The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Wyman may be mistaken. He never confronted Salameh about Munich. But then he can’t recall discussing the issue with Ames either. He may have assumed that the legend surrounding Salameh and Munich was true because many Americans and Israelis in the business believed it. Mustafa Zein has another story. “Initially, Bob thought Ali was behind the Munich operation, and so he thought he could never see Ali in a million years. But later he learned otherwise from sources inside the PLO. This intelligence persuaded him that Ali was not personally responsible.” Zein insists, “Ali’s role was to hunt the Mossad; Force 17 had nothing to do with Munich.” Writing in his unpublished memoir “Deceit with Extreme Prejudice,” Zein explained, “I am not trying to portray him [Salameh] as St Francis, but what I am trying to make clear is that Ali had many operations, [some] extremely deadly, but they were very focused to make sure they did not harm innocent civilians.”

  Salameh never talked publicly about Munich. But his sister Nidal later told the British journalist Peter Taylor that she’d confronted her brother about it. “When I heard about Munich,” she said, “I asked him right away. I’d heard in one way or another that he was behind it, but I couldn’t believe it. So I asked him, ‘Were you behind the Munich massacre?’ He said, ‘No.’ ” Taylor also reports that Ali Hassan’s mother asked him about it and he denied it: “He said he was against killing any civilian and didn’t believe in it.”

  But Munich nevertheless became a part of his legend. And he must have realized that it forever made him a target. As George Jonas, the author of Vengeance—yet another book about the Munich tragedy—wrote in 1984, “In counter-terrorism, as in terrorism itself, military objectives often took second place to symbolic acts. In a sense, assassinating Salameh became the equivalent of capturing the enemy’s flag.”

  Salameh became a living reminder of the Munich murders. He was an iconic figure for both Palestinians and Israelis. And inside Mossad the quest for his death became an obsession. Israeli intelligence officers demonized him as a “man with the imagination of the devil and the determination of the believer.” Salameh himself was unapologetic. He explained that Black September’s operations were a desperate but necessary response to the Palestinian defeat in Jordan in 1970–71. He was very candid about their thinking: “At the time, we were subjected to a blackout—a terrible blackout. We had to overcome this blackout, and we did. We did burst out on the world scene. We overcame the blackout and were able to tell the world: ‘We are here, even though we have been temporarily ousted from Jordan.’ The world looked at us as terrorists. It didn’t look at us as revolutionaries.… But the truth is that we are waging a revolutionary struggle.” In Salameh’s view, “revolutionary” terrorism worked. It made global headlines and made it clear that the Palestinians were not giving up.

  But it is also true that Salameh believed that his “revolutionary struggle” someday had to end at the negotiating table. Long before Munich, sometime in the late 1960s, he and Mustafa Zein were arguing one day about the armed struggle. “What is the end game?” Zein wanted to know. Ali Hassan replied, “It has to be resolved in a political settlement that is just and fair between us and the Israelis.”

  Incredibly, not long after the Munich tragedy the CIA made another pass at recruiting Salameh as a full-blown agent. Ames was not involved in the second recruitment attempt, but there was a witness to the clumsy effort—none other than Salameh’s wife, Nashrawan Sharif, who told Peter Taylor: “I saw somebody give him [Salameh] a cheque without any amount written in, telling him, ‘You write in the number you want.’ My husband was mad, very angry at the time, because it was very insulting to him. He threw the cheque back and left. He couldn’t be an agent for anybody, not only the Americans. He used to tell me, ‘Nobody in this world could give me anything my revolution is not giving me.’ He didn’t mean by that the money; he meant the satisfaction and pride he got from fighting for his country.”

  The CIA officer who made the pitch left Beirut empty-handed. Salameh had once again made it quite clear that he was his own man. Salameh was decidedly annoyed. It seemed to him that the CIA’s only agenda was recruitment.

  Ames had not given up on restoring their friendship and regular contacts, but he knew the clumsy offer of a blank check to Ali Hassan only complicated his delicate attempt to reopen the channel. His superiors had been stupid. By once again offering Ali Hassan crass dollars the Agency had only offended the Palestinian. But Ames also understood that his agency had endangered Ali Hassan’s life. Ames knew full well that an organization like the PLO was extremely vulnerable to foreign intelligence. Arab, Soviet, and Israeli intelligence agencies undoubtedly had sources planted within the PLO who could report on Salameh’s various contacts. And that could mark him as a CIA source, and thus a traitor to the revolution.

  Late in 1972, just weeks after the Munich fiasco, Ames met with Zein in Beirut and got an earful. Zein was angry. Things seemed to be slipping away, and Zein was venting. Ames left unhappy. In February 1973, after months of silence, he finally wrote Mustafa a long letter. “I won’t try to explain my silence these past months in any detail. I still consider you a friend, and friends do not have to apologize for things that happen beyond their power. Also, there is not much one can put on paper and commit to the open mails.” Bob then complained that he thought “some of the things you conveyed in Beirut were unfair, but I understand why you did it.”

  Ames was still disturbed by what he had learned in the aftermath of Munich. “What hurt deepest were the comments of Ali,” Ames wrote Zein. “I thought we understood each other. We are both professionals in our trade, but I have a personal loyalty to friends that transcends business.”

  Ames then confessed, “I have written much about Ali as I’m sure he has done about me for his organization. What I wrote was intimate and detailed because I wanted our people to understand him, his motives and his organization. What was written was written at the time we all had great hopes. Unfortunately, we never saw those hopes come into fruition and, in frustration, we went our separate ways. However, I never gave up my hopes and still have them today.”

  But then Bob acknowledged that Munich had happened. And that had changed everything. “I came back here [to Washington] ready to do things and I actually was making some headway. Then came September [the Munich operation]. Leave aside the motives for this act, and my own feelings. The fact of the matter is, this act so alienated all the people here that the damage is irreparable. It was the timing and place, not the act in and of itself that did the damage. After that act no one would listen anymore. All sympathy was gone. The only thought was that this should never happen again.”

  Munich had led to an upheaval at Langley. The game had changed. The horrendous casualties—innocent Israeli athletes killed on global live television—had forced the CIA to share more intelligence with Mossad. Ames was shocked by what he saw. “I happened to see many files on Ali,” he wrote Mustafa Zein, “particularly from the southern company [Mossad] and believe me the details were amazing, particularly since they included much on me which could only have come from his organization! I’m sure much of our files were passed to other companies although I cannot be sure of that. Ali is not exactly unknown.”

  A leak had occurred. Ames obviously thought it had come from within the PLO, suggesting that Mossad had informants inside the PLO who were able to pass on information about Salameh and his contacts with Ames. Zein insists that only Arafat himself knew Ames’s identity. But it was also possible that CIA sources had shared information about the Ames-Salameh back channel with their Mossad counterparts. Perhaps a leak had been inevitable.

  But in any case, by February 1973, the back channel was virtually dormant. Ames had not seen Salameh since May or June 1971, shortly before his transfer back to Langley. Their only communication was through Zein. Ames had tried repeatedly to resuscitate the relationship. Munich had put even these efforts on hold. Having convinced himself that the Munich killings could not be blamed on Sa
lameh, Ames was pushing hard to see Salameh. But Ali Hassan was clearly fearful of resuming any contact. He feared yet another recruitment attempt. Worse, he feared that perhaps in lieu of recruitment the Agency might be out to “get” him. Ames tried to address this fear directly in his February 10, 1973, letter to Zein: “If he [Salameh] believes that I or my company is out to get him personally, he is wrong and he should know this without my having to say so. In spite of all that is in the fiction books, my company does not ‘get’ people. Sometimes I think we’re foolish in this respect, but it is, nonetheless, true.”

  Ames told Zein that he planned to be in Beirut around February 24 and again on March 9. “There is much I would like to tell you which I cannot put on paper. Also, I’d be willing to meet Ali any place he chooses and answer any questions he might have personally. If he then wants to ‘get’ me he can, although I hope we are above such things.”

  Sometime in the second week of March 1973, Ames finally reestablished contact with Salameh. They met in Beirut shortly after five Black September operatives invaded the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, interrupting a farewell party in honor of American chargé d’affaires George Curtis Moore. The American ambassador, Cleo Noel Jr., was wounded as the Black Septemberists stormed the embassy. They held everyone hostage for a day, demanding the release of Abu Daoud from a Jordanian prison. Abu Daoud had recently been captured by Jordanian intelligence and brutally tortured. The Jordanians ignored Yasir Arafat’s demand for Daoud’s release, so on March 2, 1973, Ambassador Noel, Curtis Moore, and a Belgian diplomat were taken to the basement and machine-gunned to death. The killings garnered worldwide condemnation.

  Ames must have been shocked by the coldhearted brutality of the Black September murders in Khartoum. An American ambassador and his chargé had been executed in cold blood. But this did not stop him from seeing Salameh. He believed Salameh had not been personally responsible. Salameh was in Kuwait at the time, not Khartoum. Zein later told him that it had been a kidnapping plot, organized by Abu Iyad, to extract millions of dollars from the Saudis.*4 But this couldn’t have mollified Ames. PLO thugs had murdered American diplomats. We don’t have a full account of the Ames-Salameh meeting. Perhaps strong words were exchanged. Or more likely, Ames quietly listened to Salameh’s explanation.

  We do know that Salameh told Ames, “Khartoum has made its point of causing the USG [U.S. government] to take Fedayeen terrorist activity seriously.” According to a memorandum Ames later wrote about this encounter, Salameh implicitly defended the Khartoum operation as a necessary evil. He said, “No blackmail was intended, the men would have been killed in any event.” But he also assured Ames that Khartoum would not be repeated: “The Fedayeen have no plans to go after individual Americans or American interests.”

  Some Americans may be astonished that a CIA officer chose to meet with a man like Salameh so soon after his organization killed two American diplomats. Peter Taylor once asked a CIA officer who later dealt with Salameh if America as such was “dealing with a terrorist.” The officer replied, “I suppose we were. But then we deal with all sorts of people.” Surely it is a gray area, but just as surely, this is what CIA agents do—deal with bad guys. “You sup with the devil,” said one clandestine officer, “but you use a long spoon.”

  Sometimes the bad guys can offer useful intelligence. In the early 1970s, the CIA received unconfirmed intelligence about what was described as a PLO plot to assassinate President Nixon. Ames passed an urgent message to Salameh, inquiring about the plot. Salameh investigated and later told Ames and Beirut chief of station Gene Burgstaller in a meeting in Beirut’s Bedford Hotel that it was merely a scam by a Libyan businessman named Al-Khudairi, who had been caught smuggling fifteen kilograms of pure heroin in Rome. According to Force 17’s Mohammed Natour (Abu Tayeb), the Libyan had fabricated a story in a gambit to get himself out of jail: “The Libyan told Italian intelligence that Ali Hassan Salameh was planning to assassinate President Nixon during his coming trip to Europe.” Salameh explained that he indeed knew Al-Khudairi as a millionaire businessman who lived in Switzerland. Al-Khudairi, he said, had invested $200,000 in the Diplomat Restaurant, a venture owned by Force 17 in Rome. Salameh’s story checked out.

  In the meantime, the Israelis were striking back at Black September with a vengeance. “After Munich,” says one Mossad officer, “we had a lot of people who were to be given passports to hell. I admit some of them were not very important people. But they paid the price.” On October 16, 1972, two gunmen shot and killed Abdel Wael Zu’aytir, allegedly the PLO’s representative in Rome. On December 8, 1972, Mahmoud Hamshari was killed in Paris by an exploding telephone. On January 24, 1973, Hussein al-Bashir, a Fatah representative, was killed in Nicosia by a bomb planted under his bed. Accounts by the New York Times and other press outlets at the time implied that all three men had “played undercover roles” in the Munich massacre. In fact, we now know that none of these men had any connection to the Munich operation.

  The case of Zu’aytir seems particularly troubling. Writing in his 2005 book, Striking Back, Aaron J. Klein convincingly portrays Zu’aytir, thirty-six, as an intellectual, a lover of music and books. At the time of his assassination he was working on an Italian translation of One Thousand and One Nights. He was a part-time translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome and was paid so poorly that his telephone had recently been disconnected. Born in Nablus, he was naturally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause—but the extent of his political activism was turning out for the occasional political rally. Mossad had but one piece of circumstantial evidence linking him to an actual operation, the August 16, 1972, explosion in the baggage compartment of an El Al flight from Rome. The pilot had safely returned the aircraft to Rome without any injuries. But afterwards, hundreds of Arabs living in Rome had been picked up for interrogation—and Zu’aytir was one of those questioned and summarily released. This slim fact persuaded Mossad that Zu’aytir was guilty of something.

  “Over the years,” Klein wrote in Striking Back, “Zu’aytir’s guilt came to be taken as fact.” But in 1993, Maj. Gen. Aharon Yariv, Prime Minister Golda Meir’s personal adviser on terrorism, told the BBC, “As far as I remember, there was some involvement on his [Zu’aytir’s] part in terrorist activities; not in operations but in terrorist activities: supplying, helping, let us say ‘support’ activities. You must remember the situation. Activity continued on their part and the only way we thought we could stop it—because we didn’t have any interest in just going around killing people—was to kill people in leadership roles. And it worked in the end. It worked.” Klein flatly concludes that there was no link between Zu’aytir and Munich. Zu’aytir had publicly denounced the use of violence. His assassination was, writes Klein, “a mistake.” Mossad was using the right of “vengeance” for Munich as an excuse to strike out blindly at Palestinians whose worst crime was sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Mossad was combatting terror with its own brand of targeted terror.

  Next on the Israeli hit list was Basil al-Kubaisi, the young Iraqi whom Ames had met in 1967–68 while stationed in Aden. Ames had cultivated Al-Kubaisi. They shared a mutual interest in the history of the Arab Nationalist Movement. Perhaps Ames had tried to recruit Al-Kubaisi. But more likely, they had just become friends. Ames would have described it as a relationship with a knowledgeable source. And he no doubt would have reported what he had learned from this source in cables back to Langley. Al-Kubaisi would have been assigned a cryptonym.

  Al-Kubaisi had earned his doctorate in 1971 from American University in Washington, D.C., and then moved to Beirut, where for a while he taught as a part-time lecturer at the American University of Beirut. He’d joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and George Habash regarded him as one of the Front’s most promising young intellectuals. “Basil was an Arab nationalist, but certainly not a violent man,” said his doctoral adviser at American University, Dr. Abdul Said Aziz. “He was a mild-mannered young man, always focused and attentiv
e, but not verbose.”

  Now forty years of age, Al-Kubaisi wore impeccably tailored suits; he spoke fluent English, French, and Arabic. He traveled under his own name. He was unarmed and not undercover. That spring the PFLP sent him on what was essentially a public relations mission to Paris. According to one source, Al-Kubaisi was “on a tour in Europe to acquaint the European left with the views of the PFLP.” He was a suave, sophisticated academic—a man who could represent the “civilized” face of the PFLP. He lived modestly; by one account, in Paris he walked around the city, avoiding taxis to save money. Unbeknownst to him, he was being followed by Israeli agents, who tracked him down to a Paris hotel. In the late evening of April 6, 1973, two Israelis confronted him near the Church of the Madeleine, a block from his hotel, and pulled out long-barreled Berettas fitted with silencers. Al-Kubaisi cried out, “La! La! La!”—Arabic for “No!” But the Israeli agents pumped nine .22-caliber bullets into his chest and head. And then they calmly walked away. French police said the murder was “carried out with a dexterity and precision that one can only call professional.” The New York Times cited an Iraqi embassy official who described Al-Kubaisi as “a revolutionary avant-garde intellectual known for his anti-Zionist positions.” The Washington Post quoted a police spokesman saying that it “looks very much like the execution of a secret agent.” Police found $1,000 in cash in Al-Kubaisi’s hotel room, and nine different passports. He’d traveled extensively in recent months to Canada and Europe.

  Mossad was probably unaware that they’d assassinated someone who might have still been an active CIA source. Basil Raoud al-Kubaisi was known to the Israelis as an operative for George Habash’s PFLP. By one account, they thought him to be a “quartermaster” for PFLP operations in Europe. Al-Kubaisi was certainly a member of the PFLP—and in the eyes of Mossad that was enough evidence to label him a terrorist. After his murder, a Palestinian news agency in Beirut reported that he was a leading member of the PFLP and was “on a mission” in Paris to talk with a French government official. Some newspaper accounts called him Habash’s “roving ambassador.”