The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (37 page)

Mustafa Zein witnessed the chaotic scene. “
It was an unforgettable day,” Zein said. Arafat was a mess. He’d been in Damascus when he heard the news. A snowstorm had blocked the road from Damascus to Beirut, and it had taken Arafat and his convoy of security guards seven hours to drive to Beirut. At one point, the chairman of the PLO had to get out of his car and use his bare hands to remove snow from beneath the tires. At the funeral, Arafat came up to Zein and remarked bitterly, “
Your friends could not protect my son. I gave them the most I cared for, my right hand. How could that happen?”

In an extraordinary tribute, the Maronite warlord Bashir Gemayel attended the funeral, and at the moment of burial a squad of his men saluted Ali with a volley of rifle fire in the air. “The most ardent enemies of the Palestinians were honoring the death of a Palestinian leader,” Zein remarked.

The page-one headline in the
New York Times
read, “
Reputed Planner of Munich Raid Killed in Beirut.” In Tel Aviv that day, the widow of one of the Olympian athletes killed at Munich, Ilana Romano, told reporters that
she’d waited for this day for years. “In my name, and in the name of all the other widows, I want to thank those who did it.” For virtually all Israelis, the man responsible for the Munich tragedy had been justly executed.

In Langley, the CIA did not see it the same way. “
The day Ali Hassan Salameh was killed was a very bad day,” recalled
Lindsay Sherwin
, a senior Middle East analyst. “Everyone in the Agency knew it was a big deal. Bob was clearly stunned when he heard the news. He became very quiet, and the color drained from his face. I heard someone ask, ‘Is he all right?’ ”

Many of Langley’s clandestine officers thought Salameh’s death was an egregious mistake. “
I am surprised Clair George and those guys didn’t try harder to keep Salameh alive,” said
Sherwin
. Others labeled
it a tragedy. “
If Ali Hassan had lived,” Sam Wyman said, “things might have gone in a different direction. He could never have been recruited, but if handled carefully he could have been a very powerful diplomatic conduit. It was a blow to our influence, and a blow to the prospects for peace.” In Beirut, Chief of Station Anderson agreed: “
We lost a very important diplomatic channel. We lost the capability to advance the peace process. Arafat by comparison to Ali Hassan was just a very weak man.” When Anderson finally met Arafat in 1993, he came away from the interview thinking that the PLO chairman was an empty vessel. “
A few weeks later,” Anderson recalled, “I was having dinner with King Hussein and I began to describe how unimpressive Arafat seemed. The king finished my sentence by saying, ‘There’s nothing there.’ ”

Many in the Agency thought that Salameh should have been protected. Whatever the political risks, some spooks thought the Israelis should have been told that he was untouchable. One veteran DO officer, Charlie Allen, thought killing Salameh harmed Israel’s national interest. “
When Mossad killed Ali Hassan,” Allen said, “it was an act of cutting off the nose to spite the face.”

Herman Eilts, the U.S. ambassador to Cairo at the time, candidly told the
Wall Street Journal
, “
He was extraordinarily helpful—as was Fatah—in assisting in security for American citizens and officials. I regard his assassination as a loss.” Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director in the Carter administration, reportedly told the president that “our man” in the PLO had been assassinated.

Some Mossad officers understood the American conundrum. “
It is an enormous investment,” observed Yoram Hessel. “Salameh was a ten-year intelligence relationship. So on the one hand you can see why they wanted to protect him. But there is something wrong about all this. From our perspective—the Israeli perspective—it is unthinkable that you would have anything to do with such a man. The idea that there was intelligence sharing with the Red Prince would have been anathema to us.”

It was a thin red line.
Meir Harel
—later a Mossad director general—understood perfectly why Ames would have cultivated Salameh.
“A
backstage contact is well within the accepted rules of the game,”
Harel
observed. “We knew Salameh was talking to the Americans. And I came to know later that Ames was very angry with us when Ali Hassan was killed.” But
Harel
seems to think that if the Americans wanted to keep Salameh alive all they had to do was ask: “You may assume that if the Americans had told us that Ali was an asset, we would have stopped our operation.” But this begs the question because Ali never would have agreed to be considered an asset. And
Harel
himself admits that he knew Ali was not an agent. “It does not surprise me,”
Harel
said. “It does not make me angry that the Americans were talking to the Palestinian. It was part of the game. But it is fascinating. We suspected Ali had contacts with the Americans. We thought, however, that the relations were of a liaisonship nature and not of an agent to his control.”

Another senior Israeli intelligence officer,
Dov Zeit
, recalls talking with Ames in Washington about his “
close professional relations with the PLO.” This must have been after Salameh’s death. “He was not playing games,”
Zeit
recalled. “He was being honest—even matter-of-fact. I remember my superiors were shocked by the nature of the relationship.”

Virtually the entire Israeli military and intelligence establishment celebrated Salameh’s death. A terrorist was dead. But aside from vengeance, what exactly did this accomplish for the Israelis? Ronen Bergman, one of Israel’s most prominent national security and intelligence reporters, remains highly skeptical. “
Did it solve the Palestinian problem?” Bergman asks. “No. Did it help to bring peace to the Middle East? No—and it created bloodshed from both sides in Europe. Tactically, it was successful. Strategically, it was a failure.” Frank Anderson had a more cynical interpretation: “
The Israelis had a policy to eliminate everyone around Arafat who had a tendency to be liberal. I know they deny this, but just look at who they killed.”

To be sure, killing the Red Prince probably postponed the day when American officials would openly negotiate with Yasir Arafat. But it did not close the back channel for long. In the wake of Salameh’s assassination,
Anderson wanted to know who would replace Salameh as the liaison to the Agency. The PLO’s Mohammed Subeh—whose wife was the sister to Salameh’s first wife, Nashrawan—came to Beirut and told Anderson that Mustafa Zein would be the liaison. And indeed, Zein was called to one of Arafat’s safe houses in Beirut in the middle of the night and had a long talk with the Old Man. “
I want you to do this,” Arafat told Zein, “even though I am asking you to put one foot in the grave. But you are Lebanese, not Palestinian, so maybe it will be easier for the Americans to meet with you.” Anderson was skeptical that Zein could replace Salameh, and so too were his bosses back at Langley. But the CIA made a determined effort to keep the channel open by meeting with, among others, Hani al-Hassan, the PLO official who had met with Gen. Vernon Walters in Rabat in 1973.

Two weeks after Salameh’s assassination, Zein flew into Washington. Ames visited him in his hotel room and the two men commiserated over Salameh’s death. Mustafa remembers tears. Ames told him, “
We want to finish the job we started with Ali.”

On February 1, 1979, just nine days after Ali Hassan Salameh’s assassination, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was welcomed home in Tehran by millions of Iranians celebrating the shah’s ouster just two weeks earlier. Over the next eleven days Khomeini mobilized his supporters in the streets. By February 11, Khomeini’s revolutionaries were in full command of the government. The revolution had begun in October 1977 with a few hundred demonstrators. Protests escalated throughout 1978, and by the late autumn it was clear to everyone that the Pahlavi regime could no longer control the streets.

After the 1979 revolution, George Cave was brought back from Saudi Arabia to Washington, where he worked on the problem of how to deal with a very unstable, fluid revolutionary government in Tehran. As national intelligence officer (NIO) for the Near East, Ames was working on many of the same issues. Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, a fierce power struggle had been taking place in Tehran between moderate members of the revolutionary government and Khomeini’s more radical Islamists, who wanted to turn Iran into a fundamentalist theological state. The moderates were led by Mehdi Bazargan, a professor of engineering from Tehran University whom Khomeini had appointed as his interim prime minister. But while Bazargan tried to restore essential
government services and get a constitution written, Khomeini inflamed political passions with fiery speeches attacking foreign imperialists and corrupt, irreligious secularists at home. Throughout 1979, the ayatollah was methodically undermining his prime minister.

By the spring of 1979, Tehran was descending into chaos. Bands of radical Islamists loyal to Khomeini roamed the streets. Armed men set up checkpoints throughout the city. On March 18, 1979, the acting chief of station, Howard Hart, was out meeting a source in the middle of the night when he was attacked by a couple of men shouting, “CIA! CIA!” Beaten to the ground,
Hart pulled out his gun and shot them dead. On the other hand, it was a period of postrevolutionary exuberance when a “thousand flowers were blooming.” Hawkers on Tehran sidewalks were selling newspapers and magazines espousing viewpoints that ran the gamut from communist to Islamist. The Tudeh Communist Party maintained public offices, as did the People’s Mujahedin Party, an armed group with a leftist Islamic program. Yet it was clear that Khomeini’s Islamist radicals had the political momentum and the street muscle to prevail in any political showdown.

In this uncertain atmosphere, U.S. policy makers were under no illusions that the monarchy could ever be restored. Washington’s decidedly modest goal was merely to restore some normalcy to American-Iranian relations and hope that Prime Minister Barzargan’s cabinet, dominated by men of more or less moderate and modernist temperaments, could survive long enough in power to stabilize the government and write a democratic constitution—and perhaps keep the oil exports flowing to the international markets. Sadly, this goal would prove illusory. As one American official noted, “
It is not easy to sleep next to an elephant that you have wounded.” But Bob Ames and George Cave nevertheless made a valiant attempt in 1979 to divert the Iranian revolutionaries’ relations with America from messianic nihilism to something approaching normalcy.

The obstacles in their path were truly enormous. Most Iranians were highly suspicious of American intentions. They knew that the CIA had planned the coup that put the shah back in power in 1953. They
knew that the CIA had worked closely with the shah’s secret police, the hated and feared SAVAK. And most Iranians assumed in 1979 that the Americans were doing everything they could to mount a counterrevolution.

In the spring of 1979, just after the revolution, the Carter administration had pulled its ambassador, William H. Sullivan, out of Tehran because he was so closely identified with the shah. So there was no ambassador, only a chargé d’affaires, in the Tehran embassy. The CIA maintained a small station with only four officers, and over the next few months the number of embassy personnel shrank from hundreds to fewer than eighty. None of the CIA officers had any experience with Iran—and, incredibly,
not one spoke Farsi. Ironically, Mossad had better information about the new regime because they’d trained scores of SAVAK agents, some of whom had shed their military uniforms, let their beards grow, and joined the Revolutionary Guards.

That summer the State Department and the CIA tried to pry open a back channel to the regime. Prime Minister Bazargan had appointed his personal aide, Deputy Prime Minister Abbas Amir Entezam, to be the main liaison to the U.S. embassy. Bazargan wanted better relations with the Americans, and so with his express authority Entezam began meeting regularly with U.S. embassy officials. Entezam was a forty-six-year-old engineer and businessman who’d studied and worked in the United States. As a young man, he’d once delivered a letter of protest to the U.S. embassy in the wake of the 1953 coup. He was an Iranian patriot and dissident, a longtime member of the anti-shah National Resistance Movement, and by 1978 he was an ardent supporter of Khomeini as the figurehead of the revolution. And just coincidentally, Entezam had met Cave when the CIA officer was stationed in Tehran in the late 1950s. Cave hadn’t recruited Entezam; the Iranian was not a paid asset. But Cave had known him and solicited his views about the Pahlavi regime. Cave had empathized. Unbeknownst to Entezam, the CIA had assigned him a cryptonym: SDPLOD/1. This would ruin his life, later turning him into revolutionary Iran’s longest incarcerated political prisoner.

But in the spring of 1979, it made perfect sense to put Cave and Entezam back together again. And so it happened that the two men met in Stockholm on August 5 and 6. Entezam remembered Cave from their casual acquaintanceship years earlier. Cave explained that Washington wished to reestablish a friendly, working relationship with Tehran—and to that end he proposed that they set up a series of regular meetings in which Iranian officials could be briefed on various intelligence issues of interest to the revolutionary regime. Entezam agreed, and a briefing was scheduled for late August in Tehran.