The Foreign Service Journal, October 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2014 69 A Unique View of the Middle East e Good Spy: e Life and Death of Robert Ames Kai Bird, Crown Publishers, 2014, $26.00, hardcover, 430 pages. R Á S After winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 2005 biography of J. Robert Oppen- heimer, American Prometheus , author Kai Bird turns his attention to a much less known but no less worthy subject: CIA agent and Middle East hand Robert Ames. Bird, the son of a For- eign Service o cer, paints a vivid picture of Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and the wider Middle East during the tumultu- ous years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. He also provides a truly excellent primer on the early years of the Palestinian struggle for independence, going into the world of Fatah and Black September in great detail. Bob Ames grew up in Philadelphia and played basketball at La Salle University; he was on the team that took the NCAA championship in 1954. Following a stint in the Army—he was a member of the Signal Corps in what is now Eritrea—he took and failed the Foreign Service exam and then applied to the Central Intelli- gence Agency, into which he was quickly accepted. He proved himself a gifted intelligence o cer and chose to specialize in the Middle East, which at the time was not a highly sought-after area. His rst CIA posting was to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where his cover was that of a commercial o cer in the Foreign Service. Bird—whose father was posted in Dhahran during this same period— describes life in a small desert post won- derfully, and includes a highly amusing vignette in which Ames and Vice Consul (and later Ambassador) Patrick eros y to Bahrain, where eros’ duty was to bring back a suitcase full of alcohol into dry Saudi Arabia. is did not go o without a hitch. Following his years in Dhahran, Ames had a succession of postings in the Middle East—Aden, in what was then South Yemen, Beirut, Tehran— as well as back in Washington, D.C. It was during this period that Ames exhibited his enviable ability to make friends in the Middle East, and often turn those friends into uno cial sources for the CIA. His uent Arabic and deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history helped tremendously. It was during his years in Beirut that he became embroiled in the Israel-Palestine issue, and got to know two individuals who would change his life: Mustafa Zein and Ali Hassan Salameh. rough them he gained unparalleled insight into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Pales- tine and the creation of Black September. e latter was responsible for such atroci- ties as the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the 1973 killings of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Deputy Chief of Mission George Curtis Moore in Khartoum. Ames’s relationship with Salameh opened a window into this world and cre- ated a back channel that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger never acknowleded publicly. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Ames’ career had some successes and some setbacks. A great success was the PFLP’s promise to not target Americans as long as the back channel remained open and the U.S. provided some support to the Palestinian cause. ose who know this period in the history of the Middle East are aware that Salameh was assassinated in 1979; Mossad is believed to have been responsible. e book’s subtitle gives away the fate of Bob Ames. He was among the 63 people killed in the terrorist attack on Embassy Beirut in April 1983. e life of a “good spy” ended at the age of 49. He was survived by his wife Yvonne and six children. Bird is a master storyteller, and eshes out a large swath of recent history through Ames’ life. A fascinating protagonist, almost a Forrest Gump of the intelligence world, Ames is seemingly involved in every consequential event of the Middle East during that period. e narrative is heightened by Bird’s meticulous and prodigious research, and his access to an astonishing number of people who knew Bob Ames personally and professionally. Foreign Service readers will enjoy cameos of a large number of individuals from the diplomatic community: Hume Horan, Patrick eros, Steve Buck, Frank Carlucci, Ryan Crocker, John Gunther Dean, Herman Eilts, Harriet Isom, Bruce Laingen and Henry Precht are among those who make an appearance. Bird is sympathetic to his subject— perhaps slightly too sympathetic—and is muted on criticism of the CIA’s question- able dealings with unsavory characters and the agency’s uid allegiances to the various sides of an issue. But there is no denying the power of the story, which is only enhanced by the fact that it is true. n Ásgeir Sigfússon is AFSA’s director of new media.