The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (40 page)

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 and 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.”

In 1980, Ames was still a Republican. And he was delighted when Ronald Reagan selected George H. W. Bush as his vice-presidential nominee. Like most clandestine officers, Ames had admired Bush’s handling of himself as director of the CIA under President Ford. Naturally, Ames hoped the Republican ticket would prevail that autumn. At the same time, he’d been working throughout that election year to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis, both through the aborted Desert One rescue mission that spring and later through a negotiated release of the hostages. By the summer of 1980, everyone in Washington understood that President Carter’s reelection chances might well hinge on a successful, last-minute resolution of the hostage crisis. Reagan campaign strategists feared their candidate’s rising prospects could be derailed by an “October surprise”—a sudden and dramatic release of all the hostages.

Ames knew that Yasir Arafat and the PLO had an open channel to the revolutionary regime in Tehran. Arafat had sent arms and men
to aid in the revolution, and
he’d flown to see Khomeini soon after the ayatollah’s return to Iran.
Arafat had also brokered the initial release of thirteen of the American hostages—all women or African Americans—in late November 1979. And that spring he’d helped the Americans retrieve the bodies of their eight servicemen killed at Desert One. Obviously, the PLO represented a potential channel of negotiations. Further, Arafat had every reason to believe that if he was successful in playing some part in obtaining the release of the remaining hostages, this intervention might open a door to Washington’s recognition of the PLO.