by Kai Bird
Afterward, Ames assigned one of his deputies, Thomas C. Braman, to regularly check in with Jordan. Braman was delighted to get the opportunity to liaise with the White House. “This did two things,” Braman later wrote. “It certainly made it quite clear to Jordan that his activities were known to the Agency, and it provided me with a personal, high-level contact who I could use in my own political dialogue between intelligence and operations officers within the Agency. A lesser officer than Bob would have kept the White House and Jordan to himself.” Braman thought Ames was “the ultimate team player.” Ames had brought Braman in the loop—but this did not mean that Ames cut off his dealings with Jordan.
Over the next few weeks, the CIA provided dossiers on Ghotbzadeh and his two intermediaries, Bourget and Villalón. On January 25, 1980, Jordan met with Bourget and Villalón in the White House. The two unofficial intermediaries had a plan, an intricately choreographed script that they believed would lead to the release of the hostages. First, the United Nations would create a commission of inquiry to review the historical grievances held by Iran against America. The Carter administration would criticize the idea but not block the creation of the commission. Second, the UN fact-finding commission would go to Iran and conduct a public investigation. The Iranian people would get a chance to vent. And finally, as Mark Bowden wrote in his history of the hostage crisis, Guests of the Ayatollah, “the commission would then have the moral authority in Iran to condemn the holding of hostages as ‘un-Islamic.’ ” This would then give Ayatollah Khomeini the pretext he needed to order the hostages released. Jordan and others in the Carter administration were skeptical, but they thought it was worth a shot. A detailed schedule was created, delineating who would say what and when to get the charade started. But everyone agreed that this secret protocol had to be ratified by a face-to-face meeting between Ham Jordan and Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh.
That settled, Jordan flew to Paris on the Concorde, arriving shortly after midnight on Sunday, February 17. He wore a disguise, presumably provided him by the CIA, which included a gray wig, a fake mustache, and glasses. Accompanied by a Foreign Service officer, Henry Precht, Jordan was driven to the Paris apartment of Héctor Villalón, where he met with Ghotbzadeh. The foreign minister reiterated that their meeting had to be kept highly secret. If there was a leak, he said, “First I would lose my job and then I would lose my head.”
Jordan quickly got an inkling that things might not go as planned when Ghotbzadeh volunteered, not in jest, “It is easy to resolve the crisis. All you have to do is kill the shah.” When an astonished Jordan said that was out of the question, Ghotbzadeh reassured him that the hostages would be released in a matter of weeks after the proposed UN commission did its work. Jordan and Ghotbzadeh came to a mutual understanding. Jordan returned to Washington, and the Carter administration announced that it would not oppose the creation of the commission. The UN commission soon began its work, and as if on script, Ayatollah Beheshti announced that he thought the commission would end the hostage crisis soon. The plan seemed to be working—until Ayatollah Khomeini gave one of his mercurial speeches and announced that the crisis would be resolved only after the election of a national majlis (parliament). Clearly, Ghotbzadeh did not have the backing of his ayatollah. An angry President Carter told his chief of staff, “Ham, they are crazy.” Ames had had a front-row seat to the disappointing spectacle.*1
Ames usually saw CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner at least once a week. A graduate of Amherst College and a Rhodes Scholar, Admiral Turner was not popular with the clandestine division. A Christian Scientist, he never touched coffee or tea, let alone Scotch. He valued signal intelligence over human intelligence—and in 1978–79 he fired 825 clandestine officers on grounds of incompetence. Ames didn’t share Turner’s politics or worldview. “Bob like myself was a problem-solver, not an ideologue,” observed David Long, one of his friends. “So when we talked politics it was mainly about foreign policies, not partisan domestic politics. Both Carter and Reagan made some very excellent policy decisions and some really idiotic policy decisions. We both agreed that Carter’s moralistic dislike for dirty tricks was detrimental to CIA, particularly in making Stansfield Turner the DCI [director of central intelligence]. But then, James Schlesinger as DCI under Nixon was probably worse.”
Turner nevertheless admired Bob Ames and trusted his judgment. He signed promotion orders for Ames twice during his tenure, initially awarding him a rank of GS-16. Then in 1980 he elevated Ames to the elite Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) with a rank of SIS-3. This made Ames the equivalent of a one-star army general.
Ames got along with the admiral, but he was frustrated by the Carter administration’s performance. Carter and his team were too often tentative and overly cautious. On the other hand, Ames admired the president’s determination to get a deal done on the Camp David Accords. Bob worked many long hours, preparing the CIA’s briefing book for the Camp David meetings. He was later told that Carter thought his “assessments of both Begin and Sadat were right on target.”
Throughout 1979 and 1980, Ames regularly saw President Carter’s Middle East man on the National Security Council, Ambassador Robert Hunter (a savvy foreign policy analyst who’d once worked for Senator Edward Kennedy). Hunter rapidly came to trust his judgment. “It was one-stop shopping,” Hunter said. “I would call him up once a day, and it was all I needed to know. He could talk off the top of his head about the succession battles inside the Saudi royal family, or what was going on inside the revolutionary regime in Tehran. He knew all the intricacies. And I could trust that he was also keeping me abreast of the differences, the arguments going on inside the intelligence community. He never cooked anything. He was the most effective intelligence officer I ever encountered.”
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, Ambassador Hunter and Ames worked together to draft a response for President Carter to deliver in his January 23, 1980, State of the Union address. It became known as the “Carter Doctrine,” and Hunter says that Ames contributed heavily to the language in the speech, but the key sentence was probably drafted by Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
Ames, the longtime clandestine officer, relished the opportunity to help make policy. But in retrospect, the Carter Doctrine seems a Cold War relic. Its purpose was to warn the Soviets not to threaten America’s oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz. It was all about oil. But the Carter administration also began a major covert operation to supply weapons to the Afghani mujahedeen. The program grew rapidly and would eventually succeed in forcing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. (That, of course, only served to usher into power a highly reactionary Taliban regime—one allied to a little-known Islamist Salafist group of dedicated terrorists calling themselves Al-Qaeda. But this particular blowback was far in the future.)
One day in the early spring of 1980, one of Ames’s two principal deputies, Robert Earl, walked into Bob’s office and said he’d heard rumors about a possible rescue mission. It was just “noise,” but Earl thought something was going on. Ames knew he wasn’t authorized to brief Earl on the rescue mission. “In order to preserve operational security,” Earl realized later, “Ames gently deflected me. He just turned the conversation to something else. Only later did I realize that Ames had helped plan the failed Desert One rescue mission. He was one of the few Agency people who were cleared for Desert One.” The rescue mission, of course, was a disastrous failure, and eight U.S. servicemen were killed when one of the eight helicopters brushed against a C-130 transport plane at the landing site inside Iran and exploded. An official investigation later blamed the debacle on poor operational coordination between the various branches of the armed service
s involved in the mission. But the inherent complexity of the plan probably doomed it to failure. “The effort relied very heavily on the CIA,” said a State Department official. Ames was, of course, bitterly disappointed. Working through Mustafa Zein, however, he arranged for Arafat to use his contacts in Tehran to obtain the bodies of the eight U.S. servicemen. This was but a small consolation. President Carter believed the debacle heavily contributed to his electoral defeat in November 1980.
One of Ames’s responsibilities as NIO was to get a consensus on each National Intelligence Estimate, an official report that goes to the president and his advisers. “Getting everybody to agree on an estimate was very hard,” recalled Robert Earl. “But Bob was adept at getting some kind of consensus.” Ames prided himself on his ability to write a succinct memorandum. Invariably, he’d personally write any portion of an estimate that was particularly troublesome or controversial. “He always wanted to hear people’s views,” said CIA analyst Lindsay Sherwin. “He was very good at getting experts around a table and getting them to speak their minds without any being intimidated. And by the end of the meeting he’d have produced a synthesis, hashing it out.” He could do this because he never made people bristle, even when he was making a strong argument. “Bob didn’t have a hard edge to him,” said Robert Hunter.
As NIO, Ames was called more than once to testify on Capitol Hill before the House and Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees. But these sessions were always behind closed doors, and his testimony remains classified. Fred Hitz, the Agency’s chief legislative counsel, was the Agency lawyer who helped Ames prepare his testimony on each of these occasions. Ames was well aware of how Dick Helms had perjured himself before Congress; it was a thin line. He had to know exactly how much to divulge to the legislators and how to say it. “He was much in demand,” recalled Hitz. “He was very judicious. And he always managed to leave a strong impression of how tough the neighborhood was in the Middle East.”
Ames’s job as NIO also required him for the first time to liaise with his Israeli counterparts. They knew who he was—the man who’d created the back channel to the PLO—so they were curious to meet him. “I liked Bob enormously,” recalled Dov Zeit, a senior Israeli intelligence officer. Zeit’s job in Mossad was to handle liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies. “Ames sought the company of revolutionaries,” Zeit observed. “He sought out people who were going to change things. He was looking for the avant-garde.” Zeit thought this was perfectly rational for an intelligence officer. But Zeit also sensed that this American spy understood the Israeli predicament: “Bob’s sympathy for Israel came from his being simply decent.”
By official agreement, Israel and the United States had for some years agreed to share intelligence. As part of this arrangement, a team of their respective intelligence officers would meet twice a year. The liaison meetings would alternate between Tel Aviv and Washington. “I traveled to Israel with him,” recalled Bruce Riedel, a top analyst, “on his first official meeting with Mossad. The Israelis were very eager to meet this guy.”
It was an awkward moment. But Ames was blunt. According to Robert Hunter, Ames spoke plainly to the Israelis. He came right out and said that killing Salameh had been a mistake. Ames told them, “Our need was greater than yours.” The Israelis at the table disagreed, but they admired the chutzpah of the man and his directness. “The Israelis respected him,” Hunter said. “He won their confidence.” Ames had always loved a good argument, and not surprisingly, he found it exhilarating to sup and drink with Mossad officers. They were his adversaries, but they were smart adversaries. “Bob enjoyed sparring with the Israelis,” said Graham Fuller. “It was like going into the belly of the beast.” He was very straightforward with them. “After the Camp David Accords,” said Lindsay Sherwin, “he told the Israelis that Egypt was now off the table. There would be no more intelligence sharing on the subject of Egypt. He could be very tough.”
The Israelis had a real problem working with CIA Arabists, and the feeling was mutual. “Other than on the subject of terrorism,” said John Morris, a clandestine officer who knew Ames well, “the Israelis have the least understanding of the broader issues and trends in the Arab world. It’s surprising, since it is their neighborhood, but they just don’t get it.” During one of his trips to Tel Aviv, Ames was taken to a Jaffa restaurant by his Mossad counterparts. “Somehow the conversation turned ugly,” said Bob Layton, an analyst who was then his deputy. “Ames got mad when one of the Israelis brashly asserted that his analysts were tilting their estimates to fit Washington’s political priorities. Ames strongly chided the Israeli: ‘Professionals don’t accuse other professionals of cooking their intelligence.’ ”
Yoram Hessel, a senior Mossad officer, confirmed the story. “I was most certainly there,” Hessel said. “It sounds like me.” Hessel had goaded Ames into an argument, but he was nevertheless drawn to the man. “Bob was a towering, handsome man,” Hessel recalled, “and he was treated with awe. He could speak out of line. He knew he was special. What endeared him to us was that he was a storyteller. He had tidbits of gossip to share. You knew that when Bob Ames came to town you would have entertainment. He had this flair. He was an American Lawrence, a Lawrence with Stars and Stripes. He was making himself into a legend.” Hessel had dealt with Ames in 1978–79 when Bob was the NIO for the Near East. And he also saw him when Ames became head of the Directorate of Intelligence for the Near East. He liked Ames. But Hessel also thought Ames’s expertise came with considerable baggage. “Empathy in intelligence can be dangerous,” Hessel said. “An intelligence officer is not an advocate. When Ames came to Tel Aviv, his job was to listen—and to see if what he knew measured up to reality. But he was clearly emotionally involved with the Arab world. We were always aware that he was presenting things through a certain lens. We didn’t see him as an adversary—but he certainly came from a different place.”
Ames didn’t often blow up. It was uncharacteristic. “But he understood that you do not make any inroads with the Israelis by being meek and mild,” said Bob Layton. “They are not meek and mild among themselves. You could have a blowup at them and the next day everything would be okay. Still, the Israelis were perplexed on how to deal with him. They knew he had contacts on the policy side—and they knew all about his clandestine career. Ames didn’t come across as a proselytizer, but he could be outspoken and he knew his shit. Anyone with a head on his shoulders would have known that he knew what he was talking about.”
Uri Oppenheim, who spent a decade abroad as a clandestine officer and then worked for twenty-one years in Mossad’s research division, saw Ames regularly in their twice-yearly liaison meetings. Typically, Ames might arrive in Tel Aviv with a dozen CIA officers in tow and they’d sit down with two dozen Mossad officers. “We were told,” recalled one Mossad officer, “don’t crack jokes in Arabic because he knows Arabic.” Ames stood out. “He could tell stories,” Oppenheim recalled, “but he wasn’t a schvitzer—a boaster. Bob was a smiling personality.” Another Mossad officer remarked that Ames seemed sympathetic to Israeli constraints: “We wouldn’t be getting moralizing from Bob Ames. He understood what the traffic would bear.”
Ames had a sense of humor tinged with sarcasm about the Agency’s bureaucracy. “I remember one day he called me into his office,” recalled John Morris, “and read aloud a portion of the performance report he was writing about me: ‘The subject is the second-best writer in the division.’ I laughed, because I knew he meant that he was the best writer.” Bill Fisk first met Ames during the 1976 Beirut evacuation, right after the ambassador had been killed. “Bob had incredible gravitas,” recalled Fisk. “But I had heard that as a young man he had been a throat-cutter and back-stabber. The Agency was a terribly competitive place and he was very ambitious. But once he established himself, he wasn’t afraid to manage up and protect his people below him.”
And while he was now at an elevated position within the Agency, briefing policy makers an
d testifying on the Hill, he still kept his hand in the clandestine. “He really didn’t want to give up being an operations officer,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin. “He was always out of town, seeing his sources. We joked with him that he was always away when there was a crisis.… He would imply he was in New York, but he wasn’t. I just assumed he was maintaining relationships with people he had recruited.”
He was juggling a lot of issues. When the Iran-Iraq War broke out, Ames was slightly incredulous. “He was very reluctant to believe that Iran and Iraq would be so stupid as to go to war,” recalled Sherwin. But when it happened in September 1980, “We had to switch a lot of our assets to that battlefield.”