The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  But even Israeli sources seem to agree that he had no role in the Munich affair. Klein writes that Al-Kubaisi “was probably not affiliated with Fatah’s Black September and certainly had no hand in the Munich Massacre.” Klein nevertheless reports that Mossad’s file on Al-Kubaisi was “one of the thickest.” This raw intelligence implied that Al-Kubaisi might have been involved in a long list of terrorist attacks. The Israelis thought that in 1956 he had somehow been associated, at the age of twenty-three, with a failed plot to assassinate Iraq’s King Faisal II. Maybe. More recently, Mossad thought he’d aided the PFLP in smuggling arms and explosives into Europe. Maybe. And just a month before he was killed, Mossad thought he might have been involved in the March 4, 1973, planting of three car bombs in New York City, timed to explode on the same day that Israeli prime minister Golda Meir arrived at New York’s JFK airport. Maybe. But all Klein can do is report what he was told by his Mossad sources about what was in Al-Kubaisi’s file. We really don’t have any evidence of how Mossad would have known these things. And the allegation that Al-Kubaisi was involved in the March 1973 New York car bomb plot seems particularly implausible. That was a Black September operation, carried out by a Fatah operative named Khalid al-Jawary, who was extradited to the United States in 1991 and convicted of the car bomb plot. (The bombs failed to explode.) Al-Jawary was sentenced to thirty years in prison, but he was released in 2009 and extradited to Sudan. No evidence emerged from the Al-Jawary prosecution that implicated Al-Kubaisi. If the evidence was murky, so too was Al-Kubaisi’s life and death.*5

  Al-Kubaisi was not a man of the gun. So why was he targeted? One of his friends, Dr. Fadle Naqib, a Palestinian economist, had a premonition that he would be assassinated. In July 1972, when the Israelis killed Ghassan Kanafani—the PFLP’s spokesman, but also a well-known novelist and literary critic—Naqib wrote to Al-Kubaisi that he feared his friend would be targeted next. Naqib later observed that the Israelis did not seem to be targeting men with guns. “The Mossad was not after the muscle of the Palestinian revolution,” wrote Naqib, “but its soul.… Basil was a prominent leader of the Arab Nationalist Movement.… He was different from other Arab intellectuals or militants. He was well educated, with a Ph.D. in political science. But he was not interested in an academic career.”

  Al-Kubaisi was an intellectual emissary for the PFLP—and perhaps a secret asset of the CIA. We don’t know if Al-Kubaisi was an active CIA asset at the time of his death. If so, this was the first time Ames had lost an agent to assassination. “Kubaisi rings a bell,” said George Cave, the officer who worked with Ames in Iran. “But since I was in Islamabad when he got zapped, I don’t know much about him. Bob developed a lot of contacts among the various Palestinian organizations but did not formally recruit them. They were assigned cryptonyms for communication purposes.” So Al-Kubaisi might have been one of these unrecruited sources that were nevertheless assigned a crypt. “Mr. K was a chattering contact not a spy,” says Dewey Clarridge, “for Bob was not a closer.” Whatever his status, Al-Kubaisi was certainly in a position to provide the Agency with a great deal of information about the PFLP. His death was a loss for the Agency. “I know,” said Graham Fuller, “there was a lot of anger among officers that the Israelis seemed to be deliberately gunning down our assets who could provide influential info on the Middle East other than via Mossad channels.” Fuller went on to observe, “Most Agency case officers working in the Middle East at that time did not view Mossad as friendly, or working to the same goals at all. Rather, Mossad was seen as in competition or antipathetic to the work and reporting of Agency officers. That’s because most Agency officers had a view of Palestinian realities that were both based on realities that we were close to, and that we knew were not generally listened to at the Washington policy level—due mainly to Israeli or pro-Israeli domination of all such info at the policy level.”

  In late June 1973, Salameh sent Ames a letter in which he said that he urgently needed to see him again. So in early July Ames flew into Beirut from Tehran. The two men met on July 9 and 10 in a CIA safe house. They had a long agenda. Salameh gave Ames his assessment of the situation in Lebanon and said that Arafat had instructed his forces to avoid any confrontation with the Lebanese army “at all costs.” He also complained about the Israeli assassination program. The latest victim, Muhammad Boudia, an Algerian playwright, had been blown up in his car in Paris on June 29. Salameh revealed that he had “personally recruited” Boudia to run Black September operations in France. Ames thought this was “interesting intelligence.”

  Two days after Boudia’s assassination, in the early morning hours of July 1, 1973, Col. Yosef Alon, the assistant air attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., was shot and killed outside his Chevy Chase home. The murder remains unsolved, but it was reportedly the work of a Force 17 assassination team led by an operative named Abu Faris, a Palestinian of African descent who wore an Afro hairstyle. Their intended target was Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, but because Rabin’s personal security was so tight, the assassins instead targeted Colonel Alon. The next day a Voice of Palestine radio broadcast out of Cairo claimed that Colonel Alon had been killed in retaliation for Muhammad Boudia’s assassination in Paris: “His is the first execution operation carried out against a Zionist official in the U.S.” If it was a Force 17 operation, Ali Hassan Salameh must have known about it. Indeed, Mustafa Zein believed that Salameh himself “had ordered the execution of the Military Attaché.” Ames reportedly sent an urgent message to Salameh after the assassination, demanding to know if Force 17 was operating on U.S. territory. We don’t know what Salameh replied, but he reportedly had the team extracted safely back to Beirut. Four years later, the CIA tipped off the FBI that the Agency had learned from a “Fedayeen senior official” that “the Black September Organization” was responsible for the assassination. Perhaps this information came from Ames, and perhaps the “Fedayeen senior official” was Salameh.

  Salameh was obviously involved with some Black September operations. He no doubt considered himself a guerrilla soldier, fighting a war to restore Palestine to his people. If he was involved in Colonel Alon’s murder, he would have considered him to be a legitimate “military” target. Mossad was killing civilians like Boudia and Al-Kubaisi in the streets of Paris. Black September was retaliating. This is how Salameh would have viewed it. But if it had also become known that such a man was regularly talking with a CIA officer, well, the controversy in the media would have been the least of the Agency’s problems. But at the same time, Ames must have believed that talking with Salameh was the right thing to do.

  And indeed, during their talks on July 9 and 10 in the CIA’s Beirut safe house, Ames learned that Salameh had something to say of extreme importance. Ali Hassan said that he’d been instructed by Arafat to initiate a major overture to the Americans. Arafat was “gratified” that a recent Nixon communiqué with the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev had included a brief but telling mention of “Palestinian interests” in the Middle East. Salameh told Ames that significant changes had taken place in the Palestinian movement since the two had last seen each other in early March 1973. Arafat wanted the U.S. government to know that he’d “put a lid” on any Fedayeen operations targeting Americans—and that “the lid would stay as long as both sides could maintain a dialogue, even though they might have basic disagreements. This was not a threat—i.e., talk to us or else—but a recognition that talking was necessary.” Arafat could not guarantee Americans “complete immunity from terrorist acts” because “no one can stop a determined individual gunman,” but there would be no PLO operations against Americans.

  The PLO’s inner circle had settled on a new strategy. Munich might have put Palestinian grievances in the media spotlight, but Arafat had decided that going after European and American targets was counterproductive. He was going to turn off the terror spigot. Henceforth, Salameh said, the Fedayeen would confine their operations to Jordan and Israel. The Hashemite Kingdom would
be priority number one. Why? Salameh explained that Arafat had persuaded his comrades to alter a key plank in Fatah ideology. They now recognized that “Israel is here to stay.” So the “establishment of a democratic state of Muslims, Christians and Jews in what is now Israel is just not realistic.” Nevertheless, the Palestinians had to have a home, and “that home will be Jordan.”

  As Ames put it in a long memo to Helms dated July 18, “Arafat claims to have the agreement of all Arab states, including Saudi Arabia in principle, to the replacement of the Hashemite Kingdom by a Palestinian Republic. Jordan, therefore, will be the prime target of the Fedayeen, with acts of terrorism against Israel maintained to sustain the movement’s credibility.… Arafat wants a real state or nothing.”

  Salameh then asked Ames if he could get Washington to answer the following questions:

  What does the USG mean when it says Palestinian interests?

  How does the “Peaceful Solution” take into consideration Palestinian interests?

  Is there any consideration being given to the Palestinians in the plans for a partial or interim solution? If so, what are they? How can any solution be meaningful while Jordan exists?

  Ames said he couldn’t predict how Washington would respond to “such provocative questions,” but he’d pass them on. He did.

  In late July Ambassador Helms flew from Tehran to Washington, D.C., and told Kissinger about Salameh’s approach to Ames. Arafat wanted a dialogue with the Americans, a dialogue based on two premises: that “Israel is here to stay” and that a Palestinian state should replace the Hashemite Kingdom.

  Helms and Ames certainly believed that a dialogue with the PLO was worthwhile. After all, Arafat’s first premise—that “Israel was here to stay”—was a dramatic concession to reality. This was a real breakthrough. His second premise was provocative, but the future and nature of the Hashemite regime in Jordan could be negotiable. In reality, Jordan was a de facto Palestinian state, since a majority of its population was Palestinian. Helms bluntly told Kissinger, “The issue is whether you want to have policy talks with Fedayeen or not.”

  Kissinger agreed that this was the question, and according to his memoirs, he told Helms he would think about it. “My reflections were unlikely to be positive,” he later wrote. “I considered King Hussein a valued friend of the United States and a principal hope for diplomatic progress in the region.” Kissinger also wrote that he thought any Palestinian state run by the PLO would become irredentist and that any Palestinian entity in the West Bank would be used as a launching pad for attacks on both Jordan and Israel. Kissinger thought that the Palestinians would never relinquish their desire to return to all of Palestine. “To them,” he wrote, “a West Bank mini-state could be only an interim step toward their final aims.” The Palestinians wouldn’t be satisfied even if the Israelis returned to the 1967 borders and gave back East Jerusalem. And besides, Kissinger wrote in his 1982 memoir, “There were few who thought this [an Israeli withdrawal] in the realm of possibility.” Basically, Kissinger didn’t believe the Israelis would give up the occupied territories—and he didn’t believe Arafat when the PLO leader said, “Israel is here to stay.”

  So on August 3, 1973, Kissinger told Helms that he had “a nothing message” by way of reply. At least, that is how he characterized the message in his memoir. But in the spring of 2008 the CIA declassified some of Richard Helms’s papers. Among them was an unsigned and untitled document that addressed Arafat’s questions. This memo was the first formal diplomatic communication between Arafat and any U.S. administration. It was probably conveyed to Arafat through the Ames-Salameh back channel—and it was not “a nothing message”: “When the USG says that an Arab-Israeli settlement must take ‘Palestinian interests’ into account, it has two points in mind: First, there has to be a far-reaching solution of the refugee problem, and the U.S. is prepared to participate actively in a major program to help these people reestablish normal lives. Second, it is apparent that some Palestinians have an interest in political self-expression of some kind.”

  Kissinger’s reply concluded, “Exactly how Palestinian interests reach an accommodation with those of others in the region is best decided by negotiation. If the Palestinians are prepared to participate in a settlement by negotiation, the U.S. would be pleased to hear their ideas. The objective of overthrowing existing governments by force, however, does not seem to be the most promising way.”

  Kissinger was, in fact, inviting the PLO to the negotiating table, signaling that Washington would fund a major program to resettle the refugees, but also conceding that the Palestinians had a right to some kind of “political self-expression.” His only caveat was the warning that they could not expect to achieve their aims by the forcible removal of King Hussein.

  This was a classic Kissinger gambit. In 1973 Kissinger was saying publicly that the PLO was a terrorist organization and that no American official could talk with its representatives. But privately, he was using what he disparagingly called in his memoirs “low-level intelligence channels” to explore how to bring this terrorist organization in from the cold. Maybe this was both devious and brilliant.

  On August 13, 1973, Kissinger received another feeler from the PLO, this time through Morocco’s King Hassan, who passed on the same three questions conveyed by Salameh to Ames. Perhaps there hadn’t been enough time for Salameh to receive Kissinger’s August 3 reply—but the fact that the PLO was knocking on another door was evidence of its seriousness. The message this time was given to Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters, then deputy director of the CIA, who happened to be visiting the king in Casablanca. Kissinger told Walters to keep the door open to a possible meeting. In early September 1973, Ames sent Salameh an encouraging message: “My company is still interested in getting together with Ali’s company. The southern company [Israel] has investigated. I’ve seen a lot of their files, and they know about our contacts.” Kissinger dispatched General Walters to Rabat with instructions to listen to the PLO representatives—and also warn them that any further attacks on Americans wouldn’t be tolerated. Walters hesitated for a moment and then said, “Dr. Kissinger, I must be No. 8 or 9 on their hit list.” Kissinger responded in his Germanic accent, “But Valters, I’m No. 2, so you’re going.”

  On November 3, 1973, Walters and the CIA’s station chief met in Rabat with two high-ranking PLO emissaries, the brothers Khalid al-Hassan and Hani al-Hassan. They assured Walters that the PLO was not targeting Americans—but that King Hussein was still regarded as an obstacle to Palestinian aspirations. Walters responded—on Kissinger’s instructions: “We regard the King of Jordan as a friend.” But in the context of a comprehensive settlement, Washington would expect the Palestinian movement and the Hashemite regime to “develop in the direction of reconciliation.” Walters told the Al-Hassan brothers, “There are no objective reasons for antagonism between the United States and the Palestinians.”

  The Palestinians responded with not much more than a sermon about the plight of the Palestinian people. They insisted that the West Bank was too truncated for a Palestinian state and that it followed that King Hussein would have to step aside to make way for a Palestinian republic. The important implication of all this was that the PLO representatives were still talking under the presumption that “Israel was here to stay.” Kissinger was unimpressed. He still didn’t think the Palestinians were serious: “The dynamics of the movement made it unlikely that such moderation could be maintained indefinitely.”

  In his 1982 memoir, Kissinger downplayed the significance of this Rabat meeting, but he also quietly acknowledged that the talks had gained something concrete for Washington: “After it [Walter’s Rabat meeting with the PLO], attacks on Americans—at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO—ceased.” Salameh had, in fact, delivered on his promise to Ames the previous summer that Americans would no longer be targets of the Fedayeen. Ames’s back channel to Salameh had created a virtual nonaggression pact between the U.S. government and Arafat’s Fatah
guerrillas.

  At the time, of course, Kissinger could not publicly acknowledge that he was dealing with the PLO. But he was. And he understood that such a clandestine negotiation with the PLO was “potentially too explosive to risk its uncontrolled leakage.” So to protect himself and Nixon, he quietly informed King Hussein, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and other Arab leaders of the very preliminary talks. He also made sure Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Simcha Dinitz, was briefed on Arafat’s approaches. The Israelis, of course, were shocked and would now do everything they could to keep Washington from further talks with the PLO.*6

  Yitzhak Hofi, Mossad’s director general from 1974 to 1982, was outraged when he later learned of Kissinger’s dealings with the PLO. And he became apoplectic when he learned that it was Ali Hassan Salameh—whom he regarded as a mastermind of the Munich tragedy—who had initiated the talks. Even worse, he thought, was the intelligence that Arafat had designated Salameh as the PLO’s liaison to the Americans. Hofi was livid to think that the Americans were talking to a man that his own Mossad officers had recently tried to assassinate.

  On July 21, 1973—just eleven days after Ames had met with Salameh—a Mossad hit team in the Norwegian resort town of Lillehammer gunned down a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Boushiki, in the mistaken belief that he was Ali Hassan Salameh. Six of the Mossad officers were arrested and convicted of murder, and some spent two years in prison. The botched assassination brought an abrupt end, for the moment, to Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God attempts to kill Black September operatives.