion this year, but I won’t.” He felt underappreciated. He’d been a GS-14 for only about two years, but he was already impatient for another promotion. “
If John MacGaffin
[a younger clandestine officer whom Ames had known in Beirut] gets promoted to GS-15 I leave the Division. That would be just too much to take.” Ames admired MacGaffin, but he saw no reason why the younger man should advance more rapidly than he: “
I’m more and more convinced that there are just a few good men in NE and they get ridden into the ground to make others look good. Strange people.”

“
I hear indirectly from people on what a great job the Station is doing,” Ames wrote home. “But I’ve never heard a word from the Division management. I think we’re doing great in terms of quality and quantity—in fact, I think we’re nothing short of amazing. But not a word, and then they wonder why people want to get out.” Most of his work was generated from his meetings with Salameh. He spent hours with “our friend” on Saturday, April 9—the day before Easter: “I just got back from a long meeting with our friend,” Ames wrote, “so I have lots to write down between now and Monday morning, so I’ll probably spend part of Easter writing.” An unappreciated aspect of good spy craft is simply writing down what transpires, and Ames’s cables back to Langley about his meetings with the Palestinian were detailed and meticulous. (And they remain classified.)

Ames was scheduled to spend another month in Beirut to complete a full three-month TDY. But on April 23, 1977, he received an emergency phone call from Yvonne. She told him that his father, Albert, had been hospitalized the previous day—and had died that day. Albert had apparently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer some time earlier, but he’d kept this news from his family. He’d also had emphysema—and on April 23 his heart finally gave out. “Bob took his father’s death very hard,” said
Sanford Dryden
. “I think they had been very close. He did cry.” Ames boarded a flight home the next day, but he arrived too late for the funeral. His father had been seventy-seven years old.

On June 8, 1977, Salameh married Georgina Rizk, who became his second wife.
He wore a white suit for the occasion. It was not a lowprofile
affair. Salameh was always a bit self-indulgent. As a Muslim he could decide to take a second wife. He wouldn’t divorce Nashrawan, but neither could he resist the charms of Georgina. “
She seduced Ali,” Mustafa Zein said. “And after they made love for the first time, that was it, Ali was in love.” Arafat had bluntly told Salameh, “Marry her or leave her. Leaders do not take mistresses.”

A year after Salameh’s second marriage, in mid-June 1978, Ames boarded a TWA plane at Dulles and flew off to Beirut. He was traveling on a newly issued
diplomatic passport, No. X135101.
He hadn’t been back to Lebanon in a year. His immediate boss, Alan Wolfe, had asked him to stand in for Frank Anderson, then chief of station in Beirut, while Anderson went on home leave for nearly a month. Ames was ambivalent about these occasional TDYs. They earned him extra cash—and he liked the opportunity to look up his old sources. But he disliked being away from his family. The last thing he told Yvonne was that she had to promise him to write regular letters. (All his letters to her ended with the line “God love you.”)

Bob arrived in Beirut on June 16 and checked into the Riviera Hotel. But then two days later he moved into Anderson’s three-bedroom apartment in the El Dorado building, right on the corniche and overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. He thought the Andersons were “
lousy housekeepers,” so he spent that Sunday cleaning up the apartment. In the evening he could sit on the balcony and watch the sunset. He was amused to see that the Lebanese were participating in the current worldwide rage for jogging: “It is really hilarious to see these fat Lebanese in their Dior & Yves St. Laurent sweats.… Will they never change? The world may be falling down around them, but they’ll never be caught out of style.”

Beirut had changed dramatically. The first stage of the civil war, from 1975 to 1978, had left much of Beirut and the center city looking like a war zone. On block after block stood rows of high-rise apartment buildings that were now empty shells, pockmarked by bullets and mortar rounds. The 1976 “war of the hotels” had turned the city’s famous
Phoenicia Intercontinental, the Holiday Inn, and the St.-George hotels into towering ruins. More recently, on March 11, 1978, a squad of eleven Fatah Fedayeen led by a woman, Dalal Mughrabi, had landed on Israel’s northern coast in rubber rafts and had proceeded to hijack a bus. They had driven the bus south on the coastal highway toward Tel Aviv until stopped by an Israeli roadblock. A nine-hour gun battle ensued. Mughrabi and most of her squad were eventually killed, together with thirty-seven Israelis—including thirteen children—and a female American photographer who happened to be sitting on the beach when the Fedayeen arrived. The Coastal Highway massacre remains the single worst terrorist attack carried out inside Israel. Three days later, on March 14, 1978, more than twenty-five thousand Israeli soldiers invaded South Lebanon, seizing the southern portion of the country up to the Litani River. The Israeli invasion
killed an estimated two thousand Lebanese civilians and turned another quarter million into refugees.

Lebanon was a mess. Ames nevertheless could see lots of people strolling along Beirut’s seaside corniche. On Sunday, June 18, he sat on the balcony and in his neat cursive handwriting addressed a four-page letter to his family back in Reston. As was his style, he began affectionately, “Dear Bonnie, Babies & beasts …” The “Babies” were the six children, none of whom were any longer babies. And the “beasts” were Hansje, the Hungarian Vizsla breed of dog, and their numerous cats. “You would not believe this is a troubled country to look off your balcony.” Five days earlier, on the morning of June 13, six hundred Phalangist militia—under the control of the Gemayels, a leading Maronite Christian family—had assaulted the ancestral home of the Franjiehs, a rival Maronite clan who opposed the Gemayel alliance with Israel. Their goal was to kill Tony Franjieh, the thirty-six-year-old son of the family’s patriarch, former Lebanese president Suleiman Franjieh. The Phalangists killed thirty of Franjieh’s bodyguards and then forced Tony Franjieh and his wife, Vera, to watch as they shot two dozen bullets into their three-year-old daughter, Jihan. The killers then shot Tony’s
wife—and finally executed him. “
The murder was truly savage and brutal,” Ames wrote home. “In spite of this, I think the masses are just fed up with fighting and killing.… I’m speaking logically, of course, and there is not much room for logic in Lebanon.”

Ames was later shocked to read in
Monday Morning
that after the murders of Tony Franjieh, his wife, and his daughter, Suleiman Franjieh, the clan’s patriarch, had taken Tony’s eleven-year-old son to see the bloody scene before the bodies were removed “so he would know what his duty was.” To Bob’s thinking, this was sad proof that “
there is enough hatred in Lebanon for the rest of the world.”

The day after he arrived in Beirut, Ames had dinner with Ali Hassan Salameh. Their relationship was long past the point of meeting awkwardly in CIA safe houses. Ali Hassan welcomed Bob into his home as a friend and colleague. “
Our friend sends his best,” Ames wrote Yvonne. “I had dinner with his family on Friday night [June 16]. His wife [Nashrawan, his first wife], who does all the cooking despite several maids, really made some great Leb. dishes. I gorged myself so much that I only had a
Shawarma
[minced lamb sandwich] on Sat!” The two men had a lot to discuss. Over the next three weeks, Ames made it a habit to visit Salameh every other night at 6:30
P.M.
Usually, he spent an hour and a half with him and then returned to the El Dorado apartment. The meetings left Bob with “
lots on my mind.” He’d often wake up in the middle of the night, “usually thinking how to write the info I get in my almost nightly 6:30
P.M.
–8
P.M.
meetings with our friend.”

Even before the civil war started in 1975, Lebanon had been a very complicated piece of geography. By 1978 it was a maze of inexplicable narratives and constantly changing allegiances. The Palestinians were both a factor in the escalation of the civil war and its chief victims. Initially, Arafat and the PLO tried desperately to stay out of it, but by the end of 1976 they’d inevitably thrown in their lot with the Lebanese leftist alliance of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Druze parties against the right-wing
Maronite Christian militias. Salameh was trying to brief Ames on what was turning into a very bloody sectarian war. “
Lebanon is still waiting,” Bob wrote to Yvonne on June 25, “for the other shoe to fall after the assassinations up North and the continued trouble down South. Unfortunately, there is much outside interference in Lebanon’s affairs—not to mention their own tendency to shoot themselves in the foot. The Israelis like to keep the South unstable in order to keep the Palestinians out and to give themselves an excuse to come back in. The Palestinians want a weak Lebanon so there will be no army to harass them, and the Syrians just want Lebanon.”

Three days later, the proverbial shoe dropped. Thirty-three Christian Phalangist members near Baalbek were taken from their homes and executed. Their bodies were mutilated. Ames thought this massacre was probably carried out by the Syrians as a favor to their Franjieh allies—who had lost the same number in the attack on Tony Franjieh. At the same time, gun battles erupted in East Beirut between the Syrian army and the Gemayel clan’s Phalangist militia. “
It’s getting nasty here in Beirut,” Bob wrote to Yvonne on July 5, “and we had some mortar rounds just a few hundred yards from my apartment. When they hit they sound as if they are right in the room. As I write this in the office, I can hear firing breaking out again.… Electricity has been on and off (mostly off) since noon yesterday.… One doesn’t go out on the streets these days unless he has to.… I love and miss you lots. God love you.”