The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (4 page)

Back home in Philadelphia, Ames got a job with Allstate Insurance Company, and in the evenings he began studying to take the State Department’s Foreign Service written exam. He told his parents that he “could not spend his life stuck behind a desk.” He wanted to travel
“and see the world.” The insurance company had its offices in the Gimbel Building in downtown Philadelphia. Bob was a
“repo man” for Allstate. It was unpleasant work, having to repossess cars or other property. But the company’s six-foot-three rookie was charming and he could get the job done. After lunch one day in the spring of 1959, Ames was walking back to work when he spotted a pretty blond, blue-eyed young woman whom he recognized as someone who worked as a secretary in the insurance company. He made a mental note to himself that she was far too beautiful for him—and that she must have a dozen men after her already.

Yvonne Blakely had been born on June 21, 1937, in San Diego, California, where her father was stationed with the navy at the time. But like any navy brat, she had moved around. She ended up spending her high school years in Groton, Connecticut, graduating in 1955. Instead of college, she enrolled in the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in Boston and learned stenography and typing. “Gibbs girls” were considered to be class A secretaries; every student was required to wear a formal hat and long white gloves. “You were virtually guaranteed to get a job,” Yvonne recalled. She graduated in 1956 and followed her parents to Honolulu, where her father was stationed at Pearl Harbor. She spent two years working for a shipping company until 1958, when her father was transferred once again, this time to the navy yard in Philadelphia.

For her part, Yvonne, twenty-two, had noticed Ames. She’d already
heard through the office rumor mill about a new employee, a handsome and very tall bachelor. “I was going back to work,” she recalled, “and I saw this giant of a man. I decided right away that he wasn’t for me because there were already too many girls after him.”

But one day they found themselves together, walking to catch a bus on Chestnut Street. Bob introduced himself. “One of the first things he talked about was his love of Arabic,” Yvonne said. “He wanted to go to the Middle East.” Yvonne thought he was not only attractive but worldly. By then, he’d taken to smoking a pipe—and even when he was not actually smoking he often had it clenched in his teeth.

Ames took her out on their first date on April 11, 1959. They went to a movie theater. “Bob was not a big winer and diner,” Yvonne recalled. But by July 30 they were engaged. “His parents were wonderful about it,” Yvonne said. “My parents hesitated because of Bob being Catholic.” Yvonne had been raised in the Lutheran Church—and when her father retired from the navy in 1961 after twenty-nine years of service, he enrolled in a Lutheran seminary and became an ordained pastor. The Blakelys were serious Lutherans.

There was also a big class difference. Yvonne’s father, Robert Graham Blakely, had been born in San Bernardino, California, and raised in Idaho. His parents were from Ireland and Scotland. During World War II he’d been a submariner—dangerous duty. But he’d survived and spent the rest of his career in the navy. By 1960, he had risen to the rank of a navy commander. He was somebody, and young Bob Ames from Roxborough had no pedigree other than his association with a winning college basketball team. But he was charming, and he was clearly in love.

Later that summer Bob wrote a love poem to Yvonne:

Yvonne was a truly stunning woman. She had dirty-blond hair, icy-blue eyes, and the prominent, high cheekbones of her mother’s Norwegian ancestors. (One of Bob’s friends later remarked that she bore a strong resemblance to the Norwegian movie actress
Liv Ullmann.) She walked with a quiet elegance that came naturally. She knew how to dress stylishly, but without great expense. She possessed the polite poise of a navy officer’s daughter. There was something formal about her demeanor, but it wasn’t pretentious.

They were married on April 30, 1960, in a Lutheran church. “Bob was excommunicated by the Catholic Church,” Yvonne said. “He just accepted it; he didn’t have a problem with it.” He was Catholic, but he chose Yvonne over the Church. It was an easy choice.

Immediately after their marriage in the spring of 1960 Bob took the written Foreign Service exam—and soon learned that he’d failed it. Still determined to have a career in the Middle East, he decided to apply to the Central Intelligence Agency. In late June he and Yvonne made a quick trip to New York City, where he had his first Agency interview. In New York, the couple took the opportunity to see Alfred Hitchcock’s newly released thriller
Psycho
. By mid-August, Yvonne was pregnant.

Late in 1960, the CIA offered Ames a job. They hired him at a salary of more than $5,000 per annum. That was serious money for the young man from Philadelphia. Bob and Yvonne moved down to Washington, D.C., right after the Christmas holidays and rented—for $150 a month—a small apartment at 1400 South Twenty-eighth Street in Arlington, Virginia. They arrived in Bob’s red Fiat, his first car. They called it the “tomato can.”

Bob had been told that he couldn’t tell anyone whom he was working for. Ostensibly, that meant even his wife. But in practice most CIA officers told their wives. Yvonne knew. But other relatives usually had only a vague notion of what they were doing in Washington. When one of Ames’s future colleagues, Clair George, joined the CIA a few years earlier, he wrote home:
“Dear Mom, I have been offered about $4,500 per year or so to do something for Uncle Sam, exactly what I’m not sure. Nor do I know where, when, how, or why. So think it over and remember the child of 1955 has [a] strange and sometimes tortuous path to follow.” Bob probably told his parents what he was doing after CIA officers came by to interview them and various neighbors for his background check. Helen and Albert then told his sisters that he’d joined the CIA.
“Initially, I couldn’t picture him as CIA,” said his sister
Nancy. “This was not the brother I knew. Bob didn’t seem like the kind of person who would put himself in danger. But later we all told ourselves that this was the perfect job for him. He was very private and he knew how to keep a secret.”

It was an exciting time to be in Washington. Jack Kennedy was about to be inaugurated as president. Bob and Yvonne were both registered Republicans, but after watching the Kennedy-Nixon televised debates they decided to vote Democratic.
“Nixon looked horrible,” Yvonne recalled. “I tended to vote Republican, but I never voted a straight party ticket.” Bob rarely talked politics with his wife. He had very conventional views about women: he thought they belonged at home.

That winter Ames was inducted into the Agency as a junior officer trainee (JOT) and assigned to Operations Course-11. (The Agency had been founded in 1947, but this was the eleventh year in which the yearlong Operations course had been offered.) There were forty-four other men in this class—and, unusually,
one woman.
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Everyone in the class was slated to work in the Directorate of Plans (DP)—which later became the Directorate of Operations (DO) and today is called the National Clandestine Service. DP was the Agency’s branch for the collection of intelligence by covert means. If the JOTs survived the DO’s nearly two-year-long training program, they could become case officers, usually assigned abroad to work in U.S. embassies or consulates under diplomatic cover. While ostensibly listed as Reserve Foreign Service officers, their actual job would be the recruitment of foreign agents and the collection of covert intelligence from foreign sources. Operations Course-11 would teach them basic tradecraft: how to spot and assess potential agents and then how to recruit and manage them. Ames was surprised by how much of it entailed “sitting behind a desk.” It was a bureaucracy. Initially, the trainees had to memorize a one-page
list of cryptonyms identifying the Agency’s various departments and functions. Classes were held in a row of dilapidated white clapboard, barrack-like buildings thrown up during World War II as “temporary” office space. Years later, in the early 1960s, the CIA was still using the spartan structures, located on Ohio Drive along the Potomac River. One could see the ground between the gaps in the floorboards. All day long, the trainees were subjected to a parade of speakers from various parts of the Agency, each more eager than his predecessor to regale the new recruits with the virtues of his particular expertise. “It got old, fast,” recalled one of Ames’s classmates.

Because the Agency barracks were located so close to National Airport, there was a sign at the back of each classroom, facing the speaker, that read, “Pause for Planes.” The roar of the planes taking off was close enough to rattle the windows.

By 1961, at the dawn of President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the CIA was already a large, unwieldy bureaucracy
, numbering some sixteen thousand employees. The Agency was about to move into its new seven-story quarters in Langley, Virginia. Allen Dulles, veteran Wall Street lawyer and former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officer, was the Agency’s director of central intelligence. But he was also head of the entire intelligence community and the president’s principal intelligence adviser. The new recruits got so tired of being told that Dulles wore “three hats” that some took to coming to work wearing more than one hat. No one seemed to get the joke. One day a speaker in class was surprised to be greeted with groans and boos when he casually boasted, “At this time, I am actually wearing two hats.” Ames and his fellow Operations Course-11 classmates quickly acquired a reputation for their public unwillingness to suffer such pretentiousness without a display of derision.

The men snickered when more than one speaker was heard to say, “We’ll run this up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.” And they sat nonplussed when another officer admonished them, “Do not clog the intelligence stream with the luxuriant water hyacinth of trivia.”

But they were impressed when a group of four or five men from the
Agency’s School of International Communism came to address them. They were cigar-smoking, hard-drinking intellectuals, all with doctorates in political science or history. They explained that it was their job to keep themselves well informed on the intricacies of the international communist movement. They talked about the doctrinal disputes and the various personalities who led one faction or another in the world of communism. Ames and his colleagues were surprised to learn that communism was less than monolithic.

There were rules in the game of intelligence, and then there were rules to be broken. Some years later the Agency hired some psychiatrists to profile the qualities of a good covert operative. One of the characteristics identified was
“a high tolerance for ambiguity.”

Ames quickly made new friends, discovering early on that one of his classmates came from Philadelphia. Socially, the group split between those who were married and those who were still single. “The institution of the cocktail party was still alive, and we all supported the institution,” recalled one of Ames’s classmates. “Mixed drinks were very much still in vogue, and beer and wine might accompany a meal, but they never preceded it.”