by Kai Bird
Soon after this White House encounter, Casey asked to see Ames. It was one of his earliest meetings. Casey had heard a bit about Ames’s exploits as a case officer, and he wanted to take the measure of the man. Ames was at his most empathetic. He knew what Casey wanted to hear. So when Casey asked why America seemed to have so many enemies in the Middle East, Ames told his story about befriending the young South Yemeni revolutionary Abd’al Fatah Ismail, who had been trained by the Soviets and had later become head of the Marxist regime in Aden. As Casey later remembered it, Ames emphasized that in the Middle East the Soviet strategy was to undermine traditional values: “This meant undermining the influence of religion.” The story, emphasizing the Soviet Union’s meddling in the Middle East, struck a chord with Casey. Henceforth, Casey relied on Ames for all things Middle Eastern.
Casey was also drawn to Ames because he was an operations guy who’d made the transition to analysis. Casey wanted to break down the segregation between the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations, and Ames seemed to be a model for this new kind of officer. Ames was an experienced clandestine case officer, but he was also an articulate briefer. And Casey needed articulate people around him precisely because he was notoriously inarticulate. He was a mumbler. Early in 1981 Casey was briefing President Reagan in the White House. After the CIA director droned on at some length, Reagan quietly handed his aide Mike Deaver a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Deaver later recalled, “It was a relief when Casey was traveling and his deputy would come to the White House instead. We’d actually know what was going on.” Secretary of State George Shultz later observed of Casey, “People said he was the one guy in Washington who didn’t need a secure phone to scramble.”
Ames didn’t know what to make of Casey. At first glance, the man was an odd choice for director of central intelligence. Sure, everyone knew he’d done stellar work in the OSS—but that was forty years ago. Casey had spent all those years making money on Wall Street and working for conservative Republicans. He was worth nearly $10 million in 1981 dollars. And he was very conservative—some might say an ideologue. But everyone agreed he was smart. John Bross, a clandestine officer dating back to the Agency’s founding, thought Casey was “capable of great kindness and great ruthlessness.” Dick Helms called him a “conniver.” “I liked Casey,” said Clair George. “He was nuts.”
Casey had certitudes and an ironclad worldview. He wanted his analysts to see the world as black or white, not as wishy-washy gray: “I hate these iffy conclusions.… I’m not looking for consensus.” He welcomed high technology as a tool, but he knew that satellite pictures and intercept intelligence rarely revealed anything about your adversary’s intentions. “Facts can confuse,” Casey said. “The wrong picture is not worth a thousand words.”
In early April 1981 Ames accompanied Casey on a trip to Rabat, Cairo, Amman, and Tel Aviv. They flew into Tel Aviv with Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The Israelis didn’t know what to make of Casey, partly because he was incomprehensible. “At the end of one meeting,” recalled a senior Mossad officer, Yoram Hessel, “the note taker asked me what the hell he had said.”
It was an exhausting trip. In Cairo, Casey ran out of books. Like Ames, he was a voracious reader. One Friday afternoon after a post-lunch nap, Casey announced that he wanted to visit a Cairo bookstore. “Off we went through the streets of Heliopolis,” recalled Charles Englehart, the deputy chief of station at the time. Arriving at the bookstore, they found it closed for Friday prayers. But an Egyptian security officer bounded up the steps and pounded on the door. “Soon a disheveled Egyptian appeared,” recalled Englehart, “suitably terrified, and came down with the keys and opened the bookstore. Casey browsed a bit and picked out two books on Egypt.” Casey was trouble.
In Tel Aviv, they met with Mossad’s chief at the time, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi. Casey explained to Hofi that the Reagan administration was anxious to sell $8.5 billion worth of AWACS surveillance airplanes to Saudi Arabia. Naturally, the Israelis were uneasy about the Saudis’ acquiring such sophisticated technology. Casey bluntly asked Hofi what he could do to have Tel Aviv turn down the dial on its lobbying against the AWACS deal in Congress. Hofi responded that they could use some satellite intelligence on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear energy reactor. A deal was made, and two months later, on June 7, 1981, Israeli jets bombed the reactor.
On the way back to Washington, Casey and Ames had a layover in Madrid. The next morning, Ames had breakfast with Geoffrey Kemp, the NSC staffer for Middle Eastern affairs. They poured out their frustrations to each other. “One real problem of this trip,” Kemp wrote in his diary, “is the failure of the principals to brief line staff—thus Ames goes to Rabat to meet Casey with very little background from [Secretary of State Al] Haig. No wonder this government gets its messages crossed. No one spends the time or effort to communicate. According to Ames, NEA [the State Department] can’t stand CIA. Ergo, [the State Department] doesn’t pass info to Ames. Ergo, Haig doesn’t brief Casey. Ergo, Casey may say very different things than Haig. Ergo, trouble.”
By then, Reagan insiders had nicknamed Haig “the Vicar.” And everyone in Langley headquarters thought Haig was trying to cut the CIA out of the policy loop. Gradually, Casey came to rely on Ames to make sure that didn’t happen.
Late in May 1981 Bob went back to Israel for more meetings with his Mossad contacts. Unusually, Yvonne joined him in Israel. She took a separate flight to Tel Aviv on May 30, 1981, and joined Bob there in his hotel. They’d visited Jerusalem together in 1966, driving in from Damascus, but Yvonne wanted to see the Holy City again. It was a quick and uneventful trip. They saw the major tourist sights in the Old City. Yvonne then returned to Washington on June 4, while Bob stayed a little longer to meet with his Mossad counterparts. Just before leaving for Israel, Bob thought it had come time to tell his oldest child, Cathy, about his true employment. Cathy had just turned twenty years old and was attending a local college but living at home. None of the children had known Bob was a clandestine officer for the CIA. They had all thought he worked for the State Department. It was a small but necessary subterfuge. The previous year Bob had arranged for Cathy to have a summer internship at the State Department, so he drove her every day into downtown Washington, dropped her off, and pretended to go to an office in the State Department—when actually he had to turn around and drive back to Langley. So the news came as a surprise to Cathy. “Children sense that there is something going on that shouldn’t be talked about,” said Meir Harel, a former Mossad director general who’d known Ames. “They learn not to ask too many questions. But on the other hand, they may also learn not to share their emotions.” This Mossad officer was speaking about his experience with his own children. But it may be true in some sense for all children whose fathers lead a life in intelligence.
The five other Ames children were never told. They didn’t need to know, but if something happened to Bob and Yvonne on this trip in the summer of 1981, at least Cathy would know where to turn for help.
With a new administration, Ames had hoped he might be given the chance to run the Near East Division for Operations. But to his bitter disappointment he was passed over. He was told that he was “too intellectual” for the job. He resented this and thought it ridiculous that being “intellectual” was a disqualification rather than an asset. He’d excelled in the clandestine work of the Directorate of Operations. Those in the know realized that he’d penetrated the PLO, creating at least two high-level sources—Ali Hassan Salameh and Basil al-Kubaisi. But most DO officers would have known these two individuals only by their “crypts” and not by their names. And of course, some DO officers, such as Dewey Clarridge, had always complained that Salameh was never a fully recruited agent—only a liaison. “I have a notion that Bob had rubbed some of the DO personalities the wrong way,” recalled Bob Layton. Ames was a DO man to the core, but he’d never burrowed into the DO’s peculiar culture. Bob Gates told Casey’s biographer, Joseph Persico:
Then there is the negative side of this culture.… It’s a closed fraternity. Their attitude toward outsiders is like that of local people in Maine or Cape Cod toward summer people; if you weren’t born there, you’re always an outsider. You haven’t been through what they’ve been through. They’ve put their families through hell at times. They’re not able to talk about what they do. Some may eventually end up in London or Paris. But they start out in Third World hellholes without even a Western doctor when their kids get sick. They have a strong sense that almost no one understands them or what they do. So they feel defensive and misunderstood.
Bob Ames was part of this culture. But at the same time, he was an outsider as well, an anomaly. He’d never complained about being sent to Third World “hellholes.” In fact, he liked them. He didn’t want Paris or London. Even Yvonne preferred Aden to Beirut, and Kuwait to Tehran. So Ames didn’t feel the brittle resentments of some DO officers who regarded their service as a sacrifice. For Ames, being an intelligence professional wasn’t a sacrifice; it was a calling. Some of his colleagues must have sensed this difference, and it made them uncomfortable. It wasn’t that Bob Ames was too much of an intellectual. It was that he loved those damned, troublesome Arabs too much. He was too empathetic.
In early September 1981, Ames received hard intelligence that a plot was afoot to assassinate Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin during his visit to the UN General Assembly. Ames called Mustafa Zein and asked him to query Arafat. Zein claims that he quickly passed the message on to Arafat, who replied that there was indeed an assassin in New York. “Arafat gave me a signed letter addressed to this man, telling him to come see [Arafat] at once.” Zein reported back to Ames that the plot had been aborted. “But Bob wanted proof, so I told him, okay, on the opening day of the U.N. General Assembly, make sure you have video cameras trained on the Israeli delegation.” Ames knew Zein was capable of mischief, but he did as he was told. On the appointed day, Zein went to the United Nations armed with his special UN pass that identified him as an adviser to the Arab League’s UN delegation. He approached an old friend, Jimmy Ziadi, a former New York policeman of Lebanese American ancestry, who was then working as chief of security for the PLO delegation to the United Nations. Zein asked to borrow Ziadi’s gun—but without any bullets. Ziadi carefully emptied the bullets and handed over the gun. Zein slipped the gun into his waistband and then brazenly walked into the General Assembly. He made his way toward the Kuwaiti delegation—seated near the Israeli delegation. The Israelis included Prime Minister Begin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and Minister of Defense Gen. Ariel Sharon. Zein noticed that Sharon, a large man, sat on a tiny seat at the end of the row. “I made a sharp turn,” Zein recalled, “and bumped heavily into Sharon, knocking him off his perch and onto the floor. I quickly apologized and helped him to his feet. And then I shook hands with him, and then Begin and Shamir. I had caused quite a commotion. When I turned away, I made sure that the cameras caught sight of the gun shoved in my waistband.”
Ames saw the whole incident on film. He later told Zein, “You practically gave me a heart attack!” But Ames also showed the tape to John N. McMahon, the deputy director for operations at the time. He explained to McMahon that Zein had just reenacted how the aborted assassination could have taken place.
In the autumn of 1981, Casey decided on an internal coup. He was unhappy with the wishy-washy analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) but also unhappy with what he viewed as an overly cautious culture in the DO. He wanted more action and less talk. The man who headed operations was John McMahon, a thirty-year veteran of the Agency. McMahon was solid and competent, but Casey thought that in the wake of the Church Committee investigations he was overly protective of the Agency’s reputation. Casey wanted as chief of the DO his own man, Max Hugel, a businessman with no experience in intelligence. To that end, he persuaded a reluctant McMahon to head up the DI instead. It was unprecedented for an operations veteran to lead the DI. But McMahon was liked and trusted by most everyone. (Hugel proved to be a disaster and soon resigned.)
At the same time, Casey and his executive assistant, Robert Gates, found themselves in an ongoing dispute with Helene Boatner, the director of NESA in the DI. Gates and Boatner exchanged a series of tough notes that led to Boatner’s firing. A trained economist, Boatner was probably the Agency’s highest-ranking female officer. But some thought her brittle and “an acquired taste.” In any case, late in the autumn of 1981, Gates selected Ames to replace her. Casey’s counselor, Frederick Hutchinson, had pushed both Casey and Gates to give Ames the job. By the end of the year, Ames was director for intelligence in NESA, and the thirty-eight-year-old Gates was himself promoted to become deputy director for intelligence. As such, he was Ames’s immediate superior. It was an amicable pairing. As Gates would later say, “I always considered my greatest recruitment in my whole life at the Agency was recruiting Bob Ames out of the clandestine service to be head of the CIA analytical office working on the Middle East.”
Winston Wiley was a thirty-six-year-old analyst when Helene Boatner called him into her office soon after her dismissal. Ames was sitting across from her desk. “This is Bob Ames,” Boatner said. “He’s going to be taking over NESA.” Ames shook hands with Wiley and said, “Helene has said great things about you.” Ames then said he knew that Wiley intended to move on to another job. He added that he wanted to support what was best for Wiley but that he could use his help. “I wanted to work for him from the moment I met him,” Wiley said. “He recruited me on the spot.”
The DI was a wholly different world from operations. Ames was aware that some of his new colleagues wondered whether he could be objective. “Bob was more aware than his critics of the problems of someone like himself coming to the DI,” said Bob Layton, who became his deputy in February 1982. “We talked frankly about this problem, and we struck a bargain. He agreed that I would first review the papers written by our analysts. And unless there was a problem, he would never interfere. He just wanted to be sure that each issue was respectfully argued.” Helene Boatner had recommended Layton to Ames. Layton had spent his whole career as an analyst, working on Vietnam from 1965 to 1976. He knew nothing about the Middle East. But this didn’t bother Ames. “Bob was very comfortable in his skin,” recalled another analyst. He ran the DI office as if he were its coach. He made it clear that the Arab-Israeli issue was his bread and butter. But he also demonstrated that he could be detached.
“Bob defended his analysts,” recalled Layton. “If the situation warranted it, he could stand up to the guys on the seventh floor. He stood up to Bob Gates. But he did it without confronting Gates. If there were a disagreement, Bob would just ignore Gates. And Gates would not challenge Ames, particularly about the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” Ames was now in the business of analysis, but he didn’t give up seeing his old sources. “Ames didn’t talk about his DO contacts,” said Layton. “But I know that even after Salameh’s death, Ames continued to see PLO sources. He was willing to cut his own path.”
“Bob was very excited about the NESA job,” said Fred Hutchinson, who as counselor had an office in Casey’s seventh-floor suite. He used to see Ames at least once a week in the Agency’s executive dining room. “Bill Casey and I had a very warm relationship,” Hutchinson said, “and I used to watch out for Ames.” Hutchinson recalled vividly the first time he met Ames. “He was dressed in these very modestly priced Brooks Brothers jackets. He had a certain reserve and gre
eted you with a slight smile. He had a certain charisma. I had the impression that this guy was just very solid. Later, in our meetings with Casey, well, sometimes things could get a little overwrought with Casey. But Bob was imperturbable.”
“Ames clearly had a formidable operational career,” said Paul Pillar, who had worked with him in the National Intelligence Council (NIC). “But he was functionally comfortable in the analytical arena.” Coming from the clandestine side had its advantages. Analytical intelligence estimates could be notoriously dry. “But,” said Pillar, “Ames was someone who could illustrate the abstract estimates with his own personal experience.”
As one of thirteen national intelligence officers, Ames had from time to time briefed policy makers in the Carter administration. But as the deputy director for intelligence for the Near East, he would have regular contacts with ranking officials in the White House, the NSC, and the State Department. “Bob liked the analytical side,” said George Cave, a case officer who’d worked with Ames on the Iranian revolution. “He was damn good at it. He had finally found his home, and he was getting to the point where senior policy makers were seeking him out.”
“It is a huge difference,” Lindsay Sherwin said. “Instead of recruiting and running agents, he was having to do real policy support. It is also a big difference in terms of who you meet and greet.” The conventional wisdom within the Agency was that there should be a wall between intelligence and policy. Ames thought this ridiculous. To be sure, everyone valued objectivity. “Don’t contaminate the intelligence with policy” was a constant mantra within the Agency. But according to Hutchinson, Ames strongly believed that the intelligence should help shape policy. To that end, intelligence officers had to understand the needs, prejudices, and motivations of the consumers of their intelligence—the policy makers. Politicians by definition have a very short time frame. “Ames was very good at interpreting the long-term implications of the intelligence to the policy makers,” explained Hutchinson. “But he did this well precisely because he took into account their biases and their short four-year time frame.”