The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (42 page)

On November 19, 1980, Turner and Kessler met with Reagan and his staff around a dining-room table at his prepresidential headquarters on Jackson Place, near the White House. After the briefing, Reagan asked quite a few questions about the Golan Heights, Syria, and Palestinian politics. At one point, Turner was taken aback when the president-elect asked in all earnestness, “What is the biblical name for the Golan Heights?” He hadn’t expected this query and had no idea how to answer this Sunday Bible-study quiz. At one point, Kessler ventured, “
We could lose Sadat.” This was a risky thing for a CIA analyst to say. Reagan responded, “What do you mean, ‘lose Sadat’?” Kessler explained that Egypt was not invulnerable to the Middle East’s general instability. Sadat, she said, could be overthrown just like the shah—or assassinated. (Less than a year later, Kessler’s speculations proved prophetic with Sadat’s assassination by a radical Islamist cell within the Egyptian army.)

Ames, Kessler, and other CIA briefers did not buy into the press’s notion that Reagan was disconnected. But it became clear that the new president grasped information anecdotally. “
You can’t capture his attention,” Ames told a friend, “for more than three or four minutes before he interrupts you with an anecdote.” The president-elect also had certain preconceived convictions coming into office. “
The problem with Ronald Reagan was that his ideas were all fixed—he was an old dog,” said Peter Dixon Davis, a CIA analyst. His ideas about anything to do with the Palestinians were set in concrete. At some point prior to the inauguration, the CIA produced a memorandum to try to bring the prospective president up to speed about the Palestinian conundrum. It was complicated. The memo tried to explain the different factions within the Palestinian movement for self-determination—the radical
rejectionists, the emerging consensus among those willing to settle for something like a two-state solution, and the crazy nihilists like Abu Nidal, who was from time to time assassinating any Palestinian showing any hint of a willingness to compromise with the Israelis. Reagan read the memorandum “very slowly and thoughtfully,” recalled Dixon Davis. “He must have taken ten minutes. At the end he said, ‘But they are all terrorists, aren’t they?’ My heart just sank.”

When Bill Casey walked into Langley headquarters on January 28, 1981, he found himself in charge of a highly demoralized intelligence agency. Because of the personnel cuts under both Schlesinger and Admiral Turner, the CIA had shrunk to about fourteen thousand personnel with a
budget of about $6 billion. “
With the people fired, driven out or lured into retirement,” complained Robert Gates, who’d served as Turner’s executive assistant, “half our analysts had less than five years’ experience. And our analysis wasn’t at all sharp, forward looking or relevant. Our paramilitary capability was clinically dead. What covert action we did carry out was super-cautious and lacked any imagination.” The Agency, Gates, concluded, “was hunkered down in a defensive crouch.”

Ames was one of those officers who felt very skeptical about the Agency’s mission. He was frustrated, gloomy, and cynical. “
He was not happy with his career,” said
Lindsay Sherwin
. “He said no one leaves the Agency feeling good about their career.” He morbidly told one of his best friends, Bob Headley, another CIA officer, “When we’re gone, they’ll pass the hat for us and that will be that.” Ames worried about his family finances.
He hired a financial consultant, who
bluntly told him that if he intended to send all six of his children to college, he was going to have to quit the government and get a job in the private sector. He told a friend that he’d stay in the Agency until 1984, when he’d turn fifty and be eligible for early retirement. He’d then leave to make some real money.

Before cleaning out his desk at the National Security Council (NSC), Robert Hunter called his successor, Geoffrey Kemp—who was slated to take over the Middle East portfolio—and told him, “
Look, I just want you to know that I think Bob Ames is the most knowledgeable fellow they have at Langley on the Middle East. He is really terrific.” In early February 1981, Ames came by with Chuck Cogan to introduce himself to Kemp. (Cogan was then chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations.)

Soon after this White House encounter, Casey asked to see Ames. It was one of his earliest meetings. Casey had heard a bit about Ames’s exploits as a case officer, and he wanted to take the measure of the man. Ames was at his most empathetic. He knew what Casey wanted to hear. So when Casey asked why America seemed to have so many enemies in the Middle East, Ames told his story about befriending the young South Yemeni revolutionary Abd’al Fatah Ismail, who had been trained by the Soviets and had later become head of the Marxist regime in Aden. As Casey later remembered it, Ames emphasized that in the Middle East the Soviet strategy was to undermine traditional values: “
This meant undermining the influence of religion.” The story, emphasizing the Soviet Union’s meddling in the Middle East, struck a chord with Casey. Henceforth, Casey relied on Ames for all things Middle Eastern.

Casey was also drawn to Ames because he was an operations guy who’d made the transition to analysis. Casey wanted to break down the segregation between the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations, and Ames seemed to be a model for this new kind of officer. Ames was an experienced clandestine case officer, but he was also an articulate briefer. And Casey needed articulate people around him precisely because he was notoriously inarticulate. He was a mumbler. Early in
1981 Casey was briefing President Reagan in the White House. After the CIA director droned on at some length, Reagan quietly handed his aide Mike Deaver a note: “
Did you understand a word he said?” Deaver later recalled, “It was a relief when Casey was traveling and his deputy would come to the White House instead. We’d actually know what was going on.” Secretary of State George Shultz later observed of Casey, “
People said he was the one guy in Washington who didn’t need a secure phone to scramble.”

Ames didn’t know what to make of Casey. At first glance, the man was an odd choice for director of central intelligence. Sure, everyone knew he’d done stellar work in the OSS—but that was forty years ago. Casey had spent all those years making money on Wall Street and working for conservative Republicans. He was
worth nearly $10 million in 1981 dollars. And he was very conservative—some might say an ideologue. But everyone agreed he was smart. John Bross, a clandestine officer dating back to the Agency’s founding, thought Casey was “
capable of great kindness and great ruthlessness.” Dick Helms called him a “conniver.” “
I liked Casey,” said Clair George. “He was nuts.”

Casey had certitudes and an ironclad worldview. He wanted his analysts to see the world as black or white, not as wishy-washy gray: “I hate these iffy conclusions.… I’m not looking for consensus.” He welcomed high technology as a tool, but he knew that satellite pictures and intercept intelligence rarely revealed anything about your adversary’s intentions. “
Facts can confuse,” Casey said. “The wrong picture is not worth a thousand words.”

In early April 1981 Ames accompanied Casey on a trip to Rabat, Cairo, Amman, and Tel Aviv. They flew into Tel Aviv with Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The Israelis didn’t know what to make of Casey, partly because he was incomprehensible. “
At the end of one meeting,” recalled a senior Mossad officer, Yoram Hessel, “the note taker asked me what the hell he had said.”

It was an exhausting trip. In Cairo, Casey ran out of books. Like
Ames, he was a voracious reader. One Friday afternoon after a post-lunch nap, Casey announced that he wanted to visit a Cairo bookstore. “
Off we went through the streets of Heliopolis,” recalled Charles Englehart, the deputy chief of station at the time. Arriving at the bookstore, they found it closed for Friday prayers. But an Egyptian security officer bounded up the steps and pounded on the door. “Soon a disheveled Egyptian appeared,” recalled Englehart, “suitably terrified, and came down with the keys and opened the bookstore. Casey browsed a bit and picked out two books on Egypt.” Casey was trouble.

In Tel Aviv, they met with Mossad’s chief at the time, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi. Casey explained to Hofi that the Reagan administration was anxious to sell $8.5 billion worth of AWACS surveillance airplanes to Saudi Arabia. Naturally, the Israelis were uneasy about the Saudis’ acquiring such sophisticated technology. Casey bluntly asked Hofi what he could do to have Tel Aviv turn down the dial on its lobbying against the AWACS deal in Congress. Hofi responded that they could use some satellite intelligence on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear energy reactor. A deal was made, and two months later, on June 7, 1981,
Israeli jets bombed the reactor.

On the way back to Washington, Casey and Ames had a layover in Madrid. The next morning, Ames had breakfast with Geoffrey Kemp, the NSC staffer for Middle Eastern affairs. They poured out their frustrations to each other. “
One real problem of this trip,” Kemp wrote in his diary, “is the failure of the principals to brief line staff—thus Ames goes to Rabat to meet Casey with very little background from [Secretary of State Al] Haig. No wonder this government gets its messages crossed. No one spends the time or effort to communicate. According to Ames, NEA [the State Department] can’t stand CIA. Ergo, [the State Department] doesn’t pass info to Ames. Ergo, Haig doesn’t brief Casey. Ergo, Casey may say very different things than Haig. Ergo, trouble.”

By then, Reagan insiders had nicknamed Haig “the Vicar.” And everyone in Langley headquarters thought Haig was trying to cut the CIA out of the policy loop. Gradually, Casey came to rely on Ames to make sure that didn’t happen.

Late in May 1981 Bob went back to Israel for more meetings with his Mossad contacts. Unusually, Yvonne joined him in Israel. She took a separate flight to Tel Aviv on May 30, 1981, and joined Bob there in his hotel. They’d visited Jerusalem together in 1966, driving in from Damascus, but Yvonne wanted to see the Holy City again. It was a quick and uneventful trip. They saw the major tourist sights in the Old City. Yvonne then returned to Washington on June 4, while Bob stayed a little longer to meet with his Mossad counterparts. Just before leaving for Israel, Bob thought it had come time to tell his oldest child, Cathy, about
his true employment. Cathy had just turned twenty years old and was attending a local college but living at home. None of the children had known Bob was a clandestine officer for the CIA. They had all thought he worked for the State Department. It was a small but necessary subterfuge. The previous year
Bob had arranged for Cathy to have a summer internship at the State Department, so he drove her every day into downtown Washington, dropped her off, and pretended to go to an office in the State Department—when actually he had to turn around and drive back to Langley. So the news came as a surprise to Cathy. “
Children sense that there is something going on that shouldn’t be talked about,” said
Meir Harel
, a former Mossad director general who’d known Ames. “They learn not to ask too many questions. But on the other hand, they may also learn not to share their emotions.” This Mossad officer was speaking about his experience with his own children. But it may be true in some sense for all children whose fathers lead a life in intelligence.

The five other Ames children were never told. They didn’t need to know, but if something happened to Bob and Yvonne on this trip in the summer of 1981, at least Cathy would know where to turn for help.