Monday, September 13, 1993
It was a bright blue, cloudless September day in Washington, D.C., a day of hope for the peoples of the Middle East after decades of cyclical wars, massacres, and spectacular acts of terrorism. But Frank Anderson—the Central Intelligence Agency’s ranking clandestine officer in the Arab world—was nevertheless somehow annoyed that morning. He knew something extraordinarily good was about to happen. At fifty-one, Anderson had spent half his life working on the Middle East. After joining the CIA in 1968, Anderson had risen rapidly in the ranks of the Agency’s clandestine services, learning Arabic in Beirut and specializing in the war-torn Middle East. By 1993, he was chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. That morning he had every reason to believe that peace was finally coming to a region to which he had dedicated his entire career. He should have felt elated, but he was quietly miffed.
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, were about to sign a peace accord at the White House. President Bill Clinton had invited three thousand people to witness the historic moment on the South Lawn of the White House—and Anderson suspected that not a single CIA officer had been invited. Anderson thought that was wrong. Someone in the White House had forgotten how this peace process had started as an intelligence operation. Anderson believed the CIA, through its careful cultivation of clandestine sources, had created the opportunity for the Oslo Accords, which were to be signed that morning. He knew it had all started decades earlier when a young CIA officer named Robert Clayton Ames had cultivated the first highly secret contacts between the United States and the Palestinians. Ames had paved the way for the peace accords—and for his dedication to his spy craft and his work as an intelligence officer, he’d been murdered in Beirut on April 18, 1983, in the first truck-bomb assault on a U.S. embassy. He had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The horrifying attack had killed sixteen other Americans—including seven other CIA officers—and forty-six Lebanese civilians. Anderson thought that on this special day someone should remember what Ames had done for the peace process.
So when he arrived at his office at Langley’s CIA headquarters that morning, Anderson convened a regular 9:00 A.M. meeting of his top officers. “It was noted that this was a big day for the peace process,” recalled Charles Englehart, another clandestine officer, who’d worked with Ames. “We were all quite optimistic in those days that this time the Israelis and the Palestinians would get it right. Someone asked who was representing the CIA on the occasion: the director? A quick check indicated that there was no CIA representation at the ceremony.”
After an awkward moment of silence, Anderson turned to his assistant, Bob Bossard, and said, “Okay, let’s get a bus and go visit our dead.” Anderson quickly spread the word that he wanted to take dozens of young, newly minted clandestine officers—and a few analysts—out to Arlington National Cemetery. They would walk to Ames’s gravestone and say a few words in his memory. “I’m proud to say that it was my idea,” Anderson said many years later. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. By 10:30 A.M. a CIA bus was waiting at the southwest entrance. “We filled the bus,” said Anderson, “probably thirty or forty people.” Anderson wanted the younger officers there because he thought of the visit as a “values transmission opportunity.”
When they arrived at Ames’s gravesite on a gentle hill near a clump of oak trees, Anderson and his colleagues stared across the Potomac River toward the White House. They knew that at that moment, at 11:43 A.M., Israeli and Palestinian officials were signing a Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Rabin said in his formal remarks, “We the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: ‘Enough of blood and tears! Enough!’ ”
The New York Times’s correspondent Thomas Friedman reported that as soon as the documents were signed, President Clinton “took Mr. Arafat in his left arm and Mr. Rabin in his right arm and gently coaxed them together, needing to give Mr. Rabin just a little extra nudge in the back. Mr. Arafat reached out his hand first, and then Mr. Rabin, after a split second of hesitation and with a wan smile on his face, received Mr. Arafat’s hand. The audience let out a simultaneous sigh of relief and peal of joy, as a misty-eyed Mr. Clinton beamed away.” It was an awkward moment, but “hope” had seemingly “triumphed” over history.
“We were at Bob’s gravesite,” Anderson later recalled, “at the moment of the handshake—as planned.” The chalky white gravestone read simply, “Robert Clayton Ames, Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, March 6, 1934–April 18, 1983.” Nearby were the graves of veterans from the Civil War and America’s wars in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. A rear admiral born in 1876 was buried behind Ames. But Ames’s was then the only gravestone in Arlington to identify a clandestine officer of the CIA. Standing near the grave, Frank Anderson spoke briefly of Ames’s career and how Bob’s clandestine relationship with Arafat’s intelligence chief, Ali Hassan Salameh, had brought the Palestinians in from the cold. Ames, Anderson explained to the novice officers, was one of the CIA’s fallen heroes, a man who was good at forming clandestine relationships in a dangerous part of the world. “He was no Lawrence of Arabia,” said Henry Miller-Jones, another clandestine officer. “He had little patience with pretentiousness or patronizing ‘Arabophiles’ and fanatic adventurers. He was never naïve about the Middle East, a cockpit of power politics. He understood the personalities and motivations of the revolutionary left in the Arab world as much as he appreciated the rituals of the Sheiks.”
Ames had understood that a good CIA officer must have a curiosity about the foreign other—and a certain degree of empathy for their struggles. As Miller-Jones put it, “He came to know kings, emirs and princes as well as revolutionaries and terrorists, goat herders and penthouse commandos.” He was adroit at making his way through the wilderness of mirrors that was the Middle East. He was naturally reserved, a man who easily kept secrets. He inspired trust, even in the company of men with bloody pasts. But he was also an intellectual, who later in his career could brief a president or a secretary of state about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics and history. He was a model intelligence officer. “Everyone credited Ames with getting the peace process started,” recalled Lindsay Sherwin, a CIA analyst.
“There was a moment of silent prayer,” recalled Englehart, “as we all stood on the grass around the grave. I remember wondering why, after all we had done for this, President Clinton would not recognize our contribution—but it wasn’t politically expedient. We should have known that, but it still stung.”
After a few minutes, Anderson led his colleagues over to the nearby grave of William Buckley, the CIA Beirut station chief who’d been kidnapped in March 1984; he had been severely mistreated in captivity and had died fifteen months later, probably of pneumonia. Next they visited the gravesites of James and Monique Lewis, both of whom had died with Ames on that terrible day in April 1983. Both were CIA employees. And then they walked to the gravesite of Kenneth Haas, the CIA station chief in Beirut at the time. He too had died with Ames. Finally, they found the gravesite of Frank Johnston, yet another CIA officer who’d died that day in Beirut. All had been buried in Arlington. It had been a heavy toll—the worst in the Agency’s history.
The visit to the cemetery was a sobering moment. But there was also a feeling of exhilaration—as if these sacrifices had been vindicated. “We were all quietly excited,” Englehart recalled. “For those of us who spent our working lives in the Arab-Israeli firestorm, it was positive. After all, everybody would get what they wanted [with the Oslo peace accords], or what they thought they wanted. I had a definite feeling at the time that the sacrifices of our dead were not in vain, that the Israeli people and the Palestinian people could at last let go of each other’s throats and understand that they are all brothers and sisters.”
It was not to be.
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin hesitates for a moment before the iconic handshake with PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, September 13, 1993.