The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (6 page)

Those involved had hoped to be congratulated on their operational planning and execution. But they were sadly mistaken. The Agency was a bureaucracy like any other, and while some of the instructors privately expressed praise for the audacity of their escapade, the Farm hierarchy was not amused. “We were roundly and soundly excoriated on the spot,” recalled one of the mutineers. “This became the outstanding event in which we were reminded, not gently, that not only were we not yet officers, we were junior trainees.”

Despite the reprimands, the story of what happened that night began to circulate through the corridors of Langley. Membership in Operations Course-11 became a badge of honor, particularly among those involved in the planning and conduct of clandestine operations.
Though Ames’s graduation ceremony may have been subdued, in the end, the “insurrection” didn’t hurt his career.

After graduating from the Farm all trainees had the option to volunteer for additional paramilitary training at the Jungle Warfare Training Center at Fort Sherman in Panama’s Canal Zone. Not everyone in Ames’s class volunteered, but Ames did. The
“Jungle Operations Course” included further weapons training and jump training. The latter required a minimum of five parachute jumps from an Agency C-47. The final exam, as such, required a three-day solo exercise in which the trainees were flown into a Panamanian jungle, given a knife and a compass, and told they had to find their way out on their own. It was a very demanding exercise, but Ames passed with flying colors. He had his last parachute jump in October and graduated on November 22, 1961.

Most of Ames’s classmates were assigned to work in the Soviet Union or Western Europe. Some of the men had already gone through Russian-language training in the army. The Soviet Union, of course, was the Agency’s primary target for the collection of intelligence and the recruitment of agents. But early on Ames advertised his interest in the Middle East. Everyone knew that he’d already begun to study Arabic and that he wanted to learn more. It was a natural fit, and he had no problem being assigned to the Near East Division, which was then headed by James H. Critchfield (1917–2003), a legendary CIA officer who was known as one of the Agency’s powerful “Barons.” Critchfield once described the CIA’s operations in the Middle East during the 1950s as
“the cowboy era.” He was determined to end that swashbuckling culture and bring a greater degree of knowledge and sophistication to the Agency’s activities in the region.
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In the wake of World War II, Americans had remarkably little professional knowledge or
experience in the Arab world. Duane R. Clarridge, a veteran CIA clandestine officer who later became one of Ames’s bosses, observed that Washington
“was terribly dependent on the missionaries and the oil crowd for first hand knowledge.”

The Agency’s Middle East operatives in the 1950s and early 1960s were men with large, outsized personalities. Though they were supposed to be clandestine officers, many created public personas. Men like Archie Roosevelt (and his cousin Kermit Roosevelt), Miles Copeland, Wilbur Crane Eveland, and James Russell Barracks spent many years wandering through the back alleys of Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo—yet they were known to the working press. Copeland was once described by
Time
magazine correspondent Wilton Wynn as
“the only man who ever used the CIA for cover.” Copeland thought of intelligence as a sport, and he later wrote a book about his exploits entitled
The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics
. Similarly, Eveland more or less advertised his intelligence credentials and later wrote his own book,
Ropes of Sand
, in which he described his involvement in bribing Syrian generals to stage coups. But in retrospect none of these clandestine officers, who confidently posed as if they were playing a virtual board game of Risk, were very good spies.

None of these men possessed a deep knowledge of the history and culture of the Arab world, and most spent their careers helping conservative military dictators and kings to maintain the status quo. Moreover, few of these Middle East “experts” actually spoke any Arabic—and the handful who did, such as Ray Close and his brother Arthur, and William Eddy, were the sons of American missionaries who’d learned the language as children.

By the time Ames joined the Near East Division in 1961, it was thought to be an “elitist” arm of the Agency. Partly this was just because learning Arabic was hard and so only really dedicated officers stuck it out.
“People tended to go there and stay there,” recalled Peter Earnest, a veteran case officer who served in Europe and the Middle East for twenty-five years. At the end of 1961, Ames was told that he would soon receive an overseas posting. In the meantime, he studied
Arabic for six months. Then in the early summer of 1962 he was posted to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was, to say the least, a hardship post. But Ames was pleased. He was all of twenty-eight years old.

When the CIA was established in 1947, fully one-third of its early recruits were veterans of the recently disbanded OSS. A preponderance of these OSS men were upper-class gentlemen, graduates of Ivy League schools like Yale and Harvard, and many had some experience on Wall Street—or their fathers came from Wall Street. The former head of the OSS, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, was himself a Wall Street lawyer, and he had recruited men with similar pedigrees into the wartime OSS. When Donovan and other leading lights of the early postwar American foreign-policy establishment, such as the ubiquitous Rockefeller family lawyer, John J. McCloy, finally succeeded in persuading President Harry S. Truman to form a civilian centralized intelligence agency, they naturally sought out young men who had similar backgrounds. The early CIA therefore was well populated with those having elite Establishment credentials—men like Allen Dulles, William Bundy, John Bross, Kermit Roosevelt, Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, and Mike Burke. All were gregarious extroverts who embraced the “Great Game” of intelligence with a fearless exuberance. Many were graduates of Groton, the elite preparatory school, and went on to get degrees from Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. (If they went to Yale, they invariably were tapped for Skull and Bones, one of the university’s most exclusive secret societies.) They not only believed in America but confidently believed that they could work America’s will abroad with the adroit use of cloak-and-dagger operations—and a little cash. And in the 1940s and 1950s they successfully toppled regimes in Guatemala and Iran with splashy covert operations.

These were not the kind of people Bob Ames had known growing up in Philadelphia. Not at all. He wasn’t a blue blood, but he was smart and ambitious. And while he shied away from pretentiousness, he exuded
some of the qualities valued by the Establishment. John McCloy, the son of a poor hairdresser, had also grown up in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood (on Twentieth Street in North Philadelphia, just a block from where Ames’s maternal grandfather lived). Like Ames, McCloy was a scholarship boy, but he went to Amherst College and then Harvard Law School. He’d risen in the ranks of the Establishment despite his origins. McCloy had a reputation for common sense; his clients were reassured by his ordinary reasonableness. Over time, he positively began to exude gravitas.

Bob Ames was not a John McCloy. He would never wield that kind of power. But he had some of the same down-to-earth qualities. And coincidentally, Ames’s ranking CIA superior in 1962, Richard Helms, was another Philadelphia boy. There’s no reason to believe that Helms had yet met this novice case officer, but Ames certainly knew of Helms. He knew Helms was his boss. An immediate consequence of the Bay of Pigs fiasco was that Richard Bissell—another Boston Brahmin—lost his job as deputy director of plans. Dick Helms replaced him in early 1962, becoming chief of the Agency’s covert operations.

Helms had always made it clear that he was skeptical of paramilitary operations. Experience had taught him that the collection of secret intelligence was an all-important task—and that high-visibility covert-action operations were usually not conducive to that task. Helms had a cohesive philosophy about intelligence that would greatly influence young Bob Ames. In just a few years, he would become a mentor and friend who would shepherd Ames’s rapid rise through the ranks of the Agency. Bob Ames would become one of Dick Helms’s most promising protégés.
“Helms and Ames were very much alike,” recalled
Lindsay Sherwin
, a veteran intelligence officer. “Both were real gentlemen who valued a certain decorum. They were not soldiers of fortune like some of the guys in operations.”

Dick Helms was an enigma to many who worked with him. His official pseudonym inside the Agency was “Fletcher M. KNIGHT.” (Agency
etiquette required the surname of any pseudonym to be capitalized so as to be identified as a pseudonym.) In some ways he was very much old school. He had a patrician, reticent demeanor. Unlike Ames, he came from a solid upper-middle-class family; he was very cosmopolitan. His father was a business executive with Alcoa. Born in 1913, Helms grew up in South Orange, New Jersey—but his parents sent him to boarding schools in Europe for two of his high school years. He spent one year at Le Rosey in Switzerland and another year at the Real gymnasium in Freiburg, Germany, where he learned fluent French and German. In 1935 he graduated from Williams College, a highly selective liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Thereafter he got a job in Germany working as a reporter for United Press International. At the age of twenty-three he covered the 1936 Summer Olympics, and that autumn he found himself with several other reporters in Nuremberg Castle interviewing Adolf Hitler.

After two years in Europe, Helms returned to America harboring the ambition to someday own a newspaper. To that end, he got a job as the national advertising manager for the
Indianapolis Times
. Just as he was getting to know the business side of running a newspaper, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Helms quickly joined the navy—but a year later he was recruited into the OSS. He was given paramilitary training on an OSS farm in Maryland. It was very similar to what Ames later experienced at the CIA’s Farm: hand-to-hand combat, weapons training, and intelligence tradecraft. Like Ames, he was a tall, physically fit young man. But over the course of the war he was to learn that much of what he’d been taught was irrelevant to the actual business of espionage. He would never have to fire a gun in combat or use a knife on an adversary. As his biographer Thomas Powers later wrote in
The Man Who Kept the Secrets
,
“From the outside, espionage and covert action may seem all of a piece, but in fact they proceed in a quite different spirit. Paramilitary teams or covert political operatives necessarily draw attention to the people they support, if not always to themselves.… But espionage, properly conducted, never announces itself. ‘Stolen’ information remains in its accustomed place; the ‘spy’
is a trusted civil servant; the spymaster betrays no sign of special knowledge.”

Helms learned this from hard experience running OSS operations from Scandinavia, trying to glean information from agents who had contacts in wartime Germany. These weren’t covert “actions” but the careful parceling together of bits of information bought or solicited from businessmen, journalists, and low-level civil servants. Talking was what mattered.