The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  By early 1982, Bob Ames was the CIA’s “Mr. Middle East” in the Reagan administration. He spent most of his time in Washington, but his staff noticed that he made regular trips to New York City. He told them he was seeing sources. But most of these trips were to see his old friend Mustafa Zein, who in January 1982 had finally decided to flee Lebanon’s civil war and settle in New York. Zein had made a small fortune in the past decade, so he could afford to buy a lovely apartment at 372 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. “Bob arranged for me to get a green card,” Zein recalled. Ames was listed as a personal reference on Zein’s green card application for permanent U.S. residency, and the green card was issued from the CIA’s limited quota of one hundred individuals admitted to the country annually. A man Zein knew only as “Edward”—a CIA officer assigned to the United Nations—personally delivered the card. Whether he was in Reston, Kuwait, or Tehran, Ames had kept in frequent touch with Zein by mail or phone. And now Zein occasionally visited Bob and Yvonne in Reston.

  Zein, Ames, and Bob’s former mentor Dick Helms sometimes lunched together in Washington in these years. Helms always picked up the check. To make it up to him, one day Zein arrived at the luncheon table with a gift for Helms: a set of amber prayer beads he’d recently bought in Beirut for $2,000. “Helms loved them.”

  Ames had to keep abreast of developments all over the Middle East, but events in Lebanon were about to monopolize his energies. A lull had occurred in Lebanon’s persistent civil war. But in July 1981 PLO forces in southern Lebanon launched hundreds of rockets into northern Israel. Israel retaliated by bombing PLO buildings in downtown Beirut, killing hundreds of people. Subsequently, on July 24 a cease-fire was negotiated and the PLO agreed to halt its cross-border attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel. Over the next ten months the border was relatively quiet, indeed, almost serene.

  In April 1982, Ames invited three of his top analysts to meet with Mustafa Zein. Ames rented a large suite in the Hilton Hotel, just north of Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. He ordered a nice buffet lunch and then told everyone he wanted to hear them debate whether there was going to be another conventional war in the Middle East. After some back-and-forth, the three analysts said no, but “the Israelis are going to bleed Arafat” in a steady war of attrition. They pointed out that ousting the PLO from Lebanon would just free Arafat from having to deal with the Lebanese morass. Zein disagreed. “I have studied Sharon,” he said, “and he is just waiting for an opportunity to invade Lebanon and push the PLO out. He will come with an armored column up along the seacoast and another column through the mountains—and he will rush all the way to Beirut.”

  Ames’s analysts argued about this scenario and concluded that, if there was an invasion, Sharon would stop his advance north at the Litani River, well south of Beirut. At the end of the day, Ames told Zein that he should write up his prediction and hand it to Arafat. “Tell Arafat that Bob wants you to see this.”

  On June 3, 1982, the Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, was shot and grievously wounded in an assassination attempt that the Israelis blamed on the PLO. In fact, the assassins proved to be employed by Abu Nidal. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin was told that the assassins were Abu Nidal’s men—sworn enemies of Arafat and the PLO—he reportedly scoffed, “They’re all PLO, Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal—we have to strike at the PLO.”

  In retrospect, it’s clear that for several years the Israelis had been looking for a pretext to eliminate the PLO from Lebanon. The right-wing Likud government of Prime Minister Begin had come to the conclusion that the 1979 Camp David Accords had removed the possibility that a military offensive against the PLO in Lebanon could escalate into a general war. Egypt was out of the game, leaving Begin free to move against the PLO. In December 1981, Begin and his defense minister, Gen. Ariel Sharon, actually discussed inside the cabinet an invasion plan, code-named “Big Pines” (a reference to Lebanon’s famous cedar trees). The plan was rejected at the time. But Sharon was determined to use any future PLO provocations as an excuse to launch a decisive blow. He later wrote in his memoirs that the assassination attempt on Ambassador Argov was “merely the spark that lit the fuse.”

  On June 6, 1982, a massive Israeli ground force, including more than fifteen hundred tanks, invaded Lebanon. Begin and Sharon had assured the Israeli cabinet that the strike force would advance only forty kilometers into southern Lebanon, clearing out the PLO’s militia and artillery encampments. But three days later, Sharon’s men were on the southern outskirts of Beirut. As George Shultz later wrote in his memoirs, “Israel’s real objective was the destruction of the PLO and its leadership of the Palestinian movement.”

  It later emerged that Sharon had received a tacit green light from Secretary of State Al Haig when they’d met in Washington on May 19 and 20. According to the authoritative Israeli historian Benny Morris, Haig characterized the Israeli plan to invade Lebanon and expel the PLO as a “lobotomy.” Israel was going to take out the PLO, and when asked how far into Lebanon he intended to go, Sharon replied, “As far as we have to.”

  Ames had come to despise Secretary Haig. Giving Sharon tacit permission to invade Lebanon was, he thought, highly irresponsible. Lunching with Dick Helms and Mustafa Zein in a French restaurant in downtown Washington, Ames described the chaotic discord he was witnessing between the State Department and the White House. A few days later, Zein sent Ames a memo with his thoughts about the Lebanese crisis. “Israel, with its military might, is creating, as usual, new facts in the Middle East. The Arab regimes, whether they are conservative or radical, are different faces of the same coin. Corrupt, oppressive and impotent, they cannot in any way face the Israeli challenge politically or militarily.” Zein feared there were only two political trends in the Arab world: the radical Left and Islamic fundamentalism. He argued that Israel’s war in Lebanon was empowering the “religious zealots.” He predicted that the Islamic fundamentalists would prevail and that this would ultimately “come back to haunt America and Israel.” Israeli policy regarding the PLO was shortsighted, to say the least. “To eradicate the Palestinian question,” Zein bluntly wrote, “the Israelis must eradicate every Palestinian.” Washington faced a stark choice: “It can continue its unlimited support and accommodation of Israeli politics and objectives in the region, or it can forge an independent policy using the war in Lebanon as an opportunity to establish a just peace in the Middle East.” Zein was a hardheaded idealist—just like Bob Ames. The two men agreed, and over the coming months they would try desperately to unchain Washington from its rote support of Israeli behavior.

  Gen. Ariel Sharon was soon to learn that laying siege to Beirut would come at considerable cost. The PLO’s ragtag forces put up a fierce resistance and the Israelis lost more men than they expected. The war threatened to escalate, drawing in Soviet-supplied Syrian troops. Moreover, the Reagan administration soon made it clear that it was unhappy with the ambitious Israeli operation. President Reagan phoned Begin and complained that Israeli forces had gone “significantly beyond the objectives that you have described to me.” The president urged an immediate cease-fire. Begin and Sharon stalled for time. Reagan sent out a seasoned Foreign Service officer, Phil Habib, to negotiate a cease-fire. But Israeli forces continued to lay siege to Beirut, and the cease-fire was always precarious.

  In the midst of the June Lebanese crisis, President Reagan announced that George Shultz would replace Al Haig as secretary of state. At the time, Shultz was president of the Bechtel Corporation, a company with extensive interests in the Arab world. Some thought he might for this reason be more critical of Washington’s perennial pro-Israeli tilt. “In contrast to ‘pro-Israel’ Haig,” Shultz later wrote, “I was being stereotyped as an ‘Arabist,’ because Bechtel Corporation had big construction jobs under way in Saudi Arabia and around the Persian Gulf.”

  But Shultz was a conservative Republican through and through. His instincts were conservative with a small c. He was not the kind of m
an who understood the history of dispossession that drove Palestinian nationalism. He believed the PLO’s use of political terrorism made it inappropriate, if not impossible, to have any kind of dialogue with its representatives. And he was surrounded by such early neoconservatives as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who believed that U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East were synonymous with Israeli interests.

  Nevertheless, coming aboard in the midst of the Lebanon crisis, Shultz was open to innovative thinking. He thought of himself as a pragmatist. On July 16, 1982, President Reagan took Shultz out to the White House Rose Garden and swore him in as secretary of state. Afterwards, Shultz went to the State Department and made a few phone calls. His second phone call was to Bob Ames. Shultz had heard of Ames and knew that he was highly regarded. Just two weeks earlier, on July 2, 1982, Bill Casey had promoted Ames to SIS-4 (Senior Intelligence Service). Reagan’s deputy secretary of defense, Frank Carlucci, told Shultz that if he wanted to understand the Middle East, he had to listen to Ames. “Please listen to him,” Carlucci said. “He’s good because he’s balanced and he has no ego hang-ups.” Within months, Shultz ran into Carlucci and told him, “One of the best pieces of advice you gave me was to listen to Bob Ames.”

  Shultz met with Ames several times in July. He thought of Ames as “the CIA’s top specialist” on Arab affairs. “I was impressed by his understanding of the Arab political and cultural scene,” Shultz wrote. “I once told Bob he reminded me of the engineers at Bechtel with their ‘can do’ approach to difficult challenges.” But he was disturbed to learn that Ames “had been carrying on a dialogue with the PLO leadership through envoys and intermediaries for at least a year.” (Obviously, Shultz was unaware that Ames had been doing this off and on since 1969!) Ames tried to impress on Shultz that the Beirut siege presented the Reagan administration with an opportunity to achieve a breakthrough. The PLO, he argued, was ready to meet Washington’s primary demand: acceptance of UN Resolution 242, which specified Israel’s right to exist and the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict.” Arafat had only one condition. In return, Washington would have to release a statement in support of Palestinian “self-determination.” Shultz rightly regarded that as a code word for endorsing an independent Palestinian state. “That would be a gigantic step, not a gesture,” he later wrote, “and I was unwilling to consider it.” He told Ames that the PLO’s messages were “all too slippery and vague.” Further, when Ames indicated that he was about to see his PLO contact, Shultz recalled, “I instructed that there must be no such meeting.”

  But just days later, on July 19, Ames went ahead and saw his PLO contact. He did so with the specific approval of CIA director Casey. Both men believed there was just too much going on for the Agency not to be communicating with a key actor in the Beirut crisis. By then, Arafat had made it clear that he was willing to evacuate the PLO leadership and the bulk of his fighters. But no one at this point knew whether any other Arab nation would take in Arafat’s men. Casey and Ames did what they thought was necessary. Shultz nevertheless discovered the next day that his explicit instruction had been ignored. It was his first lesson in interagency rivalry: “I saw then that Bill Casey and the CIA acted independently.”

  That summer Shultz scheduled a weekly luncheon with Casey, whom he’d known casually for more than a decade. But the luncheons soon ended because the two men discovered they really didn’t like each other. “He had too much of an agenda,” Shultz told Tim Weiner, a reporter for the New York Times. “It’s a mistake for the CIA to have an agenda. They’re supposed to produce intelligence. If they have an agenda, the intelligence can get slanted.” When the luncheons ended, Shultz relied on Ames as his conduit to the CIA.

  Shultz blamed Casey, not Ames. In any case, Ames continued to see his PLO contacts. And Shultz in practice acquiesced to the necessity of keeping that channel open. Later in July, the cease-fire in Beirut all but collapsed. Israel began shelling the city again. Sitting in Beirut, the president’s envoy Phil Habib called Shultz and shouted through the line, “Their guns are firing only a few hundred yards from me. I could have walked down the hill myself and told them to stop!” General Sharon had concluded that the PLO was stalling for time and did not intend to evacuate Beirut. He told his senior officers to plan for a full-scale assault on the city.

  Ames’s channel to the PLO at this point proved to be critical. As Israeli jet fighters targeted Arafat’s command bunker, the PLO leader sent a message that reached Ames. The gist of it, as reported by Shultz, was a plea to negotiate the details of an evacuation: “Habib talks only about our going,” complained Arafat, “never about how and where. Where are we to go? Syria will not take us. I am not interested in saving only my life.”

  Ames’s contacts with the PLO now ran straight to Yasir Arafat and his chief of staff Abu Jihad. The main interlocutor was Hani al-Hassan, the PLO official who’d met with General Walters in Rabat in 1973. He and his brother Khalid were regarded as leading advocates of the “pragmatic” line within the PLO. Hani al-Hassan was well known to the dozens of foreign correspondents who hung out at the Commodore Hotel in Ras Beirut. Hani regularly came by the hotel’s bar to brief the reporters on the siege. From his public pronouncements it was clear that Hani believed the PLO’s survival depended on its ability to transform itself from a paramilitary organization into a political movement. He was openly calling for a dialogue with the United States. Some of these messages between Ames and Hani al-Hassan and other PLO leaders were transmitted through Johnny Abdo, the Lebanese intelligence chief from 1977 through 1983. Abdo was a cultivated Maronite who nevertheless had wide-ranging friendships throughout Lebanon’s sectarian mosaic. He was a personal friend of the Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt but was also on close terms with Bashir Gemayel. Discreet and enigmatic, Abdo was regarded as an “honest broker” in wartime Lebanon. Abdo’s sources were “good guys and bad guys high and low from all points on the spectrum.”

  Phil Habib was a consummate diplomat. But in Lebanon he was being forced to negotiate without being allowed to see the Palestinian leaders he was negotiating with. It was surreal. The prohibition against talking to the PLO was still in place. Habib was aware of the Ames back channel, but that was no substitute for what he had to do sitting on the Beirut battleground, trying to negotiate the terms of the PLO’s departure from Lebanon. Habib decided he couldn’t talk face-to-face with Arafat because he knew if Begin discovered he was in direct talks with the “terrorist,” the prime minister would probably go ballistic. General Sharon bluntly warned Habib that if he learned that Habib was talking directly to a PLO official, he would send his army into West Beirut.

  So Habib suggested what he called “proximity talks.” Johnny Abdo had a safe house where Arafat and Habib could sit on separate floors. They would not actually meet face-to-face. Lebanese intermediaries would shuttle between the floors with messages. “They’ll be on the first floor,” Habib assured Begin, “and I’ll be above. I will never even see them. There’ll be no handshakes.” Begin replied heatedly that this was unacceptable. Ironically, the man who had himself once been accused of being a terrorist for the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem—in which ninety-one people had died—understood that even “proximity talks” lent an unacceptable veneer of legitimacy to Arafat the terrorist. It was a charade. But it was a charade that the U.S. government felt bound to carry out despite Begin’s objections.

  The crisis stretched on for weeks. Sharon kept threatening to invade West Beirut and the sprawling refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. On August 1, 1982, Sharon escalated his assault, and some fifty thousand Israeli artillery shells landed in West Beirut in the space of only fourteen hours. Hundreds of civilians were dying. That day a reporter in Washington asked President Reagan, “Are you losing patience with Israel?” Reagan replied, “I lost patience a long time ago. The bloodshed must stop.”

  But finally, by mid-August, it was clear that th
e PLO was preparing to leave. Arafat had demanded that a Multinational Force (MNF) of peacekeepers first land in West Beirut. Only then would he and thousands of his fighters agree to board ships bound for Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, the smallest country in North Africa. Habib had promised in the name of the U.S. government that the MNF would protect the Palestinian civilians left behind in the refugee camps.

  At one point, Phil Habib asked Johnny Abdo, the Lebanese intelligence chief, for his opinion on how many soldiers in the MNF would be needed to protect Palestinian civilians after the PLO left. Abdo replied, “Two hundred and fifty thousand men.” Habib thought he was joking. “That’s ridiculous.” In the end, Habib decided that just eight hundred U.S. marines, eight hundred French Foreign Legionnaires, and four hundred Italian soldiers would constitute the MNF. These numbers would prove to be woefully inadequate.

  Sitting in his perch at Langley, Ames watched the Beirut drama unfold. He found the battle images highly disturbing. But at the same time he realized that the crisis opened up an opportunity to create a new dynamic. He was seeing a lot of high-ranking Reagan administration officials, and he was hearing men like Secretary Shultz voice their anger and displeasure with the Israelis. “I was enraged,” Shultz later wrote about Begin’s and Sharon’s duplicitous behavior.

  Ames took advantage of Shultz’s anger with the Israelis to gently encourage the new secretary of state to think about what he wanted to see happen in the Middle East after Arafat and the PLO left Beirut. By the end of July, Shultz had gathered a small core group of advisers to iron out what he called a “fresh start” on U.S. policy toward the long-term issues of war and peace in the Middle East. Shultz invited eight “informed, experienced and volatile” men to meet with him regularly in a conference room across the hall from his office in the State Department. The group included Bob Ames, NSC official Bud McFarlane, and veteran Foreign Service officers Lawrence Eagleburger, Charles Hill, William Kirby, Alan Kreczko, and Nicholas Veliotes. Shultz swore them to total secrecy. “Any premature hint that the United States was reconsidering its position on the Palestinian issue,” Shultz wrote, “would have disruptive effects not only on Phil Habib’s work in getting the PLO out of Beirut but also on the ability of the United States to make something positive emerge from this terrible war.”