The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (45 page)

Ames’s contacts with the PLO now ran straight to Yasir Arafat and his chief of staff Abu Jihad. The main interlocutor was Hani al-Hassan, the PLO official who’d met with General Walters in Rabat in 1973. He and his brother Khalid were regarded as leading advocates of
the “pragmatic” line within the PLO. Hani al-Hassan was well known to the dozens of foreign correspondents who hung out at the Commodore Hotel in Ras Beirut. Hani regularly came by the hotel’s bar to brief the reporters on the siege. From his public pronouncements it was clear that Hani believed the PLO’s survival depended on its ability to transform itself from a paramilitary organization into a political movement.
He was openly calling for a dialogue with the United States. Some of these messages between Ames and Hani al-Hassan and other PLO leaders were transmitted through Johnny Abdo, the Lebanese intelligence chief from 1977 through 1983. Abdo was a cultivated Maronite who nevertheless had wide-ranging friendships throughout Lebanon’s sectarian mosaic. He was a personal friend of the Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt but was also on close terms with Bashir Gemayel. Discreet and enigmatic, Abdo was regarded as an “
honest broker” in wartime Lebanon. Abdo’s sources were “
good guys and bad guys high and low from all points on the spectrum.”

Phil Habib was a consummate diplomat. But in Lebanon he was being forced to negotiate without being allowed to see the Palestinian leaders he was negotiating with. It was surreal. The prohibition against talking to the PLO was still in place. Habib was aware of the Ames back channel, but that was no substitute for what he had to do sitting on the Beirut battleground, trying to negotiate the terms of the PLO’s departure from Lebanon. Habib decided he couldn’t talk face-to-face with Arafat because he knew if Begin discovered he was in direct talks with the “terrorist,” the prime minister would probably go ballistic.
General Sharon bluntly warned Habib that if he learned that Habib was talking directly to a PLO official, he would send his army into West Beirut.

So Habib suggested what he called “
proximity talks.” Johnny Abdo had a safe house where Arafat and Habib could sit on separate floors. They would not actually meet face-to-face. Lebanese intermediaries would shuttle between the floors with messages. “They’ll be on the first floor,” Habib assured Begin, “and I’ll be above. I will never even see them. There’ll be no handshakes.” Begin replied heatedly that this was unacceptable. Ironically, the man who had himself once been accused of being a terrorist for the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem—in which ninety-one people had died—understood that even “proximity talks” lent an unacceptable veneer of legitimacy to
Arafat the terrorist. It was a charade. But it was a charade that the U.S. government felt bound to carry out despite Begin’s objections.

The crisis stretched on for weeks. Sharon kept threatening to invade West Beirut and the sprawling refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. On August 1, 1982, Sharon escalated his assault, and some
fifty thousand Israeli artillery shells landed in West Beirut in the space of only fourteen hours. Hundreds of civilians were dying. That day a reporter in Washington asked President Reagan, “
Are you losing patience with Israel?” Reagan replied, “I lost patience a long time ago. The bloodshed must stop.”

But finally, by mid-August, it was clear that the PLO was preparing to leave. Arafat had demanded that a Multinational Force (MNF) of peacekeepers first land in West Beirut. Only then would he and thousands of his fighters agree to board ships bound for Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, the smallest country in North Africa. Habib had promised in the name of the U.S. government that the MNF would protect the Palestinian civilians left behind in the refugee camps.

At one point, Phil Habib asked Johnny Abdo, the Lebanese intelligence chief, for his opinion on how many soldiers in the MNF would be needed to protect Palestinian civilians after the PLO left. Abdo replied, “
Two hundred and fifty thousand men.” Habib thought he was joking. “That’s ridiculous.” In the end, Habib decided that just eight hundred U.S. marines, eight hundred French Foreign Legionnaires, and four hundred Italian soldiers would constitute the MNF. These numbers would prove to be woefully inadequate.

Sitting in his perch at Langley, Ames watched the Beirut drama unfold. He found the battle images highly disturbing. But at the same time he realized that the crisis opened up an opportunity to create a new dynamic. He was seeing a lot of high-ranking Reagan administration officials, and he was hearing men like Secretary Shultz voice their anger and displeasure with the Israelis. “
I was enraged,” Shultz later wrote about Begin’s and Sharon’s duplicitous behavior.

Ames took advantage of Shultz’s anger with the Israelis to gently
encourage the new secretary of state to think about what he wanted to see happen in the Middle East after Arafat and the PLO left Beirut. By the end of July, Shultz had gathered a small core group of advisers to iron out what he called a “fresh start” on U.S. policy toward the long-term issues of war and peace in the Middle East. Shultz invited eight “informed, experienced and volatile” men to meet with him regularly in a conference room across the hall from his office in the State Department. The group included Bob Ames, NSC official Bud McFarlane, and veteran Foreign Service officers Lawrence Eagleburger, Charles Hill, William Kirby, Alan Kreczko, and Nicholas Veliotes. Shultz swore them to total secrecy. “
Any premature hint that the United States was reconsidering its position on the Palestinian issue,” Shultz wrote, “would have disruptive effects not only on Phil Habib’s work in getting the PLO out of Beirut but also on the ability of the United States to make something positive emerge from this terrible war.”

The problem was that Shultz wanted a “fresh start” that wouldn’t reward Arafat with recognition of the PLO—let alone a Palestinian state. Neither did he wish to undermine King Hussein by doing anything that would replace the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan with a Palestinian state. Throughout late July and August, Shultz and his small team met regularly. In the interest of secrecy, they often met on weekends. Their discussions were sometimes heated. At one point, someone warned Shultz, “
Anything we come up with will be unacceptable to Israel.” Shultz replied, “Nothing that is worthwhile is acceptable to anyone in the Middle East, but everyone looks to us for ideas. It is up to us to set the agenda.”

Shultz essentially wanted to square the circle. He wanted to offer hope that the Palestinians, like other people, could have “self-determination.” But he knew that “self-determination” was code for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. And Shultz was enough of a politician to know that a Palestinian state was not in the cards. So he told himself that a Palestinian state in the occupied territories was not economically viable. Shultz concluded that “self-determination” would have to occur within the political confines of the Jordanian state.

Various parties had kicked around the notion of a “Jordanian option” for years. Ames and others familiar with the Black September civil war understood that satisfying Palestinian aspirations within a Jordanian state would work only if Jordan became a democratic state. But because Palestinians represented a majority of Jordan’s population, a “Jordanian solution” entailed the collapse of King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy. Yet Shultz had made it clear that he wasn’t prepared to undermine King Hussein. Nevertheless, Ames saw great value in Shultz’s determination to have President Reagan lend his administration’s prestige and influence to a grand American peace initiative. So he encouraged Shultz.

By mid-August Shultz and his secret group had the outlines of a plan. As specified by the Camp David Accords, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would acquire autonomy over the next five years. Local elections would be held. And during this period Israel would freeze all settlement activity. Ames knew this was the critical factor. With a freeze on new settlements in the occupied territories, Palestinian “self-determination” in the West Bank and Gaza could gradually become a reality. To be sure, Shultz was making it clear that the United States opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. The autonomous Palestinian entity would instead be linked to Jordan. Ames understood that Shultz was trying to finesse an intractable issue. And that was fine with him. Shultz’s “fresh start” might not be so fresh, but it was nevertheless a step forward. As an intelligence officer, Ames understood that a policy maker like Shultz had to operate under political constraints.

Shultz was always suspicious of any memo that reeked of a contrived consensus. He thought most of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates were boring “compromises.” So periodically, he’d call up Bob Gates and ask him to stop by for an hour with several of his brightest analysts. Shultz would quiz them. “
You find out the analysts have all kinds of different opinions,” Shultz later explained, “and that’s much more useful, much more interesting.” Ames shone in these situations.

Bob knew he had the secretary’s ear—and that was an invaluable
thing. Some CIA officers spend their whole careers without ever really getting to influence a powerful policy maker. “
It is a tricky business,” recalled
Lindsay Sherwin
. “Do you try to stay true to your views or do you try to remain effective? At some point, people stop listening to you.”
Sherwin
and other CIA colleagues thought that Ames was buying into some wishful thinking. “When it came down to it, they were proposing a Jordanian option,” said
Sherwin
, “and everyone knew that was a nonstarter. But Bob argued that we should try to remain in the game. I would like to think that he had a broader view. He was telling himself that if we could persuade the Israelis to end the occupation, maybe down the road a real peace could emerge.”

Bruce Riedel, an Agency analyst who worked with Ames on the peace initiative, thought it was the right thing to do. “
Bob was a passionate believer in the idea that the Palestinian issue was a critical threat to U.S. national interests,” Riedel said. “So he thought something had to be done. The initiative was a compromise between those saying we have to put forward an American peace plan and those who said we can’t piss off the Israelis. It was a big step forward, even if it was a Jordanian option.” Some of his colleagues nevertheless thought Ames was drinking the Kool-Aid. Some muttered that he was “getting too big for his cowboy boots.” Even Ames’s boss, CIA director Casey, was beginning to have some misgivings about Ames’s close relationship with Shultz. “The fact that Ames was by then so much a part of Shultz’s inner circle must have led to some tension,” recalled Riedel.

On August 14, Shultz took Ames and several other members of his secret team up to Camp David to brief President Reagan on their progress. They had lunch with Reagan in a cozy dining room lined with knotted-pine boards. The president wore black cowboy boots, jeans, and a bright-red polo shirt. After lunch, the men adjourned to the living room, where Shultz outlined his peace initiative. He then asked Ames and Veliotes to “role-play” how the plan would be presented to Begin, King Hussein, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak—and how these leaders would react. “The actors were effective,” recalled Shultz.
“The play was tense and presumed no sure outcome.” The little drama appealed to the actor in Reagan—which was probably why Shultz put on this production. He knew the plan would inevitably attract intense controversy, so he wanted to be sure the president was on board and engaged—and that he would know his lines.

A few days later, Shultz called in Israeli ambassador Moshe Arens. Without revealing his still-secret initiative, Shultz suggested that with Arafat’s departure from Lebanon imminent, perhaps it was time to revitalize the peace process.
Arens vigorously disagreed. “Look,” he said, “we have wiped the PLO from the scene. Don’t you Americans now pick the PLO up, dust it off, and give it artificial respiration.”

Ames was telling Shultz that Arens was wrong. Arafat, he said, was in the process of solidifying his political position even as he was being defeated and removed from the battlefield. “The PLO has plenty of life in it,” Ames insisted. He predicted that after leaving Beirut, Arafat would take “a grand tour” of all the Arab capitals, drumming up political support. The PLO’s new headquarters in Tunis was already being furnished. Operating out of Tunis would free Arafat from his previous dependency on Syria’s dictator, Hafez Assad. And in an ironic twist, Ames argued, the PLO’s defeat in Beirut had actually strengthened the hand of moderates within the organization. These political pragmatists in the PLO would now turn Arafat into a more effective leader on the world stage. Moreover, Ames said that from his meetings with his counterparts in Tel Aviv, he knew that Mossad’s intelligence analysts agreed that Arafat had decisive control over the organization. Arafat was not going to disappear—and neither was the Palestinian conundrum.

Shultz didn’t doubt Ames’s analysis. But he did not regard the PLO as a reliable player. And he certainly did not see the PLO as moderate. That was why he thought it essential to bring King Hussein “back into the center of the scene.” Shultz trusted and admired Ames. But a part of Shultz also discounted Ames’s optimism precisely because of his Arabist credentials. On the afternoon of August 24, Shultz convened a meeting of his secret team to hear Nick Veliotes report back on his
briefing of King Hussein. From Shultz’s perspective, it was critical that he get Hussein firmly on board. But from Veliotes’s account of his meeting with the king, it was clear that Hussein was covering his bases. Yes, he liked the Shultz plan—but Shultz could see from King Hussein’s carefully worded written response that he really wanted the United States to negotiate directly with the PLO—and get the Israelis to withdraw from the occupied territories. “It’s a very upbeat letter,” Veliotes said, trying to put it in a good light. “The king is very interested; it’s just that he has to cover his ass.” Ames chimed in, “Hussein is always this way in first meetings. He’ll come around.”