The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (49 page)

Ames tried to be a little upbeat about it all. “
I’m a little more optimistic about a solution than I was on Sunday,” Ames wrote his mother afterward. “But I’m not holding my breath.” He told her he was off on a four-day business trip to Paris the following weekend. Upon his return he hoped to “relax” a bit and perhaps drive up to Philadelphia for a visit. He never made the trip to visit his mother.

Ames was alternately depressed and exhilarated. The news from Lebanon was never good, and early that year it seemed highly likely that the civil war would once again resume. Yet Ames also felt empowered by his access to the Reagan White House. He was suddenly receiving high-level recognition for his work. On January 13, 1983, Casey issued Ames the CIA’s “
Distinguished Intelligence Certificate”—the “highest honor granted under the Senior Intelligence Service award system.” Casey himself formally handed Ames the leather-bound certificate in a ceremony that month; the award came with a substantial stipend of $20,000. Yet some of his colleagues thought his opinions were markedly unrealistic. “
I saw Ames in early 1983,” said Clair George, the veteran DO officer whom Casey had appointed as the CIA’s liaison to Congress. “He gave me a five- or six-minute sermon on how the Arab-Israeli conflict would be solved. I thought it was naive.”

In early March 1983, David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré, the acclaimed British novelist, released a new book,
The Little Drummer Girl
. Ames usually favored nonfiction, but he knew that le Carré had set this spy story in Beirut—and naturally this aroused his interest. The novel tells the story of Mossad’s recruitment of a young British woman as part of an operation to assassinate a Palestinian terrorist.
Ames told his NSC counterpart, Geoff Kemp, that he really liked it. Ames was unaware that le Carré had taken the title for the novel from a young American freelance reporter, Janet Lee Stevens, who was known in the Palestinian refugee camps as “the little drummer girl.”

Later that month, shortly after his March 17 meeting with President Reagan, Ames decided to plan a trip back to the Middle East. He hadn’t been back there in some five years. That was too long an absence. He told one of his deputies, Bob Layton, that he felt out of touch with things. He needed to get a feel for the “
ground truth.” Initially, he planned to visit just his Mossad contacts in Tel Aviv. But then at the last minute he added Beirut to his itinerary. He wanted to see Mustafa Zein, who’d cabled him that he had urgent business to discuss. Mustafa had returned to Beirut from his Fifth Avenue apartment
in New York, just temporarily, to take care of business concerns—but also to help Ames. Among other things, Zein wanted Ames to see Lebanon’s new president, Amin Gemayel—the brother of the assassinated president-elect, Bashir Gemayel. Amin was a drab, uninspiring figure—nothing like his flamboyant younger brother. But when Bashir had been assassinated, the Israelis had virtually dictated that Amin take his place:
“We Israelis said, ‘This is a Gemayel era.’ ”

On Friday, April 15, the day before his departure, Ames had lunch with his old friend and colleague Sam Wyman, who was then chief of the Arabian Peninsula desk of the DO. Bob explained that he’d added Beirut to his trip but claimed he really didn’t have any other official business to do there. He asked Sam if he thought he had to go into the CIA station in the embassy. “
Oh, you have to drop by the station,” Sam replied. “Otherwise, they will consider it a snub.”

He also had a long talk with
Lindsay Sherwin
. They argued. It was nothing personal, just a firm debate about policy. “
We had our differences,”
Sherwin
said.
Sherwin
was very skeptical of the Reagan peace initiative and thought it was a nonstarter, a “Jordanian solution” in disguise. But
Sherwin
also knew Ames didn’t mind a good argument. “I told him he was going on a fool’s errand, trying to push a Jordanian solution that he knew was not viable. He was of two minds about it. But when I look back on that conversation,”
Sherwin
recalled, “well, I regret it.”

Ames was torn between his natural skepticism and his desire to see things change for the better. Recently he’d told his mother, Helen, “
We think we can smooth the whole thing over, over there, and we can’t.”

He expressed a similar feeling of pessimism to Bruce Riedel, the young analyst who’d accompanied him on one of his Mossad liaison meetings in Tel Aviv.
“He told me he thought, ‘Things are falling apart,’ ” Riedel recalled. “He was skeptical of the idea that we and the Israelis could impose a Maronite government on the Shi’ites. He felt he had to go to Beirut and see if he could come back with an idea that could turn the situation around.” But he was well aware of
the perils. “We also discussed the fact that things were getting pretty dangerous.”
^*1
Riedel mentioned the fact that a few months earlier a car bomb had destroyed an Israeli interrogation and prison facility in Tyre. It was only the second time this tactic had been used in Lebanon. (The first occasion had been when a truck bomb destroyed the Iraqi embassy in Beirut.) Riedel thought this was ominous, and Ames agreed. Seventy-five Israelis had been killed in the attack, along with a score of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. The Israelis had publicly announced that it had been an accidental propane gas explosion—but the CIA believed otherwise.

Before leaving Langley late that afternoon, Ames dropped by the operations center to say good-bye to a few people. He ran into Thomas Braman, whom he’d first met at the Farm twenty-three years earlier. Braman was then serving as Director Casey’s intelligence officer. Ames and Braman had worked together on Iran in recent years; Braman had been posted to Tehran in late 1978, just as the revolution broke. Prior to his departure for Tehran, Ames had told him, “
Keep your head down.” Braman had been captured and roughed up in February 1979 when Revolutionary Guards briefly occupied the Tehran embassy. Ever since, whenever one of them was off on a trip, the other would jokingly tell him, “Keep your head down.” It had become a mantra between two old friends. “When Bob came to see me that day,” Braman recalled, “my parting words were, ‘Keep your head down.’ ”

That evening, Bob called his mother in Philadelphia and casually told her that he was flying to Beirut the next morning. “
He had this way about him,” Helen Ames later said, “of letting you know that everything was alright.”

That Saturday morning Ames said good-bye to his children. As usual, he told Andrew, “Take care of your mom.” But the fourteen-year-old happened to be annoyed with his father that morning—later,
he couldn’t remember why—so instead of answering, Andrew turned away in silence. His ever-patient father ignored the adolescent slight and walked to his car.

Yvonne drove him to National Airport. She knew he’d be absent for about two weeks. She regarded it as a short trip—nothing compared to those two- or three-month TDYs to Beirut or Yemen. It seemed normal. In 1983, their eldest daughter, Catherine, twenty-one, was married. Adrienne, nineteen, was finishing her freshman year at Concordia Lutheran College in Austin, Texas. But the four other children—Kristen, eighteen, Karen, fifteen, Andrew, fourteen, and Kevin, eleven—were living at home. Bob was still very much the family man, always involved in his children’s activities. “
He coached their basketball teams,” Yvonne recalled, “and always went to the soccer games.… He left at the same time every morning, and he was always home for dinner. And he was always there on the weekends. He was the cornerstone of the family.”

Bob arrived in Beirut early Sunday morning, April 17, and checked into Room 409 of his favorite boutique inn, the Mayflower Hotel, near Hamra Street in Ras Beirut. It was an overcast, rainy day—not unusual for a Lebanese spring. “
He was exhilarated to be back,” said Susan M. Morgan, a CIA officer who was also visiting Lebanon that week. Morgan was an economist and a newly minted analyst on the Lebanon desk. She’d arrived in Beirut on April 11 for a short TDY assignment. It was her first trip abroad as a CIA officer. Ames was her office director, but she’d been unaware that he was flying into Beirut. She was “
delighted to see Bob.” That evening he saw Morgan and several other Agency officers at a dinner party hosted by James and Monique Lewis. Jim was the Agency’s deputy station chief, and his Vietnamese-born wife had just passed her security clearance to become an Agency secretary. Monday would be Monique’s first day on the job in the station.

The embassy phone book listed James F. Lewis, age thirty-nine, as a political officer. That was his cover. A former Green Beret, Jim Lewis was one of the Agency’s most experienced covert operatives. He was
fluent in French and Vietnamese, and his Arabic was more than decent. Lewis had an extraordinary résumé. During his years in Vietnam he’d led an elite guerrilla unit of Montagnards. He’d once guided a Special Forces unit on a reconnaissance mission deep into North Vietnam. He won four Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, an Air Medal, and a Gallantry Cross. In 1970 Lewis was recruited by the CIA and sent back to Southeast Asia. On April 11, 1975—on the eve of Saigon’s fall—Lewis was wounded by rocket fire and then captured by enemy troops. He spent the next six months in North Vietnam’s infamous Sontay prison, where he was beaten and tortured. He was finally released in late October 1975—the last American prisoner of war to come home. By then, he’d spent nearly thirteen years fighting the North Vietnamese in a losing war.

Back in America, the Agency allowed him two years off to study French literature at George Washington University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1977. He then met and married Monique Nuet, a beautiful Vietnamese woman who’d studied pharmacology in Switzerland and France. The newly married couple moved to Chicago, where the Agency assigned Jim to study Arabic. By 1982 the Agency considered Lewis proficient enough in Arabic to assign him to Beirut. They needed someone there with his paramilitary skills. Lewis arrived in Beirut on August 13, 1982. The city was under Israeli siege. Yasir Arafat was about to depart with his PLO militia.

Beirut was becoming a veritable hellhole, and not only for the Lebanese. Earlier that summer of 1982 David Dodge, the president of the American University of Beirut, was kidnapped by the Islamic Amal. (Dodge would not be released for a full year.) By the autumn of 1982 there were
a dozen or more explosions in the city each week. Israeli soldiers patrolled some neighborhoods. Tensions remained high between the Israelis and the multilateral peacekeepers. In one incident a lone U.S. Marines officer, Capt. Charles B. Johnson, stepped in front of a column of three Israeli tanks, pulled out his loaded Colt 45, and ordered the Israeli officer driving the lead tank to turn it around. Pointing his pistol at the tank, Captain Johnson said the Israeli tank would
pass only “
over my dead body.” The incident created headlines in the
New York Times
and elsewhere, underscoring the growing animosity between erstwhile allies.

Militias were everywhere.
On his very first day in Beirut, Marine Sgt. Charles Allen Light Jr. glanced out his bedroom window in the U.S. embassy and saw a man suddenly assaulted and nearly beaten to death on the sidewalk. LCpl. Robert “Bobby” McMaugh, twenty-one, was walking down a street in West Beirut one day in early April 1983 when
a car bomb exploded and knocked him flat on his back. McMaugh brushed himself off and walked away—this time. On April 14,
someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the embassy. It crashed into an empty office and exploded. No one was hurt.

Though Beirut was clearly a dangerous city, Jim Lewis’s wife, Monique, was allowed to join him in early 1983. Monique’s first day on the job as a station secretary was scheduled for Monday, April 18. So the dinner party they hosted Sunday evening in honor of Bob Ames was also something of a celebration for Monique’s new career in the Agency. Jim had learned to cook French and Vietnamese food during his years in Southeast Asia, and he’d spent hours preparing a gourmet meal. He had also invited the entire CIA station to his apartment, just a ten-minute walk from the embassy. They were a very close-knit group of friends.

At thirty-nine, Kenneth E. Haas was young to be a station chief. He had earned a doctorate in philosophy by the time he was twenty-five; he’d taught at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for a few years, but in the early 1970s he joined the CIA. He was considered a rising star. His son Alex was born in 1975 and several months later he was posted abroad. He served in Tehran some years prior to the revolution, and he also had a stint as chief of station in Oman. But his wife worried about the risks they were taking, and tensions in the marriage led to a divorce in 1980. In July 1982, Haas married his second wife, Alison, and days later left for Beirut. She joined him there in October. Despite the chaos and uncertainty, Alison thought of Beirut as an exhilarating adventure. “
There was a lot of socializing,” she later
recalled. “You had maids and drivers and things, so socializing wasn’t a big burden. It was really something almost every night, and because of the situation and the closeness of the embassy, it was like a family. You became close to people very quickly.”

Frank J. Johnston, age forty-six, also came to the Lewis dinner party that evening, accompanied by his twenty-three-year-old bride, Arlette. Born in Nazareth, Israel, Arlette was a Palestinian-Israeli, and though her native tongue was Arabic, this was the first time she’d lived in an Arab country. Arlette called Frank her “
first real love, her husband, her universe.” She knew Frank was a veteran CIA operative. They’d met in a bowling alley in Germany, dated for six months, and then gotten married on October 26, 1982. They’d arrived in Beirut in January 1983. For security reasons, they had to drive around the streets of Beirut in a car with armor plating. But Arlette liked the city. “
I spoke Arabic,” Arlette recalled, “and Lebanon felt like home for me.” Frank had served under Ken Haas in a previous posting in prerevolutionary Iran. They were good friends, and Frank was eager to work with him again.