When I began the research for this book, I visited the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and met with George Little, then head of the Agency’s Office of Public Affairs. We met for exactly one hour: I did most of the talking, trying to describe the kind of book I hoped to write about Robert Ames. I also explained that I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with one of the CIA’s in-house historians and check basic facts about Ames’s career. I was hoping that the CIA would declassify some materials related to Ames and his work in the Middle East. Mr. Little eagerly expressed the hope that the Agency would be able to give me some kind of limited assistance. But after repeated requests in the months and years to come, I never heard back from the Agency. CIA directors Leon Panetta and David Petraeus never replied to my e-mails. So I wrote this book without the cooperation of anyone inside the CIA.
Fortunately, I found more than forty retired officers, both clandestine officers from the Directorate of Operations and analytical officers from the Directorate of Intelligence, who generously shared their memories of Bob Ames. Some of these individuals were willing to speak for the record, but many spoke not for attribution. I have given aliases to those sources who did not want to be named. These aliases appear in the narrative in italics. This is also the case for a number of retired Mossad officers who agreed to be interviewed.
I knew Bob Ames when I was an adolescent. He and his wife, Yvonne, were our next-door neighbors from 1962 to 1965 in the small U.S. consulate compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. So I have vivid memories of this tall, handsome young man who liked to play basketball with the consulate’s squad of U.S. marine guards. I was unaware at the time that Bob was a CIA clandestine officer. I thought he was just another Foreign Service officer, like my father. Decades later, I approached Yvonne to say that I was writing a biography of her late husband; she remembered me. And though she’d never spoken to a reporter about her husband’s life, she graciously agreed to talk and to share her small collection of photographs, correspondence, and a family scrapbook.
I also found a few declassified documents in the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library pertaining to Ames. But most of this book is based on interviews in Washington, D.C., Beirut, Amman, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I wrote it in Barranco, a suburb of Lima, Peru.