Free The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird

from the members of the wounded man’s family—and the National Guard troops began to finger their rifles. At this point, Ames calmly turned to Theros and said, “I think we should leave.” They turned and walked quickly up an alley away from the square. A moment later, they heard a single shot. A National Guard officer had stepped forward and killed the wounded murderer with a shot to the head. Theros remembers how unemotional and nonjudgmental Ames was in the wake of witnessing such a grisly event. Bob was cool. This was just the way justice was handed out in Arabia.
    Theros saw a lot of Ames during his stint in Dhahran. Saudi Arabia was Theros’s first posting abroad as a newly minted Foreign Service officer. He knew Ames was CIA because that was how he’d been introducedat the consulate’s weekly country team meetings. It was a very small post and everyone knew everyone else’s brief. Theros was stamping visas. But Theros and Ames were the only two consulate officers who regularly traveled to Bahrain and the Trucial sheikhdoms to the south. Ames flew to Bahrain frequently to liaise with his counterparts in British intelligence. So sometimes he and Theros flew together. It regularly fell to Theros, as a lowly vice-consul, to make the run to Bahrain, where he would buy a suitcase full of Ballantine whiskey and smuggle it into “dry” Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities at Dhahran airport knew full well that Theros was bringing in the consulate’s monthly stash of booze, but they’d been instructed to ignore this diplomatic smuggling.
    In the summer of 1965, Theros was asked to make another booze run to Bahrain and bring back an extra-large shipment of Ballantine for the consulate’s Fourth of July party. After the landing in Dhahran, a Saudi porter picked up the heavy bag before Theros could grab it—and the porter promptly dropped it. The sound of broken glass echoed through the terminal, and the whiff of alcohol left no doubt about what had happened. Theros was told to leave the bag and return late that night when the terminal would be largely empty. Theros was only five feet eight inches tall and weighed a mere 165 pounds. Thinking he could use someone with more brawn, he persuaded Ames to assist him. They arrived at about 10:00 P.M. and found the suspicious bag hidden away in a storage room. “Bob was a muscular fellow and weighed over two hundred pounds,” recalled Theros. “So he grabbed the bag and swung it over his shoulder—and then suddenly dropped it. He had thrown his back out. I’m afraid this was the source of his persistent back pain in the years to come.”
    Despite this unfortunate injury, Ames and Theros became good friends. “Bob tended to see humor in every situation—however bad,” Theros recalled. Bob and Yvonne didn’t socialize much in their home, which was rapidly becoming a nursery. On June 13, 1963, Yvonne gave birth to a new baby girl, Adrienne. She was born in the local hospital in Al-Khobar, a very rudimentary town a few miles away fromthe consulate compound. And just a year later, Yvonne was pregnant again. Kristen was born in Al-Khobar on February 6, 1965. So now there were three baby girls in house number 8. There was little time for dinner parties. “But Yvonne decided that I was one more child to feed,” Theros said. “So I came by pretty often for dinner and sometimes I baby-sat the girls. Bob and Yvonne—well, it was as tight a family as I had ever seen.”

    In the summer of 1966, Bob and Yvonne packed up their household goods in Dhahran and shipped them off to Beirut, where Bob was slotted for a full year of intensive Arabic language training. Meanwhile,Aramco told Ames he had a standing offer to join the oil company; he would have made a lot more money, but he turned them down. He liked being a CIA case officer; he thought of it as public service. That summer he and Yvonne went on home leave to Philadelphia and Boston to see their parents and other relatives.