The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (5 page)

In late March of 1961 Ames was sent to the CIA’s “Farm”—a nine-thousand-acre training ground at Camp Peary, located on the York River in Virginia’s Tidewater region near Williamsburg. Army MPs stood guard at the gates, part of the site’s cover as an army base. Officially, Camp Peary was known for “Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity.” But everyone referred to it as “the Farm.” The trainees were housed in Quonset huts; everyone had individual rooms, but they had to share common latrines and showers. Upon arrival, they donned khaki shorts and shirts. That first evening they attended a cocktail party hosted by an army colonel whom they never saw again. Every day there were morning reveille and evening retreat announced with bugle calls on loudspeakers. There was an auditorium shaped like a small Roman coliseum with a speaker’s well at the bottom. They
called it “the Pit.” Everyone ate together in a central mess hall, and after dinner an officers’ club opened in the evening where the men could drink beer. The club had a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, and a television. A small movie theater screened a different film each evening for ten cents. It might have been a rustic country club.

But over the next twenty-two weeks Ames and the other men received paramilitary training in the use of firearms and demolitions. They learned to fieldstrip an AK-47, an early version of the M-16 rifle, pistols, and other weapons. They practiced firing these weapons on a target range but also in moving cars and at night. They learned how to maneuver and land a small motorboat and engaged in hand-to-hand combat exercises. They ran through an obstacle course of barbed wire, chain-link fences, and trenches set up to simulate a border. “We gained a respect for the borders that can both be protected and breached,” recalled one trainee. They were taught to handle explosives.
“It was the first time I learned that ordinary fertilizer could be used to blow stuff up,” recalled fellow DO officer Henry Miller-Jones. “They blew up a barn for us using fertilizer.” Recruits took a course in map reading and went on uncomfortable marches through the forest at night. It was physically exhausting—but not as rigorous as a marine boot camp. Some sixteen years later another young recruit went through a similar paramilitary training course at the Farm.
“The course was a relic from the OSS, which really did fight in World War II,” Robert Baer wrote in his memoir,
See No Evil
. “But the DO existed to run agents, not defend battle lines. As far as I could figure out, the only reason the DO kept the course going was to engender an esprit de corps in its new officers—a reminder that we didn’t work for the pinstriped crowd down at the State Department.”

Soon after coming to the Farm, on the morning of April 17, 1961, the trainees were called to the Pit and told that a Cuban rebel force supported by the CIA had landed at the Bay of Pigs. They were given regular updates throughout the next few days. “We cheered initially,” said one of Ames’s classmates, “but became increasingly quiet as the scope of the disaster unfolded. Everyone was pretty despondent.” One
trainee, Ben Ramirez—a Mexican American and a former marine—revealed that a few months earlier he’d briefly had an interim assignment with the Agency in Miami. His job had been to help with the training of some of the Cuban volunteers. Ramirez was devastated that so many good men he’d trained had probably died in the operation. There was no guilt, but there was a profound sadness.

A few weeks later, Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency’s inspector general, came to the Farm to brief everyone on what had happened. Kirkpatrick was one of the Agency’s highest-ranking officers. He’d contracted polio during a trip to Bangkok in 1952 and was still confined to a wheelchair. But he sat at the bottom of the Pit and briefed the members of Operations Course-11 at length on the Bay of Pigs. When he was finished, he announced that he’d be available for further questions in the bar of the officers’ club after dinner. He stayed in the bar until closing hour, taking questions.
Kirkpatrick made it clear that he didn’t blame President Kennedy or the Agency. He characterized the Bay of Pigs as a professionally planned and executed operation that had gone terribly awry. He explained that he’d be leading a vigorous investigation of what was obviously one of the Agency’s most embarrassing debacles. Ames and his classmates were impressed that someone of Kirkpatrick’s stature would spend so much time with them.
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Three weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Ames was given permission to rush home to see Yvonne, who was about to give birth to a baby girl. On May 11, 1961, Catherine was born. A few days later, he had to report back to the Farm. Bob never told Yvonne what he was doing at the Farm—only that he was undergoing some kind of training.

After Ames got back from seeing his newborn daughter, he was finally exposed to the Farm’s core purpose: learning how to recruit and handle agents. (The paramilitary training might seem glamorous, but it would rarely, if ever, prove useful in Bob’s future career as a case officer.) One morning he and his fellow trainees reported to the Pit. Everyone was handed thick briefing books for what was called a “live problem scenario.” Ames was told to imagine that he’d been posted to a CIA station in a fictional country. The briefing books named this fictional country and gave it a history, a geography, a currency, a cultural life, a government—everything that a CIA officer might expect to encounter in a real country. Government leaders and opposition-party members were identified. These fictional characters had detailed biographies that the trainees were told to memorize. Senior military and intelligence officials were named. “The live problem scenario was to become very real to us,” recalled one trainee, “and the degree to which each of us was able to immerse himself in it had a great deal to do with our eventual performance at the Farm.”

The trainees were divided into five or six groups, and each team was assigned an individual mentor from the Farm’s training staff. The mentor guided the trainees through imaginary scenarios; the mentor played the role of a station chief in a CIA post abroad, and the trainees acted as case officers. Everyone was given individual assignments. There was no pretense of teamwork—because in reality case officers act alone.

Everyone was assigned the same pseudonym—John O. Thorne—to be used in official correspondence. The only female trainee was assigned a similar pseudonym: Jane O. Thorne. (After a while, it occurred to the trainees that the initials of the pseudonym, JOT, stood for “junior officer trainee.”)

One of Ames’s fellow JOTs later explained the elaborate game:

The trainees were taught that the hardest part of their job was recruitment. Not many CIA officers are good at this, because recruitment is simply very hard and improbable. It is a slow dance, a subtle exercise in peeling away an individual’s loyalties and transferring them from one “cause” to another. It happens rarely, usually when the recruiter can make it seem only natural and fitting that the target should be talking to his case officer. Invariably, recruited spies want to be recruited. Most of them, in fact, are walk-ins—meaning they volunteer to serve in some fashion. Otherwise, a genuine recruitment happens via a form of intellectual seduction. The case officer shows his empathy and solicits the heartfelt views of his target. He takes him or her to dinner and eventually offers small, even innocuous material rewards. And one thing leads to another. The goal is to get the “source” to sign up as a knowing agent with a written agreement. It is a psychological dance. Once the target of recruitment has given his “views” or “information” in return for some benefits, material or otherwise, the game is in play.
“But the other side of the coin,” observed an officer who went through the Farm and later worked with Ames, “is the target’s own conscience and sense of what he is doing. Sometimes you know what he feels; often not. Most people will rationalize their way out of anything that makes them feel bad, whatever the objective evidence. And others will feel guilty on very flimsy evidentiary bases. Both are exploitable.”

The JOTs met their “agents” in clandestine meetings outside the
Farm in restaurants or shops in nearby Williamsburg and Richmond. Each encounter was carefully planned. One had to make sure that one hadn’t been followed to the meeting point. Ames learned how to set up a safe house and how to make sure that neither he nor his controlled “agent” was subject to surveillance. The trainees were taught how to communicate with agents through “dead drops”—a hole in a tree or a loose floor tile—and how to set up a clandestine meeting in a safe house. They also learned that a mountain of mundane paperwork was associated with any recruited agent. Payment varied widely. It could be as little as several hundred dollars a month, or, in extraordinary cases, it could go into the six figures. Typically, a bank account had to be established, sometimes in the United States. Occasionally, an agent would be given a life insurance policy. And often an asset would be required to sign a “certification … stating briefly that U/1 [the abbreviated cryptonym of this particular agent] understands that no federal or state or social security taxes would be withheld from his RTACTION [the cryptonym for the CIA] compensation during this period of employment.” A copy of this signed certification was to be filed away in Langley
just in case “any questions arise as to his compliance with the IRS regulations with regard to his RTACTION compensation.” Even spies have to pay their taxes if they are U.S. citizens or green card holders!

Later, the training staff that played the roles of agents sat down with the trainees and graded them on their tradecraft. Ames was taught that after each encounter with a foreign source, one had to write up a “Contact Report” of how the meeting was arranged, what was said, and what “intelligence” was conveyed, if any. Writing things down accurately was essential. Arranging and evaluating these encounters with agents required methodical planning and the meticulousness of a scientist. But Ames soon realized that his new profession was much more of an art than a science. Or it was an imprecise science. The hardest part of these human relationships was the introduction. He was taught that the relationship between a case officer and his agent was fraught with ambiguities and even deceptions. As a general rule, the agent knew his
case officer only by his alias. But it was a real relationship. The agent needed to feel that his case officer was somehow empathetic with his circumstances, with his cause, and indeed, with his life.
There had to be trust—but the kind of trust that left the agent entirely dependent on the case officer for his security and well-being.

Forming a new relationship was a delicate proposition. But it was almost equally difficult to “turn” a source or agent over to a new case officer. The relationship between a case officer and a paid or knowing source was not worth much in the end if it could not be sustained from one case officer to another. But turning over a source to a new case officer required intimate knowledge of an agent’s personal biography. “At the end of our twenty-two weeks,” recalled one JOT, “we were either to turn the agents over to a new case officer or establish with them a re-contact procedure. None of the cases came to a resolution, and this, too, was an excellent early taste of what our professional lives, for the most part, were to be like. Very seldom was a clandestine activity ever to come to a
neat, orderly, successful and satisfactory conclusion.”

Ames did very well on his live problem scenario, scoring the highest grade in his group of forty-six Operations Course-11 JOTs. He won a reputation for a cool demeanor combined with a low-key, commonsensical approach to problem solving.

He also gained a degree of notoriety during one of the Farm’s nighttime exercises. At dusk one evening, all forty-six trainees were given a flashlight and a compass and told that they needed to navigate their way through several miles of wooded fields. To make sure that no one cheated by walking on the roads instead of cutting through the woods, they were told that Agency guards in jeeps would be patrolling the roads, armed with pistols and submachine guns loaded with blanks. The trainees boarded a school bus to take them to a drop-off point in the forest. But along the way, someone proposed that they turn the tables on the instructors. Instead of walking through the woods, everyone agreed to ambush the armed guards, disarm them, and then use their jeeps to get to the target point. After months of grueling work,
this would be their mock insurrection. As the bus bounced along to their destination, Ames remarked, quite loudly, “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.” It was very uncharacteristic of him to say something so boastful. But everyone was exhibiting high spirits, and as each trainee was dropped off every fifty yards near the woods, they shouted out some epithet. “
Abajo
[Down with] Fidel,” exclaimed one trainee. An Irishman called out, “Erin go bragh!” But when it was Ames’s turn, he cried out in French, “
Vive le soixanteneuf
”—in celebration of the joys of a certain oral sexual practice. “It was so un-Ames-like,” recalled one of his friends, “that all of us on the bus simply broke up in laughter.”

The “insurrection” went according to plan. Most of the men went off individually through the woods as they’d been instructed. But a smaller group, including Ames, ambushed a jeep. One trainee lay down in the road as a jeep approached and feigned injury. The jeep stopped and a guard got out to see what was wrong, leaving his machine gun in the jeep. Three trainees then jumped the driver from behind, got him in a choke hold, and disarmed him. The other guard was wrestled to the ground and made a prisoner. Several more jeeps were similarly ambushed and captured. A few hours later, Ames and the other insurrectionists triumphantly arrived at the target point, armed and in possession of both jeeps and their prisoners.