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The Good Spy is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird's compelling portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most important operatives in CIA history - a man who, had he lived, might have helped heal the rift between Arabs and the West.
On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a geopolitical turning point. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America's most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East - CIA operative Robert Ames. What set Ames apart from his peers was his extraordinary ability to form deep, meaningful connections with key Arab intelligence figures. Some operatives relied on threats and subterfuge, but Ames worked by building friendships and emphasizing shared values - never more notably than with Yasir Arafat's charismatic intelligence chief and heir apparent Ali Hassan Salameh (aka "The Red Prince"). Ames' deepening relationship with Salameh held the potential for a lasting peace. Within a few years, though, both men were killed by assassins, and America's relations with the Arab world began heading down a path that culminated in 9/11, the War on Terror, and the current fog of mistrust.
Bird, who as a child lived in the Beirut Embassy and knew Ames as a neighbor when he was twelve years old, spent years researching The Good Spy. Not only does the book draw on hours of interviews with Ames' widow, and quotes from hundreds of Ames' private letters, it's woven from interviews with scores of current and former American, Israeli, and Palestinian intelligence officers as well as other players in the Middle East "Great Game."
What emerges is a masterpiece-level narrative of the making of a CIA officer, a uniquely insightful history of twentieth-century conflict in the Middle East, and an absorbing hour-by-hour account of the Beirut Embassy bombing. Even more impressive, Bird draws on his reporter's skills to deliver a full dossier on the bombers and expose the shocking truth of where the attack's mastermind resides today.
Rezensionen (4)
Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
More exciting than le Carre's George Smiley or Fleming's James Bond, Bird (Crossing Mandelbaum Gate) recreates the life of C.I.A. superspy Robert Ames, an operative with a skill for appreciating the turns and twists of Mideast politics. Ames, a detail-oriented, Philadelphia-bred scholar, was offered a job by the Agency as a junior officer in 1960, rising quickly through the ranks. Later, one colleague said Ames "would have stood tall in his All American shoes [cowboy boots] as a Louis L'Amour hero." Whatever the assignment-Beirut, Aden, Asmara, Kuwait-Ames cultivated key Arab sources, befriending such unlikely personalities as Mustafa Zein, a strategic advisor to the ruling sheik of Abu Dhabi, and Ali Hassan Salameh, a favorite of Yasir Arafat, through such flashpoints as the Jordanian civil war, the Munich massacre, and the Iran hostage crisis. Although Ames was an essential player in the 1977 Camp David accords, the C.I.A. Mideast expert with so much potential to unify the opposing factions died in a 1983 bomb explosion outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut, setting back the process of reconciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians. Bird's meticulous account of Ames's career amid an ongoing Mideast climate of caution and suspicion is one of the best books on American intelligence community. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books-Rezension
WHEN DEVOURING THIS THRILLER about Kim Philby, the high-level British spymaster who turned out to be a Russian mole, I had to keep reminding myself that it was not a novel. It reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming or John le Carré, all of whom make appearances, leavened by a dollop of P.G. Wodehouse. But, in fact, "A Spy Among Friends" is a solidly researched true story. The London journalist Ben Macintyre, who has written nine previous histories chronicling intrigue and skulduggery, takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era. And like one of his raffish characters relaxing around the bar at White's, that venerable clubhouse of England's old boys' network, he is able to play the role of an amusing raconteur who can cloak psychological and sociological insights with dry humor. The story of Philby and his fellow Cambridge University double agents has been told many times, most notably by Phillip Knightley and Anthony Cave Brown, as well as by Philby himself and two of his four wives. Macintyre, who draws on these and other published sources, was not able to pry open any archives or uncover startling new revelations. Instead, he came up with a captivating framing device: telling the tale through Philby's relationship with Nicholas Elliott, a fellow Cambridge-educated spy who was, or thought he was, Philby's trusted friend. In doing so Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship: Why does it exist, what causes people to seek it and how do we know when it's real? The world of upper-crust young Englishmen provides a rugged yet rewarding terrain for such an exploration. Taught on the playing fields of Eton to shield themselves from vulnerability, they mask their feelings for one another with jokes, cricket-watching, drinking and "a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty." Macintyre also takes on a related subject: the tribal loyalties of the inbred social class, on the fraying fringe of Britain's aristocracy, that nurtured such friendships, both real and feigned, and created the boys' club that populated its foreign, colonial and intelligence services. Members harbored, Macintyre writes, "a shared set of assumptions about the world and their privileged place in it." While watching the races at Ascot one day, Nick Elliott mentioned to a diplomat friend of his father, who was the headmaster of Eton, that he would like to be a spy. "I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy," the diplomat replied, and Elliott was soon ensconced at MI6, Britain's counterpart to the C.I.A. Kim Philby had the same desire, and he was recommended by the deputy head of MI6, Valentine Vivian, who had served as a colonial official with Philby's father. Even though the younger Philby had dabbled in Communist circles while at Cambridge, there was little vetting other than Vivian's asking Philby's father about it over drinks at their club. "Oh, that was all schoolboy nonsense," the elder Philby replied. So Vivian had him hired. "I was asked about him and said I knew his people." Elliott not only became Philby's friend, he began to worship him "with a powerful male adoration that was unrequited, unsexual and unstated." He even bought the same expensive umbrella that Philby liked to sport. What he did not know was that Philby was a double agent working for Russia. That meant he had a different angle on their friendship. "Nicholas Elliott was a rising star in the service and a valued friend," Macintyre writes, "and no one understood the value of friendship better than Kim Philby." One of us. That was Philby's deep cover, and Macintyre recounts in ways both amusing and appalling how powerful a cover it was. Even as his betrayals doomed colleagues and potential Soviet defectors to their deaths, no one in his circle suspected him, and he rose to be MI6's Washington-based liaison with the C.I.A. There he became friends, in the Philbyesque sense of that word, with another excessively fascinating character in this book, James Jesus Angleton, who was rising in the ranks of the C.I.A. "Angleton was a little like one of the rare orchids he would later cultivate," Macintyre writes, "alluring to some but faintly sinister to those who preferred simpler flora." He was obsessed with rooting out spies and moles, but he missed the biggest one in his midst, indeed became enamored of him. Just as Elliott took to carrying around the same umbrella as Philby, Angleton wore the same homburg hat. Like almost every character in this book, Philby and Angleton were ferocious and competitive drinkers. They would meet at a clublike Washington saloon and oyster bar, Harvey's, and match each other drink for drink. As they exchanged confidences, Angleton was at a deadly disadvantage: He didn't know that Philby wasn't on his team. An undercurrent of Macintyre's book is the sense that, for those living a duplicitous life, alcohol was a tool of the trade and a psychological necessity. Philby's Cambridge colleagues in the ring of Russian double agents, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, were also world-class drinkers. At one point a drunken Maclean, then in Cairo, smashed up the apartment of two embassy secretaries and ripped up their underwear. Yet he was soon promoted to head the American desk at the British Foreign Office. "Even drunken, unhinged knicker shredding, it seemed, was no bar to advancement in the British diplomatic service if one was the 'right sort,'" Macintyre writes. Through decrypted Russian messages, the British finally discovered, in 1951, that Maclean was a spy. Among the first people MI6 informed was Philby, its top man in Washington. Philby dispatched Burgess, who happened to be living with him as a houseguest, back to England to warn Maclean. They both quickly defected to Moscow. Though Philby was able to feign shock when told the news, his closeness to the Cambridge defectors finally made him a target of suspicion. Once again, class lines were drawn. The old boys' network of MI6, led by Elliott, rallied to Philby's defense. But MI5, the British domestic service akin to the F.B.I., was filled with rough-and-tumble cops and constables who did not have the same reverence for toffs whose parents had known one another at Eton. The evidence against Philby was circumstantial and not enough to have him arrested, but he was quietly eased out of the intelligence ranks. It was amazing that Philby had risen so far and been undetected for so long. But in 1954 something even more astonishing happened. His connections began a quiet campaign to rehabilitate him. It was led by Elliott and Angleton, who that year became chief of the C.I.A.'s counterintelligence division. Philby held a press conference to deny that he had been a spy. When Edwin Newman of NBC asked about his friendship with Burgess, Philby gave his one honest answer: "On the subject of friendship, I'd prefer to say as little as possible, because it's very complicated." Philby was allowed to return to the fold of MI6, albeit as a lower-level agent, and was sent to spy-infested Beirut under the cover of being a journalist. He was soon reunited with Elliott, who became MI6's station chief there. "Kim Philby's return to British intelligence displayed the old boys' network running at its smoothest: A word in an ear, a nod, a drink with one of the chaps at the club and the machinery kicked in." Just as smoothly, Philby also resumed being a double agent serving Moscow. Why did Philby betray his country, club mates, class and friends? He later insisted that it was because of his higher loyalty to the Communist ideal. "I left the university with the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism," he said. Yet there's no evidence that Philby ever read Marx, had any interest in ideology or harbored burning sympathies for the plight of exploited classes. Macintyre emphasizes a more psychological factor: "Philby enjoyed deception. Like secrecy, the erotic charge of infidelity can be hard to renounce." That thrill seemed to be ingrained at an early age. "Philby tasted the drug of deception as a youth and remained addicted to infidelity for the rest of his life." Underlying this explanation was a deep-seated urge familiar to many biographers: a desire to come to terms with a father. St. John Philby, an adventurous colonial service officer who helped both the British intelligence services and the Saudi king navigate the murky politics of the Middle East, "was a man who regarded his opinions, however briefly adopted, as revealed truth." In 1960, on his way back to Saudi Arabia from England, where he had gone to watch a Lord's cricket test match, he stopped in Beirut to visit his son. Elliott threw a drunken lunch party for the Philbys and friends. St. John Philby, Elliott later wrote, "left at teatime, had a nap, made a pass at the wife of a member of the embassy staff in a nightclub, had a heart attack and died." His last words were, "God, I'm bored." Kim Philby buried his father (who had become a Muslim) with full Islamic rites, then went on a drinking binge that lasted for days. Philby's mooring began to slip after his father's death and, inevitably, his past caught up with him again. By 1962, enough evidence had accumulated that even Elliott became convinced his friend was a mole. He insisted that he be the one allowed to confront Philby and try to extract a confession. "Inside he was crushed," Macintyre writes. "He wanted to look Philby in the eye one last time. He wanted to understand." Macintyre's book climaxes with a psychological duel over tea, cloaked by a veneer of gentility, which led to some subsequent meetings and a partial confession from Philby. But instead of arranging an arrest or abduction or assassination, Elliott told his erstwhile friend that he was going to Africa for a few days before the process of interrogation resumed. On his own in Beirut, Philby immediately contacted his Russian handlers, who whisked him on a freighter to Moscow, where he lived the rest of his life in exile. Why did Elliott let Philby escape? At first it seemed as if he and the British intelligence service were bumbling fools. But Macintyre offers a different theory, one made plausible by his book's narrative. After extracting Philby's confession, Elliott may have intentionally left the door open for him to flee. Perhaps he even nudged him to do so. The old boys' network had nothing to gain from further revelations or a public trial. It also probably had no stomach for punishing one of its own. At first Philby reveled in the fact that he had escaped. It was only after a few months in Moscow that it dawned on him that he may have been pushed. He smuggled Elliott a letter suggesting that they secretly meet in a place like Helsinki to clear things up. "Our last transactions were so strange that I cannot help thinking that perhaps you wanted me to do a fade." Elliott rejected him with a cold, blunt response. One new piece of evidence comes from the former spy John le Carré, who tackled the Philby case in his novel "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." Le Carré interviewed Elliott in 1986 and resurrected his notes to write an afterword for this book. He asked Elliott whether he and his MI6 colleagues ever considered having Philby dragooned back to London. "Nobody wanted him in London, old boy," Elliott replied. Le Carré followed up: "Could you have him killed?" To that Elliott gave a disapproving response. "My dear chap," he said. "One of us." That neatly encapsulates the underlying theme of this book, one Macintyre explores with both insight and humor. What does it really mean to be "one of us"? Even as Philby's betrayals doomed colleagues to their deaths, no one in his circle suspected him. WALTER ISAACSON, chief executive of the Aspen Institute, has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. His latest book, to be published in October, is "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution." By Mark Mazzetti THE GOOD SPY The Life and Death of Robert Ames By Kai Bird Illustrated. 430 pp. Crown Publishers. $26. GOOD HUNTING An American Spymaster's Story By Jack Devine with Vernon Loeb Illustrated. 324 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/FSG. $27. BEFORE THE DEAD ENDS and the false dawns, before the latest revenge killings and Secretary of State John Kerry's quixotic shuttle diplomacy, there were people who believed that a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible. One of them was a quiet American named Robert Ames, the subject of Kai Bird's textured and absorbing book "The Good Spy." Ames was not only a spy but, as the title says, a good one. However, what exactly does that mean? He recruited few significant foreign agents to work for the C.I.A., falling short in what some inside the spy agency consider the true measure of a clandestine officer. The mission to which he devoted the bulk of his energies - maneuvering in the shadows to broker a Middle East peace deal - is, shall we say, unfinished. Instead, as Bird artfully demonstrates, Ames was a good spy because he was a good listener, and "he listened with a plain sense of human empathy." During the 1960s and 70s, the Robert Ames Listening Tour played in Dhahran, Beirut, Sana, Tehran and other lesser cities throughout the Middle East. Ames died in 1983, along with 62 others, when a truck filled with explosives slammed into the American Embassy in Beirut. Bird, the son of a Foreign Service officer who as a child was Ames's neighbor in Dharan, has made a career writing impressively about American diplomatic history; he is also the co-author, with Martin J. Sherwin, of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But a biographer's skills are tested when the material is thin, as seems to be the case with Ames's early life in a working-class section of Philadelphia, which Bird sketches with generalities and clichés. The reader learns that Ames was a "steady, solid character" and a "serious young man." On the basketball court he was "always a team player." By the end of the first chapter, I feared I was embarking on an account of Beaver Cleaver's adventures in Arabia. But the book quickly becomes a rich, nuanced portrait of a man who, in the C.I.A.'s term, had "a high tolerance for ambiguity." It is this trait that led Ames to develop a deep relationship - even a friendship - with Ali Hassan Salameh, the P.L.O.'s jet-setting, womanizing intelligence chief, whom the Israelis called "the Red Prince." That relationship forms the narrative spine of much of the book, and Bird's patient, detailed exposition of how the two men came to rely on each other is one of the best accounts we have of how espionage really works. It was a thorny arrangement. Salameh had a role in terrorist attacks launched by Black September, the Palestinian group most famous for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the Mossad believed Salameh himself was a chief planner of the operation. Bird says the evidence tying Salameh to Munich is murky, but Salameh was certainly involved in other Black September operations. "You sup with the Devil," one spy put it, "but you use a long spoon." Ames saw an opportunity for a back channel to Yasir Arafat, and hoped that the secret relationship might help nudge the P.L.O. toward a deal with the Israelis. Salameh never went on the C.I.A.'s payroll, refusing to become an official "agent" for the spy service. Bird recounts how this led to grumbling inside the C.I.A. that Ames had difficulty closing the deal, but Ames knew that Salameh would consider it a betrayal to his cause to take money from Americans. Yet this also left Salameh unprotected. When the Mossad asked the C.I.A. whether Salameh was an American agent, Langley faced a dilemma. If the answer was yes, the Mossad would have spared Salameh's life. But the Israelis would also have demanded that the Americans share the intelligence Salameh was providing. The C.I.A. said nothing, and Salameh was killed in early 1979 in Beirut when a Mossad officer detonated a bomb hidden inside a Volkswagen. Ames met his end four years later, an event that Bird recounts in heartbreaking detail. He sifts through the evidence in an attempt to determine who bore responsibility for the bombing, a case that for the most part remains unsolved, but ends on a curious note: Bird believes that a commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Ali Reza Asgari, played a central role in the bombing, and that Asgari may have later cut a deal with the C.I.A. to give up intelligence about Iran's nuclear program. Bird says that Asgari is now living in the United States. The C.I.A. has denied this assertion, but Bird has done a solid job investigating the episode. The puzzling part is that Bird clearly wants the reader to feel outrage that the C.I.A. may have brokered a deal with someone who had American blood on his hands - at the end of a book about a man who understood that such deals are part of the spying game. Nobody's hands are clean - and nobody knew that better than Robert Ames. SOME MONTHS BEFORE Ames's death, the C.I.A. had begun planning to escalate a secret operation in a different corner of the Muslim world, the effort to arm rebel fighters to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan. What had originally been envisioned as low-grade harassment would grow to be the largest covert action of the Cold War, and contributed to thousands of Soviet military deaths. Not long after Jack Devine took over the C.I.A.'s Afghan Task Force, in early 1986, the Reagan administration decided to introduce a powerful new weapon into the conflict: American Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Soviet helicopter gunships. In "Good Hunting," Devine spins some fascinating yarns about his time running the covert Afghan war, from negotiating with the Pentagon for the Stingers to haggling over the price of AK-47s with Egyptian officials to buying mules from the Chinese. He also devotes considerable attention to his involvement in the story of Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer turned Soviet spy with whom he crossed paths frequently throughout his career. The interactions between the two men over several decades illuminate how the C.I.A. has always been a small, closed society. But the book suffers from the same problems that cripple so many spy memoirs. First, there's the empty bragging. The chapter that recounts Devine's ascent to a leadership job at Langley is titled "Raising the Bar," and the book is marbled with phrases like "It's fair to say I can put a tail on someone just about anywhere in the world faster than most spy agencies," and "My job was to make decisions, and the consequences were always significant, so the pressure was high." Then there's Devine's depiction of nearly every C.I.A. officer he ever worked with as bright, resourceful and patriotic. In the author's telling, the C.I.A. is Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average and there's scarcely a dolt in the entire organization. Like many former spies, Devine is critical of intelligence reforms implemented after the 9/11 attacks, including the creation of a director of national intelligence - which Devine laments has "diminished" the C.I.A.'s role. That certainly was the concern at Langley when the position was created in 2005, but the opposite has occurred. The C.I.A. has only gained in power and influence, especially during the Obama administration. The spy agency is now in charge of America's many secret wars abroad. Just ask John Brennan, President Obama's top White House counterterrorism adviser during the first term, who has had his pick of assignments in the second term. He's now running the show at Langley. MARK MAZZETTI, a national security reporter for The Times, is the author of "The Way of the Knife : The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth."
Choice-Rezension
The life of CIA officer Ames provides the entrée to an important broader story. With remarkable detail, it gives insight into the daily life and career of a member of the clandestine services at a time when the US was developing its relations with the Arab world. It shows what one man can and cannot do to shift the organizational culture of a closed agency, while attempting to educate decision makers who often do not understand or care about the complexities of the region. It is a story of how one person can build bridges with adversaries without being co-opted by them, for example, opening doors with Palestinian leaders that helped to promote the peace process. It is a story of how the decisions made by the US and Israel helped to lead to Hezbollah and the radicalization of the Shias. While hardly a complete history of the region, this ground's-eye view told through the life of a significant participant provides rare perspective. --Daniel McIntosh, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Library Journal-Rezension
Starred Review. From the late 1960s until his death in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, CIA operative Robert Ames held increasingly influential posts in the Middle East and Washington. An ardent and accomplished Arabist, he was particularly skilled at forming valuable and trusting relationships among major intelligence figures, most notably with Ali Hassan Salameh, Yasir Arafat's intelligence chief, who may have been the mastermind behind the 1972 Olympic murders in Munich. This particular relationship opened what was effectively a back door for American contacts with the PLO. Incorporating personal letters and interviews with covert coworkers, Bird (Divided City) here writes a book that is half biography and half espionage thriller, offering fascinating insights into the murky world of spycraft and the vagaries of Middle Eastern diplomacy under four presidents. It is also a tale of a devoted family man working to avert often pointless internecine conflict and of missed opportunities for peace. The narration by veteran actor Rene Ruiz is clear and engaging. VERDICT Highly recommended for students of the Middle East and late 20th-century history. ["This is a moving biography within a balanced presentation of the complex diplomacy over the Palestinian quest for statehood and the Israeli need for security, complicated by a disintegrating Lebanon and a revolutionary Iran," read the starred review of the Crown hc, LJ 3/1/14.]-Forrest E. Link, Coll. of New Jersey, Ewing Twp. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
