He was one of the best spooks I ever met.
—David Long, State Department Bureau
of Intelligence and Research
In 1962, the year that Bob Ames undertook his first assignment abroad as a CIA case officer, the Agency’s culture was gradually shifting to one that put a high value on the kind of officers who could develop human sources. It was that part of the Agency’s culture that valued bland anonymity, discretion, and ironclad secrecy. A case officer had to have patience and restraint; one couldn’t hurry the cultivation of a source. One had to be methodical, keeping a minute record of what was said and what went unspoken during each encounter with a potential agent. A good case officer had to have commonsensical powers of observation. Ames was a natural.
“Bob was a very complex person,” recalled David Long, a State Department intelligence analyst who met him in the 1960s in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “He was self-effacing and not afraid to speak up, a cynic and an idealist, a good old boy and an intellectual, a moralist and a problem solver. Put it together and he was one of the best spooks I ever met.” Harry Simpson, a senior CIA officer who knew Ames at the time, thought he had a “magnetic” personality. “He was able to show empathy to just about anyone—if it was in his interest to do so,” said Simpson. “It didn’t hurt that he was a physically imposing human being.”
Bob, Yvonne, and baby Catherine flew into Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, early in the summer of 1962. As they stepped out of the plane, they felt the sting of hot, humid winds on their faces. With temperatures hovering at 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, it was an Arabian oven. They were driven four miles to the U.S. consulate compound. This fifty-five-acre facility had been built in 1947–51 at a cost of $600,000. It contained the consulate offices, the consul general’s two-story residence, and about a dozen other block stone homes. The compound had its own electric generator, water tower, and septic tank. A four-foot rock wall surrounded the compound, purportedly to keep out the camels and goats of nomadic Bedouins who sometimes pitched their black tents nearby. A squad of five U.S. marines guarded the outpost. Altogether, the compound housed about thirty-five Americans, including eight Foreign Service officers, secretaries, code clerks, and their families.
Bob Ames was one of only two CIA officers; his boss was Robert Carlson, who’d previously served in Damascus and Beirut. Dhahran was such a small post that the CIA deemed it a “base,” not a “station.” Carlson’s title was chief of base (COB). The Agency’s station at the time was located in the port city of Jeddah because the Saudis refused to allow any foreign legation to situate an embassy in the capital of Riyadh. That city lay in the heart of the Nedj, the Saudi royal family’s homeland, dominated by the most conservative Wahhabi tribes. The Saudis would not allow foreigners to reside there until the 1970s.
In Dhahran, Ames was listed in the consulate phone directory as the commercial officer. This was his official cover. Carlson was identified as a “consul-political officer.” (A year or so later, Carlson was replaced by Harold M. Young Jr.) Their job in the Dhahran Base was to collect political intelligence about both Saudi Arabia and the Trucial Coast emirates—the present-day United Arab Emirates. But the larger purpose, of course, was to provide intelligence on anything that might affect America’s access to Arabian oil and its special relationship with the House of Saud. Like all CIA officers, Ames was assigned a pseudonym to sign reporting cables he sent back to Langley. For the rest of his career he would be known in writing as Orrin W. BIEDENKOPF. Agency officers sometimes even used their pseudonyms to refer to each other orally—but Ames’s Germanic pseudo was a mouthful, so over the years some of his colleagues informally referred to him as RAMES instead of BIEDENKOPF. But everyone soon came to recognize the author of a cable signed by BIEDENKOPF. The communications were always snappy, tart, and well informed.
The CIA’s cramped quarters in Dhahran were located at the opposite end of the building from the consul general’s office. There was no special cage or even a locked door. The base’s secretary was a vivacious Lebanese American woman in her midforties named Martha Scherrer. Her desk was next to Ames’s. There was barely enough room between them for Bob to squeeze by. Carlson, a former marine who’d seen combat service, had his own office next door with dark, rough-hewn stone walls. It wasn’t a very pleasant work environment, but neither Ames nor Carlson spent much time inside the office.
Dhahran was even more isolating than what Ames had experienced at Kagnew Station. But in terms of his career, he was fortunate in his first tour abroad to be able to work directly under one other officer. In such a tiny base he received close supervision, and he was exposed to all facets of the work. If Ames had been sent to a large station, he would have been forced to specialize and would have received less hands-on experience. Headquarters sometimes singles out a junior officer as particularly bright and “fast-tracks” him by sending him to a small Agency base. This may have been true for Ames. In any case, Ames would call Dhahran home for nearly four years.
Bob and his family lived at house number 8, a small, three-bedroom stone-block structure with a glassed-in front porch. As it happened, I lived across the street. My father was a Foreign Service officer also stationed in Dhahran, so Bob and Yvonne were our neighbors for three years when I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen. I just remember him as a tall, handsome man who had a very pretty young wife and baby. I had no idea he was a CIA officer.
Their house, like ours, was furnished with worn, ten-year-old furniture and a tiny refrigerator and a propane gas stove. There were no locks on the doors because the consulate’s administrative officer said there was no crime in Arabia. Many years later I wrote about Arabia in a memoir and described the compound:
All we could see for miles was flat desert interspersed with the occasional jebel (hill) and a bit of scrubby vegetation. The only greenery in the compound was a few scrawny eucalyptus trees and two dozen baby Washington palm trees, planted the previous year, that lined the one paved road up the hill from the Consulate to the consul general’s residence. A solitary thirty-foot date palm—resembling the Saudi national emblem—stood in the circular driveway in front of that residence. Scattered about the compound were a few bougainvillea bushes that added a touch of color in the winter months—the only time it ever rained. Gas flares burned night and day in the surrounding jebels. The distinctive whiff of sulfur was often in the air.
Dhahran was a true “hardship” post. The only justification for the consulate’s existence lay one mile down the road. The “American Camp” housed some six thousand American oil workers inside a one-square-mile compound surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside was a slice of Texas. It looked like a typical American suburb, with brownish-green lawns and neat ranch-style homes with pitched roofs and screened porches. It contained a school, a commissary, swimming pools, a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a baseball field on “King’s Road.” When Mary Eddy, the wife of the veteran OSS and CIA officer Bill Eddy, first saw the American Camp, she wrote home, “The oil town at Dhaharan [sic] is just like a bit of USA.”
This was the home of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), a consortium of four American oil companies. Oil had first been discovered in March 1938 at Jebal (“Hill”) Dhahran. A quarter century and millions of barrels later, oil wellhead Dammam No. 7 was still producing over a thousand barrels of oil per day. By the 1960s, Aramco was selling millions of barrels of oil daily for the European and American markets.
The Aramcons pretty much kept to themselves. Bob thought they lived an unduly insular life in the American Camp. When President Kennedy was assassinated, he was shocked when he ran into an Aramcon who offered him “condolences for your president.” They’d learned of the tragedy in the middle of the night, Dhahran time. Yvonne went back to bed, but Bob couldn’t sleep; he spent the rest of the night pacing the house. Yvonne had few friends other than the half-dozen or so other wives on the consulate compound. She didn’t mind Dhahran; her life was Bob, baby Catherine, and the house.
Bob absolutely loved Arabia. On some muggy evenings he would walk out to the basketball court across the street and shoot baskets with the consulate’s marine guards. During the winter of 1963 he led the consulate’s basketball team, the Dhahran Bears, to a championship win against all the Aramcon teams. He worked on his Arabic, taking private lessons. During long road trips with a young vice-consul, Ralph Oman, he talked about his fascination with the Bedouin tribes. “He said that he had plotted out a career path,” Oman recalled, “that would keep him on the Arabian Peninsula for thirty years—at which point he would retire a happy man.” Someday he hoped to have postings to Jeddah, Kuwait, Muscat, and Yemen. On one trip he and Oman spent a day searching for ancient pottery shards at the alleged site of the ancient city of Gerrha (ca. 650 B.C. to A.D. 300), near the bay of Dohat as Salwa, about fifty miles east of the oasis of Hofuf. They didn’t find much worth taking home, but Oman vividly remembers how Ames gave him an impromptu lecture on the history of the region. He pointed out that they were standing on the very site where the Kingdom’s founder, Ibn Saud, had signed the Uqair Protocol with the British. The 1922 treaty, he explained, had set the borders between the new Saudi kingdom and its neighbors to the north.
Oman remembers being amazed by Ames’s grasp of the history. The young CIA officer obviously read a lot. “The Saudis loved him,” Oman recalled. “He was terrific in one-on-one conversations. He was tall, handsome, respectful, and soft-spoken, with an engaging smile and a lively twinkle in his eyes. He had very broad shoulders that made him almost loom over the Saudi men he was talking to, and, as a rule, Saudi men are not short. He always addressed them with the honorific ‘ya sheikh.’ They always insisted that he was too kind.” Early in his Dhahran posting, Ames persuaded one of Aramco’s Saudi desert guides to teach him how to track herds of camels. These expeditions took him out into the desert and could be physically grueling. But for Ames, the reward was meeting the Bedu. “When the Arabs did not know him well,” wrote one of his fellow Agency officers, “they held him in slight awe for his size. When they got to know him, they loved him for his humor, his Arabic, his knowledge of their ways, his heart.”
During the month of Ramadan, the eight consulate officers were often invited on Thursday nights to a large dinner hosted by the governor of the Eastern Province, the crusty old emir Bin Jiluwi—whose father had fought side by side with the Kingdom’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, at the 1902 battle of Masmak Fort in Riyadh. Old Bin Jiluwi’s spear was still stuck in the door of the fort, a stark reminder of this signature battle for the unification of Arabia under the House of Saud. Emir Bin Jiluwi ruled the Eastern Province with an executioner’s sword; he was widely feared as “Head-Chopper Jiluwi.” But at these Thursday evening affairs he usually made a point of serving Arabic coffee to the American diplomats in his private reception room before attending to his other guests.
“We entered the reception room in order of rank,” recalled Oman. “Bob and I, both junior officers, would be last in line, with Bob second to last and me last. I always had to cool my heels for an extended period before shaking Bin Jiluwi’s hand, because the emir would always grab both of Bob’s hands and have an extended conversation with him, which they both enjoyed, talking about the camel crop in the Eastern Province, and the date harvest in al-Hasa.”
After coffee, the Americans filed into a great hall where dinner was being served to more than a hundred guests. Each diplomat sat at a different low-lying, circular table that seated twelve men. In the center was a four-foot-wide platter with a huge mound of rice mixed with dates and raisins, surmounted by a whole roasted goat or sheep. “Among the Saudis,” said Oman, “Bob was a sought-after table companion, because he spoke perfect Arabic, he could tell jokes, he loved the food (which was delicious), he could eat deftly with his hand and a knife, and he seemed to really enjoy himself with the food and the good company.”
On rare occasions, Yvonne and Bob would invite a few people to dinner. They did not like large mob-scene parties. “The house was small, and Bob was big,” recalled Oman, “so he seemed to dominate the room more than ever, but in a very nice way. He was an attentive and charming host, welcoming us to his home. Thinking back, he was a gracious Bedouin, welcoming strangers into his tent, treating them with traditional Arab hospitality, and making them feel very special. No wonder he was so good at what he did.”
Ames didn’t spend much time socializing with other Americans, particularly the Aramcons in the American Camp down the road. He was a case officer, and as such his job was to cultivate Saudi contacts. The one exception was an Aramcon who worked in the oil company’s Government Relations Department. Ronald Irwin Metz was himself a veteran of the OSS and the CIA. A tall, ruddy, gregarious man with a hearty laugh, Metz had a colorful résumé. During World War II the OSS had parachuted him behind enemy lines in China. By the end of the war he spoke fluent Mandarin. Like many OSS veterans, he soon went to work for the CIA, which sent him for Arabic language studies at the American University of Beirut. Upon graduation with a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1954, he was hired by Aramco and dispatched to Riyadh as the company’s key liaison with King Saud, the eldest son of the Kingdom’s founder. (Abdul Aziz ibn Saud had died the previous year.) Metz thus had unusual access to the Saudi royal family. By the mid-1950s, he was one of the king’s drinking companions and quite possibly his closest foreign confidant. When Ron visited the royal palace the king would greet him in his audience chamber. Servants would bring trays of sweet black tea. After a few moments, Saud would curtly dismiss the servants, toss the tea, and pull out a bottle of scotch.
It was Washington’s policy then, as now, to support the Saudi royal family, if only to safeguard American access to Saudi oil. Metz’s relationship with King Saud was thus a useful conduit for conveying political intelligence about what was going on inside the palace and the Kingdom as a whole. Metz tutored Ames in the intricacies of Arabian tribal politics and no doubt helped to polish his Arabic. They had an easygoing and fruitful relationship. After hanging around Metz, Ames could talk at length about the intricacies of palace politics and, in particular, the power struggle that was then taking place between King Saud and his half-brother Crown Prince Faisal al-Saud.
Ames spent a lot of time just wandering the desert in his jeep. He loved to stop at Bedouin encampments and strike up a conversation with the tribesmen. He later told a fellow officer, Henry Miller-Jones, that he was sometimes invited to honorific dinners that took place inside the Bedouins’ black tents. Sitting on layers of Persian carpets, he would eat lamb roasted over an open fire. Inevitably, as the guest of honor he’d be offered the tastiest morsel of the lamb, its eye. Bob said he hated eating the eye.
“Ames’ interest in the Bedu was not just cultural education,” said Miller-Jones. “He was seeking contacts among them who would be sources of information on the growing Arab nationalist movement and other subversive elements. He educated me on the threat to the Saudi government posed by the Shi’a of the Eastern Province, and the Shi’a relationship to Iran. Bob always considered it a minor but not insignificant concern, but one the hyper-Sunni Saudis fretted over inordinately. At that time, he was more concerned about Arab Nationalism, and growing Soviet inroads among some of the Arab intelligentsia in the Arabian Peninsula in general.”
One day in late 1964 the consul general in Dhahran, Jack Horner, called Ames into his office along with a brand-new vice-consul, twenty-two-year-old Patrick Theros. Horner explained that he’d received an invitation from the Emir Saud bin Jiluwi to attend a head chopping.
Horner said he wasn’t in the mood to attend an execution, but he wanted Ames and Theros to go in his place. “Bob thought it would be an excellent opportunity to develop some local contacts,” recalled Theros. “He was very matter-of-fact about it.” On the appointed day the two men drove nine miles north to Dammam’s central square, where a large crowd had gathered for the spectacle. Bearing rifles, members of the feared Saudi National Guard lined the square. The condemned prisoner was soon escorted into the square. He was an alleged pederast who’d been convicted of raping and murdering a small boy from a notable family. The families of both the murder victim and the murderer were present in large numbers. Emotions were high because of the notoriety of the crime. The Emir Bin Jiluwi himself was presiding over the event. Breaking with tradition, Jiluwi announced that he would allow the eldest brother of the murdered boy to carry out the beheading. As Ames and Theros watched from the back of the crowd, the executioner’s sword was handed to the brother. Instead of taking aim at the neck, the brother swung the sword and brought it down on the condemned man’s back, severely wounding him. He had deliberately botched the execution. Angry cries erupted 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 introduced at 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 from the 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. By September they were settled into a lovely apartment in West Beirut, two blocks from the seaside corniche and within walking distance of Pigeon Rock Bay, one of Ras Beirut’s iconic landmarks. Ras Beirut was the most cosmopolitan part of the city, home to a multicultural population of middle-class Christians, Druze, and Muslims. In 1966, there were still several thousand Jewish Lebanese. It was also home to the American University of Beirut, founded a century earlier. And it boasted chic boutiques, cafés, and cinemas showing films in French, English, and Arabic. Bob studied Arabic during the week, but on weekends he and Yvonne often took the kids up to the Dhalamayeh Country Club in the mountains to the east of Beirut. When they couldn’t get away, Bob contented himself with reading the many books on Middle Eastern history and biography that he bought cheaply from Khayyat’s, Beirut’s oldest bookstore, located near the university on Rue Bliss.
Soon after his arrival in Beirut, one of Bob’s colleagues took him to the bar at the St. George Hotel. It was inevitable. The St. George was Beirut’s premier hotel in the 1950s and 1960s and well into the 1970s. It was where visiting dignitaries stayed, and its famous bar was the watering hole for two generations of diplomats, journalists, and the agents of various intelligence services. Surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, the St. George offered its clientele a beautiful view of both the sea and the snow-capped mountains to the east. It employed 285 staff to service only 110 rooms. “I felt as if my clients were running the Middle East, occasionally the world,” said Jean Bertolet, the hotel’s manager in the 1960s. Bankers and financiers such as John J. McCloy, J. Paul Getty, and Daniel Ludwig stayed at the St. George on their business trips to Beirut. Journalists like Joe Alsop and NBC’s John Chancellor were regular visitors. The legendary British spy for the Soviet Union, Kim Philby, drank his gin and tonics at the St. George—until he fled to Moscow on January 23, 1963. Philby later wrote in his memoir, “Beirut is one of the liveliest centres of contraband and espionage in the world.” He loved the city. “It was an amazing listening post,” recalled the London Daily Mail’s Anthony Cave Brown. “Everything and everyone passed through it.” Like many foreign correspondents, Newsweek’s Loren Jenkins used the bar as his “mail drop.”
The St. George’s longtime concierge was Mansour Breidy, a Maronite Christian. “He knew everyone,” said Jenkins. Around noon each day Lebanon’s most connected journalist, Mohammed Khalil Abu Rish—more commonly known as Abu Said—arrived to cultivate his sources over lunch. Abu Said had once worked for the New York Times, but by 1966 he was working for Time magazine. Abu Said knew just about everyone connected to this exotic labyrinth, including the CIA station chief and the Egyptian intelligence chief. It was an era when a reporter like Abu Said discreetly traded information with various intelligence services and in return was given useful nuggets for his reports in Time. Over the years, rumors dogged him that he was an agent for the CIA. He always firmly denied this. Certainly, he was openly pro-American and gladly passed along his observations to the CIA. “It was clear to me that Abu Said had never been anybody’s agent,” wrote Wilbur Crane Eveland, a CIA operative in the Middle East in the 1950s. “He happened to believe that Americans were friends of the Arabs.”*
Abu Said’s grown son Said Aburish was then a reporter for Radio Free Europe, and later the author of many revealing history books about the region. In 1989, he wrote a book about the St. George: “For those of us lucky enough to have known the St. George Hotel bar in the fifties, sixties and seventies, life will never be the same again; the bar will always be with us, an invisible, hallowed component of our existence 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.