The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird

feels about contact with Americans.” With the independence festivities behind him, he was eager to be “lost in the obscurity which I enjoy so much.”
    The new NLF government gradually restored a semblance of security, and it became safe enough for Ames and other consular officials to travel into the countryside. Ames drove to Lahej, a day trip north from Aden. Bob loved getting out into the rugged countryside, driving past old Arab forts, camel trains, and dusty mud villages. He later also took the opportunity to travel to the Hadramaut, South Yemen’s exotic but very isolated province in the far east—and the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden.
    Ames was rarely seen in the Agency’s consular offices. Despite the dangers on the street, he spent most of his time cultivating contacts among the locals, using his commercial-officer cover story. “I have been all over Aden in places I wouldn’t dare to have entered afew days ago.” He made himself approachable, dressing casually in his standard polo shirt, blue trousers, and chukka boots. At six feet three inches, Ames stuck out. His size impressed the Arabs and he was aware of that. Word got out that the tall American was approachable and simpatico. “I don’t recall a lengthy or active list of agents on Bob’s payroll,” said Henry Miller-Jones. “He was not an aggressive recruiter across the spectrum of potential assets, rather more the type who developed meaningful personal relationships with significant people of real potential value and, if appropriate, brought them gradually into a paid or otherwise compromised agent relationship. It was his knowledge of the area and culture that enabled him to draw real intelligence out of such contacts, rather than a more formal businesslike relationship. He was more interested in the subject matter than ‘adding coonskins’ to his belt.” Stephen Buck, a young Foreign Service officer who arrived in Aden in 1968, admired Ames’s grasp of Arabic and of Yemen’s complex tribal politics. “I used to say that Bob forgot more about Yemen than the rest of us ever learned.”
    One expatriate institution Ames made sure he frequented was the Catholic church. He was, after all, still a Catholic. He sometimes attended Mass at St. Anthony’s Church, built by the British in 1839, the year they seized Aden and made it a protectorate of the British Empire. The Franciscan order had built a church at Steamer Point in Aden. The church operated several Catholic schools. Ames easily got to know some of the priests associated with these institutions. A thirty-one-year-old priest, Father Ambrose, became a regular dinner companion. Bob described him as “a real down to earth fellow who knows more jokes and appears to be anything but a priest.” Father Ambrose came from the same order of priests Ames had known in Asmara a decade earlier.
    If you socialized in Yemeni society, that inevitably meant learning to chew
qat
, a mildly narcotic leaf that Yemenis languidly chew every afternoon for hours while sipping sweet black tea.
Qat
makes people loquacious. It is the perfect drug of choice for a case officer cultivating agents. So perhaps Ames met Abd’al Fatah Ismail while chewing
qat
insomeone’s living room. Born in 1939 in North Yemen, Ismail had been educated at the Aden Technical College. He became a schoolteacher and then a labor-union activist. He was a dogmatic, bookish Marxist. Ismail was only twenty-eight years old when he met Ames. Four years earlier, Ismail had been a founding member of the NLF. Ames later told CIA director William Casey that he had befriended this budding young revolutionary. At the very least, he got Ismail to confide in him. Yemen’s brutal civil war was finally winding down; the British were soon leaving. Ostensibly, South Yemen was about to become a republic. In reality, it was a feudal backwater, a nation with a high illiteracy rate steeped in Islamic traditions and bogged down by petty tribal feuds.