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

1933, Basil Raoud al-Kubaisi had earned a B.A. from Adams State College in Colorado, an M.A. from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a doctorate in political science from American University in Washington, D.C.His 1971 thesis was titled “The Arab Nationalist Movement, 1951–1971: From Pressure Group to Socialist Party.” The 167-page thesis explored the origins of the ANM, the same organization that Ames had been told by his Langley superiors to target for intelligence during his first posting in Dhahran in the early 1960s. By 1969, the ANM would morph into the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). But in 1967–68 Al-Kubaisi visited Aden to interview sources for his thesis research. In July 1967, for instance, he interviewed Qahtan al-Sha’bi, an ANM member who later that year became the first president of the Democratic Republic of South Yemen. He had also interviewed George Habash (a medical student at the time and the principal founder of the ANM), Nayef Hawatmeh (leader of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and Wadi Haddad, later the mastermind behind the PFLP’s spectacular air piracy in the early 1970s.
    Al-Kubaisi came from a wealthy and well-connected Sunni Muslim family in Baghdad. He finished high school in Baghdad and then studied political science at the American University of Beirut. Habash befriended him at the American University. Basil joined the ANM, but his political activities on campus eventually led to his expulsion. He spent his senior year at Colorado’s Adam State College, graduatingin 1956. Basil then returned to Iraq, where he worked in the foreign ministry. But once again his political views got him into trouble. In the mid-1960s he fled Iraq altogether and enrolled in Howard University in Washington, D.C. While pursuing his graduate studies, Basil was also a prominent leader of the ANM’s activities in America, recruiting Arab students to the cause of Arab unity. After the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Basil went back to the Middle East to interview ANM figures for his thesis.
    We cannot know what motivated Al-Kubaisi to seek out Ames in Aden, but we can know that Ames would have regarded the Iraqi academic as an invaluable source of information about a rising new generation of radical Arab political figures. “Ames was good at recruitment,” recalled a former Agency officer, “because he sensed how to match up a potential recruit’s interests with his own. He could make a recruit believe that ‘you and I talking’ was the right thing to do.” Al-Kubaisi may have been just one of Ames’s “sources” and not a fully recruited agent. We just know they knew each other in Aden. Al-Kubaisi was probably delighted to find someone who was willing to listen to what he was learning from his research about the ANM. “Bob was a very good listener,” said the Foreign Service officer who had referred Al-Kubaisi to Ames.
    That Al-Kubaisi had been educated in America presumably also made him susceptible or open to talking with an American official; he was someone who obviously understood the United States. Perhaps this made him want to help America, and Ames in particular, to understand Arab aspirations. We also know froma top-secret British Foreign Office memo that Al-Kubaisi had been a source in 1963 for information on the ANM—so he already had some experience in dealing with Western intelligence services. Al-Kubaisi’s obvious sympathy for the ANM and the Palestinian cause gave him entrée to left-wing intellectual circles. And likewise, Ames’s interest in the history of the ANM and his empathy for the Palestinian cause attracted Al-Kubaisi’s interest in the American.They were a natural fit.

    With independence and the departure of the British, it was now safe for Yvonne and the kids to come to Aden. But Bob was nevertheless forced to spend Christmas in Aden alone. He did manage to attend midnight Mass, but he called it “the most