The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (59 page)

Dealing with Asgari is an entirely different equation. Unlike Salameh, this man is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of Americans and many others. No doubt, some intelligence officer somewhere is making the case that by dealing with Asgari, America can avert a war or save some lives. But it’s also just as likely that Asgari’s “intell” became stale almost as soon as he defected—so it may become yet another sad story from the wilderness of mirrors.

Yvonne Ames today lives in a comfortable, but decidedly modest, cottage in rural North Carolina. Two of her children, Adrienne and Kevin, live nearby. She spends her days taking care of her grandchildren. She has found some solace in her religious faith. At the dinner table, she says a simple grace. She rarely hears from any of Bob’s Agency friends. After Bob’s murder, the CIA offered her a choice between an annual pension or a lump-sum payment. Perhaps unwisely, she chose the lump sum. That money ran out a long time ago.

“I was overcome by the responsibility of having five children at home; and until then I had always thought I was very strong, but that’s when I realized that the strength of the family came from Bob’s presence. He was dependable. He was reliable. He was someone you could turn to, you could lean on, and whatever children’s problems there were, I could go to him to get help. And that was gone, and it became my responsibility. It was frightening.

“I was raised in a military family, and I learned that you kept a stiff upper lip when things went wrong. And Bob also had that demeanor … and I just carried it through. To me, that was my coping mechanism. We did not take time to grieve.

“I went to work almost immediately afterwards. I lasted about a month when I realized it was just too much.” Yvonne eventually went back to work on a part-time basis.

Sixteen months after Bob’s murder, Yvonne married a man she’d known before she met Bob. She felt that with five children at home there should be a man in the house. Andrew asked her to wait until he graduated from high school. “He wanted to be the man in the house,” Yvonne said. But she thought he needed to be “the young man, and not the man of the house.” She later regretted her decision to remarry so quickly. The new husband was the “polar opposite of Bob,” Yvonne said. “There were too many changes too soon.” The marriage was rough going, and after twelve years it ended in divorce.

In retrospect, Yvonne believes she made a mistake in not confronting her grief. “So the stiff upper lip is not a good way to go. It is better to feel the pain and face the reality and heal. I think as a result of that, none of us have healed. None.”

When Anne Dammarell wrote her a letter asking her to join the civil suit against Iran, Yvonne was initially opposed to the idea. She did not like the notion of a lawsuit. But after talking with Anne on the phone, and thinking about it for a month, she changed her mind. In 2003, she told Judge John D. Bates during the trial, “My reasoning for going ahead with it is that in order to deter or even hope to begin to deter the terrorists, the money has to be stopped.” But she also thought that the act of publicly testifying might help her and her grown children heal. “Not only is it something that I now believe in, it is also a process of personal healing. And I thank you, Judge, for hearing us today.”

In September 2003, Judge Bates awarded Yvonne Ames and her children a total of $38,249,000 in compensatory damages. But she hasn’t seen a penny of this money. The Islamic Republic of Iran has ignored the U.S. court decisions in such cases, and the lawyer in the civil suit, Stu Newberger, has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to seize Iranian assets in America or abroad. Newberger says he’s still hopeful. So perhaps someday Yvonne and her children will be awarded this compensation.

When I first contacted Yvonne Ames about writing a book about her late husband, she was hesitant. She said she’d never spoken to any reporters or historians about Bob. She did not wish to divulge secrets. Instinctively, she was still the CIA spouse, reticent and protective of the Agency. In recent years she has occasionally accepted invitations to attend ceremonies at Langley marking the anniversaries of the Beirut embassy bombing. She knows that Bob devoted twenty-three years—most of his adult life—to the CIA. She bears no animosity toward the institution.

But thirty years have passed since the Beirut tragedy, and now she wants people to know what Bob Ames did with his life. More important, she wants her children to know what he did. “Bob appears in my dreams even now. He appears—initially, it was [as if] he had come back from hiding, and my concern was: But I’ve remarried. What do I do now? But lately, he appears, and it’s just a comfort.”

All six of the Ames children went to college. All married and have children of their own. But all live with a lingering sense of trauma. And all are intensely interested in whatever pieces of information they can find about their father’s life in the Agency. “Like most of my siblings,” said Adrienne, “I have collected all the articles and information written about him. And I have this habit. I like bookstores anyway, but when I go to bookstores, I always go to the historical section, and I flip through the indexes, and I look for his name.”

Mustafa Zein is equally obsessed with Bob Ames’s life and death.

Zein has spent much of the last two decades methodically investigating the Beirut embassy bombing. He wrote an unpublished memoir, “Deceit with Extreme Prejudice,” chronicling his adventures with Ames. At great personal risk, he spent many months in Damascus in 2009, patiently tracking down Syrian intelligence officers who might have known something about who carried out the Beirut embassy bombing. Today, he’s firmly convinced that the mastermind of the Beirut embassy bombing was Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard officer stationed at the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in Baalbek. He believes Bob Ames’s primary killer has been found—and that he resides comfortably today in America.

Anne Dammarell now lives in Washington, D.C.’s lively Adams Morgan neighborhood, just two miles north of the White House. In September 2003, Judge Bates awarded her $6,774,602 in compensatory damages for the many wounds she sustained during the embassy bombing. Like Yvonne Ames and the other plaintiffs in the civil suit, she has yet to receive a penny of this award. She had countless operations to repair her nineteen broken bones, and months of physical therapy: “
I had to relearn how to move my body, to walk, to write, and to focus on the printed word.” In 1994, she wrote a master’s thesis at Georgetown University titled “Hidden Fears, Helpful Memories: Aftermath of the 1983 Bombing of the United States Embassy in Beirut.” Like all of the survivors of the Beirut embassy bombing, she has struggled to understand and cope with the long-term psychological scars of what happened. For a year after the bombing she experienced an unsettling “giddiness.” She’d survived where others had not. “Paradoxically,” she wrote in her thesis, “during this difficult period, my primary emotion was joy.… I was alive. I had not died.” But later she had to cope with feelings of intense anxiety. She experienced violent nightmares that became “so commonplace that I could actually tell myself that I was having a ‘bombing dream’ and move on to something else without waking up.” Talking to her today, she seems an altogether vivacious woman. She remains interested in the news from the Middle East and empathetic with the region’s struggle to find a way toward lasting peace. Without Dammarell, there never would have been a civil suit; she was the catalyst who brought together the survivors and grieving relatives such as Yvonne Ames to create a legal record documenting their collective trauma.

Bob Ames’s legacy is uncertain. His alma mater, La Salle University in Philadelphia, still displays a plaque with his photograph, and the caption reads, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”

“
I hate to say it,” said
Meir Harel
, a former Mossad director general, “but Ames’s work was in vain.” If the Oslo peace process was fated to fall apart, perhaps this is true. But if one believes that someday the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end in a peace settlement, then perhaps the relationship Ames cultivated with Ali Hassan Salameh played a small role in opening the path to negotiations. In this sense, his legacy still resonates with hope.

But it would be altogether ungenerous to see Ames’s life as bordered by—and defined by—the depressing narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. To be sure, Ames’s story is emblematic of a struggle largely waged as a protracted, six-decade-long intelligence war. But his career as an intelligence officer also sheds light on the multibillion-dollar business of intelligence. Today, that business relies all too heavily on the technical ability of the CIA to gather information from a literal and metaphorical cloud. The Agency
used
to invest in clandestine officers who spent years acquiring foreign-language skills and learning to understand the history and cultural intricacies of a foreign society. Robert Ames was a model of this type of intelligence officer. But even in his day, many of his colleagues disparaged these qualities. Today, they are all too rare. In his time, Ames was accused of having “gone native.” It was true. He fell in love with the Middle East, its languages, its rhythms, and its deep sense of history and place.

There was nothing complicated about the way Bob Ames learned to become a good spy. “
There was no deep trick to it,” Thomas Powers wrote of the art of intelligence. “You had to want to know, you had to do a lot of homework, and you had to listen.” Ames was a listener. This is not to say that he listened without judgment. He listened as an American, and he was always skeptical. But he listened with a plain sense of human empathy. He listened to people who by any broad definition were easily labeled by policy makers back in Washington as terrorists. He listened to Ali Hassan Salameh and Yasir Arafat at a time
when it was forbidden for American diplomats to talk with any Palestinians from the PLO. Not only did he listen, he befriended Salameh. He grew to like and trust Salameh because he found a way to empathize with the PLO operative’s political dilemmas. Later, he learned to listen to his Mossad colleagues. He understood their dilemmas as well. He could see both sides, even if they stood incontrovertibly opposed to each other on grounds of history and moral imperatives.

Ironies inform Ames’s life and death. Some may note the irony that he dealt with terrorists and died at the hands of terrorists. One of the men implicated in his murder, Imad Mughniyeh, was once trained and employed by Ames’s friend Ali Hassan Salameh. Another, Ali Reza Asgari, allegedly recruited Mughniyeh to serve in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s secret war against America. Asgari himself is implicated in the embassy attack that killed sixty-three people. And then there is the final irony that this Iranian agent, a man also deeply implicated in Iran’s hostage taking of Americans in the 1980s in Lebanon, is now living in America, protected by the agency for which Bob Ames worked and died.