The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (48 page)

Sharon would be blamed. But so too would America. When Arafat was shown a videotape of the massacre, he angrily told reporters that Phil
Habib had personally signed a paper pledging to protect the Palestinians living in the refugee camps. “
What Arafat said is absolutely true,” Habib said. “I signed this paper which guaranteed that these people in West Beirut would not be harmed. I got specific guarantees on this from Bashir and from the Israelis—from Sharon.”

Secretary of State Shultz concurred. “The brutal fact is,” said Shultz, “we are partially responsible.” Shultz was stunned and angry. That morning he briefed President Reagan, who asked Shultz if he’d made a mistake in withdrawing the U.S. Marines. The two men were uncertain what should be done, but, as Reagan put it, “If we show ourselves unable to respond to this situation, what can the Middle East parties expect of us in the Arab-Israeli peace process?”

Shultz also went to see Bob Ames, who’d learned the news early Saturday morning Washington time and had rushed to Langley headquarters. There he found his colleagues deeply shaken and angry. Some were in tears. Carolyn Kovar was an analyst who was on weekend duty that day when the news came in of the massacres. She worked for Ames on Lebanese affairs. “
I started phoning people to come in that morning,” recalled Kovar. “And then I was crying, the reports were that bad. I heard a lot of anger directed at the Israelis that day. We also thought it showed that the Christian warlords were just destroying their country.”

Ames told Shultz, “
We need action quickly.” If the administration didn’t react strongly to this outrage, he argued, Washington would lose all support in the Arab world for the new peace initiative. “
After Sabra and Shatila,” said the NSC’s Geoffrey Kemp, “everyone was saying, ‘My God, we have to do something.’ ”

Reagan’s defense secretary, Cap Weinberger, objected to sending the marines back, arguing, “
A limited Beirut mission is too risky.” But on Monday, September 20, 1982, Reagan announced that he was sending the marines back to Beirut as part of a multinational force. They arrived four days later and stationed themselves in a barracks near the airport. “
It soon became clear,” said Geoff Kemp, “that the marines were caught in the middle of the Lebanese morass.”

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a disaster for all parties. Lebanon became Sharon’s war. And Sabra and Shatila was Sharon’s massacre, even though no Israelis murdered anyone in the course of those three terrible days. But as President Reagan noted in his diary,
“The Israelis did nothing to prevent or halt it.” Prime Minister Begin denied any responsibility for the massacre. But three hundred thousand Israelis rallied in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the massacre. The protests forced Begin’s government to accede to the creation of an independent investigative commission. Four months later, in February 1983, the Kahan Commission concluded: “
The decision on the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps was taken without consideration of the danger—which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to foresee as probable—the Phalangists would commit massacres and pogroms against the inhabitants of the camps.” The Kahan Commission blamed Sharon for this decision and concluded that he “bears personal responsibility.” The commission recommended that Begin “consider” firing the defense minister. Sharon initially refused to resign as defense minister. Eventually he was forced to, but Begin allowed him to remain in the cabinet without a specific portfolio. Nineteen years later, he would become Israel’s prime minister.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was by definition an event of tragic proportions. But it also became a historical marker, a turning point. It would come to symbolize everything that was wrongheaded about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an invasion that would turn into an eighteen-year occupation. The Israelis would not completely withdraw from South Lebanon until the year 2000. Sharon never achieved his goal of establishing a pro-Israeli Maronite regime in Lebanon. Instead, Lebanon became Israel’s Vietnam War. More than 675 Israeli soldiers would die over the years. Nearly eighteen thousand Lebanese were killed in 1982 alone. And when the Israelis were forced to withdraw from central Lebanon in 1985, a new round in Lebanon’s civil war resulted in the defeat of Maronite Christian forces. Lebanon would
never sign a peace treaty with Israel. To be sure, the invasion expelled the PLO to Tunis. But that only served to create a new and in some ways far more deadly enemy in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion—and the camp massacre—created a new political force called Islamic Amal, an organization that later morphed into what we know today as Hezbollah, the Party of God. “
The Israelis had assumed that they could invade Lebanon, restore Maronite supremacy, and throughout it all the Shi’ites would remain passive,” recalled Bruce Riedel. “But in actuality, the Israeli invasion unleashed the Shi’ites.”

Hezbollah’s current secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that he doesn’t believe his party would exist today had the Israelis not invaded Lebanon in 1982. “
I don’t know whether something called Hezbollah would have been born,” Nasrallah said. “I doubt it.” The Shi’ites of South Lebanon had initially welcomed the Israelis, but the Israeli occupation was heavy-handed, and their indiscriminate use of tank and artillery fire led to many civilian deaths. And then many Shi’ites were killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. “
I don’t think there was any real understanding of what was going on in southern Lebanon,” said
Lindsay Sherwin
. “We were focused on the Palestinians and the Maronites. But I remember thinking at the time, the Shi’a are a growing influence. It is hard to think ahead strategically. But it is even harder to get people to listen to you. No one wanted to hear about how unhappy the Shi’a were.”

One of those unhappy Shi’ites was Imad Mughniyeh, the twenty-year-old bodyguard who’d witnessed Janet Lee Stevens’s encounter with Arafat in his bunker just a month earlier. Mughniyeh was outraged by the massacre. He’d grown up in this part of South Beirut, and these were his neighbors who’d been butchered. That autumn, a rash of kidnappings and murders of Shi’ite and Sunni leftists in Lebanon further angered him. Hundreds of people living in non-Christian sectors disappeared that autumn, presumably at the hands of
death squads organized by the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. Many of these murders were taking place in West Beirut and other parts of the city under the nominal control of the U.S. Marines. By
one account,
Mughniyeh himself was injured that autumn when the Maronite Christian forces unleashed an artillery barrage on his neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs. The artillery barrage took place while the multinational peacekeeping force stood passively by in its encampment nearby. In the eyes of Shi’a like Mughniyeh, the Americans and their “peacekeeping” forces were somehow complicit with the Christian Lebanese Forces.

Mughniyeh knew that several hundred volunteers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had arrived that autumn in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border. These Iranians were fellow Shi’a and proselytizers for Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. On November 21, 1982, Revolutionary Guards allied with some local Shi’a Lebanese calling themselves the Islamic Amal stormed a Lebanese army post in the ancient town of Baalbek. The tattered, dysfunctional Lebanese army gave up the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks without a fight, and the barracks became the IRGC’s headquarters for the next decade. (One member of the Revolutionary Guards stationed in Baalbek was the future president of Iran,
Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.) Soon afterwards, Mughniyeh made a trip to Baalbek to offer his services to the Revolutionary Guards. He allegedly met with an IRGC intelligence officer, a twenty-five-year-old Iranian named Ali Reza Asgari. It was the beginning of a long and ominous partnership.
Asgari hired Mughniyeh and as his first assignment asked the young Lebanese to gather intelligence on Western expatriates living in Beirut.

Ames was heavily preoccupied by the Lebanese crisis. But his analytical job as director of NESA also required him to keep up with developments outside the Arab world. On October 1, 1982, he wrote his second-eldest daughter, Adrienne: “
I’m off to India and Pakistan tonight and won’t be back until 19 October. The troubles in the Middle East have been keeping me pretty busy. I’m almost a stranger in my own house!” Adrienne was then a freshman in college, and Catherine, his eldest child, had recently married. But Bob would still attend basketball
games at Reston’s South Lakes High School with his boys and watch them play soccer on weekends. His two other teenage girls were just beginning to express interest in boys, so he’d sit in the stands and make comments on the boys’ characters based on how they played the game. His son Andrew later called him “my coach, my mentor.… He taught me everything about growing up.” His daughters called him “gentle, and loving and kind.”

On January 11, 1983, Ames stopped by the White House around 3:00
P.M.
and had a long talk with the NSC’s deputy for the Middle East, Geoffrey Kemp. Afterwards, Kemp noted in his diary that Ames had given him a “
very pessimistic assessment of [the] state of play in our Mid-East policy. Simply not enough follow-up and not enough dynamics.” Their conversation prompted Kemp to write another memo to Reagan’s chief of staff, Judge William Clark, urging him to try a new approach.

On February 4, 1983, Ames participated in a two-hour-long meeting with President Reagan in the Cabinet Room. It was a tense, pessimistic meeting. President
Reagan’s “talking points” for the meeting had him saying, “We are increasingly seen as incapable of persuading our oldest friends in the area [Israel,] never mind convincing our newest partners on the need for progress toward a Middle East peace.” The focus of the discussion was all about how to “persuade the Israeli Cabinet” to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon. It wasn’t going to happen.

Ames returned again on Tuesday, February 22, to give the president a long briefing on the PLO. Afterwards, Judge
Clark wrote Ames a thank-you note. Reagan, he wrote, “would like to compliment you on your incisive review of a complex and important issue.” Judge Clark added his own special thanks for Ames’s “continued help in support of the President’s September 1 initiative. We shall certainly want to call on you in the near future as we press ahead with this vital foreign policy issue.” Ames was called back less than a month later and gave
Reagan another briefing on Thursday, March 17. The topic was how and whether the Israelis could be coaxed to pull out of Lebanon. President Reagan was quite determined to try once again to impress upon the Israelis that they had to withdraw from Lebanon—but also to stop building settlements in the West Bank. Reagan was about to meet with the Israeli foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and Reagan wanted to be sure that
Shamir “cannot leave without hearing from me once again our deep concern over Israeli settlements policy and our determination to pursue the initiatives outlined in September 1.” Shamir listened, and the Israeli Likudite government did nothing. This was to become a familiar script in Israeli-American relations.