The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (46 page)

Shultz knew he was being spun. “I also felt that I was seeing some of the professional optimism, even wishful thinking, for which the Arabists in the government were known.… My Arabist advisers did not appreciate my reaction and considered me lacking in the sophistication necessary to plumb the Arab mind.”

He was right to be suspicious. The Arabists—Ames included—understood perfectly well why King Hussein was not willing to stick his neck out. Ames was the one man in the room who’d always had a jaundiced view of the Hashemite regime. But in this instance he no doubt kept that opinion to himself and tried to encourage the secretary of state to press ahead with what everyone knew would be a controversial initiative.

Shultz would have been shocked to learn that Ames had also arranged for Arafat to see a summary of the peace plan even before Reagan unveiled it.
Four days before Arafat departed, Ames had Mustafa Zein fly into Cyprus from New York with a typed two-page summary of the plan. Beirut was still under siege and the airport was closed, so Zein had to take the ferry from Cyprus to the Maronite-controlled Lebanese port of Jounieh. Fearing that Israeli or Maronite soldiers would search him, Zein befriended an Egyptian doctor on the ferry and persuaded him to take his briefcase through customs. Zein had forged a press pass that identified him as an ABC News employee. The ruse worked: he sailed through customs, retrieved his briefcase, and emerged from the port. Ames had sent the new CIA station chief, Ken
Haas, to meet him. Haas was driving a weathered white Mercedes sedan. It was late at night, so Haas drove him to the Hotel Alexander, a hangout for journalists and foreign nationals in East Beirut.

As they pulled up in front of the Alexander, Haas groaned, “Oh, shit, here come a bunch of Mossad guys.”

Mustafa turned to Haas and told him, “Here, take my briefcase and wait right here.” He then popped out of the car and ran toward the Mossad men, shouting, “Hey boys, I am with ABC News. I’d just like to talk.”

The Israelis hastily walked away, not wanting to talk to anyone from the press. Haas was incredulous. He’d never met Zein before, but he’d heard of his exploits. Ken later laughed about the incident and told Ames, “The last I saw Mustafa he was chasing Mossad officers in Jounieh.”

The next morning Zein crossed over to West Beirut, leaving Haas behind. He paid a driver for the ABC News crew $500 to take him across the Green Line dividing the city between Maronite-controlled East Beirut and Muslim-controlled West Beirut. When they passed through the dangerous Museum checkpoint, Zein was greeted by Force 17 commandos, who escorted him to see Arafat.

Zein briefed Arafat on the peace plan, handing him a document titled “
US Views Regarding the Future Settlement.” The highlights included:

Only the last point would have caused Arafat unhappiness. But Zein argued that the other points were a significant step in the right direction. Arafat was personally inclined to agree, but he correctly knew that most of his colleagues in the PLO would conclude that the plan didn’t go far enough to satisfy their minimalist demands for a Palestinian state on some portion of old Palestine. Moreover, Arafat understood that the PLO’s defeat in Beirut left him little political capital.

On August 30, 1982, Arafat finally boarded a ship in Beirut and sailed for Tunis. (Mustafa Zein was there at the dock to see him off.) All told, some 8,500 PLO fighters were evacuated under the eyes of Israeli sharpshooters. Habib was ecstatic. Nearly three months of excruciating diplomacy had finally triumphed.

Some people thought the PLO shouldn’t have left. “
Arafat muffed it,” said David Hirst, a seasoned British reporter for the
Manchester Guardian
. “The PLO was on the verge of its first real heroic moment. People were ready to go on. He blew it.”

Another reporter in Beirut, Janet Lee Stevens, agreed. Thirty-two years old, Stevens had come to Beirut in late 1981 and was freelancing for a number of magazines, including the local English-language weekly
Monday Morning
and a Japanese newspaper,
Asahi
. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, she published an article in
Monday Morning
titled “
Slaughterhouse Lebanon.” It described the “thousands of civilians who were maimed and wounded” in the invasion. She was also filing reports on human rights cases for Amnesty International.

Born in 1951, Stevens was trying to finish her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. A Fulbright scholar, she’d once been married to the Tunisian playwright Taoufik Jebali. By 1982, Janet spoke fluent Arabic and knew her way around the Palestinian refugee camps. That summer she had lived through the Israeli siege, stubbornly refusing to leave. She was an advocate. Other journalists thought of her as a partisan journalist. Some wondered if she was working for some intelligence
agency. “
I thought she was CIA,” said the
Washington Post
reporter Loren Jenkins. “I had dinner with her a couple of times at the Commodore Hotel.” But Janet was just a passionate young woman who felt strongly about the plight of the Palestinian refugees. She spent a lot of time in Sabra and Shatila, sometimes volunteering her time at the Akka Hospital and the Gaza Hospital, both located in the camps. She was a familiar figure. The residents of Sabra and Shatila knew her as Miss Janet. And because of her strongly voiced opinions, some called her “
the little drummer girl.” Anne Dammarell, a U.S. embassy official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), thought Janet “was not flashy.… She was a very serious young woman.”

The British novelist David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré, hired Stevens to serve as his “guide, interpreter and irrepressible philosopher” when he visited Beirut in 1982. Le Carré had visited the Middle East for three months in 1980 to conduct research for his novel
The Little Drummer Girl
—a title le Carré appropriated from Janet’s moniker in the refugee camps.
He was introduced to Yasir Arafat on this trip and also met with Mossad officers in Israel. He met Stevens when he returned in 1982 to scout out scenes for a movie based on the book. Le Carré later wrote of his friendship with Stevens: “
We all loved Janet, and quickly appointed her to be our instructor and—even more—our moral and compassionate focus for the pain and devastation which we witnessed.” Janet took le Carré into Sabra and Shatila so he could see for himself the conditions in which these poor people lived. “
It was Janet’s sensitivity which guided us through Sabra and Shatila, the Gaza hospital and the camps of the south; [it was] Janet’s amazing capacity to reach the poor and bereaved and destitute that made us feel their plight, and her unswerving commitment.”

Le Carré and Stevens clicked. The novelist admired her passion and her disarming irreverence. He once teased her that when she was old she would acquire “the venerability, if not the piety, of Mother Teresa.” Janet scoffed at this. She thought the comparison was absurd. They also shared similar political views about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“
I think the Israelis have behaved disgracefully,” le Carré told
Monday Morning
, “and I don’t care who knows it.”

Janet had interviewed Yasir Arafat on numerous occasions, and on August 8, 1982—three weeks before Arafat’s eventual departure—Stevens walked into Arafat’s bunker headquarters and begged him not to evacuate his PLO Fedayeen to Tunis. She urged him to stand and fight the Israelis.
“You must launch a ‘Stalingrad defense,’ ” she told the guerrilla leader. “The international public will support it.… You cannot believe the Reagan Administration, Abu Ammar! Women and children are terrified of what might happen if their husbands and brothers leave them alone.” Arafat understood. He tried to console her. She became distraught and started to cry. Arafat actually wrapped his arms around her even as she began to beat his shoulders gently with her clenched fists. There were witnesses to this drama. One was a twenty-year-old Lebanese Shi’ite named Imad Mughniyeh. Four years earlier, Ali Hassan Salameh had recruited Mughniyeh into Arafat’s elite intelligence unit, Force 17. By 1982, Mughniyeh was serving as one of Arafat’s many bodyguards. When Arafat left Beirut he would leave his young Shi’ite bodyguard behind. The unemployed Mughniyeh would soon transfer his allegiances to a new underground militia called Islamic Amal. His presence that day in Arafat’s bunker would become a deadly irony.