[Spooks] Legendary CIA agent Bob Ames to get full biography

[Al Fansome]

	Legendary CIA agent Bob Ames to get full biography, 30 years after bombing death 

	



By 
		
			Jeff Stein
		
	



 


	Bob Ames is finally getting a book of his own. 

Washington author Kai Bird, 
co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of atomic scientist 
Robert Oppenheimer, is turning his sights on Ames, the legendary CIA 
operative who died in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in 
Beirut. 

Crown-Broadway paid six figures for the book, scheduled for 
publication on the 30th anniversary of Ames' death, according to 
publishing sources.
  Ames was the closest thing the CIA had to James 
Bond, it's sometimes said.  A year shy of 50 at the time of his murder, 
Ames makes at least a cameo appearance in most treatments of U.S. policy
 in the Middle East, as well as, in fictional form, the spy novels of 
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and others. A full treatment of
 him is long overdue, many say.

“Ames was the master player of the so-called ‘war of the secret 
services’ in Beirut, where spies and intelligence services crawled all 
over each other, and where nearly every shot, bomb or diplomatic move 
had a secondary intelligence implication,” The Post’s Bob Woodward once 
wrote. “In this world, survival at times meant balancing and hedging 
your double crosses.”

Bird says, “Ames's life and career are legendary inside the CIA. He 
is known for his professional spy craft, his ability to recruit agents 
and his commonsensical analytical skills as a briefer of Ronald Reagan. 
He is also known as the agency officer who established a highly valued 
but controversial intelligence liaison conduit to the PLO as early as 
1969.”

Bird and Ames have a personal connection as well.

“I knew him as a boy in Dhahran,” said the author, 58, whose father 
was an American diplomat in Saudi Arabia, and, later, Beirut, where they
 lived in the same embassy that would be destroyed by Hezbollah 
terrorists.

“The last part of the book will be all about the embassy bombing,” 
Bird said. “I have the trial transcripts from a 2003 civil suit filed 
[by relatives of those killed] against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The
 witness testimony is very graphic, even, shall I say, cinematic.”