'The Good Spy' by Kai Bird makes the case for a more humane form of espionage
Kai Bird's biography of Robert Ames – a CIA operative whom Bird praises as an almost perfect spy – offers valuable insight on the Middle East.

By Nick Romeo
CSM
May 20, 2014

Before his 1981 inauguration, president-elect Ronald Reagan was briefed by the CIA on the intricacies of Palestinian politics. He read a nuanced memorandum outlining the wide spectrum of positions within the Palestinian movement for self-determination. Some groups favored a two-state solution, while others were ready to assassinate any Palestinian willing to compromise with the Israelis. Reagan read carefully for about 10 minutes before looking up and asking a question. "But they are all terrorists, aren't they?"

It would be hard to accuse Reagan of an overly scholarly approach to the Middle East. Perhaps a thorough knowledge of the region was not essential if the president could rely on experts. It's unsettling, however, to learn that some of these ostensible experts seemed to share Reagan's aversion to learning about the subtleties of one of the world's most complex and volatile areas.

In the spring of 1979, for instance, just after the Iranian revolution, none of the CIA officers in Tehran spoke Farsi. The chief of the CIA's Near East and South Asia division in the mid-1970s once said that learning a local language was a waste of time. Another high-ranking intelligence officer later wrote of the Middle East that "in a generic sense, it's all the same."
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A singular exception to this culture of ignorance was a man named Robert Ames, the subject of Kai Bird's new biography, The Good Spy: the Life and Death of Robert Ames. According to a colleague, Ames was perceived within the CIA's directorate of operations as "being too smart, too much of an intellectual." He was later denied a major promotion because he was "too intellectual" for the job. But in Bird's view, Ames was close to the perfect spy: someone who combined a deep knowledge of the Middle East with a formidable talent for practical operations.

Ames joined the CIA in 1960, and one of his early postings was to Yemen, where he was the only staffer with sufficient Arabic to follow political speeches. He also had a gift for understanding local points of view. He empathized with Yemeni resentment of British colonial occupation. "The soldiers are arrogant and forever harassing the Arabs," he wrote. "No wonder they're hated."

While many spies recruited sources with abrupt offers of lavish compensation, Ames worked slowly, cultivating genuine friendships and engaging in long political and philosophical discussions. His understanding of local cultures and his interest in different perspectives allowed him to acquire more vital intelligence information than cash handouts could.
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The most important result of Ames’s approach was probably his relationship with Ali Hassan Salameh, an influential leader in Yasir Arafat's Fatah, a secular Palestinian political party and militia. Salameh also oversaw Force 17, the intelligence arm of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

In the early 1970s, Israeli Mossad operatives were targeting various Palestinian leaders for assassination. Some Palestinians, meanwhile, were launching a series of attacks on Israelis. Often these were designed more to draw international attention to the Palestinian's plight than to inflict serious damage. A depressing pattern began to recur: a Palestinian strike would trigger a disproportionate retaliation by the Israelis, which in turn would radicalize and displace more young Palestinians.

America's position in the region was delicate. Officially, the White House did not want to appear to negotiate with "terrorist" organizations, but alienating the PLO would present a considerable threat to American security at home and abroad. While some in the CIA made clumsy attempts to recruit Salameh as a paid source, Ames listened carefully to Salameh's ideas and sometimes shared his own. Rather than treating him strictly as a source of intelligence to be bought, Ames pursued a kind of clandestine diplomacy. By 1973, Bird writes, "Ames's back channel to Salameh had created a virtual nonaggression pact between the US government and Arafat's guerrillas." The next year, Arafat would address the UN general assembly in New York.

In 1978, Mossad operatives asked the CIA if Salameh was a paid source. The subtext of the question was clear: is he a legitimate target for Israeli assassins, or does he supply the US government with valuable intelligence? Salameh was not a paid agent, yet he was an essential conduit for Ames and the Americans. He even arranged for the PLO to provide security for American diplomats and the US embassy in Beirut.

If the CIA claimed Salameh as a paid source to protect him from Mossad, the PLO would regard him as a traitor. But if the CIA didn't claim him, Mossad would proceed with the assassination. Ames wanted the CIA to protect Salameh from Mossad without compromising Salameh’s position within the PLO. But his superiors did not follow his advice, and Salameh was killed in a car bombing in Beirut in 1979. Eight civilians died in the explosion.
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After Salameh's death, Ames still had other valuable Palestinian contacts. He used his influence to help avert the assassination of Israel's prime minister Menachem Begin in New York City in 1981. But Ames could not control the actions of every Palestinian. When the Israeli ambassador in London was shot in 1982, Prime Minister Begin ignored the fact that the assassin was employed by a group the PLO had condemned. He wanted a pretext to invade Lebanon and attack the PLO. "They're all PLO," he declared in a generalization worthy of Reagan.

A few days after the shooting in London, the Israelis initiated a massive invasion of Lebanon with tacit American support. Thousands of Lebanese with no connection to the PLO were killed, and many others were radicalized. Ames's advice not to sanction the invasion was ignored, but he was able to help facilitate peace negotiations with Arafat.

Bird argues that when Ames was killed in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, the prospects for peace in the Middle East diminished dramatically. "The Good Spy" is a meticulous and moving biography, and Bird makes a persuasive case that Ames might have been able to help establish peace in the region.

Ames represents a type: the knowledgeable and humane spy who promotes American interests through conversation rather than coercion. His story is a parable for the advantages of a certain approach to intelligence work. Instead of placing confidence only in high-tech surveillance and paid sources, Ames realized what many in the CIA did not: the humanity of those whose organizations he was assigned to infiltrate.

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When asked what people should read to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, CIA veteran George Cave gives a simple answer: the Old Testament. Kai Bird's biography of Robert Ames deserves to join the list of essential reading.

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A Life in the Shadows in the Cold War Mideast

By Dwight Garner

May 14, 2014

The first thing to understand about “The Good Spy,” Kai Bird’s cool and authoritative new biography, is that while it’s about a C.I.A. operative named Ames, it is not about Aldrich Ames, the United States counterintelligence officer and analyst who in 1994 was convicted of spying for the Russians.

“The Good Spy” introduces us instead to Robert Ames, son of a Philadelphia-area steelworker, who rose to become America’s most influential intelligence officer in the Middle East. Ames made close connections with important Arab intelligence figures and established an improbable early back channel to Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

Had he lived longer, Mr. Bird suspects, Ames might well have coaxed out better relations between Arabs and the West. He died on April 18, 1983, when a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. He was 49 and left behind a wife and six children. Only upon his death did most of them learn that their father had been a spy.

The second thing to understand about “The Good Spy” is that the book’s understated pleasures come from reading a pro writing about a pro. Mr. Bird has a dry style; watching him compose a book is like watching a robin build a nest. Twig is entwined with twig until a sturdy edifice is constructed. No flourishes are required, and none are supplied.

Mr. Bird’s several books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (2005), written with Martin J. Sherwin. Most recently he is the author of a memoir, “Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and the Israelis, 1956-1978” (2010).

Mr. Bird’s style is ideal for his subject. Ames despised pretense and flash. Not a Lawrence of Arabia manqué, he was solid and reliable, perhaps even a bit dull. He was frugal and rarely drank. His idea of a good time was root beer and a bowl of pretzels, ideally consumed while listening to a Beach Boys or Glen Campbell record.

People warmed to him because he took an interest in them. Ames liked to wear Western boots, but he was more John le Carré than Louis L’Amour. A colleague described him as being “anonymous, perceptive, knowledgeable, highly motivated, critical, discreet — with a priest’s and cop’s understanding of the complexity of human nature in action.”

Mr. Bird tells several stories at once in “The Good Spy.” At the center is Ames’s narrative. But the author also looks consistently backward, to the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as forward to Sept. 11 and the current snarled realities of the Middle East. There is a great deal of incisive writing about the nature of spy craft.
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Kai BirdCredit...Stephen Frietch

Ames graduated from La Salle University in Philadelphia and in 1956 entered the Army, where he was chosen for signal intelligence duty and assigned to a listening post in Ethiopia. He became interested in the Middle East while on brief visits to Cairo and Jerusalem and began to learn Arabic. He joined the C.I.A. in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, when most of his colleagues were immersed in Soviet affairs. He was posted in South Yemen, in Beirut, in Tehran, in Kuwait. He stood out. He was tall. He spoke the local language in an era when few American Middle Eastern hands did. “Don’t crack jokes in Arabic,” an Israeli Mossad officer was told, “because he knows Arabic.”
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The core of “The Good Spy” is an account of Ames’s relationship with Ali Hassan Salameh, a wealthy playboy — he resembled the comeback-period Elvis — who was Arafat’s intelligence chief and heir apparent. Ames arranged a clandestine meeting with Salameh in 1970 and told him, in the author’s paraphrase: “You Arabs claim your views are not heard in Washington. Here is your chance. The president of the United States is listening.”

He was stretching the truth, to some degree. But the delicateness of this relationship is hard to exaggerate. The P.L.O. was viewed as a terrorist organization, and official political contacts with its members were prohibited. Later in the decade, Andrew Young, ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, would resign after it was discovered he’d met in New York with the chief of the P.L.O. mission.

Mr. Bird is excellent on the odd couple that Ames and Salameh made. Ames was criticized by some in the C.I.A. for not officially recruiting Salameh as a spy. But Ames felt he was more useful merely as a source.

Salameh had links to the organization behind the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and in 1979 he was assassinated by the Mossad. An American clandestine officer says here about relationships like Ames and Salameh’s: “You sup with the devil, but you use a long spoon.” Mr. Bird, though, shows Salameh to be a complicated and often sympathetic figure, one impossible to reduce to the term terrorist.

Ames ultimately moved with his family back to Virginia and became a high-level Middle East analyst for the C.I.A. He was consumed by the hostage crisis in Iran, and was involved in the development of the botched Desert One rescue mission that helped sink President Carter’s hopes for a second term.

During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the C.I.A. director William Casey relied on Ames for “all things Middle Eastern,” Mr. Bird writes. Ames regularly briefed Reagan; he was, Mr. Bird says, the C.I.A.’s “Mr. Middle East.”

“The Good Spy” provides a fresh and grainy view of the rise of organizations like Hezbollah, and of figures like Osama bin Laden. It allows us to meet in Ames a quiet but strong personality, a man whose fundamental decency allowed him to see both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict clearly.

Ames could have sold out and made millions by working for an American oil company. He had offers. His moral compass was too strong. His life and work deserve to be better known.

The Good Spy is a fascinating look at just how hard it actually is, to be a good spy. The most fascinating aspect of it may have been the hard stance the author took on Israel. We are so used to the United States always backing Israel and considering the Arabs to be nothing but bloodthirsty terrorist. But Bob Ames was able to form strong relationships, even friendships, with high ranking members of the PLO. Ames was convinced that the PLO wanted to reach some kind of peace accord with Israel. But Israel always took a hard stance and seemed unwilling to make any concessions. And I have to say I was quite surprised to read of just how harsh the Israeli Mossad could be when seeking out vengeance against the PLO. Talk about ruthless. The Mossad often crossed the line and were downright brutal, often killing innocent people along with their intended victims.The hardest part about reading this book was detailed account of how, Ames despite all his efforts to achieve peace in The Middle East, was himself a victim of yet another act of senseless terrorism. ( )

Fascinating book, it was very hard to put down. This is a biography of Robert Ames, a CIA operative but it is also a story of the Middle East during the 1970s, 1980s. Very sad to read in one part due to the tragic death of Robert Ames but also due to the failure of the parties involved to seize any of the opportunities presented to them for a just solution to the problems of the Palestinians. Highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about the Middle East during this period, but also to learn how the consequences of these failures brought about the rise of Islamic Fundamentalists and eventually the events of 9/11. ( )

Bird accomplishes the impressive yet dubious feat of writing the dullest book about spies I have ever read. Spies and their exploits, fictional or otherwise, are endlessly fascinating to me. But not the ones depicted in this book. It was well written enough I suppose, but the level of engagement the book fosters is minimal. One of the main hurdles the author is unable to overcome is the utter blandness of Robert Ames the man. We are told about a hundred times that he likes basketball. That is about the extent of the personality. For me the book was an air ball. ( )

Books about Israeli-Palestinian strife are way down on my list of interests. However, this was a book about a CIA agent who, while unknown to the world, was a major player in Middle Eastern politics for a while, so I was mildly interested.

It’s possible this book may incite some strong feelings for those who dear care about those politics.

For the record, my own biases are that Israel has way too much influence in American affairs. It is not the 51st state. It has not been a staunch ally. It is capable of taking care of itself. On the other hand, I really don’t care what Israel does with their Palestinian or Arab neighbors. The necessity for America to insert itself in this conflict is non-existent in a post-Cold War era where America produces so much of its own oil.

Robert Ames, a CIA employee from 1960 to his violent death on April 18, 1983 when the United States embassy in Lebanon was bombed, was not a neutral in that conflict. He sympathized with the Palestinians. He was a romantic Arabist, a lover of the Arab street though, in his later days, he did empathize with Israeli concerns too.

The book starts on September 13, 1993 with Ames’ CIA colleagues going to his grave as a peace accord is about to be signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat at the White House. They privately tell some CIA young recruits that Ames made that moment possible. But, as the book notes, that, like every other attempt at settling the Israeli-Palestinian question, came to naught.

Bird seems to think the effort was worthwhile. Yet, it has still come to nothing. It’s hard to think that this book is not the story of an unusually talented agent who devoted his career to a futile cause. Bird acknowledges that possibility by quoting others.

I must say that, especially for someone who is not very interested in the background to this story, Bird makes Ames’ story compelling. Bird received absolutely no help from the CIA with this biography, but Ames’ former colleagues (many on record but a few hiding behind italicized pseudonyms) as well as Mossad agents, Palestinians, and Lebanese were happy to co-operate with Bird. And Bird doesn’t just quote those who agreed with Ames but those critical of him too. An amazing amount of detail was put together to provide a picture of Ames on and off duty.

Additionally, there is an unusual connection between Bird and Ames. Bird, as a young boy, met Ames when he posted to Saudi Arabia where Bird’s father served as a Foreign Service officer. To Bird, he was a handsome, affable man always happy to play basketball with the American kids, and Ames’ wife was friends with Bird’s mother. (Bird, of course, did not know until years later that Ames was not a Foreign Service officer but a CIA agent under diplomatic cover).

Ames career eventually took him from an agent in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to a senior analyst to a man who had input in President Reagan’s speeches on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and U.S. attempts at a peace process. He became an intelligence agent who self-consciously tried to influence policy, generally considered bad practice. Director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, did not think highly of CIA field agents – in fact he fired many, but he regarded Ames highly and helped in his promotion.

Ames interest in Arab matters started with his posting, in 1951 as an Army serviceman to the highlands of Ethiopia at a CIA listening post. He started to teach himself the language. After he joined the CIA, he loved to drive around and talk with Bedouin and street Arabs. It sharpened his language skills and knowledge of Arab history and cultures. He genuinely sympathized with what he considered the Arab world’s struggle against colonialism, and he considered Israel as a colonizer. An example of what that attitude and knowledge is shown when he quashed a rumor that Russian pilots were flying planes over North Yemen planes in a civil war. After all, a body recovered from a crash had red hair according to report. Ames bluntly pointed out the pilot was an Arab returned from the haj, his hair colored with henna, a frequent occurrence in returning pilgrims.

Ames never really recruited many agents – many CIA case officers never recruit foreign agents. Ames had sources, many sources, whom he genuinely liked, but they weren’t formal agents.

The most significant of these in Lebanon was Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh was a high ranking member of the PLO, closely tied to Arafat, and Ames knew he was involved in several acts of international terrorism though there is some dispute whether he was involved in the Black September terrorist operation at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Essentially, Salameh was an unacknowledged diplomatic channel from the U.S. government, starting with the Nixon administration, to the PLO. The CIA tried to recruit Salameh who always refused. He was willing to pass information and frank statements about PLO policies and goals, but he would not be bought off.

The Mossad operation to kill Salameh for his alleged part in the Munich Olympics incident resulted in the death of an innocent waiter in Norway and ended the revenge operation by Israel. However, after the CIA failed to explicitly list him as a US asset, the Mossad did get Salameh – and his driver, two bodyguards, a British secretary, a German nun, and two Lebanese bystanders – on November 22, 1979 with a car bomb. (Detonated by Erika Chambers, a British citizen, who was chosen because she didn’t delay – due to moral or psychological reasons or simply better reaction times isn’t clear– pushing the button unlike the men the Mossad tested.)

The book is full of violence: kidnappings, public executions, assassinations, suicide bombers, massacres in refugee camps, and good old-fashioned conventional warfare. However, Bird doesn’t dwell too much on the gory details except a detailed accounting of the bombing that killed Ames and 62 other people. It is clear is Bird is interested in memorializing the career of a man he knew briefly and providing some comfort to the Ames family.

Personally, I was interested for the background to news stories I heard in my youth.

While he doesn’t overstress it, Bird points out the moral and personal ambiguities of espionage. Did Ames become too friendly to those who supplied him information? Did he empathize too much with men he knew to be terrorists and with the Arabs in general?

Espionage involves dealing with bad people. Ames wasn’t under illusions about who he was dealing with in the PLO – though he probably was too incredulous in believing the PLO’s claim they would recognize Israel’s right to exist as anything more than a temporary concession.

Epitomizing that truth is that Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian intelligence agent that planned the bombing that killed Ames, ended up coming to America, the guest of the CIA. ( )