People expect a revolutionary to be a miserable-looking, shabby creature dressed in rags. That’s the wrong notion.… As the Arabic saying goes: Better a reputation of opulence than a reputation of misery.
—Ali Hassan Salameh
In Beirut, Ames began to spend a lot of time with Mustafa Zein. One day in late 1969 they began talking about various personalities in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Zein mentioned that he’d reconnected with a young Palestinian who had the ear of Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the PLO. At forty years of age, Arafat was already known as the “Old Man.” Zein’s friend, Ali Hassan Salameh, twenty-seven years old, was a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council and since 1968 had worked with Fatah’s Revolutionary Security Apparatus. Salameh was essentially nurturing the PLO’s rudimentary intelligence bureau, later called Force 17, simply named after its telephone extension in Fatah’s Beirut headquarters. He was trying to turn Force 17 into a professional intelligence organization. He was no ideologue. Soon after taking control of Force 17, he overheard one of his men accusing another officer of being an Israeli spy simply because the man could speak Hebrew and was seen reading an Israeli newspaper. Salameh interrupted to say that they all should be fluent in Hebrew. And then he dismissed the officer who had made the accusation.
Salameh was a decidedly cosmopolitan Palestinian. Zein said he was the kind of young man who broke all the social mores of the Arab world. He flaunted his modernity. Though married, he loved beautiful women and usually had one on his arm. “He was a youthful Marlon Brando, standing over six feet tall,” recalled Zein. Ali Hassan was also a sixties revolutionary. That didn’t mean that he was a Marxist. Like many other Palestinian revolutionaries, Salameh was just a young man with a gun who believed in the righteousness of the struggle to return to his ancestral homeland in Palestine. He drove around town in an expensive car and ate in the finest restaurants. He obviously came from money. Israeli intelligence gave him an aristocratic moniker: the Red Prince. Ames was intrigued.
At this point, Ames made a brazen pitch to Zein. He told the young Arab that President Richard Nixon himself had authorized him to “explore the possibility of contact between the USA and the PLO.… He
[Ames] was the person designated for this task.” It was a good story, an improbable story, but a perfect story. There are no declassified records in the Nixon Presidential Library to suggest that Nixon had entrusted Ames—a low-ranking, thirty-five-year-old CIA officer—to open a back channel to the PLO. But Ames told the story to inspire Zein—and to underscore the importance of their collaboration. Ames then asked Zein to go to Amman and look up his friend Ali Hassan Salameh. Zein left for Amman the very next day.
Zein told Ames that he was a very close friend of Ali Hassan’s. Zein had met Salameh five years earlier in Cairo in 1964. They had been introduced by the president of the General Union of Palestinian Students, just prior to a trip Salameh was making to Europe. Salameh was off to visit an Italian girlfriend. “The man was a magnet,” recalled Zein, “who literally could not be resisted by girls. Period.” Ali Hassan and Mustafa instantly connected. “He was a fixture in my apartment, spending many nights in my guest room.” When Ali Hassan returned from Italy he told Mustafa that he’d decided to move to Kuwait and join the PLO. In Kuwait City Salameh was interviewed by Khalid al-Hassan, the head of the PLO mission in Kuwait and a founding member of the organization. Al-Hassan was delighted to meet the young Salameh—because he knew of the young man’s singular pedigree. Zein and Salameh kept in touch even after Salameh moved to Kuwait. The Palestinian visited Zein in Abu Dhabi—and at one point Zein gave Salameh a very thin Swiss platinum watch. Salameh would wear it for the rest of his life.
Ali Hassan Salameh was born in 1942 in Baghdad, where his parents had fled from Palestine when the British Mandate authorities put a price on his father’s head. His father, Sheikh Hassan Salameh, was born in 1911 into a poor Palestinian peasant family in Qula, near Lydda. By the time he was twenty-three, Sheikh Salameh was a wanted man. In 1934 he joined Abdul Qader al-Husseini’s anti-British underground army, the Jihad al-Muqaddas (Holy Struggle). During the 1936–39 Arab Revolt he was a commander of a Palestinian militia in the Lydda-Ramla district. In 1938 he led a raid that blew up the Lydda-Haifa railroad tracks. British Mandate records from the Criminal Investigation Department describe Sheikh Salameh at the time as a “gang chieftain.” The Haganah—the military arm of the Zionist movement at the time—created an intelligence file on Salameh that portrayed him as a hardened criminal and terrorist: “Salameh has turned Ramla [town] into a centre of disorder,” the Haganah reported. “People are being murdered in the middle of the city.” Whether he was a “gang chieftain” or a guerrilla resistance leader, Salameh had the backing of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. And when the mufti fled Palestine in 1939, Salameh followed him into exile to Baghdad. There he received military training in Iraq from 1939 to 1940. But soon afterwards, Salameh followed the grand mufti to Nazi Germany, where he served as his senior aide.
For Palestinian nationalists in World War II this was a classic story: the Nazis were the enemies of their enemies—the British Empire and the Zionist colonialists—so the most prominent Palestinian leader at the time, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin Husseini, considered the Nazis to be strategic allies. This would prove to be an egregious miscalculation, not only because the Germans lost the war, but also because of what the Germans did to the Jews. The enormity of the Holocaust would mean that Haj Amin Husseini’s alliance—however ineffectual—would become a black stain on the reputation of the Palestinian cause. And Hassan Salameh was personally involved. He became a virtual covert operative of the Germans.
In December 1941 Haj Amin met with Hitler and suggested that German and Palestinian commandos should parachute into Palestine and incite the local population to rise up against the British. This idea languished until late in the war, when the Germans activated a covert plan—Operation Atlas—to do exactly what the grand mufti had suggested. By one account, Haj Amin Husseini persuaded the Germans to provide the commando team with poison to release into the city of Tel Aviv’s water supply.
On the evening of October 6, 1944, a five-member unit parachuted from a small plane over the Jericho Valley. Hassan Salameh was one of the five. A German SS officer, Colonel Kurt Wieland, led the team. Wieland had grown up in the Templar community of Sarona, just outside Jaffa. (Templars were a small German Protestant sect whose millennial beliefs drove them to immigrate to Palestine in the late nineteenth century.) In 1936 Wieland traveled to Germany and joined the Nazi Party. He was familiar with Palestine and spoke fluent Arabic. Wieland was thus unusually well qualified, but Operation Atlas was an impossible mission. Things went awry from the moment the men jumped out of a German prototype plane powered by an experimental engine. The plane was supposed to have dropped the five-member team at a site north of Jericho. But it flew too high, so Wieland and two other team members landed south of Jericho—while Hassan Salameh and another German officer landed even farther afield. Their supplies—which included two thousand gold coins, guns, maps, radio equipment, and allegedly ten cardboard boxes of poison—were scattered over a wide region.
The parachute drop botched the entire operation. British police soon received reports that locals had stumbled across gold coins. Search parties were sent out to scour the Jericho region. Wieland and two others sought refuge in one of Jericho’s caves—where they were soon discovered and arrested by British forces. But Salameh and another German escaped on foot toward Jerusalem. Salameh had suffered a foot injury during the parachute landing. He nevertheless made his way to his native Qula, near Lydda, where a doctor treated him. Despite putting a price on his head, the British never caught Salameh.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming that the British Mandate in Palestine would end on May 15, 1948. On that date Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The Jewish population of Palestine celebrated long into the night of November 29. The very next morning, however, Palestinian guerrillas firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades attacked a Jerusalem-bound bus filled with Jews, six of whom were killed. Salameh’s guerrillas allegedly carried out the attack. A week later, Salameh led three hundred of his men in an attack against the Hatikva Quarter, a suburb on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv. But he lost sixty of his fighters and was forced to retreat. Salameh concluded that his militia was no match for the Haganah, so in the ensuing months he returned to attacking Jewish vehicles on the open roads. It was a deadly strategy.
Sheikh Hassan coordinated his road attacks with Abdul Qader al-Husseini, the Palestinians’ most famous guerrilla leader—and a cousin of the grand mufti. Abdul Qader tried to conquer Jerusalem, while Salameh sought to control the roads leading up to Jerusalem. During the first six months of 1948, Salameh’s force grew to a roving band of perhaps five hundred guerrillas. He called his men the “Mediterranean Irregulars.” They specialized in roadside bombs. On January 22, 1948, seven Jewish auxiliary policemen were killed when their vehicle was blown apart as it drove past a booby-trapped carcass of a dog lying in the middle of the road. In late March 1948, Salameh boasted to a reporter from the Associated Press that his men were preparing to conquer Tel Aviv. He maintained his headquarters in a building in an orange grove outside Ramla. On the night of April 4, 1948, this four-story structure was blown up; more than twenty of his men died, but Salameh once again escaped with his life. By then he and Abdul Qader al-Husseini were recognized as the Palestinians’ two top military commanders. But not for long. On April 8, an Israeli sentry outside the village of Al-Qastal shot and killed Husseini.
On May 30, 1948, militia from Menachem Begin’s paramilitary group, the Irgun, attacked the strategic village of Ras al-Ein, whose wells supplied Jerusalem with much of its drinking water. After a two-hour battle, the Irgun seized the village, including the ruins of Antipatris, a Crusader fortress. The next day Salameh led three hundred of his men to take back Ras al-Ein. After eleven Irgun men were killed and a score were wounded, the Irgun fell back. But as they retreated, they managed to fire off one more mortar round that exploded in the midst of the advancing Fedayeen—volunteer militia. Salameh’s cousin was killed and a nephew was wounded. And Salameh himself suffered shrapnel wounds to his chest. On June 2, 1948, he died in a Ramla hospital. He was only thirty-seven years old. His death marked a decisive turning point in the Palestinian resistance to the newly established Israeli state.
Ali Hassan Salameh was only six years old when his father died. But he grew up with family stories of his father’s exploits. Salameh was reared to regard his father as a legendary Palestinian hero and martyr to the cause—notwithstanding his association with the failed plot to poison Tel Aviv’s water supply. His father had displayed audacity and courage. “We must mention two Palestinian commanders,” later wrote the official historian of the Haganah. “Abdul Kader [al-Husseini] and Hassan Salameh. In spite of all the cruelty they showed in harming non-combatant Jewish civilians, they fought personally at the head of their soldiers, and both perished in battle.”
Salameh was a Palestinian patriot, a guerrilla fighter, and a terrorist. He had killed civilians in the name of Palestinian nationalism. His fellow partisans would say that he only fought terror with terror. He was brazen and unorthodox and fearless. His son would become all these things.
Ali Hassan spent his childhood years in Beirut. He and his sisters, Jihad and Nidal, were raised by their mother in a middle-class apartment in the lovely neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh. They were Palestinian refugees; the Salameh family house in Qula had been razed to the ground. But in Beirut they did not live like refugees. Ali attended Maqassed College, a private school. In 1956, when he was fourteen, he was sent to a boarding school in Bir Zeit, on the West Bank. His mother constantly reminded him of his father’s legacy. “The influence of my father has posed a personal problem to me,” Ali Hassan Salameh later told a Lebanese reporter in the only extended interview he ever gave to the press. Twelve other family members, mostly cousins, had died in the 1948 war. “My upbringing was politicized,” Ali Hassan said. “I lived the Palestinian cause, at a time when the cause was turning in a vicious circle. They were a people without a leadership. The people were dispersed, and I was part of the dispersion.… The problem I faced was this: whereas the family considered struggle a matter of heritage, there was no real cause to struggle for. There was a history of a cause, but no cause. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan Salameh at a time when the most any Palestinian could hope for was to live a normal life.… I was constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that, even without being told how the son of Hassan Salameh should live.”
Ali tried for years to live his own life. “I wanted to be myself,” he said. “The fact that I was required to live up to the image of my father created a problem for me.”
In 1958 the family moved to Cairo, where Ali studied engineering, graduating with a B.A. in 1963. The move to Cairo was made possible by an invitation from Egypt’s charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser—who had heard that the family of the famous Palestinian martyr was living in strapped circumstances. Nasser offered scholarships to Ali Hassan and his two sisters. Afterwards, Ali did graduate work in Germany—where he learned fluent German and acquired a taste for expensive clothes, gourmet foods, and wine. Also women. But all along, despite his ambivalence, he was always drawn to politics. In May 1964 Ali Hassan attended the first convening of the Palestinian National Council in East Jerusalem, and thus he witnessed the formation of the PLO. Shortly afterwards he joined Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, a secular Palestinian political party and militia. (The name is an acronym from the full name—the Palestinian National Liberation Movement—which when spelled backwards becomes “Fatah” in Arabic, or “opening.”) Ali Hassan had finally found his cause—and how to live as the son of Hassan Salameh. “I became very attached to Fatah,” he recalled. “I had found what I was looking for.”
After spending a year in Cairo, Salameh was sent by Arafat to Kuwait to be in charge of the PLO’s Popular Organization Department. As chairman of the Kuwaiti chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students, Salameh actively recruited students into Fatah. In 1966 Mustafa Zein paid a visit and spent a week in his home. When the June 1967 war broke out, Ali Hassan fled to Amman, thinking he could join in the fight. It was all over soon after he arrived. Afterwards, Arafat assigned him to work in Fatah’s Revolutionary Security Apparatus (al-Razd), the organization’s intelligence bureau. In 1968 Salameh was sent back to Cairo, where he received intelligence training from the Egyptian government. Initially, Ali Hassan specialized in counterintelligence, vetting the security files of Fatah volunteers and keeping track of Palestinians who might have been recruited by the Israelis to penetrate Fatah. It was distasteful work, but Ali Hassan was good at it. He was methodical and patient.*1
Arafat liked Salameh—despite the young man’s extravagant lifestyle. And he was certainly drawn to Salameh’s pedigree as the son of a famous Palestinian martyr. Perhaps it also counted that Ali Hassan had married well. His wife was Nashrawan Sharif, whose wealthy Palestinian family came from Haifa, where they’d owned property worth millions of dollars. Ali and Nashrawan had met in Cairo—and it had been a love marriage. Nashrawan was an intelligent, attractive woman who had earned a bachelor’s degree in French literature.
Bob Ames knew only enough of Salameh’s biographical details to know that he made an interesting target for recruitment. Accordingly, he encouraged Mustafa to approach his friend. Zein and Salameh soon met in Faisal’s Restaurant on Rue Bliss, across the street from the American University of Beirut’s main gate. Salameh was as clever as he was flamboyant, and he immediately understood that Zein had some special American friends. According to Zein, some months earlier Salameh had “alerted me to expect an American request for me to arrange a contact with the PLO.” Salameh wanted to establish contact with some “official” Americans. But he could not meet in public. So Ames later conveyed through Zein his plan for an initial contact: Zein would meet Salameh at the Strand café at Hamra Street and Rue Jeanne d’Arc. Ames would stroll by at an appointed hour, and as he walked by their table Zein would signal that the man walking by was their contact. Salameh would respond by placing his hand on Zein’s shoulder. It was a script by which Ames could know that Salameh indeed knew whom he was dealing with and was willing to play the game. They would not speak to each other; they might make eye contact. In public, they were merely passing strangers on Hamra Street. But in the future, they’d be able to recognize each other. It was designed by Ames as the first step—one that would preserve Salameh’s security.
The scene is accurately portrayed in David Ignatius’s novel about Ames and Salameh, Agents of Innocence. Both Salameh and Ames brought their own security. Salameh had a number of Force 17 commandos in civilian clothes stationed discreetly around the café. Ames had his own security team in place. As scripted, Ames approached Salameh’s table at the Strand café; but instead of walking by silently as planned, Ames suddenly paused, and Salameh rose and shook his hand. “Ali looked at Bob, and then pointed to me,” Zein recalled, “and said, ‘This is my man.’ ”
Soon afterwards, Ames had Zein set up a clandestine meeting with Salameh in a CIA safe house—actually an apartment—in Beirut. A PLO source later told David Ignatius that Ames had told Salameh he’d been authorized by the National Security Council to open up a channel to the PLO. The gist of his message was: “You Arabs claim your views are not heard in Washington. Here is your chance. The president of the United States is listening.” This was somewhat of a calculated embellishment. Ames would have reported the initial contact and requested permission to develop the relationship.
CIA director Richard Helms had cause to learn of Ames’s operation at the end of January 1970, when he attended a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House’s West Wing. Also present were President Nixon and British prime minister Harold Wilson. On the agenda was a discussion of the political challenges facing King Hussein’s Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. The British handed over intelligence reports showing that Arafat had communicated to one of Hussein’s associates an offer to be prime minister in a future government. Clearly, the PLO expected to soon topple the king. According to David Ignatius, who talked with a source close to Helms while researching Agents of Innocence, Helms went back to the Agency convinced that the CIA needed to improve its sourcing from within the PLO. After questioning some top officers in the Directorate of Operations, Helms was informed about Ames’s promising lead with a top Fatah officer.
Helms thus knew about Ames’s contact with Salameh within six weeks of the meeting. But at what point Helms went to President Nixon to inform him of the existence of this back channel is unknown. Helms had an awkward relationship with Nixon. They didn’t meet often. So Helms probably waited until he had something of substance to report from Ames’s meetings with Salameh. He wouldn’t have waited too long, however, because of the political sensitivities. The PLO was regarded as a terrorist organization, and thus political contacts with its members were prohibited. On the other hand, the CIA viewed the PLO as a natural target for intelligence recruitment. Ames had not gone “rogue” by approaching Salameh. Helms knew Ames was just doing his job as a clandestine officer. His encounter with Salameh could always be seen as the first step in an attempted recruitment. But it was another matter if Ames’s intention was not recruitment but the opening of a liaison relationship. That could be political dynamite if it were to leak. Helms understood that the president—and probably his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger—had to approve the operation and judge its potential rewards against the risks of disclosure. Nixon and Kissinger were probably brought into the loop by the summer of 1970, some six months after the initial contact. And this meant that at some point intelligence reports sourced to someone close to Chairman Arafat—not naming Salameh, but making it clear where the information came from—would have landed on the president’s desk, perhaps in the Presidential Daily Brief. So maybe Ames’s boast to Salameh was not such an exaggeration. The president of the United States was listening.
Ames and Salameh had an easy and quite open relationship. “Bob had Ali Hassan over to our apartment one time,” recalled Yvonne, “but I didn’t meet him.” They made an odd pair. On one level, they clearly had nothing in common. Ames dressed modestly, like a conservative American businessman: cheap tan slacks, perhaps a loose-fitting polo shirt and a gray sports jacket. Nothing out of the most ordinary—except for the cowboy boots he sometimes chose to wear. Going on thirty-six years of age, Bob had a bit of a paunch. He kept his hair short and well trimmed. He was devoted to his wife of ten years and their five children. And he hated to spend money. He rarely drank. There was nothing extravagant about Bob Ames.
Ali Hassan, age twenty-seven, looked like a movie actor or a rock ’n’ roll musician. He dressed his six-foot frame in black. His standard uniform was a tight-fitting black shirt unbuttoned to show his hairy chest, a black leather jacket, and black trousers. His wavy, jet-black hair was thick and brushed straight back, revealing a broad forehead. His sideburns were long and bushy, almost like a nineteenth-century Englishman’s muttonchop sideburns. His stomach muscles were taut and firm, evidence of his almost daily karate workouts in the Continental Hotel’s gym; he’d earned either a fourth or a fifth black belt. He was in very good shape. “He moved like a panther,” recalled Frank Anderson, a case officer who worked with Ames. He spoke fluent English, German, and French. He listened to American pop music; his favorite song was Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” He was rumored to have an IQ of 180. Ali Hassan was not a nervous man, but rather incongruously, he chain-smoked cigarettes. He drank Scotch whiskey, but he also had a taste for expensive red wines, and though he was married and had two sons he openly dated other women. “When Ali walked in,” recalled the wife of one CIA case officer, “he sucked the air out of the room.” He knew people gossiped about his playboy lifestyle. But he didn’t care. He once told a reporter, “People expect a revolutionary to be a miserable-looking, shabby creature dressed in rags. That’s the wrong notion.… As the Arabic saying goes: Better a reputation of opulence than a reputation of misery.”
Ames and Salameh were opposites. But they quickly established a genuine friendship. Ali Hassan joked that by hanging out with Ames he’d get a chance to practice his English. “Professionally speaking,” said Anderson, “they each were the most significant person in each other’s lives.”
The ever-reliable Mustafa Zein always arranged their meetings. “Mustafa was a constant presence,” Anderson said. “He deeply admired both Bob and Ali Hassan.” Zein had cultivated a persona in West Beirut’s café society as a smooth-talking radical-chic Lebanese leftist who strongly sympathized with the Palestinian cause. He seemed to know everyone.
By the summer of 1970, Ames’s special relationship with Salameh had evolved to a point where the young Palestinian had become a critical source of information about the brewing crisis in Jordan. Salameh was still just a “source”—not a recruit. Nevertheless, the CIA sometimes assigns a cryptonym to a source, if only to make it easier to disseminate the source’s information more widely within the Agency without compromising his identity. Salameh’s crypt was MJTRUST/2. All crypts are capitalized and begin with a two-character prefix, a diagraph that signifies a country or subject. At the time, MJ stood for Palestinian. The originating case officer—in this instance, Bob Ames—usually selected the root word following the two-character diagraph. Significantly, Ames called Salameh TRUST, suggesting exactly what he thought of him. He was trusted. The root word in the crypt is always followed by a slash and a number. MJTRUST/2 signified that Salameh was the second member of this organization to have been identified by this case officer. “The PLO factions were the darling of Arab intellectuals and the Arab street,” recalled Hume Horan, then the U.S. embassy’s chief political officer in Amman. “King Hussein was extraordinarily isolated. Washington wondered how Hussein could last, with half of
Jordan’s population being Palestinian.… Every Arab under twenty thought Hussein a stooge for Zionism and Western imperialism.”
Early in 1970, Ambassador Harry Symmes made it clear to President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that he believed the king’s days were numbered. “I didn’t think the king was effectively in charge of the situation—and even if he tried to be in charge that he would succeed.”
Kissinger agreed that King Hussein was “in grave peril” and was concerned that his collapse “would radicalize the entire Middle East.” At the same time, he doubted that Israel would ever allow the PLO to take over Jordan.
But the facts on the ground suggested that the Hashemites could no longer be sustained in power. By June 1970, lawlessness was commonplace. Both the Fedayeen and the army committed various atrocities. That month the king’s convoy of cars was attacked and Hussein personally participated in a street battle. On September 1, 1970, he barely survived an assassination attempt. The CIA’s longtime station chief in Amman, Jack O’Connell (1921–2010), bluntly told the king that the time had come to mount a crackdown on the PLO’s militia and seize back the streets from the Fedayeen. “I was virtually alone in believing that the king and his army would ultimately prevail,” O’Connell later wrote in his memoirs. “The U.S. government was deeply divided. State was pessimistic. The Agency was split between my views in Amman and the views of Bob Ames, a rising CIA star who was stationed in Beirut and in liaison with Arafat’s intelligence chief, Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames and I were rivals.”
O’Connell had first arrived in Amman in 1958 when he was sent by the Agency to warn King Hussein of an army plot against his regime. O’Connell played a key role in thwarting the coup and thus earned the king’s gratitude. In 1963, O’Connell was sent back to Amman as chief of station, and he quickly became the king’s closest foreign confidant. O’Connell believed deeply in the “plucky little king” and believed that his Bedouin army could keep him in power—regardless of the wishes of the majority of his people.
Ames believed Salameh—who was telling him that the PLO forces were capable of withstanding anything the Hashemites could throw at them. Ames believed the Palestinians were going to win, if only because the PLO had a popular mandate and the momentum. “Bob was just very clearly anti-Hashemite—and ambivalent about Israel,” recalled Dewey Clarridge, later a high-ranking officer in Arab Operations. Ames and O’Connell argued vigorously with each other, both verbally and in their cables back to Langley. O’Connell thought Ames was “misinterpreting his own personal experience with urban warfare in Aden, where the Yemeni insurgents had driven British troops from the port city in 1967.” O’Connell pointed out that the British were the foreigners in Aden, while the Jordanian army was fighting on home ground. Ames countered that historically, King Hussein, the Hashemite family, and the king’s Bedouin tribesmen were actually the foreigners in that they had come from the Hejaz in western Arabia during World War I. The British colonialists, Ames reminded O’Connell, had imposed the Hashemite regime on the Palestinian population. It was the Palestinians, he argued, who were on home ground, and it was the Palestinians who possessed the higher quotient of political legitimacy. O’Connell thought this was too fine a point; Ames was intellectualizing. What mattered was power, and Hussein’s army had 150 tanks and plenty of artillery. “Bob was prescient,” said Graham Fuller, another clandestine officer. “And like many prescient officers, he would be right about the longer time frame, and just wrong in the short term.”
As civil war loomed, the PLO had around twenty-five thousand men in its militia, but all summer they’d been passing out arms to thousands of young men in the refugee camps. All told, there were perhaps as many as forty thousand Palestinians walking around with guns in their hands. Hussein’s regular army numbered some sixty thousand troops, but more than half of these men—even many of the officers—were Palestinians. Hussein felt he could count on the loyalty of less than half his army. But O’Connell was right about one thing: Bedouin officers loyal to the monarch controlled the armored units, and they could prove to be decisive in any showdown with the guerrillas.
Ironically, the Israeli political and military establishment was having the same debate as Ames and O’Connell. Leading Israeli political figures were themselves divided on whether saving King Hussein’s throne was good for Israel. Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, Abba Eban, and Yitzhak Rabin surmised that King Hussein might someday be persuaded to conclude a separate peace deal with Israel. “The opposing opinion,” wrote Mordechai Gur, the Israeli general in charge of the Syrian-Lebanese front in 1970, “supported the transformation of Jordan into a Palestinian state.… They suggested allowing the guerrillas to achieve their aims and to take control over all of Jordan. In this they saw the ideal solution to the issue of the Palestinians.” Ezer Weizman, Gen. Moshe Dayan, and Shimon Peres made this argument—and so too did Gen. Ariel Sharon.
Henry Kissinger claims that he knew nothing of this internal Israeli debate. But in the midst of the crisis, on September 20, 1970, he told his aides, “I’m not really sure the Israelis would mind it if Hussein should topple. They would have no more West Bank problem.” And just a few days later he read an official memorandum of a conversation in which Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, speculated that Israel might indeed be better off without the Hashemite regime:
Foreign Minister Eban told [U.S.] Ambassador [Charles] Yost at the UN on September 23 that while Israel, on balance, favored Husayn at this time, “the world would not come to an end if he departed the scene.” Eban said the Palestinians would become more responsible when saddled with the day-to-day burdens of government, and the long-term trend in Jordan was toward greater recognition of the fact that Jordan was 70 percent Palestinian. Yost added that Eban seemed to imply that, sooner or later, Israel has to find an accommodation with the Palestinians and that it might in the long run be easier if they dominated the state of Jordan.
Kissinger read and initialed this memorandum—but evidently he discounted Eban’s analysis. Years later he insisted to the British scholar Nigel Ashton that “any move to undermine Hussein would have provoked a crisis in their [the Israelis’] relations with Washington.” More likely, Kissinger instinctively thought America’s Cold War imperatives—which in the Middle East usually meant blind support for a pro-American, anticommunist, and anti-Nasserite monarch—was a safer policy than actually addressing the Palestinian problem, one of the region’s primary sources of unrest. Ames thought this shortsighted. And O’Connell thought Ames was too much under the influence of his “Red Prince.”
Some thought Ames had an overt pro-Palestinian prejudice. But in point of fact, most CIA officers who spent any time in the region came to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian refugees. “Like all of us who get to know anything about the Palestinian problem,” said George Cave, a veteran of more than three decades in the Agency, “you can’t help but feel sympathy for them.… When people ask me what to read about the Arab-Israeli problem I tell them the Old Testament.” O’Connell also sympathized with the Palestinians—but he had a personal relationship with Hussein and genuinely liked the king.
On September 6, 1970, the crisis in Jordan was further inflamed by a brazen act of air piracy. Commandos from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four commercial airliners all in one day. One of the four planes, a Pan Am jumbo jet, was flown to Cairo. A hundred feet above the runway, a PFLP commando lit a fuse and informed the crew that they had eight minutes to get everyone off the plane. As the plane screeched to a halt at the end of the runway, the cabin crew blew the emergency slide chutes open and yelled at the 173 passengers to evacuate. Three minutes later, the $25 million jet blew apart on the tarmac. Miraculously, no one was injured. The hijacking of an El Al passenger jet bound for New York from Amsterdam was foiled by Israeli security guards; one of the hijackers, an American citizen, Patrick Arguello, was killed, and his companion, Leila Khaled, was detained in a British police station in London. But two of the other planes were piloted to Dawson’s Field, an abandoned World War II–era desert airstrip north of Amman. The passengers were kept hostage by hundreds of PFLP Fedayeen. Three days later, they were joined by yet another hijacked plane. By then, the PFLP had 426 hostages at Dawson’s Field—surrounded by hundreds of King Hussein’s Arab Legionnaires sitting in armored personnel carriers.
The multiple hijackings were a piece of meticulously planned guerrilla theater, designed to focus the world’s attention on the problem of Palestine. The PFLP demanded the release of more than three thousand Palestinians held in Israeli prisons in return for the release of the hostages. A year earlier, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir had famously insisted that when Israel was created in 1948, “it was not as though there was a Palestinian people.… They did not exist.” Now it became a little harder to say this with any credibility. As Walter Cronkite intoned on the CBS Evening News, “Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world’s attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace.”
The standoff at Dawson’s Field dragged on for ten days. King Hussein felt this was the final humiliation. The CIA’s Jack O’Connell urged the king to order his Arab Legionnaires into action. Finally, on September 16, 1970, Hussein declared martial law. That evening fifty tanks moved into positions above the main Palestinian refugee camps of Amman. The king told the new American ambassador, L. Dean Brown, that he was “betting all his chips.” It was going to be an “all or nothing showdown.”
At dawn the next morning, the Arab Legion began lobbing artillery shells at guerrilla positions on Jebel Hussain and into the crowded camps of Wahdat and Al-Husseini. The bombardment was indiscriminate, hitting residential quarters in the tightly packed camps. “It was very messy,” recalled the embassy’s Hume Horan. “The Jordanians didn’t want to send their infantry against the guerrillas in the slums of Amman. They felt the urban geography would negate the Army’s edge in discipline and weaponry. So they led their assaults with armor, the infantry following close behind. Through field glasses you could see the tanks roll up toward some buildings. Lurch to a stop. Then the main battle guns would go, ‘Boom!’ and part of the buildings would collapse. Out would swarm some Palestinians. The tanks would chase them, firing machine guns, with the infantry also in pursuit.” The result was carnage. The Royal Jordanian Air Force dropped phosphorus and napalm bombs on the refugee camps. From his bunker in one of the camps, Arafat vowed, “The fight goes on until the fascist military regime in Jordan is toppled.” By his side stood Salameh, who had rushed to Amman when the fighting broke out.
Over the next ten days, the Fedayeen held their ground in Amman and even turned down a cease-fire offer. Many were able to survive by hunkering down in some 360 subterranean bunkers carved beneath the refugee camps. Most of northern Jordan was still controlled by the PLO. But not for long. The threat of American and Israeli intervention dissuaded the Syrians from providing air cover for the attacking Syrian armor that had invaded northern Jordan in support of the Palestinians. At one point in the battle, King Hussein sent a frantic message to Washington asking “for an air strike by Israel against the Syrian troops.” But in the end, outright Israeli intervention was not necessary. The king’s own armored forces managed to advance, the Syrians withdrew, and the PLO’s guerrillas soon began to fall back. In Amman, the king ordered his army to redouble its bombardment of the refugee camps. An estimated 3,400 Fedayeen and civilians were killed. Some had to be buried in mass graves. “There were atrocities,” admitted Horan. “It was a time when no quarter was asked by or given to some of these combatants.” And yet, in the end, Horan believed, “The good guys won.”
That is certainly not how Arafat or Salameh saw things. By the end of September, they’d been forced to accede to a cease-fire brokered by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The PFLP agreed to release the remaining hostages from the air hijackings. And the PLO’s Fedayeen had to retreat from Amman. Salameh was responsible for getting Arafat out of Amman. It was Salameh’s idea to dress Arafat in the robes of a Kuwaiti sheikh; he and Salameh were then smuggled aboard an airliner, posing as part of the fourteen-member Arab Committee sent to mediate a cease-fire. Arafat arrived safely in Cairo, where he met with President Gamal Abdel Nasser and signed the cease-fire.
That autumn, King Hussein appointed Wasfi al-Tal as prime minister. A half-Kurdish businessman from Irbid in northern Jordan, Al-Tal was known for his hard-line views critical of the PLO. He now urged the king to rid the country of the PLO once and for all. In July 1971, Al-Tal ordered the army to resume its offensive against the Fedayeen. After four days of artillery and napalm strikes, at least 1,000 PLO fighters were killed or wounded and some 2,300 were arrested. King Hussein’s secret police arrested another 20,000 Palestinian civilians and expelled Arafat and all other PLO officials to Lebanon. Henceforth, Jordan would be for “authentic” Jordanians—and “Jordanized” Palestinians.
Salameh was devastated by the PLO’s defeat in Jordan. “It left an indelible mark on all of us,” he told Nadia Salti Stephan, a reporter from Beirut’s English-language weekly Monday Morning, in April 1976. “I am one of those who were and remain unable to imagine how on earth we were driven out.”
The month of September 1970 was a national calamity for the Palestinians—and a sad month for Arabs everywhere. On the evening of September 28, 1970—just hours after Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had patched together a temporary truce between the PLO and King Hussein—the charismatic Arab leader died suddenly, felled by a massive heart attack. He was only fifty-two years old. Sitting in Beirut, Ames watched as tens of thousands of mourners poured into the streets, weeping and crying out Nasser’s name. Some of the mourners burned tires, and men armed with Kalashnikovs fired barrages into the evening heavens. Arabs everywhere could see television images of four to five million Egyptians walking behind the six-mile-long funeral procession. Nasser had been a volatile figure. A populist leader who had genuinely tried to improve the lives of Egypt’s impoverished peasantry, he had also gradually built an inefficient and sometimes bumbling police state. He was not exactly a tyrant, but neither was he a democrat. He was personally incorruptible. He was the only Arab leader of his time who could plausibly claim to reflect the broad popular will. But more than one American president had tried to dislodge him from power—and Nasser personally believed that the CIA had plotted with his domestic political enemies. Ames nevertheless was moved to write a poem the day Nasser died.
Abd-al Nasir died today:
A light went out, an era ended.
A world stood still, a gloom descended.
A nation cried today:
A river stopped, a dream lay shattered.
A nation cried today.
Ames was an idealist—and as this poem suggests, he felt real empathy for the millions who were in mourning for Nasser.
Back in Langley headquarters, the news of Bob Ames’s meetings with Ali Hassan Salameh was still a tightly held secret. Henry Kissinger was adamant in public that the United States could not be seen as lending a terrorist organization any legitimacy. But inside the CIA, Ames’s relationship was regarded as an intelligence coup. Salameh was providing raw intelligence that eventually landed on the desks of the president’s National Security Council staff. (In this sense, Ames had fulfilled his promise to Mustafa Zein that the Palestinians would have a channel to the U.S. president.) Dick Helms knew all about Ames’s back channel with Salameh and approved it. The CIA director later privately complained to Frank Anderson that he was “under a lot of pressure from Nixon and Kissinger to get better intelligence about Arafat’s Fatah.” Ames was providing that intelligence.
Yet some of Ames’s superiors were unhappy that it was still only a relationship and not a formal recruitment. “Headquarters in Langley wanted Salameh to be a fully recruited agent,” said Bruce Riedel, an Agency officer who later read all fifteen volumes of cables and memoranda associated with the case. “Everyone involved knew that it was an extraordinary case. And everyone was debating the messy questions about whether we should be in liaison with a terrorist organization. Of course the director of central intelligence (Helms) knew. But this also went all the way up to the president. Helms had to tell Nixon because of the potential for blowback.”
Riedel and other Agency officers believe that Helms was always supportive of Ames. But the policy makers—really Kissinger—and President Nixon blew hot and cold. They wanted the intelligence. They even wanted the back channel because it only made pragmatic sense to be able to communicate with such important actors on the ground. But the policy makers would have greatly preferred that the relationship be with a controlled, paid agent—and not an independent actor like Salameh.
There were layers upon layers of ambiguity. “There is a lot that is just a matter of opinion in the business,” said Henry Miller-Jones. “Mainly it is what the customer thinks of the agent’s reporting that determines his overall value and it doesn’t matter whether he signed a chit or not.”
This was the nature of the game. It was hard to know exactly how to define the relationship. Some officers later insisted that Ames surely must have turned Salameh into a fully recruited agent. But those few people with direct knowledge of the case believe it was always a liaison relationship. “Part of the time, Salameh was probably telling Arafat that he had recruited a CIA officer,” said Riedel. “And Ames probably knew this. He would have understood that there was probably some resentment inside Fatah circles against Salameh’s friendship with a CIA officer. Salameh needed to tell his own people something like this for his own protection.”
Late in 1970, a debate took place inside the CIA about what to do about Salameh. At the time, the chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the DO was David Henry Blee, fifty-four, a South Asia expert, Harvard lawyer by training, and highly regarded administrator. (He was also a devout Catholic who wore a Fatima medallion beneath his shirt.) Dave Blee looked over the Salameh case file and decided it was time to make the recruitment pitch. Ames thought this unwise. “Bob would say,” recalled John Morris, another clandestine officer, “ ‘You know, it would be fine to recruit Salameh, but you get what you can.’ ” Ames thought Salameh was not recruitable. “My best sources were never recruitable,” said Graham Fuller, a fellow Arabist and case officer. Ames sensed, correctly as it turned out, that Salameh had from the beginning kept Arafat apprised of his meetings with Ames. Salameh had explained to Arafat that the PLO needed a way to communicate with the Americans—and if Washington wouldn’t allow its diplomats to be seen talking to the PLO, then the next best thing was to establish a regular back channel through the CIA. Arafat agreed. The PLO chairman was running an armed liberation struggle, but at the same time he desperately wanted America to take him seriously. And from Ames’s point of view, his relationship with Salameh was as useful and productive as a formal recruitment could be. Moreover, it was a two-way street in which Ames tried to influence Salameh to have the PLO act more like a political party—and less like a guerrilla organization—while Salameh tried to influence Washington, through Ames, to understand that it was unrealistic for U.S. policy makers to ignore the Palestinian cause. “Ali’s ambition was to turn the back channel into a real diplomatic relationship,” recalled Frank Anderson. “He wanted the relationship to evolve into a de facto recognition of the PLO. But on our side, we had to cloak the relationship as an intelligence operation. At the same time, Ali had to make it seem to his own people that this was diplomacy, not intelligence. In the end, we committed more diplomacy, and he conveyed more intelligence.”
At times, Salameh and Ames traded useful bits of hard intelligence with each other, the kind of information that could save lives. “I remember avidly reading MJTRUST’s file,” recalled Charles Allen, an experienced DO officer. “It was unbelievably good stuff.” Ames obviously thought so too. So when Dave Blee pressured Ames to take the next step and turn Salameh into a full recruitment, Ames resisted. Why, he argued, should such a valuable relationship be jeopardized just so the CIA could claim it had a paid agent at the side of Arafat? “I thought it was a mistake,” recalled Charles Waverly, who was privy to the argument. “I thought it was out of context.” Sam Wyman also sided with Waverly and Ames. “I was of the opinion that it was not necessary to recruit Salameh,” Wyman said. “We had what we wanted.”
This was an old argument in the intelligence business. “An agent does not always mean a paid agent,” says Hillel Katz, a former high-ranking Mossad officer. “If I had heard about this, I would have said, ‘Bob, very good work. This is a good way to cultivate an agent.’ As a matter of principle you have to allow your agent to have a good reason to justify what he is doing. Sometimes, he has to be able to tell himself, ‘I am doing good service for my people.’ It is never clean. In fact, it is best for everyone to keep it vague. Let him keep his pride.”
Ames, Wyman, and Waverly were overruled, and Blee ordered another Agency officer, Vernon Cassin, to make the recruitment pitch. Ames nevertheless played his part. He told Mustafa Zein that Washington had agreed to initiate a dialogue with the PLO. A clandestine meeting would take place in Rome. “A CIA officer would start the ball rolling and Bob would pick it up in Beirut afterwards.” Bob gave Mustafa handwritten instructions on how to meet Cassin in Rome. He told Mustafa to fly to Rome, where on December 16, 1970, he would receive a phone call in his hotel room at precisely 4:00 P.M.: “John will say he and his wife are in Rome and hope to see you …” Exactly one hour later, Mustafa was supposed to walk into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel with a coat over his arm. “John will carry [a] rolled Italian newspaper. You should take a seat in the corner of [the] lobby. John will approach and say, ‘I think I met you in the Semiramis Hotel.’ You should reply, ‘I think it was the Shepard’s [sic] Hotel.’ ” (Both were landmark hotels in Cairo.)
Zein did as he was told. Traveling on a diplomatic passport issued by Sharjah, Zein arrived in Rome on December 16, 1970. He met with “John”—Vernon Cassin—and subsequently made reservations for adjoining suites in the Cavalieri Hilton Hotel from December 18 through 21. Posing as a rich Arab businessman, Zein played host. Salameh arrived in Rome, along with a contingent of twenty-three security guards. His guards mostly kept out of sight. Salameh had been briefed by Zein and was under the impression that he was to meet with a high-ranking CIA official who was authorized to open a dialogue with the PLO. This was only several months after the September debacle in Jordan, and there was much to discuss. Salameh was introduced by Zein to Cassin, a tall, thin man who wore a fedora. A former station chief in Damascus and Amman, Cassin was a pretty straitlaced Agency officer. One colleague described him as “a complete professional who went by the book.”
Cassin told Zein that he wanted to speak to Salameh alone. Zein immediately understood what was up, and before the meeting he took Ali Hassan aside and told him, “He is coming to recruit you. Just be cool. Listen to what he has to say and then politely excuse yourself.” Salameh did as Zein advised. According to Peter Taylor, a British broadcast reporter who interviewed Zein at length, “The meeting did not go well.” Salameh was offered $300,000 a month “to co-ordinate activities between your organization and our organization.” Taylor later wrote in his 1993 book, States of Terror, that there was no proverbial suitcase stuffed with cash—just a verbal offer. After making the pitch, Cassin was pleased by Salameh’s calm demeanor. No theatrics was a good sign. When Salameh rose to leave, Cassin promised they’d meet the next day for a fine meal in one of Rome’s most expensive restaurants.
The next day the three men met for lunch. When Salameh momentarily excused himself, Zein turned to Cassin and said, “Ali told me everything. He said you were willing to finance the PLO to the tune of $35 million a year—and recognize the PLO. He’s already sent a coded message to Arafat. The Chairman is very pleased.”
Flabbergasted, Cassin hastily left the restaurant. Salameh and Zein were playing with him. He knew the attempted recruitment had failed; he reported this to Langley, but he also claimed that Salameh had angrily refused to cooperate with the Agency in combating terrorism. This was a lie, but one that conveniently explained the failed recruitment. Cassin painted Salameh as a dogmatic extremist.
For his part, Salameh was deeply offended by the overture. “It took a while to restore the relationship,” said Waverly.
Back in Beirut, Ames and Zein tried to put things on an even keel. But Ames was terribly disappointed by the fallout from the Rome fiasco. “We, you and I,” he wrote Mustafa Zein, “really tried to do something which was perhaps ahead of our time.” He was also angry about the “lies and misunderstandings” told by Cassin about Salameh. “Since I have read the files on these matters I can say, unfortunately, that lies were told.” Ames also had cause to worry about Salameh’s safety. Soon after the Rome meeting, Salameh received a package addressed to him in Beirut. “Bob had warned us to watch out for letter bombs,” Zein said. Salameh normally received all his mail through the PLO office. But one day in early 1971 a heavy manila envelope arrived at his Verdun Street apartment. Salameh had it x-rayed. Had he opened it, he would have been maimed or worse. This was almost certainly Mossad’s first attempt to kill Ali Hassan.*2
Ames saw Salameh intermittently over the next six months, and they met about a month before Ames was posted back to Washington in June 1971. But then Salameh seemed to disappear. “After the Rome meeting,” Zein said, “Ali lost favor inside the PLO. Arafat had put him in charge of Palestinian-American relations, and now this didn’t seem to be going anywhere.” Ames was aware that Salameh’s fortunes had dimmed precisely because of his association with the Agency. “I know he’s suffered some setbacks because of his contact with me,” Ames wrote Zein. “He was also ahead of his time. We really started something good and I believe history will prove that if people had been wiser and more honest much misery could have been avoided.”
Just two weeks later, Ames wrote Zein again. The tone of the letter made it clear that Ames was trying to keep Zein on board, trying to persuade him that all was not lost in their venture. It was not a letter from a CIA case officer instructing his access agent. It was a letter of persuasion from one friend to another. “It sure was great to hear from you,” Ames wrote in longhand, “and learn you are still in the middle of things. Life back here [Washington, D.C.] is dull by comparison—paper, politics and bureaucracy. Frankly, I miss the action and wish I were out doing something again.”
Zein was then still working for the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi, but he was planning to move back to Lebanon. Ames told Zein that he felt indebted to him and offered to help: “Whatever you choose, I hope you’ll keep in touch and if there is anything I can do to help let me know. I don’t like to owe debts and I do owe a great deal to you.” He said that he was planning a trip to Beirut and Amman in late October and suggested that perhaps they could meet there or in Bahrain. “I have much more to discuss when we get together later,” Ames wrote. “There is much that can’t be put in writing. As I’m sure you realize.”
Zein was not an agent of the CIA. Ames knew that Mustafa was his own man. But Mustafa was also Bob’s invaluable channel to Ali Hassan. “Regarding our friend,” Ames wrote, “if you see him tell him that we are doing our best to balance things and we have achieved some success. I have a few things for him which I’ll pass along via you. These items will help him regain some of the stature I know he lost because of his contact with us. I have a debt to him too which I want to pay off.”
Bob signed this letter “Munir”—Arabic for “the Enlightener.” This was Mustafa’s affectionate, Sufi-derived alias for his American friend. Bob used his home for the return address on the envelope, but instead of his name he used the initials RCA.
Three weeks later, on September 14, 1971, Ames wrote Mustafa again about possibly setting up a meeting with Salameh. Ames was anxious to resume his conversations with Salameh, but he knew any such meeting, if leaked, could jeopardize Salameh’s standing in the PLO. “Regarding our friend,” Ames wrote Zein, “I believe it is imperative that you and I discuss any meeting with him prior to any firm commitment being made, if indeed we decide such a meeting should even take place. I, of course feel, personally, such a meeting would be extremely useful but what we want to avoid is any misunderstanding, such as existed in the past, and which caused all the parties concerned, especially you, so many problems. Now that he is back in his proper position, we do not want to repeat past mistakes.”
Salameh’s standing in the PLO had indeed suffered a setback in the spring and summer of 1971. Ali Hassan had his rivals, and Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf) was one of them. The PLO’s number-two leader had once been a mentor of Ali Hassan’s. But after the disastrous outcome of the Jordanian civil war, some blamed Abu Iyad for poor intelligence on King Hussein’s intentions and capabilities. Ali Hassan had once worked directly under Abu Iyad, but after September 1970 Salameh became Arafat’s shadow. Abu Iyad resented Salameh’s growing influence and access to the Chairman. By the spring of 1971, Abu Iyad was looking for any excuse to discredit Salameh. The perception that Salameh had somehow mishandled the back channel to the CIA had hurt his standing. But Abu Iyad also seized upon an incident in Europe on February 6, 1972, where a shoot-out involving some of Salameh’s Force 17 commandos had resulted in the deaths of five men. Abu Iyad went to Arafat and complained that Salameh was out of control. Arafat placed Salameh on a three-month leave while an internal PLO investigation probed the incident. Salameh used the time to visit London and other European cities, traveling on an Algerian diplomatic passport. Upon his return to Beirut, Salameh was vindicated. Arafat’s investigation concluded that the five men killed by Salameh’s Force 17 operatives had been Mossad informants. As Ames had heard through his own sources, by the autumn of 1971 Salameh had been restored to his position as chief of Force 17.
The incident later became an important piece of Salameh’s résumé, because in his absence Abu Iyad had created a rival organization within the PLO that became known as Black September. Salameh was not there when this happened. He thus had an alibi for not being present at the creation of Black September.
In the aftermath of the Jordanian civil war, the PLO found itself at a difficult crossroads. The defeat in Jordan had demoralized Arafat’s Fatah Fedayeen and had simultaneously increased the political appeal of radicals to Arafat’s left. The spectacular airline hijackings carried out by George Habash’s PFLP had turned the Palestinian cause into a global issue. But now Arafat’s younger cadres demanded that the “Old Man” come up with a new strategy. Arafat needed some victories lest he find himself pushed aside. His ranking deputy, Abu Iyad, urged Arafat to escalate the violence. Arafat was torn. A sharp debate took place. Khalid al-Hassan, the PLO’s virtual foreign minister at the time, later explained to the British journalist Alan Hart, “I was opposed to the playing of the terror card. But I have to tell you something else. Those of our Fatah colleagues who did turn to terror were not mindless criminals. They were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it. I have to say they were wrong, and did so at the time, but I have also to understand them. In their view, and in this they were right, the world was saying to us Palestinians, ‘We don’t give a damn about you, and we won’t care at least until you are a threat to our interests.’ In reply those in Fatah who turned to terror were saying, ‘Okay, world. We’ll play the game by your rules. We’ll make you care!’ ”
Arafat quietly authorized Abu Iyad to organize a clandestine force to bring the war to the West—and to take his revenge against the Hashemites. Abu Iyad was Arafat’s oldest friend. With Arafat’s blessing, he now created a covert arm of Fatah called Black September, named obviously after the bloody events of September 1970. Abu Iyad was thought to be its “spiritual godfather and chief.” Black September was said to be “more a state of mind than an organization as such,” but the shadowy group drew on Fatah communications and financial resources.
Arafat may have thought he could turn on terror operations—and then just as easily turn them off. But it was more complicated than that. Alan Hart later interviewed a member of Black September whose nom de guerre was Ben Bella. Hart asked him about Arafat’s attitude toward its activities. “At the time,” said Bella, “Arafat could not afford to speak against us in public because he knew what we were doing had the support of the majority in the rank and file of our movement. Our way was the popular way. But in private meetings he took every opportunity to tell us we were wrong. I remember an occasion when he said to some of us, ‘You are crazy to take our fight to Europe.’ I was angry and I said, ‘Abu Amar, maybe you are right, maybe we are crazy—but tell me this: is it not also crazy for us to sit here in Lebanon, just waiting to be hit every day by Israeli fighter planes, and knowing that we will lose some ten or more fighters every day without advancing our cause. Is that not crazy too?”
Ali Hassan Salameh no doubt understood these sentiments. As the head of Force 17, Salameh supervised the men who served as Arafat’s personal bodyguards. But Force 17 was also Fatah’s nascent intelligence service. As such, Salameh reported to Abu Iyad—though he had his own special relationship with Arafat. If Abu Iyad served as Black September’s spiritual inspiration, another senior PLO chieftain, Abu Daoud, was its tactical and operational commander. But the chain of command was murky. As head of Force 17, Salameh could hardly be unaware of the existence of this shadowy group. But according to Mustafa Zein, Salameh was not responsible for Abu Iyad’s operations: “I told Ali that under no circumstances should he involve himself in spilling civilian blood.”
Salameh was clearly a rival of Abu Iyad’s. Both men were in competition for Arafat’s affections. Citing Jordanian authorities, the New York Times reported that “Ali Hassan Salameh, the hard-living Fatah intelligence expert, who they say oversees Black September activities, has become a pawn in a rivalry between veteran commando chiefs.” The Times published a photograph with this story “said to depict Ali Hassan Salameh”—but it was a mistake. The photograph was clearly not Salameh.
Black September’s first target was Jordan’s prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal. Salameh personally chose the assassins and organized the operation. According to Yezid Sayigh, the author of the definitive history of the PLO, Salameh was the “mastermind.” On November 28, 1971, as the Jordanian prime minister was walking into Cairo’s Sheraton Hotel, four Palestinians attacked him. Before his bodyguards could do anything, a young man named Izzat Ahmad Rabah fired four shots at close range. As Al-Tal’s wife and bystanders watched in horror, one of the assassins, Monsa Khalifa, crouched next to the dying prime minister and licked some of his blood off the floor. As they were arrested, the assassins cried out, “We are Black September.… We have taken our revenge on a traitor.”
Bob Ames happened to arrive in Amman that Sunday, just a few hours after the prime minister’s assassination in Cairo. “The Jordanians were in an ugly mood,” Ames wrote, “and you can bet that there was not a Palestinian to be seen on the streets.” What he had planned as a brief informal fact-finding trip now became something more official. Two days after the assassination, Ames drove up with some other American diplomats to Irbid, where they paid a condolence call on Wasfi al-Tal’s family. “It was a pleasant trip and I enjoyed the good bedu coffee,” Ames wrote, “even though the occasion was solemn.… It was kind of fun to be in the middle of things again.”
Later that week, Ames drove to Allenby Bridge on the River Jordan and crossed into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It had been only a little more than four years since the Israelis had conquered the West Bank, but they were already intent on taking every opportunity to demonstrate that their presence was permanent. When Ames arrived at Allenby Bridge—the only crossing point from Jordan into the occupied territories—the Israelis wanted to stamp Ames’s diplomatic passport with an Israeli visa stamp. Normally, as a courtesy, and to encourage tourism, the Israelis routinely gave visitors an Israeli visa on a separate piece of paper so that their passports would still be valid for travel in Arab countries. But on this occasion, the Israeli officials at Allenby Bridge made a point of trying to stamp Ames’s diplomatic passport. When he refused to permit this, they delayed his passage. “They really put me through the mill,” Ames wrote. “They completely took apart my suitcases, emptied my toothpaste tube, dug into my shoe polish, exposed the film in my camera … and they were not going to let any of my aerosol cans in—deodorant, shaving cream—they could be bombs you know.”
And then someone intervened. Ames saw an Israeli army major inspecting his passport and wallet. Upon finding some Yemeni money stuffed into the wallet, the Israeli army major turned to Ames and explained that he’d emigrated from Yemen in 1948. They’d found common ground. Ames charmed the man. “We talked about Yemen (my common language with the Israelis is Arabic) and he put all the aerosol cans back in my suitcase and let me go through.”
Arriving in Jerusalem, Ames checked in to the American Colony, a quaint boutique hotel in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Built in the late nineteenth century out of Jerusalem’s beautiful white stone, the American Colony had served as an integral part of Jerusalem’s social and political life for decades. It was a genteel expatriate haven in the midst of Arab Jerusalem. At the end of World War I another spy, T. E. Lawrence, had taken lodgings in the American Colony. Lowell Thomas, Gertrude Bell, and John D. Rockefeller were among the Colony’s notable list of visitors. Even after the June 1967 war, its bar and grand dining hall served as a cosmopolitan salon for Jerusalem’s diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals. In the evenings, dozens of expatriates and Palestinian intellectuals mingled in the “big salon,” sitting in overstuffed armchairs under an elaborate Damascene ceiling hand-painted with gold leaf. Ames loved the hotel’s old-world, Orientalist charm. He liked the convenience of its location, just a few blocks from the American consulate. Also nearby was St. George’s Cathedral, where Ames’s old friend from Dhahran, the newly ordained Ronald Metz, was now an aide to the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. Metz had left both the CIA and Aramco for the Church. But his political work for the bishop focused on aiding the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem in coping with all the difficulties they faced living under the Israeli occupation. (The Israelis had annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, but neither the Palestinians nor the international community regarded the annexation as legal.)
Despite all his sympathies for the Palestinians, Ames could sometimes empathize with the other side. In Jerusalem he visited the Old City, entering through Jaffa Gate in the Jewish Quarter. He walked to the Wailing Wall. “Today is the Jewish Sabbath,” he wrote home, “so there was a large turnout at the Wall, and I must say this was impressive. Most of the visitors to the Wall were Oriental/Orthodox Jews dressed in their traditional garb. One goes away with the feeling that these people should not be denied access to the Wall no matter what the final solution is.”
Ames could see that the Israelis had imposed some modernity on the Old City. Hebrew signs adorned every street. The garbage was picked up routinely, and the city was just better organized than when the Jordanians had ruled it. But Ames was a bit of a romantic, and he “missed the oriental dignity that was Jerusalem.” He wrote Yvonne that he “kind of liked the old chaos—it made you feel a little closer to the time of Christ.”
Ames also disapproved of what the Israelis were doing to encircle East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods. “I can look out my window [from the American Colony] and see all the high rise apartments the Israelis are building on the hills that surround Jerusalem. Somehow that doesn’t seem right.… You certainly get the impression that the Israelis are here to stay.”
After seeing a few contacts, both Israeli and Palestinian, Ames returned to Washington in time for the Christmas holidays.
*1 Another part of Salameh’s intelligence job was to liaise with “comrades” from radical organizations like the Baader-Meinhof Group, a terrorist organization that operated in Europe. In 1970 Andreas Baader and other German colleagues reportedly received training in a Fatah camp in Jordan. But the Germans misbehaved, and eventually Ali Hassan Salameh sent them packing back to Europe.
*2 Mossad had a technician skilled in assembling letter bombs. This individual devised the book bomb that maimed the PFLP’s Bassam Abu Sharif on July 25, 1972. Mossad’s “Q” was reportedly responsible for more than thirty such mail bombs.