by Kai Bird
“We entered the reception room in order of rank,” recalled Oman. “Bob and I, both junior officers, would be last in line, with Bob second to last and me last. I always had to cool my heels for an extended period before shaking Bin Jiluwi’s hand, because the emir would always grab both of Bob’s hands and have an extended conversation with him, which they both enjoyed, talking about the camel crop in the Eastern Province, and the date harvest in al-Hasa.”
After coffee, the Americans filed into a great hall where dinner was being served to more than a hundred guests. Each diplomat sat at a different low-lying, circular table that seated twelve men. In the center was a four-foot-wide platter with a huge mound of rice mixed with dates and raisins, surmounted by a whole roasted goat or sheep. “Among the Saudis,” said Oman, “Bob was a sought-after table companion, because he spoke perfect Arabic, he could tell jokes, he loved the food (which was delicious), he could eat deftly with his hand and a knife, and he seemed to really enjoy himself with the food and the good company.”
On rare occasions, Yvonne and Bob would invite a few people to dinner. They did not like large mob-scene parties. “The house was small, and Bob was big,” recalled Oman, “so he seemed to dominate the room more than ever, but in a very nice way. He was an attentive and charming host, welcoming us to his home. Thinking back, he was a gracious Bedouin, welcoming strangers into his tent, treating them with traditional Arab hospitality, and making them feel very special. No wonder he was so good at what he did.”
Ames didn’t spend much time socializing with other Americans, particularly the Aramcons in the American Camp down the road. He was a case officer, and as such his job was to cultivate Saudi contacts. The one exception was an Aramcon who worked in the oil company’s Government Relations Department. Ronald Irwin Metz was himself a veteran of the OSS and the CIA. A tall, ruddy, gregarious man with a hearty laugh, Metz had a colorful résumé. During World War II the OSS had parachuted him behind enemy lines in China. By the end of the war he spoke fluent Mandarin. Like many OSS veterans, he soon went to work for the CIA, which sent him for Arabic language studies at the American University of Beirut. Upon graduation with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1954, he was hired by Aramco and dispatched to Riyadh as the company’s key liaison with King Saud, the eldest son of the Kingdom’s founder. (Abdul Aziz ibn Saud had died the previous year.) Metz thus had unusual access to the Saudi royal family. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the king’s drinking companions and quite possibly his closest foreign confidant. When Ron visited the royal palace the king would greet him in his audience chamber. Servants would bring trays of sweet black tea. After a few moments, Saud would curtly dismiss the servants, toss the tea, and pull out a bottle of scotch.
It was Washington’s policy then, as now, to support the Saudi royal family, if only to safeguard American access to Saudi oil. Metz’s relationship with King Saud was thus a useful conduit for conveying political intelligence about what was going on inside the palace and the Kingdom as a whole. Metz tutored Ames in the intricacies of Arabian tribal politics and no doubt helped to polish his Arabic. They had an easygoing and fruitful relationship. After hanging around Metz, Ames could talk at length about the intricacies of palace politics and, in particular, the power struggle that was then taking place between King Saud and his half-brother Crown Prince Faisal al-Saud.
Ames spent a lot of time just wandering the desert in his jeep. He loved to stop at Bedouin encampments and strike up a conversation with the tribesmen. He later told a fellow officer, Henry Miller-Jones, that he was sometimes invited to honorific dinners that took place inside the Bedouins’ black tents. Sitting on layers of Persian carpets, he would eat lamb roasted over an open fire. Inevitably, as the guest of honor he’d be offered the tastiest morsel of the lamb, its eye. Bob said he hated eating the eye.
“Ames’ interest in the Bedu was not just cultural education,” said Miller-Jones. “He was seeking contacts among them who would be sources of information on the growing Arab nationalist movement and other subversive elements. He educated me on the threat to the Saudi government posed by the Shi’a of the Eastern Province, and the Shi’a relationship to Iran. Bob always considered it a minor but not insignificant concern, but one the hyper-Sunni Saudis fretted over inordinately. At that time, he was more concerned about Arab Nationalism, and growing Soviet inroads among some of the Arab intelligentsia in the Arabian Peninsula in general.”
One day in late 1964 the consul general in Dhahran, Jack Horner, called Ames into his office along with a brand-new vice-consul, twenty-two-year-old Patrick Theros. Horner explained that he’d received an invitation from the Emir Saud bin Jiluwi to attend a head chopping.
Horner said he wasn’t in the mood to attend an execution, but he wanted Ames and Theros to go in his place. “Bob thought it would be an excellent opportunity to develop some local contacts,” recalled Theros. “He was very matter-of-fact about it.” On the appointed day the two men drove nine miles north to Dammam’s central square, where a large crowd had gathered for the spectacle. Bearing rifles, members of the feared Saudi National Guard lined the square. The condemned prisoner was soon escorted into the square. He was an alleged pederast who’d been convicted of raping and murdering a small boy from a notable family. The families of both the murder victim and the murderer were present in large numbers. Emotions were high because of the notoriety of the crime. The Emir Bin Jiluwi himself was presiding over the event. Breaking with tradition, Jiluwi announced that he would allow the eldest brother of the murdered boy to carry out the beheading. As Ames and Theros watched from the back of the crowd, the executioner’s sword was handed to the brother. Instead of taking aim at the neck, the brother swung the sword and brought it down on the condemned man’s back, severely wounding him. He had deliberately botched the execution. Angry cries erupted from the members of the wounded man’s family—and the National Guard troops began to finger their rifles. At this point, Ames calmly turned to Theros and said, “I think we should leave.” They turned and walked quickly up an alley away from the square. A moment later, they heard a single shot. A National Guard officer had stepped forward and killed the wounded murderer with a shot to the head. Theros remembers how unemotional and nonjudgmental Ames was in the wake of witnessing such a grisly event. Bob was cool. This was just the way justice was handed out in Arabia.
Theros saw a lot of Ames during his stint in Dhahran. Saudi Arabia was Theros’s first posting abroad as a newly minted Foreign Service officer. He knew Ames was CIA because that was how he’d been introduced at the consulate’s weekly country team meetings. It was a very small post and everyone knew everyone else’s brief. Theros was stamping visas. But Theros and Ames were the only two consulate officers who regularly traveled to Bahrain and the Trucial sheikhdoms to the south. Ames flew to Bahrain frequently to liaise with his counterparts in British intelligence. So sometimes he and Theros flew together. It regularly fell to Theros, as a lowly vice-consul, to make the run to Bahrain, where he would buy a suitcase full of Ballantine whiskey and smuggle it into “dry” Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities at Dhahran airport knew full well that Theros was bringing in the consulate’s monthly stash of booze, but they’d been instructed to ignore this diplomatic smuggling.
In the summer of 1965, Theros was asked to make another booze run to Bahrain and bring back an extra-large shipment of Ballantine for the consulate’s Fourth of July party. After the landing in Dhahran, a Saudi porter picked up the heavy bag before Theros could grab it—and the porter promptly dropped it. The sound of broken glass echoed through the terminal, and the whiff of alcohol left no doubt about what had happened. Theros was told to leave the bag and return late that night when the terminal would be largely empty. Theros was only five feet eight inches tall and weighed a mere 165 pounds. Thinking he could use someone with more brawn, he persuaded Ames to assist him. They arrived at about 10:00 P.M. and found the suspicious bag hidden away in a storage room. “Bob was a mus
cular fellow and weighed over two hundred pounds,” recalled Theros. “So he grabbed the bag and swung it over his shoulder—and then suddenly dropped it. He had thrown his back out. I’m afraid this was the source of his persistent back pain in the years to come.”
Despite this unfortunate injury, Ames and Theros became good friends. “Bob tended to see humor in every situation—however bad,” Theros recalled. Bob and Yvonne didn’t socialize much in their home, which was rapidly becoming a nursery. On June 13, 1963, Yvonne gave birth to a new baby girl, Adrienne. She was born in the local hospital in Al-Khobar, a very rudimentary town a few miles away from the consulate compound. And just a year later, Yvonne was pregnant again. Kristen was born in Al-Khobar on February 6, 1965. So now there were three baby girls in house number 8. There was little time for dinner parties. “But Yvonne decided that I was one more child to feed,” Theros said. “So I came by pretty often for dinner and sometimes I baby-sat the girls. Bob and Yvonne—well, it was as tight a family as I had ever seen.”
In the summer of 1966, Bob and Yvonne packed up their household goods in Dhahran and shipped them off to Beirut, where Bob was slotted for a full year of intensive Arabic language training. Meanwhile, Aramco told Ames he had a standing offer to join the oil company; he would have made a lot more money, but he turned them down. He liked being a CIA case officer; he thought of it as public service. That summer he and Yvonne went on home leave to Philadelphia and Boston to see their parents and other relatives. By September they were settled into a lovely apartment in West Beirut, two blocks from the seaside corniche and within walking distance of Pigeon Rock Bay, one of Ras Beirut’s iconic landmarks. Ras Beirut was the most cosmopolitan part of the city, home to a multicultural population of middle-class Christians, Druze, and Muslims. In 1966, there were still several thousand Jewish Lebanese. It was also home to the American University of Beirut, founded a century earlier. And it boasted chic boutiques, cafés, and cinemas showing films in French, English, and Arabic. Bob studied Arabic during the week, but on weekends he and Yvonne often took the kids up to the Dhalamayeh Country Club in the mountains to the east of Beirut. When they couldn’t get away, Bob contented himself with reading the many books on Middle Eastern history and biography that he bought cheaply from Khayyat’s, Beirut’s oldest bookstore, located near the university on Rue Bliss.
Soon after his arrival in Beirut, one of Bob’s colleagues took him to the bar at the St. George Hotel. It was inevitable. The St. George was Beirut’s premier hotel in the 1950s and 1960s and well into the 1970s. It was where visiting dignitaries stayed, and its famous bar was the watering hole for two generations of diplomats, journalists, and the agents of various intelligence services. Surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, the St. George offered its clientele a beautiful view of both the sea and the snow-capped mountains to the east. It employed 285 staff to service only 110 rooms. “I felt as if my clients were running the Middle East, occasionally the world,” said Jean Bertolet, the hotel’s manager in the 1960s. Bankers and financiers such as John J. McCloy, J. Paul Getty, and Daniel Ludwig stayed at the St. George on their business trips to Beirut. Journalists like Joe Alsop and NBC’s John Chancellor were regular visitors. The legendary British spy for the Soviet Union, Kim Philby, drank his gin and tonics at the St. George—until he fled to Moscow on January 23, 1963. Philby later wrote in his memoir, “Beirut is one of the liveliest centres of contraband and espionage in the world.” He loved the city. “It was an amazing listening post,” recalled the London Daily Mail’s Anthony Cave Brown. “Everything and everyone passed through it.” Like many foreign correspondents, Newsweek’s Loren Jenkins used the bar as his “mail drop.”
The St. George’s longtime concierge was Mansour Breidy, a Maronite Christian. “He knew everyone,” said Jenkins. Around noon each day Lebanon’s most connected journalist, Mohammed Khalil Abu Rish—more commonly known as Abu Said—arrived to cultivate his sources over lunch. Abu Said had once worked for the New York Times, but by 1966 he was working for Time magazine. Abu Said knew just about everyone connected to this exotic labyrinth, including the CIA station chief and the Egyptian intelligence chief. It was an era when a reporter like Abu Said discreetly traded information with various intelligence services and in return was given useful nuggets for his reports in Time. Over the years, rumors dogged him that he was an agent for the CIA. He always firmly denied this. Certainly, he was openly pro-American and gladly passed along his observations to the CIA. “It was clear to me that Abu Said had never been anybody’s agent,” wrote Wilbur Crane Eveland, a CIA operative in the Middle East in the 1950s. “He happened to believe that Americans were friends of the Arabs.”*
Abu Said’s grown son Said Aburish was then a reporter for Radio Free Europe, and later the author of many revealing history books about the region. In 1989, he wrote a book about the St. George: “For those of us lucky enough to have known the St. George Hotel bar in the fifties, sixties and seventies, life will never be the same again; the bar will always be with us, an invisible, hallowed component of our existence which we celebrate wherever we may be.”
But though Bob Ames certainly knew some of these St. George bar regulars, he was not one of them himself. Aburish never met him. Ames was studying Arabic in 1966, not cultivating agents. But neither was he a barfly. He preferred to spend his free time either practicing his Arabic in the suq or doting on his girls.
* * *
* Many years later, however, a retired CIA officer claimed that Archie Roosevelt had recruited Abu Said as an agent in the late 1940s. This source said that Abu Said was assigned the cryptonym PENTAD. This was corroborated in 2010 when Abu Said’s son Said Aburish confided to the Norwegian journalist Karsten Tveit that his father had confessed to him that he had indeed been an agent of the CIA.
CHAPTER FOUR
Aden and Beirut
He didn’t share secrets, so that made life normal.
—Yvonne Ames
By the spring of 1967, Ames was told he was scheduled for a posting in Sana’a, North Yemen. As Yemen was still embroiled in a brutal civil war, it was unlikely that Yvonne and the children would be allowed to move with him. But then yet another Arab-Israeli war broke out, on June 5, 1967. A month prior to the war, as tensions escalated, the Israelis sent an intelligence estimate to the Johnson administration warning that they could be defeated. Within six hours the CIA’s top analysts produced a counterestimate that predicted, “Israel could defeat within two weeks any combination of Arab armies which could be thrown against it no matter who began the hostilities.” Dick Helms thought the Israelis were just trying to get President Johnson to green-light a preemptive attack—and authorize American arms shipments. When a skeptical President Johnson asked Helms to review the estimate—or, in his words, to have it “scrubbed down”—the Agency analysts revised their prediction: the Israelis would win any war within one week. As it happened, the Agency’s estimate was off by only one day. Within six days Israeli forces swept into East Jerusalem and occupied both the West Bank and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
The June War was a defeat for the entire Arab world—but specifically for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brand of secular Arab nationalism. It was a humiliation that disillusioned an entire generation of Arabs. But it also circumscribed American influence in the Middle East. In its aftermath, twenty-four thousand American expatriates working in the region were expelled. Anti-American demonstrations swept through Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. Egypt and most other Arab states broke diplomatic relations with Washington. Ames’s posting to North Yemen was canceled, and instead he was posted to Aden in the British protectorate of South Yemen.
Yvonne was already pregnant again. That summer Bob had completed nine months of intensive Arabic language study. The family spent much of that summer in Washington and Boston—where baby Karen was born on August 30, 1967. Bob came up to Boston from Washington, D.C., to see his new baby—their fourth child. And then in early September he flew off to Aden. Yv
onne and the girls weren’t permitted to join him. And for good reason. Aden was a war zone.
Before heading off to Aden, Ames was required to take a routine polygraph. He thought it a waste of time. He told the technician administering the test, “Why don’t you ask me the one question that matters: Have I had an illicit contact with a foreign agent? And then we can be done with this.” The technician was not amused.
Ames flew to London in late September and had a couple of nights in the Cumberland Hotel near Hyde Park. He chose this hotel because he knew it was within walking distance of Francis Edwards, an antiquarian bookseller dating back to 1855. He found many books he wanted to buy, but he wrote Yvonne that he had “no honey to convince me that I should buy them.” He later regretted this. “When I think of all the good maps in them I get mad at myself, but that’s me. Mr. Indecision.” Bob was instinctively too careful with his money.
On the evening of Monday, October 2, 1967, he flew to Tripoli and then Nairobi, finally landing in Aden at 9:15 A.M. Bob was startled to see that as his plane rolled to a stop it was quickly surrounded by British troops with rifles cocked. A helicopter hovered overhead, providing additional security. Armed with a green diplomatic passport, he walked rapidly through customs, to be greeted outside by Consul General William Eagleton and another Foreign Service officer. As they exited the airport, they drove past a sandbagged machine-gun nest manned by two British Tommies wearing their trademark berets. “Everywhere you look there are soldiers with guns,” Bob wrote home. “Kind of creepy.” The streets were mostly deserted and plastered with political graffiti. Aden had been built on forbidding volcanic rocks. Its paint-flecked, fortresslike houses now were pockmarked with bullets. Ames could see, off in the distance, the blue and turquoise waters of the harbor. He and his companions drove directly to the waterfront offices of the U.S. consulate general in Tawahi, just down the street from the Aden Port Trust. There, Bob was introduced to Arthur Marsh Niner, the Agency’s chief of station. Niner was the product of an East Coast prep school. He wore casual wrinkled seersucker suits and Brooks Brothers shirts and ties. He’d married a pretty German woman just before arriving in Aden. His cover in the consulate was as a political officer. Ames’s cover would be as a commercial officer. He was one of only seven officers in the tiny post.