Kai Bird - The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

ALSO BY KAI BIRD

The Chairman: John J. McCloy; The Making of the American Establishment (1992)

The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy; Brothers in Arms (1998)

Hiroshimas Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (coedited with Lawrence Lifschultz, 1998)

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (coauthored with Martin J. Sherwin, 2005)

Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 19561978 (2010)

Copyright 2014 by Kai Bird

All rights reserved

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bird, Kai.
The good spy : the life and death of Robert Ames / by Kai Bird.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Ames, Robert, 19341983. 2. United States. Central Intelligence AgencyOfficials and employeesBiography. 3. Intelligence officersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

JK468.I6B549 2014
327.12730092dc23
[B]
2013049480

ISBN 978-0-307-88975-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-88977-5

Jacket design by Darren Haggar
Jacket photograph by George Baier IV (Newspaper: UMAM Documentation and Research, Beirut)
Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

v3.1

DEDICATED TO SUSAN.

AND FOR YVONNE AMES,
who lost the father of her six children in Beirut.

AND IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,
Jerine Newhouse Bird (19262012).

THREE STRONG WOMEN.

When I began the research for this book, I visited the CIAs headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and met with George Little, then head of the Agencys Office of Public Affairs. We met for exactly one hour: I did most of the talking, trying to describe the kind of book I hoped to write about Robert Ames. I also explained that I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with one of the CIAs in-house historians and check basic facts about Amess career. I was hoping that the CIA would declassify some materials related to Ames and his work in the Middle East. Mr. Little eagerly expressed the hope that the Agency would be able to give me some kind of limited assistance. But after repeated requests in the months and years to come, I never heard back from the Agency. CIA directors Leon Panetta and David Petraeus never replied to my e-mails. So I wrote this book without the cooperation of anyone inside the CIA.

Fortunately, I found more than forty retired officers, both clandestine officers from the Directorate of Operations and analytical officers from the Directorate of Intelligence, who generously shared their memories of Bob Ames. Some of these individuals were willing to speak for the record, but many spoke not for attribution. I have given aliases to those sources who did not want to be named. These aliases appear in the narrative in italics. This is also the case for a number of retired Mossad officers who agreed to be interviewed.

I knew Bob Ames when I was an adolescent. He and his wife, Yvonne, were our next-door neighbors from 1962 to 1965 in the small U.S. consulate compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. So I have vivid memories of this tall, handsome young man who liked to play basketball with the consulates squad of U.S. marine guards. I was unaware at the time that Bob was a CIA clandestine officer. I thought he was just another Foreign Service officer, like my father. Decades later, I approached Yvonne to say that I was writing a biography of her late husband; she remembered me. And though shed never spoken to a reporter about her husbands life, she graciously agreed to talk and to share her small collection of photographs, correspondence, and a family scrapbook.

I also found a few declassified documents in the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library pertaining to Ames. But most of this book is based on interviews in Washington, D.C., Beirut, Amman, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I wrote it in Barranco, a suburb of Lima, Peru.

Robert C. Ames: A CIA officer in the Directorate of Operations and later chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the Directorate of Intelligence.

Yvonne Blakely Ames: The wife of Bob Ames and mother of his six children.

Frank Anderson: Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the CIAs Directorate of Operations.

Ali Reza Asgari: Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence officer.

Anne Dammarell: A U.S. Agency for International Development officer stationed in Beirut.

Robert S. Dillon: U.S. ambassador, Beirut.

Phyllis Faraci: A CIA administrative officer working in Beirut.

Bashir Gemayel: A Maronite Christian warlord and president-elect of Lebanon.

Kenneth Haas: The CIA station chief in Beirut. Haas had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Syracuse University.

Deborah Hixon: A thirty-year-old CIA officer in Beirut on a temporary-duty assignment.

Frank J. Johnston: A CIA officer in Beirut, married to Arlette, a Palestinian-Israeli woman.

James F. Lewis: The deputy CIA station chief in Beirut. He was the last POW released from a North Vietnamese prison, in October 1975.

Monique Nuet Lewis: A Vietnamese-born, naturalized American citizen. She was the wife of James Lewis. Monday, April 18, 1983, was her first day on the job as a CIA administrative officer.

Sgt. Charles Allen Light Jr.: Assistant commander of the Marine Security Detachment for the U.S. embassy in Beirut.

William McIntyre: Acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Beirut.

LCpl. Robert (Bobby) McMaugh: The U.S. marine on duty at Post Number One in the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983.

Henry Miller-Jones: A CIA officer who served with Ames in Aden and Beirut.

Imad Mughniyeh: A Shiite Lebanese, recruited by Ali Hassan Salameh into the PLOs Force 17 and later associated with a long list of kidnappings, air hijackings, and car bombings.

Stuart H. (Stu) Newberger: A senior partner at Crowell & Moring, a Washington-based law firm, who has pioneered civil suits on behalf of victims of international terrorism.

Georgina Rizk: Miss Lebanon and Miss Universe, 1971. Rizk became Ali Hassan Salamehs second wife in 1977.

Ali Hassan Salameh: Chief of the PLOs Force 17 intelligence unit.

William R. Sheil: