The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (54 page)

That they’d never been allowed to see Bob’s body made things infinitely worse. It had been surreal at Andrews Air Force Base, where they’d had to stare at sixteen flag-draped coffins without knowing which contained Bob’s body. Later, Yvonne had asked if she or another family member could identify the body—and she was told this was not possible. “There was no closure for us,” Yvonne said in 2003. “I think if we’d been able to see Bob … we could have had closure. I know I have spent these twenty years thinking, well, perhaps he was involved in something and for the safety of his family—I feel ridiculous saying this, but it is the truth—that he was alive somewhere.”

All the children had the same thoughts. “
I guess the way we put it in our minds,” Kristen said, “was that he was doing something noble for us, and he’s not really in there; he’s just protecting us from whoever’s trying to get him so that he’s alive somewhere.… There’s a hope.”

On Tuesday, April 26, more than
3,100 diplomats, government employees, and private citizens ga
thered in the nave of Washington’s National Cathedral to honor all those who had died. Vice President
George H. W. Bush attended the forty-five-minute memorial service, as did Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Bush made a point of taking Yvonne aside and offered her his condolences.

The April 1983 Beirut embassy bombing is a largely forgotten moment in the history of America’s presence in the Middle East. But it was a signal moment. It was the beginning of America’s deadly encounter with a political Islamist movement. It was also the birth of a Shi’ite political entity that we now know as Hezbollah. As a 1984 declassified CIA document noted, “The [1979] Iranian revolution … and the Israeli invasion of predominantly-Shi’a southern Lebanon galvanized the Shi’a and set the stage for the emergence of radical groups prone to terrorism.” Young Shi’ites in southern Lebanon traumatized by the Israeli invasion saw the Americans as allies of the Israelis. It’s easy to see how America became a target. “
We were very much identified with the Israelis,” testified Ambassador Robert Dillon in 2003, “particularly among the Shi’as. There was huge resentment of the Israelis by this time in southern Lebanon.”

Ambassador Robert Oakley read a flash cable about the bombing while standing in his office in the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia. “
I was not astonished,” he later said, “because we’d seen the frenzy with which the Lebanese Shi’a responded to the United States following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and above all, the massacres of the Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila camp. The United States by that time had become identified with the Israelis and we were seen as an enemy of Islam and as an enemy of Iran because we were supporting the Iraqis in the war against Iran—and the Iranians had good reason to try to get us out of there. But we also were seen throughout the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon as sort of public enemy number one right after the Israelis themselves.”

To be sure, Americans had lost their lives before in this troubled part of the world. Ambassadors had been assassinated. But April 18, 1983, was the first time a truck bomb was used against a high-profile
target like an American embassy. President Reagan and Secretary Shultz tried to talk tough in the wake of the embassy tragedy. Reagan publicly called the bombing a “
vicious … cowardly act.” Shultz said, “Let us rededicate ourselves to the battle against terrorism.” But these words were mere bromides. There was no talk of retaliation, because no one was quite sure who’d carried out the attack. Privately, Reagan confided in his diary, “
Lord forgive me for the hatred I feel for the humans who can do such a cruel but cowardly deed.” But he knew there was nothing to be done.

At a memorial service at CIA headquarters, Bill Casey described Ames as “
the closest thing to an irreplaceable man.” He intoned, “They did not die in vain.”

But in reality, the truck bomb, driven by a single suicidal driver, demonstrated more than just America’s political and military weakness in the Middle East. For some, it seemed to underscore that Americans were very much out of place in this part of the world. Shortly before Susan Morgan left Beirut, she ran into a young U.S. Army officer who’d been working on providing military assistance to Lebanon’s national army. He was bitterly disillusioned and told Morgan that “
his men had come out here John Wayne–style, believing that they could save Lebanon, only to find themselves being shot at by the Israelis and bombed by the Arabs.” He said, “We should withdraw and let the people here fight it out among themselves. They deserve each other.”

On Wednesday, April 27, Morgan got up in the middle of the night to catch her ride to the airport. It was 3:00
A.M.
“I look out my hotel window to the Embassy on the seaside, less than a mile away. It is brightly and garishly lit up, the only visible building in the blackness and mist. From here it looks almost like a stage set. It seems right to turn my back and drive away from Beirut in the darkness.”

Shortly afterwards, Morgan resigned from the CIA.

In the days after the attack, Bill Casey was visibly angry. He ordered his officers to launch an investigation. He wanted justice for those who’d died in Beirut. But it wouldn’t be easy. “
Terrorist targets had shifted,” said John McMahon, Casey’s deputy director. “At one time, we had a PLO that was big enough to penetrate. But what we were getting now in places like Lebanon were small mom-and-pop operations. Unless you’re practically a member of the family, you don’t get in. These organizations are almost impossible to infiltrate.”

The National Security Agency scoured its satellite data for any intercepts of phone conversations in the region that mentioned the embassy as a target. All it could find were some cryptic conversations between Iranian Foreign Office officials in Tehran and their diplomats in Damascus. The NSA may also have intercepted some phone calls from Revolutionary Guard officers in Baalbek and the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
The intercepts merely hinted that someone might be striking at an American installation somewhere in the region. One intercepted cable from the Iranian Foreign Ministry reported that $25,000 had been sent to Lebanon for an unspecified
operation.
^*
Only in retrospect did it seem logical that they were talking about the American embassy as a target.

Later that autumn, President Reagan was awakened at 2:30
A.M.
on October 23, 1983, with a phone call informing him that another truck bomb had exploded—this time hitting the barracks near Beirut airport that housed U.S. marines serving as part of the Multinational Force. This bomb was much larger than the one that had hit the U.S. embassy six months earlier. It created an explosion the equivalent of
twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT—the largest non-nuclear event ever. It killed 241 U.S. servicemen. “
We all believe Iranians did this bombing,” Reagan wrote in his diary, “just as they did with our embassy last April.”

In a generic sense, this judgment is probably accurate. But many aspects of both tragedies remained a mystery. The Reagan administration really didn’t know
who
had hit them. “
We were too paralyzed by self-doubt,” recalled Secretary of State George Shultz.

Casey asked his in-house counselor, Frederick Hutchinson, to supervise an investigation. “When Bob was killed,” Hutchinson said, “Casey asked me to give him a full picture of what happened and why.” Hutchinson had entered the Agency as a high-ranking GS-16 in 1974. Bill Colby had recruited him from the Defense Department. Born in 1933, Hutchinson was one of the officers who’d persuaded Casey to promote Ames to be head of the Near East and South Asia Division in the Directorate of Intelligence. Hutchinson ended up writing a twenty-five-page report on the embassy attack. The report remains classified. But Hutchinson recollects its substance: “
It criticized the State Department’s security policies. The embassy was wide open to attack.” Within hours of the truck-bomb attack someone had called several media outlets in Beirut and claimed responsibility on behalf of the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO). No one had ever
heard of this group. Hutchinson believes the IJO was actually a cover name for Islamic Amal, a recent breakaway faction from Amal, the Shi’ite Lebanese political party led by Nabih Berri. Hutchinson recalls that the Lebanese intelligence agency picked up four individuals who’d witnessed the attack.
But they were released two days later. They merely told police that they’d seen a young man wearing a black leather jacket crash a black pickup truck into the front door of the embassy.

Eventually, a dozen people were arrested, including an Egyptian named “Harb,” who Hutchinson believes was the “
principal grunt on the ground who helped put the bomb together.”

In a subsequent phase of the investigation, a CIA contract officer named Keith Hall, age thirty-two, was ordered to fly to Beirut to interrogate those arrested by the Deuxième Bureau, Lebanon’s intelligence bureau, headed at the time by Johnny Abdo. Hall was a former U.S. marine who’d worked as a cop in California before joining the CIA in 1979. (He’d also earned a master’s degree in history.) At the time, he was assigned to the CIA’s investigative and analysis unit. He was called to Langley’s seventh floor and told, “We want you to go to Beirut and find out who blew up the embassy and how they did it. The President himself is going to be reading your cables. There is going to be some retribution here.”

Hall later told his story to author Mark Bowden in the
Atlantic
magazine. He flew to Beirut and occupied an office in the Deuxième Bureau. And he confessed to Bowden that he “
took part without hesitation in brutal questioning” of the Lebanese men arrested. Clubs and rubber hoses were used. The suspects eventually fingered a man named Elias Nimr, whom they described as the “paymaster” of the bombing. Nimr was arrested, but he initially evinced no fear, thinking that his family and political connections would protect him. He was only twenty-eight years old, but he was already a feared man. Years later,
Newsweek
’s accomplished investigative reporter Christopher Dickey wrote that Nimr
“appears to have been a double, triple, a geometric-multiple
agent. He was a Christian Lebanese intelligence chief who was trained by the Israelis but allegedly worked secretly for the Syrians as a paymaster for agents from Iran.”

The Lebanese allowed Hall to feed questions to Nimr’s interrogators, and over the course of ten days Hall personally questioned Nimr alone. According to Bowden, on the first occasion Hall bluntly told Nimr, “I’m an American intelligence officer. You really didn’t think that you were going to blow up our embassy and we wouldn’t do anything about it, did you?” Hall warned him that his Lebanese compatriots were not going to let him go. “That’s not going to happen,” Hall said. “You’re mine. I’m the one who will make the decisions about what happens to you. The only thing that will save your ass is to cooperate.” When Nimr refused to talk, he was taken to a cell and made to stand for two days.

When he was brought back for another session, Hall kicked the chair out from under Nimr. He still refused to talk. “I sent him back to his cell,” Hall said, “[and] had water poured over him again and again while he sat under a big fan, kept him freezing for about twenty-four hours. He comes back after this, and you can see his mood is changing. He hasn’t walked out of jail, and it’s beginning to dawn on him that no one is going to spring him.”