by A. R. Norton
Until 1:04 PM on April 18, 1983, Robert Clayton Ames was little known outside U.S. foreign policy and intelligence circles. On that day he died, along with 62 other casualties in and around the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, then a familiar landmark on Beirut’s seaside corniche.
The building suffered [...]]]>
by A. R. Norton
Until 1:04 PM on April 18, 1983, Robert Clayton Ames was little known outside U.S. foreign policy and intelligence circles. On that day he died, along with 62 other casualties in and around the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, then a familiar landmark on Beirut’s seaside corniche.
The building suffered devastating damage when a pickup truck laden with 2,000 pounds of explosives was driven into the lobby. Ames, the influential Director of the Near East and South Asia division within the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, was on a visit to Lebanon, which President Ronald Reagan declared a “strategic interest” for the U.S. following Israel’s game-changing invasion the prior year.
A former National Intelligence Officer, Ames’ intelligence assessments carried weight in Washington where he enjoyed access to Secretary of State George Shultz. He had arrived in Beirut in April 1983 carrying the outline of an agreement that would be announced the following month. Mediated between Israel and Lebanon by Shultz, the May 17 agreement called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, but with the proviso that the Syrians would also withdraw their soldiers.
Hours before his death, Ames shared the details with Mustafa Zein, a longtime Lebanese confidante, a wielder of wasta (connections), which are far more important in Lebanon than institutions or laws. Zein urged irreverently that the agreement be printed on very thin paper so it might be used in the toilet. Ames enjoyed the joke, a hint of his own cynicism about the prospect that then-President Hafez al-Assad would yank his forces from Lebanon, particularly at a time when the high blown but mutually contentious hopes of Israel and the United States were deflating.
The agreement did accomplish one thing, perhaps its hidden motive: it helped repair a rupture in U.S.-Israeli relations that had been provoked by the clash of their rival agendas in Lebanon. Otherwise, Zein got it right.
Defective policy
One of the many virtues of Kai Bird’s impressive volume, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, is that he offers a fine-grained, if sometimes gruesome account, of the destruction of the embassy as well as the broader tableau for U.S. engagement in a Middle East that would become more vicious and venomous.
The U.S. intervened in Lebanon in support of a political order that was being upended, in significant measure as a result of the rise of the large Shi’a community. It was this community that bore the brunt of brutish Israeli behavior that bred enmity to Israel and to its protective uncle. Ames and his fellow intelligence officers were deeply skeptical of U.S. policy in Lebanon. They worried about growing dangers, but their political masters were slow to grasp the reality. At the time, I felt that the understanding in the White House of the evolving situation in Lebanon lagged months behind the reality on the ground.
President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, walk by the flag-draped caskets of victims of the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Credit: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
There were precedents for the deadly attack, including similar incidents in December 1981 when the Iraqi Embassy was demolished, and in November 1982 when an Israeli intelligence center near the southern city of Tyre was decimated. Yet, the scale of destruction came as a shock to U.S. policymakers. Bird reports that two vehicle barriers that might have impeded the April attack were gathering dust in a warehouse.
Credible evidence — reprised by Bird — points to Iran as the progenitor of the April attack as well as the even more massive bombings in October 1983 against the U.S. Marine Barracks and a building housing French Paratroopers that killed more than 300 soldiers. Bird offers new details about the role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials in Lebanon, including Ali Reza Asgari, who he links to both attacks.
Iran found ready partners, especially among young militants inspired by the 1979 “Islamic Revolution,” including a young man by the name of Imad Mughniyeh, born in Tayr Dibbah (Bird mangles the name of the village) in southern Lebanon.
The notorious Mughniyeh (assassinated in Damascus in 2008), while not the mastermind according to Bird, did have a key hand in the embassy bombing. He is credited with lots of deadly mischief and terrorism in the ensuing years, but details remain murky, including in Bird’s account. As one retired Agency officer wryly notes, “when in doubt, and we are always in doubt about this, blame Mughniyeh.”
A very good spy
Ames joined the CIA in late 1960. The slow-paced early chapters of the book offer glimpses of his early career as a spy and his pre-CIA service as a young draftee assigned to a secluded intelligence station in Eritrea where his fascination with Arabic and the Arab world on the opposite shore of the Red Sea emerged.
All of Ames’ Agency assignments were in challenging locales. He served in Aden, in 1968-69, in the waning days of British control and the first and violent days of the former protectorate’s independence and subsequent estrangement from the West. Even so, he proved an adept recruiter of sources, a talent for which he gained admiration around the Agency.
He subsequently served in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon — countries affected profoundly but differently by the magnetic appeal of Arab nationalism, especially from the lips of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Ames kept his emotions in his pocket, like when he witnessed a botched execution in Saudi Arabia and simply murmured to a colleague that they should leave. That was, he reasoned, how things were done in Arabia.
He was not immune to the fervor of the period though. When Nasser was felled by a heart attack in 1970, he composed a poem reading in part: “A light went out, an era ended.” And so it had. Nasser’s exit opened the way for contending Arab dreams based on state nationalism or the idealism of Islamism.
After his death, he was described by CIA Director William Casey as “the closest thing to an irreplaceable man”. In part, Casey’s tribute honored Ames for his success in penetrating the Palestinian resistance in the early 1970s, which he did largely on his own initiative, retrospectively gaining the blessing of the CIA Director. His key source was the flamboyant Ali Hassan Salameh, who Yasser Arafat trusted and entrusted with maintaining a conduit to the United States.
Salameh, who headed the organization’s intelligence apparatus, was a rival of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chieftain Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), creator of Black September. Salameh headed Force 17 (Mughniyeh had once been a member), the Fatah Special Ops unit, and he operated on the margins of Black September. He was suspected by the Israelis of involvement in the kidnapping and deaths of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. Bird offers an ambivalent assessment of his role.
Ames maintained an extraordinary relationship with Salameh, with whom he brokered effective security cooperation in Lebanon, including guarantees for the safety of U.S. diplomats. Ames warned the Palestinian that the Israelis were gunning for him (they succeeded in 1979). Recall that in the 1970s, the prospect of an independent Palestinian state was well beyond the pale, and the PLO was reflexively decried as a terrorist group. Within Washington circles, the usual formula for accommodating Palestinian aspirations was to be found in an arrangement with Jordan that came well short of an independent Palestinian state.
Ames is credited with ghostwriting the peace initiative announced by Ronald Reagan on September 1, 1982, which Prime Minister Menachem Begin quickly rejected. Begin had approved the June invasion of Lebanon and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s objective of crushing Palestinian nationalist aspirations. He had no intention of accepting even an autonomy scheme with Jordan.
Ames, for his part, was oddly optimistic about the initiative, which many of his colleagues viewed as a “non-starter,” a “fool’s errand”. Given the access to power that Ames enjoyed, he was grasping what was feasible in the Washington context, but in doing so he was contradicting what his deep knowledge of the Arab world would have taught him was necessary to accommodate Palestinian aspirations.
To give Ames his due, when the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel were signed a decade later, he was credited by his colleagues with opening the door that made possible the acceptance of the PLO as a respectable diplomatic actor.
Knowledgeable readers will appreciate the author’s nuanced account. General readers will find the book accessible, lucid and rewarding. There are many more nuggets to be mined and assayed from The Good Spy, but within the confines of a concise review that will have to wait.
Robert Ames worked in a murky environment populated by people with plenty of dirt under their nails and blood on their hands; not people whose moral probity stands up well to scrutiny under bright lights. He would probably appreciate the bitter irony that Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian intelligence officer who played a key role in bringing his life to a terrible end, defected in 2009 and is now living someplace in America under an assumed identity after being drained of his many secrets. That was the milieu in which the good spy thrived and then perished.
– A. R. Norton is a professor of anthropology and of international relations at Boston University. Princeton University Press published the new edition of his book, Hezbollah: A Short History, in May 2014. This article was first published by LobeLog.
Photo: A view of the US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after the bombing that killed 63 people on April 18, 1983.
]]>by Farideh Farhi
This Washington Post article about Iran and Hezbollah building networks in Syria in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall is certainly eye-catching. It’s also suggestive of Iranian shrewdness in trying to make the best out of every situation they face in the region.
Assad’s turmoil was supposed [...]]]>
by Farideh Farhi
This Washington Post article about Iran and Hezbollah building networks in Syria in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall is certainly eye-catching. It’s also suggestive of Iranian shrewdness in trying to make the best out of every situation they face in the region.
Assad’s turmoil was supposed to have been a dream come true for those who consider Iran as the source of all troubles in the Middle East. If Syria could be peeled away, a weakened Islamic Republic would either implode or be feeble enough to give in to Western demands. Now, a couple of years into the Syrian tragedy — fueled by the urges of all sides that hope to turn the democratic aspirations of a population into a proxy war — we are informed by US officials that Iran has long-terms plan to protect its interests in Syria in the event of Assads departure and the country’s fracturing into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
How can we confirm this? According to a “senior Obama administration official”, the evidence can be found in the words of the Iranians themselves, of course! Citing “Iranian claims that Tehran was backing as many as 50,000 militiamen in Syria,” the official said. “It’s a big operation… The immediate intention seems to be to support the Syrian regime. But it’s important for Iran to have a force in Syria that’s reliable and can be counted on.” To boot, a senior Arab official agrees that Iran’s strategy has two tracks, “one is to support Assad to the hilt, the other is to set the stage for major mischief when it collapses.”
I am naturally intrigued. An Iranian official has “claimed” that Tehran was building a force of as many as 50,000 militiamen in Syria, and this hasn’t made headlines in Iran (or in the always-on-the-lookout BBC Persian, Radio Farda and Voice of America Persian, for that matter!). So I began searching (one can also use Google in Persian) and I couldn’t find the statement anywhere. Not that there isn’t any reference to Jaysh al-Sha’bi. There are indeed a few references to Jaysh al-Sha’bi as a popular militia, as well as the claim that since its creation, it has been able to engage in pushback against the rebel forces.
One person, identified as a “political expert for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the province of Semnan,” goes as far as to suggest that perhaps Assad has decided to use the “model” of the Iranian popular militia — the Basij — in Syria. He ends the interview that Mehr News conducted with him this past August by stating that the Islamic Republic should relay its experiences with the Basij — which, he says, was the most useful instrument for fighting the war against Iraq in the early 1980s — so that the Syrian government can “liberate itself from the trap set for it by superpowers.” The Basij model, he argues, does not work everywhere, but can be tried in order to draw from popular energy.
Another “expert on political issues” tells the Iran Student News Agency (ISNA), during an interview at a book fair of all places, that the Basij indeed serves as a “model” for Jaysh al- Sha’bi.
Then there are the direct words of the commander of the IRGC from a September press conference. In response to a question regarding Iran’s involvement in Syria, he explicitly states first that Hezbollah’s decision-making process and relations with Syria are independent of Iran: “if they decide to help Syria or not, depends on them,” he says. And second, that Tehran assesses that Damascus does not need external support for its security since its “50,000-strong popular forces known as Jaysh al Sha’bi… is active” on the side of the Syrian military.
Apparently the mixing of these various statements is good enough for the Treasury Department to release a statement noting that “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander” has said that Jaysh al Sha’bi was “modeled after Iran’s own Basij,” which it described as “a paramilitary force subordinate to the IRGC that has been heavily involved in the violent crackdowns and serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran since the June 2009 contested presidential election.”
This is all the evidence that’s mustered to delineate Iran’s effort to build its Syrian militia networks. The rest of the article is speculative analysis regarding what might happen in Syria if Assad falls. After all, Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick want us to know: “Iran has a history of profiting from chaos, even without control of the government ostensibly in power. Hezbollah arose out of the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s (sic), when Iran was able to exploit the grievances of that country’s Shiite population, a pattern it also followed in Iraq during the chaos that followed the U.S. invasion.”
Setting aside the glaring error of attributing the rise of Hezbollah to the 1970s Lebanese civil war and not even mentioning the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon (the Iranian revolution did not even occur until 1979!), and the fact that Jaysh al-Sha’bi’s roots go back to pre-uprising Syria, there is a problem with the formulation of Iran as an all-knowing and all-conniving power — and the only one at that — in the region. To be sure, it’s not very hard to imagine that Tehran is trying hard not to “lose Syria”, particularly given the way that the Syrian tragedy and fall of Assad has been framed by a host of regional and extra-regional powers as a “loss” for Iran. It’s also not difficult to imagine that, given Iran’s longstanding presence in Syria, its relationships may extend beyond Assad, providing Iran with the opportunity to salvage something even if Assad falls. Whether Tehran can actually pull any of this off is another question that’s certainly not answered by the flimsy evidence and stretched speculation that we’re provided with.
What is most bothersome about reports like these — which highlight Iran’s shrewdness and sinister designs in benefitting from every situation that the US finds unable to address or control — is the full regurgitation of the US government position. Not to mention the failure to challenge the core paradox that exists in the elevation of the Iranian threat while consistent policies deal with Iran as mostly a nuisance, open to pressure, and certainly not worthy of treating with adequate respect for its leverage in the region.
In their book, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor provide a perfect example of how this paradox works out in practice. They point out that General David H. Petraeus rejected overtures of cooperation in Iraq from Iran’s lead man in the country, General Qasem Soleimani, and saw him as “a truly evil figure.” But according to the authors, Soleimani’s wickedness did not prevent Petraeus from having back-channel interactions with him through intermediaries. Indeed, apparently Petraeus became convinced that being able to send messages to Soleimani was useful, but that meeting with the Iranian general, even secretly, would have elevated the Iranian’s stature and reinforced his notion that he was entitled to have a say over Iraq’s future.
Iran’s power is then a useful reference when trying to explain away the failures of US policies. Syria’s imbroglio can be blamed exclusively on Iran’s clever and devious hands and not the premature and unreflective policies that under-estimated the staying power and will of the Assad regime to dish out violence in order to survive. At the same time, Iran’s alleged extended reach does not make it a sufficiently entitled or significant player in the region. The contradiction that exists at the core of US policy towards Iran is exposed when Iran’s presumably formidable power and options in the region are highlighted for political purposes while the premise that it can be pressured into submitting to something willed by extra-regional players continues to reign supreme.
]]>“U.S., allies in Gulf naval exercise as Israel, Iran face off”: Reuters reports on the mineclearing exercise scheduled to take place in the coming days in the Strait of Hormuz:
Publicly announced in July, the operation, known as IMCMEX-12, focuses on clearing mines that Tehran, or guerrilla groups, might deploy [...]]]>
“U.S., allies in Gulf naval exercise as Israel, Iran face off”: Reuters reports on the mineclearing exercise scheduled to take place in the coming days in the Strait of Hormuz:
Publicly announced in July, the operation, known as IMCMEX-12, focuses on clearing mines that Tehran, or guerrilla groups, might deploy to disrupt tanker traffic, notably in the Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and the Arabian peninsula.
…. However, it was a clearly deliberate demonstration of the determination on the part of a broad coalition of states to counter any attempt Iran might make to disrupt Gulf shipping in response to an Israeli or U.S. strike on its nuclear facilities – a form of retaliation Iran has repeatedly threatened.
“Israeli PM makes appeal to US voters: Elect president willing to draw ‘red line’ with Iran”: Though some commentators judged that Netanyahu’s Meet the Press appearance was meant to dissociate himself from Republican criticism of the Obama Administration, the Associated Press did not accept that Netanyahu’s appearance was aimed at smoothing over the animosity between him and the president:
His remarks were an impassioned election-season plea from a world leader who insists he doesn’t want to insert himself into U.S. politics and hasn’t endorsed either candidate. But visibly frustrated by U.S. policy under President Barack Obama, the hawkish Israeli leader took advantage of the week’s focus on unrest across the Muslim world and America’s time-honored tradition of the Sunday television talk shows to appeal to Americans headed to the polls in less than two months.
Ali Gharib writes at the Daily Beast that with this appearance, Netanyahu is still trying to force the US to accept his definition of a “red line”:
This flap has not been about imposing a red line, but about shifting it—from actual weapons production to the capability to produce weapons—something elucidated even in the pages of the neoconservative Weekly Standard. Meet the Press host David Gregory asked U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice about it. Why, in an otherwise tough interview, he didn’t ask Netanyahu to expound the distinction is beyond me.
“Ambassador Susan Rice: U.S. Not ‘Impotent’ in Muslim World”: The US Ambassador to the UN told ABC’s Jake Tapper that the protests in Libya and other Muslims countries such as Egypt, Sudan and Yemen, were not evidence of a US decline in influence in these states:
I [Tapper] … asked Rice, “President Obama pledged to repair America’s relationships with the Muslim world. Why does the U.S. seem so impotent? And why is the U.S. even less popular today in some of these Muslim and Arab countries than it was four years ago?”
“We’re not impotent, we’re not even less popular, to challenge that assessment,” Rice said in response. “What happened this week in Cairo, in Benghazi and many other parts of the region was a result, a direct result, of a heinous and offensive video that was widely disseminated, that the U.S. government had nothing to do with, which we have made clear is reprehensible and disgusting.”
Rice further denied that the embassy storming in Libya was pre-planned to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary, a point which the Washington Post says contradicts Libyan claims.
“Revolutionary Guard Chief Holds Press Conference”: Al-Monitor runs a summary translation of remarks made by Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in a widely-publicized Tehran speech. Jafari discussed the prescence of Iranian advisors in Syria but avoided making a firm commitment to the military defense of Assad’s government:
Regarding Syria, Jafari made a number of revealing comments. He said, “everyone knows the corps (sepah) had and has a unit by the name of the Islamic Movements, formed to help the oppressed and export the revolution, and which works in this direction. From the time the Qods force was formed, the goal of this force was the defence of innocent nations, particularly Muslims. A number of the Qods forces are present in Syria, but this isn’t the same as a military presence in this country.”
He continued, “if we compare the presence with Arab and non-Arab countries we will see that Iran doesn’t have such a presence. We are helping intellectually and advising Syria as a resistance group, as the Supreme Leader also indicated and Iran is proud of this issue and the help it is providing for it. The corps will partake in any kind of intellectual assistance or even economic support, but it does not have a military presence and this is at a point where some countries are not refraining from terror[ism] in this country. We of course forcefully condemn this matter, and don’t accept it.”
When Jafari was asked whether Iran would support Syria militarily in the event of a military attack, given the security agreement between the two countries he replied: “this issue depends of the circumstances. I can now say with assurance in the event of a military attack against Syria, whether Iran will also support militarily is unclear, and it completely depends on the circumstances.”
“The Innocence Protests Expose Deeper Tensions in Yemen”: TIME provides some context for the storming of the US embassy in Yemen, a country where the US (alongside Saudi Arabia) is participating in a Yemeni government counterinsurgency campaign, which is highly reliant on drone strikes, against Yemeni Islamists and elements of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP):
]]>It would be naive to think that Thursday’s infiltration and wholesale destruction of one of the most, if not the most, highly secured buildings in the country was the product of a few hundred angry protesters. A fuller explanation seems to lie in the capital’s tense environment, where rival elites are jockeying for power in an uncertain political landscape.
…. On the eve of the U.S. embassy attack, the President dismissed stalwart Saleh loyalist Major General Abdul Wahab al-Anesi from his powerful posts as director of the Presidential Office and chairman of the National Security Bureau, as well as sacked four pro-Saleh governors across the country.
The following morning, CSF (Central Security Force) forces under the command of Saleh’s nephew Yahya were pictured at a checkpoint outside the embassy signaling the mob of angry protesters to enter the premises. Video footage of the waning moments of the embassy attack showed exhilarated rioters embracing a CSF soldier before sprinting out of the compound.