The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

5/5 stars

Robert Ames was a CIA agent who developed the United States' first unofficial contacts with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the early 1970s. Dealing with PLO was effectively illegal at that time, following a promise made by Nixon and Kissinger to the Israelis that would not recognize any independent Palestinian political actor. Ames pressed ahead regardless, motivated by the sensible belief that the Palestinians were a basic reality of the region who could not simply be wished away. Only by talking to them and developing connections could a negotiated peace to the larger conflict that began with the creation of the State of Israel be achieved. This book is the story of Ames life and career, during a time when the U.S. began to lose in its innocence in the Arab world.

The popular, negative image of CIA agents tends to a reflect an idea of them as ruthless and conniving sociopaths, or, post-9/11, as hands-on murderers and torturers. Unsurprisingly, the reality is far more complex. No one embodied that complexity better than Ames. A trained Arabist, during military postings in the region as a young man he developed a genuine love for the culture, people, and history of the Middle East. He was emotionally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and even wrote a poem in his diary eulogizing Nasser upon his death. Ames spent years living in the region and found that he sincerely liked the people and empathized with their perspective. He also had the old-school American curiosity about foreign cultures that has since been replaced today by a more judgemental cultural absolutism.

Ames slowly became a well-known figure in political circles in the region. Through a well-connected Lebanese Shia friend, Mustafa Zein, in 1970 he got to know and befriend a Palestinian militant named Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh was a young lieutenant of Yasser Arafat who had become notorious to the Israelis for his alleged role as a commander in the Black September terrorist organization. Salameh would become a source, though not an agent for Ames, serving effectively as the PLO's liason with the CIA. As Ames continued to rise in the ranks of the CIA his views he became more of an influence on policymakers, including at the presidential level, who for the first time started to acknowledge the need for a political solution to the Palestinian problem. Ames was also a channel for Palestinian views to the U.S. Incredibly, thanks to his efforts with Salameh and later Arafat, the PLO also became the local security guarantors for Americans in the Middle East through its Force 17 commando unit at a time when they were officially listed as a terrorist organization.

The Palestinians knew even back then that a political solution was the only way to end the conflict with Israel. They used asymmetrical warfare and acts of terrorism against Israelis as a means of putting their problem back on the international agenda. It is really curious to remember, but that at that time the Israelis simply did not acknowledge Palestinians as having political agency or even existing as a people. Golda Meir went so far as to state the latter as a fact publicly. Israel also prized its special relationship with the U.S. and was hostile to the idea of Palestinians and Americans talking separately. Many Palestinians were assassinated in Europe and elsewhere when it was felt that they had made too many inroads to Western audiences. The Mossad knew about the channel between Ames and Salameh and did not like it. Salameh was already on their hit-list for his past role in Black September. In 1979, the Mossad carried out a car bomb assassination in Beirut that killed him along with several civilians as he drove down a commercial street. For Ames, the loss was personal. Salameh was a prized source, but also somewhat of a friend whom he brought on several trips to the U.S. His death was also a blow to the U.S., who lost the man who represented its major political inroad to the PLO. Despite that, American ties with the Palestinians continued to grow and mature from the seed that Ames had planted.

This book draws a lot from Ames personal diaries, as well as interviews with former CIA officials, foreign intelligence agents, and Ames own agents and sources in the Middle East. His early years show him as an idealistic young man who had wholesome desires to raise a family and make the world a better place. As time goes on the narrative becomes less about him and more about the chaos into which the region that he loved was devolving – with the U.S. drawn in as a belligerent due its relationship with a military aggressive Israel. Ames would not survive this maelstrom. In 1983, during the Lebanese civil war, he was killed in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut by a precursor to the Shia militant group Hezbollah. Lebanon at the time was adrift in savage violence between militia warlords, Palestinian resistance groups, and the Israel military. The U.S. was seen as tied to the Israelis and in the eyes of the locals shared the blame for their acts. Ames died in the embassy bombing along with dozens of other American and Lebanese citizens. It was the end of a life spent serving the United States interests in the Middle East, but also of someone who genuinely wanted to make the region better for its people. In a dark irony, one of the men believed responsible for organizing the attack that killed Ames, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander named Ali Reza Asghari, defected to the United States in 2007. He became a valuable U.S. intelligence source and is believed to still live there today.

This book is the story of a political and personal tragedy, but also a lesson in the irreducible moral complexity of the world. On top of all that it also happens to be a great education about the period of Middle Eastern history that led up to our own time, and which has largely slipped from public memory. Robert Ames really was a good spy, both in the sense of competence at his job but also in terms of his general motivations. The Middle East has changed a lot since the time that he first fell in love with it, and so has the United States.