The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (38 page)

Bob Ames was selected to give the first briefing. As NIO for the Near East, Ames was thought to have a broad overview. They also knew he was a good briefer. And, of course, he’d had some prior experience in Iran. He flew into Tehran from Paris, arriving on Air France Flight 168 at 10:00
P.M.
on August 21, 1979. He carried with him a “courier letter” to protect his classified briefing papers—which typically would have been placed in a locked pouch chained to Ames’s wrist. The courier letter under standard international diplomatic agreements exempted his bags and his person from any searches while passing through immigration control in Tehran. Ames was traveling under his own name on a diplomatic passport. But CIA cable traffic referred to him only by his Agency pseudonym, Orrin W. BIEDENKOPF. The next day he gave the briefing. Bruce Laingen, the U.S. embassy’s chargé d’affaires, and Victor Tomseth, the embassy political officer, accompanied him to the meeting. The only Iranians in the room were Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, and Entezam. Ames was told that his goal was to entice the Iranians into having regular briefings. In this he clearly succeeded. Scheduled for one hour, the briefing went on for a full two hours. Ames did not in this initial session convey any hard intelligence, but he gave the Iranians a summary of how Washington saw developments generally in the Middle East. Entezam had earlier requested information about external threats to the new regime. Ames mostly talked about developments
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Soviet Union. Bruce Riedel, the analyst with whom Ames was working in Washington, later explained that Ames was trying to disabuse Iranians of their long-standing suspicions of America’s intentions. “
Bob was basically trying to convince them that the
real
Great Satans were their neighbors in the region, the Soviet Union and Iraq.” At the end of the two hours, Entezam said, “
We hope your organization will improve its ties with us just as our countries are improving ties through the efforts of the Chargé [Laingen] and Dr. Yazdi.” Entezam said this sitting next to Prime Minister Bazargan, who clearly understood English. Ames did not “reveal” his “RTACTION connection”—the code word for the CIA—but clearly everyone in the room understood that he was from the CIA. The meeting concluded with Bazargan stating that he “hoped similar briefings could be provided every two months.” Entezam later told Cave that “
they had considered” the briefing from the “NIO [Ames] as a good start.”

Now that Ames had opened the channel, his job was basically done. But he lingered in Tehran for at least a few more days, trying to gauge the temper of the revolutionary regime. He managed to arrange an interview with Ayatollah Dr. Mohammed Beheshti, age fifty-one, a leading scholar and theologian who was deeply involved in writing the new constitution. This was the same Ayatollah Beheshti that Ames knew had been involved in the disappearance of Lebanon’s revered Shi’a leader, Imam Musa Sadr. Ames had read the intelligence reports on Sadr’s disappearance, reports that implicated Beheshti. So on every level he knew he was seeing a tough, formidable player in the Iranian revolution. Beheshti was a leading advocate of an Islamic republic and an ally of Ayatollah Khomeini’s. “If Khomeini was the revolution’s charismatic chairman of the board,” said one Agency analyst, “Beheshti was the chief executive officer.” But he was also a man who had lived in the West, having led the Islamic Center in Hamburg, Germany, for five years in the 1960s. As such, he was thought to be a little more cosmopolitan and erudite than most mullahs in the new regime. Nevertheless, he had Khomeini’s ear and his respect. Beheshti had no idea that he was meeting with a CIA officer—one who was
merely trying to educate himself by meeting an influential ayatollah. They met in early September, and soon afterwards Ames flew back to Washington.
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Six weeks later, in October 1979, George Cave, pseudo-named ADLESICK, came back to Tehran to convey to Foreign Minister Yazdi and Entezam some concrete military intelligence. Some analysts in the U.S. intelligence community had come to the conclusion the previous summer that neighboring Iraq might be preparing to invade Iran. Ames hadn’t been authorized to convey this information in August, but now Cave came to Tehran with hard technical evidence that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was quietly positioning his vastly superior military forces in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The noted American scholar on Iranian history Mark Gasiorowski wrote about this intelligence mission: “
Alarmed about the prospect of war between these two strategically important countries, [Undersecretary of State David Newsom] and presumably other top US officials decided the United States should provide intelligence on Iraq’s activities to the Bazargan government so it could take steps to deter an invasion and thus prevent war from breaking out. An obvious way to do this was through the briefing series initiated by Robert Ames.”

The Americans had an ulterior reason for conveying this warning to the revolutionary regime. To be sure, they wanted to establish some semblance of normalcy in their relations with the new people in control. But the CIA also wanted to persuade the provisional government in Tehran to reactivate two separate electronic surveillance systems. IBEX was an electronic system with ground-based listening posts that gathered intelligence from three C-130 aircraft flying along the Iran-Iraq border. The system could provide aerial photographs of Iraqi military movements up to seventy miles inside Iraq. In the chaos of the revolution, IBEX was no longer operational. Bazargan, Yazdi, and Entezam
had no knowledge of IBEX’s existence, let alone its intelligence-gathering capabilities.

The other electronic surveillance system, Tacksman, was of special interest to the Americans because it could monitor Soviet missile tests. The CIA hoped that if it could prove the value of IBEX in providing Iran with hard military intelligence about Iraq, perhaps the new regime could also be enticed into reactivating the Tacksman missile-monitoring facilities. In 1979 the Cold War with the Soviet Union remained the Agency’s number-one priority.

So on October 15, 1979, Cave gave another top-secret briefing. He bluntly told the Iranians that Iraq was preparing to invade. The Iranians were taken aback. “
They wouldn’t dare,” Foreign Minister Yazdi exclaimed. Three days later, in another meeting with Yazdi, Cave patiently explained that if he was incredulous, he could reactivate the IBEX system and see the intelligence for himself. Yazdi and his boss, Prime Minister Bazargan, must have been swayed. The Americans were sharing hard intelligence. “
We went to the degree of actually sitting down with them,” said Chargé d’Affaires Bruce Laingen, “and giving them highly classified intelligence on Iraq.”
After Cave got back to Washington, he and Ames briefed CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner on their Iranian missions.

By then, however, things in Tehran had rapidly deteriorated. On October 20, President Jimmy Carter very reluctantly decided to permit the exiled shah to come to New York to treat his cancer. Carter had been hounded for months by a lobbying campaign, code-named “Project Alpha,” personally financed by David Rockefeller. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on “Project Alpha.” Rockefeller paid Chase Manhattan Bank employees and high-powered lawyers from Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy to pester Carter administration officials to give the shah political asylum. At one point First Lady Rosalynn Carter noted in her diary, “
We can’t get away from Iran. Many people—Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Howard Baker, John McCloy, Gerald Ford—all are after Jimmy to bring the shah to the United States, but Jimmy says it’s been too long, and anti-American and anti-shah
sentiments have escalated so that he doesn’t want to. Jimmy said he explained to all of them that the Iranians might kidnap our Americans who are still there.” The president’s fears were all too prescient.

On October 22, 1979, the shah arrived in New York and checked into a hospital to treat his cancer. A few days later, millions of Iranians demonstrated in the streets of Tehran, protesting the shah’s arrival in America. Khomeini incited the crowds with fiery statements, denouncing America and criticizing internal leftists and secularists. When several hundred students stormed the American embassy on November 4, 1979, and seized sixty-one American hostages, Khomeini praised the students. “
Khomeini probably sensed that the Americans were trying to lure Iranians like Bazargan, Yazdi, and Entezam into a moderate path,” said Bruce Riedel, the analyst who worked with Ames. “So when the students took over the embassy, this gave him the opportunity he needed to radicalize the situation.” Two days later, Prime Minister Bazargan and his cabinet resigned. Khomeini had used the embassy seizure to purge his government of anyone critical of his vision of Iran as an Islamic theocracy.
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The hostage crisis created the pretext for Khomeini to tip political power into the hands of his mullahs. But it also destroyed the back channel created by Ames, Cave, and the CIA to Bazargan, Yazdi, and Entezam. Khomeini had not known about Ames’s intelligence briefing. Neither did Khomeini know of the intelligence evidence conveyed by Cave that the Iraqis were planning an invasion. Ironically, the students who took over the American embassy found a treasure trove of thousands of classified documents—including CIA cables describing the Ames and Cave meetings with Bazargan, Yazdi, and Entezam. The classified documents—many painstakingly reconstructed from the bins of the embassy’s shredding machines—were used to charge Entezam
with espionage. He was arrested in mid-December and eventually tried and sentenced to life in prison.
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A number of CIA assets named in the documents were also arrested; Simon Farzami (SDTRAMP/1), a Jewish Iranian journalist, was executed by firing squad in December 1980. And Khosrow Qashqai (SDROTTER/4), a tribal leader, was
publicly hanged in 1982.

In September 1980, as predicted by George Cave, Saddam Hussein’s military launched a major invasion of Iran. The Iranians were caught completely unprepared and suffered major defeats and high casualties. The Iraq-Iran War quickly descended into brutal trench warfare and extensive use of chemical weapons. It slogged on until August 1988, by which time an estimated half a million soldiers on both sides had lost their lives. In the end, neither side gained anything.

“
The tragic irony,” writes Professor Gasiorowski, “is that the radical Islamists who seized the US embassy in early November [1979] did so in part because they thought US officials were plotting a coup or other nefarious activities there. In fact, US officials were warning Iran’s government about Iraqi activities that culminated in the devastating invasion of September 1980.”

In retrospect, there was probably nothing Ames, Cave, and the CIA could have done to change the course of this unfortunate history. Khomeini was determined to push moderates like Bazargan aside and forge a hard-line Islamic republic. He and his fellow revolutionaries were deeply suspicious of America and the West on both political and religious-cultural grounds. But Ames thought it had been worth the effort to try to keep a channel of communication open to a moderate faction of the revolutionary government.

Seven years later, on May 25, 1986, Cave boarded a chartered jet in Tel Aviv bound for Tehran on a secret mission. Accompanying him
were the Reagan administration’s national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane; Lt. Col. Oliver North; and an Israeli intelligence official, Amiran Nir. Their goal was to attempt to revive a back channel to a “moderate” faction of the revolutionary regime.
Cave carried with him a chocolate cake made in a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv. The key-shaped cake was meant to symbolize their desire to unlock the door barring a resumption of American-Iranian relations. President Ronald Reagan authorized the trip; it was Cave’s idea to bring the key-shaped cake. The mission, of course, was a failure. But it—and the cake—was a signature event of what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.