The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  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.

  Powers wrote of Helms, “Friends said he carried away two abiding impressions: that secret intelligence matters, and that paramilitary derring-do doesn’t.” Human beings, not machines, could steal secret documents. But even government documents are sometimes just pieces of paper. “Just because a document is a document,” wrote the legendary Soviet spy Kim Philby, “it has a glamour which tempts the reader to give it more weight than it deserves.… An hour’s serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents.” Philby hastened to add, “Of course, it is best to have both.” But if human intelligence was essential, it required the simple art of conversation—and that could be a most complicated skill.

  After the war, Helms briefly tried to return to the newspaper business, but he soon realized that he’d never have the money necessary to own a paper. He needed a job, so when the CIA was created in 1947, he became a ranking officer in the Office of Special Operations. At the age of thirty-three, he was running agents in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Throughout the early Cold War, Helms fought a bureaucratic battle inside the Agency, arguing for the primacy of espionage and quiet intelligence gathering over the splashy pyrotechnical covert operations run by Frank Wisner’s team.

  Helms was a political moderate, a Cold War anticommunist—but certainly no ideologue. He was cool and opaque, and an astute and pragmatic bureaucratic player. When asked one day, “Just what are the prerogatives of a chief of station?” Helms gave the enigmatic reply, “To do the best job he can unless and until recalled for cause.” He avoided making arguments that delved into what he called “the soggy mass of morality.” On those rare occasions when someone in the room suggested assassinating an errant agent, Helms always dissented. Violence, he said, was usually impractical, ineffective, and costly. Lethal covert operations usually got into the newspapers, thus drawing attention to the Agency. This, he thought, made the Agency’s job of collecting secrets much harder. On the other hand, Helms knew he was working in a dirty business. He liked to say, “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we’d have joined the Boy Scouts.” He participated in the planning of scores of covert ops—but he was invariably the one man in the room who asked the hard questions that compelled his colleagues to scale the operation back, to make it more cautious, less visible, and more subtle in its execution. For some in the room, he was always an irritant.

  He lost many bureaucratic battles in the 1950s, and his career was often sidetracked. It was impossible, for instance, to discount the sheer volume of raw intelligence produced by Richard Bissell’s high-altitude U-2 spy planes. The photos of Soviet military installations were invaluable. “Our best Russian agents, [Pyotr] Popov and [Oleg] Penkovsky,” said Helms, “suddenly seemed pale and inadequate.” And so Helms was not terribly surprised when Allen Dulles passed him over for the job of deputy director for plans in the autumn of 1958 and gave the job to Bissell. As Helms later explained it, “The collectors with technical gadgets began to disparage the efforts of the human collectors. The new cry from the gadgeteers was, ‘Give us the money and leave it to us.’ And indeed, why take risks running spies when gadgets would tell you what you wanted to know? But therein lay a fallacy.… Gadgets cannot divine a man’s intentions.” He knew the pendulum would swing back.

  The Bay of Pigs was a turning point. After that debacle, Helms’s priorities became the Agency’s priorities—at least for the next two decades, until the pendulum once again swung away from human intelligence (HUMINT) and back toward expensive high-tech intercept intelligence and paramilitary covert ops under the administration of President Ronald Reagan and his CIA director, William Casey.

  * * *

  *1 Harriet Isom was a physically imposing, six-foot-tall young woman who had a graduate degree from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Diplomacy. Isom survived the JOT program, but at the end of the course the CIA did not offer her an operational slot, so she resigned and subsequently joined the State Department, where she became an ambassador many years later.

  *2 Kirkpatrick’s subsequent classified report was highly critical of the architects of the Bay of Pigs operation, and specifically of Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes. President Kennedy fired Bissell in early 1962. Richard Helms replaced him as deputy director of plans—and in 1966, when Helms became director of central intelligence, he fired Barnes. Kennedy also dismissed Allen Dulles as director in November 1961 and replaced him with John McCone, a Republican businessman. But before leaving the Agency, Dulles managed to have nineteen of the twenty copies of Kirkpatrick’s scathing report destroyed. The one surviving copy remained classified for nearly forty years.

  *3 Critchfield gave CIA support to the 1963 coup that killed Iraq’s president, General Abdul Karim Kassem, and brought the Ba’ath Party to power. This paved the way for Saddam Hussein’s rise to power five years later.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Arabia

  He was one of the best spooks I ever met.

  —David Long, State Department Bureau

  of Intelligence and Research

  In 1962, the year that Bob Ames undertook his first assignment abroad as a CIA case officer, the Agency’s culture was gradually shifting to one that put a high value on the kind of officers who could develop human sources. It was that part of the Agency’s culture that valued bland anonymity, discretion, and ironclad secrecy. A case officer had to have patience and restraint; one couldn’t hurry the cultivation of a source. One had to be methodical, keeping a minute record of what was said and what went unspoken during each encounter with a potential agent. A good case officer had to have commonsensical powers of observation. Ames was a natural.

  “Bob was a very complex person,” recalled David Long, a State Department intelligence analyst who met him in the 1960s in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “He was self-effacing and not afraid to speak up, a cynic and an idealist, a good old boy and an intellectual, a moralist and a problem solver. Put it together and he was one of the best spooks I ever met.” Harry Simpson, a senior CIA officer who knew Ames at the time, thought he had a “magnetic” personality. “He was able to show empathy to just about anyone—if it was in his interest to do so,” said Simpson. “It didn’t hurt that he was a physically imposing human being.”

  Bob, Yvonne, and baby Catherine flew into Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, early in the summer of 1962. As
they stepped out of the plane, they felt the sting of hot, humid winds on their faces. With temperatures hovering at 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, it was an Arabian oven. They were driven four miles to the U.S. consulate compound. This fifty-five-acre facility had been built in 1947–51 at a cost of $600,000. It contained the consulate offices, the consul general’s two-story residence, and about a dozen other block stone homes. The compound had its own electric generator, water tower, and septic tank. A four-foot rock wall surrounded the compound, purportedly to keep out the camels and goats of nomadic Bedouins who sometimes pitched their black tents nearby. A squad of five U.S. marines guarded the outpost. Altogether, the compound housed about thirty-five Americans, including eight Foreign Service officers, secretaries, code clerks, and their families.

  Bob Ames was one of only two CIA officers; his boss was Robert Carlson, who’d previously served in Damascus and Beirut. Dhahran was such a small post that the CIA deemed it a “base,” not a “station.” Carlson’s title was chief of base (COB). The Agency’s station at the time was located in the port city of Jeddah because the Saudis refused to allow any foreign legation to situate an embassy in the capital of Riyadh. That city lay in the heart of the Nedj, the Saudi royal family’s homeland, dominated by the most conservative Wahhabi tribes. The Saudis would not allow foreigners to reside there until the 1970s.

  In Dhahran, Ames was listed in the consulate phone directory as the commercial officer. This was his official cover. Carlson was identified as a “consul-political officer.” (A year or so later, Carlson was replaced by Harold M. Young Jr.) Their job in the Dhahran Base was to collect political intelligence about both Saudi Arabia and the Trucial Coast emirates—the present-day United Arab Emirates. But the larger purpose, of course, was to provide intelligence on anything that might affect America’s access to Arabian oil and its special relationship with the House of Saud. Like all CIA officers, Ames was assigned a pseudonym to sign reporting cables he sent back to Langley. For the rest of his career he would be known in writing as Orrin W. BIEDENKOPF. Agency officers sometimes even used their pseudonyms to refer to each other orally—but Ames’s Germanic pseudo was a mouthful, so over the years some of his colleagues informally referred to him as RAMES instead of BIEDENKOPF. But everyone soon came to recognize the author of a cable signed by BIEDENKOPF. The communications were always snappy, tart, and well informed.

  The CIA’s cramped quarters in Dhahran were located at the opposite end of the building from the consul general’s office. There was no special cage or even a locked door. The base’s secretary was a vivacious Lebanese American woman in her midforties named Martha Scherrer. Her desk was next to Ames’s. There was barely enough room between them for Bob to squeeze by. Carlson, a former marine who’d seen combat service, had his own office next door with dark, rough-hewn stone walls. It wasn’t a very pleasant work environment, but neither Ames nor Carlson spent much time inside the office.

  Dhahran was even more isolating than what Ames had experienced at Kagnew Station. But in terms of his career, he was fortunate in his first tour abroad to be able to work directly under one other officer. In such a tiny base he received close supervision, and he was exposed to all facets of the work. If Ames had been sent to a large station, he would have been forced to specialize and would have received less hands-on experience. Headquarters sometimes singles out a junior officer as particularly bright and “fast-tracks” him by sending him to a small Agency base. This may have been true for Ames. In any case, Ames would call Dhahran home for nearly four years.

  Bob and his family lived at house number 8, a small, three-bedroom stone-block structure with a glassed-in front porch. As it happened, I lived across the street. My father was a Foreign Service officer also stationed in Dhahran, so Bob and Yvonne were our neighbors for three years when I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen. I just remember him as a tall, handsome man who had a very pretty young wife and baby. I had no idea he was a CIA officer.

  Their house, like ours, was furnished with worn, ten-year-old furniture and a tiny refrigerator and a propane gas stove. There were no locks on the doors because the consulate’s administrative officer said there was no crime in Arabia. Many years later I wrote about Arabia in a memoir and described the compound:

  All we could see for miles was flat desert interspersed with the occasional jebel (hill) and a bit of scrubby vegetation. The only greenery in the compound was a few scrawny eucalyptus trees and two dozen baby Washington palm trees, planted the previous year, that lined the one paved road up the hill from the Consulate to the consul general’s residence. A solitary thirty-foot date palm—resembling the Saudi national emblem—stood in the circular driveway in front of that residence. Scattered about the compound were a few bougainvillea bushes that added a touch of color in the winter months—the only time it ever rained. Gas flares burned night and day in the surrounding jebels. The distinctive whiff of sulfur was often in the air.

  Dhahran was a true “hardship” post. The only justification for the consulate’s existence lay one mile down the road. The “American Camp” housed some six thousand American oil workers inside a one-square-mile compound surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside was a slice of Texas. It looked like a typical American suburb, with brownish-green lawns and neat ranch-style homes with pitched roofs and screened porches. It contained a school, a commissary, swimming pools, a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a baseball field on “King’s Road.” When Mary Eddy, the wife of the veteran OSS and CIA officer Bill Eddy, first saw the American Camp, she wrote home, “The oil town at Dhaharan [sic] is just like a bit of USA.”

  This was the home of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), a consortium of four American oil companies. Oil had first been discovered in March 1938 at Jebal (“Hill”) Dhahran. A quarter century and millions of barrels later, oil wellhead Dammam No. 7 was still producing over a thousand barrels of oil per day. By the 1960s, Aramco was selling millions of barrels of oil daily for the European and American markets.

  The Aramcons pretty much kept to themselves. Bob thought they lived an unduly insular life in the American Camp. When President Kennedy was assassinated, he was shocked when he ran into an Aramcon who offered him “condolences for your president.” They’d learned of the tragedy in the middle of the night, Dhahran time. Yvonne went back to bed, but Bob couldn’t sleep; he spent the rest of the night pacing the house. Yvonne had few friends other than the half-dozen or so other wives on the consulate compound. She didn’t mind Dhahran; her life was Bob, baby Catherine, and the house.

  Bob absolutely loved Arabia. On some muggy evenings he would walk out to the basketball court across the street and shoot baskets with the consulate’s marine guards. During the winter of 1963 he led the consulate’s basketball team, the Dhahran Bears, to a championship win against all the Aramcon teams. He worked on his Arabic, taking private lessons. During long road trips with a young vice-consul, Ralph Oman, he talked about his fascination with the Bedouin tribes. “He said that he had plotted out a career path,” Oman recalled, “that would keep him on the Arabian Peninsula for thirty years—at which point he would retire a happy man.” Someday he hoped to have postings to Jeddah, Kuwait, Muscat, and Yemen. On one trip he and Oman spent a day searching for ancient pottery shards at the alleged site of the ancient city of Gerrha (ca. 650 B.C. to A.D. 300), near the bay of Dohat as Salwa, about fifty miles east of the oasis of Hofuf. They didn’t find much worth taking home, but Oman vividly remembers how Ames gave him an impromptu lecture on the history of the region. He pointed out that they were standing on the very site where the Kingdom’s founder, Ibn Saud, had signed the Uqair Protocol with the British. The 1922 treaty, he explained, had set the borders between the new Saudi kingdom and its neighbors to the north.

  Oman remembers being amazed by Ames’s grasp of the history. The young CIA officer obviously read a lot. “The Saudis loved him,” Oman recalled. “He was terrific in one-on-one conversations. He was tall, handsome, resp
ectful, and soft-spoken, with an engaging smile and a lively twinkle in his eyes. He had very broad shoulders that made him almost loom over the Saudi men he was talking to, and, as a rule, Saudi men are not short. He always addressed them with the honorific ‘ya sheikh.’ They always insisted that he was too kind.” Early in his Dhahran posting, Ames persuaded one of Aramco’s Saudi desert guides to teach him how to track herds of camels. These expeditions took him out into the desert and could be physically grueling. But for Ames, the reward was meeting the Bedu. “When the Arabs did not know him well,” wrote one of his fellow Agency officers, “they held him in slight awe for his size. When they got to know him, they loved him for his humor, his Arabic, his knowledge of their ways, his heart.”

  During the month of Ramadan, the eight consulate officers were often invited on Thursday nights to a large dinner hosted by the governor of the Eastern Province, the crusty old emir Bin Jiluwi—whose father had fought side by side with the Kingdom’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, at the 1902 battle of Masmak Fort in Riyadh. Old Bin Jiluwi’s spear was still stuck in the door of the fort, a stark reminder of this signature battle for the unification of Arabia under the House of Saud. Emir Bin Jiluwi ruled the Eastern Province with an executioner’s sword; he was widely feared as “Head-Chopper Jiluwi.” But at these Thursday evening affairs he usually made a point of serving Arabic coffee to the American diplomats in his private reception room before attending to his other guests.