The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  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:

  Although we became almost intimately familiar with many of the Scenario characters and their life stories, we were never to meet them. We were, however, to meet other, lesser individuals who either knew or had other access to the characters, or who worked in some of the various government ministries and offices. This was our first contact and experience with agents. We initially met our agents, either in turnover meetings in which a departing case officer brought us in as his replacement, or in cold meetings making use of an established re-contact plan, complete with appropriate signals and paroles. All of this involved, as we proceeded to grasp them, increasing use of the principles and techniques of clandestine operations, included in that all-encompassing term that was quickly becoming integral to our lives: tradecraft.

  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.

  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.*3 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.