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

which we celebrate wherever we may be.”
    But though Bob Ames certainly knew some of these St. George bar regulars, he was not one of them himself. Aburish never met him. Ames was studying Arabic in 1966, not cultivating agents. But neither was he a barfly. He preferred to spend his free time either practicing his Arabic in the
suq
or doting on his girls.
    ----
    * Many years later, however, a retired CIA officer claimed that Archie Roosevelt had recruited Abu Said as an agent in the late 1940s. This source said that Abu Said was assigned the cryptonym PENTAD. This was corroborated in 2010 when Abu Said’s son Said Aburish confided to the Norwegian journalist Karsten Tveit that his father had confessed to him that he had indeed been an agent of the CIA.

CHAPTER FOUR
Aden and Beirut
    He didn’t share secrets, so that made life normal.
    —Yvonne Ames
    By the spring of 1967, Ames was told he was scheduled for a posting in Sana’a, North Yemen. As Yemen was still embroiled in a brutal civil war, it was unlikely that Yvonne and the children would be allowed to move with him. But then yet another Arab-Israeli war broke out, on June 5, 1967. A month prior to the war, as tensions escalated, the Israelis sent an intelligence estimate to the Johnson administration warning that they could be defeated. Within six hours the CIA’s top analysts produced a counterestimate that predicted, “Israel could defeat within two weeks any combination of Arab armies which could be thrown against it no matter who began the hostilities.” Dick Helms thought the Israelis were just trying to get President Johnson to green-light a preemptive attack—and authorize American arms shipments. When a skeptical President Johnson asked Helms to review the estimate—or, in his words, to have it “scrubbed down”—the Agency analysts revised their prediction: the Israelis would win any war within one week. As it happened, the Agency’s estimate was off by only one day. Within six days Israeli forces swept into East Jerusalem and occupied both the West Bank and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
    The June War was a defeat for the entire Arab world—but specifically for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brand of secular Arab nationalism. Itwas a humiliation that disillusioned an entire generation of Arabs. But it also circumscribed American influence in the Middle East. In its aftermath, twenty-four thousand American expatriates working in the region were expelled. Anti-American demonstrations swept through Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. Egypt and most other Arab states broke diplomatic relations with Washington. Ames’s posting to North Yemen was canceled, and instead he was posted to Aden in the British protectorate of South Yemen.
    Yvonne was already pregnant again. That summer Bob had completed nine months of intensive Arabic language study. The family spent much of that summer in Washington and Boston—where baby Karen was born on August 30, 1967. Bob came up to Boston from Washington, D.C., to see his new baby—their fourth child. And then in early September he flew off to Aden. Yvonne and the girls weren’t permitted to join him. And for good reason. Aden was a war zone.

    Before heading off to Aden, Ames was required to take a routine polygraph. He thought it a waste of time. He told the technician administering the test, “Why don’t you ask me the one question that matters: Have I had an illicit contact with a foreign agent? And then we can be done with this.” The technician was not amused.
    Ames flew to London in late September and had a couple of nights in the Cumberland Hotel near Hyde Park. He chose this hotel because he knew it was within walking distance of Francis Edwards, an antiquarian bookseller dating back to 1855. He found many books he wanted to buy, but he wrote Yvonne that he had “no honey to convince me that I should buy them.” He later regretted this. “When I think of all the good maps in them I get mad at myself, but that’s me.